The Bastard Children Of Empire Part I: The Mulatto

I wrote the following essay for my Seminar class titled, From Empire to Global World Order: A Study in 19^th Century British Literature. This class was awesome! I liked that the professor asked us to do something that I had never even considered, justify slavery and empire. Are there any justifications? Was empire an accident or planned? Those are all interesting questions that point to thinking about colonialism from the perspective of the colonizer. My professor presented these questions in a way that were not white supremacist justification as well. I thought that it was interesting that we were charged with trying to think about all sides of colonialism. I can't do that, and never would, but I am grateful that I was afforded the opportunity to engage in such discussions. I wrote this essay because I am interested in exposing the tactics of white supremacy no matter how implicit. 
             
This essay was originally going to be about mulattoes and mestizos but the research on the history of mulattoes was just so large, that paper would have to be for a graduate course, I think that would be a great thesis, how mulattos and mestizos, The Bastards of Empire, are used to further the goals of the white supremacists. But I'm currently writing a part II about mestizos and their lust for a white designation. 
             
Just a disclaimer. I was not trying to refute or denigrate any of the scholars noted. I think for me to do that it would take way more time and effort than an undergraduate course. This is also an essay for a grade, I just believe it has some great information, pertinent to my life and to the history of my people.

The Bastard Children of Empire Part I: The Mulatto

I am going to attempt to examine the role that the children of the colonizer and colonized have in achieving the colonialists’ goals. Are these children of love, a glowing example of the ability for humans to connect on a metaphysical level or are these bastard children of rape and molestation, used only as a buffer class between the conquerors and a population? How do the children conceive using their dual identity to the benefit of the colonizer? How do these children use their conflicting identities to the detriment of part of their identity being colonized? What are the benefits the buffer class receives for their allegiance to the colonizer side of their identity?

            

In my analysis, I am going to focus on one group of these “bastard children” of empire, the mulattos. The mulatto is a creation of European colonization. Despite the existence of individuals that could be considered mulatto when the Moors conquered Spain, Sicily, and Southern Italy, I contend that the mulatto is a creation of the racial system created in the lands conquered by the European. Coincidentally, Columbus set sail for the Americas and the last of the Moors were expelled from Spain in the same year, 1492.¹

            

A mulatto is a person having one white and one black parent (that is why mulatto is a colonialism term black/white race are constructs of imperialism). Frequently, more generally: a person of mixed race resembling a mulatto.² The last part of that definition is abstract as that can also encompass mestizos and those not traditionally considered mulatto in the black and white context which is the predominate context in the United States. The word mulato in Spanish and Portuguese, mulâtre in French, and mulatto in Italian and English³ all have origins in the middle to late 16^th century. All those countries that used some variation of the word the word mulatto were unabashed colonizers and all nations on the Mediterranean that had contact with the Moorish Empire (which had a large black African contingency).

            

Furthermore, the African slave trade was maturing from its infancy in the late 15^th Century to the institution those European nations fathered to corrupted, suicidal adulthood in the late 18^th and early 19^th Centuries. The European had become necessarily close to the African, and intensely and grotesquely close to the African woman. In Spanish and Portuguese, the root word is mulo, in English mule, a mule is, of course, the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse.

For the purpose of this examination I am going to focus on the mulattos in Africa; specifically São Tomé and Príncipe and the United States of America. I am choosing those two locales because they were former colonial holdings of two distinct European nations, the Portuguese and the British; although they did have differences in their methods both colonizers used the mulatto buffer class quite similarly.

            

As an aside mulatto is a term that is no longer in use officially, although colloquially, in the United States but a variation of mulatto, mestiço, is used in São Tomé and Príncipe. In the United States the term mulatto was stricken from the 1920 census. This also signified that as Professor of Gender and Women Studies at Harvard, Robert F. Reid-Pharr wrote in the article Cosmopolitan Afrocentric Mulatto Intellectual, “the 1920s become not so much a moment in which black intellectuals come to recognize the essential Africanness of their culture, but instead one in which black intellectuals in concert with white social scientists begin the very difficult cultural and social work of erasing the distinction between black and mulatto and rigidifying the distinction between the purely black and the wholly white.”⁴ The dominant society was distancing themselves from the mulattos and aligning them strictly to their African ancestry. Mulatto was not the only term that signified mixed African and European blood Quadroon (1/4 black), and Octaroon (1/8 black) had been removed from census some decades earlier.⁵ Anyone with the racial distinctions that were necessary during chattel slavery were being gradually told that they were now solidly apart of the oppressed class since the institution was formally abolished there was know need for an official buffer class. It was the United States society’s determination with governmental reinforcement of the one-drop rule.⁶ You are black if your DNA contains any amount of African ancestry.  

