Mixed Race Studies

Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present

Routledge: Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
2010-10-21
204 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-39808-4

Sarah Salih, Professor of English
University of Toronto

This study considers cultural representations of “brown” people in Jamaica and England alongside the determinations of race by statute from the Abolition era onwards. Through close readings of contemporary fictions and “histories,” Salih probes the extent to which colonial ideologies may have been underpinned by what might be called subject-constituting statutes, along with the potential for force and violence which necessarily undergird the law. The author explores the role legal and non-legal discourse plays in disciplining the brown body in pre- and post-Abolition colonial contexts, as well as how are other bodies and identities – e.g. black, white are discursively disciplined. Salih examines whether or not it’s possible to say that non-legal texts such as prose fictions are engaged in this kind of discursive disciplining, and more broadly, looks at what contemporary formulations of “mixed” identity owe to these legal or non-legal discursive formations. This study demonstrates the striking connections between historical and contemporary discourses of race and brownness and argues for a shift in the ways we think about, represent and discuss “mixed race” people.

Table of Contents

• 1: Introduction: The Mulatto in Law and Literature
• 2: Pre-Emancipation Stories of Race: Marly and The Woman of Colour
• 3: Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century: Dinah Craik’s Olive [1850] and Richard Hill’s Lights and Shadows
• 4: Mulattos in the Contact Zone: Mary Seacole and Ozias Midwinter Coda: Modern Mulattos: Mona Lisa and The Crying Game
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Migration from the West Indies to Britain, 1750-1820

The University of Michigan
2010
481 pages

Daniel Alan Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in The University of Michigan 2010

This dissertation shows that the migration of mixed-race individuals from the Caribbean to Britain between 1750 and 1820 helped to harden British attitudes toward those of African descent. The children of wealthy, white fathers and both free and enslaved women of color, many left for Britain in order to escape the deficiencies and bigotry of West Indian society. This study traces the group’s origin in the Caribbean, mainly Jamaica, to its voyage and arrival in Britain. It argues that the perceived threats of these migrants’ financial bounty and potential to marry and reproduce in Britain helped to collapse previous racial distinctions in the metropole which had traditionally differentiated along class and status lines and paved the way for a more monolithic racial viewpoint in the nineteenth century.

This study makes three major contributions to the history of the British Atlantic. First, it provides a thorough examination of the West Indies’ elite population of color, showing its connection to privileged white society in both the Caribbean and Britain. Those who moved to the metropole lend further proof to the agency and influence of such individuals in the Atlantic world. Second, it expands the notion of the British family at the turn of the nineteenth century. Through analyses of wills, inheritance disputes, and correspondence, this project reveals the regularity of British legal and personal interaction with relatives of color across the Atlantic, as well as with those who resettled in the metropole. Third, it allows for a material understanding of Atlantic racial ideologies. By connecting popular discussions in the abolition debate and the sentimental novel to biographical accounts of mixed-race migrants, British notions of racial difference are more strongly linked to social reality. Uncovering an entirely new cohort of British people of color and its members’ lived experiences, this dissertation provides crucial insight into the tightening of British and Atlantic racial attitudes.

INTRODUCTION

In 1840, the Reverend Donald Sage completed his memoirs. Reflecting on the meandering twists and turns of life, he wrote extensively on his education and the different schools he attended as a youth. One of these institutions, where he stayed only briefly between 1801 and 1803, was located in the small seaside town of Dornoch, in the Scottish Highlands. Sage described the village as a “little county town” which had been “considerably on the decrease” by the time his family had arrived. As one would do in such a journal, Sage thought back on his boyhood friends, and noted that while at Dornoch he and his brother became close companions with the Hay family. Like Sage, the three Hay brothers were not originally from the village; they had instead been born in the West Indies. In fact, Sage revealed that they were “the offspring of a negro woman, as their hair, and the tawny colour of their skin, very plainly intimated, [and] [t]heir father was a Scotsman.” Sage became particularly good friends with Fergus, the eldest of the three, of whom he gave a very qualified endorsement: “Notwithstanding the disadvantages of his negro parentage, Fergus was very handsome. He had all the manners of a gentleman, and had first-rate abilities.”

