Mixed Race Studies

Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking (review)

Journal of World History
Volume 23, Number 3, September 2012
pages 676-680
DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2012.0064

Magnus Fiskesjö, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Cornell University

Michael Keevak has given us a wonderful, even riveting, deep-historical account of how people in Asia (particularly East Asia) came to be seen as yellow. It surveys how Asians were described as white in most European accounts prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and only later determined to be yellow—in the new color-differentiated theories of human “races” dreamt up from the eighteenth century onward, which established white, black, red, and yellow as key identifiers.

Becoming Yellow investigates this long process in considerable detail. Keevak shows how the race-color classification evolved in the works of seminal European scholars, such as Linneaus, Linnean disciples dispatched to Asia, plus Buffon, Blumenbach, Kant, and others, who all contributed toward developing a scientific racism with color as a defining feature. He also discusses how colors retained the key role as classificatory headings even as other characteristics (eye shape, skull morphology, etc.) became important in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science. Blumenbach (who actually was not history’s worst racist!) is identified as largely responsible for naming the “Mongolian” race—a long-lived label, to which others labored to firmly attach its designated color, yellow. Keevak catalogs (chap. 3) these efforts, including such strange devices as the Color Top, originally a children’s toy, in all seriousness spun near native limbs by anthropologists and other scientists, to ascertain that East Asian skin really was yellow.

But why yellow, and why the effort? Keevak says there is no definite answer, and not even a clear beginning point for the use of yellow instead of white or other terms that were used before (some writers acknowledged seeing lighter-skinned people in the north, and brown-or dark-skinned Southerners). The choice of yellow was the result of a complex, fitful process. Keevak hints at the larger global-historical context in which the new European world-classification was produced, including the importance of transatlantic slavery (which, of course, concentrated on enslaving “black” Africans only after ambiguous seventeenth-century beginnings in which “white” Europeans were also enslaved), but he does not explore this much further. He discusses the ambiguities of India, which like East Asia also presented trouble, as a difficult anomaly. He examines and rejects (for lack of evidence) the hypothesis that European observers were inspired to use yellow for the Chinese, at least, by the apparent high status of the Chinese-language term for yellow (huang)—as, purportedly, in the mythical Yellow Emperor’s name, and in the official color of the last imperial dynasty. Instead, it was a coincidence—and later a part of the foundation for today’s Chinese acceptance of Western race theory, and for its peculiar fusion with recycled elements of the historical Chinese use of huang (chap. 5 on the reception of yellow in China, and in Japan, which was less receptive).

Most interestingly, Keevak describes (chaps. 1–2) how the original European description of the Chinese, Japanese, and others as white was abandoned in the course of a slow-in-coming realization that even though these people were both light-skinned and civilized, they would not easily give themselves up to Christianity. If they had done so, it would have confirmed what the Europeans hoped was a certain kinship: the Asian’s lightness contrasted with the darkness of the purportedly noncivilized within “Asia” as a whole in a way that closely paralleled how Europe contrasted with the darkness of its own non-Christian others, notably Africans. The scientific insight that all humans were originally dark-skinned and that lightness of skin is in part an evolutionary response to latitude, had not yet been reached; instead, the observation that many civilized Orientals had light skin, similar to Europeans, was interpreted in theological terms, where light represented good and dark was evil, as in the dark enemies of Christianity.

Here is a point of connection with anthropology’s insights about colors and cultures, not engaged by Keevak. To explain briefly: the natural color spectrum is…

The New Colored People: The Mixed Race Movement in America (Book Review)

Mixed American Life
2012-11-15

Charles T. Franklin

The New Colored People: The Mixed Race Movement in America by Jon Michael Spencer (1997) makes the argument that the US multi-cultural movement, like other movements in the past, is something that we need to pay attention for two reasons. Spencer cites the first reason to pay attention is due to the increasing numbers of people who are born with or have become more comfortable expressing their “mixed-race”heritage. The second reason Spencer gives is his assertion that our society as whole is not particularly ready to deal with the potential social, legal, and cultural consequences that could happen as a result. In other words, the multi-racial movement is more than just the right to check multiple ethnicities or the “Other” section for race on an application. Spencer’s interest in the growing multicultural movement of the US is not for its own sake (though he believes it worth studying) , but to compare this movement with similar movements in South Africa and use that comparison to predict the impact of the multicultural movement in the future. Spencer conducts a comprehensive analysis on the subject; however his primary audience and the target of his study is the impact of the mixed-race movement on the African-American community…

Read the entire review here.

