Mixed Race Studies

Drs. Regina E. Spellers and Kimberly R. Moffitt to be Featured Guests on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #199-Drs. Regina E. Spellers and Kimberly R. Moffitt
When: Wednesday, 2011-03-30, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 16:00 CDT, 14:00 PDT)

Regina E. Spellers, President and CEO
Eagles Soar Consulting, LLC

Kimberly R. Moffitt, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Drs. Spellers and Moffitt are editors of the anthology Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/ Body Politics in Africana Communities.

Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference 2010—Reflections

MultiRacial Network Newsletter
Winter 2011
pages 4-5

A few months have passed since the inaugural Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) Conference held November 5-6, 2010 at DePaul University in Chicago, IL, but we’re still thinking about it! Here is why:

The People: Over 450 people registered for the two-day conference, and 430 people actually showed up! For those of us who have experience planning conferences or large-scale academic event, that is a pretty good yield from RSVPs! These attendees came from all over the U.S., from Hawaii to Tennessee to New York, and also included participants from Canada, France, Korea, Norway, and the UK! What was great about the people was that it included a great mix of academic scholars, administrators, artists, and community activists… all hoping to connect with and learn from each other…

Read the entire article here.

The Anglo-Indians: Aspirations for Whiteness and the Dilemma of Identity

Counterpoints
The Flinders University Online Journal of Interdisciplinary Conference Papers
Volume 3, Number 1 (September 2003)
Flinders University of South Australia

Sheila Pais James
Department of Sociology
Flinders University of S.A.

The Anglo-Indian, as a distinct ethnic identity, was the product of the racialised social hierarchies of British India. Set off from the Indian majority by their claims to British heritage, they were, because of their mixed ancestry, never accorded full status as British. At the end of British rule, their anomalous status was confirmed in certain protections, including employment quotas, enshrined in the Indian constitution. Despite this, the Anglo-Indian community in India declined in the decades after Independence as many chose to leave. Climate, proximity, and its British roots meant that Australia was considered a desirable destination by many. In particular, this paper focuses on the relevance of the study of whiteness in relation to the study of the Anglo-Indians as an ethnic and racial minority. It traces the aspirations for whiteness among these diasporic people in their quest for identity. It explores the dimensions in the constructions of identity and the possibility of identity dilemmas among the Anglo-Indians as transcolonial migrants in a multicultural Australian society.

…The discourse on whiteness as a theoretical notion that attempts to uncover the authority of the invisible is very promising. Studying whiteness delves into the silence or invisibility (Frankenberg, 1993; Dyer, 1997) about whiteness which lets everyone continue to harbour prejudices and misconceptions. This silence, when penetrated, opens channels for the understanding of identity dilemmas among the Anglo-Indians and the identity choices they make vis-à-vis the skin colour of others in similar situations.

By the 19th century, the British separated themselves from the coloured people but accepted fairer (and often wealthier) people of dual heritage as ‘Anglo-Indian’ . Darker (and usually poorer) people were given the name ‘Eurasian’ . Anglo-Indians were of British descent and British subjects; some even claimed to be British to escape prejudice. The British did not however accept such identification. They did not see Anglo-Indians as kinsmen, socially viewing them as ‘half-caste’ members who were morally and intellectually inferior to the sons and daughters of Britain (Varma 1979). The Anglo-Indians tried to counter this by trying to be more like the British. Their campaign to be called ‘Anglo-Indians’ was aimed at establishing a closer link with the British Raj (rule) in contrast to the general term ‘Eurasian’ (Bose, 1979).

Under these circumstances, it was not easy for Anglo-Indians to develop a clear conception of their own identity. Europeans tended to think of them as Indians with some European blood; Indians thought of them as Europeans with some Indian blood. On both the cultural and social level they were alien to many other Indians, though kin to them on the biological level. Many of the prejudices of the British were adopted by the Anglo-Indians towards the Indian people of dark complexion, thus creating rejection of the Anglo-Indians both by the British and other Indian communities. The prejudices against them, real or imagined, or the prejudices that they themselves had against other Indians were an obstacle to both group and individual identity (Gist, 1972, Gist and Wright, 1973)…

Read the entire paper here.