It may seem out of place for three West Indian children, the offspring of an interracial couple, to be living in a small village at Scotland’s northern tip in 1801. Historians tend to think of an Afro-Caribbean presence in Britain as a phenomenon of the last sixty-plus years, and one localized around major urban centers. At the same time, only recently has the topic of inter-racial unions been addressed in the “new” multicultural Britain. The story of the Hay children in Dornoch, however, was not at all unique at the turn of the nineteenth century. Rather, the Hays were members of a regular migration of mixed-race West Indians who arrived in the home country during the period. Facing intense discrimination, few jobs opportunities, and virtually no educational options in the colonies, West Indians of color fled to Britain with their white fathers’ assistance. Once arrived, they encountered myriad responses. While some white relatives accepted them into their homes, others sued to cut them off from the family fortune. Equally, even though a number of fictional and political tracts welcomed their arrival, others condemned their presence and lobbied to ban them from landing on British soil. Regardless of these variable experiences, mixed-race migrants traveled to Britain consistently during the period. The Hay children may have turned heads on the roads of Dornoch, but they would not have been a wholly unfamiliar sight.

This study examines the movement of mixed-race individuals from the Caribbean to Britain at the end of the long eighteenth century. It argues that the frequent and sustained migration of these children of color produced a strong British reaction, at both the personal and popular levels, against their presence, and helped contribute to the simplification and essentialization of British racial ideology in the nineteenth century. A number of personal histories are followed through the various stages of this transplantation, and are compared to published accounts of the phenomenon in general. White patronage and parental ties were vital in the colonies if a mixed-race individual was to leave for Britain. Connected through these kinship and business associations, elite West Indians of color maintained their own Atlantic networks. Once in Britain, they had to monitor their finances vigilantly against rival claimants to Caribbean fortunes. Family attempts at disinheritance were a frequent problem, and demonstrated an increasing British disgust at colonial miscegenation, along with mixed-race resettlement. With the advent of the abolition movement in the 1770s and 1780s, the issue took on greater political importance. Rich heirs of color now in Britain seemed to herald the cataclysmic prophesies of slavery supporters. Certain that abolition would destroy the racial and class barriers between black and white, many Britons recoiled at those of hybrid descent now resident in the metropole. If class distinctions had restrained racial prejudice in the early years of the eighteenth century, they no longer produced the same moderating effects at the century’s close…

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The World They Left Behind: Family Networks and Mixed-Race Children In the West Indies
• Chapter 2: Patterns of Migration: Push and Pull Factors Sending West Indians of Color to Britain
• Chapter 3: Inheritance Disputes and Mixed-Race Individuals in Britain
• Chapter 4: Success and Struggle in Britain
• Chapter 5: West Indians of Color in Britain, and the Abolition Question
• Chapter 6: Depictions of Mixed-Race Migrants in British Literature
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• Brunias, 1779
• 1.2 “The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl,” by Agostino Brunias, 1779
• 1.3 “Joanna,” by William Blake, 1796
• 1.4 Percentages of Children Born of Mixed Race, and the Percentage of Mixed-Race Children Born in Wedlock, St. Catherine, Jamaica, 1770-1808
• 1.5 Percentage of Mixed-Race Children Born in Wedlock, Kingston, Jamaica, 1809-1820
• 1.6 Percentage of Free, Mixed-Race Children with Interracial Parents, Kingston, Jamaica, 1750-1820
• 1.7 Thomas Hibbert’s House, Kingston, Jamaica, 2008 (erected 1755)
• 2.1 Deficiency Fines Collected (in pounds current), St. Thomas in the Vale Parish, Jamaica, 1789-1801
• 2.2 Percentage of West Indians in Student Body (University of Edinburgh Medical School and King’s College, Aberdeen), 1750-1820
• 2.3 “Johnny New-Come in the Island of Jamaica,” by Abraham James, 1800
• 4.1 “A Scene on the quarter deck of the Lune,” by Robert Johnson from his Journal, April 8, 1808
• 4.2 Cartoon by Robert Johnson from his Journal, April 8, 1808
• 4.3 Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath, London
• 4.4 “Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray,” unknown artist (formerly attributed to John Zoffany), c. 1780
• 4.5 “The Morse and Cator Family,” by John Zoffany, c. 1783
• 4.6 “Nathaniel Middleton,” by Tilly Kettle, c. 1773
• 4.7 “William Davidson,” by R. Cooper, c. 1820
• 4.8 “Robert Wedderburn,” 1824..306
• 5.1 “Sir Thomas Picton,” c. 1810
• 5.2 Calderon’s Torture, from The Trial of Governor Picton
• 5.3 Calderon’s Torture, and “Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave,” by William Blake, 1793
• 6.1 “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” by Josiah Wedgwood, 1787

