Mixed Race Studies

Oscar James Dunn: A Case Study in Race & Politics in Reconstruction Louisiana

University of New Orleans
December 2011
296 pages

Brian Mitchell

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies

The study of African American Reconstruction leadership has presented a variety of unique challenges for modern historians who struggle to piece together the lives of men, who prior to the Civil War, had little political identity. The scant amounts of primary source data in regard to these leaders’ lives before the war, the destruction of many documents in regard to their leadership following the Reconstruction Era, and the treatment of these figures by historians prior to the Revisionist movement have left this body of extremely important political figures largely unexplored. This dissertation will examine the life of one of Louisiana’s foremost leaders, Lt. Governor Oscar James Dunn, the United States’ first African American executive officeholder.
 
Using previously overlooked papers, Masonic records, Senate journals, newspaper articles and government documents, the dissertation explores Dunn’s role in Louisiana politics and chronicles the factionalization of the Republican Party in Reconstruction New Orleans. Born a slave and released from bondage at an early age, Oscar J. Dunn was able to transcend the stigma which was often attached to those who had been held in slavery. A native of New Orleans, born to Anglo-African parents, he was also able to transcend the language barrier that often excluded Anglo-Africans from social acceptability in Afro-Creole society. Although illiterate, Dunn’s parents made critical strides in securing his social mobility by providing him with both a formal education and a trade apprenticeship. Those skills propelled Dunn forward within his Anglo-African community wherein he became a key figure in the community’s two most important institutions, the York Rite Masonic Lodge and the African Methodist Episcopal church.
 
This dissertation argues that Dunn’s political ascent was linked to the political enfranchisement of antebellum Anglo-Africans in Louisiana, Dunn’s involvement in Anglo-African institutions (particularly the York Rite Masonic Lodge and the African Methodist Episcopal church) and Dunn’s ability to find middle ground in the racially charged arguments that engulfed Reconstruction New Orleans’s political arena.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• ABSTRACT
• CHAPTER I: Introduction
  • Understanding the complexities of Ethnicity and Class in Reconstruction New Orleans
• CHAPTER II: Literature Review
  • Specific Literature in Regard to Oscar James Dunn
• CHAPTER III: Methodology
  • The Problem
  • My Hypothesis
• CHAPTER IV: Giving Roots to the Rootless: The Origin of Oscar James Dunn (1822-1865)
  • Dunn’s Parents
  • Oscar James Dunn’s Youth
  • Dunn the Music Teacher
  • A Plasterer Again
  • Dunn the Mason
  • Dunn the Soldier
  • What a Difference a Place Makes: Geography in Dunn‘s Early Life
  • Reaching a Consensus on Dunn’s Origin
• CHAPTER V: Oscar J. Dunn’s Political Ascension
  • Outside of the Political Arena
  • Civil Rights and the Riot of 1866
  • White Lodge, Black Lodge
  • Cracks in the Foundation
• CHAPTER VI: The Negro Lieutenant Governor and the Republican Schism (1868-1869)
  • The Reluctant Candidate
  • The Test Oath Imbroglio
  • Dunn‘s Inauguration
  • The Metropolitan Police Bill
  • The Civil Rights Bill
  • There and Back again: The First Black Political Junket
  • A Homecoming of Sorts
  • Ending the French Masonic Invasion
  • The Lieutenant Governor‘s New Home
• CHAPTER VII: No Greater Divide (1870-1871)
  • The Masquerade Misadventure
  • Back in the Slammer Again
  • The Voodoo Exorcism
  • Airing Their Dirty Laundry in the Winds of Change
  • Warmoth‘s Presidential Visit
  • The Failed Coup: While the Cat was Away
  • The Two Conventions
  • The Longest Second Line
  • Hard Times and Fond Memories
• CHAPTER VIII: Dunn-Forgotten Hero
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX A: John Parson’s Biography of Dunn
• APPENDIX B: J. Henri Burch’s Masonic Eulogy of Oscar J. Dunn
• APPENDIX C: Dryden’s Biography of Dunn
• APPENDIX D: Dunn’s Inaugural Address
• APPENDIX E: Louisiana’s Civil Rights Bill
• APPENDIX F: Lieut. Gov. Dunn’s Letter to Horace Greeley
• APPENDIX G: Oscar J. Dunn Commemoration ( J. Morris Chester’s Speech)
• VITA:

