Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

“The debate about the slave trade, and of slavery itself, formed a critical background to everything that happens in the book. In fact, I would contend that the rhetoric around abolitionism was one of the most important factors in how the Anglo-Atlantic World thought about race at the end of the eighteenth century. For mixed-race migrants, there were three specific discussions that were relevant to them. First, activists working to abolish the slave trade started arguing in 1788 that once enslaved people were treated better and encouraged to marry one another, then they would increase naturally as a population, making the slave trade obsolete. That argument produced an ancillary claim that reformers should prevent interracial sex in the colonies because it undercut the natural growth of enslaved populations. In other words, the interracial relationships that produced mixed-race offspring suddenly became political, not just moral, problems for reformers. Second, when the Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791, French and English observers blamed abolitionists for stirring up trouble. But they also pointed to an event in the colony of Saint Domingue (that becomes Haiti) a few months before the Revolution. Vincent Ogé, a mixed-race Dominguan educated in France, led a militia of color demanding equal rights. They were quickly put down, but whites across the Caribbean assumed that his metropolitan education had radicalized him, and helped to inspire the later enslaved uprising. Jamaicans of color living in Britain, who had the same kind of biography as Ogé, were now even more threatening. Third, once the slave trade was abolished in 1807, observers immediately grew concerned that whites would flee the West Indies in droves, as the islands would no longer be economically productive. Someone still had to oversee these colonies, though, and mixed-race migrants who had been educated in Britain came to be seen as the best replacements for that white population that would inevitably leave the Caribbean.” —Daniel Livesay

Christopher Jones, “Q&A with Daniel Livesay, author of Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833,” The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History, April 20, 2018. https://earlyamericanists.com/2018/04/20/qa-with-daniel-livesay-author-of-children-of-uncertain-fortune-mixed-race-jamaicans-in-britain-and-the-atlantic-family-1733-1833/.

I am not Pocahontas

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2014-09-09 20:44Z by Steven

I am not Pocahontas

The Weeklings (also in Salon)
2014-09-04

Elissa Washuta

AS A COWLITZ Indian child, white-skinned and New Jersey-born, I grew up fielding the question, “How much Indian are you?” without any sense of its meaning. Once I was old enough to know that my mother was Indian and my father wasn’t, I began responding “Half.” It wasn’t until my teenage years that I would ask my mother for the details of my ethnic breakdown. She pulled an index card out of her desk drawer. I knew that I was Cowlitz, Polish, Irish, and Ukrainian, but the card was full of surprising facts as well. What did it mean to be Welch? French?

The truly shocking information the card carried was my Indian blood quantum. I didn’t know that was the term for the sum of the fractions next to Cowlitz and Cascade. This was the “How much?” people had prodded me about, and it wasn’t the half I’d assumed. “What are you, a quarter?” people would toss out at times. It wasn’t that. The sum of the Cascade and Cowlitz fractions made an awkward hybrid. I decided it would be nobody’s business.

I grew up in the time of Native American proverb posters and mass-produced dream catchers. Disney’s Pocahontas was released in 1995, when I was ten. I had outgrown my Barbies then, but I still added a Pocahontas doll to my retired collection. I knew that she was a fullblood. She communicated with animals and never wore a jacket. She painted with all the colors of the wind. If someone had asked me to explain the difference between my plastic doll and me, I might have said that she was the real Indian and I was the fake one…

…Although my tribe doesn’t require me to demonstrate a minimum degree of ancestry, acquaintances’ innocent questions of “How much?” seem to gesture toward a desire to get at the truth about how far I am from ancestor plucked from Kevin Costner’s friendly and doomed band: a real Indian.

“How much Indian are you?”, however well-intentioned, implies that alive within me is only a tiny piece of the free, noble Indian that passed on long ago, a remnant from which I am far removed. The questions, individually, are borne from a place of curiosity, but the questions have embedded in a time when blood quantum was used to rob indigenous peoples of rights and, ultimately, lead to our being defined out of existence. Pocahontas, in the final scene of the Disney re-creation, sends John Smith back to England and tells him, “No matter what happens, I’ll always be with you. Forever.” What happens: the viewer is spared the discomfort of a mixed-race happy ending. What happens, historically: Pocahontas is captured by the English, marries John Rolfe, has a son, travels to England to serve as the Crown’s symbol of the civilization and Christianization of the “heathens,” and dies there from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two. The Disney version, in which Pocahontas never fit her feet into heeled shoes and refused to leave the woods (until the afterthought of a straight-to-video sequel), persists…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Elissa Washuta, Pocahontas, The Weeklings

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