Negotiating Coloured Identity Through Encounters with Performance

University of the Western Cape
November 2005
148 Pages

Gino Fransman

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MA in the Faculty of Arts University of the Western Cape

In this study theatre, as staged performance and as text, will be used as an exploratory and discursive tool to examine the negotiation of Coloured identity in the ‘New South Africa’. I investigate debates on Coloured identity while also drawing on theories of the performativity of identity. The role of performance in negotiating this identity is foregrounded; this provides a context for a case study which evaluates responses by Coloured and Black students at the University of the Western Cape to popular Coloured identity-related performances. These include Marc Lottering’s ‘Crash’ and ‘From the Cape Flats With Love’, and Petersen, Isaacs and Reisenhoffer’s ‘Joe Barber’ and ‘Suip’. These works, both as texts and as performance, will be used to analyse the way stereotypical representations of Coloured identities are played with, subverted or negotiated in performance. I attempt to establish how group stereotypes are constructed within the performance arena, and question whether attitudes can be negotiated through encounters with performance.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter One
  • Setting the Scene
• Staging, de-staging and re-staging the Coloured:
  • Chapter Two
    • Staging the Coloured––An Inter-disciplinary Approach
    • Comedy and Reflexivity
  • Chapter Three
    • De-staging the Coloured
    • The Theatre in Action: Using Stereotype
  • Chapter Four
    • Framing the Performances
    • The Performances as Texts
    • ‘Joe Barber’ – The Script
    • ‘Suip’ – The Script
  • Chapter Five
    • The Performances: Re-staging the Coloured
    • Conveying Meaning and Method
    • ‘From the Cape Flats With Love’
  • Chapter Six
    • The Case-Study: Methodology and Discussion
    • The Sample
    • Ethics Statement
    • The Participants as Spectators/Audience
    • Audiences and Venues
    • Special Features of the Performances Useful for the Investigation
    • Methods of Data Collection
  • Chapter Seven
    • Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Appendix A:
  • Images
  • Marc Lottering ‘From the Cape Flats With Love’
  • ‘Crash’ Promotional Material
  • ‘Joe Barber’
  • ‘Suip’ Promotional Material
• Appendix B:
  • Sample Questionnaire

Introduction

Where is the theatre now located in the ‘New South Africa’? To what extent has the focus shifted to “the representation of present struggle” (Orkin, 1996:61), rather than the struggle for a democracy enshrined within a constitution? How does this contribute to establishing an emergent national identity, and simultaneously affect specific group identities? These questions are key to the discussions that follow, as the national identity encompasses different groups assembled under one banner: the ‘New South Africa’. These groups, in turn, are all subject to group negotiations of identity.

In the study that follows, theatre as staged performance and as text will be used as exploratory and discursive tools to investigate the negotiation of identities. The aim is to explore this theme by examining the responses to four popular Coloured identity-related staged performances; Marc Lottering’s ‘Crash’ (2004) and ‘From the Cape Flats with Love’ (2001), as well as Petersen, Isaacs and Reisenhoffer’s ‘Joe Barber’ (1999) and ‘Suip’ (1996). These works, both as performance and as text, will be used to investigate the way stereotypical representations of Coloured identities are played with, subverted or negotiated in performance. In this work I attempt to establish how meanings are constructed within the performance arena. I also examine how they have been negotiated by using the responses of a selected group of students at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), as a case study, in order to explore current student attitudes.

The primary focus of the thesis examines Coloured identity as a construction still represented as a stereotype at times, but also as fluidly reflecting the changing South African society. The readings of the performances, as well as the performances as texts, illustrate occasions where this fluidity, or lack of fluidity in stereotypical instances, is represented on the stage. On the other hand the case study provides a student audience response to representations of Coloured people on the stage in South Africa. The slippages between being a cultural insider and investigating that very culture often manifest themselves, within the scope of this work and beyond its constraints. It is the difficulty of maintaining the theoretical trend that Coloured identity is fluid, which makes identifying these manifestations in the performances and case study so fascinating. The thesis explores this tension as far as possible within a limited scope for detail…

…Chapter One: Setting the Scene

‘Coloureds don’t feel included in mainstream South African society’… this sense of exclusion could in some ways explain why they had ‘no real stake in obeying the rules of this society’. (Ted Leggett, Institute of Security Studies- South Africa: 2004)

I am a Coloured. At least that is what I call myself. In South Africa today, ten years after democracy, it is surprising that this statement requires qualification. No qualification, in our democratic country, is required for someone stating, “I am Black,” or “I am White.” Yet, Coloured identity is mired in questions of, amongst others, belonging, status, and power. The contradictions implicit in claiming a Coloured identity are explored here, as my own claiming of the term places me in opposition to ‘being named’. To myself, it means one thing, but to someone else, it could carry an entirely different meaning when it is ascribed to me, and thus imposes a way of being onto the term Coloured.

