That the Blood Stay Pure

Arica L. Coleman

Description

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2014

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That the Blood Stay Pure traces the history and legacy of the commonwealth of Virginia's effort to maintain racial purity and its impact on the relations between African Americans and Native Americans. Arica L. Coleman tells the story of Virginia's racial purity campaign from the perspective of those who were disavowed or expelled from tribal communities due to their affiliation with people of African descent or because their physical attributes linked them to those of African ancestry. Coleman also explores the social consequences of the racial purity ethos for tribal communities that have refused to define Indian identity based on a denial of blackness. This rich interdisciplinary history, which includes contemporary case studies, addresses a neglected aspect of America's long struggle with race and identity.

Acknowledgments
Foreword
Author's Note
Introduction
Part 1: Historicizing Black—Indian Relations in Virginia
Prologue: Lingering at the Crossroads: African-Native American History and Kinship Lineage in Armstrong Archer's A Compendium on Slavery
1. Notes on the State of Virginia: Jeffersonian Thought and the Rise of Racial Purity Ideology in the Eighteenth Century
2. Redefining Race and Identity: The Indian-Negro Confusion and the Changing State of Black-Indian Relations in the Nineteenth Century
3. Race Purity and the Law: The Racial Integrity Act and Policing Black/Indian Identity in the Twentieth Century
4. Denying Blackness: Anthropological Advocacy and the Remaking of the Virginia Indians (The Other Twentieth Century Project)
Part 2: Black-Indian Relations in the Present State of Virginia
5. Beyond Black and White: Afro-Indian Identity in the case of Loving V. Virginia
6. The Racial Integrity Fight: Confrontations of Race and Identity In Charles City County, Virginia
7. Nottoway Indians, Afro-Indian Identity, and the Contemporary Dilemma of State Recognition
Epilogue: Afro-Indian Peoples of Virginia: The Indelible Thread of Black and Red
Appendix: Racial Integrity Act Text
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Native American Studies
• Ethnic Studies
• 19th Century
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• América
• History of the Americas
• American
• United States

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 18 octobre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253010506
• Langue: English

Extrait

THAT THE BLOOD STAY PURE
BLACKS IN THE DIASPORA
Editors
Herman L. Bennett
Kim D. Butler
Judith A. Byfield
Tracy Sharpley-Whiting
THAT THE BLOOD STAY PURE
AFRICAN AMERICANS, NATIVE AMERICANS, AND THE PREDICAMENT OF RACE AND IDENTITY IN VIRGINIA
ARICA L. COLEMAN
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
2013 by Arica L. Coleman All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coleman, Arica L.
That the blood stay pure : African Americans, Native Americans, and the predicament of race and identity in Virginia / Arica L. Coleman.
pages cm. - (Blacks in the diaspora)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01043-8 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01050-6 (ebook) 1. African Americans-Virginia- History. 2. Indians of North America- Virginia-History. 3. African Americans -Relations with Indians. 4. Virginia- Ethnic relations-History. 5. Racism- Virginia-History. I. Title.
F235.N4C65 2013
305.8009755-dc23
2013011321
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
In memory of Lillian, Leighton, and Jack
I found that to tell the truth is the hardest thing on earth, harder than fighting in a war, harder than taking part in a revolution. If you try it you will find at times sweat will break upon you. You will find that even if you succeed in discounting the attitudes of others to you and your life, you will wrestle with yourself most of all, fight with yourself, for there will surge up in you a strong desire to alter facts, to dress up your feelings. You ll find that there are many things you don t want to admit about yourself and others. As your record shapes itself, an awed wonder haunts you. And yet there is no more exciting adventure than trying to be honest in this way. The clean, strong feeling that sweeps you when you ve done it makes you know that.
- RICHARD WRIGHT
CONTENTS

Foreword by Joseph F. Jordan
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART 1. HISTORICIZING BLACK-INDIAN RELATIONS IN VIRGINIA

Prologue. Lingering at the Crossroads: African- Native American History and Kinship Lineage in Armstrong Archer s A Compendium on Slavery

1 Notes on the State of Virginia: Jeffersonian Thought and the Rise of Racial Purity Ideology in the Eighteenth Century
2 Redefining Race and Identity: The Indian-Negro Confusion and the Changing State of Black-Indian Relations in the Nineteenth Century
3 Race Purity and the Law: The Racial Integrity Act and Policing Black-Indian Identity in the Twentieth Century
4 Denying Blackness: Anthropological Advocacy and the Remaking of the Virginia Indians
PART 2. BLACK-INDIAN RELATIONS IN THE PRESENT STATE OF VIRGINIA

