The Historical Legal Construction of Black Racial Identity of Mixed Black-White Race Individuals: The Role of State Legislatures |
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association
Manchester Hyatt
San Diego, California
2008-03-20
Richard T. Middleton, IV, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Missouri, St. Louis
This research paper is an analysis of the historical legal construction of black racial identity of mixed black-white race individuals in America. In particular, I investigate how state legislatures in the United States constructed black racial identity through the enactment of laws and constitutional provis ions. This research identifies the following two-part framework by which state legislatures historically used the language of the law to coerce mixed black-white race individuals to adopt a personal sense of collective identity with people of black African ancestry: (1) identification of mixed black-white race individuals and blacks/Negroes as constituting two separate racial groups yet speaking of them in the same blush and disadvantaging them the same, and (2) abandoning recognition of mixed black-white race individuals (mulattoes) as a distinct racial group from Negroes/blacks through the enactment of statutes that espoused the rule of hypodescent. To provide empirical support for this paper’s thesis, a survey of statutes across all fifty states ranging from the colonial period up to the mid-1900s is conducted.
Read the entire paper here. Supporting documents: 1 and 2.
Tags: anti-miscegenation laws, hypodescent, Richard Middleton, Richard T. Middleton