Richard van der Ross, one of the former rectors of UWC (which was established in 1960 as a Coloured or ‘Bush’ College), states that at first, those now called Coloured were simply referred to as “from the Cape”. He says:

In time, however, through education and general development, the group has become aware of its situation and oppression, and has sought to shake off its feelings and position of inferiority… They base their claims on the long line of descent taking them back, in some cases, to the original inhabitants of the land of their birth… the new group which has emerged has been known by many names. (2005:94)

 In the 1600s, slaves of mixed parentage had already been afforded more privilege than Black slaves. Following this rationale, boys born of mixed slave parents were preferred over the descendants of Black slaves, as “the masters thought they learned rapidly” (2005:35). Following a progression of ascribed names, Robert Shell (quoted in Van der Ross) says the identification of the group occurred “after the abolition of the slave trade (1808) [when] the convenient name coloured was introduced into the South African vocabulary, where it stubbornly persists” (2005:98).

Van der Ross outlines an intricate web of inter-group mixing, from slaves, colonists, locals, exiles and freed slaves. That these groups are all represented in his framework does not indicate that inter-mixing necessarily occurred amongst all of these groups in a single family line. For the purposes of this study, the combinations of these do “not mean that all the components are to be found in any individual [C]oloured person. There may be no more than two” (2005:98).

Read the entire thesis here.

Half-Breed Citizenship Bill, 1857

Oregon State Archives
Echoes of Oregon History Learning Guide

A Bill
 
To enable certain Half Breeds to acquire the rights of citizenship within this Territory.Section1. Be it enacted by the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Oregon. That any person, being the child of a white father and an Indian mother, and therefore disfranchised by existing laws, may be admitted to the privileges of citizenship, by the District Court, upon satisfactory proof that he is a permanent resident and land owner of the county or district, and can speak read and write the English language, and has in all respects the educatio habits and associations of a white person, and would, if he were a white person, be a citizen of the United States or entitled to admission as such, and is a person of good moral character and in all respects worthy to enjoy the said privileges. The District Court shall make a record of such admission and grant to the applicant a certificate thereof which shall entitle him to enjoy, during the pleasure of the Legislative Assembly, all the rights privileges and immunities of a citizen of the United States within this Territory as fully as it is competent for the Territory to grant the same.

Sec. 2. This act shall take affect from the time of its passage.

Background

American immigrants in Oregon Territory disliked people of mixed Indian-white parentage. In 1855, the territorial government passed a law which prevented mixed race men from becoming citizens. This bill is an attempt to gain these rights for the children of white fathers and Indian mothers, subject to the satisfaction of certain requirements. Many white citizens would have been unable to satisfy these requirements, which included proof of literacy and good moral character. This bill did not pass.

The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance

Ashgate Publishing
November 2009
232 pages
Includes 5 b&w illustrations
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-6198-6

Rachel Farebrother, Lecturer in American Studies
University of Swansea

Beginning with a subtle and persuasive analysis of the cultural context, Farebrother examines collage in modernist and Harlem Renaissance figurative art and unearths the collage sensibility attendant in Franz Boas’s anthropology. This strategy makes explicit the formal choices of Harlem Renaissance writers by examining them in light of African American vernacular culture and early twentieth-century discourses of anthropology, cultural nationalism and international modernism. At the same time, attention to the politics of form in such texts as Toomer’s Cane, Locke’s The New Negro and selected works by Hurston reveals that the production of analogies, juxtapositions, frictions and distinctions on the page has aesthetic, historical and political implications. Why did these African American writers adopt collage form during the Harlem Renaissance? What did it allow them to articulate? These are among the questions Farebrother poses as she strives for a middle ground between critics who view the Harlem Renaissance as a distinctive, and necessarily subversive, kind of modernism and those who foreground the cooperative nature of interracial creative work during the period. A key feature of her project is her exploration of neglected connections between Euro-American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, a journey she negotiates while never losing sight of the particularity of African American experience. Ambitious and wide-ranging, Rachel Farebrother’s book offers us a fresh lens through which to view this crucial moment in American culture.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Boasian Anthropology and the Harlem Renaissance
• 2. ‘[F]lung out in a jagged, uneven but progressive pattern’: ‘Culture-citizenship’ in The New Negro
• 3. ‘[A]dventuring through the pieces of a still unorganized mosaic’: Jean Toomer’s Collage Aesthetic in Cane
• 4. ‘Think[ing] in Hieroglyphics’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cross-Cultural Aesthetic
• 5. Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Textual Synthesis in Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

Read the introduction here.
Read the index here.

