posted
Mulattoes and Quadroons (I guess Octaroons as well) have a rich history in American culture as black Americans and in many states represented the freed people of color and the emergence of a black middle class. To deny such individuals were black is to take from blacks their history. I was wondering if anyone could/would talk about other black societies throughout the world that are quadroon, mulatto or octaroon. I should mention also, that I don't consider mulattoes, quadroons, etc "half black" either. I consider them fully black.Blackness was socially defined by having a certain percentage of African ancestry. You either had enough and were black or did not and were not. Being half African is not the same as being half black.
Posts: 26 | Registered: Dec 2011
| IP: Logged |
posted
Are you saying that these people were viewed legally as Negro?
quote:Originally posted by Smiley Coast: Mulattoes and Quadroons (I guess Octaroons as well) have a rich history in American culture as black Americans and in many states represented the freed people of color and the emergence of a black middle class. To deny such individuals were black is to take from blacks their history. I was wondering if anyone could/would talk about other black societies throughout the world that are quadroon, mulatto or octaroon. I should mention also, that I don't consider mulattoes, quadroons, etc "half black" either. I consider them fully black.Blackness was socially defined by having a certain percentage of African ancestry. You either had enough and were black or did not and were not. Being half African is not the same as being half black.
quote:Originally posted by Confirming Truth: Are you saying that these people were viewed legally as Negro?
quote:Originally posted by Smiley Coast: Mulattoes and Quadroons (I guess Octaroons as well) have a rich history in American culture as black Americans and in many states represented the freed people of color and the emergence of a black middle class. To deny such individuals were black is to take from blacks their history. I was wondering if anyone could/would talk about other black societies throughout the world that are quadroon, mulatto or octaroon. I should mention also, that I don't consider mulattoes, quadroons, etc "half black" either. I consider them fully black.Blackness was socially defined by having a certain percentage of African ancestry. You either had enough and were black or did not and were not. Being half African is not the same as being half black.
Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Smiley Coast: Mulattoes and Quadroons (I guess Octaroons as well) have a rich history in American culture as black Americans and in many states represented the freed people of color and the emergence of a black middle class. To deny such individuals were black is to take from blacks their history. I was wondering if anyone could/would talk about other black societies throughout the world that are quadroon, mulatto or octaroon. I should mention also, that I don't consider mulattoes, quadroons, etc "half black" either. I consider them fully black.Blackness was socially defined by having a certain percentage of African ancestry. You either had enough and were black or did not and were not. Being half African is not the same as being half black.
More self-hate from these negroes lol.
Yes, of course you would classify people who are heavily admixed with white genes, as black, to claim those phenotypical traits.
No one wants the pure-blooded negroid phenotype, so blacks now are clustering themselves with people who are 1/2 or 1/4 white to claim white traits such as straighter hair and lighter skin as ''black''.
Posts: 2408 | From: My mother's basement | Registered: Dec 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Smiley Coast: Mulattoes and Quadroons (I guess Octaroons as well) have a rich history in American culture as black Americans and in many states represented the freed people of color and the emergence of a black middle class. To deny such individuals were black is to take from blacks their history. I was wondering if anyone could/would talk about other black societies throughout the world that are quadroon, mulatto or octaroon. I should mention also, that I don't consider mulattoes, quadroons, etc "half black" either. I consider them fully black.Blackness was socially defined by having a certain percentage of African ancestry. You either had enough and were black or did not and were not. Being half African is not the same as being half black.
More self-hate from these negroes lol.
Yes, of course you would classify people who are heavily admixed with white genes, as black, to claim those phenotypical traits.
No one wants the pure-blooded negroid phenotype, so blacks now are clustering themselves with people who are 1/2 or 1/4 white to claim white traits such as straighter hair and lighter skin as ''black''.
Considering the fact that you have a long history in raping woman of African descent you should be hush.
Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Confirming Truth: Are you saying that these people were viewed legally as Negro?
Yeah, they were.
quote: More self-hate from these negroes lol.
Yes, of course you would classify people who are heavily admixed with white genes, as black, to claim those phenotypical traits.
I don't see race as biological, but social. Phenotype means very little to me as Africans themselves can show plenty of diversity with or without mentioning quadroons/octaroons. In my previous threads, the Supreme Court mentions "African Race" interchangeably with "black race" so ALL of Africa counted as black. ALL of Africa was one race, but now you see the 'African race' being narrowed and divided in definition today. Regardless of their biology, they were all categorized as being of one race. Whites also labeled quadroons and octaroons as black and they hold a role in black history as forming in many states the freed people of color population and black middle class (since they were more likely to be released). If socially they have a role in black history and were originally classified as black why are they now white?
..Look, to some of you who seem offended I'm not a proponent for focusing only on societies/rulers that were mulatto, quadroons/octaroons(people considered originally BLACK not WHITE) but I feel like some attention could be provided on the subject.
