The Language of Slavery and its Impact on Black Women's Bodies
This post is an excerpt from Dr. Cheryl’s unpublished dissertation, Race and beauty in Canada: print culture, retail, and the transnational flow of products, images and ideologies, 1700s to present
The first permanent English settlement in the North Americas was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. Several scholars have noted that when the first slave ships arrived in Jamestown in 1619, black people served no differently than white bondservants and, consequently, the markers of slavery were not immediately linked to a bodily difference.[1] Further, the word slave initially held no meaning in the English legal system; black subjects were regarded merely as servants.[2]
In 1662, when Virginia law made a connection between black identity and slave status by adopting the civil rule of Partus sequitur ventrem (Latin for “Follow the mother giving birth”) which held that the slave status of a child followed that of his or her mother, and then in 1664 when the colony of Maryland made a distinction between black people and servants, blackness became increasingly conflated with the social status of slaves which stood in opposition to whiteness as a marker of freedom.[3]
Source: Unsplash @Social History Archive
Believed to be from the later 1800’s, at a cocoa bean plantation, location unknown. It's unknown if these images are of workers post-slavery abolishing in the colonies, or if the people picture are indeed slaves. Read about the history of the history of exploration and the cocoa industry in West Africa here.
By the 1680s, the institution of slavery in the Atlantic colonies was premised on race. Blackness became intertwined with servitude, whiteness became an attribute of the free and by extension white identity functioned as a “shield from slavery.”[4] As Nadine Ehlers poignantly observes, “the status of slave pervaded their very being.”[5]
In the American and Caribbean colonies, a tiered system based on skin colour distinguished whites and light-skinned Creoles from Africans.
The term “Creole” was used to describe both enslaved and free people of different races in the Caribbean but it had different meaning in the American colonies. The word “Creole” derived from the Latin creare – “to beget” or “create.”
As Steeve O. Buckridge asserts, a process of creolization that occurred in the Atlantic colonies reflected the African customs that were brought there and the resourcefulness and the ingenuity of African people as well as an openness to use materials present in the new land, even acquiring knowledge of native plants from indigenous people.[6] For instance, Creole women in Jamaica often used plant fibres, pigments, and bark to make their own clothing, and Creole dress often displayed many indigenous and African cultural characteristics.[7]
Buckridge asserts further that dress was a visually accessed language of the body in that one’s dress “was constantly scrutinized and itself provided a narrative especially in the absence of a shared spoken language, culture or religion.”[8] In the American South the term Creole grew out of the racial politics in the state of Louisiana. Under Spanish and French rule in the eighteenth century, Louisiana Creoles held a distinct intermediate position between African slaves and the white inhabitants.[9] Where in the Caribbean any person born in the Atlantic islands was considered Creole (including white Europeans), skin colour separated Creoles from blacks in America.[10]
Source: Unsplash @LibraryofCongress
[Susie King Taylor, known as the first African American Army nurse], detail, frontispiece of book published in 1902. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/2003653538/
By the late-nineteenth century, New Orleans’s Creole community was not exactly white or black and not exactly free or enslaved.[12] The city operated in a three-tiered system with whites at the top, Creoles in the middles, and black people at the bottom.[13] American slavery was also made unique by its emphasis on blood quotient. As Nadine Ehlers notes, “the initial distinctions that were made based on skin pigmentation, facial lineaments, and body conformations were seen (and fabricated) to denote inherent subcutaneous differences of blacks – characteristics of blackness – that determined identity.”[14] In order to draw an invisible line between the white body and black body, laws against interracial unions began to appear in the United States as early as 1664.[15]
Source: Wikimedia Commons
David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, Title page of the 72 page pamphlet "Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro", which was published in 1864. The pamphlet first coined the term 'miscegenation'. Published as a white supremacist hoax during the American Civil War to discredit abolitionists and the Republican Party. January 1864.