LIST OF TABLES

• Table 1. Attackers of James Dunn
• Table 2. Discrepancies in the Eureka Lodge‘s Roll and the First Regiment‘s Service
• Table 3. Dunn‘s Addresses and Dates of Residence
• Table 4. Black Voter Registration Sites in the City of New Orleans in 1865
• Table 5. First Ballot: Dunn‘s nomination for Lt. Governor
• Table 6. Second Ballot: Dunn‘s nomination for Lt. Governor

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

• Figure 1. The American Theater (The Old Camp)
• Figure 2. Freedmen Voting in New Orleans (1867)
• Figure 3. First Vote
• Figure 4. The President Leaving the Willard Hotel (March 4,1853)
• Figure 5. Lieutenant Governor Dunn. 137
• Figure 6. Metropolitan Hotel (1863)
• Figure 7. Canal Street above Claiborne Street circa 1860-1870
• Figure 8. Lt. Governor Dunn and Family
• Figure 9. Sketch of Dunn in Formalwear
• Figure 10. Krewe of Comus Ball
• Figure 11. Currier & Ives Image

Read the entire dissertation here.

Health in Black and White: Debates on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities in Brazil

University of California, San Diego
2011
320 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3458492
ISBN: 9781124703657

Anna Pagano

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology

In 2006, the Brazilian Health Council approved a National Health Policy for the Black Population. The Policy is striking because it promotes the image of a biologically and culturally discrete black population in a nation where racial classification has historically been relatively fluid and ambiguous. It transforms established patterns of racialization by collapsing “brown” (pardo) and “black” (preto) Brazilian Census categories into a single “black population” (população negra) to be considered a special-needs group by the public health apparatus. This construction resembles the United States’ dominant mode of racialization based on hypodescent and represents a significant departure from hegemonic portrayals of Brazil as a racially mixed nation. Furthermore, the Policy challenges national ideologies of racial and cultural unity by affirming the existence of an essential black body with specific health concerns, as well as an essential Afro-Brazilian culture that materializes in recommendations for culturally competent health care. As such, the Policy constitutes an important site for new negotiations of racial and cultural identity in Brazil.

In this dissertation, I explore the political and social implications of treating racial and ethnic groups differently within Brazilian health care. I examine how the re-definition and medicalization of racial and cultural identities unfolds in public clinics, temples of Afro-Brazilian religion, and social movements based in São Luís and São Paulo, Brazil. Through an analysis of ethnographic data that I collected over twenty-four months, I assess the impact of recent developments in race-conscious health policy on Brazilians’ lived experiences of race, ethnicity, and health disparities.

