Mixed Race Studies

Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier

University of Nebraska Press
2005
202 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-2016-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-6841-8

Andrew K. Frank, Allen Morris Associate Professor of History
Florida Atlantic University

Creeks and Southerners examines the families created by the hundreds of intermarriages between Creek Indian women and European American men in the southeastern United States during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Called “Indian countrymen” at the time, these intermarried white men moved into their wives’ villages in what is now Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. By doing so, they obtained new homes, familial obligations, occupations, and identities. At the same time, however, they maintained many of their ties to white American society and as a result entered the historical record in large numbers.

Creeks and Southerners studies the ways in which many children of these relationships lived both as Creek Indians and white Southerners. By carefully altering their physical appearances, choosing appropriate clothing, learning multiple languages, embracing maternal and paternal kinsmen and kinswomen, and balancing their loyalties, the children of intermarriages found ways to bridge what seemed to be an unbridgeable divide. Many became prominent Creek political leaders and warriors, played central roles in the lucrative deerskin trade, built inns and taverns to cater to the needs of European American travelers, frequently moved between colonial American and Native communities, and served both European American and Creek officials as interpreters, assistants, and travel escorts. The fortunes of these bicultural children reflect the changing nature of Creek-white relations, which became less flexible and increasingly contentious throughout the nineteenth century as both Creeks and Americans accepted a more rigid biological concept of race, forcing their bicultural children to choose between identities.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Introduction: The Problem of Identity in the Early American Southeast
• Chapter 1: The Invitation Within
• Chapter 2: “This Asylum of Liberty”
• Chapter 3: Kin and Strangers
• Chapter 4: Parenting and Practice
• Chapter 5: In TwoWorlds
• Chapter 6: Tustunnuggee Hutkee and the Limits of Dual Identities
• Chapter 7: The Insistence of Race
• Epilogue: Race, Clan, and Creek
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival

University of Nebraska Press
2004
206 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-1527-6

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

“A name creates life patterns,” Allison Adelle Hedge Coke writes, “which form and shape a life; my life, like my name, must have been formed many times over then handed to me to realize.” Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer is Hedge Coke’s narrative of that realization, the award-winning poet and writer’s searching account of her life as a mixed-blood woman coming of age off-reservation, yet deeply immersed in her Cherokee and Huron heritage. In a style at once elliptical and achingly clear, Hedge Coke describes her schizophrenic mother and the abuse that often overshadowed her childhood; the torments visited upon her, the rape and physical violence; and those she inflicted on herself, the alcohol and drug abuse. Yet she managed to survive with her dreams and her will, her sense of wonder and promise undiminished.

The title Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer refers to the life-revelations that brought Hedge Coke through her trials, the melding of language and experience that has brought order to her life. In this book, Hedge Coke shares the insights she has gathered along the way, insights that touch on broader Native issues such as modern life in the diaspora; the threat of alcohol, drug abuse, and violence; and the ongoing onslaught on self amid a complex, mixed heritage.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Of Seeds
• 2. From Winds
• 3. When Fire and Water Meet
• 4. Ashes
• 5. Back to the Lands
• 6. Oceans, Rivers
• 7. Crossings

‘Yo, Jose Dupard, Pardo Libre Natural Y Vecino De Esta Ciudad’: Masculinity, Race and Respectability in Spanish New Orleans/Jose Dupard, A Free Man of Color in Spanish New Orleans

Ìrìnkèrindò: A Journal of African Migration
Issue 5 (December 2011)
31 pages

Megan Kareithi, ABD History
Tulane University, Louisiana

This paper explores the methods free men of color used to assert their masculinity in Spanish New Orleans.  Jose and Carlos Dupard were free, mulatto brothers living in New Orleans in the late eighteenth century, at a time when Spanish officials attempted to force new laws, like coartación, on resistant French masters.  Coartación was a Spanish law that allowed for slaves to buy their freedom or self-purchase and views on the French population. Thus at the same time that new opportunities opened up for free people of color, challenges appeared as French masters attempted to enforce their hegemony by limiting the social and economic aspirations of New Orleans’ free people of color.  Free men of color like the Dupard brothers fought against this and solidified their claims to masculinity and respectability through land ownership, slave ownership, patronage, and participation in the colonial militias.

