Mixed Race Studies

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.

Racializing Obama: The Enigma of Post-Black Politics and Leadership

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 11, Issue 1, 2009
pages 1-15
DOI: 10.1080/10999940902733202

Manning Marable (1950-2011), Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies
Columbia University

In the 1990s, a new race-neutral, “post-black” leadership of African Americans emerged who favored political pragmatism and centrist public policies. Barack Obama, Newark Mayor Corey Booker, and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick were representative of this group. During his successful 2008 presidential campaign, Obama minimized the issue of race, presenting a race-neutral politics that reached out to white Republicans and independents. Yet despite his post-racial orientation, critics repeatedly attempted to “racialize Obama,” questioning his racial authenticity, religious affiliations, and Americanism. Despite extremist attacks, Obama successfully won the election by building an unprecedented coalition of blacks, Latinos, Jews, Asian Americans, women, and youth. The question remains whether the pragmatic, centrist Obama will commit his government to oppose all forms of racial inequality and oppression.

The historical significance of the election of Illinois Senator Barack Obama as president of the United States was recognized literally by the entire world. For a nation that had, only a half century earlier, refused to enforce the voting rights and constitutional liberties of people of African descent, to elevate a black American as its chief executive, was a stunning reversal of history. On the night of his electoral victory, spontaneous crowds of joyful celebrants rushed into streets, parks, and public establishments, in thousands of venues across the country. In Harlem, over ten thousand people surrounded the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building, cheering and crying in disbelief. To many, the impressive margin of Obama’s popular vote victory suggested the possibility that the United States had entered at long last an age of post-racial politics, in which leadership and major public policy debates would not be distorted by factors of race and ethnicity…

…Obama undoubtedly took most of these factors into account—the possibility of a “Bradley/Wilder effect” on whites’ support of black candidates, African-American grievances surrounding the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, the recent debacle of the Katrina Crisis, and the rise of the postracial politics of a new generation of black leaders—to construct his own image and political narrative essential for a presidential campaign. Early on in their deliberation process, the Obama pre-campaign group recognized that most white Americans would never vote for a black presidential candidate. However, they were convinced that most whites would embrace, and vote for, a remarkable, qualified presidential candidate who happened to be black. “Race” could be muted into an adjective, a qualifier of minimal consequence. So ethnically, Obama did not deny the reality of his African heritage; it was blended into the multicultural narrative of his uniquely “American story,” which also featured white grandparents from Kansas, a white mother who studied anthropology in Hawaii, and an Indonesian stepfather. Unlike black conservatives, Obama openly acknowledged his personal debt to the sacrifices made by martyrs and activists of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet he also spoke frequently about the need to move beyond the divisions of the sixties, to seek common ground, and a post-partisan politics of hope and reconciliation. As the Obama campaign took shape in late 2006–early 2007, the basic strategic line about “race,” therefore, was to deny its enduring presence or relevance to contemporary politics. Volunteers often chanted, in Hari Krishna–fashion, “Race Doesn’t Matter! Race Doesn’t Matter!,” as if to ward off the evil spirits of America’s troubled past…

Read the entire essay here.

Perceived discrimination, group identification, and life satisfaction among multiracial people: A test of the rejection-identification model.

Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology
Volume 18, Number 4 (October 2012)
pages 319-328
DOI: 10.1037/a0029729

Lisa S. Giamo
Department of Psychology
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Michael T. Schmitt, Associate Professor of Psychology
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

H. Robert Outten
Department of Psychology
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Like other racial minority groups, multiracial people face discrimination as a function of their racial identity, and this discrimination represents a threat to psychological well-being. Following the Rejection-Identification Model (RIM; Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999), we argue that perceived discrimination will encourage multiracial people to identify more strongly with other multiracials, and that multiracial identification, in turn, fosters psychological well-being. Thus, multiracial identification is conceptualized as a coping response that reduces the overall costs of discrimination on well-being. This study is the first to test the RIM in a sample of multiracial people. Multiracial participants’ perceptions of discrimination were negatively related to life satisfaction. Consistent with the RIM, perceived discrimination was positively related to three aspects of multiracial group identification: stereotyping the self as similar to other multiracial people, perceiving people within the multiracial category as more homogenous, and expressing solidarity with the multiracial category. Self-stereotyping was the only aspect of group identification that mediated a positive relationship between perceived discrimination and life satisfaction, suggesting that multiracial identification’s protective properties rest in the fact that it provides an collective identity where one “fits.”