In 1863 when the journalist David Goodman Croly published a pamphlet entitled “Miscegenation: The Theory and the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro,” the pamphlet coined the word miscegenation, combining the Latin misce, “to mix,” and “gene” “race.”[16] Miscegenation was often the result of unwanted sex stemming from white males’ exploitation of black slave women, but there were also sexual intimacies between white European women and black slave men.[17] Ultimately, a racial hierarchy was maintained in the United States through a rigid colour line.[18]
Across the Atlantic colonies, light-skinned black women were often called mulattos or mulattas and were generally viewed by contemporary observers as being more sexually desirable because of the value placed on proximity to “European” facial features, hair texture and lightness of skin colour.[19]
In the Spanish-speaking colony of Cuba, for instance, Alicia Arrizón explains that whenever the black population made attempts to separate from the white population, the process of blanqueamiento (whitening) was used in systematic ways reduce visible markers of an African ancestry. Arrizón asserts that
“Mulattas were ‘seduced’ and impregnated by their white ‘masters,’ who envisioned a ‘better’ race through the process of blanqueamiento.”[20]
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Juan Rodríguez Juárez (1675-1728), De mulato y mestiza, produce mulato, es torna atrás, c. 1715
After the Dominican Republic separated from Haiti in 1844, Maxime Raybaud, the French consul-general in Haiti, also claimed that the people of the Spanish part of Santo Domingo were obviously “of mixed African and Spanish descent yet considered themselves not mulattos or colored, as the Haitians did, but ‘blancos de la tierra [whites of the land].’”[21] Ana-Maurine Lara observes that in the Dominican Republic, a mestizo class and then a mulatto class of people developed.[22]
By the sixteenth century, through the initiation and increase in the importation of peoples from Africa directly, and the increase in the mulatto/mestizo marriages and offspring, Lara writes further that the overall population of African descendants and Africans grew to be significantly larger than that of the Spaniards/whites. It was then that the Spaniards began to implement policies to police the boundaries of a new ideology of race, juxtaposing the “indio” to the “africano ladino/bozal” to the “white Spaniard” and developing numerous categories by which to maintain a strict hierarchy of social-economic participation.[23] Like in Cuba, through the process of blanqueamiento, “white” Europeans became the colonial powers and “true” models of the Dominican Republic’s nationhood over the course of the nineteenth century.[24]
At the same time, in the English-speaking Caribbean such as Jamaica, the large light-skinned population were called mulattos or coloureds, and they made up the majority of the emerging middle-class.[25] In 1820, for example, this middle-class, mixed-race group outnumbered the white population, as colour and phenotype became visible characteristics that distanced them from the supposedly lower African or Negro class.[26]
In America, a mulatto signified “one-half blood” or the child of a black and a white; a quadroon had “one-quarter blood” (or the child of a mulatto and a white); an octoroon had “one-eighth blood” (or the child of a quadroon and a white).
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Agostino Brunias (1728 - 1796) – Artist (Italian, active in Britain (1758-1770; 1777-1780s), West Indian Creole woman, with her Black Servant, c. 1780
As Jennifer De Vere Brody argues, octoroons might have had no apparent trace of black blood in their appearance but they were still subject to the legal disabilities which attached them to the condition of blacks.[27] The appearance of terms like mulatto or quadroon in eighteenth-century Canadian newspapers indicate that the white settler population was also well versed in the colonial language of race,[28] even though British and French colonialists did not create their own distinct terminology.
Significantly, the stigmatization of black people’s hair did not gain its historical intransigence by being a mere concept. As Kobena Mercer writes, once we consider that the “New World” was created on the basis of the slave trade economy, “we can see that where race is a constitutive element of social structure and social division, hair remains powerfully charged with symbolic currency.”[30]
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Among the diverse societies along Africa’s west coast, hair had carried different meanings; it had been used to indicate a person’s marital status, age, religion, ethnicity, wealth, and social standing within the community. In the Wolof culture of Senegal, for example, young girls who were not of marrying age partially shaved their heads to emphasize their unavailability for courting, while a recently widowed woman would stop caring for her hair in order to look unattractive to men during her time of mourning.[31]
Traditionally, the leaders of a community, both men and women, showcased the most ornate hairstyles, and only royalty or the equivalent was expected to wear a hat or headpiece to signify their stature within the community.[32] Hairdressers were also prominent members of African communities because a person’s spirit was believed to be embedded in their hair.[33]
…
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hair began to function in both scientific and public discourse alongside skin as a colour marker of racial difference. As scientific and popular discourses became obsessed with the texture and stylization of black hair, some Europeans even went so far as to claim that hair served as a better indicator of racial identity than skin colour.[34] Importantly, newspapers played a key role in the normalization of racial and bodily difference across the Atlantic colonies.
notes
[1] Ehlers, Racial Imperatives, 33; also see Leonard Higginbotham and Barbara Kopytoff,. “Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia,” Georgetown Law Journal 77 (1989): 1970.
[2] Ehlers, Racial Imperatives, 33.
[3] David H. Fowler, Northern Attitudes Towards Interracial Marriage – Legislation and Public Opinion in the Middle Atlantic and the States of the Old North-West, 1780-1930 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 41.
[4] Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993): 1720; also see Ehlers, Racial Imperatives, 34.
[5] Ehlers, Racial Imperatives, 34.
[6] Steeve O. Buckridge, “The Role of Plant Substances in Jamaican Slave Dress” Caribbean Quarterly 49.3 (Sept. 2003): 62. In her analysis of the Italian painter Agostino Brunias’ scenes of Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Kay Dian Kriz asserts that in addition to showing enslaved and free people conversing, dancing, trading in local markets and along roadsides, Brunias frequently drew a distinction between the skin colour of Caribbean Creoles. “Light-skinned women of color [were] usually shown more lavishly dressed [in paintings] than their darker-skinned counterparts and [were] often accompanied by darker-skinned slaves or servants.” See Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 59.