I argue that the new Policy, and its associated health programs, signals the emergence of a new biopolitical paradigm in which the Brazilian state formalizes citizens’ racial and ethnic differences in order to address inequalities among them. I also show that many aspects of these programs, which incorporate global discourses and concepts related to health equity, fail to resonate with Brazilian citizens’ notions about race and health. Consequently, patients and healthcare providers often resist the new measures. The result is a disjuncture between policy and practice that ultimately hinders Brazil’s efforts to reduce health inequalities among its citizens.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Signature Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Vita
• Abstract of the Dissertation
• PART I: RACE, MEDICINE, AND BIOPOLITICS IN BRAZIL
  • Chapter 1: Introduction
    • Race and Ethnicity
    • Biologization and the Re-Biologization of Race
    • Medicalization
    • Medicalization of Race
    • Biopower and Biopolitics
    • Applying a Biopolitical Framework to the Medicalization of Race
    • Race and National Identity in Brazil
    • Black Movement Activism
    • Public Health in Brazil
    • Ethnographic Field Sites
  • Chapter 2: Everyday Narratives on Race, Racism, and Health
    • Patients’ Narratives on Race and Health
    • Health Care Professionals’ Narratives on Race and Health
    • Patients and Providers: A Counter-Biopolitics
• PART II: THE BLACK HEALTH AGENDA
  • Chapter 3: The Birth of the Black Health Agenda in Brazil
    • Black Health Activism in Brazil
    • The Black Health Agenda in São Paulo
    • The Black Health Agenda in São Luís
  • Chapter 4: The Black Health Epistemic Community in Brazil
    • The Politics of Categorization
    • The Imperative of Self-Declaration
    • Etiological Claims
    • Medicalizing Racism
    • Discourses of Difference
    • Implications for Citizenship
    • Conclusion
• Part III: AFRO-BRAZILIAN RELIGIONS AND HEALTH
  • Chapter 5: Health and Healing in Afro-Brazilian Religions
    • Afro-Brazilian Religions: A Brief Background
    • Mãe Letícia
    • Pai Cesar
    • Healing in Afro-Brazilian Religions
  • Chapter 6: Afro-Brazilian Religions and the State
    • Partnerships between Terreiros and SUS: Rehabilitating History
    • Razor Blades and Comic Strips
    • Other Sources of Conflict
    • Cultural Competence and the Terreiro
    • De-Sacralizing the Terreiro
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 7: Afro-Brazilian Religions and Ethnic Identity Politics in the Brazilian
    • Public Health Arena
    • Terreiro Health Activists’ Identity Politics
    • Conclusion
  • Chapter 8: Health in Black and White
• Bibliography

LIST OF FIGURES

• Figure 1. Household Income, 2000
• Figure 2. Distribution of Race/Color (Pretos and Pardos), 2000
• Figure 3. Public Health Facilities and Distribution of Population by Color in São Paulo, 2000
• Figure 4. Population Density of São Paulo, 2000

LIST OF TABLES

• Table 1. Characteristics of Sample Population
• Table 2. Self-Identified Race or Color
• Table 3. Beliefs Regarding Health Outcomes between Blacks and Whites

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Black List: Photographs by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Eigth and F Streets, NW
Washington, D.C.
Open daily: 11:30-19:00 ET
2011-10-28 through 2012-04-22

Curator: Ann Shumard
Historian: David C. Ward

 
Portraits by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders — Individual prints are Epson inkjet prints, 147.3 x 111.8 cm (58 x 44 in.)

What is a “black list”? The dictionary defines it as “a list of persons who are disapproved of or are to be punished or boycotted.” But imagine if the black list were a roll call of distinction rather than of disenfranchisement? What if being on the black list was a point of pride rather than dread? What if the black list could shed its negative connotation to become a term of affirmation and empowerment like black pride, black power, or black is beautiful?

These are some of the questions that prompted photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (born 1952) to embark on a portrait project to create an entirely new kind of black list—a visual “who’s who” of African American men and women whose intelligence, talent, and determination have propelled them to prominence in disciplines as diverse as religion, performing arts, medicine, sports, art, literature, and politics.

Although these individuals have traveled different paths to success, all share a deep-seated activism that has carried them over daunting obstacles and continues to be a driving force in their lives. If the new black list represents a chronicle of African American achievement, the fifty men and women pictured here surely merit inclusion on its rolls.

Artist Statement

On February 24, 2005, Toni Morrison was having lunch in my East Village kitchen. The conversation turned to “divas,” as Toni described the extraordinarily talented performers she had auditioned for her opera, Margaret Garner. “Timothy, we should do a portrait book on these women. “Call it . . . Black Divas.”

It got me thinking about all the African Americans I knew and had photographed. I made a list: Toni of course, David Hammons, Bill T. Jones, and Colin Powell quickly came to mind…

Read the entire Artist Statement here.

Mixed-race People and Emancipation-Era Jamaica

Emancipation: The Caribbean Experience
Bulding Communities
University of Miami
Fall 2001

Kiara Bell

This website was created by the students of History 300: Caribbean History: Emancipation and Freedom, in Fall 2001 at the University of Miami, with the assistance of the staff of Richter Library’s Archives and Special Collections.