List of Tables

• 1.1 Racial Classification of the Mothers of Mixed-Race Children with White Fathers, by Percentage, 1770-1820
• 1.2 Percentages of Interracial Parents vs. Two Parents of Color Amongst Mixed-Race Children in Jamaica, 1730-1820
• 2.1 Percentage of white men’s wills, proven in Jamaica, with bequests for mixed-race children in Britain (either presently resident, or soon to be sent there), 1773-1815
• 2.2 Percentage of white men’s wills with acknowledged mixed-race children, proven In Jamaica, that include bequests for mixed-race children in Britain (either presently resident, or soon to be sent there), 1773-1815.131
• 2.3 Professions of testators sending mixed-race children to Britain, by percentage, 1773-1815
• 2.4 Destinations of mixed-race Jamaicans, by percentage, 1773-1815

Navigating Racial Boundaries: The One-Drop Rule and Mixed-Race Jamaicans in South Florida

Florida International University
2010
343 pages

Sharon E. Placide

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparitive Sociology

Like many West Indians, mixed-race Jamaican immigrants enter the United States with fluid notions about race and racial identifications that reflect socio-political events in their home country and that conflict with the more rigid constructions of race they encounter in the U.S. This dissertation explores the experiences of racially mixed Jamaicans in South Florida and the impact of those experiences on their racial self-characterizations through the boundary-work theoretical framework. Specifically, the study examines the impact of participants’ exposure to the one-drop rule in the U.S., by which racial identification has been historically determined by the existence or non-existence of black forebears. Employing qualitative data collected through both focus group and face-to-face semi-structured interviews, the study analyzes mixed-race Jamaicans’ encounters in the U.S. with racial boundaries, and the boundary-work that reinforces them, as well their response to these encounters. Through their stories, the dissertation examines participants’ efforts to navigate racial boundaries through choices of various racial identifications. Further, it discusses the ways in which structural forces and individual agency have interacted in the formation of these identifications. The study finds that in spite of participants’ expressed preference for non-racialism, and despite their objections to rigid racial categories, in seeking to carve out alternative identities, they are participating in the boundary-making of which they are so critical.

Table of Contents

• I. INTRODUCTION
  • Theoretical Framework
  • Rationale for Population and Location of Study
  • Research Methodology and Data Analysis
  • Defining Terms
  • Challenges and Limitations
  • Chapter Descriptions
• II. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF A RACIAL DICHOTOMY IN THE U.S
  • Race as a Social Construction
  • Section 1 Race and Mixed-Race During Slavery: The Social Construction of the One-Drop Rule
    • The Construction of Race During Slavery
    • Miscegenation and the Emergence of the One-Drop Rule
  • Section 2 The Rise and Crystallization of Bright Boundaries
    • Contesting Racial Boundaries: Abolitionists, Free Negroes and Slaves Oppose Slavery
    • White Response: Entrenchment of Racist Ideology
    • Emancipation and Reconstruction Blur Boundaries
    • Southern Whites Defend their Status, Strengthening Racial Divides
    • Crystallization of the Bright Boundary: The One-Drop Rule
    • Mulattoes, Blacks, and Boundary-Work
    • Science Supports the One-Drop Rule
  • Section 3 Blurring Racial Boundaries
    • The Civil Rights Movement and its Impact
    • The Multi-Racial Challenge to the One-Drop Rule
    • Why the One-Drop Rule Persists
    • Chapter Conclusion
• III. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF A COLOR HIERARCHY IN JAMAICA
  • Clarification of Terms: Color and Race
  • Section 1 Construction of Bright Boundaries: Formation of a Tripartite Color Hierarchy During Slavery (1655 to 1834)
    • African Slavery and the Beginnings of Race Ideology
    • The Impact of Demography
    • Miscegenation, Free Browns, and the Status Mixed Progeny (Slave and Free)
    • Free Browns Become Buffer
  • Section 2 Boundary Blurring: Color and Social Status from Abolition to the Independence (1834 to 1962)
    • Loss of Labor and Decline of the White Planting Class
    • Boundary-Blurring Continues: Rise of the Brown Class And Black Social Mobility
    • Complicating the Color Hierarchy: East Indians, Chinese, “Syrian” Immigrants
    • Creole Multiracialism Versus Black Nationalism
    • Persistence of a Color Hierarchy
  • Section 3 Boundary-Shifting: Race, Color and Social Status after Independence (1962 to present)
    • Boundary-Blurring: Race, Color, and Social Location
    • Color as Symbolic and Social Boundary
    • Chapter Conclusion
• IV. OUT OF MANY, ONE PEOPLE: RACE AND COLOR IN JAMAICA
  • Race is Not Important
  • Intersectionality: Class Plus Race
  • Color Draws Boundaries in Jamaica
  • Chapter Conclusion
• V. ENCOUNTERING BOUNDARIES AND BOUNDARY-WORK IN THE U.S
  • Race Draws Bright Boundaries in the U.S.: The Centrality of Race Boundary Maintenance: Two Worlds
  • South Florida: Three Worlds?
  • Theoretical Discussion
  • Chapter Conclusion
• VI. NAVIGATING RACIAL BOUNDARIES IN THE U.S.
  • I am Jamaican – Ethnic (Post-Racial) Identification
  • Racial Identification Choices
  • Factors Affecting Jamaicans’ Immigrants Racial Identifications
  • Choice or No Choice? The Impact of Structure on Agency and Vice Versa
  • Mixed-Race Jamaicans Doing Boundary-Work
  • Chapter Conclusion
• VII. CONCLUSION
  • Findings
  • Limitations and Directions for Future Research
  • REFERENCES
  • APPENDICES
  • VITA