Posts: 26 | Registered: Dec 2011
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Confirming Truth: And what about the blood-fraction rule? Do you even know what the fvck you talking about?
What about blood fraction rules? Anyone with a specific amount of "negro blood" was considered "negro" themselves. Not half black,or a quarter black... but fully black.
Posts: 26 | Registered: Dec 2011
| IP: Logged |
posted
LOL! Obviously, you do not know about the blood-fraction rule.
quote:Originally posted by Smiley Coast:
quote:Originally posted by Confirming Truth: And what about the blood-fraction rule? Do you even know what the fvck you talking about?
What about blood fraction rules? Anyone with a specific amount of "negro blood" was considered "negro" themselves. Not half black,or a quarter black... but fully black.
"The law also defined “Negro” as having “any negro blood whatever.” Dichotomous “racial” classification was also invented in colonial times, with blood-fraction laws defining a “Negro” as having more than a given fraction of African ancestry. North America’s first blood-fraction law, in 1705, used a one-eighth rule (a person was black if one great-grandparent was entirely of African ancestry). By 1910, twenty states classified citizens by blood-fraction, most using one-fourth or one-eighth. However, appearance also played a role in racial definition in pre-1911 Arkansas, as exemplified by the case of the 1861 freedom case of Daniel v. Guy, in which slave Abby Guy was awarded her freedom largely because of her appearance and behavior. Before 1911, Arkansas’s railroad segregation law defined “Negro” as “one in whom there is a visible and distinct admixture of African blood.” However, the emergence of scientific racism gave rise to the notion that a person could look and self-identify as white but still somehow be black."
The 'one-drop rule' as implemented in the United Snakes of Amerikkka was nothing more than 'yte' people trying to impose white supremacy....and state laws differed as to the standards of who was who from state to state....
ones would also do well to remember that a person of dual heritage can be considered to be a Black Man/Woman in one country but be considered to be a 'yte' man/woman in a next country....some countries had/have the opposite 'one drop rule' that was implemented in the U.S....
SIDE NOTE: I am sure more than a few here are familiar with the "quadroon balls" that were held in the U.S. and frequented by yte men...
quote: Quadroon Balls functioned as a form of entertainment but also served a meeting space for its participants to enter into plaçage/sexual relationships. It was at these dances that free young women of color, guided by their mothers, charmed their way into the hearts and pockets of Louisiana’s white males. At the balls, quadroon women “show their accomplishments in dancing and conversation to the white men.” Upon finding a quadroon to his liking, a man would negotiate with the quadroon woman’s mother. If both mother and daughter were satisfied with his financial and social ranking, she would be “placed” as his placée. According to literary traveler George William Featherstonhaugh,
When one of them [a quadroon] attracts the attention of an admirer, and he is desirous of forming a liaison with her, he makes a bargain with the mother, agrees to pay her a sum of money, perhaps 2000 dollars, or some sum in proportion to her merits, as a fund upon which she may retire when the liaison terminates. She is now called “une placée;” those of her caste who are her intimate friends give her fetes, and the lover prepares “un joli appartement meuble.”
Each quadroon had a “value” which “depended on the attractiveness of the subject, the fairness of her complexion, and her mother’s ability to show her off against the competition.” This “value” was derived through negotiations between the quadroon’s mother and the white suitor. If an agreement was reached, the quadroon would become a concubine or placée for the white man in exchange for financial support for the woman. These exchanges frequently meant that the quadroon woman would receive housing, a sum of money, and promised financial support for any children that would come from these relationships. The “price” for a quadroon varied, but could be as much as $2,000. Often times, the quadroon woman would be set up in an apartment (“un joli appartement meuble”) located on Ramparts Street in New Orleans that was rented by the white gentleman for their use. These plaçage relationships could last for weeks, months, years, and, much less frequently, a life-time. In these exchanges, sexual exploitation by both parties is particularly noticeable; the quadroon exploited the pocketbook and the man exploited her body.
Quadroon women who participated in the balls had been groomed from early childhood by their mothers to take advantage of this unique opportunity to become the exploiters, using their bodies, beauty and assumed exotic sexuality to enter into contracts with wealthy white men. Monique Guillory discusses this exchange that gives women some power when she states, “Through this strategic commodification of the quadroon body, which I have called the commercial, women of color seized an opportunity beyond the confines of slavery to set the price for their own bodies.” These quadroon women chose to use their bodies as leverage to raise their own social status above the “negro” slave and the dark-skinned free people of color. This population of women became agents who exploited themselves and white men in an effort to transcend the racist system of antebellum Louisiana.