Read or purchase the article here.

I continue to identify myself as black. I don’t see it in contradiction with my white and Mexican ancestry. Nor does it negate these other parts of myself. I have come to understand that my multiplicity is inherent in my blackness, not opposed to it. To be black, for me, is to contain all colors. The choice stems from my childhood decision not to define myself differently from my sister or my father. But it also grows out of my increasing understanding that race is not real, but rather is a social, political, and historical construct. Race has never been about blood, and it has never been about reason. Rather, it has to do with power and economics and history. One of my concerns about the multiracial movement is that it buys into the idea of race as a real, biological category. It seems to see race almost as chemistry: Mix black and Japanese, you get Blackanese, mix Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian and you get Cablinasian. I wonder if it will work toward a deconstruction of race, or a further construction of it. When we look at societies that acknowledge racial mixture, such as Haiti, Brazil, and South Africa, it becomes clear that multiracial pride does not necessarily mean the end of racism. Even when we look at the history of our own country—blue vein societies, brown paper bag tests, and light-skinned privilege—it becomes clear that a multiracial identity can live happily with racism and white supremacy intact.

Source: DanzySenna.com

Danzy Senna, “Passing and the Problematic of Multiracial Pride (or, Why One Mixed Girl Still Answers to Black),” in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Kennell Jackson, (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press: 2005), 85.

In Judaism, one’s mother must be Jewish in order to be ‘officially recognized’ as Jewish. Because it was my father who was Jewish, I didn’t count. And although I was born in Japan, I was not granted citizenship because only my mother was Japanese. From both sides, stranded. When I was 18, I decided to convert to Judaism. My mother was supportive, but she insisted that if I were to have a mikvah I must also start taking Japanese lessons. I’m not sure why she though these two things went together, or that they somehow balanced each other out. Balance was something both my parents strove for. Balance was important, they explained.

Naomi Angel, “On the Train,” in Other Tongues: Mixed Race Women Speak Out, edited by Adebe De Rango-Adem and Andrea Thompson (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2010): 143.

…race is not a biological category that naturally produces health disparities because of genetic differences. Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health.

Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, (New York: The New Press, 2011), 129.

Amerasians

Atmo
1998-10-22
52 minutes

Erik Gandini, Director/Producer

In 1988, after the Congress passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act, Vietnamese youngsters who could prove they had been fathered by an American were issued with a ticket for the U.S. and granted six months ”upkeep”.

Overnight, society’s lowest ranks became ”golden children”, able to take a whole family to the U.S. But proving one’s paternity wasn.t a simple matter.

For many, all that was left were physical traits suggesting American parentage and, with luck, an old photo of a father in uniform.

To date, 38,000 offsprings have moved to the U.S., and this documentary by Erik Gandini introduces us to a number of Amerasians, some who have moved, and others who are about to leave Vietnam.

The reality that confronts them in the U.S. can be a challenge. Even if their look is no longer a problem in the melting pot of American society, the culture shock is considerable—language, food, culture—so much is strange to them, and they feel themselves to be neither Vietnamese nor American.

For the first time in their lives, they learn to be proud of themselves as Amerasians.

Festivals

• Vue Sur les Docs, Marseille.
• Golden Gate Film Festival, San Francisco.
• Nordic Panorama Festival.
• Leipzig documentary festival etc.

Awards

• Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival 1999,
• Silver Spire, Golden Gate Filmfestival, San Francisco, USA.
• Golden Antenna, best indipendent documentary of the year, Swedish Television, 1998.

Event: Joe Bataan, the Afro-Filipino King of Latin Soul

Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program
National Museum of Natural History
Baird Auditorium
10th & Constitution Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530

Friday, 2012-10-19, 18:30-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

“Latin soul comes straight from the streets of Harlem. It’s a cha-cha backbeat with English lyrics and a pulsating rhythm that makes your feet come alive.”
 — Joe Bataan

Come learn about the power of music to move people—to get us on our feet and across borders of race, geography, class, language, and culture. The intersecting lines of heritage in Joe Bataan’s music and identity offer a unique entry point into the lives and community commitments of the civil rights movement and a deeper understanding of the American experience. Born and raised in Spanish Harlem to a Filipino father and an African American mother, Joe Bataan symbolizes the dynamic intersections between Afro-Asian-Latino histories and cultural forms.
 
