Mixed Race Studies

Why Race Isn’t as ‘Black’ and ‘White’ as We Think

The New York Times
2005-10-31

Brent Staples

People have occasionally asked me how a black person came by a “white” name like Brent Staples. One letter writer ridiculed it as “an anchorman’s name” and accused me of making it up. For the record, it’s a British name—and the one my parents gave me. “Staples” probably arrived in my family’s ancestral home in Virginia four centuries ago with the British settlers.

The earliest person with that name we’ve found—Richard Staples—was hacked to death by Powhatan Indians not far from Jamestown in 1622. The name moved into the 18th century with Virginians like John Staples, a white surveyor who worked in Thomas Jefferson’s home county, Albemarle, not far from the area where my family was enslaved…

…As with many things racial, this story begins in the slave-era South, where sex among slaves, masters and mistresses got started as soon as the first slave ship sailed into Jamestown Harbor in 1619. By the time of the American Revolution, there was a visible class of light-skinned black people who no longer looked or sounded African. Free mulattos, emancipated by guilt-ridden fathers, may have accounted for up to three-quarters of the tiny free-black population before the Revolution.

By the eve of the Civil War, the swarming numbers of mixed-race slaves on Southern plantations had become a source of constant anguish to planters’ wives, who knew quite well where those racially ambiguous children were coming from.

Faced with widespread fear that racial distinctions were losing significance, the South decided to define the problem away. People with any ascertainable black ancestry at all were defined as black under the law and stripped of basic rights. The “one drop” laws defined as black even people who were blond and blue-eyed and appeared white.

Black people snickered among themselves and worked to subvert segregation at every turn. Thanks to white ancestry spread throughout the black community, nearly every family knew of someone born black who successfully passed as white to get access to jobs, housing and public accommodations that were reserved for white people only. Black people who were not quite light enough to slip undetected into white society billed themselves as Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, South Asian, Native American—you name it. These defectors often married into ostensibly white families at a time when interracial marriage was either illegal or socially stigmatized…

Read the entire essay here.

(No Title)

Franklin Repository
1863-12-09
page 4, Column 4

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: Argues that “amalgamation” is common in the South and “very rare” in the North. A Southern correspondent concerned with the number of mixed marriages occurring wanted “amalgamation” outlawed. The Repository claims that the grooms are Southerners or foreigners because “amalgamation” is no stranger to a social system that includes slavery. In the free North, on the other hand, mixed marriages are “very rare.”

Full Text of Article:

A clerical correspondent writes us from the Southern coast protesting against the rapid tendency to amalgamation. He says that he has been called upon to perform the marriage service repeatedly where the bride was mulatto, quadroon or octoroon, and he calls upon Congress to arrest this unnatural mingling of the races, which, to use his own language, “threatens the annihilation of the white race in the United States.”

We beg our correspondent to quiet his fears on the subject. He cites some half a dozen cases to vindicate his apprehensions; but not one of them presents the union of a northern man with the southern negress. All the happy grooms were either southerners or foreigners, and they have been adopting no novel social system. Slavery has never fastened its desolation on any land without carrying the social evil of amalgamation with it; and the crime has been peculiar to the chivalric and opulent rather than to the lowly. Had our correspondent cast a thought as to the origin of the mulatto, quadroon and octoroon brides of whom he speaks, he might have cherished a reasonable suspicion that amalgamation is not just dawning upon the world, but has blotted and blurred the whole social organization of the South ever since slavery came with its endless train of crime.

In the North, where the negro race is free and not the legitimate prey of a brutal master’s lust, amalgamation is very rare, and embraces only the most abandoned of both sexes; and we regard the destruction of Slavery as the only hope of dealing a death-blow to that unnatural evil. Slavery has been its parent, its shield, its apologist and stripped it of its hideous moral deformity by bringing virtuous wives and daughters and sensual sons in daily contact with it; and when its great foundation is destroyed, the whole structure of social pollution will fall with it. The remedy is not in Congress, but in the moral tone of the people, and that seems to be progressing well toward a better and brighter Nationality, free from the blistering stains of both legalized and lawless mingling of the distance races of the Continent.

