Mixed Race Studies

Becoming American in Creole New Orleans: family, community, labor and schooling, 1896-1949

University of Sussex
May 2015
371 pages

Darryl G. Barthé, Jr.

Doctorate of Philosophy in History

The Louisiana Creole community in New Orleans went through profound changes in the first half of the 20th-century. This work examines Creole ethnic identity, focusing particularly on the transition from Creole to American. In “becoming American,” Creoles adapted to a binary, racialized caste system prevalent in the Jim Crow American South (and transformed from a primarily Francophone/Creolophone community (where a tripartite although permissive caste system long existed) to a primarily Anglophone community (marked by stricter black-white binaries). These adaptations and transformations were facilitated through Creole participation in fraternal societies, the organized labor movement and public and parochial schools that provided English-only instruction. The “Americanization of Creole New Orleans” has been a common theme in Creole studies since the early 1990’s, but no prior study has seriously examined the cultural and social transformation of Creole New Orleans by addressing the place and role of public and private institutions as instruments and facilitators of Americanization. By understanding the transformation of Creole New Orleans, this thesis demonstrates how an historically mixed-race community was ultimately divided by the segregationist culture of the early-twentieth century U.S. South.

In addition to an extensive body of secondary research, this work draws upon archival research at the University of New Orleans’ Special Collections, Tulane University Special Collections, the Amistad Research Center, The Archdiocese of New Orleans, and Xavier University Special Collections. This thesis makes considerable use of census data, draws upon press reports, and brings to bear a wide assortment of oral histories conducted by the author and others.

Most scholars have viewed New Orleans Creoles simply as Francophone African Americans, but this view is limited. This doctoral thesis engages the Creole community in New Orleans on its own terms, and in its own idioms, to understand what “becoming American” meant for New Orleans Creoles between 1896-1949.

Read the entire dissertation here.

News Alert | Four new theses in Europe explore Louisiana history

Louisiana Historic and Cultural Vistas
2016-06-17

Christophe Landry

For immediate release

European theses explore Louisiana history

In 2015 and 2016, students in England and the Netherlands finalized research on Louisiana history, culminating in dissertations (called theses in the United Kingdom and Holland). It probably will sound far-fetched, but there’s good reason behind it. The University of Sussex in Brighton, England, has a scholar named Richard Follett. Richard conducted his doctoral research at LSU in Bâton Rouge and has written and spoken extensively on the sugarcane industry in Louisiana, especially on race and emancipation in Louisiana’s sugarcane-growing parishes. The University of Leiden, in Leiden, Holland, has Adam Fairclough. Adam’s career also hinges on US history, specifically on race, racism and the African American experiences in the US South.

Richard supervised 3 theses on Louisiana. Carin Peller-Semmens’s thesis discusses issues preventing Reconstruction from materializing its intended goals on a longterm basis in Louisiana’s Anglo Red River valley (northwest Louisiana). Darryl Barthé and I both wrote on 20th century transformations in the Creole community of New Orleans and southwest Louisiana.

Mark Leon de Vries, like Carin, explored Reconstruction in Louisiana’s Red River valley.

Below is a summary of each of those theses, as well as a URL where they can be downloaded free of charge. I’ve grouped them in Creole and Red River, since they present different periods, cultural milieux, ethnic groups, realities and experiences in Louisiana’s Latin and Anglo communities…

Read about the four theses here.

The first Africans to arrive in North America did not arrive as slaves and almost certainly did not conceive of themselves as “negros.” The word, appropriated from the Latin word for “black” was a descriptive device divorced from any cultural or historical context for these people. Over time, that descriptive device would become a social designation constructed in opposition to and structurally inferior to “whiteness.” The first Africans to arrive in Virginia may not have arrived as slaves, but legislation would ensure that black freedom would exist only as a misshapen simulacrum of white freedom. Where whiteness signified privilege, blackness had to signify subordination, a dynamic which was eventually codified in racial slavery. For those without claim to “whiteness,” there was no recourse to white domination and so within this racialized caste system, “half-blackness” or “half-whiteness” were as problematic concepts as “partial-oppression” or “half-supremacy.”

Darryl G. Barthé, Jr., “Racial Revisionism, Caste Revisited: Whiteness, Blackness, and Barack Obama,” in Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority, edited by Andrew J. Jolivétte (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2012), 82.

Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority

Policy Press
February 2012
256 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN-10: 1447301005; ISBN-13: 978-1447301004

Andrew J. Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies (Also see biographies at Speak Out! and Native Wiki.)
Center for Health Disparities Research and Training
San Fransisco State University

Since the election in 2008 of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States there have been a plethora of books, films, and articles about the role of race in the election of the first person of color to the White House. None of these works though delves into the intricacies of Mr. Obama’s biracial background and what it means, not only in terms of how the President was elected and is now governing, but what multiraciality may mean in the context of a changing U.S. demographic. Obama and the Biracial Factor is the first book to explore the significance of mixed-race identity as a key factor in the election of President Obama and examines the sociological and political relationship between race, power, and public policy in the United States with an emphasis on public discourse and ethnic representation in his election. Jolivette and his co-authors bring biracial identity and multiraciality to forefront of our understanding of racial projects since his election. Additionally, the authors assert the salience of mixed-race identity in U.S. policy and the on-going impact of the media and popular culture on the development, implementation, and interpretation of government policy and ethnic relations in the U.S. and globally. This timely work offers foundational analysis and theorization of key new concepts such as mixed-race hegemony and critical mixed race pedagogy and a nuanced exploration of the on-going significance of race in the contemporary political context of the United States with international examples of the impact on U.S. foreign relations and a shifting American electorate. Demographic issues are explained as they relate to gender, race, class, and religion. These new and innovative essays provide a template for re-thinking race in a ‘postcolonial’, decolonial, and ever increasing global context. In articulating new frameworks for thinking about race and multiraciality this work challenges readers to contemplate whether we should strive for a ‘post-racist’ rather than a ‘post-racial’ society. Obama and the Biracial Factor speaks to a wide array of academic disciplines ranging from political science and public policy to sociology and ethnic studies. Scholars, researchers, undergraduate and graduate students as well as community organizers and general audiences interested in issues of equity, social justice, cross-cultural coalitions and political reform will gain new insights into critical mixed race theory and social class in multiracial contexts and beyond.

Contents

• Part I
  • Obama and the biracial factor: An introduction – Andrew Jolivette
  • Race, multiraciality, and the election of Barack Obama: Toward a more perfect union? – G. Reginald Daniel
  • “A Patchwork Heritage” Multiracial citation in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father – Justin Ponder
  • Racial revisionism, caste revisited: Whiteness, blackness and Barack Obama – Darryl G. Barthé, Jr.
• Part II: Beyond black and white identity politics
  • Obama mamas and mixed race: Hoping for “A More Perfect Union” – Wei Ming Dariotis and Grace Yoo
  • Is ‘no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama’? Racial authenticity, cognitive flexibility and the racial Rorschach test – Rebecca Chiyoko King O’Riain
  • Mixed race kin-aesthetics in the Age of Obama – Wei Ming Dariotis
  • Mutt like me: Barack Obama and the mixed race experience in historical perspective – Zebulon Miletsky
• Part III: The battle for a new American majority
  • A different kind of blackness: The question of Obama’s blackness and intraracial variation among African Americans – Robert Keith Collins
  • Obama and race in the recessionary period of the colorblind era – Kathleen Odel Korgen and David L. Brunsma
  • Barack Obama and the rise to power: Emmett Till revisited – Andrew Jolivette