‘The Black Count:’ the epic true story behind ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’

The Seattle Times
2012-11-16

Tyrone Beason

Tom Reiss’ swashbuckling new book, “The Black Count,” tells the true story of Alex Dumas, son of a French nobleman and an African slave, the father of author Alexandre Dumas and the inspiration for the younger Dumas’ classic novel “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss Crown, 414 pp.

There are no statues in monument-laden France commemorating the legendary 18th century swordsman and general Alex Dumas, whose son Alexandre based literary classics like “The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” on scenes from the elder’s epic life story.

It’s a sad civic oversight, but nothing compared to the tragic decline suffered by the novelist’s heroic father as laid out in Tom Reiss’ fascinating, and dare to say, swashbuckling new biography, “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo.”

It turns out that the heroes in those classics are modeled on a black man who was born in 1762 in the French colony of Haiti. Alex Dumas was the son of a wayward French nobleman and an African slave, and it is his biracial identity that adds such rich complexity to his rise through the ranks of the French military to become one of the most beloved generals of his time, arguably even more admired than Napoleon, a fact that probably didn’t sit well with the megalomaniacal future ruler.

It was Napoleon who tapped Dumas to command the cavalry that invaded Egypt, an enormous, and as it turns out, fateful honor.

“The Black Count” meticulously evokes the spirit of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, but it also explains the exasperating paradox of a nation that was simultaneously a huge slaveholding empire and the pioneering exponent of the concept of “liberté, egalité, fraternité.”

Let’s not forget the context. By the 1750s, black slaves taken to France were able to sue their masters for freedom. After the French Revolution in 1793, special schools were set up in France to educate the children of “revolutionaries of color” from the colonies. Black and mixed-race politicians were allowed to serve in the national government…

Read the entire review here.

Zakes Mda: The Madonna of Excelsior

Muthal Naidoo: Published Books, Plays, Poems and Articles
2011-11-01

Muthal Naidoo

(2002. Cape Town. Oxford University Press)
 
The Immorality Act of 1927, which prohibited sex between Blacks and Whites, was amended in 1950 to prohibit sex between Whites and all non-Whites. Zakes Mda bases his novel, The Madonna of Excelsior, on the 1971 case in which 19 people from Excelsior were charged under the Immorality Act. He traces the lives of Niki, one of the accused, and her children Viliki and Popi, and the effects of the ‘illicit’ activities on their lives and those of the people around them.

Niki, the Madonna of Excelsior, lives in Mahlaswetsa, the black township of Excelsior. She and several other women fall prey to circumstances of poverty and become involved with white men from Excelsior. When the women give birth to white babies, fourteen of them are arrested and put on trial with five white men. But the case comes to nothing; the Minister of Justice withdraws the charges. And there are no fathers of the white babies of black women. This attempt to wipe out the whole event and pretend it never happened may have succeeded in the rest of the country but in Excelsior it lives on in the shame that families both black and white feel, in the many ‘coloured’ children walking the streets, in the unacknowledged connections that they represent. And especially in Popi’s hatred of herself. People call her ‘boesman” and she is ashamed of her blonde hair, blue eyes and hairy legs. She has a white half-brother whom she does not acknowledge and clings to the memory of her black father…

Read the entire review here.

Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (review) [McKibbin]

University of Toronto Quarterly
Volume 81, Number 3, Summer 2012
pages 704-705
DOI: 10.1353/utq.2012.0140

Molly Littlewood McKibbin

Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson, eds.(Inanna Publications, 2010)

DeRango-Adem and Thompson’s new collection of the artistic, autobiographical, and scholarly work of almost seventy women performs the important task of bridging the gap between late twentieth-century mixed-race writing and more contemporary work. Their text demonstrates the changes multiracial discourse has undergone and is undergoing. Other Tongues addresses the important concerns that dominated multiracial discourse in North America in the final decades of the twentieth century, which, as the contributions illustrate, are still quite relevant to the experiences of both older and younger multiracial women. Prominent recurring themes include belonging; racial inclusion and exclusion; identity formation; racism; physical appearance; the continuing prevalence of the ‘what are you/where are you from?’ question; the relationships between race, culture, and ethnicity; and the relationship of ‘colour’ to whiteness. Although some writers do not further these issues beyond what earlier collections have already done, others take them up in ways that renew older ideas with fresh perspectives. Many contributions touch on issues that are central to ongoing multiracial discourses, including gender, sexuality, class, migration, transracial adoption, single parenting, families consisting of multiracial parents, the rhetoric of ‘post-racialism,’ and the impact of Barack Obama as a public figure.

As Amber Jamilla Musser argues, race is ‘all about context,’ and this collection makes a concerted effort to include work arising out of many different contexts. Through contributors from a large variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds working in a range of genres – including autobiographical essays, narrative sketches, poetry, drama, scholarly essays, and visual art (unfortunately not printed in colour) – Other Tongues offers diverse voices that explore multiracial experience in North America (a necessarily limited geographical region, as the editors acknowledge). The exclusive engagement with women’s voices is, the editors explain, the result of a commitment to the goals of women’s studies. But while Carol Camper’s preface (itself rather troubling in its uncritical adoption of conventional notions of authenticity) signals DeRango-Adem and Thompson’s debt to her 1994 collection of women’s writing, Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women, and while the desire to offer a forum in which women’s voices can be heard is clear, the absence of men’s experiences is at times a notable lack. Since multiracial discourse is in many ways a product of critical race theory and, consequently, is dependent on the ‘storytelling’ of racialized individuals as a way of approaching matters of race, the absence of male contributors seems limiting. While the editors’ choice is made explicit, the collection is presented in a way that suggests it is quite straightforwardly a text grappling with multiracialism that happens to include only women. Since contemporary North American multiracial theory, scholarship, and cultural production have never been dominated by men, there is no immediately apparent reason to focus on women to the exclusion of men.

However, the most significant feature of the volume is that it exhibits clearly the complicated set of variables that affect the experiences and identities of racialized figures, and several of the contributions are especially insightful. The blend of contributors of different ages and from different class, educational, regional, and cultural backgrounds aids the project of multiracial discourse, which is perhaps best defined by its heterogeneity. This collection is helpful since the importance of hearing a variety of voices is essential for resisting the homogenizing process of racialization in North American society. As Jackie Wang explains, ‘I write because I believe that it means something, because I have a story, although it is not the story,’ and, indeed, the multitude of ‘stories’ in Other Tongues demonstrates the differences within ‘mixed race’ even as it identifies similarities.

Although the content of the book does not really break new ground, the editors foster an unusual dialogue between their contributors that emphasizes the important links among ‘real life,’ art, politics, and the academy. A strength of the collection is that because it…

Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921 (review) [Allan Cho]

University of Toronto Quarterly
Volume 81, Number 3, Summer 2012
pages 690-691
DOI: 10.1353/utq.2012.0090

Allan Cho, Program Services Librarian
University of British Columbia

As part of a new collective at the University of British Columbia re-envisaging the landscape and boundaries of early Canada, Renisa Mawani’s Colonial Proximities exemplifies a new wave of scholarship on ‘Pacific Canada.’ Focusing on how migrants from Asia, Europe, and other parts of the Americas interacted with each other and with First Nations peoples historically, the important work of these scholars examines the parallels beyond the histories of French-English Canada and to larger histories in North America.