           

This societal reinforcement of the one-drop rule has lead to the idea in modernity that there is only one “black” intellectual spectrum and it cannot be divided by shade or percentage of African blood. Pharr continues, “this idea… is compelling because it disallows the still widely held notion that black intellectual movements such as the Harlem Renaissance represent a return to a black and African originality that somehow had been lost by earlier generations of black Americans. Specifically, this radical idea insists that the expression of black identity, even putatively Afrocentric expression, was always a cosmopolitan (that is to say, interracial, transnational) affair.”⁷ Despite the current unified black intellectual consciousness across the shade, ethnic, racial spectrum the mulatto was initially considered separate from the “full-blooded” or “purely” African people, despite the majority of both populations being slaves.

            

As a caveat Havard graduate and the University of British Columbia, Professor Wendy D. Roth combats the one-drop rule in her paper, The End of the One-Drop Rule? Labeling of Multiracial Children in Black Intermarriages. She writes, “Recent research has illustrated that intermarriage results in various identity options for some multicultural offspring. As well as allowing cultural assimilation into the mainstream identity, it can also allow retention of a minority identification, or result in the creation of a new racial identity that is neither one nor the other and often embraces both.”⁸ Despite the obvious that children born from parents of different ethnic and racial distinctions may form a more dynamic definition of race, ethnicity and heritage along side the need for humans to connect themselves to the entirety of their identity but making those designations officially or unofficially does not determine that society will not view you very stringently racially. Despite, social, cultural, and racial distinctions that separate you from blackness you may still be treated like the black lower class. Your cultural distinctions or markers may distance you from black (if only minutely) but they do not bring you closer to being considered white.

           

Cultural assimilation is the process of mimicking the values and modes of upward mobility of the dominant society and culture. The distinctions being made may allow for certain positive social benefits (exoticism, diversity, multiculturalism) or governmental benefits but it does not allow you the social, political, and economic access of those classified as solely white.

               

Furthermore, minority⁹ identification does not signify or mandate any racial or cultural designation. If you try hard enough, just about every citizen of the United States of America can classify themselves as a minority as the term encompasses sexual orientation, gender, and disability amongst other culturally and racially ambiguous distinctions. The term minority as used socially and politically is an oxymoron as it encompasses the majority of the population.

                 

She continues later in the article, “what made it possible for a one-drop rule to develop is a person could only have one race. In this, it contrasts with the concept of ethnicity, which changed to allow multiple simultaneous identities as interethnic marriage became more common. Until recently, most official forms allowed individuals to enter only one race and would recode multiple answers. Thus, the idea of being "multiracial" did not officially exist.”¹⁰ The idea of being multiracial did exist officially and it was mulatto, a term that encompasses a lot of the possible ethnic and cultural intermarriage. Although mulatto is a term relegated to those with some African ancestry, it’s past use on the United States Census Form and it’s multi-racial/ethnic definition further convolutes the expression of a unique multi-racial identity as many mulatto children were disavowed by their white parentage so the history of their European ancestry denied as well.

How did the mulattos as defined above come to be? The place to go for all things racial is the onset of the slave trade. The country involved with the slave trade for the longest and transported the most slaves was Portugal¹¹, the colonization of São Tomé and Príncipe is a case study in how the mulatto the race was formed. It is generally accepted that the islands were uninhabited until their discovery by Portuguese navigators in the 15^th Century, but their suitability for sugar cane plantations and the proximity to the African mainland favored a settlement process based on the importation of large numbers of slaves from the adjacent African coasts. During slavery the number of “pure” Africans outnumbered any other racial or ethnic population on the island.¹²

             

The male colonizers took full advantage of the dominion they had over the body of the female slave as evident by the children produced. The relationships could not be mutually beneficial or ones of love. They were the product of a corrupt institution. This must be pointed out because the new mulatto class, born of rape, has often times sided with the side of their identity that is more socially and economically powerful, the side of their identity that forced their duplicitous existence.

            

Currently, the majority of the nearly 200,000 inhabitants of São Tomé and Príncipe are a mulatto race. 71% of the population of its neighbor, Cape Verde, is also classified as mulatto, or officially, mestiços, in their nation.  The vast majority of the current populations of both nations are descendants of “unions” between the Portuguese and the people they brought from mainland Africa to work as slaves. In the early years of slavery on the island, mestiços began to form a third-class between the Portuguese colonists and African slaves, as they were usually bilingual and often served as interpreters between the populations.¹³ Currently, Portuguese is the official language of both island nations.