Join us for a public discussion featuring Joe Bataan, activist and performer Nobuko Miyamoto, and African American Studies scholar Dr. Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar. With them we revisit the political and cultural ferment and collaboration of the late 1960s and 1970s in New York City when groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party, Asian Americans for Action, and El Comité contributed to dynamic social justice movements, catalyzed largely by young people, which inspired cultural pride, creativity, and activism. Miguel “Mickey” Melendez, author and former member of the Young Lords, will moderate the discussion.

For more information, click here.

Miscegenation

Otago Witness
Dunedin, New Zealand
Issue 652, 1864-05-28
Page 1
Source: Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

From the “Saturday Review.”

Words being the signs of ideas, for a new notion a new term is necessary. The barbarous word “miscegenation” has been invented by the fanatics of Abolitionism to express a doctrine which it was for a time found convenient to wrap up in the term of “amalgamation,” but which, after a brief tribute to modesty, it is now found not an insult to American morality to disclose in all its indecency and immodesty. That doctrine is, that the white race in general, and the white of the Northern States in particular, is dying out, and that, to preserve it from utter destruction, it must be mixed with the richer, purer, and nobler blood of the negro. Physiologically, this very practical use of the slave is based on the fact that mixture of blood is necessary for the perfection of race—which is indisputable but here a slight difficulty occurs. How does it happen that if, as the writer owns, hitherto the white has almost universally mixed with the white, and only degenerates more and more, the very opposite result occurs with the black, who just as universally has hitherto only mixed with the black, and only improves by it The white breeds in and in, and nothing but a degenerate and puny posterity is the result the black breeds in and in, and he only becomes “richer,” “warmer,” “nobler,” and more emotional,” “vigorous,” and fresher.” We may, however, best state the facts of the case in the very graphic language of the author or authoress, as it is surmised.

“The white people of America are dying for want of flesh and blood. They are dry and shrivelled for lack of the healthful juice of life. In the white American are seen unmistakeably the indications of physical decay. The cheeks are shrunken, the lips are thin and bloodless, the under jaw is narrow and retreating, the teeth decayed, the nose sharp and cold, the eyes small and watery, the complexion of a blue and yellow hue, the head and shoulders bent forward, the hair dry and straggling upon the men, the waists of the women thin and pinched, telling of sterility and consumption, the general appearance gaunt and cadaverous from head to foot. You will see bald heads upon young men. You will see eye-glasses and spectacles, false teeth, artificial colour on the face, artificial plumpness to the form. The intercourse will be formal, ascetic, unemotional. Turn now to an assemblage of negroes. Every cheek is plump, the teeth are whiter than ivory, there are no bald heads, the eyes are large and bright. Our professional men show more than any of the lack of healthful association with their opposites’ of the other sex. They need contact with healthy, loving, warm-blooded natures to fill up the lean interstices of their anatomy.

Nor is this a matter of theory only. The Southerners have shown a wonderful success in the civil war and it is all owing to their connection, licit and illicit, with the negro. “The emotional power, fervid, oratory, and intensity which distinguishes ail slaveholders is due to their intimate association with the most charming and intelligent of their slave girls.” It seems that “the mere presence of the African in large numbers infused into the air a sort of barbaric malaria” which, indeed, has been often noticed, and is commonly called by a coarser name, but which we are now told is a miasm of fierceness which has come to infect the white men and even the women too, and which accounts for the wild chivalrous spirit of the South, and its success in the field.” Nor are these the only benefits which the rebels derive from their privileged propinquity to the ideal man, the vigorous able-bodied negro. The sweet magnetism of association attracts the daughters of the South to the sable Apollos of the tropics.

“The mothers and daughters of the aristocratic slaveholders are thrilled with a strange delight by daily contact with their dusky male servitors. These relations, though intimate and full of a rare charm to the passionate and impressible daughters of the South, seldom if ever pass beyond the bounds of propriety. A platonic love, a union of sympathies, emotions, &c, &c. The white Southern girl, who matures early, is at her home surrounded by the brightest and most intelligent of the young colored men on the estate. Passionate, full of sensibility, without the cold, prudence of her Northern sister, who can wonder at the wild dreams of love which fix the hearts and fill the imagination of the impressible Southern maiden?… It is safe to say that the first heart experience of nearly every Southern maiden, the flowering sweetness and grace of her young life, is associated with a sad dream of some bondman lover. He may have been the waiter or coachman, or bright yellow lad who assisted the overseer but to her he is a hero, blazing with all the splendors of imperial manhood. She treasures the looks from those dark eyes which made her pulses bound.”