Situated in this intellectual context, Mawani argues that these early interracial encounters between aboriginal peoples, Chinese migrants, and other “racial enemies” provoked such deep concerns among colonial authorities that a production of a number of ‘juridical racial truths’ were needed to pave the way for modes of governance that eventually pervaded for the remaining century. As a contact zone saturated by interraciality, the colonial administrators sought a delicate balance of moral assimilation for its aboriginal populace and physical segregation of its Chinese settlers. Not only did fear of racial encounters promulgate accusations of either coerced or deliberate prostitution ever threatening to colonial morals, heterosexuality ultimately became a contested field among the colonial authorities that sought to regulate the social mores of its inhabitants.

Unfurling a bio-political conundrum, this settler colonialism produced a paradoxical blend of assimilation and segregation intersecting at one of the colony’s main economic engines, the salmon cannery industry. Could the economic fortunes that required an abundant supply of cheap labour from Chinese and aboriginal workers in the canneries justify the possibilities of this ‘contagion’ that would result from intimate contact between these races? Could the desire for racial purity within a racially mixed labour force even be possible?

Whereas aboriginal women were seen as an internal danger to the colony, Chinese women were racial enemies who threatened the racial balance of its white populace. Liquor provisions further worked to augment racial divisions and fortify existing power structures dominated by European colonialists. The illegal liquor trade served to underpin the hostility that exacerbated the accusation of Chinese selling liquor to aboriginals, which required an ‘interracial prevention.’ Matters became complicated, however, when mixed peoples, the ‘half breeds,’ challenged and defied colonial taxonomies, as colonial authorities could no longer easily pinpoint those that it needed to control.

Not surprisingly, these interracial exchanges among aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations engendered racial anxieties that sustained colonial institutions run by the Indian agents, missionaries, and legal authorities who sought manifold ways to monitor these encounters through friendships, alliances, and even sexual relations. This legislation of race emerged as a common voice among the largely white administration. Lively debates and discussions eventually led to the creation of royal commissions, further solidifying colonial procedures and legislation that would systematically demarcate racial lines.

Colonial Proximities is an evolution of Mawani’s doctoral dissertation, showing a maturation of ideas. This fresh and more fluid understanding of early Canada is one that seeks to examine the role of trans-Pacific migration in multiple directions throughout the Pacific region, highlighting the history of racism and exploitation of migrants and displacement of First Nations people…

Michele Elam: The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium [Johnson Review]

New Books in African American Studies: Discussions with Scholars of African Americans about Their New Books
2012-10-31

Sherry Johnson, Assistant Professor of English
Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan

“What are you?” The question can often comes out of nowhere One can be going about her quotidian activities, or she might have just finished a meeting at work. “What are you?” The question is disorienting for most, but for others who are racially ambiguous it is commonplace. The ostensibly benign question suggests that it is about the person being asked. However, one might argue that it is more about the one who does the asking. In The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millenium (Stanford University Press, 2011), Michele Elam critically discusses the rise of the Mixed Race Studies. To demonstrate the new sub-genre of cultural studies in both art and academia Elam shows elements of what mixed-racedness looks like in the classroom, as well as in the public sphere here at the turn of the 21st century…

Read the entire review here. Listen to the interview (00:59:00) here.

“Tense and Tender Ties”: a review of Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother (2011)

Transition
Number 108 (2012)
pages 129-140

Kimberly DaCosta, Associate Professor of Sociology; Associate Dean of Students
New York University, Gallatin

Psychologically conflicted, confused, traitorous, tragic, and deracinated: the public vocabulary used to describe multiracial people has hardly changed since the days when state laws banned marriage between black and white. Zeroing in on interracial kinship, Kimberly DaCosta close reads Janny Scott’s biography of Barack Obama’s mother.

My father’s white, I tell them, and rural.
You don’t hate the South? they ask. You don’t hate it?
—Natasha Trethewey, “Pastoral”

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” said Cornel West in an interview published on the political blog, TruthDig in May 2011. “It’s understandable,” he continues, “As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening … Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.”

West claims to understand quite a lot about Obama, intuited from the most general facts of his upbringing in an interracial and international family context. According to West, this upbringing has directly shaped (or perhaps “distorted” is the better description from West’s point of view) his political formation, alienating him from his people (“deracination”) and thus making him ideally suited to become what West calls “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”

“It is a tried and true ritual of American politics to interpret interracial intimacy and mixed race subjectivity as a sign of suspect political loyalty.”