Read the entire dissertation here.

“A gallant heart to the empire.” Autoethnography and Imperial identity in Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures

Philological Quarterly
Volume 83, Number 2, Spring, 2004

Sarah Salih, Professor of English
University of Toronto

A portrait of Mary Seacole in oils, c. 1869, by the obscure London artist Albert Charles Challen (1847–81). The original was discovered in 2003 by historian Helen Rappaport, and acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2008.

It seems fitting that the bi-centenary year of Mary Seacole’s birth has been marked by a spate of discoveries and publications about the author of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857). In January 2005 a “lost” portrait of Seacole, painted in 1879 by an obscure London artist named Albert Challen, was placed on view in the National Portrait Gallery. Coincidentally, Jane Robinson’s rather clumsily-titled biography, Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea, was published only weeks later, and in the same month the Home Office named one of its new buildings after Mary Seacole. (1) To round off these events, a Channel 4 documentary screened in April 2005 revealed the identity of Seacole’s husband Horace (hitherto unknown), and Wonderful Adventures was published as a Penguin Classic at the beginning of that year. (2) Assuredly, Seacole is enjoying a second heyday (albeit a posthumous one), having already taken her place amidst a burgeoning group of “Great Black Britons” whose achievements are receiving belated recognition. (3) This is not to imply that Seacole has been rescued from obscurity: between her death in 1881 and Alexander and Dewjee’s edition of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands almost a century later, a steady trickle of articles and publications concerning Seacole appeared both in Britain and Jamaica. Moreover, since 1984, Seacole has received increasing academic attention, and she has long been installed as a figurehead for a number of different groups including Jamaicans, black British people and nurses.

Still, it does seem to be the case that during the last decade or two, “Seacole” has become something of a brand name for Caribbean nurses, so-called “ethnic minorities” in Britain, and Jamaicans both patriate and expatriate. There are already numerous buildings called “Mary Seacole” in Britain and Jamaica, and a Mary Seacole Street almost came into existence in London during the 1990s. (4) It is not only Seacole’s name that is being invoked; people are also reading her text, or sections of it, since it is widely available in its entirety (Wonderful Adventures has been issued at least three times since Alexander and Dewjee’s 1984 edition) and in excerpted form. Moreover, there is a growing canon of critical literature about Seacole and her autobiography, and well-known scholars such as Moira Ferguson and Simon Gikandi have tackled the thorny question of Seacole’s national, cultural and racial identifications–a question on which I wish to focus here. Certainly, Seacole has been adopted by different groups both inside and outside the academy, and she has been made to stand for (not always complementary) national, racial and cultural causes. Is there something about Seacole’s text that lends itself to these multiple interpretations? Why does “Seacole” mean so many different things to so many different people? Both in the country of her birth (Jamaica) and the country she adopted (Britain), Seacole is a national heroine, and yet sometimes it does seem as though the Seacole text (by which I mean Wonderful Adventures, as well as reconstructions of “Mary Seacole” by different generations of critics) is being pulled in quite different directions. Can Seacole be “black,” “British,” and “Jamaican” at the same time? If these ontological vectors are in fact compatible, then is it important for contemporary readers and critics to take into account how Seacole constructed herself; or how she was constructed by her nineteenth-century contemporaries?…