Furthermore, European settlers, mainly Portuguese, have always remained a small fraction of the total population, in spite of measures implemented by the Portuguese to stimulate their settling, which included encouragement of miscegenation with the Africans and protection of the social rights of the newly formed families.¹⁴ Miscegenation assumes complicity that is not coerced or forced. Were the unions between the Portuguese and the African slaves mutually beneficial as are unions of love? Were mulattos imminent considering the proximity the two races occupied under slavery? A slave, one who is the property of, and entirely subject to, another person, whether by capture, purchase, or birth; a servant completely divested of freedom and personal rights¹⁵ must be obedient to their master, because if they weren’t obedient then they would not be slaves. Being that the body of an African slave was the dominion of the Portuguese slave master the mulatto’s existence in São Tomé and Príncipe is that born of rape.

            

What benefit did the mulatto give the oppressor class besides being a skillful and dutiful interpreter of their mother’s maiden tongue when the colonizer did not want to use violent means of getting access to whatever they wanted? São Tomé and Príncipe, a society built for the sole purpose of profitable slave plantations, had always been intensely stratified. Helped by a succession of manumission decrees, as well as by participation in local Catholic brotherhoods, the slaves on the islands and their descendants acquired their freedom, becoming known as Forros. Forros are a mixed European and African ancestry who speak creole. Some of the elite Forros became slave-traders and planters”¹⁶ Forros are not simply African slaves gaining their freedom from the bottom of the stratified society. The freedom came based upon racial stratification, how long have your mulatto ancestors been mating with people of Portuguese blood? Forros or “free men” were a mix of African and Portuguese descent.

           

In São Tomé and Príncipe, the Portuguese used the mulatto class as not only a buffer between the Black African Slaves and the White Portuguese but also as a class a people used to further propagate Portuguese language and culture, as to bolster the numbers of those practicing Portuguese culture on the island. The creation of the mulatto was embraced because the Portuguese understood that they needed a way into the culture of the Angolans, and Cameroonians and other “full-blooded” African populations were on the island.

   

Instead of the mulatto class embracing their mother’s tongue and Portuguese together and becoming bi-lingual or tri-lingual as is customary in Europe and in other nations around the globe, a culture may blend with another culture but they do not lose their language even though they may mate with each other. Slavery as an institution disallowed the Africans to speak their language as they had to communicate with their slavers and the slavers knew that language brings unity. Language, I would argue is the most uniting element of every culture. Because with language comes a peoples’ history, why they use certain words to describe ideas and concepts a collective way, and how a group of people views the world, the universe. São Tomé and Príncipe is an example of how colonizers can infiltrate society and get them to agree tacitly with the eradication of one culture and the enforcement of another by forcefully merging with the culture.

            

In the United States, the mulatto is used differently despite also being a by-product of the rape of imported African slaves from the settling European slavers. But first I think that it must be pointed out that Europeans are not necessarily against miscegenation. The first recorded interracial marriage in the United States was the marriage of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. In colonial Jamestown, the first biracial people were the children of White-Native unions. Patrick Henry proposed that intermarriage between whites and Natives be encouraged through the use of tax incentives and cash stipends. Henry's proposal and mass social acceptance of interracial unions was not well received in the colonies and, in many cases, was made illegal.¹⁷

               

During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson tried to continue Patrick Henry’s insistence in miscegenation with Natives in his Letter to slaver owner, U.S. Senator, and George Washington’s former General Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Benjamin Hawkins, 

"In truth, the ultimate point of rest; happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people. Incorporating themselves with us as citizens of the U.S., this is what the natural progress of things will of course bring on, and it will be better to promote than to retard it. Surely it will be better for them to be identified with us, and preserved in the occupation of their lands than be exposed to the many casualties, which may endanger them while a separate people.”¹⁸

Whites and Natives were allowed to have children together and initially so were Natives and Blacks (this was soon prohibited as colonists feared that their populations united might become too large) but Whites and Blacks were barred from procreating together, in early colonialists society it was never promoted, it had no visible proponents. The miscegenation being promoted by Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson is exactly what the Portuguese had begun in São Tomé and Príncipe in the 16^th Century. They were attempting to get the Natives to assimilate into American colonialist (British by proxy) culture not the other way around.