A Very Sad Occurrence

Staunton Vindicator
1869-08-27
page 3, Column 2

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: The paper prints an account of the killing of Jacob Scherer by John Stanley. Stanley had been co-habiting with a woman of mixed race. Scherer led a party to break up the union. They broke into the house and Stanley shot Scherer in the process. Stanley was arrested for murder. The article includes a transcript of the testimony before the grand-jury.

(Names in announcement: Jacob Scherer, John B. Scherer Sr., John Stanley, Ginnie Sorrel, Clinedinst, Anderson, Dr. B. B. Donaghe, James Gilmore, Joseph Ryan, Trayer, N. S. White, Dr. Fauntleroy, J. T. Parrent, Robert Campbell, M. G. Harman)

Full Text of Article:

Our people were startled, about midnight Saturday night last, by the announcement that Jacob Scherer, third son of Jno. B. Scherer, Sr., had been killed by Mr. John Stanley.

Jacob Scherer was a young, unmarried man, about twenty years of age, full of fun, sociable, of an amiable disposition, which caused all our people to esteem him highly, and it may well be imagined, that the announcement that he had been cut down, in the vigor of life, caused a thrill of pain in the very breast of every one.

Mr. Stanley is a man of middle age, with a wife and one child, a son, about 15 or 16 years old, and was regarded as a steady, quiet, well-meaning man.

The circumstances attending the killing are as follows:

A party of some eight or ten young men, learning that Mr. Stanley was co-habiting with a mulatto girl, named Ginnie Sorrel, blacked their faces and went to her house, on Market Street, Saturday night last, for the purpose of breaking up the illicit connexion. Several entered the house and immediately a pistol was fired, killing Jacob Scherer, almost instantly.

Mr. Stanley was identified by several of the party present, as the one who fired the shot, and was arrested, at his house, about two hours after and lodged in jail.

The examination of the case was entered into before Justices Pearce, Clinedinst and Anderson, on Tuesday morning last. We give below a synopsis of the testimony of the witnesses examined…

Read the entire article here.

The American Race

Semi-Weekly Dispatch
Franklin County, Virginia
1861-05-17
page 1, Column 3

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

Summary: Reasons that America’s population has increased by one-third in the past ten years because of the intermarriage in the United States of the races of Celts, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons, and North American Indians. This mixing of the races has made the “stock” more “vigorous” and will ultimately produce a peculiar “American race,” which will exhibit the different positive characteristics of all these distinct peoples.

Full Text of Article:

The present census reveals the astonishing fact that the population of the United States has increased thirty-three per cent, within the last ten years. The Roman Empire, approaching the culmination of its power, increased about thirty per cent each hundred years, but no nation in recorded times has afforded any parallel to the advancement of our own. Spain has been depopulating for a thousand years; England is not three times more populous than three centuries ago, and Italy is no more important numerically than she was in the days of Pliny; but within three quarters of a country the population of the United States has risen from three to thirty millions. It is a common error to attribute this vast increase to immigration from foreign countries; but of the twenty-three millions enumerated in ’50, not three millions were of foreign birth. Vast as the annual immigration is, it bears no proportion to the yearly increase by birth, which in itself, independent of immigration, averages thirty per cent, every ten years of the present century. This wonderful fecundity is not unexplained by physical law; it is observed that in populous countries of Europe where the same people continually intermarry, the increase is comparatively insignificant; on the same principle the aristocracy of England is observed to diminish rather than multiply, because interest and pride confine people to intermarriage to people of the same race, and often within the circle of consanguinity. But in the United States various races amalgamate; the stock becomes more vigorous, there is less of disease and early death, and the population consequently increases with a prodigious ratio… …It is computed that at least one-third of the population of the U. States are descendants of the Puritans, who were Anglo-Saxons; this strong-willed, enterprising and indomitable race, intermingling with others, has preserved ascendancy and produced a people superior in physical strength and in those attributes of mind most required in the rapid development of the great Empire of the West. Humiliating as the institution of any analogy may appear to man of the immortal mind, he must submit to the laws governing the rest of animal creation in which the union of distinct stocks produces improvement. Some of the finest examples of physical beauty have resulted from the intermarriage of Europeans and North American Indians; and, indeed, instances are not wanting where the offspring has been endowed with wonderful intellectual strength…

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Doctor’s quest to engineer a “master race” in the early 1900s still hurting Virginia’s Indian tribes

WTVR-CBS 6 TV
Richmond, Virginia
2011-07-12

Mark Holmberg, Staff reporter

RICHMOND— Richmond’s famous Hollywood Cemetery serves as the final resting place of presidents, statesmen and generals.