Introduction

From its beginning in 1718, New Orleans was filled with a mix of people of European, Indian, and African descent, some free and some enslaved.  Due to the heterogeneous nature of the settlement, the small number of settlers, and the myriad potential threats the frontier settlement faced, a complex racial hierarchy developed over the years.  This was further complicated by the transition from French to Spanish control in 1768.  The social ideal the French ruling elite planter class envisioned and enforced had the white male patriarch at the top and the slave of African descent at the bottom.  The complex relationships that developed between people of different races meant that reality often challenged this ideal.  And while the upper and lower echelons of this hierarchy were firmly established, the place of free people of color in society was much more ambiguous.  Throughout the era of Spanish control in New Orleans, the community of free people of color continually tested and negotiated its place in society.  This was especially true of the free men of color, whose claims to full citizenship, masculinity and social respectability were often challenged by the ruling class.  Two men who embodied this struggle in Spanish New Orleans were Jose and Carlos Dupard, two mulatto brothers who both typified the successes and struggles of the free community of color.  Free men of color like the Dupard brothers solidified their claims to masculinity and respectability in the same way that white men of Spanish New Orleans did: through land ownership, slave ownership, patronage, and participation in the colonial militias.

Jose and Carlos Dupard, living in New Orleans in the late eighteenth century, were descended from Pedro Delille Dupard, a French patriarch and plantation owner. In the mid-eighteenth century, Pedro Delille Dupard lived with his wife Jacquelina Michel and their children on St. Anne Street in New Orleans.  His brother, Pierre Joseph Delille Dupard, was also a prominent landowner in New Orleans and lived with his wife and children at their large cattle ranch at Cannes Brulées above Tchoupitoulas.  Both the Delille Dupard men owned slaves and the cattle ranch at Cannes Brulées was home to 69 slaves by 1763.  As the patriarchs of elite wealthy Creole families Pedro and Pierre Delille Dupard embodied the ideals of masculinity in colonial Louisiana.  They had all the necessary titles, possessions and duties that made a man honorable and respected in colonial Louisiana: they were vecinos, or citizens of the city of New Orleans, owned large properties, served in the militia, were the masters of numerous slaves, and heads of their families. 

Land and slaves were concrete markers of wealth and prosperity in colonial New Orleans.  But illegitimate mulatto sons of respected white men, such as Pedro Delille Dupard’s sons Jose and Carlos, faced great challenges in establishing and maintaining their masculinity.  While some mulatto sons inherited homes or slaves from their white fathers, most had to start from scratch in their accumulation of wealth.  In their business dealings and in society in general, mulatto and Black men faced the racism of a slaveholding society that equated darker skin with slavery.  Society viewed the masculinity of these free men of color as a threat and a challenge to the traditional patriarchy of white men.  Despite these challenging social conditions, Jose and Carlos Dupard were able to accrue many of the markers of masculinity and respect, such as land ownership and slaves, and proudly called themselves vecinos of New Orleans.

Much has been made of Louisiana’s French colonial heritage in both academic scholarship and popular culture.  The American antebellum period from 1803-1860 has also been intensely studied as well, but the period of Spanish rule over New Orleans, 1763 –1803, and its influence on the city is often ignored, despite the fact that this era was a crucial time in the development of New Orleans’ distinctive society.  The city grew from 6,375 people in 1766 to 12,000 total residents in the beginning of the nineteenth century.  At the close of the French period there were about 200 free people of color.  By the end of the Spanish era, there were around 1,355 were free persons of color, roughly one-fifth of the city’s population.  In fact, recently scholars such as Jennifer M. Spear, in her comprehensive and groundbreaking work, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans, have shown that the introduction of Spanish slave laws and attitude helped strengthen and solidify the position of free people of color in New Orleans.

Interracial sexual relationships and the system of plaçage in colonial New Orleans are aspects of New Orleans’s history that have received much attention from both scholars and popular media, but the focus of most of this scholarship is on the mulatto or quadroon woman, her relationship with white men, and her place in society.  On the other hand, the history of the sociological status of free men of color has often been overlooked.  Comparing and contrasting the lives of the Dupard men and the white Delille Dupards can illuminate the ambiguous and multifaceted roles that free men of color played in Spanish New Orleans society…

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William W. Warren: The Life, Letters, and Times of an Ojibwe Leader

University of Nebraska Press
2007
212 pages
9 photographs, 2 maps, figure, index, 2 appendixes
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-4327-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-2498-8

Theresa M. Schenck, Associate Professor of Life Sciences Communications and American Indian Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison

This is the first full-length biography of William W. Warren (1825–53), an Ojibwe interpreter, historian, and legislator in the Minnesota Territory. Devoted to the interests of the Ojibwe at a time of government attempts at removal, Warren lives on in his influential book History of the Ojibway, still the most widely read and cited source on the Ojibwe people. The son of a Yankee fur trader and an Ojibwe-French mother, Warren grew up in a frontier community of mixed cultures. Warren’s loyalty to government Indian policies was challenged, but never his loyalty to the Ojibwe people. In his short life the issues with which he was concerned included land rights, treaties, Indian removal, mixed-blood politics, and state and federal Indian policy.
 