            

Furthermore, Jefferson’s letter foreshadows what eventually happens to the Natives, “While they are learning to do better on less land, our increasing numbers will be calling for more land, and thus a coincidence of interests will be produced between those who have lands to spare, and want other necessaries, and those who have such necessaries to spare, and want lands. This commerce, then, will be for the good of both, and those who are friends to both ought to encourage it.”¹⁹ The Natives, despite Pocahontas’ promotion, and the White settlers did not agree with miscegenation so since the Natives did not fully accept the European settlers ultimatum they were displaced or eradicated. Jefferson’s reasoning behind his propagation of miscegenation with the Natives, is solely for the benefit of the colonists’ goals. The Natives were in “possession” rather “occupied” land that Jefferson knew would be of great use to the proliferation of the United States as a society, a culture, and a nation.

           

The colonizers already had purposed the Black slaves to employ the agricultural knowledge the Natives had taught them. The slaves already had a fixed position in society and any association with a Black slave outside of procurement was socially and lawfully prohibited in most instances. For example, Virginia passed legislation prohibiting interracial marriage and later passed laws that prohibited ministers from marrying racially mixed couples. The fine was ten thousand pounds of tobacco. Virginia also required that any white woman who bore a mulatto child pay a fine or face indentured servitude. Similarly, in Maryland, a woman who married a Negro slave had to serve her husband's owner for the rest of her married life. Maryland's legislature made cohabitation between any White person and a person of African descent unlawful. As the number of colonies grew, miscegenation laws became increasingly commonplace.²⁰ Black slaves were essentially considered “beasts of burden”²¹ and public opinion although there may have been no official miscegenation laws in a certain locale sex with a Black person could be akin to bestiality.

             

I point out the acceptance of miscegenation with the Natives juxtaposed with the anti miscegenation laws against Blacks because it illuminates just how much of a cultural shock the mulatto was in the United States’ society. The mulatto, one could argue, was the main catalyst for the white abolitionist movement. Abolitionists charged that sexual exploitation of slaves was widespread. Some abolitionists maintained that slave owners had turned their plantations into harems.²² Slavery was promulgating immorality in the nation. It was not simply denying the slave pay for a hard days work, or the beatings and mutilations, the breeding, and inbreeding; or even the rape of black slave women that was creating a class of people that was socially and lawfully barred from being able to exist, it was the adultery. Mulatto children were a challenge to the pride of the women colonizer as they were concrete evidence of rape and adultery.

           

So when they came to be, unlike the mulattos in São Tomé and Príncipe, the mulattos born from rape in the United States were to be slaves for time immemorial, they were given a few more benefits than the “unmixed” black slaves but they were still slaves. The mulatto in the United States was the physical embodiment of the subconscious that always wondered the moral integrity of slavery. And now that moral “conundrum” had been decided, slavery was moral degradation, and its physical form was the mulatto.

            

The mulatto was still a slave, despite being overrepresented in the “free” Black population, so still considered part of the slave class but there are ancillary benefits the mulatto may have received on the plantation, like less arduous physical labor. The mulatto was most often in the “big house” because of the common notion that the mulatto was, from a physician in 1860, “generally much shorter lived than negroes of unmixed blood. The pure African, when judiciously managed, has a reasonable prospect of reaching his three scores and ten; and instances of much greater longevity abound. If active, intelligent, house-servants are a prime consideration, and if planters have sufficient means to consult pleasure and convenience before interest, it may do to rest in this mongrel race: but if stout hearty, durable, long lives slaves are wanted, and if pecuniary interest is a permanent consideration, the pure African should be chosen in preference to the mulatto; and the blacker the better.”²³ So the benefits that the mulatto supposedly received by being house-slaves were because of the colonizers being mindful of the supposed scientific weakness of the mulatto. The mulatto was spared from fieldwork because it was believed that the full-blooded African was a stronger beast.

           

Despite both being slaves the mulatto has always been more accepted and easier assimilated into American society. In observation of the 1916 “Who’s Who In Colored America”²⁴ it was noted that “a study of the more advanced groups of Negroes shows a great preponderance of individuals of mixed blood and a dearth, almost an entire absence, of Negroes of pure blood. In the numerous lists of exceptional Negroes, published from time to time by Negroes as well as by white students of race matters, there is a regular recurrence of a few names; the various lists are virtually repetitions. The dozen or score of men everywhere mentioned as having attained some degree of eminence are, in all but one or two cases, men of more Caucasian than Negro blood. In a recently published compilation of one hundred and thirty-nine of the supposedly best-known American Negroes there are not more than four men of pure Negro blood.”²⁵ The mulatto in the United States are used as an example of Black progress of the possibility of upward mobility for all black people, while also signifying the exclusion of most black people. The mulatto was used to hide the continued harsh racial treatment of blacks, as well as, the social and economic exile “full-blooded” Blacks have constantly been subjected.