Noël Voltz, “Black Female Agency and Sexual Exploitation: Quadroon Balls and Plaçage Relationships” (PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2008).
quote: Black Female Agency and Sexual Exploitation: Quadroon Balls and Plaçage Relationships
Ohio State University May 2008 81 Pages
Noël Voltz The Ohio State University
A Senior Honors Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for graduation with research distinction in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University
In 1805, a New Orleans newspaper advertisement formally defined a new social institution, the infamous Quadroon Ball, in which prostitution and plaçage–a system of concubinage–converged. These elegant balls, limited to upper-class white men and free “quadroon” women, became interracial rendezvous that provided evening entertainment and the possibility of forming sexual liaisons in exchange for financial “sponsorship.” It is the contention of this thesis such “sponsored” relationships between white men and free women of color in New Orleans enabled these women to use sex as a means of gaining social standing, protection, and money. In addition, although these arrangements reflected a form of sexual exploitation, quadroon women were able to become active agents in their quest for upward social mobility.
Until recently, historians have overlooked the lives of Louisiana’s free women of color during the colonial and antebellum eras. My research, therefore, expands historical knowledge about the unique social institution of Quadroon Balls and plaçage relationships in order to give greater breadth to scholarly understandings of quadroon women’s sexual and economic choices. This research formally began in summer 2006, during my participation in the Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) at the Ohio State University. Through this experience, I was able to begin analyzing the institution of Quadroon Balls and I have discovered the immense possibilities of this topic. While there are many directions that this research can take, I have decided to focus my undergraduate research and honors thesis on the history of the balls and quadroon women’s agency in antebellum New Orleans. In order to research these concepts, I have utilized a combination of primary sources and secondary sources written about women of color. In winter 2006, I was awarded an Undergraduate Research Scholarship and, with this money, I visited New Orleans and Baton Rouge to conduct archival research. My most recent trip to New Orleans and Baton Rouge has augmented my understanding of the topic by providing a large quantity of primary source materials, including court cases and other legal documents, as well as affording me an opportunity to experience archival research first hand in the actual historical environment in which the balls took place. Ultimately, I plan to continue my current research as my dissertation topic.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments Abstract “The Quadroon Ballroom” Poem by Rixford J. Lincoln Introduction and Historiographic Review Chapter 1. A Historical Background of New Orleans’ Free Women of Color Chapter 2. Plaçage Relationships Chapter 3. Quadroon Balls Chapter 4. Case Study: Five Generations of Women Conclusion Appendix Bibliography
posted
Look up Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924....
-------------------- "TRUTH IS LIKE LIGHTNING WITH ITS ERRAND DONE BEFORE YOU HEAR THE THUNDER" - Gerald Massey "TRUTH IS FINAL" -Mumia Abu-Jamal Posts: 3446 | From: U.S. by way of JA by way of Africa | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Confirming Truth: ^You miss those days, don't you, TAR ;-)
Nope...why would I....
however....your f*cked-out mother cries herSelf to sleep every night reminiscing (sp?) bout her nights at the quadroon balls....ah suh your mother took nuff nuff yte man cocky and their money ina dem days deh....
nowadays, mi hear seh she cyaa get even one man fe touch har rotten dun-out crotches, much less f*ck har....di mon dem seh fe har p*ssy stink like three day old dead dog weh swollen and ready fe burst...
nuh badda start with mi tiday enuh...
Posts: 3446 | From: U.S. by way of JA by way of Africa | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Confirming Truth: ^You miss those days, don't you, TAR ;-)
Nope...why would I....
however....your f*cked-out mother cries herSelf to sleep every night reminiscing (sp?) bout her nights at the quadroon balls....ah suh your mother took nuff nuff yte man cocky and their money ina dem days deh....
nowadays, mi hear seh she cyaa get even one man fe touch har rotten dun-out crotches, much less f*ck har....di mon dem seh fe har p*ssy stink like three day old dead dog weh swollen and ready fe burst...
quote:Originally posted by asante-Korton: did confirmed bitch just get owned again?
yuh dun know....
@ Confirmed Eediat-Bwoy...
yes yuh fe gwaan roll yuh yeye dem....jus like how yuh f*ckbox madda roll ova when she tek battery...
Posts: 3446 | From: U.S. by way of JA by way of Africa | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
quote: 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. [1]
Regardless of the distinctions that observers made among people of color, they still enjoyed many advances politically. When James Thome went on a sixth month tour of the island of Jamaica following emancipation, he observed Harbour Streetthe activity of people of color in various social institutions. By 1831, free people of color had all of the political offices open to them, and after emancipation they were represented in an array of offices in Kingston. They were justices of the peace, alderman of the city, justices of the peace, public institution inspectors, and school trustees. At a local legislature meeting, Thome noticed that there were fifteen members present, and just as many different shades of complexion. A planter who clearly had aristocratic blood was sitting next to a “deep mulatto,” born in the same parish as a slave. Yet they all conversed freely as though they were one color, providing a sense of “harmony, confidence and good feeling.” [2] There were ten colored special magistrates and four colored members of the Assembly at the time of his visit. However they occupied only one third of the seats in the Assembly, as whites filled the others. Yet as people of color filled seats, they voted for white alderman and city officers. Thome observed, “The influential men among them, have always urged them to take up white men, unless they could find competent men of their own color. As they remarked to us, if they were obliged to send an ass to the Assembly, it was far better for them to send a white as than a black one.” [3] Nonetheless, colored people were gradually participating in political and civil bodies on the Island and dividing the legislative and judicial powers with whites.
