Mixed Race Studies

Intimacy and Inequality: Manumission and Miscegenation in Nineteenth-Century Bahia (1830-1888)

University of Nottingham
April 2010
428 pages

Jane-Marie Collins

Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Hispanic and Latin American Studies

This thesis proposes a new paradigm for understanding the historical roots of the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. In order to better comprehend the co-existence of race discrimination and racial democracy in Brazil it is argued that the myth itself needs to be subjected to an analysis which foregrounds the historically unequal relations of both race and gender. This study demonstrates how the enigma that is Brazilian race relations is the result of two major oversights in the scholarly work to date. First, the lack of critical attention to the historical processes and practices which gave rise to the so-called unique version of race relations in Brazil: manumission and miscegenation. Second, the sidelining of the role of gender and sex, as well as the specific and central place of black women’s labour, in theoretical formulations about Brazilian race relations.

The overarching intellectual aim of this thesis is to invert the way notions of familiarity and intimacy have been represented in the history of miscegenation and manumission in Brazilian slave society. The role of intimacy in the social history of race relations is instead shown to be firmly located within a hierarchy of race and gender inequalities predicated on the inferiority of blacks and women. In turn, this thesis explores how these race and gender inequalities intersected to inform and shape enslaved women’s versions of resistance and visions of freedom. In doing so this study unpicks some of the notions of advantage and privilege traditionally associated with women in general and light skin colour in particular in the processes of manumission and miscegenation; notions that are foundational to the myth of racial democracy.

Through an examination and analysis of primary sources pertaining to the lives of enslaved and freedwomen and their descendants in nineteenth-century Bahia, this study brings together different areas of their lived experiences of enslavement, manumission, miscegenation and freedom as these women came into contact with the authorities at pivotal moments in their lives. Collectively, these sources and the analysis thereof expose the limitations of advantage or privilege that have been associated with being female, parda or mulatta in the historiography of Brazilian slave society in general and the literature on manumission in particular. By foregrounding and highlighting the ways in which overlapping inequalities of race, gender and status determined experiences of enslavement and expectations of freedom during slavery, this study produces a new approach to interpreting race and gender history in Brazil, and a more comprehensive understanding of Brazilian slave labour relations.

CONTENTS

• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Section One: Introduction
  • Part 1: Introduction and overview
  • Part 2: ntimacy and Inequality: inverting the paradigm of racial democracy
• Section Two: Becoming Freed
  • 2.1 Introduction
  • 2.2 Manumission in comparative perspective
  • 2.3 Manumission in Africa
  • 2.4 Manumission in the Americas
  • 2.5 Manumission in Brazil
  • 2.6 Manumission, a gendered perspective: assessing advantage
  • 2.7 Childhood manumissions, Salvador 1830-1871
  • 2.8. Disputing and defending freed status
  • 2.9 Conclusion
• Section Three: Work, Wealth and Mobility
  • Part 1: The Demographics of Slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil
    • 3.1 Introduction
    • 3.2 The slave trades: trans-Atlantic and domestic
    • 3.3 Brazilian slave societies: provincial profiles
    • 3.4 Conclusion
    • 3.5 Occupational hierarchies, race and gender
    • 3.6 Conclusion
  • Part 2: Manumission and Mobility
    • 3.7 Introduction
    • 3.8 Manumission and creolisation
    • 3.9 Manumission and mobility
    • 3.10 Lourença on liberty
    • 3.11 Markets, labour and love
    • 3.12 Africanas and brasileiras, libertas and livres
    • 3.13 Motherhood and marriage
    • 3.14 Material wealth
    • 3.15 Markets and mobility
    • 3.16. Lourença’s last words
    • 3.17 Conclusion
• Section Four: The Enslaved Family: Unity, Stability and Viability
  • 4.1 Introduction
  • 4.2 The historiography of the Brazilian slave family: an overview
  • 4.3 Slave family 1: African/urban
  • 4.4 Slave family 2: mixed race/mixed status
  • 4.5 Slave family 3: married/rural
  • 4.6 Slave family 4: slave/free marriage
  • 4.7. Conclusion
• Section Five: Resistance
  • 5.1. Introduction
  • Part 1: Flight
    • 5.2 Paradigms
    • 5.3 Male flight
    • 5.4 Female flight: single women
    • 5.5 Female flight, family and protection
    • 5.6 Conclusion
  • Part 2: Murder
    • 5.7 Introduction
    • 5.8 Case studies
    • 5.9 Analysis
    • 5.10 Conclusion
  • Part 3: Infanticide
    • 5.11 Introduction
    • 5.12 Infanticide and slave resistance
    • 5.13 Infanticide and Illegitimacy: a question of honour?
    • 5.14 Conclusion
• Section Six: Conclusion
• Appendix
• Sources and Bibliography