The social position of multiracial groups in the United States: evidence from residential segregation

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 34, Issue 4 (April 2011)
pages 707-729
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2010.527355

Pamela R. Bennett, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University

I use multiple perspectives on the racial order in the United States to generate hypotheses about the social position of mixed-race groups. Perspectives that view the racial order as binary, ternary with an undifferentiated middle, or ternary with a stratified middle present different expectations for the social position of multiracial groups. I use a group’s level of residential segregation as an index of social position. In 2000, multiracial persons lived in neighbourhoods that were more white than the neighbourhoods of single-race minorities, though more diverse than the neighbourhoods of whites. Thus, multiracial groups appear to occupy an intermediate social position relative to blacks and whites, a finding that supports contemporary arguments about shifting colour-lines in the United States and the emergence of a triracial system of stratification. Yet, findings also suggest that the social space between blacks and whites is, itself, racially stratified.

Read or purchase the article here.

Finding, and correcting, my mistakes

Sociology
Volume 39, Number 3 (July 2005)
pages 483–499
DOI: 10.1177/0038038505052488

Michael Banton, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
Univeristy of Bristol

Mistakes are inherent in the process of research but can illuminate it. Some of the author’s mistakes have been false assumptions shared with others of his generation. His early work lacked a sufficiently sharp focus for him to be able to make any interesting mistakes. In 1967 he claimed that race was used as a role sign when he should have claimed that phenotypical differences were so used. He tended to take race as a synonym for colour, and failed to appreciate that a social construct could not be a basis for a general theory. His subsequent attempts to correct these mistakes are outlined.

Sir Karl Popper, one of my teachers, taught that we should learn from our mistakes, indeed ‘that all our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes’ (1969: ix; see also Agassi, 1968). In line with this doctrine, I have looked for the mistakes that I have made in the study of ethnic and racial relations, and what I have done to correct them. The exercise has strengthened my belief that Popper’s claim was either a pardonable exaggeration or depended on a restrictive conception of what constitutes knowledge. For in social science much can be learned from a data-gathering inquiry, like a social survey or a population census, or from attending a lecture. In the accumulation of new knowledge there are two phases. The first is inductive in character, gathering and sorting observations. The second phase, in which hypotheses about causal relations are put to the test, relies on deductive reasoning. Popper’s doctrine applies best in the second phase.

Much research in contemporary social science is entangled in the transition from the first to the second phase. Not all inquiry makes this move. Information collected for the purposes of public policy, like a population census, may remain descriptive. When, however, the research worker perceives in the information an intellectual problem, something requiring explanation, there is an impulse to deductive reasoning.

Another of my teachers, Sir Raymond Firth, told me that Malinowski, his teacher, used to insist that ‘without problems there are no facts’. Only when a scholar has decided on the problem can he or she decide which facts are or could be relevant. ‘Science begins with problems, practical problems or theoretical problems’, wrote Popper (1994a: 95–101). Yet the perception of a problem is no simple matter. The German expression Problemstellung is useful as denoting the recognition that something constitutes an intellectual problem; this recognition should include a formulation of the problem in such a way that it can be addressed, for, as others have said, a problem well stated is a problem half solved. Some of my mistakes have been false assumptions that I have shared with others of my generation, errors that can be identified only in retrospect. In trying to correct them I have learned things that, for me, constituted personal discoveries. Many of these were steps on the way towards the identification of causal relationships and the prospect that, one day, it may be possible to subject them to empirical testing…

Read or purchase the article here.

