The Coe Ridge Colony: A Racial Island Disappears

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, Tri-Racial Isolates, United States on 2010-12-01 03:58Z by Steven

The Coe Ridge Colony: A Racial Island Disappears

American Anthropologist
Volume 74, Issue 3 (June 1972)
pages 710–719
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00350

Lynwood Montell
Western Kentucky University

The ninety year history of a racial isolate in the KentuckyTennessee border is examined. Peopled by a mixed population of Whites, Blacks, and, occasionally, Indians, the community received notoriety as an enclave for fugitives from the law of neighboring jurisdictions. Its demise came in 1958 as a result of changing land use and increasing tensions between the residents and those of the environing White society.

It has been said that the American Negro has in his veins not the blood of one race alone, or of two, but of three (Porter 1932: 287); the reference, of course, being to the Indian and White races. Such was certainly the case with the Coe Ridge racial island, comprising a people in southern Cumberland County, Kentucky, who called themselves Negro but who freely and proudly admitted to an early blood intermixture with the Cherokees of western North Carolina and a later infusion of White blood on multiple occasions on the Kentucky frontier. This racial group was concealed from the glare of the outside world in the raw yet beautiful hillcountry of southern Kentucky near the point where the Cumberland River disappears into Clay County, Tennessee, after meandering from Wolf Creek Dam across Russell, Cumberland, and Monroe Counties in Kentucky. It was here that the now legendary Black Coe bastion flourished, withered, and then perished before the relentless assault of the White man’s world.

Placed on Coe Ridge as a result of slave emancipation following the Civil War, the Coe racial island withstood for ninety years the attempts of resentful White neighbors to remove this single blot within an otherwise homogeneous White Society. The Black Coe people fought so fiercely in defense of their lives and property that, by the time the settlement finally succumbed to economic and legal pressures in the late 1950s, it was notorious in folk legend across the upper South as a place of refuge for White women shunned by their own families and communities and as a breeding ground for a race of rather handsome mulattoes, as a stronghold of moonshining and bootleggers, and as a battle ground for feuds that produced a harrowing list of ambushes, street murders, stabbings, and shootings. After years of raids, arrests, and skirmishes with federal agents and local lawmen, the Negroes’ resistance was broken, and they departed the hill country enclave for the industrial centers north of the Ohio River

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The Physical Anthropology and Genetics of Marginal People of the Southeastern United States

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Tri-Racial Isolates, United States on 2010-12-01 01:34Z by Steven

The Physical Anthropology and Genetics of Marginal People of the Southeastern United States

American Anthropologist
Volume 74, Issue 3 (June 1972)
pages 719–734
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00360

William S. Pollitzer
University of North Carolina

Admixture of White, Negro, and Indian peoples of the Southeastern United States from colonial days on has led to some unique populations isolated by social status. In time they formed distinctive gene pools. On the basis of physical traits and serological factors, it has been possible to reconstruct the approximate genetic contribution of parental populations to the hybrid ones. Some inherited diseases have also been concentrated in these isolates. Both differential fertility and changing social factors may affect the future of these populations.

Over vast spans of time populations of mankind have evolved many physical differences. In accordance with well established genetic principles, they arose because mutations in the genes controlling such traits occurred at random but conferred upon the individuals selective advantages. Thus, heavy pigmentation of the skin may have been an advantage to those living in the extreme sunlight of the tropics. Some anthropologists believe that body form and facial features may similarly represent adaptations to extremes of temperature and humidity. Geographical barriers such as oceans and deserts serve to isolate populations and emphasize their distinctive characteristics, although gradients exist between the physical traits of related people. Man’s increasing capacity for food production, most notably in the neolithic era when the cultivation of crops and domestication of animals greatly increased his food resources, contributed to the growth of populations. Particular groups of people of similar appearance expanded in numbers and later in territory, giving the impression that the earth was populated with a few “races.” An earlier generation of anthropologists, searching for distinct types, classified all people on the basis of a few physical traits such as skin color, hair form, head shape or nose width. More modern students of mankind have recognized that there are indeed only clines or gradients in all of these traits and that mixture is a universal phenomenon.