Theresa M. Schenck has assembled a remarkable collection of newly discovered documents. Dozens of letters and other writings illuminate not only Warren’s heart and mind  but also a time of radical change in American Indian history. These documents, combined with Schenck’s commentary, provide historical and contextual perspective on Warren’s life, on the breadth of his activities, and on the complexity of the man himself; as such they offer a useful and long-awaited companion to Warren’s History of the Ojibway.

Miscegenation, a story of racial intimacy!

African American Registry
2012-07-20

On this date, the African American Registry discusses miscegantion.

Reference: The Encyclopedia of African-American Heritage

Susan Altman

Shortly before Christmas in 1863 a 72-page pamphlet appeared for sale on newsstands in New York City. It was titled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.” The pamphlet began with details of its title. “Miscegenation” was a word that the author had created and he explained that he had invented it by combining two Latin words: miscere (to mix) and genus (race). The authors intended to replace the word “amalgamation,” which they felt was not scientific enough.

The pamphlet went on to give a social philosophy that by the racist standards of 1863 was highly inflammatory.

The authors wanted to promote the practice of miscegenation and encourage white and black people to have children with each other. The real authors were David Goodman Croly, managing editor of the New York World, a staunchly Democratic paper, and George Wakeman, a World reporter. Within months, two Democrats in the presidential election campaign of 1864 anonymously issued the same pamphlet, which appeared in the New York Times. During this time, sex across the color line was an obsession of white America, particularly the stereotype of black men’s alleged craving for white women, along with believers in Anglo-Saxon “racial” superiority who feared that “mongrelization” was degenerative.

It is a fact that black-white sex existed from the beginning of the slave trade in the 16th century, virtually always on the initiative of Europeans who held Africans in their total control. During the infamous Middle Passage between Africa and the New World, black women and children were allowed mobility on board ship so that white sailors could have unlimited sexual access to them. Sex played a role in the gradual separation of Africans from other indentured servants in Virginia upon arrival with the unique North American reality of chattel slavery, by which people were legally defined as property. The very first case in this chain was a sexual one: In 1630 Hugh Davis was sentenced by the Virginia court to a whipping “for defiling his body in lying with a Negro.” Although it was a white man who was convicted and punished for the act, the case shows the early eroticisation of racial differences…

Read the entire article here.

Equality Trouble: Sameness and Difference in Twentieth-Century Race Law

California Law Review
Volume 88, Issue 6 (2000)
pages 1923-2015

Angela P. Harris, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis

In this Essay, Professor Harris suggests that “race law” consists not only of antidiscrimination law, but law pertaining to the formation, recognition, and maintenance of racial groups, as well as the law regulating the relationships among these groups. Harris argues that a constant tension in the story of race law in the past century has been the effort to reconcile constitutional and statutory norms of equality with the desire for white dominance. In the first part of the century, it was assumed that the fact of racial difference required management through sound public policy; in the second part of the century, race gradually became understood as an arbitrary distinction that the law should ignore. Neither treating race as difference nor as sameness, however, has succeeded in accomplishing racial justice.

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Administering Identity: The Determination of Race in Race-Conscious Law

California Law Review
Volume 82, Issue 5 (1994)
pages 1231-1285

Christopher A. Ford

Modern American anti-discrimination law seeks to remedy the effects of racial and ethnic prejudice by ensuring equality in areas such as political access and employment opportunity. In this effort, the concept of race is central both to identifying and to rectifying the effects of prejudice. Various economic and social benefits, for example, are awarded based upon injuries and solutions defined with reference to racial categories. Race and ethnicity, however, are today recognized as being largely social constructs with little empirical or scientific basis. This dichotomy between the importance of race classification to anti-discrimination law and its fundamental indeterminacy creates what the author calls a core dilemma of modem race-conscious law: the difficulties of how we “administer race.” He explores two related questions bearing on this dilemma. How should the law-indeed, can the law-intelligibly define the nature and boundaries of the groups to whom remedial preferences are addressed? Furthermore, can the law “accurately” sort individuals into these groups once they have been defined? The author explores the approaches several different group conscious programs and legal regimes have taken in attempting to deal with these questions, from methods employed in sex and Native American classification to the systems of classification used in the Jim Crow South, in modem India and in South Africa during the apartheid era.

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The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race: The Normal Science of American Racial Thought

California Law Review
Volume 85, Issue 5 (1997)
pages 1213-1258

Juan F. Perea, Cone, Wagner, Nugent, Johnson, Hazouri & Roth Professor of Law
University of Florida

This Article is about how we are taught to think about race. In particular, I intend to analyze the role of books and texts on race in structuring our racial discourse. I believe that much writing on racism is structured by a paradigm that is widely held but rarely recognized for what it is and what it does. This paradigm shapes our understanding of what race and racism mean and the nature of our discussions about race. It is crucial, therefore, to identify and describe this paradigm and to demonstrate how it binds and organizes racial discourse, limiting both the scope and the range of legitimate viewpoints in that discourse.

