Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • “Maneuvers of Silence and the Task of ‘New Negro’ Womanhood”

    “Maneuvers of Silence and the Task of ‘New Negro’ Womanhood”

    Journal of Narrative Theory
    Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2012
    pages 46-68
    DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2012.0006

    Emily M. Hinnov, Assistant Dean of Curriculum & Lecturer of English
    Granite State College, Concord, New Hampshire

    Yes, she has arrived. Like her white sister, she is the product of profound and vital changes in our economic mechanism, wrought mainly by the World War and its aftermath. Along the entire gamut of social, economic and political attitudes, the New Negro Woman, with her head erect and spirit undaunted is resolutely marching toward the liberation of her people in particular and the human race in general.

    — Editorial, The Messenger’s “New Negro Woman” issue (1923)
    But I have no civilized articulation for the things I hate. I proudly love being a Negro woman; [it’s] so involved and interesting. We are the PROBLEM—the great national game of TABOO.

    — Anne Spencer, qtd. in Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (1927)
    Here is a woman who tried to be decisive in extremis. She “spoke,” but women did not, do not, “hear” her. Thus she can be defined as a “subaltern”—a person without lines of social mobility.

    — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

    Given the primitivist stereotypes projected upon African American women as oversexed, exotic creatures during the Harlem Renaissance era, contemporaneous poet Anne Spencer’s statement suggests that women writers’ doubly conscious performance of self must have been challenging (to say the least). With her comment about the state of “New Negro Womanhood” in mind, we might ask: to what extent were women writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance successful in critiquing representations of race or gender within the context of that male-dominated literary and cultural movement? Forthright literary depictions of race, gender, and mobility in now canonical Harlem Renaissance works by Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston allow expression of varied facets of the African American woman’s experience during the early part of the twentieth century. Hurston’s women (and Hurston herself) refuse to be “tragically colored” and instead embrace the power inherent in their female sexuality—even using it, in part, remain perpetually mobile. For Larsen, however, the triple bind of double-consciousness, female sexuality, and white supremacy eventually disallows any true mobility for her fictional characters. When Larsen was accused of plagiarism in 1930, there were no legal charges, but her career never recovered from this blow. It seemed that “in America, whites might borrow from blacks with impunity, but Negro use of white materials is always suspect” (Douglas 105). As Ann Douglas writes, “The New Negro was a figure with few claims on mainline America’s attention, interest, or sympathy. If he insulted or displeased, he could be cut off, erased, without thought or regret” (106). It is difficult to determine how much mutuality between black and white artists and audiences could have existed in light of Larsen’s fate. She was “cut off” from what has developed into the African American literary canon essentially because she was a black female artist working within the confines of a racist and sexist culture. Thankfully, Larsen’s rediscovery in the 1980s, and the subsequent inclusion of her work in high school, college, and graduate school classrooms, enabled Larsen’s legacy to resist such erasure. Larsen and Hurston’s work has triumphantly evaded the threat of removal from the literary canon thanks to the gynocritical efforts of many feminist scholars, while other writers of the era still languish on the critical precipice of silence.

    In this essay, I am especially interested in the ways in which two still largely ignored Harlem Renaissance women writers, Elise Johnson McDougald, in her more straightforward essay “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” and Marita O. Bonner, in her multigenred, haltingly-titled “On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored,” use silence as a means to maneuver among the various identity positions that comprise the interstices of “New Negro Womanhood.” Placing them within the context of more widely known writers of their era such as Hurston and Larsen is edifying,…

  • The Crime of Being Married

    The Crime of Being Married

    Life Magazine
    1966-03-18
    pages 85-
    Source: Library of Virginia

    Photographs by Grey Villet

    A Virginia couple fights to overturn an old law against miscegenation

    She is Negro, he is white, and they are married. This puts them in a kind of legal purgatory in their home state of Virginia, which specifically forbids interracial marriage.

    Last week Mildred and Richard Loving lost one more round in a seven-year legal battle, when the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state’s antimiscegenation law. Once again they and their three children were faced with the loss of home and livelihood…

    Read the article here.