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People of Color in Lousiana: Part I

The Journal of Negro History
Volume 1, Noumber 4 (October, 1916)
pages 361-376

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)

PEOPLE OF COLOR IN LOUISIANA

PART I

The title of a possible discussion of the Negro in Louisiana presents difficulties, for there is no such word as Negro permissible in speaking of this State. The history of the State is filled with attempts to define, sometimes at the point of the sword, oftenest in civil or criminal courts, the meaning of the word Negro. By common consent, it came to mean in Louisiana, prior to 1865, slave, and after the war, those whose complexions were noticeably dark. As Grace King so delightfully puts it, “The pure-blooded African was never called colored, but always Negro.” The gens de couleur, colored people, were always a class apart, separated from and superior to the Negroes, ennobled were it only by one drop of white blood in their veins. The caste seems to have existed from the first introduction of slaves. To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleur. Among themselves, however, there were jealous and fiercely-guarded distinctions: “griffes, briques, mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, each term meaning one degree’s further transfiguration toward the Caucasian standard of physical perfection.”

Negro slavery in Louisiana seems to have been early influenced by the policy of the Spanish colonies. De las Casas, an apostle to the Indians, exclaimed against the slavery of the Indians and finding his efforts of no avail proposed to Charles V in 1517 the slavery of the Africans as a substitute.  The Spaniards refused at first to import slaves from Africa, but later agreed to the proposition and employed other nations to traffic in them. Louisiana learned from the Spanish colonies her lessons of this traffic, took over certain parts of the slave regulations and imported bondmen from the Spanish West Indies. Others brought thither were Congo, Banbara, Yaloff, and Mandingo slaves.

People of color were introduced into Louisiana early in the eighteenth century. In 1708, according to the historian, Gayarré, the little colony of Louisiana, at the point on the Gulf of Mexico now known as Biloxi, in the present State of Mississippi, had been in existence nine years. In 1708, the population of the colony did not exceed 279 persons. The land about this region is particularly sterile, and the colonists were little disposed to undertake the laborious task of tilling the soil. Indian slavery was attempted but found unprofitable and exceedingly precarious. So Bienville, lacking the sympathy of De las Casas for the Indians, wrote his government to obtain the authorization of exchanging Negroes for Indians with the French West Indian islands. “We shall give,” he said, “three Indians for two Negroes. The Indians, when in the islands, will not be able to run away, the country being unknown to them, and the Negroes will not dare to become fugitives in Louisiana, because the Indians would kill them.”…

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Tiffany Rae Reid pens first book as a guide for raising biracial children

phillyBurbs.com
2011-12-18

Naila Francis, Staff Writer

At first, there were the looks, brazenly curious, speculative, and in Briety McKeon’s eyes, even judgmental.

Who was the little girl beside her? The one with the warm, honeyed tint to her skin, the darker, curlier hair, the features that didn’t quite match the pretty white woman beside her and the young white girl who was more her mirror image? How did she fit in?