Can we then speak of “races” of man at all? While the concept of fixed types remains in the popular thinking, many scientists have gone to the opposite extreme and denied the reality of race at all. My own position is an intermediate one in which I liken human populations to the surface of the earth. Here is a small elevation and, there, a larger one; here is a single contour and, there, a doubled one. Shallow valleys separate some high ground; deep valleys separate others. Who can say, then, what is to be labeled a hill and what is to be called a mountain? Shall we use one name or two names for closely related projections? Where we draw the line-what labels we attach-these are arbitrary decisions; but the rises and the falls in the earth’s surface are facts of nature. So it is with human populations. How finely we wish to divide them, how broadly we lump them or the designations we give to them will inevitably vary; but large populations with distinctive features are still recognizable. It is, of course, mating preferences for physical characteristics which govern the collection of genes in so-called gene pools; and it is our culture which determines these choices. In that sense, those physically recognized groupings which we may popularly refer to as “races” are dependent upon our culture both for their formation and for their definition…

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The American Isolates

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Tri-Racial Isolates, United States on 2010-11-29 19:49Z by Steven

The American Isolates

American Anthropologist
Volume 74, Issue 3 (June 1972)
pages 693–694
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00320

B. Eugene Griessman
Auburn University

More than 200 American isolates have been identified historically in at least eighteen of the eastern states of the United States. Their total population has been estimated at 75,000. Those who populate these communities commonly bear unflattering local names-Red Bones, Brass Ankles, Issues-although they themselves usually want to be known as Indians or as Whites.

They are an obscure people in American life and many of them would prefer to remain unnoticed because they are keepers of secrets. Some of them, or their children, or distant relatives, have crossed racial boundaries so that it would not do for them to receive much attention. Scholars for the most part have granted them their wish. “As a sizeable native minority,” William Harlan Gilbert, Jr., wrote twenty-six years ago, “they deserve more attention than the meager investigations which sociologists and anthropologists have hitherto made of their problems” (1946:438-447).

This state of affairs has been remedied partially by a few scholars who have studied these populations over a period of years. Some of their findings were presented for the first time at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society in 1970. And now with this issue of the American Anthropologist several articles will provide the basis for a wider knowledge of the enclaves…

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On Mixed-Racial Isolates

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Tri-Racial Isolates, United States on 2010-11-29 03:32Z by Steven

On Mixed-Racial Isolates

American Anthropologist
Volume 76, Issue 2 (June 1974)
pages 343–344
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1974.76.2.02a00190

G. Harry Stopp, Jr.
Louisiana State University

In recent articles on American isolates (American Anthropologist 74: 693-7 34) Beale, and Dane and Griessman predicted change for “mixed-racial” communities in the United States stemming from the recent civil rights legislation. They alluded to “Red Power” movements or associations and coalitions of some kind as mechanisms for such possible divergence from past models of behavior.

These gentlemen have presented an excellent outline of the problems many “mixed-racial” isolates have had to face. Dane and Griessman’s North Carolina example could serve as a model of almost every isolate group in the United States. Beale’s chronology of group identity assumption gives us insight into the time-depth most isolate groups will exhibit. Both articles, however, lean too heavily on the “Indian” identity as both the isolate groups’ own solution to its controversial background and as the ultimate role of all isolates.

If we assume American isolates to be “tri-racial,” I believe we will see that their reactions to racial problems have been, and continue to be, three-fold. The Lumbee have chosen to be Red; the community around them has accepted this; so, we could consider the Lumbee as Indians. With the advent of recent civil rights legislation, I expect that the Lumbee, and any other isolate group that has assumed a Red identity, will remain a cohesive group, possibly under a banner of Red Power. The Creoles of Mobile have, on the other hand, often accepted the mantle of the Black man. Bond (1931:556) reported this, and I have seen evidence of this also in my brief acquaintance with the Mobile Creoles. I can only assume that, with the advent of civil rights legislation, this group will begin to identify with the Black Power movement (though not necessarily on a radical basis). I would expect any isolate group that has accepted a Black identity to maintain cohesiveness as a Black group…

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An Overview of the Phenomenon of Mixed Racial Isolates in the United States