When he made these statements, West was participating in a tried and true ritual of American politics—the one in which interracial intimacy and mixed-race subjectivity are interpreted as sign of, or explanation for, suspect or insufficient political loyalty. George W. Bush performed the ritual in 2000, successfully smearing John McCain in the South Carolina Republican primary with a whisper campaign that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock. Most recently, in a widely read and discussed New York Times opinion piece published just a few months after the West interview, Drew Westen, psychologist and self-described “scientist and strategic consultant,” explained Obama’s perceived political betrayal as a consequence of his insufficiently integrated identity. In Obama, Westen writes, we have “a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his reelection. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in Dreams from My Father appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there—the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in” (emphasis added).

These statements rely on familiar stereotypes of mixed race people—psychologically conflicted, confused, race traitors—for their impact, and evidence no more than a cursory knowledge of the details of Obama’s family life. Not that more detail about those relationships matters much to those making these kinds of political speculations. Ideologies, as Barbara Fields reminds us in the New Left Review, “are real, but it does not follow that they [need to be] scientifically accurate” in order to do their work. They work because they reflect the daily rituals that people engage in to make them seem plausible—rituals like the ones West and Westen are performing—that assert, while claiming to merely describe, the political impact of mixed-race subjectivity.

Janny Scott’s biography emerges in this moment in which the political utility of interracialism reveals itself yet again. If statements about the significance of Obama’s upbringing in his political decision-making proceed largely on the basis of supposition and innuendo,A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, published by Riverhead Press, provides some much needed context. Scott did not get to comment on this most recent controversy since the volume went to press before it occurred. Yet, her book can be read as a long (nearly 400-page) retort to those who would so blithely use interracial kinship and mixed-race subjectivity in this way…

Read the entire article in HTML or PDF format.

Race, Religion, and Law in Colonial India. Trials of an Interracial Family [Review]

Reviews in History: Covering books and digital resources across all fields of history
October 2012

Peter Robb, Research Professor of the History of India
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

Race, Religion, and Law in Colonial India. Trials of an Interracial Family, Chandra Mallampalli, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, ISBN: 9781107012615; 286pp.

This book uses the story of one family and its legal battles to uncover relationships between religion, race, gender, identity, and personal law in south India in the first half of the 19th century. Matthew Abrahams was an Indian Roman Catholic of lowly background but increasing wealth. He married an Anglo-Portuguese woman, Charlotte Fox, and adopted what was regarded as a largely ‘East Indian’ (or Anglo-Indian) lifestyle. His money was made from the abkari (liquor) contract, trading in arms and money lending in Bellary and also Kurnool after the annexation of 1839. One of his sons, Charles, was sent to Cambridge University to study for the law. After Matthew’s death, intestate, in 1842, his younger brother, Francis, continued to manage and develop the business. Starting in 1854, suits were brought against Francis by Charlotte and her sons, for possession of Matthew’s estate. They progressed from the Bellary District Court, on appeal to the Sadr Adalat in Madras, and then to the Privy Council in London.

The main point at issue was whether or not Matthew and Francis had operated on a joint family basis, as partners, or as master and servant. It suited Francis’s case to claim that the Abrahams were a joint family, in line with supposed Hindu custom, but also with the alleged practice of many Indian converts to Christianity. It suited Charlotte to insist that Francis had been a mere employee with no rights in his brother’s estate, which therefore ought to devolve according to ‘Christian’ principles. The District Court agreed with Charlotte; the appellant court found for Francis; and the Privy Council cut through both arguments, arguing that personal law ought to follow not inherited traditions but the lifestyle. This final judgment (of 1863) favoured Charlotte on the point of inheritance. But it also supported Francis’s rights as an active partner in business, entitled to rewards at very much the level Francis had offered to accept before the litigation began.