Those implied questions would crush her, though McKeon adored her daughters equally, though she herself yearned for them to be as empowered by their obvious differences as the many bonds they shared.

“Still, to this day, we will walk into a room and get the look,” says McKeon, a single mom to daughters Aurora, 5, whose dad is black, and Lydia, 10, whose father is white. “There is going to be a certain paranoia in your head. It’s not so much that people are going to come out and say something. It’s more the reaction on their face. It’s like, ‘Are both of them yours? Is Aurora adopted?’ Even friends will say, ‘Yeah, it took me a while to figure it out.’”

When Aurora was born, McKeon admits to an initial naïveté: “On the inside, you think, ‘We’re OK with it, so everyone else will be OK with it.’ ”

As she quickly learned otherwise, she struggled with how to handle the blatant stares, the questions, the perceived criticism she encountered whenever she was in public with her girls.

But it wasn’t until Aurora came to her this year asking why she looked different from everybody else in their large Irish-Italian family that McKeon began worrying more about what her daughter was internalizing than the reactions of the world around her.

That’s when she turned to Tiffany Rae Reid…

At 36, the biracial Reid is still coming to terms with who she is. For more than half her life, the Voorhees resident believed she was white. She was raised in rural Ashtabula, Ohio, the daughter of a Hungarian mother and absentee African-American father whom she met for the first time when she was 26. Until that point, Reid, whose sister is also white, had believed her mother’s stories about her permanently tanned complexion. Whenever she dared to ask why she looked so different, her mother would pull out the family albums, pointing to photos of Reid’s dark-skinned Hungarian uncle, whose light green eyes, curly hair and thick lips mimicked her own.

“I would ask my mom, ‘Am I adopted? Why don’t I look like you?’ ” recalls Reid. “She created this whole reality that I was a dark Hungarian.”…

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Narrative Miscegenation: “Absalom, Absalom!” as Naturalist Novel, Auto/Biography, and African-American Oral Story

Journal of Narrative Theory
Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer, 2001)
pages 155-179
DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2011.0080

Alex Vernon, Associate Professor of English
Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas

Charles Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, especially as disseminated by Herbert Spencer, profoundly affected literary criticism at the end of the nineteenth century, with genres treated like biological species to the degree that at least one critic wrote about “a struggle for existence among genres” (Pizer 82). A century later, in “The Law of Genre,” Jacques Derrida repeatedly expresses this law—that “genres are not to be mixed” (51)—in naturalist terms. He remarks that genres have been treated in a system akin to “race, familial membership, [and] classificatory genealogy” whereby to mix genres is, by convention, to “risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (57, 53). It is to commit a kind of miscegenation. Yet his essay finally finds such intermixing inevitable, an inevitability he calls “the law of the law of genre” (55).

William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! also employs naturalistic language in its various accountings of the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. While the story turns on the historical Southern taboo of racial intermixing, Faulkner artfully incorporates generic miscegenation into the novel’s structure. The narrative structure of Absalom, Absalom! can be viewed as a “cross-breed” of several literary forms, including (among others) the naturalist novel, biography, autobiography, and the oral tale largely associated…

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Between Black and White: Attitudes Toward Southern Mulattoes, 1830-1861

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 45, Number 2 (May, 1979)
pages 185-200

Robert Brent Toplin, Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Wilmington

The documents of slavery—laws, narratives speeches, and political tracts—contain abundant references to “Negroes” and “mulattoes.” By the standards of antebellum America, the distinction was not accidental or minor. Contemporary attitudes about the difference between Negro and mulatto related to fundamental racial ideas. For many years Americans from both the North and South openly expressed a marked bias favoring the mulatto over the Negro. The variations in white attitudes toward mulattoes in the antebellum period need closer investigation than they have received, especially in connection with conflicting opinions about miscegenation, sexual oppression, and racial identification. In many respects disputes about the mulatto’s position in southern society related to fundamental points in the debates about slavery and abolition.