Following the emancipation of all enslaved Africans in 1834, the island of Jamaica was left in a stage of rebuilding.  Religion, education, and family structure were all in disarray and were in need of reconstruction.  With their new-found freedom, people also had the task of establishing a new way of life that would allow them prosperity and fulfillment.  However, the group that faced the most complex rebuilding process was the so-called “people of color.”  People of color, who were a result of “miscegenation,” or sexual relationships between people of African and European descent, faced the challenge of readjusting in the midst of distinct color lines on the island.  They faced particular challenges in the areas of politics, marriage and family, and child education. 

During slavery, white slave owners fathered numerous children with black slaves, and generations of children of mixed race heritage were the result.  White observers tried to subdivide these people of color into various categories.  Mulattos were one half-black and one half-white.  Samboes were black and mulatto (three fourths black and one fourth white).  Quadroons were the offspring of whites and mulattos (three fourths white and one fourth black).  Mestees were the offspring of whites and quadroons (one eight black).  After the Mestees few could perceive a color distinction because it is unlikely that one could detect “black” characteristics if an individual had less than one eighth African ancestry.  Observers also believed that one could detect the differences between the various subdivisions of people of color based on particular qualities, in addition to physical appearance.  The Sambo, although three-fourths black and one fourth white, was still seen differently from the “Negro” in various manners and habits.  Generally, people believed that people of color were less subject to disease than whites or “Negro.”  White observers also firmly adhered to the idea that most people of color felt a distinct advantage and pride in being slightly removed from the “Negro race” and attempted to take on manners and customs of whites…

Read the entire essay here.

Southern Free Women of Color In the Antebellum North: Race, Class, and a “New Women’s Legal History”

Akron Law Review
Volume 41, 1Number 3 (2007-2008)
pages 763-798

Bernie D. Jones, Associate Professor of Law
Suffolk University

• I. Configuring Race, Gender, and Class in American Legal History
• II. African-American Women in the Antebellum United States: Enslaved and Free Women Facing the Law
• III. Formulating an Abolitionist Law Practice: John Jolliffe
• IV. Conclusion

In thinking about the status of Southern slave women newly freed in the antebellum North, it is important to think about the ways in which they experienced race, gender, and class. According to Deborah Gray White, “[they] were slaves because they were black, and even more than sex, color was the absolute determinant of class in antebellum America.”1 These women were “[black] in a white society, slave in a free society, woman in a society ruled by men [as] female slaves [they] had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable group of antebellum Americans.” This was their reality, as a result of cultural and social practices founded in law. Legal elites developed as far back as the colonial period, a law of slavery based upon hierarchical notions of humanity seen as “natural.” Blacks were inferior to whites, and it was natural that they should be enslaved, as a matter of organic law. Southern social and economic demands necessitated this legal order.

In order to conceptualize race, gender, and class in American legal history today, it is important, first of all, to explain and discuss these topics within the contours of American legal thought. Race, gender, and class can be indicators of hierarchy and status in American society, especially when they are modulated through the institutional practices of politics and law. Within the realm of American legal thought over the past century, though, American lawyers have struggled with the extent to which they believed the law was indeed about power and politics. The following diagram, figure 1, “American Legal Thought, Late 19th Century into Today,” lists the various schools of thought which have been significant, and demonstrates the relationships among them…

…If anything, the Black laws indicate further the significance of race and class in “women’s legal history,” highlighting the ways in which black women could be disempowered as a matter of law. Mixed-race slave women were not always privileged by their ties to whiteness. If they had been enslaved, they could be returned to slavery if the relatives who owned them would deny them freedom, and when they were “free people of color,” they could be denied access to public education if they did not look “white enough.” A light-skinned mixed-race slave woman, Matilda Lawrence, from Missouri, accompanied her slave owner father in 1836 on trips into the North. She expressed an interest in becoming free, but he refused to manumit her. Easily passing as a white woman, she escaped into Cincinnati and found employment. Her father hired a professional slave catcher to capture her. Upon being apprehended, she was charged as a fugitive under the Act of 1793, and eventually removed from Cincinnati.