Few have had the impact of Dr. Walter Plecker. His stormy legacy continues today, 150 years after his birth.

“My parents always made sure we knew the story of what Walter Plecker had done and how it had affected our people,” said Wayne Adkins, president of the Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance For Life.

“Plecker was a menace to Virginia Indians over many years,” said Stephen R. Adkins, chief of the Chickahominy Tribe. “My mom and dad, for instance, had to go to Washington DC in 1935 to get married as Indians. It was illegal to do so in Virginia under penalty of up to a year in jail.”

“Dr. Plecker was convinced that there was a need to purify the white race,” said Paul Lombardo, a law professor at Georgia State University and formerly a eugenics expert at the University of Virginia. “He thought that he was preserving the Commonwealth of Virginia, that he was maintaining the United States of America and, most importantly to him, that he was protecting the white race.”

For 34 years, starting in 1912, Dr. Plecker served as the director of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, carefully compiling birth, death and marriage records.

For Plecker, a native of Augusta County, there were only two races: white and non-white. Anyone who had what he thought was one drop of other than white blood was listed as “colored.” They were mongrels, in his view.

Plecker was a complex man who saved the lives of countless babies, including those of blacks and Indians, with updated birthing and midwife techniques, along with simple, homemade incubators for premature babies, according to historic profiles.

He was relentless. With great energy he compiled lists and wrote letters chastising whites who applied for marriage licenses with those Plecker thought were impure. Those letters are part of the extensive correspondence that are part of the vast Plecker record.

“There’s no question that Plecker was incredibly aggressive using the few prerogatives the law gave him to register people,” Lombardo said. “He used those prerogatives really to threaten people, to coerce them… Dr. Plecker once boasted that he had a list of people, by race, that rivaled the list that was kept by Hitler of the Jews.”

If he even just suspected someone had any African-American blood, they would go on his mongrel list.

Virginia’s Native Americans particularly felt his wrath. He was certain the tribes had interbred with blacks. “Like rats, when you’re not watching, they’ve been sneaking in their birth certificates though their own midwives,” Plecker wrote.

“We couldn’t claim we were Indian, it was against the law to say we were Indian,” said Kenneth Branham, chief of the Monacan Tribe. “What do we claim? We’re not black. And we’re not white.”

“That whole idea that you’re not what you believe yourself to be,” said Sharon Bryant, the newly elected Monacan chief. “That an entire community would tell you that, it becomes very oppressive to the people.”

“Whole groups of people who formerly were recognized among the tribes of Virginia simply disappeared from the records,” Lombardo said. “They were no longer considered to be Native Americans or Indians as they were called. Their children were not recognized as members of the tribes, and they’re living with that legacy right now.”

Plecker and his many supporters believed not only that the races should never intermarry, they shouldn’t even mingle. Strict segregation would last for generations.

Blacks had to have their own schools and neighborhoods. So did Indians…

…In 1924, at Plecker’s urging and with the support of many Virginians, the General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act, which narrowly defined race and made it illegal to for whites to marry anyone of any other race. Plecker wrote to the governors of the rest of the states, urging them to pass similar laws to save the white race.

Also, that year, Lombardo said, “there’s a sterilization law that’s passed in Virginia, upheld later in the United States Supreme Court, allowing some 60,000-plus people to be sterilized in institutions in 32 states all over the country.”

There was also a strict immigration law passed then.

The Racial Integrity Act stood until 1967, when the Loving case about an interracial couple led to a Supreme Court reversal.

But the damage to Virginia’s Indian tribes continues. There are more than 560 federally recognized Indian tribes in the country. But none of Virginia’s tribes, the ones that helped the settlers survive, have that crucial recognition that gives them, in essence, sovereign status and entitles them to nation-building assistance.

The U.S. Department of the Interior requires that tribes be able to show an unbroken bloodline. And Walter Plecker carved a hole – decades long – in their heritage…

Read the entire article here.