            

Mulattoes were used as tokens, as these shining symbols of the Black race, whose fortunes signify the opportunities, if taken, afforded to every member of the Black race. If you consider the racial makeup of some of the most prominent figures in the Black intellectual and political pantheon many could have been classified as mulatto, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and the first black President of the United States, Barack Obama. If Barack Obama was a “full-blooded” African what would that signify about race relations? But what a mulatto President signifies is there must be some grandiose cover-up of the maltreatment of the mulatto but more harshly the “full-blooded” Black person.

            

The mulattos like other groups in a society have very varied positions on their own race, on society, on the world and universe. But the colonizers knew what they would use their bastard children for. Their children born of rape will always be considered a racial other but were used to promote their white supremacist ideals. Maybe, the mulatto is simply choosing to adopt one half of their identity and maybe the mulatto has longed to be nurtured by their most abusive parent, to the great detriment of their other parents’ culture. After slavery was abolished in Portugal and its colonies the Portuguese left São Tomé and Príncipe economically devastated and the island has yet to recover. And although, there is no data to corroborate this, since there is no longer a mulatto category unites the prospects and fortunes of the former mulattos and the fortunes of former “full-blooded” Blacks. The economic and lawful benefits once afforded the mulatto are no more. The father the mulatto always wanted still has yet to come, at least you have been reunited with your brothers and sisters.

          

^FOOTNOTES:

¹ In January, 1942 the last Moorish Stronghold was expelled from Spain. Christopher Columbus set sail in August of the same year.

² Oxford English Dictionary. Definition and etymology of “mulatto”

³ Oxford English Dictionary. Definition and etymology of “mulatto”

^{4, 7} Reid-Pharr. Robert. “Cosmopolitan Afrocentric Mulatto Intellectual.”American Literary History. Oxford University Press. 2001

⁵ Saperstein, Aliya and Gullickson, Aaron. “A ‘Mulatto Escape Hatch’ in the United States? Examining Evidence of Racial and Social Mobility During the Jim Crow Era.” Population Association of America. 2013

⁶ Social and legal principal that insisted that if you have one black African ancestor in your family tree you are inherently African no matter how much European ancestry you possess.

⁸ Roth, Wendy. “The End of the One-Drop Rule? Labeling of Multiracial Children in Black Intermarriages.” Sociological Forum Vol. 20. Springer. 2005.

⁹ From the Oxford English Dictionary, A small group of people differing from the rest of the community in ethnic origin, religion, language, etc.; (now sometimes more generally) any identifiable subgroup within a society, esp. one perceived as suffering from discrimination or from relative lack of status or power.

¹⁰ Roth, Wendy. “The End of the One-Drop Rule? Labeling of Multiracial Children in Black Intermarriages.” Sociological Forum Vol. 20. Springer. 2005.

¹¹ The slave trade officially began in 1444 when Portugal transported its first slaves. It ended in 1869. It is estimated Portugal transported over 8.5 million African slaves.

^{12, 13,14} Multiple contributors. “The Peopling of São Tomé: Origin of Slave Settlers and Admixture With the Portuguese.” Wayne University Press. 2002.

¹⁵ Oxford English Dictionary. “Slave.”

¹⁶ Multiple contributors. “The Peopling of São Tomé: Origin of Slave Settlers and Admixture With the Portuguese.” Wayne University Press. 2002.

¹⁷ Berson, Michael and Cruz, Barbara. “The American Melting Pot? Miscegenation Laws In The United States.” OAH 
^18,19 Jefferson, Thomas. “Letter To Benjamin Hawkins, February 18, 1803.”

²⁰ Berson, Michael and Cruz, Barbara. “The American Melting Pot? Miscegenation Laws In The United States.” OAH Magazine of History. Oxford University Press. 2001

²¹ An aphorism alluding to a mule or donkey.

²² Steckel, Richard. “Miscegenation and American Slave Schedules.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.The MIT Press. 1980.

²³ Frazier, Franklin. “Children In Black and Mulatto Families.” American Journal of Sociology. The University of Chicago Press. 1933.
²⁴ A list of prominent and successful black people in the United States, usually produced by major media outlets.

²⁵ Reuter, E.B. “The Superiority of the Mulatto.” American Journal of Sociology. The University of Chicago Press. 1933