[7] Buckridge, “Role of Plant Substances,” 61.
[8] Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760-1890 (Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 78. Hilary Beckles has also done extensive work on slavery in the Caribbean, and the experience of African-born and Creole persons. See Beckles, “An Economic Life of their Own: Slaves as Commodity Producers and Distributors in Barbados,” in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), 732-742; Beckles, “‘War Dances’: Slave Leisure and Anti-Slavery in the British-Colonised Caribbean” in Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Verene Shepherd (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002), 223-246.
[9] Anthony G. Barthelemy, “Light, Bright, Damn Near White,” in Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, ed. Sybil Kein (Baton Rouge: Louisiana state University Press, 2000), 252-275.
[10] For more of a discussion of creoles in Louisiana in the historical and contemporary context, see Yaba Amgborale Blay, “‘Pretty Color ‘n Good Hair’: Creole Women of New Orleans and the Politics of Identity,” in Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities, eds. Regina E. Spellers and Kimberly R. Moffat (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2010), 29-52.
[11] J.W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans: 1860-1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 21.
[12] Joan M. Martin, “Plaçage and the Louisiana Gens de Couleur Libre: How Race and Sex Defined the Lifestyles of Free Women of Color,” in Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, ed. Sybil Kein (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 57-70. Also see Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2012), 57.
[13] Marouf Hasian Jr., “Critical Legal Theorizing, Rhetorical Intersectionalities and the Multiple Transgressions of the ‘Tragic Mulatta,’ Anastasie Desarzant,” Women’s Studies in Communication 27 (2004): 119-48.
[14] Ehlers, Racial Imperatives, 36.
[15] Virginia restricted intermarriage in 1691, Massachusetts in 1705, North Carolina in 1715, South Carolina and Delaware in 1717. See Stephen Talty, Mulatto America: At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A Social History (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 53.
[16] Talty, Mulatto America, 70.
[17] In the United States, historian Randall Kennedy has conducted an extensive historical analysis of interracial sex, marriage and adoption in America, see Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); for a discussion of white women and their sexual encounters with black men in the Caribbean see Beckles, “White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean,” in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, eds. Verene Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2000), 659-669.
[18] Martha Hodes posits that the colour line in the U.S. was also underpinned by the argument that “if whites and blacks could have children together, then racial categories could be preserved.” For more of a discussion on miscegenation see Hodes, “The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War,” in American Sexual Politics: Sex, Gender and Race Since the Civil War, ed. John C. Fout and Maura Shaw Tantillo (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1993), 59-74.
[19] See Shirley Tate, Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics (Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 61. Also see Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1838 (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990); Alicia Arrizón, Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006); Ginetta Candelario, Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
[20] See Arrizón, Queering Mestizaje, 103.
[21] Candelario, Black Behind the Ears, 42. Also see Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity,” Callaloo 23.3 (Summer 2000): 1086-1111. The history of the Haitian revolution and the role of the Spanish Creole, their manumission practices have played a significant role in the demarcation of racial difference in the Dominican Republic.
[22] The term mestizo is used to specifically classify the offspring of Spanish Catholic/Indigenous people in the Dominican. See Ana-Maurine Lara, “Cimarronas, Ciguapas, Señoras: Hair, Beauty, Race, and Class in the Dominican Republic,” in Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities, eds. Regina E. Spellers and Kimberly R. Moffat (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2010), 117, also see note 6. Arrizón also explores the racial category of mestizo in the colonial Philippines; see Queering Mestizaje, 125-29.
[23] Lara, “Cimarronas, Ciguapas, Señoras,” 118. Also see Donna Goldstein, “‘Interracial’ Sex and Racial Democracy in Brazil: Twin Concepts?,” American Anthropologist 101.3 (Sept. 1999): 563-78.
[24] Lara, “Cimarronas, Ciguapas, Señoras,” 119-20.
[25] Buckridge, Language of Dress, 113. Also see Patricia Mohammed, “‘But most of all mi love me browning’: The Emergence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as the Desired,” Feminist Review 65 (Summer 2000): 22-48.
[26] Buckridge, Language of Dress, 113-4.
[27] Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 47.
[28] Charmaine Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 55.
[29] Ehlers, Racial Imperatives, 39.
[30] Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), 102.
[31] Byrd and Tharps, Hair Story, 2-3.
[32] Byrd and Tharps, Hair Story, 3.
[33] Hair grooming in African societies included washing, combing, oiling, braiding, twisting, and decorating the hair with adornments including cloth, beads, and shells; the tools at their disposal were hand-carved and specially designed to remove tangles and knots from the hair. See Byrd and Tharps, Hair Story, 5-6.
[34] Arthur Riss, Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 97-8.
