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Date: | Sun, 18 Feb 2007 10:25:24 -0500 |
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The legal definitions of "mulatto" in Virginia involved individuals with
one "white" parent and one "Negro" parent (or grandparent or great
grandparent) or "Indian" parent. The combination left undefined, at
least in Virginia, was that involving one Indian parent and one Negro
parent (in a couple of other colonies, the term "mustee" was used for
this). With every generation, of course, the mix could get even more
complicated, as mulatto of one type married mulatto of another, etc.
What these racial designations--externally invented and imposed--did was
to set limits on those so labeled. They convey no useful information
about the identity or culture of people in the past or the present
(self-defined by individuals in a specific family and group context).
Historians should pay more attention to these ethnic realities, and less
to the fictions of race-based traits. Clearly, we need to look beyond
misleading census categories to discover the things we'd like to know
about persons of Native American and African ancestry (plus European too
in the case of so-called "tri-racial isolates"). The "corn cob dolls in
the kitchen" tell us far more than skin color.
Doug Deal
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