The Monacan Indian Nation of Virginia: The Drums of Life

University of Alabama Press
2008
248 pages
Quality Paper ISBN: 978-0-8173-5488-6
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8173-1615-0
E Book ISBN: 978-0-8173-8113-4 
 
Rosemary Clark Whitlock, Monacan Indian and Independent Scholar

The contemporary Monacan Nation had approximately 1,400 registered members in 2006, mostly living in and around Lynchburg, Virginia, in Amherst County, but some are scattered like any other large family. Records trace the Monacans of Virginia back to the late 1500s, with an estimated population of over 15,000 in the 1700s.
 
Like members of some other native tribes, the Monacans have a long history of struggles for equality in jobs, health care, and education and have suffered cultural, political, and social abuse at the hands of authority figures appointed to serve them. The critical difference for the Monacans was the actions of segregationist Dr. Walter A. Plecker, Director of the Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 until he retired at age 85 in 1946. A strong proponent and enforcer of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Law of 1924 (struck down in 1967), which prohibited marriage between races, Plecker’s interpretation of that law convinced him that there were only two races–white and colored–and anyone not bearing physically white genetic characteristics was “colored” and that included Indians. He would not let Indians get married in Virginia unless they applied as white or colored, he forced the local teachers to falsify the students’ race on the official school rolls, and he threatened court clerks and census takers with prosecution if they used the term “Indian” on any official form. He personally changed government records when his directives were not followed and even coerced postpartum Indian mothers to list their newborns as white or colored or they could not take their infants home from the hospital. Eventually the federal government intervened, directing the Virginia state officials to begin the tedious process of correcting official records. Yet the legacy of Plecker’s attempted cultural genocide remains. Through interviews with 26 Monacans, one Episcopal minister appointed to serve them, one former clerk of the court for Amherst County, and her own story, Whitlock provides first person accounts of what happened to the Monacan families and how their very existence as Indians was threatened.

Native, Aboriginal, Indigenous: Who Counts as Indian in Post Apartheid Virginia

Mid-Atlantic Conference on the Scholarship of Diversity, Conference Proceedings
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
April 2004
17 pages

Jay Hansford C. Vest, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies
University of North Carolina, Pembroke

In 1948, sociologist William Gilbert wrote: “Indian blood still remains noticeable in our eastern States population in spite of the depletions arising from over 300 years of wars, invasions by disease and white men from Europe and black men from Africa.” Gilbert chronicled remnant Indian groups of the eastern states from Maine to Texas and Virginia to Illinois. In his findings, he reported that only Vermont and New Hampshire exhibit no residual Native tribal population while Georgia, Arkansas and Illinois manifest no surviving social groups. At the time, Gilbert estimated the survival of 75,000 to 100,000 mixed-blood Natives “Who may frequently be more white or Negro in appearance” than Indian. Having fallen into disuse, the original tribal names were largely lost in time and most often the distinguishing terms applied to these Native Americans has been nicknames given them by the dominant white people.

Noting that Virginia’s surviving Indian groups tended to retain traditions of their Native origin, Gilbert identified several mixed blood groups along the Blue Ridge and Piedmont zones of the state. Stating that these concentrations “beginning with Rappahannock County in the north and continuing southward along the Blue Ridge through Rockbridge and Amherst Counties and striking directly southward to Halifax County on the North Carolina border,” he gave definition to the geographical occupation of these interior Virginia tribal groups. Specifically he identified 500 to 600 mixed bloods in central and the extreme western end of Amherst County near Bear Mountain and Tobacco Row Mountain of the Blue Ridge. Known locally as “Issues,” he describes these people as having “a very rich brunette with straight black hair and Caucasian features.” Noting a second group northwest of Amherst County, he further identified a population of over 300 “Brown people” exhibiting “a mixture of white, Indian, and occasionally Negro blood.” A third group who claimed Indian descent was identified by Gilbert in “Halifax County on the North Carolina border. Locally both groups were considered to be “mulattoes” but acknowledged as “a group apart from both whites and Negroes.” While this brief summary exhausts the information supplied by Gilbert, it does not begin to manifest the social history and cultural significance of these and other surviving Virginia Piedmont and Blue Ridge Indian groups.