Not only did the Black laws threaten blacks’ interest in freedom and escaping from slavery, but it also denied them the chance to have their children educated in the public schools. These were for white children only. Thus, black children were to be educated privately. But those mixed-race black children who appeared “white” could go to school with whites, as happened in the case of the Williams family, headed by an octoroon man married to a white woman. He was of 1/8 black ancestry—one of his eight great-grandparents was black. Socially, the couple was taken to be white by all who knew them, but when they hoped to enroll their children in a local public school, they were barred, until the Ohio Supreme Court clarified what it meant to be “white.” Whiteness was not limited to ancestry, but to appearance. The children appeared white, their parents lived in a white world; for the purposes of school enrollment, the children were white.

The cases brought by formerly enslaved free women of color and their children for inheritances did not involve the drama of communities caught between abolitionist fervor and pro-slavery sentiment as found in the fugitive slave cases and the earlier cases which challenged the Black laws. It is of great significance, then, that these cases escaped the public scrutiny that the other cases generated, and as a result, have not been the focus of scholarly inquiry. They provide, however, another view of what abolitionist law practice entailed. The women were struggling to be defined as “free.” State institutions in their home states had carefully defined and proscribed definitions of “family” which did not include them. The relatives of the white men to whom they had biological ties never saw them as “family,” but saw them instead as property to be owned. Thus, lawyers and testators had to be resourceful at using legal institutions and doctrines…

Read the entire article here.

Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans

University of Texas Press
2001
389 pages
6 x 9 in., 50 b&w illus., 4 maps
Paperback ISBN: ISBN: 978-0-292-75254-2

Martha Menchaca, Professor of Anthropolgy
University of Texas, Austin

The history of Mexican Americans is a history of the intermingling of races—Indian, White, and Black. This racial history underlies a legacy of racial discrimination against Mexican Americans and their Mexican ancestors that stretches from the Spanish conquest to current battles over ending affirmative action and other assistance programs for ethnic minorities. Asserting the centrality of race in Mexican American history, Martha Menchaca here offers the first interpretive racial history of Mexican Americans, focusing on racial foundations and race relations from prehispanic times to the present.

Menchaca uses the concept of racialization to describe the process through which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. authorities constructed racial status hierarchies that marginalized Mexicans of color and restricted their rights of land ownership. She traces this process from the Spanish colonial period and the introduction of slavery through racial laws affecting Mexican Americans into the late twentieth-century. This re-viewing of familiar history through the lens of race recovers Blacks as important historical actors, links Indians and the mission system in the Southwest to the Mexican American present, and reveals the legal and illegal means by which Mexican Americans lost their land grants.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Racial Foundations
• 2. Racial Formation: Spain’s Racial Order
• 3. The Move North: The Gran Chichimeca and New Mexico
• 4. The Spanish Settlement of Texas and Arizona
• 5. The Settlement of California and the Twilight of the Spanish Period
• 6. Liberal Racial Legislation during the Mexican Period, 1821-1848
• 7. Land, Race, and War, 1821-1848
• 8. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Racialization of the Mexican Population
• 9. Racial Segregation and Liberal Policies Then and Now
• Epilogue: Auto/ethnographic Observations of Race and History
• Notes
• Bibliography

Introduction

In this book it is my intent to write about the Mexican American people’s Indian, White, and Black racial history. In doing so, I offer an interpretive historical analysis of the experiences of the Mexican Americans’ancestors in Mexico and the United States. This analysis begins with the Mexican Americans’prehistoric foundations and continues into the late twentieth century. My focus, however, is on exploring the legacy of racial discrimination that was established in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest and was later intensified by the United States government when, in 1848, it conquered northern Mexico (presently the U.S. Southwest) and annexed it to the United States (Menchaca 1999:3). The central period of study ranges from 1570 to 1898.

Though my interpretive history revisits many well-known events, it differs from previous histories on Mexican Americans and on the American Southwest because the central thread of my analysis is race relations, an area of study that is often accorded only secondary significance and generally subsumed under economic or nation-based interpretations. It also differs because I include Blacks as important historical actors, rather than denying their presence in the history of the Mexican Americans. Finally, as part of this analysis I demonstrate that racial status hierarchies are often structured upon the ability of one racial group to deny those who are racially different access to owning land. This process leads to the low social prestige and impoverishment of the marginalized. I close my analysis with commentaries on contemporary United States race relations and auto/ethnographic observations of Mexican American indigenism. Auto/ethnography is used as a method to illustrate how historical events influence racial identity.