In a community that is rebuilding, marriage and family are important because those institutions are essential for its growth. However, few marriages took place among people of color because many females believed that it was more Native Domestic Servantsreputable to be the kept mistress of a wealthy white man than to marry a “Negro” or another person of color. Beautiful women of color were “fortune-made if they got a place in a white man’s harem.” [4] When females of color were asked why they did not generally intermarry with men of their own class, the typical response was that most brown men were either too poor or indolent to support a wife and children and that as husbands they could be jealous and tyrannical. Many women also disliked the idea of marriage and viewed it as an unnecessary and unnatural restraint. Yet numerous females of color found themselves as a “housekeeper” to white men, while men of color found for themselves the comfort of a black woman. [5]
James Stewart, an Englishman who lived for some time in Jamaica, also observed that men of color were divided by society into three classes. The first was the offspring of men of fortune, who were sent to Great Britain to receive a liberal educated and expected to inherit independent fortunes. Next came the offspring of men in moderate circumstances, who gave their children a plain education and left the bulk of property among their children at their death. Finally, there were the men who did not have the means or inclination to provide for their children, which he noted as the most numerous class. These children lived in idleness and were what Stewart considered a burden to themselves and the community. Few men of color were elevated above their social stratum by the advantages of fortune and a liberal education and received into the white population. [6]
Thome also visited the streets of Jamaica and places of business to see how people of color were employed. The market that he visited was one of the largest and the best and people of color were the primary attendants and Taken by Daguerreotype by A. Duperlysuppliers. People of color owned furniture and cabinet manufactures. They were also artisans, bookstore owners, controlled newspapers, and as well as merchants, druggists, and grocers. He noticed that colors freely associated in the streets, making business transactions. After emancipation and the establishment of a working class of people of color, the general trade of the island was passing into their hands. Prior to emancipation people of color rarely reached a status higher than that of a clerk. Those who conducted their own business faced the limits imposed by white-owned monopolies, which were a direct result of slavery. “Since emancipation,” Thome noted, “they have been unshackling themselves from white domination in matters of trade, extending their connections and becoming every day more and more independent.” [7]
Education is essential in building a community, especially among children, as they are being groomed to be the future leaders of the community. Thome observed that in schools in Kingston, there was not a lot of division among color lines and students were thoroughly intermingled. In a letter Thome received from E. Reid, the “principle” of the Wolmer School he said he had “no hesitation in saying that children of color are equal in both conduct and ability to the white.” [8] However, as other observers noted, schools were few and far between. While children may have been taught well, most did not get to attend them.
As all communities rebuilt themselves, people of color not only had to build a community in the face of a distinct color line between blacks and whites, but also in the light of division among themselves. This division ranged from social standing to skin tone, and affected areas such as politics, marriage and family, employment, and education. Authors have pointed out that this division made their rebuilding process more complex than that of any other group. Yet people of color were also able to integrate themselves into post-emancipation life, and today play an intricate role on an island that is known for producing individuals with multi-ethnic backgrounds.
[1] [John] Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica, (Edinburgh, 1823,) 325.
[2] James Thome, Emancipation in the West Indies. A Six Months’ Tour in the Islands of Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica, in the Year 1837, (New York, 1838), 368.
[3] Thome, 362.
[4] Thome, 88.
[5] Stewart, 326.
[6] Stewart, 335.
[7] Thome, 365.
[8] Thome, 365.
Posts: 3446 | From: U.S. by way of JA by way of Africa | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
White Metropolis Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001
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
quote: 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.” [/b]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.[/b]
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…
-------------------- "TRUTH IS LIKE LIGHTNING WITH ITS ERRAND DONE BEFORE YOU HEAR THE THUNDER" - Gerald Massey "TRUTH IS FINAL" -Mumia Abu-Jamal Posts: 3446 | From: U.S. by way of JA by way of Africa | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
The first greeks. Modern greeks have a some African ancestry too don't they? Maybe they're what quadroons stereotypically look like (never encountered one in real life, that I know of).
Posts: 2508 | From: . | Registered: Nov 2011
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
yuh dun know....
Printer-friendly view of this topic