Considered in an ahistorical context, these sociological reports of “tri-racial isolates” have largely been taken as a means of undermining the aboriginal-indigenous character of surviving Native Americans in the eastern United States. Minding this conclusion, it is the intent of this paper to, first, supply to an historical background of Colonial Indian assimilation and explore the American institutional racism that has plagued these Natives, particularly in the south, and second, to consider factors of their Native-aboriginal-indigenous birthright…

Read the entire paper here.

The Black-and-White World of Walter Ashby Plecker

The Virginian-Pilot
2004-08-18

Warren Fiske

Lacy Branham Hearl closes her eyes and travels eight decades back to what began as a sweet childhood.

There was family everywhere: her parents, five siblings, nine sets of adoring aunts and uncles and more cousins than she could count. They all lived in a Monacan Indian settlement near Amherst, their threadbare homes circling apple orchards at the foot of Tobacco Row Mountain.

As Hearl grew, however, she sensed the adults were engulfed in deepening despair. When she was 12, an uncle gathered his family and left Virginia, never to see her again. Other relatives scattered in rapid succession, some muttering the name “Plecker.”

Soon, only Hearl’s immediate family remained. Then the orchards began to close because there were not enough workers and the townspeople turned their backs and all that was left was prejudice and plight and Plecker.

Hearl shakes her head sadly.

“I thought Plecker was a devil,” she says. “Still do.”

Walter Ashby Plecker was the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, which records births, marriages and deaths. He accepted the job in 1912. For the next 34 years, he led the effort to purify the white race in Virginia by forcing Indians and other nonwhites to classify themselves as blacks. It amounted to bureaucratic genocide…

…From the grave, Plecker is frustrating the efforts of Virginia tribes to win federal recognition and a trove of accompanying grants for housing, health care and education. One of the requirements is that the tribes prove their continuous existence since 1900. Plecker, by purging Indians as a race, has made that nearly impossible. Six Virginia tribes are seeking the permission of Congress to bypass the requirement.

“It never seems to end with this guy,” said Kenneth Adams, chief of the Upper Mattaponi. “You wonder how anyone could be so consumed with hate.”..

…Plecker’s first 12 years on the job were groundbreaking and marked by goodwill. He educated midwives of all races on modern birthing techniques and cut the 5 percent death rate for black mothers almost in half. He developed an incubator – a combination of a laundry basket, dirt, a thermometer and a kerosene lamp – that anyone could make in an instant. Concerned by a high incidence of syphilitic blindness in black and Indian babies, he distributed silver nitrate to be put in the eyes of newborns…

…Plecker saw everything in black and white. There were no other races. There was no such thing as a Virginia Indian. The tribes, he said, had become a “mongrel” mixture of black and American Indian blood.

Their existence greatly disturbed Plecker. He was convinced that mulatto offspring would slowly seep into the white race. “Like rats when you’re not watching,” they “have been sneaking in their birth certificates through their own midwives, giving either Indian or white racial classification,” Plecker wrote.

He called them “the breach in the dike.” They had to be stopped.

Many who came into Plecker’s cross hairs were acting with pure intentions. They registered as white or Indian because that’s how their parents identified themselves. Plecker seemed to delight in informing them they were “colored,” citing genealogical records dating back to the early 1800s that he said his office possessed. His tone was cold and final.

In one letter, Plecker informed a Pennsylvania woman that the Virginia man about to become her son-in-law had black blood. “You have to set the thing straight now and we hope your daughter can see the seriousness of the whole matter and dismiss this young man without any more ado,” he wrote.

In another missive, he rejected a Lynchburg woman’s claim that her newborn was white. The father, he told her in a letter, had traces of “negro” blood.

“This is to inform you that this is a mulatto child and you cannot pass it off as white,” he wrote.

“You will have to do something about this matter and see that this child is not allowed to mix with white children. It cannot go to white schools and can never marry a white person in Virginia.

“It is a horrible thing.”…

…Plecker’s racial records were largely ignored after 1959, when his handpicked successor retired. Virginia schools were fully integrated in 1963 and, four years later, the state’s ban on interracial marriage was ruled unconstitutional. In 1975, the General Assembly repealed the rest of the Racial Integrity Act…

Read the entire article here.