This form of intellectual inquiry emerged from my conversations with archaeologist Fred Valdez. In 1986 Fred and I were both hired as assistant professors in the Anthropology Department at the University of Texas at Austin. It was the first time that I had met a Mexican American archaeologist. We were both fascinated by the ethnohistory of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and shared the unconventional view that Mexican Americans were part of the indigenous peoples of the American Southwest. Following endless conversations on the indigenous heritage of the Mexican Americans, we decided to study the indigenous groups of the Southwest that had been conquered by Spain and Mexico. Our objective was to identify the groups that had become subjects of Spain and, later, citizens of Mexico. This research was used to prepare an undergraduate class on the “Indigenous Heritage of the Mexican Americans.” We were pleasantly surprised that our class became very popular, as evidenced by the large enrollments. In general, students were interested in knowing about their heritage, while many others were interested in seeking specific information about the mission Indians from whom they were descended.

For me, this academic endeavor converged with the publication of Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s classic book Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (1986). Their work influenced me to reassess the significance of studying the racial heritage of the Mexican Americans, given that my interest until that point had been solely to outline their indigenous ancestry. According to Omi and Winant, the significance of studying race is not to analyze the biological aspect of a people’s heritage, but rather to understand the politics and processes of racial categorization. They urgently call upon social scientists to study race as a central source of societal organization, because in multiracial societies race has been used historically by those in power to share social and economic privileges with only those people who are racially similar to themselves. Omi and Winant do not urge scholars to explore the origins or psychology of this inclusive-exclusive behavior, but rather to provide a historical context, showing how those in power use race to rationalize the distribution of wealth…

Read the entire Introduction here.

White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001

University of Texas Press
2005
299 pages
6 x 9 in., 20 halftones
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-292-71274-4

Michael Phillips, Historian

The first history of race relations in Dallas from its founding until today.

From the nineteenth century until today, the power brokers of Dallas have always portrayed their city as a progressive, pro-business, racially harmonious community that has avoided the racial, ethnic, and class strife that roiled other Southern cities. But does this image of Dallas match the historical reality? In this book, Michael Phillips delves deeply into Dallas’s racial and religious past and uncovers a complicated history of resistance, collaboration, and assimilation between the city’s African American, Mexican American, and Jewish communities and its white power elite.

Exploring more than 150 years of Dallas history, Phillips reveals how white business leaders created both a white racial identity and a Southwestern regional identity that excluded African Americans from power and required Mexican Americans and Jews to adopt Anglo-Saxon norms to achieve what limited positions of power they held. He also demonstrates how the concept of whiteness kept these groups from allying with each other, and with working- and middle-class whites, to build a greater power base and end elite control of the city. Comparing the Dallas racial experience with that of Houston and Atlanta, Phillips identifies how Dallas fits into regional patterns of race relations and illuminates the unique forces that have kept its racial history hidden until the publication of this book.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Through a Glass Darkly: Memory, Race, and Region in Dallas, Texas
• 1. The Music of Cracking Necks: Dallas Civilization and Its Discontents
• 2. True to Dixie and to Moses: Yankees, White Trash, Jews, and the Lost Cause
• 3. The Great White Plague: Whiteness, Culture, and the Unmaking of the Dallas Working Class
• 4. Consequences of Powerlessness: Whiteness as Class Politics
• 5. Water Force: Resisting White Supremacy under Jim Crow
• 6. White Like Me: Mexican Americans, Jews, and the Elusive Politics of Identity
• 7. A Blight and a Sin: Segregation, the Kennedy Assassination, and the Wreckage of Whiteness
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

1. The Music of Cracking Necks: Dallas Civilization and Its Discontents

Toward the end of her life, Lizzie Atkins looked back on the days since Texas Emancipation and, despite the abolition of slavery, believed that the African American community had degenerated. The Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s sent a host of interviewers across the South to collect anecdotes from former slaves. Interviewed at her home in Madisonville, Texas, 144 miles southeast of Dallas, Atkins insisted that something bad had happened to black Texans since the end of the Civil War. Blacks grew lazy, becoming liars and thieves, Atkins said, because “they are mixing with the white people too much, so many half-breeds, and this shows they are going backwards instead of forwards.”