Historians of slavery recognize that antebellum Americans often showed special interest in mulattoes, but their estimates of the extent and importance of this interest vary greatly. In a careful study of white attitudes from 1550 to 1812 Winthrop D. Jordan…

The Anatomy of Grey: A Theory of Interracial Convergence

College of Law Faculty Scholarship
Paper 74
January 2008
56 pages

Kevin Maillard, Associate Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Janis L. McDonald, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

This article offers a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. Ground-breaking scholarship addressing racial boundaries, as written by Randall Kennedy, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, generally focuses on the enduring legacy of race discrimination. We approach these boundaries from a different angle—whites who become “less white.” We bring together the challenges of passing and adoption to offer a theory of fluid racial boundaries.

Transracial adoption provides one viable channel to discuss the possibilities of white-to-black racial identity transformation. By confronting the meaning of white identity in relation to their black surroundings, adoptive parents may engage along a continuum of what we term “interracial convergence.” Parents who adopt transracially potentially face some of the pressures of being black in the United States. The Interethnic Placement Act forbids the consideration of race in adoption placements, but white adoptive parents nevertheless receive sharp criticism from black social workers for lacking the ability to teach “survival skills” necessary for the child’s racial identity development. We argue, alternatively, that it creates a grey space where racial convergers—adoptive parents and racial passers—can challenge the stability of racial boundaries.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I. Introduction
• II. Invisible Racial Connections
  • A. Racial Defection
  • B. Racial Intentions And Performance
  • C. The Performativity Of Passing
• III. White Racial Identity Development
  • A. Colorblindness
  • B. Willful Racial Ignorance
• IV. White Parents: Black Children: Racial Performativity
• V. Transformative White Identity: Interracial Convergence
  • A. The Pre-Encounter Stage
  • B. Encounter and Disorientation
    • a) Initial Racial Disorientation
    • b) Awareness of Repetitive Racial Incidents
    • c) Reckoning with Privilege
  • C. Augmenting a White Racial Identity
• VI. Conclusion: Interracial Convergence

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1998, Boston city authorities terminated the eleven-year employment of two firefighters who had falsified their employment applications. Twin brothers, Philip and Paul Malone, transformed themselves from white to black on their applications in order to benefit from a federal diversity program. Although their family had identified as white for three successive generations, the brothers claimed their black ancestry from their maternal great-grandmother. They relied on the traditional, although controversial rule in law and social practice of hypo-descent, or the “one-drop” rule, to justify their status. A hearing officer held that the twin brothers, who had lived most of their lives as white, “willfully and falsely identified themselves as black in order to receive appointments to the department.” The officer based her determination of their racial identity on three criteria: visual observation of facial features, documentary evidence, and social reputation of the families. Under this test, the Malones failed to qualify as “black.” In a different case, a Pennsylvania social service agency failed to approve a potential adoption placement for Dante, a biracial black/white child, with his white foster parents, Victor and Mary Jane DeWees. Before the family accepted Dante as a foster child Mrs. DeWees expressed to a social worker that she preferred a white child because she “did not want people to think that [she] or her daughter were sleeping with a black man.” The social service agency based their denial on the DeWees’ negative racial attitudes, which they believed conflicted with Dante’s best interests. In return, the foster parents argued that their views had changed in the two years that they fostered Dante and they were ready to “accept [him] as any other child.” Nevertheless they did not view race as important to Dante’s upbringing: they informed the social worker that race had “no impact” on the self-esteem and identity of minority children, and refused “to manufacture black friends.” Challenging the relevance of the child’s racial identity, Mr. and Mrs. DeWees brought suit against the agency in federal court.