  • Drawn in Bloodlines: Blood, Pollution, Identity, and Vampires in Japanese Society

    Drawn in Bloodlines: Blood, Pollution, Identity, and Vampires in Japanese Society

    University of Texas, Austin
    May 2012
    117 pages

    Benjamin Paul Miller

    Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

    This thesis is an examination of the evolution of blood ideology, which is to say the use of blood as an organizing metaphor, in Japanese society. I begin with the development of blood as a substance of significant in the eighth century and trace its development into a metaphor for lineage in the Tokugawa period. I discuss in detail blood’s conceptual and rhetorical utility throughout the post-Restoration period, first examining its role in establishing a national subjectivity in reference to both the native intellectual tradition of the National Learning and the foreign hegemony of race. I then discuss the rationalization of popular and national bloodlines under the auspices of the popular eugenics movement, and the National Eugenics Bill. Then, I discuss the racialization this conception of blood inflicted on the Tokugawa era Outcastes, and its persistent consequences. Through the incongruity of the Outcastes ability to “pass” despite popular expectations that their blood pollution was visibly demonstrative, I introduce the notion of blood anxiety. Next, I address the conceptual and rhetorical role blood played in articulating Japan’s empire and imperial ambitions, focusing on the Theory of Common Descent and the Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus report. I follow this discussion with a detailed examination of the postwar reconceptualization of national subjectivity, which demands native bloodlines and orthodox cultural expressions, and which effectively de-legitimized minority populations. As illustration of this point, I describe the impact of this new subjectivity on both the Zainichi and the Nikkeijin in lengthy case studies. Finally, I conclude this examination with a consideration of blood ideology’s representation in popular culture. I argue that the subgenre of vampire media allegorizes many of the assumptions and anxieties surrounding blood that have developed since the Restoration, and demonstrates the imprint of blood ideology on contemporary society.

    Table of Contents

    • List of Tables
    • Introduction
      • Blood Matters
      • Thesis Organization
    • Chapter One: The Development of Blood as an Organizing Metaphor
      • The Blood Bowl Sutra and the Feminization of Blood Pollution
      • Sōtō Zen and the Dissemination of Blood Determinism
      • Lineage and a New Vocabulary
    • Chapter Two: Bloodlines in Modern Japanese Society
      • A State Without a Nation
      • The Formulation of the Family-State
      • Civil Code and Constitution
      • Eugenics and the Rationalization of Bloodlines
        • Race, Science, and the Introduction of Eugenic Thought
        • Popular Eugenics
        • State Eugenics
      • From Outcastes to Burakumin
        • Outcastness as Pollution
        • The Racialization of the Outcastes
        • Infiltration and Blood Anxiety
    • Chapter Three: The Empire
      • Blood-Kinship and Overseas Expansion
      • Imperial Manifesto
    • Chapter Four – Postwar Reconceptualization and the De-legitimization of Minority Populations
      • The Aesthetics of Ethnic Homogeneity
      • Blood and Culture
      • Zainichi
        • Colonial Koreans and Their Subjective Shift
        • Hereditary Foreigners
      • The Nikkeijin
        • Immigration and the Racially Homogenous State
        • The Sakoku-Kaikoku Debate
        • 1990 Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act
        • Culture Clash
    • Chapter Five – Blood Ideology in the Popular Media
      • The Vampire Boom
      • The Vampire as Blood Allegory
    • Bibliography
    • Vita

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • The New Virginia Law To Preserve Racial Integrity

    The New Virginia Law To Preserve Racial Integrity

    Virginia Health Bulletin
    Virginia Department of Health
    Volume XVI, Extra Number 2 (March 1924)
    pages 1-4
    Source: Pamphlet: Rockbridge County Clerk’s Correspondence, 1912–1943. Local Government Records Collection. The Library of Virginia, (Racial Integrity Act Documents) 12-1245-005

    W. A. Plecker, M. D.
    State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Richmond, Virginia

    Senate Bill 219, To preserve racial integrity, passed the House March 8, 1924, and is now a law of the State.