Atkins, who grew up as a slave in Washington County, about 204 miles southeast of Dallas, believed that before the Civil War a solid color line existed between black and white. On one side, blackness equaled dignity, honesty, and thrift. On the other, whiteness meant degeneracy. Atkins could not hide her contempt for white people or their culture. In spite of the inequality it generated, Texas’ color line allowed a separate black society to develop in which African Americans judged the world and their peers on their own terms. Seven decades after slavery, Atkins saw this separation as natural and miscegenation violated this fundamental order.

Atkins’ comments reflect one basic truth. Much of East and North Central Texas before the Civil War had a simpler black-white racial structure. As this chapter will argue, soon after Anglo Texas’ separation from Mexico in the 1835-1836 revolution, white elites created a society rooted in the absolute legal separation of the white and black worlds. In order to prevent the development of a mulatto population that might inherit the political and economic wealth of the racial ruling class, white leaders promulgated harsh legal penalties in the 1840s and 1850s attached to blackness. Blacks faced slavery, the death penalty for many crimes punished less severely for whites, and laws defining the offspring of mixed-race parents as enslaved bastards ineligible for inheritance. Whiteness was defined simply as the absence of blackness, Indian blood, or other racial “pollution,” although many who were socially accepted as white had been polluted in this manner. Elites hoped that the social superiority all whites ostensibly enjoyed over blacks ameliorated disparities of power and wealth within the white community.

To the dismay of elites, however, frequently severe weather and a cash-strapped economy made life insecure for the non-slaveholding majority. In Dallas, divisions developed along economic and regional lines, leading to outbursts of violence that disturbed elite confidence and security. When a fire destroyed downtown Dallas in 1860, elite suspicions settled on white abolitionists born outside the South. The violence of 1860 created the terrain on which postwar racial ideology developed. Elites labeled those opposed to their notions of race and class hierarchy as uncivilized and therefore not fully white. After Reconstruction, the city leadership embraced a more fluid concept of race in which white status could be gained or lost based on acceptance of elite social norms. This more flexible definition of whiteness, which held dissent in check, shaped Dallas politics for more than 130 years afterward.

The legal division of Texas into completely separate white and black boxes purportedly meant that all white people were created equal. The poorest white Texans were at least not black slaves and could claim higher social status than their servile neighbors. It was just that some white Texans were more equal than others. Dallas’ wealthiest pioneer Anglo families saw no contradiction in creating a community in which a few families rapidly accumulated great wealth while simultaneously praising the principles of democracy. Men such as Frank M. Cockrell, son of the city’s first business magnates, Alexander and Sarah Cockrell, divorced the concept of aristocracy from anything so crass as monetary wealth. Dallas, Frank Cockrell insisted, developed as a racial aristocracy, with a white ruling class atop a permanent black underclass.

From the perspective of the 1930s, Cockrell admired the culture of 1850s Dallas, where “[t]here were among the women the refined, cultured and accomplished. Socially all on an equality. Merit the only distinction.” Cockrell, however, emphasized another distinction: “the adaptability and self-government of the Anglo-Saxon race, characteristic of the Southern people,” which made the average pioneer in early Dallas “a very superior immigrant.” Cockrell’s words carried a particular sting in the 1930s after many non-Anglo-Saxons from Europe made America their home and faced mixed assessments of their whiteness by their contemporaries. Early on, elites like Cockrell portrayed Anglo-Saxons as the sole creators of civilization, a vital first element of the city’s Origin Myth. The Anglo-Saxon majority participated, at least theoretically, in what sociologist Howard Winant calls a herrenvolk democracy, a nominally free society in which political participation depends on skin color or ethnicity.