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, Tri-Racial Isolates, United States on 2010-11-29 03:03Z by Steven

An Overview of the Phenomenon of Mixed Racial Isolates in the United States

American Anthropologist
Volume 74, Issue 3 (June 1972)
pages 704–710
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1972.74.3.02a00340

Calvin L. Beale
Economic Research Service
U.S. Department of Agriculture

The subject of the paper is population groups of real or alleged tri-racial origin—Indian, White, and Negro. There is a review of the emergence of such groups in American history, their conflicts with public authorities, and their recognition by researchers. The past importance of separate schools as a boundary maintenance mechanism is discussed, with emphasis on the declining persistence of such schools today. The role of the church as the typical remaining group institution is noted. Mention is made of the decreasing proportion of endogamous marriages in recent times. The essentially rural nature of these racial isolates is pointed out, and the general societal trend of rural depopulation is stated to be affecting their size and continued existence. A suggested list of research needs is offered.

In About 1890, a young Tennessee woman asked a state legislator, “Please tell me what is a Malungeon?” “A Malungeon” said he, “isn’t a nigger, and he isn’t an Indian, and he isn’t a White man. God only knows what he is. I should call him a Democrat, only he always votes the Republican ticket” (Drumgoole 1891:473).

The young woman, Will Allen Drumgoole, soon sought out the Melungeons in remote Hancock County and lived with them for awhile to determine for herself what they were. Afterward, in the space of a ten page article, she described them as “shiftless,” “idle,” “illiterate,” “thieving,” “defiant,” “distillers of brandy,” “lawless,” “close,” “rogues,” “suspicious,” “inhospitable,” “untruthful,” “cowardly,” “sneaky,” “exceedingly immoral,” and “unforgiving.” She also spoke of their “cupidity and cruelty,” and ended her work by concluding, “The most than can be said of one of them is, ‘He is a Malungeon,’ a synonym for all that is doubtful and mysterious-and unclean” (Drumgoole 1891:479). Miss Drumgoole was essentially a sympathetic observer.

The existence of mixed racial populations that constitute a distinctive segment of society is not unique to the United States needless to say. But this nation must rank near the top in the number of such communities and in their general public obscurity. I refer in particular to groups of real or alleged White-Indian-Negro mixtures (such as the Melungeons) who are not tribally affiliated or traceable with historical continuity to a particular tribe. It is also logical to include a few groups of White-Negro origin that lack the Indian component. The South in particular is rich in such population strains, with all states except Arkansas and Oklahoma having such groups at present or within the twentieth century. (And I would not be surprised to be contradicted on my exception of those two states.)…

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“Race” and the Construction of Human Identity

Posted in Africa, Anthropology, Articles, Social Science on 2010-10-12 00:42Z by Steven

“Race” and the Construction of Human Identity

American Anthropologist
Volume 100, Issue 3 (September 1998)
pages 690-702
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.690

Audrey Smedley, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and African American Studies
Virginia Commonwealth University

Race as a mechanism of social stratification and as a form of human identity is a recent concept in human history. Historical records show that neither the idea nor ideologies associated with race existed before the seventeenth century. In the United States, race became the main form of human identity, and it has had a tragic effect on low-status “racial” minorities and on those people who perceive themselves as of “mixed race.” We need to research and understand the consequences of race as the premier source of human identity. This paper briefly explores how race became a part of our culture and consciousness and argues that we must disconnect cultural features of identity from biological traits and study how “race” eroded and superseded older forms of human identity. It suggests that “race” ideology is already beginning to disintegrate as a result of twentieth-century changes.

…The Non-Problem of “Mixed-Race” People

One of the more tragic aspects of the racial worldview has been the seeming dilemma of people whose parents are identifiably of different “races.” Historically, “race” was grounded in the myth of biologically separate, exclusive, and distinct populations. No social ingredient in our race ideology allowed for an identity of “mixed-races.” Indeed over the past century and a half, the American public was conditioned to the belief that “mixed-race” people (especially of black and white ancestry) were abnormal products of the unnatural mating of two species, besides being socially unacceptable in the normal scheme of things. The tragedy for “mixed” people is that powerful social lie, the assumption at the heart of “race,” that a presumed biological essence is the basis of one’s true identity. Identity is biology, racial ideology tells us, and it is permanent and immutable. The emphasis on and significance given to “race” precludes any possibility for establishing our premier identities on the basis of other characteristics. In this sense it may be argued that the myth of ”race” has been a barrier to true human identities.