    This bill aims at correcting a condition which only the more thoughtful people of Virginia know the existence of.

    It is estimated that there are in the State from 10,000 to 20,000, possibly more, near white people, who are known to possess an intermixture of colored blood, in some cases to a slight extent it is true, but still enough to prevent them from being white.

    In the past it has been possible for these people to declare themselves as white, or even to have the Court so declare them. Then they have demanded tho admittance of their children into the white schools, and in not a few cases have intermarried with white people.

    In many counties they exist as distinct colonies holding themselves aloof from negroes, but not being admitted by the white people as of their race.

    In any large gathering or school of colored people, especially in the cities, many will be observed who are scarcely distinguishable as colored.

    These persons, however, are not white in reality, nor by the new definition of this law, that a white person is one with no trace of the blood of another race, except that a person with one-sixteenth of the American Indian, if there is no other race mixture, may be classed as white.

    Their children are likely to revert to the distinctly negro type even when all apparent evidence of mixture has disappeared.

    The Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics has been called upon within one month for evidence by two lawyers employed to assist people of this type to force their children into the white public schools, and by another employed by the school trustees of a district to prevent this action.

    In each case evidence was found to show that either the people themselves or their connect ions were reported to our office to be of mixed blood.

    Our Bureau has kept a watchful eye upon the situation, and has guarded the welfare of the State as far as possible with inadequate law and power. The condition has gone on, however, and is rapidly increasing in importance.

    Unless radical measures are used to prevent it, Virginia and other parts of the Nation must surely in time go the way of all other countries in which people of two or more races have lived in close contact. With the exception of the Hebrew race, complete intermixture or amalgamation has been the inevitable result.

    To succeed, the intermarriage of the white race with mixed stock must be made impossible. But that is not sufficient, public sentiment must be so aroused that intermixture out of wedlock will cease.

    The public must be led to look with scorn and contempt upon the man who will degrade himself and do harm to society by such abhorrent deeds.

    The Bureau of Vital Statistics, Clerks who issue marriage licenses, and the school authorities are the barriers placed by this law between the danger and the safety of the Commonwealth…

    Read the entire article here.

  • “A Problem for Which There Is No Solution”: Eurasians and the Specter of Degeneration in New York’s Chinatown

    “A Problem for Which There Is No Solution”: Eurasians and the Specter of Degeneration in New York’s Chinatown

    Journal of Asian American Studies
    Volume 15, Number 3, October 2012
    pages 271-298
    DOI: 10.1353/jaas.2012.0022

    Emma J. Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations; Associate Professor of Chinese Studies
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    In 1898, journalist Louis J. Beck offered the reading public what he saw as a valuable case study in “heredity and racial traits and tendencies.” This case study was none other than the infamous “half-breed” criminal George Washington Appo (1856–1930), whose name was virtually a household word for New Yorkers of the time. Born to an Irish mother and the “Chinese devil man” Quimbo Appo, a notorious criminal in his own right, George Appo was a preeminent celebrity criminal of the 1890s. A notorious pickpocket and “green-goods man,” George was catapulted to national fame after appearing as a star witness in the dramatic Lexow Committee investigation that brought down New York’s Tammany Hall. Taking sensationalism to a new level, the “king of confidence men,” as the Boston Globe called him, had even appeared on the stage, playing himself in George Lederer’s theatrical melodrama In the Tenderloin to national acclaim. To cap it all off, the World voted Appo among “The People Who Made the History of 1894.”

