Mixed Race Studies

Righteous Fathers, Vulnerable Old Men and Degraded Creatures: Southern Justices on Miscegenation in the Antebellum Will Contest

Tulsa Law Review
Volume 40 (2005)
pages 699-

Bernie D. Jones, Associate Professor of Law
Suffolk University

Although scholars have long addressed the role of legislators and local elites in policing the color line between black and white, antebellum jurists hearing will contests also played a special role, different from the roles they played in miscegenation prosecutions, but just as effective, nonetheless. State court justices, who heard cases involving bequests to the putative slave children of slaveholding elite men, exercised their power to police by deciding when the color line had been breached. In those cases, miscegenation between white men and slave women or free women of color was not the problem, however. Instead, the color line was breached in those cases when white men recognized and accorded slave women and their mixed-race children status through manumission and property. Official recognition by white relatives meant access to whiteness. Black personal freedom, combined with access to money and land, were threats to the social order of slavery and white supremacy. Free blacks were deemed uncontrollable and arrogant, particularly when they had money. They were perceived as a bad influence upon the bonded. In the eyes of many jurists, wealthy free black status was to be denied at all costs, for the benefit of the white social order, and the white relatives or creditors seeking to establish their claim to the decedent’s estate.

In this article, I explore the attitudes of antebellum jurists towards slavery, miscegenation, and the transfer of property from elite white men to black slave women, free women of color, and their mixed-race children, as found in antebellum will contests. This article is a historical study, in which I do a case-by-case analysis and categorization of the language used by state high court justices of the South in describing the white men who left wills that gave property to black women and their children. Although these cases have been studied by historians and legal scholars in other contexts, reading these cases for the purpose of discovering judicial narratives on miscegenation has not been the focus on inquiry. As a result, scholarship on the full flavor of judicial responses to slavery is missing.

Read the entire article here.

What’s in a Name? Mixed-Race Families and Resistance to Racial Codification in Eighteenth-Century France

French Historical Studies
Volume 33, Number 3 (2010)
Pages 357-385
DOI: 10.1215/00161071-2010-002

Jennifer L. Palmer, Collegiate Assistant Professor of History
University of Chicago

The Saint-Domingue planter Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau did not simply leave colonialism behind when he returned to his hometown La Rochelle: he literally brought some of its complications with him. Five of his mixed-race children by his former slave Jeanne arrived with or soon after their white father. The very existence of this family complicated an increasingly easy equation between blackness and slavery, and for both the planter and his children, family ties shaped their experience of race and status. In the midst of growing racial paranoia in France and legislation that regulated all people of color, Fleuriau and his daughter Marie-Jeanne privileged family over race as a means of carving out a position of autonomy for themselves in French society, albeit in very different ways and for very different reasons. In doing so, they shaped what the category “family” meant in France.

Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau, ex–résident blanc de Saint-Domingue, au lieu d’abandonner le colonialisme après son retour à La Rochelle, a rapporté avec lui certaines des complications coloniales. Cinq des enfants métisses qu’il a eus avec son ancienne esclave Jeanne sont arrivés avec lui, ou peu après. L’existence même de cette famille a compliqué le lien évident entre la négritude et l’esclavage. Pour le planteur et ses enfants les liens familiaux ont informé leur manière d’assumer leur race et leur position sociale. Au milieu de la paranoïa raciale croissante en France au dixhuitième siècle et la législation qui réglementait tous gens de couleur, Fleuriau et sa fille Marie-Jeanne ont privilégié les liens familiaux plutôt que raciaux afin de créer une position d’autonomie dans la société française, bien que par des moyens et pour des raisons très différents. Ils ont ainsi façonné la catégorie « famille » en France.

Read or purchase the article here.