…Reading Wonderful Adventures as a transcultural autoethnography in conjunction with the responses of Seacole’s nineteenth-century critics to both author and text will yield broader insights into the construction and representation of “mixed race” women, both now and in Seacole’s era. My analysis of Wonderful Adventures will accordingly draw on the growing cluster of paratexts that has surrounded Seacole’s autobiography since the time of its publication. In particular, I wish to dwell on how Jamaican and British newspaper articles featuring Seacole exemplify Benedict Anderson’s idea of national identity as an imagined, textual community that is linguistically, rather than consanguineously, constructed. It is my hope that such a discussion will contribute to a more wide-ranging investigation into the naming, representation and construction of the “mixed race” female subject in imperial contexts….

Purchase the entire article here.

Patterns of Mixed-Race Migration to Britain in the Eighteenth-Century Black Atlantic

American Historical Association
124th Annual Meeting
Friday, 2010-01-08 15:10 PST (Local Time)
Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego
Manchester Ballroom F (Hyatt)
San Diego, California

Daniel Alan Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

With tremendous gender and racial disparities, miscegenation and interracial cohabitation became the norm in eighteenth-century Jamaica.  A large number of mixed-race children came from these unions, and in many cases these individuals received financial and personal assistance from their white fathers.  Lacking schools, and with almost no professional prospects for free people of color on the island, many fathers sent their mixed-race children to Britain for a better chance at schooling and employment.  These individuals took their place in the upper ranks of metropolitan society, with large colonial fortunes behind them.  Their interactions with white relatives, and scholarly success in Britain, paved the way for continued achievement in the metropole, or for a more advanced position in Jamaican society, if they chose to return. This paper examines the wills of over 2200 Jamaican residents from 1770-1815 to provide a quantifiable look at mixed-race migration to Britain.  Gathered from the Island Record Office in Central Village, Jamaica, these wills shed light not only on the frequency and regularity of this practice over the period in question, but also on the gender and class dynamics that dictated life for mixed-race Jamaicans who traveled to the metropole.  Though primarily a male phenomenon, mixed-race migration to Britain also included a large number of women who, more often than their male counterparts, stayed in the metropolis permanently.  This paper will argue that such movement became an important component in the development of the Black Atlantic, and that the remigration of mixed-race Jamaicans from the metropole to the periphery constituted a vital force in the creolization of the West Indies.

‘But most of all mi love me browning’: The Emergence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as the Desired

Feminist Review(on-Line)
Volume 65, Issue 1
June 2000
pages 22 – 48
DOI: 10.1080/014177800406921

Patricia Mohammed, Head and Lecturer
Centre for Gender and Development Studies, Mona Unit
University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica

One of the most common threads in the Caribbean tapestry races which have populated the region over the last five centuries largely through forced or voluntary migration, is that there have emerged mixtures of the different racial groups. A large proportion of Caribbean women and men are referred to euphemistically as ‘mixed race’. The terms used to describe people of mixed race vary by territory and have been incrementally added to or changed over time. The original nomenclatures such as sambo, musteephino, mulatto, creole, etc. have been replaced at present to include terms like brown skin, mulatto, clear skin, light skin, red-nigger, dougla and browning. The title of the article comes from a contemporary dancehall song in Jamaica in which the black singer, Buju Banton, unwittingly echoes an unspoken yet shared notion of female desirability in the Caribbean: a preference for ‘brown’ as opposed to black women or unmixed women. In the ongoing constructions of femininity in the region, class and skin colour have intersected with race to produce hierarchies and stereotypes of femininity based on racial mixing. Drawing on some of the historical data available, particularly that of the pioneering research in this area produced by Lucille Mathurin [1924-2009] in 1974, this article interrogates some aspects of miscegenation in the Jamaican past, to configure these with gender, race and class relations in the present. The article does not attempt to arrive at conclusive findings but to contribute to the ongoing process in the region, and elsewhere, of differentiating the category ‘woman’ in historiography and sociology.

Belonging to Britain

The Munk Centre for International Studies
University of Toronto
2008-11-14
Video Length: 00:46:36

Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies
Yale University

In her lecture, “Belonging to Britain”, Hazel Carby looks at the historic relationship between England and Jamaica, including the history of the slave trade in Bristol and the complex question of identity for those of mixed British and West Indian heritage. Carby is a professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.

View the video here.