    But Beck was not much interested in the details of New York police corruption, nor in the new low point to which American theater had sunk: his true concern was the Chinese Question. Beck was the author of New York’s Chinatown: An Historical Presentation of Its People and Places, published by the Bohemia Publishing Company in 1898. Part tourist guidebook, part amateur ethnography, part muckraking exposé, this amply illustrated volume was the first full-length book on New York’s Chinese Quarter, and would in time become a frequently quoted source for Chinatown history. Beck promised his audience that his book would shed light on the vexed Chinese Question by presenting the city’s Chinese residents through the unbiased lens of the reporter. At the heart of the Chinese Question was this—could the Chinese in time become assimilated, and patriotic, American citizens, or did their “racial traits” render this impossible, warranting their exclusion from the nation? Beck offered George Appo’s biography as food for thought:

    George Appo was born in New York City, July 4, 1858 [sic], and is therefore an American citizen, and should be a patriotic one, but he is not. His father was a full-blooded Chinaman and his mother an Irishwoman. He was an exceedingly bright child, beautiful to look upon, sharp-witted and quick of comprehension. For ten years he was the pet of the neighborhood where his parents dwelt. . . . At the age of ten he became a pickpocket.

    Beck’s decision to dedicate an entire chapter to the celebrity criminal stemmed from his conviction that this “noted Chinese character” was “well worth investigating,” not only for the light his story shed on the operation of the green-goods business, but, more important, “because he is the first one of the new hybrid brood” to gain public attention. As such, Beck argued, “The question which naturally presents itself to the thinker is: ‘What part will the rest of his tribe take in our national development?’”

    It was a question that was on the minds of many journalists, social reformers, travelers, and others as they toured America’s Chinatowns and saw growing numbers of “half-castes” on the streets and in doorways. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, such “mixed” children could be found virtually wherever Chinese immigrants had settled across the country. When pioneering Chinese American journalist Wong Chin Foo reported on the New York Chinese for the Cosmopolitan in 1888, he asserted that there were over a hundred “half-breed” Chinese children in that city alone. Although their absolute numbers were small, their anomalous looks drew attention and aroused curiosity. Observers attached a special significance to these children that went beyond their numbers. For many, they represented the future shape of the Chinese American population, for better or worse. Some regarded these “hybrids” as living specimens that offered a chance to see firsthand the…

  • For President, a Complex Calculus of Race and Politics

    For President, a Complex Calculus of Race and Politics

    The New York Times
    2012-10-20

    Jodi Kantor

    When President Obama greets African-Americans who broke barriers, he almost invariably uses the same line.

    “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you,” he said to Ruby Bridges Hall, who was the first black child to integrate an elementary school in the South. The president repeated the message to a group of Tuskegee airmen, the first black aviators in the United States military; the Memphis sanitation workers the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed in his final speech; and others who came to pay tribute to Mr. Obama and found him saluting them instead.

    The line is gracious, but brief and guarded. Mr. Obama rarely dwells on race with his visitors or nearly anyone else. In interviews with dozens of black advisers, friends, donors and allies, few said they had ever heard Mr. Obama muse on the experience of being the first black president of the United States, a role in which every day he renders what was once extraordinary almost ordinary…

    …“Tragically, it seems the president feels boxed in by his blackness,” the radio and television host Tavis Smiley wrote in an e-mail. “It has, at times, been painful to watch this particular president’s calibrated, cautious and sometimes callous treatment of his most loyal constituency,” he continued, adding that “African-Americans will have lost ground in the Obama era.”…

    … Her husband is more circumspect, particularly on the question of whether some of his opposition is fueled by race. Aides say the president is well aware that some voters say they will never be comfortable with him, as well as the occasional flashes of racism on the campaign trail, such as the “Put the White Back in the White House” T-shirt spotted at a recent Mitt Romney rally. But they also say he is disciplined about not reacting because doing so could easily backfire.

    “The president knows that some people may choose to be divided by differences — race, gender, religion — but his focus is on bringing people together,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser, wrote in an e-mail.

    Even when Newt Gingrich called him a “food stamp president” during the Republican primaries, the most the president did was shoot confidants a meaningful look — “the way he will cock his head, an exaggerated smile, like ‘I’m not saying but I’m saying,’ ” one campaign adviser said…

    …Out to Change Stereotypes

    Shortly before his 2009 inauguration, Barack Obama took his family to see the Lincoln Memorial. “First African-American president, better be good,” a 10-year-old Malia Obama told her father, who repeated the story later, a rare acknowledgment of the symbolic shadow he casts.