White Supremacists from 1920s Still Thwarting Virginia Tribes

Indian Country Today Media Network
2011-04-26

Tanya Lee

Congress is once again considering legislation that would grant federal recognition to six of Virginia’s 11 state-recognized American Indian tribes—the Chickahominy, Chickahominy Eastern Division, Nansemond, Rappahannock and Upper Mattaponi tribes and the Monacan Indian Nation. Chief Gene Adkins of the Eastern Chickahominy Tribe said, “We have been working on federal recognition for about 10 years. It is hard for me to understand why it has not gone through like we hoped.”

Virginia Democrat Rep. Jim Moran, sponsor of the House bill that would recognize the tribes, said he introduced the legislation to correct a “travesty of justice. The Virginia Indian tribes have been treated as unjustly as any tribe in the country, and that’s saying a lot. These are the tribes that helped the first English settlers in North America survive. Of all the tribes, they should have been recognized.”

There are three routes to federal recognition—administrative, judicial and legislative, explained Wayne Adkins, president of the Virginia Indian Tribal Alliance for Life and second assistant chief of the Chickahominy Tribe. “The administrative route is very expensive. It’s a long process. Tribes gather documents, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) reviews them and tells tribes what other documents they need, then it’s get in line behind all the other tribes seeking recognition. It could take 30 years and cost $1 million per tribe. Most tribes going for recognition just don’t have that kind of money.”

Walter Ashby Plecker, said Wayne Adkins, is another big reason why going through the BIA process would be difficult for the Virginia tribes. “When Native Americans were given the right to vote [in 1924], Virginia adopted racially hostile laws,” Moran explained. The laws targeted blacks—and, by a quirk of logic—American Indians. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was one of the most restrictive in the nation, but it was not the only one—30 states passed similar legislation.

Plecker, registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912-1946, was instrumental in crafting that state’s law. He argued that there were no full-blooded Indians left in the state by the early 20th century; therefore, all who claimed Indian heritage were part something else, and he decided the best thing to do would be to lump them in with blacks, since, by his mandate as registrar, a person could claim only one of two racial backgrounds in Virginia: Caucasian or “Negro.” People claiming to be Indians, Plecker said, were r­eally blacks trying to move their families into a position where they could “pass,” or claim to be Caucasian.

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 outlawed miscegenation, and its intent, quite simply, was to keep Anglo-Saxon blood pure. Wrote Plecker: “For the purpose of this act, the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.… The [terms] ‘Mixed,’ ‘Issue,’ and perhaps one or two others, will be understood to mean a mixture of white and black r­aces, with the white predominating. That is the class that should be reported with the greatest care, as many of these are on the borderline, and constitute the real danger of race intermixture.”…

…Though Social Darwinism and eugenics originated in England, their real champions at the beginning of the 20th century were Americans. Plecker was a zealous eugenicist, advocating both a­nti-miscegenation laws and sterilization of the “unfit,” while also proselytizing that Caucasians and non-Caucasians should be kept separated. As part of his work in the Virginia Statistics Office, he eradicated records of Indian births and marriages in order to support his directive that all Indians were to be categorized as blacks. These are the very records that Virginia’s Indian tribes now need in order to receive federal recognition. Other records of tribal significance were destroyed in fires….

Read the entire article here.

The pot that called the kettle white: Changing racial identities and U.S. social construction of race

Identities
Volume 5, Issue 3 (1998)
Special Issue: Foundational Concepts: Gender, Race, and Locality
pages 379-413
DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.1998.9962622

Norberto Valdez, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
Colorado State University

Janice Valdez
Continuing Education Department
Colorado State University

Ethnic and racial identities are deeply enmeshed in broader social processes of change. While ethnicity and race are important factors in consciousness and behavior, they are profoundly affected by the material conditions of life. Conceptually, ethnicity and race are often reified and essentialized, that is, they are attributed qualities that presumably give them independent explanatory power. This study analyzes primary sources to trace how descendants of freed slaves in colonial Virginia emerged as three apparently distinct racial populations. Factors such as national formation, the rise of slavery, and racial typologies all contributed to a restrictive social structure. Yet some individuals and families negotiated aspects of their racial identities through intermarriage, migration, legal processes, and revised genealogies in the search for opportunity. This study attempts to demystify thinking about race and ethnicity by revealing the social forces that influence the form and content of racial and ethnic identity.

Read or purchase the article here.