The Mulatto as Material/Sexual Site of Modernity’s Contacts and Exchanges

Abstract

I briefly mentioned the “mulatto” in chapter two in relation to Cheryl Harris’s article “Whiteness as Property.” Both whiteness and blackness are forms of materiality that appear in modernity through the imagination of matter. It is through the imagination that blackness and whiteness assume ontological status. The mulatto category, however, poses a problem for this scheme of allotting entitlements based upon the opposition of these two materialities because of the porous nature of its boundaries. Although this category would seems to reflect some biological reality, it can just as well operate through cultural, linguistic, or religious markers since any such marker can be employed in the service of racialization. The question this category poses for us is that of determining the ultimate source of human value. This is the question that became acute when the West entered into the modern period that it comprehended as “secular.” We were discussing this matter in chapter two—how matter was valorized while Africans were dehumanized during the mercantilist exchanges occurring at modernity’s inception. For W. E. B. Du Bois the mulatto was a sight for reflecting on “the problem of the color line” that he had identified in Souls of Black Folks as the problem of the twentieth century.¹ Du Bois’s selection of this peculiar site should not surprise us since we know that he disciplined himself not to think in binaries.

“Why, you’se a nigger, too.”

—W. E. B. Du Bois, “Jesus Christ in Georgia”

[I]n the case of the modern meaning and reception of the Bible in the world of the Atlantic after 1492, a world coincidental with the slave trade, the issue of the trade in human beings who were from Africa, injected the meaning of fundamental distinctions based on physical appearance into the interpretations and meaning of the Biblical text … they explicitly and tacitly assumed that all the important personages in the Biblical text were assumed to be white persons … The place and role of color in the Biblical text during the modern period of the massive introduction and enslavement of peoples of African descent thus took on a metaphysical structure—a structure not limited to the Biblical text but one finding a wide range of verification and justification in the apology for slavery from all European nations. (Charles H. Long, pro., pp. 2–3)

Corporeal properties have also furnished the metaphorical media for distinguishing the pure from the impure, the diseased from the clean and acceptable, the included from the excluded.

—David TheoGoldberg, Racist Culture