    For all of Mr. Obama’s caution, he is on a mission: to change stereotypes of African-Americans, aides and friends say. Six years ago, he told his wife and a roomful of aides that he wanted to run for the White House to change children’s perceptions of what was possible. He had other ambitions for the presidency, of course, but he was also embarking on an experiment in which the Obamas would put themselves and their children on the line to help erase centuries of negative views…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Reaping the Whirlwind

    Reaping the Whirlwind

    The New York Times
    Opinionator: Exculive Online Commentary From The Times
    2012-10-17

    Linda Greenhouse, Senior Research Scholar in Law, Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence, and Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law
    Yale University

    On reading the transcript and listening to the audio of last week’s Supreme Court argument in the University of Texas affirmative action case, my primary reaction was one of embarrassment — for the court and also for Texas.

    First the court. Of the four justices most intent on curbing or totally eradicating affirmative action — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas — the three who spoke (minus Justice Thomas, of course) failed to engage with the deep issues raised by Fisher v. University of Texas. Instead, they toyed with the case.

    Chief Justice Roberts, after posing only one question to the lawyer representing Abigail Fisher, the rejected white applicant who filed a lawsuit claiming she was unconstitutionally discriminated against, flung 27 questions at the university’s lawyer, Gregory G. Garre, many seemingly designed to make the university’s commitment to assembling a diverse student body look silly. “Should someone who is one-quarter Hispanic check the Hispanic box or some different box?” the chief justice wanted to know. “What about one-eighth?” he persisted. “Would it violate the honor code for someone who is one-eighth Hispanic and says ‘I identify as Hispanic’ to check the Hispanic box?”

    Justice Scalia piled on: “Did they require everybody to check a box or they have somebody figure out, oh, this person looks one thirty-second Hispanic and that’s enough?”

    On it went, and it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that ridicule rather than a search for understanding was the name of the game. “How many people are there in the affirmative action department of the University of Texas?” Justice Scalia asked Mr. Garre. “Do you have any idea? There must be a lot of people to, you know, to monitor all these classes and do all of this assessment of race throughout the thing.” Justice Scalia mused that if the court invalidated the program, “there would be a large number of people out of a job,” a prospect that seemed to tickle his fancy.

    It doesn’t take a genius to point out that it’s inherently problematic for the government to count people by race (“It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” as Chief Justice Roberts famously expressed the thought during his first term on the court, dissenting from a 2006 Voting Rights Act decision that found that Texas had improperly diluted Latino voting strength). That’s why the Supreme Court has insisted that any affirmative action plan must meet the test of “strict scrutiny” — that is, that the plan must be “narrowly tailored” to serve a “compelling interest.”

    But the fact is, as the justices obviously know, that the court has concluded that affirmative action in higher education admissions can clear that high bar — as it did nine years ago in Grutter v. Bollinger, the University of Michigan Law School decision. In other words, there was a context in which the Regents of the University of Texas, following upon the Michigan decision, chose to act, a history they sought to acknowledge, and a better future they hoped to achieve for their diverse state by supplementing the unsatisfactory and mechanical “top 10 percent” admissions plan with one that considers each applicant as an individual — with race as “only one modest factor among many others,” according to the university’s brief. It was this context that was almost entirely missing from the justices’ questions to the university’s lawyer. The questions were not so much hostile as trivializing…

    Read the entire opinion piece here.

  • ‘Master’ Jefferson: Defender Of Liberty, Then Slavery

    ‘Master’ Jefferson: Defender Of Liberty, Then Slavery

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

    Maureen Corrigan, Book Critic

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Thomas Jefferson advertises for a runaway slave in Williamsburg’s newspaper

    Thomas Jefferson advertises for a runaway slave in Williamsburg’s newspaper

    The Virginia Gazette
    Williamsburg, Virginia
    1769-09-14
    Source: Library of Congress: Thomas Jefferson: Creating a Virginia Republic


    Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virgiania

    Runaway slaves were not unknown on the Jefferson plantations. In this 1769 advertisement Thomas Jefferson, who had inherited half of his father Peter’s more than sixty slaves, offered a forty shilling reward for the return of “a Mulatto slave called Sandy.” After Sandy’s return, Jefferson sold him, as he did many problem slaves, despite his value as a shoemaker and jockey, to Col. Charles Lewis for 100 pounds on January 29, 1773.

  • Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

    Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux an imprint of Macmillan
    2012-10-16
    352 pages
    Hardback ISBN-10: 0374299560; ISBN-13: 978-0374299569

    Henry Wiencek

    Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Master of the Mountain, Henry Wiencek’s eloquent, persuasive book—based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson’s papers—opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson’s world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money.

    So far, historians have offered only easy irony or paradox to explain this extraordinary Founding Father who was an emancipationist in his youth and then recoiled from his own inspiring rhetoric and equivocated about slavery; who enjoyed his renown as a revolutionary leader yet kept some of his own children as slaves. But Wiencek’s Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the “silent profits” gained from his slaves—and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he’d vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson’s grocery bills. Parents are divided from children—in his ledgers they are recast as money—while he composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what some of his friends call “a vile commerce.”

    Many people of Jefferson’s time saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had been badly distorted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?

    The thunderstorm that shook the mountain during the telling of Peter Fossett’s story passed. We tourists were deposited back into the present, with shafts of sunlight illuminating a peaceful scene–a broad pathway stretching into the distance, disappearing over the curve of the hillside. Jefferson named it Mulberry Row for the fast-growing shade trees he planted here in the 1790s. One thousand yards long, it was the main street of the African-American hamlet atop Monticello Mountain. The plantation was a small town in everything but name, not just because of its size, but in its complexity. Skilled artisans and house slaves occupied cabins on Mulberry Row alongside hired white workers; a few slaves lived in rooms in the mansion’s south dependency wing; some slept where they worked. Most of Monticello’s slaves lived in clusters of cabins scattered down the mountain and on outlying farms. In his lifetime Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves. At any one time about 100 slaves lived on the mountain; the highest slave population, in 1817, was 140…

    …Jefferson made his emancipation proposal around the same time he took on an intriguing legal case, Howell v. Netherland, that illuminates the shifting, increasingly ambiguous racial borderland in colonial Virginia, where strict enforcement of racial laws could have the effect of making white people black.

    In the winter of 1769, Samuel Howell, a mixed-race indentured servant who had escaped from his master, sought a lawyer in Williamsburg to represent him in suing for freedom. His grandmother was a free white woman, but his grandfather was black, so Howell had become entrapped in a law that prescribed indentured servitude to age thirty-one for certain mixed-race people “to prevent that abominable mixture of white men or women with negroes or mulattoes.” Howell, aged twenty-seven, was not indentured forever, since he would be freed in about four years, but nonetheless Jefferson felt angry enough over this denial of rights that he took Howell’s case pro bono.

    Jefferson later became famous for his diatribes against racial mixing, but his arguments on behalf of Howell, made more than a decade before he wrote down his infamous racial theories, suggest that the younger Jefferson harbored doubts about the supposed “evil” of miscegenation. The word “seems” in the following sentence suggests that he did not quite accept the prevailing racial ideology: “The purpose of the act was to punish and deter women from that confusion of species, which the legislature seems to have considered as an evil.”

    Having just one black grandparent, Howell probably appeared very nearly white. But with the full knowledge that Howell had African blood, Jefferson argued to the justices that he should be immediately freed. He made his case partly on a strict reading of the original law, which imposed servitude only on the first generation of mixed-race children and could not have been intended, Jefferson argued, “to oppress their innocent offspring.” He continued: “it remains for some future legislature, if any shall be found wicked enough, to extend [the punishment of servitude] to the grandchildren and other issue more remote.” Jefferson went further, declaring to the court: “Under the law of nature, all men are born free,” a concept he derived from his reading of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers, the concept that would later form the foundation of the Declaration of Independence. In the Howell case, Jefferson deployed it in defense of a man of African descent…

    Read the entire excerpt here.