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about this course
Focused principally on the 20th and 21st centuries, this course will study the legacies and implications of the massive migration, forced and otherwise, from the African continent to the Caribbean, Latin America, and North America. Topics will range from the creation of racial categories in the contexts of slavery and colonialism to the making of transnational and transracial families to the recent cultural politics of “blackness” with emphasis on the ways that different kinds of archives produce multiple and often conflicting narratives. Students will produce as well as consume history. In addition to scholarly monographs and articles, course material will include film, sound, and fiction.
I’m very excited to be teaching this course, and looking forward to working with you all semester. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the website and read the syllabus. We will use this site extensively for announcements, postings, and virtual conversations. You should feel free to treat it as your own, and post links, images, videos, or anything else of interest to the class.
This week’s reading explores the history of a native American history and the complex relationship between the Black, White and Indian. I am impressed by the strong influence on the role of “blood” in the construction of identity. At first, the business men married Creek women to expand their trades. They first welcomed the Africa into their families and Black-Indian relationship was common. Over time, as the slaveholders controlled the central government of Creek Nation, race became essential. In order to survival, family members had to distance themselves from their black families. They faced different decisions to make. Katy chose to leave her black partner. But William decided to free Judah. In return, due to this decision, all his family members denied any connection with Judah and his sons. For survival, they had no choice but to enslave blacks rather than befriend with them.
It is a tragedy for those Mixed-racial families. I feel uncomfortable to those facts, which illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience. Violence, killing and starvation happened in that era. The Creek Nation made terrible compromises to make to survive in the shadow of the expanding American republic. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy of the United States, the black people were treated as property and numerous innocent children struggled with their identity since they were born. Many families were separated and destroyed due to racism.
I thought this week’s reading in Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family extremely fascinating particularly in regards to the exploration of race, identity, intermarriages, war, land-rights, and slavery through the genealogy of the Griersons family. The movement through time and history exposes the effects of the systematic works of institutions and of the colonial state in creating categorization and racial hierarchy within and amongst the Creek Nation. The introduction to the Griersons begins with the uniqueness of the Creek Nation, which is located in the Deep South, but did not conform to planation, slave field of cotton, or race hierarchy divide. However, this began to evolve with the beginning of kinship slavery due to the forced treaties that were taken place imposed by the State. The marriage between William Grayson and Judah Grayson becomes more and more precarious as race relations between the Creek Nations and the African descent becomes further juxtaposed and put onto a hierarchy of races. Creek law that once did not deprive Africans of equal rights eventually was coerced into legalizing racial laws and to recognize the existence of race. The “mixed-blood” Creek is seen as a full step above the “full-blood” Creek because of the mixture of the pure white blood; thus, is perceived as gaining closer to the whites and creating further distance from the Indians/ or Blacks: “some half-breeds in Indian Territory reportedly referred to themselves as “white Indians (2005, pg. 67). This framing of race for the “mixed-blood” or the “mulatto,” I argue, parallels with Frantz Fanon’s the idea of “bleaching” and “whitening” the body and mind in Black Skin, White Masks. The idea that race has to be “whitened” and this achieved by distancing oneself from any interactions, especially marriages with Blacks. However, Saunt poses how ironic this notion of fixed hierarchy of race is through Wash Grayson; despite fighting with the Confederacy and disowning his black relatives, white Americans never accepted Wash as an equal because of his “Indian” and “Black” background.
This week’s reading made my mind full of questions and I want to hear you folks’ opinions/ comments! How does intermarrying in the Creek Nation complicate and challenge the conflicting narratives of slavery and colonialism especially for its time, place, and context (11 southern slave states)?
I also agree that the way in which the author explored all these complex themes by looking at the Grayson’s was super interesting and useful. I think being able to understand through familiar relations makes this book an easier read. In terms of your question: I think the intermarrying in the Creek Nation serve as an example that demonstrates the different legal, cultural, and spiritual institutions that inform understandings of racial and gendered hierarchies through out time. Through the examples explained in this book we are able to see the ways in which colonization and colonial ideologies in general function within and outside of these institutions to maintain dominance.
This week’s readings reminded me of a video I watched on youtube a while back : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyaEQEmt5ls (The DNA Journey by Momondo). A synopsis of this short video: a group of people agreed to have their DNA tested to know their genealogy with quite surprising results; some were very adamant with their nationality (“identity”) only to be surprised when the results found out that they have much more in common with other nationalities. This thought stemmed from one of the profile chapters of the book where Saunt (rather successfully) talked to one of Robert Grierson’s descendent who is an artist in Oklahoma City. I have the impression that the fear of knowing that there is some kind of “impurity” in their blood would cause some kind of harm or open up old wounds that has severe repercussions. Echoing from last week’s readings/discussion, I find that this labeling of identities and nationalities is still persistent today – it is interesting to read how the author somewhat exposed how relatives treat each other, based on how they identify themselves, which transcends generations up until today. It occurs to such a great extent that one family ties become broken or disassociated because of their relations or how they choose to identify themselves.
It is interesting to read how entrenched the conflicts were, especially regarding interracial relationships that have caused discrimination within generations, as well as the idea of race and science (a little bit of throwback to our very first discussion back in first week) that became embedded and implicated in the legislation by the Creek and those who are non-African. Therefore, greatly impacting the status of those who are African or partly African, even if it means negatively impacting their blood relatives. The idea of keeping a “pure” race which I find to be in line with what common white American thinking, reserved their privileges to access land and other resources to an increasingly white-Creek “elite”.