William H. Wharton, pleading with Americans to support the 1835-1836 Texas Revolution, declared that God would prevent Texas from becoming “a howling wilderness, trod only by savages, or that it should be permanently benighted by the ignorance and superstition, the anarchy and rapine of Mexican misrule . . . the wilderness of Texas has been redeemed by Anglo-American blood and enterprise.” The founders of Anglo Texas envisioned a race-based society in which Indians would be driven out, blacks exploited as slaves, and Mexicans reduced to the role of surplus labor. The state’s white leadership shuddered at the thought of miscegenation. “[A]malgamation of the white with the black race, inevitably leads to disease, decline and death,” Galveston State Representative and later Dallas mayor John Henry Brown warned in 1857. The Constitution of the Texas Republic adopted in 1836 specifically denied citizenship to “Africans, the descendents of Africans, and Indians.” Interracial sex, particularly if it involved slaves, threatened this racial order. In 1837 the Texas Congress criminalized marriage between persons of European ancestry and African ancestry, even free blacks. The law denied black consorts’ claims to white lovers’ estates and reduced mulatto children to illegitimacy.

Hoping to discourage miscegenation, the Texas Legislature in August 1856 defined the children of mixed-race unions as persons “of color.” By law, anyone with at least “one eighth African blood” would be excluded from whiteness and defined as a slave. Such mixed-race persons immediately suffered the same social and political disabilities as African Americans. Both slave and free African Americans could suffer the death penalty, according to a December 1837 state law, not just for murder but also for insurrection or inciting insurrection, assaulting a free white person, attempting to rape a white woman, burglary, and arson…

Read the entire Introduction here.

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium

Rutgers University Press
2003-01-23
272 pages
14 figures, 24 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-2847-2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-3302-5

Joseph L. Graves, Jr., Professor & Associate Dean for Research
Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering
North Carolina A&T State University & University of North Carolina, Greensboro

In this groundbreaking book, Joseph Graves traces the development of thought about human genetic diversity. He argues that racism has persisted in our society because adequate scientific reasoning has not entered into the equation. Graves champions the scientific method, and explains how we may properly ask questions about the nature of population differentiation and how (if at all) we may correlate that diversity to differences in human capacity and behavior. He also cautions us to think critically about scientific findings that have historically been misused in controversies over racial differences in intelligence heritability, criminal behavior, disease predisposition, and other traits. Greek philosophy, social Darwinism, New World colonialism, the eugenics movement, intelligence testing biases, and racial health fallacies are just a few of the topics he addresses.

According to Graves, this country cannot truly address its racial problems until people understand that separate human races do not exist empirically. With the biological basis for race removed, racism becomes an ideology, one that can and must be expunged.

The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America

Plume an imprint of Penguin
June 2005
320 pages
5.35 x 7.99in
Paperback ISBN: 9780452286580

Joseph L. Graves, Professor & Associate Dean for Research
Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering
North Carolina A&T State University & University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Preeminent evolutionary biologist Joseph Graves proves once and for all that it doesn’t. Through accessible and compelling language, he makes the provocative argument that science cannot account for the radical categories used to classify people, and debunks ancient race-related fallacies that are still held as fact, from damaging medical profiles to misconceptions about sports. He explains why defining race according to skin tone or eye shape is woefully inaccurate, and how making assumptions based on these false categories regarding IQ, behavior, or predisposition to disease has devastating effects.

Demonstrating that racial distinctions are in fact social inventions, not biological truths, The Race Myth brings much-needed, sound science to one of America’s most emotionally charged debates.

Biological v. Social Definitions of Race: Implications for Modern Biomedical Research

The Review of Black Political Economy
Volume 37, Number 1 (2010)
pages 43-60
DOI: 10.1007/s12114-009-9053-3

Joseph L. Graves, Professor & Associate Dean for Research
Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering
North Carolina A&T State University & University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Misconceptions concerning the concordance of biological and social definitions of race are ongoing in American society. This problem extends beyond that of the lay public into the professional arena, especially that of biomedical research. This continues, in part, because of the lack of training of many biomedical practitioners in evolutionary thinking. This essay reviews the biological and social definitions of race, examining how understanding the evolutionary mechanisms of disease is crucial to addressing ongoing health disparities. Finally it concludes by laying bear the fallacies of “race-specific” medicine.

Read or purchase the article here.