It’s a wonderful, mixed-up world

The Daily Telegraph
2009-11-01

Aarathi Prasad

There are now more mixed-race children than ever before—and that is something for us all to celebate, says the scientist Aarathi Prasad

Just two weeks ago in Louisiana, an American Justice of the Peace made international news for refusing to issue marriage licences to couples who were not of the same race. He said he had taken the decision because he believed that mixed-race children would not be accepted by their parents’ communities. Whether this was genuine concern for a real social problem or was born of a more atavistic notion that there is something inherently, biologically wrong with mixing races, we can only speculate. Either way, his position was quite illegal, and his conduct is being challenged.

The sentiment, however, is one that is also shared much closer to home. Nick Griffin, the chairman of the BNP and a member of the European Parliament, has made his party’s stance on mixed-race children clear. Miscegenation, he says, is “essentially unnatural and destructive”, and mixed-race children “are the most tragic victims of enforced multi-racism”. The BNP says that it does not, nor will it ever, “accept miscegenation as moral or normal.”

As a person from the Indian ethnic minority in this country, I am sorry to say that I am familiar with this attitude. The most recent census in England and Wales found that people from my South Asian background were the least likely of the minorities to be married to someone from a different ethnic group.

Our relatively low inter-marriage rate might be explained by our cultural as well as racial differences, and our predilection for holding tightly to our caste systems and religions. When someone like me chooses a partner of another race, some family member is guaranteed to ask the same question as that Louisiana Justice of the Peace: “But what will the children be?”

I can answer that question now. The answer is that my daughter, and approximately 400,000 other children like her in Britain today, is mixed race. Families like mine are on the rise – nearly one in 10 British children now lives in a mixed-race family, a figure that is six times higher than it was when I was a child. In fact, mixed race people are the fastest-growing minority in this country, a trend that is set to continue. Even in my community, traditionally inward-looking when it comes to choosing partners, the proportion of mixed marriages has increased from 3 per cent to 11 per cent in the space of just 14 years…

…But the combination of inbreeding being bad and diversity being good has flung open the doors for another claim about what it means to be mixed-race. The idea sounds simple enough. If inbreeding is bad, then the opposite – outbreeding – should be good. It makes sense, some suggest, that people might be genetically better off if they were mixed race. The anecdotal evidence is writ large in the over-representation of Britain’s tiny mixed-race population in the arts, music, modelling and sport. Mixed-race people account for 30 per cent of the current England football team in a country where they make up only 2 per cent of the general population…

Read the entire article here.

Variability and Racial Mixture

The American Naturalist
Volume 61, Number 672 (Jan. – Feb., 1927)
paages 68-81

Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), Professor of Anthropology and African Studies
Northwestern University

[Read a biographical memoir by Joseph C. Greenberg here.]

[From Northwestern University: In 1948, Herskovits founded the Program of African Studies (PAS) at Northwestern, the first and foremost center of its kind at a major research university in the United States with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.]

The biometric method has come to lay great stress on the variability of populations of their development and in the discovery of the applicability of the findings of the geneticist to human populations.  One of the hypotheses which has gone hand in hand with the use of the concept of variability is what where there is a greater variation in one of two populations, that which has the larger represent the greater amount of mixture.  And when “mixture” is spoken of, the connotation is that of “racial mixture.”  The logical conclusion is that the “pure race” is that which show the lowest variability, and that when large variation is found in a population, this means it is the result of a great amount of race-crossing.

We see that this assumption is a real one in the minds of biologists and biometricians when we consider some of the  statements which have been recently made regarding this matter. Thus, in a paper published a short time ago, Castle remarks that “… as heterosis disappears, the population of later generations will be intermediate in character, and probably more variable that either uncrossed  race.”  Wissler, in a consideration of the subject of variability, remarks that “what he have… in a population unit is a number of types or pure lines, thrown together, each with its own range of variability, and these variabilities have a way of combining so as to increase the variability of the whole… As often said, the range of stature will be grater among mixed races.  This is, in fact, a recognized law of biology.”…

Read or purchase the article here.