5 Beyond Black and White: Afro-Indian Identity in the Case of Loving v. Virginia
6 The Racial Integrity Fight: Confrontations of Race and Identity in Charles City County, Virginia
7 Nottoway Indians, Afro-Indian Identity, and the Contemporary Dilemma of State Recognition

Epilogue: Afro-Indian Peoples of Virginia: The Indelible Thread of Black and Red
Appendix: The Racial Integrity Act
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD


With this timely and important new book, Arica L. Coleman extends discussions first opened by the pioneering work of scholars and activists who challenged the way Native American-African American interactions have been depicted in academic literature, political struggles, and popular culture. As she notes, scholarship using Black-Indian relations as an entry point, thus challenging the legal foundations of racialized thinking at both the federal and state levels, has proliferated over the last twenty or so years. We could even argue, convincingly, that problematizing the relationships between African Americans and American Indians has provided the most important new conceptual approaches to the study of race, identity, and place. Sadly those openings, though promising, have not produced the paradigm shifts that, if followed to their logical conclusions, would have fundamentally altered the way we study African Americans and American Indians. By extension, we would also have seen a transformation and perhaps fruitful expansion of various fields of study both disciplinary and interdisciplinary, including African American, American Indian, cultural studies, and almost every area of the social sciences and humanities. Fortunately, it is these kinds of contradictions that attract the interest of the new cadre of scholars of Black-Indian relations.
Coleman s work, which sits comfortably among new critical studies of Black-Indian lives, does not sidestep the many contradictions, conflicts, and questions that complicate the history of Black-Indian relations. In particular, the genesis and evolution of Virginia s racial state demands this kind of scrutiny as it remains one of the states that has always had a difficult time dealing with its less-than-inspiring history around matters of race. The sham science that buttressed the state s racialized statutes on marriage, identity, and property ownership went beyond the intended purpose of policing bodies and containing an imagined contagion. It also fixed and reified a historical trajectory that saw racial separation as natural if not desirable. In the minds of its citizens, particularly its White citizens, notions of privilege associated with one s race must have been difficult to reject. So difficult in fact, that when private citizens, legal advocacy organizations, and the federal government stepped in to challenge the most repugnant of Virginia s racial hierarchy laws, in many small communities and in some entire counties, White citizens engaged in their own special form of socio-civil disobedience. It is from the experience of Virginia that we learned about massive resistance and other such actions that encouraged the wholesale and complete withdrawal from schools and other public venues that might see the social mixing or social commerce between Black and White people. In the midst of this turmoil and the virtual damning of Black folk, what would an Indian do? We do know, up until a certain point, what they were forced to do, as Coleman tells us in the unfolding of her thesis. They would have chosen from several very limiting choices. They could accept the state s binary logic, which divided the state into two distinct communities: one White and on top and the other Black and consigned-or condemned if we choose the more appropriate term-to an inviolable lower, caste state. I use the term state because the condition of Blackness in this historical period was designed to designate all elements of Black existence as sanctioned. It was a physical, psychic, and even spiritual banishment whose indiscriminate aspects ensnared Indians as well. How did they resist? How did they resist and recapture their identities, or the semblance of their identities, that they d fought to preserve for over 400 years? Some were able to pass through a legal loophole that Coleman relates in the text. Bloodlines were important when seeking escape from the Black- White binary system. It does not take much research to understand that the proximity to either Whiteness or Blackness was more important than any other legacy or genealogical justification that might be offered up. More importantly, one could not necessarily declare against all evidence that one was White, but under no circumstance would it be wise to tout your closeness to a Black past.
Foreword Fortunately, in That the Blood Stay Pure Coleman amplifies discussions of narrative strategy, identity, and identity formation, and the roles of the state of Virginia s race and racializing practices. The discussion throughout this text helps us to develop the needed critical perspectives on epistemic privilege and sovereignty, the broader implications of racialist strategy, and the ways these abstract notions affect the lives of members of both of these diverse and complex communities.
This text arrives at a difficult moment in Black-Indian relations in Virginia as conflicts over identity and belonging burdens interactions that may have, under different circumstances, been less strained. In recent years, identity (i.e., tribal and familial affiliation) for Virginia s native peoples has not only arbitrated actual and perceived notions of belonging, it has also arbitrated rights within the tribe or tribal nation-place.
Fortunately Coleman s interests reach beyond these disputes, and she succeeds in challenging us to consider whether 500 years of joint histories and historical interaction should be reduced to, or be understood only in the context of, recent debates about tribal membership. This issue has captured the imagination of scholars from many fields as well as the popular press for many reasons beyond concern for either community. Within the arguments of both those who claim the right to determine tribal membership and those Freedmen descendants who assert their rights of inclusion are echoes of historical debates over blood and race, place, and rights to land. This is why this text is so important. Coleman takes a long and cri