Zoë, Or, The Quadroon’s Triumph: A Tale for the Times (Volume II)

Truman and Spofford (Cincinnati)
1855
323 pages

Mrs. Elizabeth D. Livermore

With Illustrations Henri Lovie, and Charles Bauerle

“God has bid away the human soul in the black man’s skin and his darker person, that in finding it, we may re-discover our alienated and forgotten nature; and rejoice more over the one that was lost, than the ninety and nine who went not astray.”—Belllows.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.— Santa Cruz
CHAP. II— Emancipation
CHAP.III— The Retrospect
CHAP. IV.— Zoë’s Greeting to the Tropics
CHAP. V.— Mingling op the Old and the New
CHAP. VI.— Young America expatiates
CHAP. VII.— Zoe opens her Mission
CHAP. VIII.— Young America is heretical on Art
CHAP. IX.— The Queens op the Queen City
CHAP. X.—Diamond cut Diamond
CHAP. XI—The Shipwreck
CHAP. XII.—”Books in Brooks.”
CHAP. XIII— Mrs. Pumpkin’s Tract for the Times
CHAP. XIV.— The Quarrel and its Denouement
CHAP. XV.— Young America makes a Declaration, not of Independence
CHAP. XVI.—The War-horse Eagle
CHAP. XVII—Home, with its Shadows
CHAP. XVIII.—The Wormwood and the Gall
CHAP. XIX.— The Hurricane
CHAP. XX.— Light after Darkness
CHAP. XXI.— A Voice from Amazona
CHAP. XXII.—The Church Recusant
CHAP. XXIII.— Letters and Reminiscences
CHAP. XXIV.—The Closing Triumph

We must now return to Santa Cruz and give a hasty sketch of the fortunes of George Carlan and his wife, during the twelve years absence of their daughter in Denmark.

It will be recollected that the former, in emerging from slavery, had placed before himself two objects for which to live and labor—wealth, and independence; or as it may be expressed in one phrase, independence through wealth. Towards these his aims were directed and his ambitious hopes constantly aspiring.

Sophia, on the contrary, affectionate and retiring, as she was, shared but in a slight degree her husband’s restless wishes; and if ever her thoughts were turned towards his favorite goal, and her imagination excited by his visions of distant good attained through these means, it was that he and her child, more than herself, might win the happiness which would accrue from their possession.

Mr. Carlan’s industry and enterprise had been crowned with success so far as to place them in comfortable circumstances.   Indeed, in comparison with most of his tribe, he was wealthy and was regarded with consideration by his own caste. But his affluence gave him no honorable position among the white Creoles of the island. To-be-sure, he had business relations with them, and the Danish officials treated him with a half friendly, half condescending familiarity, which was anything but agreeable. But by the English residents he was looked upon with distrust and aversion as an ambitious, discontented man, who was to be avoided and scorned on every possible occasion to prevent his impertinent encroachments upon their dignity and aristocratic rights. As these latter saw their power and influence decline in the island just in proportion to the losses and poverty incurred by their miserable management of their property, spendthrift habits, and ruinous absenteeism, so in the same ratio did they hate the Irish emigrants into whose hands their estates had fallen, or the colored people who, through their enterprise, were seizing upon their commerce and manufactures.

Had George Carlan, when he emerged from slavery, possessed a true idea of the value of freedom in its relations to the training and development of the human soul above all things else, he would have been saved much bitterness of feeling and many heartaches, and in the end have prospered much better also in his worldly affairs. For by this principle deeply-rooted and acting vitally upon his daily life, he would have gained a self-possession equal to every emergency, an insight into the laws of commercial intercourse, and proper appreciation of the forces of nature, and the due balance to be preserved between the consumption of the products in which he dealt and the law of their supply, quite indispensable to success in any business department. This, too, would have given him that patient reliance on Providence in untoward seasons, and that geniality and kindness of demeanor in his social and business relations, which are better than a capital of thousands to one who launches forth on the sea of commercial life. But these ideas he had had no opportunity of learning in slavery, and it was not to be expected that he would begin his career as a merchant under better auspices, in these respects, than multitudes, who commence life with none of his disadvantages. Still he had much skill, shrewdness, and industry, and for several years his success was without a drawback, and, as was remarked in the commencement of this story, he was enabled to surround himself and family with not only the comforts, but many of the luxuries of life…

Read Volume II here.