The story is used to advance several themes. The first concerns the conditions of life in the towns and military cantonments of a southern dry zone during a period of transition, from around 1812 to the 1850s. The second covers questions of family life, custom, and identity, particularly among liminal peoples such as the Abrahams, comprising as they did ‘Hindu’ Christians and mixed-race Protestant ‘East Indians’. (A chapter on Charles in Cambridge provides an intriguing but inconclusive footnote to this story.) Finally there are the legal and policy changes in the run-up to the establishment of the Indian High Courts in 1862, and in particular the development of a personal law according to religion – and hence the re-invention or formation of ‘communities’ in British India.

There is much of interest under the first two themes, many details being revealed in the trial papers. Several chapters are devoted to the growing wealth and status of the Abrahams. Bellary, ceded to the Company by Hyderabad in 1800 under the subsidiary alliance, is painted as a frontier place, dominated by the Company’s army and a host of camp followers. A very good impression is conveyed of the intermixture of races and communities. Bellary was clearly changing and offered opportunities to the resourceful, such as Matthew Abrahams. The Rev. John Hands of the non-denominational LMS, who converted Matthew to Protestantism, and who was later known for his translation of the Bible into Kannada, arrived in Bellary in 1810, before the change in the charter that permitted missionaries in Company territories (1813). On his arrival, Hands reported, the settlement already had seven native schools with 300 children.In this milieu, Matthew and then Francis shrugged off any links to an ‘untouchable’ paraiyar ancestry and became dora (big man). Their patterns of marriage and association show, it is suggested, somewhat obscurely, ‘how lower orders of society within an economic dry zone were uniquely suited for various forms and degrees of mixture’ (p. 26). More obviously, the circumstances seem to have provided for upward mobility…

Read the entire review here.

‘Master’ Jefferson: Defender Of Liberty, Then Slavery

Fresh Air from WHYY
National Public Radio
2012-10-18

Maureen Corrigan, Book Critic

His public words have inspired millions, but for scholars, his private words and deeds generate confusion, discomfort, apologetic excuses. When the young Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” there’s compelling evidence to indicate that he indeed meant all men, not just white guys.

But by the 1780s, Jefferson’s views on slavery in America had mysteriously shifted. He formulated racial theories asserting, for instance, that African women had mated with apes; Jefferson financed the construction of Monticello by using the slaves he owned — some 600 during his lifetime — as collateral for a loan he took out from a Dutch banking house; and when he engineered the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Jefferson pushed for slavery in that territory. By 1810, Jefferson had his eye fixed firmly on the bottom line, disparaging a relative’s plan to sell his slaves by saying, “It [would] never do to destroy the goose.”

Faced with these conflicting visions of Jefferson, scholars usually fall back on words like “paradox” and “irony”; but historian Henry Wiencek says words like that allow “a comforting state of moral suspended animation.” His tough new book, Master of the Mountain, judges Jefferson’s racial views by the standards of his own time and finds him wanting. Unlike, say, George Washington, who freed his slaves in his will, Jefferson, Wiencek says, increasingly “rationalized an abomination.”…

…Wiencek also evocatively describes Jefferson’s morning routine — how he would walk back and forth on his terrace every day at first light and look down on a small empire of slaves — among them, brewers, French-trained cooks, carpenters, textile workers and field hands. Many of those slaves were related to each other; some were related — by marriage and blood — to Jefferson himself. Jefferson’s wife had six half-siblings who were enslaved at Monticello. To add to the Gothic weirdness, Jefferson’s own grandson, Jeff Randolph, recalled a number of mixed-race slaves at Monticello who looked astonishingly like his grandfather, one man “so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.” According to this grandson, Sally Hemings was only one of the women who gave birth to these Jeffersonian doubles.

Wiencek’s scholarship infers that the potent combination of the profits and sexual access generated by slavery made the institution more palatable to Jefferson. As the years went by, Jefferson was called to account by his aging revolutionary comrades — among them the Marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Paine and Thaddeus Kościuszko. All of them pressed Jefferson on the question of why this eloquent defender of liberty would himself be a slave owner. Kościuszko even drew up a will in which he left Jefferson money to buy his slaves’ freedom and educate them, so that, as he wrote, “each should know … the duty of a cytysen in the free Government.”…

Read the entire review here. Listen to it here (00:06:44). Download it here.