Both Malone and DeWees demonstrate the inherent difficulties of rigid racial categorization. The two forms of racial subversion we examine here, passing and transracial adoption, effectively question the rigidity of racial boundaries. While passing facilitates the secret transference of racial membership, adoption across the color line compels an open form of interracial kinship. Both require a journey into unfamiliar racial territory which reorients racial identity from a biological status to a performative measurement based on the choices made by the individuals involved…

…Both cases present potential situations where transracial adoption and racial passing intersect in some ways. Passing, for those persons born as white, means confronting unearned racial privilege inherited at birth. This article seeks to expand on traditional discussions of passing by offering a theory of racial identity divorced from biological considerations. Law fails to recognize the complexity of racial performance and identity, thus categorically simplifying a perceived polarity of black and white. While the majority of passing scholarship focuses on the enduring legacy of white supremacy, much less work focuses on whites relinquishing the trappings of race privilege—whites who become “less white.” This discourse, as it stands, lacks a rigorous examination of the ways that whites might join this destabilization of racial boundaries…

…This Article proceeds in four parts. Section One addresses traditional racial “passing,” where necessary subterfuge and identity performance undermined socially identified and controlled racial divisions. In this cautious challenge to the biological essence of white identity, passers expose the different ways that white identities could be performed. Section Two introduces the continuum of white identity development, beginning with a “pre-encounter,” stage of racial awareness. The section examines the contributing role of colorblindness and racial recklessness in supporting the existence of a pre-encounter stage. Section Three introduces the application of interracial convergence into the transracial adoption debate as it relates to considerations of the child’s need to develop a healthy black racial identity. Recent changes in federal adoption law require a colorblind placement process, which eliminates scrutiny of the racial attitudes of the adoptive parents. The DeWees parents, despite their deliberate ignorance of their foster child’s racial needs, might have been approved under these new interpretations of the law. Section Four identifies the potential stages of a transformative white identity for adoptive parents. Our model identifies stages that progress from a colorblind, preencounter stage, followed by a disorienting racial encounter stage, to various stages that recognize the role of white privilege, progressing toward a stage of interracial convergence and, perhaps, a new, transformative white identity…

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Passing, segregation, and assimilation: How Nella Larsen changed the “Passing” novel

University of Texas, El Paso
December 2010
105 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1483825
ISBN: 9781124390468

Vivian Maguire

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of English

In 1929, Nella Larsen wrote Passing, a novel that delves into the lives of two African-American women living in segregated society. Passing portrays the reunion of two childhood friends, Clare Kendry and Irene Westover. The relationship between Irene and Clare is at first one of fascination, as the two have lifestyles that intrigue one another. Things quickly start to change however, when Irene concludes that Clare and her husband Brian are having an affair. Irene’s suspicious attitudes toward Clare become hostile and she is more determined than ever to prevent Clare from joining her social circle and perhaps, from taking her place in black society. The novel takes an unexpected turn with a confrontation between John Bellew and Clare. She mysteriously falls to her death through an open window with Irene standing nearby. Clare’s demise is further muddled with a plethora of thoughts that run through Irene’s mind at the time, making her the lead suspect in Clare’s sudden death. Clare’s death is never resolved, leaving that event, like many others in the novel, open for interpretation. Irene, who prides herself on her honesty, has the most befuddled interpretation of how Clare died at the end of the story.

What makes Passing such an extraordinary novel is not only that it avoids the traditional conventions of the passing novel, which are typically concerned with the dire effects of leaving one’s race behind, but it calls those conventions into question. Clare does not redeem herself by returning to the black community; she dies, and possibly at the hands of a woman who was supposed to support her according to racial laws. The reader is compelled to sympathize with Clare while wondering what is wrong with Irene. The answer to that question is of course that Irene subscribes to the very ideas about race and ethics that the majority of Americans were invested in at that time. These racial edicts became far more pressing than the lives of individuals themselves, which Larsen recognized and set out to challenge.