In this Article, I identify and criticize one of the most salient features of past and current discourse about race in the United States, the Black/White binary paradigm of race. A small but growing number of writers have recognized the paradigm and its limiting effect on racial discourse. I believe that its dominant and pervasive character has not been well established nor discussed in legal literature.

I intend to demonstrate the existence of a Black/White paradigm and to show its breadth and seemingly pervasive ordering of racial discourse and legitimacy. Further, I intend to show how the Black/White binary paradigm operates to exclude Latinos/as from full membership and participation in racial discourse, and how that exclusion serves to perpetuate not only the paradigm itself but also negative stereotypes of Latinos/as. Full membership in society for Latinos/as will require a paradigm shift away from the binary paradigm and towards a new and evolving understanding of race and race relations.

This Article illustrates the kind of contribution to critical theory that the emergent Latino Critical Race Studies (LatCrit) movement may make. This movement is a continuing scholarly effort, undertaken by Latino/a scholars and other sympathetic scholars, to examine critically existing structures of racial thought and to identify how these structures perpetuate the subordinated position of Latinos/as in particular. LatCrit studies are, then, an extension and development of critical race theory (and critical theory generally) that focus on the previously neglected areas of Latino/a identity and history and the role of racism as it affects Latinos/as.

I identify strongly, and self-consciously, as a Latino writer and thinker. It is precisely my position as a Latino outsider, neither Black nor White, that makes possible the observation and critique presented in this Article. My critique of the Black/White binary paradigm of race shows this commonly held binary understanding of race to be one of the major impediments to learning about and understanding Latinos/as and their history. As I shall show, the paradigm also creates significant distortions in the way people learn to view Latinos/as.

I begin with a review of the principal scientific theory that describes the nature of paradigms and the power they exert over the formation of  knowledge. I then analyze important, nationally recognized books on race to reveal the binary paradigm of race and the way it structures race thinking. After reviewing these popular and scholarly books on race, I analyze a leading casebook on constitutional law. Like other books, textbooks on constitutional law are shaped by the paradigm and reproduce it. Then, by describing some of the legal struggles Latinos/as have waged, I will demonstrate that paradigmatic presentations of race and struggles for equality have caused significant omissions with undesirable repercussions. Thus, I demonstrate the important role that legal history can play in both correcting and amplifying the Black/White binary paradigm of race…

…In his chapter on “Malcolm X and Black Rage” [Cornel] West describes Malcolm X’s fear of cultural hybridity, the blurring of racial boundaries that occurs because of racial mixture. Malcolm X saw such hybridity, exemplified by mulattoes, as “symbols of  weakness and confusion.” West’s commentary on Malcolm X’s views gives us another statement of the binary paradigm: “The very idea of not ‘fitting in’ the U.S. discourse of positively valued whiteness and negatively debased blackness meant one was subject to exclusion and marginalization by whites and blacks.” Although the context of this quotation is about Black/White mulattoes, West’s observation is crucial to an understanding of why Latinos/as, neither claiming to be, nor being, White or Black, are perpetually excluded and marginalized. The reified binary structure of discourse on race leaves no room for people of color who do not fit the rigid Black and White boxes supplied by the paradigm. Furthermore, most Latinos/as are mixed race mestizos or mulattoes, who therefore embody the kind of racial mixture that Malcolm X, and, I would argue, society generally tends to reject. West’s observation about mixed-race people who do not fit within traditional U.S. discourse about race applies in full measure to Latinos/as…

Read the entire article here.

The Policing of Race Mixing: The Place of Biopower within the History of Racisms

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
Volume 7, Number 2 (2010)
pages 205-216
DOI: 10.1007/s11673-010-9224-8

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

In this paper I investigate a largely untold chapter in the history of race thinking in Northern Europe and North America: the transition from the form of racism that was used to justify a race-based system of slavery to the medicalising racism which called for segregation, apartheid, eugenics, and, eventually, sterilization and the holocaust. In constructing this history I will employ the notion of biopower introduced by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s account of biopower has received a great deal of attention recently, but because what he actually has to say about race tends to be vague and radically incomplete, many race theorists have been critical of his contribution. However, even if the account of the holocaust in terms of biopower is incomplete, there is still a great deal to be learned from Foucault’s identification of this biologizing, or medicalising racism.

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U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey coming to campus

East Carolina University
Greenville, North Carolina
2012-10-24 through 2012-10-25

United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will be on campus Oct. 24-25 as part of the Contemporary Writers Series. A native of Gulfport, Miss., Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2006. She is professor of English at Emory University; she was named the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate in June.
 
Trethewey is the first Southerner to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, the first poet laureate, and the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993.
 
The Contemporary Writers Series aims to expose students and other readers to award-winning fiction and nonfiction writers, translators and poets…

For more information, click here.