The Woman of Colour

Broadview Press
2007-01-01
268 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781551111766 / 1551111764

Written by: Anonymous

Edited by:

Lyndon J. Dominique, Assistant Professor of English
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

The Woman of Colour is a unique literary account of a black heiress’ life immediately after the abolition of the British slave trade. Olivia Fairfield, the biracial heroine and orphaned daughter of a slaveholder, must travel from Jamaica to England, and as a condition of her father’s will either marry her Caucasian first cousin or become dependent on his mercenary elder brother and sister-in-law. As Olivia decides between these two conflicting possibilities, her letters recount her impressions of Britain and its inhabitants as only a black woman could record them. She gives scathing descriptions of London, Bristol, and the British, as well as progressive critiques of race, racism, and slavery. The narrative follows her life from the heights of her arranged marriage to its swift descent into annulment and destitution, only to culminate in her resurrection as a self-proclaimed “widow” who flouts the conventional marriage plot.

The appendices, which include contemporary reviews of the novel, historical documents on race and inheritance in Jamaica, and examples of other women of colour in early British prose fiction, will further inspire readers to rethink issues of race, gender, class, and empire from an African woman’s perspective.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements

Introduction

A Chronology of Women of Color in Drama and Long Prose Fiction

A Note on the Text

The Woman of Colour, A Tale

Appendix A: Lucy Peacock, “The Creole” (1786)

Appendix B: Anonymous Poem “written by a Mulatto Woman” (1794)

Appendix C: Minor Heiresses of Color in British Long Prose Fiction

1. From Agnes Musgrave, Solemn Injunction (1798)
2. From Jane Austen, Fragment of a Novel (1817)
3. From Edmund Marshall, Edmund and Eleonora: or Memoirs of the Houses of Summerfield and Gretton (1797)
4. From Robert Bissett, Douglas; or, The Highlander (1800)
5. From Mrs. Charles Mathews, Memoirs of a Scots Heiress (1791)

Appendix D: Historical and Social Accounts of People of Color in Jamaica

1. From Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1799)
2. From Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (1774)
3. From J.B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners (1793)

Appendix E: People of Color in British Epistolary Narratives

1. From Richard Griffith, The Gordian Knot (1769)
2. From Hester Thrale, “Letter to Mrs. Pennington” (1802)
3. From Clara Reeve, Plans of Education (1792)
4. John Wesley, “Letter to William Wilberforce” (1791)

Appendix F: The Woman of Colour: Contemporary Reviews

1. The British Critic (March 1810)
2. The Critical Review (May 1810)
3. The Monthly Review (June 1810)

Appendix G: Jamaican Petitions, Votes of the Assembly, and an Englishman’s Will

1. From Votes of the Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica (1792)
2. From Andrew Wright’s “Last Will and Testament” (1806)

Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence

University of Notre Dame Press
2004
376 pages
Cloth ISBN 10: 0-268-04103-2
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-268-04103-8
Paper ISBN 10: 0-268-04104-0
Paper ISBN 13: 978-0-268-04104-5

Edited by:

Paul Spickard, Professor of 20th Century U.S. Social and Cultural History
University of California, Santa Barbara

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

Racial Thinking in the United States is a comprehensive reassessment of the ideas that Americans have had about race. This useful book draws on the skills and perspectives of nine scholars from the fields of history, sociology, theology, American studies, and ethnic studies. In thirteen carefully crafted essays they tell the history of the American system of racial domination and of twentieth-century challenges to that racial hierarchy, from monoracial movements to the multiracial movement.

The collection begins with an introduction to how Americans have thought about race, ethnicity, and colonialism. The first section of the book describes the founding of racial thinking in the United States along the racial binary of Black and White, and compares that system to the quite different system that developed in Jamaica. Section two describes anomalies in the racial binary, such as the experiences of people of mixed race, and of states such as Texas, California, and Hawai`i, where large groups of non-Black and White racial groups co-exist. Part three analyzes five monoracial challenges to racial hierarchy: the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the Chicana/o movement, the Asian American movement, Afrocentricity, and the White studies movement. Part four explores the multiracial movement which developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and assesses whether it constitutes a successful challenge to racial hierarchy and binary racial thinking.

Racial Thinking in the United States provides excellent summaries of historical events and cultural movements, as well as analysis and criticism. It will be a welcome text for undergraduate courses in ethnic studies and American history.

Contributors: Paul Spickard, G. Reginald Daniel, Stephen A. Small, Hanna Wallinger, Lori Anne Pierce, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, William Wei, Michael C. Thornton, and Zipporah G. Glass.