Larsen’s Passing is important because it captures the subtlety and nuance of race relations and identity at this point in American history in a way that other novels of the time failed to do. Larsen did this by using the established genre of the passing novel to create a depiction that draws the reader’s focus to a point deeper than the act of passing itself, and directs it toward the more difficult underlying questions about race relations and racial identity. In the next chapter I will look at the social environment that surrounded the passing phenomenon. I will discuss what social analysts and early authors of passing texts identified as motivations behind passing and examine what Nella Larsen felt actually led individuals to do so. Ultimately I will address what Nella Larsen argues all along: individuals cannot fit into social roles designated by racial categories, and the resulting tension leads to unwarranted racial violence.

In my second chapter, I will address two authors who influenced Nella Larsen to change the traditional passing novel. I will describe how one author, Charles Chesnutt, inspired Larsen to change the traditional passing figure in order to demonstrate that the race problem was not in passing, but adhering to racial constructs. The second author, James Weldon Johnson, inspired Larsen with his satirical take on passing, and motivated her to further challenge the racial restrictions on American society.

In chapter three, I will explore how Larsen uses mirrors, an unreliable narrator, and ambiguous situations to comment on the futile and dangerous affect segregation and assimilation had on American culture. Her use of an untrustworthy, but racially loyal heroine helped to reveal the pitfalls in allowing an entire civilization to be divided by racial and social roles. Finally, I will look at two authors who succeeded Larsen, adopting her position on Americans’ dependency on racial and social roles, and what is lost in succumbing to assimilation. The first author I will discuss, Ralph Ellison, writes a novel that seemingly is not about passing at all, yet his exploration of assimilation illustrates that there is little difference between passing and assimilation to meet social expectations when both require performance and the severing of one’s identity. The second author, Danzy Senna, directly addresses both assimilation and passing as the same with a heroine that passes and assimilates at different intervals in order to avoid discrimination. Neither author offers a solution to the passing problem. Their message resembles Larsen’s in that though race is imagined, society’s dependence on racial divisions is not. To live separately from race is difficult, but possible, and worthwhile in the search for identity.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Crossing the Line: Nella Larsen’s Take on Transcending Racial Boundaries
• Shroud of Ethics: Nella Larsen and the Traditional Passing Novel
• Mirror on the Wall: What Nella Larsen’s Ambiguous Novel Reveals About Passing
• Passing in Time: Nella Larsen’s Impact on the Passing Novel
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Works Cited
• Curriculum Vita

Introduction

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a man who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, was forcibly removed and then jailed for sitting in the whites-only section of a railroad car in Louisiana. Plessy disputed these events in the Supreme Court in 1896, where he argued that his black ancestry was imperceptible, and that he was by all definitions a white person. The Supreme Court ruled that Plessy’s exclusion from the white railroad car was not a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because while the amendment was created to ensure that all men are treated equally, it was never intended to eliminate social distinctions based on color.

However little a percentage of his ancestry was black, it was that percentage that mattered. Despite Plessy’s white appearance, the state of Louisiana viewed him as black and treated him accordingly, illustrating the illogicality of racial lines and the laws created to guard them. This left individuals who, like Plessy, were visibly white, but by definition still black, to either accept their position in society as inferior or to escape such oppressive markers by passing for white.

In 1929, Nella Larsen wrote Passing, a novel that delves into the lives of two African-American women living in segregated society. Passing portrays the reunion of two childhood friends, Clare Kendry and Irene Westover. The two had lost touch when Clare’s father died and Clare was forced to move in with her two white and racist aunts. When they meet again, Irene is living in Harlem with her two children and her husband, who practices medicine. Clare has married a successful businessman, John Bellew. Clare’s husband however, is a white racist who is unaware that Clare is in fact black. At first glance, the title Passing appears to refer to the lifestyle that Clare has chosen. However, she decides early in the novel that she would like to rejoin black society and no longer cares for racial pretenses. Irene, who Clare has adopted as her guide into the black community, treats Clare with civility. Yet all the while, she is resentful of Clare’s cavalier attitude and wishes to prevent her reentry into the black community. In the novel, Irene’s identity will come into question, as she wears a particular visage for society while masking her true thoughts and feelings…

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