We are inclined to suspect that the North American man and woman may be something of the sort described by this indecent writer and we can well understand how it is that Mr. Hawthorne, after his experience of his sapless, dry, and bony brethren, and his angelic but angular countrywomen, is positively enraged at the sight of the wholesome flesh and blood of an Englishman and Englishwoman. We may be rather proud of being described as “bulbous,” and think it no affront that the “female Bull” may be described in Terence’s phrase as corpus validumn et succi plenum. Our juiciness and physical fulness and strength, and redundancy of muscle and blood, are certainly in strong contrast to what the writer of the pamphlet on Miscegenation describes as dryness and meagreness, the pallor and scranniness and leanness, of the American animal; and if the citizen and citizeness of the Northern States is this or anything like it, we can quite account for Northern failures in the field or any where else. The only absurdity is, that this wretched, sapless, shrivelled caricature of a man, this specimen of humanity in]its most contemptible form, should have the place which it has in the world’s estimate of nations. If this is the ideal American, we quite agree with the author of Miscegenation that the race cannot live to the third generation. If this is what “the Anglo-Saxon”—though plentifully mixed, by the by, with Germans and Irish immigrants and with most of the scum of Europe has come to, it is a comfort to think that we are near the end of it.

The sum and substance of the whole matter is, that this nasty doctrine of the physical necessity of absorbing the white race into the negro population or rather; of creating for the necessities of the American States a mixed and Creole race, is proclaimed not only by the author of this tract, but by the Rev. Beecher Stowe’s partner in the editorship of the Independent,” Mr. Theodore Tilton, by Mr. Horace Greeley, by Mr. Wendell Phillips, and by “the inspired maid of Philadelphia,” the lecturing woman, Miss Anna Dickenson. It is perhaps inconvenient to remember that some such experiment has been tried in Haiti with what success we all know. It is now to be repeated further North. How far these people carry out their views into actual life they do not inform us. If the gentlemen practice what they preach, the demand for coloured Abishags “to engraft upon our stock the rich treasure of negro blood,” and to fill up the lean interstices of the anatomy of editors, must be something more than nominal and as Miss Dickenson has lectured before the President and in many of the cities of the Union, and has not been tarred and feathered by the ladies of America, we are forced to the unpleasant conclusion that they are quite ready to play Tamora to any and every lusty negro who fulfils the “passional” and “emotional instinct” which is among the best cravings of the soul. “It is a mean pride,” we are told, unworthy of a Christian, which would lead any. one to deny that there are wants in the white nature which only the negro could fill, defects in physical organization that only the negro could supply, cravings towards fraternity that only the negro could comfort and satisfy.” Potiphar’s wife anticipated this argument, and in her plain-spoken language to the goodly Hebrew slave only put the doctrine of Miscegenation into practice and if the ladies of New England want another precedent for their “abandonment of an unwholesome prejudice,” the history of the Byzantine Court and the life of the Empress Theodosia may satisfy them that a negro-lover, though a solecism, is by no means an absolute novelty in female taste, A strong-bodied and strong-flavoured partner is perhaps the complement to that strong mind of which the Yankee female has furnished so many and such very unfeminine instances.

The wonderful and horrible thing is that this filthy nonsense is not only not hooted down, but that it represents the more advanced, and indeed the more logical, adherents of that political party which, if the smallest, is undoubtedly the most vigorous in America. All Abolitionists are perhaps not, or perhaps not as yet, avowed adherents of the doctrine of Miscegenation, but all Abolitionists with the very least regard to consistency must render the jus connubii to those who are in every respect their equals. The Miscegenation writers of course go further, and exalt the relative superiority of the nigger, and expatiate on his necessity in the great economy of things for renovating with his fiery energies the cold and languid circulation of the North. Yet even this might do comparatively little harm, for the women who will listen to and applaud Miss Anna Dickenson lecturing on these nauseous subjects are far beyond any other corrupting influences. The shamelessnes which sees “all the splendours of imperial manhood” in a woolly-headed coachman, may be left to that natural indignation which is due to the sight of Messalina vindicating her life on philosophical principles. But the evil does not end here…

Read the entire article here.

The claims of modern genetics notwithstanding, race remains a biologically meaningless concept of human categorization. Race simply has no traceable genetic essence, and the proliferation of racial DNA testing represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of race rather than the neutral application of scientific principles.

Christian B. Sundquist, “The Meaning of Race in the DNA Era: Science, History and the Law,” The Temple Journal of Science, Technology & Environmental Law, Volume 27, Number 2 (Fall 2008): 233.