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
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Notes
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folks,” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), p. 37.
Edward J. Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 54.
Edmund Husserl, “Expression and Meaning,” The Essential Husserl: Basic writings in Transcendental Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 41–42.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade to Its First Century (New York: International, 1968), p. 99.
Favor, Martin Authentic Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
W. E. B. Du Bois, “Jesus Christ in Georgia,” in The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 2, ed. Julius Lester (New York: Vintage Books, 1971).
Abraham L. Davis and Barbara Luck Graham, The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), pp. 50–53.
Joel Williamson, Rage for Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 238.
Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 211.
Thomas J. Davis, “Race, Identity, and the Law: Plessy v. Ferguson,” in Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History, ed. Annette Gordon-Reed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 61–63.
Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993), p. 1746.
Derrick Bell, Race, Racism and American Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 260.
Ibid., p. 262. The distinction in the above quoted Virginia Statute of 1662 is between a Christian and a slave. This wording reflects a situation wherein the majority of whites had been baptized but the majority of the Africans arriving to the colony had not. There were several instances, however, where black slaves successfully sued for their freedom based on the fact that they had been baptized. In 1667, Virginia took measures to prevent any Negro slaves from ever again being freed through this loophole. “Whereas some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth and by the charity and piety of their owners made partakers of the blessed sacrament of baptism, should by virtue of their baptism be made free, it is enacted... that the conferring of baptism does not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom.” see Paul Finkelman, The Law of Freedom and Bondage: A Casebook (New York: Oceana, 1986), p. 16.
Bill Maurer, “The Anthropology of Money,” Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006), p. 13.
O’Malley, “Specie and Species: The Question of Money,” American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (April 1994), pp. 391
John Edgar Wideman, Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (New York: Vintage Press, 1995).
David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 53–55.
Myron Schwartzman, Romare Bearden: His Life and Art (New York: Harry Adams, 1990).
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© 2009 James A. Noel
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Noel, J.A. (2009). The Mulatto as Material/Sexual Site of Modernity’s Contacts and Exchanges. In: Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620810_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620810_6
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