I find that Saunt was able to emphasize greatly these important perceptions of race and racial ancestry that became heavily important not only to the invading American officials but also within the Creek themselves.
The case study of the Grayson family illustrates the complexity of the construction of race in the United States. It problematizes the dominant narratives that attempt to simplify and homogenize, lived experiences based on skin color. By offering a nuance and complex understanding of the formation of the racial hierarchy of the southern United States it becomes obvious that these understandings of race emerge from specific institutionalized and normalized, unnatural (scientific racism) forms of categorizing and organizing groups of people in order to maintain dominance (colonialism/white supremacy). “There is nothing self-evident or logical about the category, and it dissolves upon even the slightest scrutiny” (23). Black, White, and Indian demonstrates the importance of specificity and historicizing the many interlocking systems of both oppression and liberation. In order to attempt to understand the motives that empowered resistance, served as tactics for survival, and often simultaneously maintained and strengthened colonial ideologies Claudio Saunt’s case study serves as a tool to dismantle the construction and maintenance of racial hierarchies.
By naming whiteness Saunt also contributes to academic activism that challenges the normalization and dominance of a white racial frame which fails to see whiteness as implicated in the maintenance of dominant class, gender, racial oppressive systems. By challenging the Black/White binary that dominates racial discourse in the United States Saunt complicates the racial history of the United States to provide a framework to understand the ways in which settler colonialism and its legacies involve moving away from binary understandings of race, colonization, resistance, and liberation. Much like Fanon, Saunt also demonstrates the lasting impacts of racial ideology in the lived experiences of colonized people. This reading made me think about the ways in which race operates in all aspects of our lives, however the ways in which colonial racial thinking is normalized through law, science, and popular discourse maintains the boundaries that strengthen racial hierarchies.
This week’s reading focused on the “Central American obsession with race (lol), and how it can act as a divisive and exclusivist force. I really enjoyed how detailed and visual Saunt was in his descriptions. (eg. In the introduction when he describes the first national conference of Black Indians, he gives his reader a clear view of what this conference was like by describing the tension mounting, the headdress of Chief Sitting Sun etc.)
In the 21st century, we are in an age of unprecedented levels of interconnectedness and globalization, and in the aftermath of liberation and decolonization movements of the mid 20th century. Settler colonialist countries like the United States and Canada are populated with millions who all have mixed origins: European, American-Indian, First-Nation, African, Asian, etc. One could say, that the displacement of Europeans and Africans to the New World (itself already populated by diverse peoples), in addition to ongoing immigration trends, has resulted in the Americas resembling the African continent in terms of racial and cultural diversity: i.e. full of complex mixes that have ensued through generations.
The aftermath of decolonization, and the consequences of past institutionalized racism that linger today involve pain and spite when it comes to dealing with the subject of race. Saunt talks about this by focusing on a micro/more personalized aspect of how race can act as divisive force within families, using the Graysons as his case study. I was truly delighted to read him dive into the depths of this, as the subject is seemingly not as considered as it ought to be when it comes to social, political, and educational methods of speaking about and dealing with race.
The history of the Grierson family that is outlined in “Black, White, and Indian” shares parallels to Ally’s history in one of the podcasts for our paper this week: “Ally’s Choice”. First, like East Jackson, Ohio in the podcast, the town of Hilabi is also described as very diverse. Irish and German timber-men, black people escaping from slavery, and Native Americans running from the Trail of Tears form the ancestry of East Jackson. The residents of East Jackson are predominately mixed-race because of this. The residents of Hilabi in the late 1700s were mostly born and raised in the Creek Nation, but immigrants from Scotland, Africa, residents of other southern states, and European Americans formed the town’s population. The mixed-race couples of East Jackson and Hilabi brought mixed-race children and families into the world and the relationship dynamics of these communities and the obstacles presented by dominant society proved to make race and identity a familial experience.
People from East Jackson “grew up black” and no matter what they looked like, that was part of their identity. Children from East Jackson had to start going to school in the town of Waverly in the 1980s. Waverly was over 96% white and historically racist. Ally’s experiences in school confirmed this. In Waverly’s schools East Jackson students experienced racism and bullying because of where they were from. For Ally it got to the point that she changed the way she looked, dyed her hair, and wore makeup. In her words, she could not take it anymore and didn’t want to be black and felt like she did not have to be. She told her peers she was white and still identifies as white. Her actions were and are her way of surviving.
I am still trying to wrap my head around Ally’s experiences and actions and I am not sure I ever totally will, but there are parallels to her tactics of survival and those of the mixed-race members of the Grierson family. In the early 1800s the Creek community that had developed into mixed peoples and small farms began to intersect with the “Racial hierarchy and sprawling plantations of the southern states,” (p. 11). Sinnugee’s mixed-race family was vulnerable in this environment. Her children renounced one another, left their spouses, and deserted their own children (p. 11). “Her descendants would enslave their own relatives, and brothers would go to war against brothers…Sinnugee’s grandchildren would deny their own existence,” (p. 11). The experiences of racial oppression, the impact these had on family units, and the subsequent actions taken by Ally and the Grierson family show how layered and complex racism and forming one’s identity can be for mixed-races people. They also show the important role that environment and community play in one’s ability to simply exist and live.