The unfortunate consequence of race ideology is that many of the people with this “mixed-race” background have also been conditioned to the belief in the biological salience of “race.” Their efforts to establish a “Mixed-Race” category in the American census forms show a total misunderstandinogf what “race” is all about, and this is, of course, a major part of the tragedy. Their arguments imply a feeling of having no identity at all because they do not exist formally (that is, socially) as a “biological” category.

The fact is that from the standpoint of biology, there have been “mixed” people in North America ever since Europeans first encountered indigenous Americans and the first Africans were brought to the English colonies in the 1620s. The average African American has about one quarter of his or her genes from non-African (nonblack ancestors, although most estimates are likely to be conservative (cf. Marks 1995; Reed 1969). There is a greater range of skin colors, hair textures, body sizes, nose shapes, and other physical features among black Americans than almost any other people identified as a distinct population. Virtually all of them could identify as of “mixed-race.” But the physical markers of race status are always open to interpretation by others. “Race” as social status is in the eye of the beholder. “Mixed” people will still be treated as black if their phenotypes cause them to be so perceived by others. Insistence on being in a separate classification willbnot change that perception or the reaction of people to them…

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Variablity in Race Hybrids

Posted in Anthropology, Articles on 2010-08-10 01:23Z by Steven

Variablity in Race Hybrids

American Anthropologist
Volume 40, Issue 4 (October-December 1938)
pages 680–697
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1938.40.4.02a00090

Wilson D. Wallis (1886-1970)

In his revised edition of The Mind of Primitive Man [Read here], Professor [Franz] Boas warns against assuming “on the basis of a low variability that a type is pure, for we know that some mixed types are remarkably uniform. This has been shown for American Mulattoes, Dakota Indians, and made probable for the city population of Italy.” In a footnote to that passage he refers to the studies of Herskovits, Sullivan, and Boas, respectively, presumably in support of this position. Inasmuch as the test of variability used in those studies is the standard deviation of dimensions, and, for reasons which I shall indicate, this is not an acceptable test of variability for this purpose, it seems proper to reexamine the data on variability of race hybrids.

Although several studies have been devoted to the results of race crossing, there are few definitive results. Some studies suggest hybrid vigor, that is, increase in dimensions over one or both parental strains. Other studies indicate that race hybrids are inferior to one or both parental strains. Some indicate that hybrids are less variable than parental strains; others, that they are more variable. The character of the results may, of course, depend upon the races crossed and upon proximity to original crossing; but on these matters there is little well attested information. Sullivan and Boas find half-breeds among Sioux and other groups taller than pure bloods among each sex. Wissler, in a series of Oglala Dakota, finds half bloods slightly shorter than full bloods. As Sullivan remarks: “NO satisfactory solution of these contradictory results can be given so long as our series are incomplete in lacking the measurements on the whites with whom the Indians have mixed.” When all the data are considered, it is not clear that in race crossing any physical trait behaves as a Mendelian recessive or dominant-despite portrayals in fiction. In Hawaiian-European hybrids in Hawaii, however, Dunn finds evidence that the brachycephaly of Hawaiians is inherited as a dominant, and the European type of head (? dolchocephaly) reappears as a recessive in later hybrid generations. Hawaiians are said to contribute to the cross relatively more dominant factors than do Europeans.  He finds evidence, also, of “segregation of ‘racial’ characters such as nose form, hair form, hair and skin color in diverse combinations in the F and backcross generation.” There is, however, no evidence of Mendelian inheritance in the ratios with which these traits occur, and no evidence of Mendelian inheritance of a cluster of traits…

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Review: “Black Gal Swing”: Color, Class, and Category in Globalized Culture [Review of works by Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Arthur K. Spears, and Rainier Spencer]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Media Archive on 2010-01-29 04:30Z by Steven

