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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