Zoë, Or, The Quadroon’s Triumph: A Tale for the Times (Volume I)

Truman and Spofford (Cincinnati)
1855
353 pages

Mrs. Elizabeth D. Livermore

With Illustrations Henri Lovie, and Charles Bauerle

“God has bid away the human soul in the black man’s skin and his darker person, that in finding it, we may re-discover our alienated and forgotten nature; and rejoice more over the one that was lost, than the ninety and nine who went not astray.”—Belllows.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE
CHAPTER I.— The Sacrifice
CHAP. II.—The Voyage
CHAP. IH—New Scenes and Associations
CHAP. IV.— Questionings
CHAP. V.—Children at Home
CHAP. VI—The Teacher and Taught
CHAP. VII.—Bereavement
CHAP. VIII.—Lady versus Law
CHAP. IX.— Color can Feel
CHAP. X.—Anglo-Saxons do not know Everything
CHAP. XI—The Cloud hangs low
CHAP. XII.— Fresh Breezes From the West
CHAP. XIII.—A New Preacher in the Field
CHAP. XIV.—Spirit-Sister
CHAP. XV.—Pic-Nic —the Wandering Jew reappears
CHAPTER XVI.— Castle Building on the Prairies
CHAP. XVII—Chit-chat
CHAP. XVIII.— Spiritualism
CHAP. XIX.—Magnetism
CHAP. XX.—The Parley
CHAP. XXI.— Steel in the Ore
CHAP. XXII—Fire in the Flint
CHAP. XXIII—The Dedication

The story of Zoë Carlan, a young colored girl, of the little Danish island of Santa Cruz, is a pathetic illustration of the false position into which a refined and educated nature may be thrown, by the fierce prejudices of caste and color.

Her father, George Carlan, was a native of the island, and originally a slave. His ancestry on the father’s side for two generations had been whites, so that with his light complexion, he combined much of the energy and restiveness under despotic rule of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Slavery under the Danes had some mild and alleviating features. Schools were supported by government, in which the rudiments of knowledge were taught the slaves, with a view to their eventual freedom, and provisions were made, by which it could be purchased by those who would employ the requisite exertion.

George so diligently used these means, that at the age of twenty-eight, he stepped forth under the clear vault of Heaven, a free man. He could but imperfectly read and write and cast accounts; and he reasoned thus with himself. “Here I am, with none to rule over me but my God and my King.   Independence and influence I will have, but how to gain them is the question. I am too old to educate myself; but rich I may become, and rich I will be, will take my stand beside the haughty whites, and whatever consideration and power may be mine through wealth, I will attain.”

Through his industry and perseverance, he had become a successful merchant; and at the time when this story commences, he was living in the enjoyment of not only the comforts, but many of the luxuries of life. On attaining his freedom, he married a young colored woman, of much gentleness and native refinement of character, and one child, the little Zoë, was given them, to be the light of their home, and the object of all his aspiring hopes and desires.

But the free blacks and colored people (for that distinction is very carefully made in the islands), though experiencing much favor from the Danish government, and sometimes even preferred to the proud and discontented white colonists, when indulgences are to be awarded, have no position in society.   In the first place, the latter are, for the most part, the children of illicit connections, and where is the community where the odium of such sin falls not upon the weaker party and her innocent offspring. Then the people of color are a continual source of contention and trouble; they are restless, discontented, aspiring. For every step they advance higher than the full black, they cast behind them a glance of indifference or of scorn, while they are ever looking upward and striving to plant their feet side by side with the whites, if not in advance of them. This is met with unflinching opposition by the dominant race. In all spheres within their control, they omit not to give the most scathing demonstrations of their contempt. In social life they seldom meet, of course. It is, however, the custom for the Danish governor-general to hold levees, from time to time; and to these the chief mulattoes are invited as well as the whites. Gladly would the latter excuse themselves from the honor of attendance, knowing the odious companionship to which they will be subjected, but it is well understood that an invitation is equivalent to a command, and policy, perchance safety, forbids a refusal. There is by no means a very cordial  feeling between many of them and their rulers. The population is a mixed one. Many of the old and more wealthy families are of English descent. Their religion is only tolerated, the Lutheran being that of the State. Almost all offices are held by Danish officials, often unscrupulous and grasping, and the Creoles are made to feel in numberless ways, that they are but step-children to the mother-country, and that their interests are ever second to her own. Then, more than all other causes of jealousy is the slackening of their control over the blacks, by the measures of the home-government. They see in it their humiliation and ruin; and as prudence forbids a very open expression of their outraged feelings to their rulers, they display a temper all the more bitter towards the immediate cause of them…

Read Volume I here.  Read Volume II here.