Review: “Black Gal Swing”: Color, Class, and Category in Globalized Culture [Review of works by Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Arthur K. Spears, and Rainier Spencer]

American Anthropologist
Volume 103, Issue 1 (March 2001)
pages 208-211
DOI: 10.1525/aa.2001.103.1.208

Fred J. Hay, Professor and Librarian of the W.L. Eury Appalachian Collection Library
Appalachian State University

(Son Bonds) Now a yellow gal will kiss you. she will kiss you awful sweet—brownskin gal kiss the same.
(John Estes) What do a black gal do?
(Son Bonds:) But a black gal spit ‘bacco juice, spew snuff all on your lips—oh, loving you just the same.

“Black Gal Swing” Delta Boys, 1941

This lyric speaks to the multiple concerns and issues addressed in these three books. In a few short lines, it depicts and satirizes social distinctions based on phenotype. it mocks the dominant economic class’s insistence on the value of whiteness, it rejects these constructs and in addition flaunts (sociologists Odum and Johnson referred to the blues as “the superlative of the repulsive [Odum and Johnson 1925:166]) its defiance of while American capitalist cultural hegemony. It is a multivocalic, nuanced, and subversive manifesto of cultural affirmation by and for those most reviled, oppressed, and economically deprived. Also, it is brutally honest and humorous. Unfortunately, it is rare for scholarly writing to achieve this level of sophistication or this degree of conciseness.

Ifekwunigwe’s Scattered Belongings (“mixed race” people in England) and Spencer’s Spurious Issues (“mixed race” people in the United States) are revised dissertations (Berkeley and Emory, respectively). Spears’s edited volume Race and Ideology is a collection of essays, by nine scholars, each examining an aspect of how racism is “interconnected and maintained” through “language, symbolism and popular culture” (back chut blurb). Ifekwunigwe, Spencer, and Spears agree on one thing: “race” is not a scientifically valid concept and should be discarded. But on how to achieve the goal of a deracialized social order, and on what intermediate steps should be taken to facilitate progress to that goal, there is little agreement among the three.

Spencer, of white German maternity and black American paternity, grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood in Queens. Ifekwunigwe, of British and Caribbean maternity and Nigerian paternity, was born in Nigeria moved to England when quite young, and then, at the age of ten, moved to “upper middle-class Jewish West Los Angeles” (p. 35). Both authors include family pictures emphasizing the wide range of color and other “racial” traits manifested in their families.

A self-proclaimed “antiracialist” and “antiracial advocate.” Spencer attacks multiracialism on the grounds that biological race does not exist and “social” race—based as it is on outdated concepts of scientific racism and popular readings of phenotype—is also spurious. Spencer argues that without race there would be no racism and that multiracialism is based on the false race concept supporting the hegemonic system of white supremacy. Furthermore, as Spencer notes, if race really existed, most, if not all, Americans would be multiracial.

Spencer’s is a straightforward presentation in which he reconstructs the history of federal racial classification and examines its purpose. He analyzes the ideology and goals of the multiracial movement in the United States, especially of the groups Project Race and the Association of Multiethnic Americans. (Spencer has been a prominent figure in multiracial circles through his column “Spurious Issues” regularly featured in InterRace magazine.) The bottom line is that Spencer is opposed to classifying people by race and adamantly against adding a new category of mixed or multi-race to the federal census. With regret, he acknowledges that for purposes of monitoring the enforcement of civil rights legislation—we must continue to use. for the present, the federal government’s existing racial categories.

Spencer’s argument against muluracialism is sound and well-articulated but, perhaps because of his commitment to antiracialist ideology, Spencer downplays issues of class: he does not acknowledge that the majority of the people in the multirace movement are middle class and committed to upward social mobility. He also downplays Project Race’s denial of and desire to escape from, blackness; ignores recent revitalization movements among what were once disdainfully referred to as “little races” and “tri-racial isolates” (especially the new Melungeon pride crusade); and fails to address issues related to individuals who share a “racial” culture different from their “race” (e.g., R&B legend Johnny Otis, culturally black son of Greek immigrants)…

Read or purchase the article here.

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