Mixed Race Studies

The Monticello Mystery-Case Continued

William and Mary Quarterly
Volume LVIII, Number 4 (October 2001)
Reviews of Books

Alexander O. Boulton, Professor of History
Stevenson University (formerly Villa Julie College)

The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty. Edited by Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, 2001. Pp. 207.)

A President in the Family: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson. By Byron W. Woodson, Sr. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001. Pp. xviii, 271.)

Free Some Day: The African American Families of Monticello, By Lucia Stanton. Monticello Monograph Series. (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000. Pp. 192.)

In October 1998 the announcement that DNA analysis identified Thomas Jefferson as the most likely father of a child by his slave Sally Hemings seemed to bring to a conclusion a historical debate that had been waging for years. Any remaining doubts about Jefferson’s paternity were apparently removed when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the organization that owns and operates Jefferson’s historic Charlottesville, Virginia, home Monticello, issued a report soon afterward declaring that “the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.” Several notable scholars of Jefferson quickly reversed their previous denials of the affair. A book on the subject issued by the University Press of Virginia and a Forum in the William and Mary Quarterly, both containing articles by leading historians, presented the new consensus “that virtually all professional historians will accept that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Sally Hemings’s children.”

Now, two new books have shattered the illusion that a kind of historical finality had been achieved…

Read the entire article here.

Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Review)

William and Mary Quarterly
Volume LX, Number 1 (January 2003)
Reviews of Books

Richard Godbeer, Professor of History
University of Miami

Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina. By Kirsten Fischer. (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv, 265.)

Kirsten Fischer’s compelling new book explores the interplay between sexual relations and racial attitudes in colonial North Carolina. In common with other recent scholars, Fischer sees evolving conceptions of race, sex, gender, and social status as closely intertwined in the early South. Unlike those who argue for a shift in emphasis from gender or class to race, Fischer stresses instead “the continual contestation, reassertion, and reconfiguration” of these categories as “assumptions of gender, race, and class difference propped each other up in the developing social hierarchy” (p. 5). Fischer identifies a gradual movement away from somewhat fluid notions of race toward an ideology in which racial difference figured as permanent and inherent. Sexual regulation played a crucial role in official attempts to affirm and police racial boundaries in southern society. This in turn “made race seem as corporeal as sex” and so “bolstered the notion that race was a physical fact” (pp. 10-11).

In colonial society, the establishment of slavery and racial subordination required careful regulation of European as well as African residents and especially of white women. Legislation that prohibited marriage between servants, outlawed interracial sex, and prescribed lengthy apprenticeships for the mixed-race children of white women made marriage and sex integral to the imposition of racial as well as class and gender ideologies. Yet sexual unions in North Carolina embodied the contestedness of racial relations in the early South: as “men and women made personal choices based on many contingencies, of which racial or ethnic identity was only one” (p. 7), they often challenged emerging proscriptive codes. The widespread incidence of unauthorized unions bespoke the resilience of alternative popular codes and the willingness of ordinary colonists, women and men, to ignore or self-consciously resist official norms….

Read the entire review here.

I’m Color-blind But What Are You, Anyway?

Electronic Journal of Sociology (2007)
ISSN: 1198 3655

Kathleen Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University

Eileen O’Brien, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Christopher Newport University

Using primary data from interviews conducted with 1) close black-white friends and 2) biracial Americans, we examine the relationship between the traditional fixation on racial categorizations and the current emphasis on color-blindness. In doing so, we reveal that, instead of indicating a decline in the importance of race, the color-blind ideology acts as both a cover for the obsession with race in U.S. society and a subtle but effective reinforcement for it.

Read the entire article here.