Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie Française de l’isle Saint-Domingue, (1797): 104.
In France's most valuable slave colony and most profitable territory in the 18th century, racial pseudoscientific theories of explaining and categorizing race emphasized 128 parts. Apparently one's entire racial background could be divised into 128 parts of black or white ancestry, according to Moreau de Saint-Mery, a prominent Creole lawyer and father of a quarteron child with his mulatto mistress. As someone othewise known as a quadroon, Saint-Mery's child would be divided into 3/4 white, 1/4 African or black. Elsewhere, this same prominent white Creole born in Martinique but residing in Saint-Domingue, would lay out several categories of race to divide the colony's population. Due to the increasingly prominent role of certain mixed-race families as slaveholders and the demand for civil rights from France and the white-dominated colonial government, it became more important for whites to measure the racial ancestry of gens de couleur and prevent them from attaining said rights. Thus, the second half of the 18th century witnessed the rise of laws targeting free people of color by mandating they take "African" surnames, cease bearing swords or weapons in public (although they were the reason the militia was able to keep the slave population in check by hunting runaways), and additional punitive laws were enacted by local whites to ensure that the free people of color would not take on the rights of voting for representatives of the colony during the French Revolution's National Assembly in the 1790s.
In spite of attempts by colonial whites reluctant to see free people of African or partial black descent vote and participate in the civic system, they continued to do so and their uprisings and involvement with slave insurgencies ensured the occurrence of the Haitian Revolution, even when it turned against their own slaveholding interests. For example, Julien Raimond, a 'quadroon' from the area of Bainet, argued in favor of dominance of Saint-Domingue from Creole multiracial planters like himself, many of whom were invested in slavery and tied to the colony while the whites were often absentee planters or came to Saint-Domingue to accumulate wealth quickly and return to France. In addition to advocating for mulatto and free people of color rights based on economic and local ties, they also defended male rights in the political discourse by asserting their masculinity, which Mimi Sheller has researched further into 19th century independent Haiti. The above excerpt from Saint-Mery's tome on French Saint-Domingue exemplifies the feminization of multiracial Saint-Dominguans, regardless of gender. Males were therefore incapable of taking on political rights extended to white men because their hybrid descent was equated with femininity in a political area rooted in patriarchal notions of governance. Their alleged depraved morality and physical qualities as mixed-race people with the strength and moral weaknesses of blacks deprived them of proper citizenship since the mulattoes lived for sexual gratification and suffered from innately effeminate features. One still sees this stereotype of la mulata in Spanish Latin American literature and elsewhere, where multiracial black women face the Jezebel stereotype based on these earlier notions of black women's sexuality.
1. negre and African, or black, was reserved for people of fully 128 parts African or black. Negroes or blacks were usually the darkest skinned with the coarsest hair textures. However, not all enslaved Africans were necessarily Negre and distinctions were recognized by whites and some Africans for groups like the Peul or Fulani of West Africa. Indeed, Sylviane Diouf in Servants of Allah describes one incidence of a literate Muslim slave referring to what were likely Fulani Muslims as "mulattoes with long hair." Michael Gomez, author of Black Crescent, describes the aforementioned long-haired mulattoes as "Arabo-Berbers" like the Moors and Tuareg of West Africa, however. Regardless, not all Africans arriving in Saint-Domingue were categorized as "black." Diouf also suggests that many enslaved Muslims, especially educated ones, throughout the Americas, were more often linked with an "Arab" identity, partly to perpetuate notions of black intellectual inferiority.
2. mulatre would be used for someone half-black and half-white, ideally 64 parts black, 64 parts white. Of course, free people of color in Saint-Domingue included some people recognized as entirely 'black,' and others were all generalized as "mulatre" regardless of their actual ancestry. Some trace the origins of the word to Arabic or Latin for "mule," the offspring between a horse and a donkey. Moreover, this etymology likely influenced notions of effeminate and inferior 'mongrelized' populations who were often stereotyped as being infertile or incapable of producing viable offpsring. Despite all the readily available evidence from multiracial families around them, many whites continued to believe in pseudo-scientific theories of inferior bodies of mixed-race individuals.
3. quarteron or quadroon was widely used for those who were 1/4 black or African. Julien Raimond, for instance, was one well-known Saint-Dominguan planter of this background. Alexandre Dumas, illustrious 19th century French writer, was also the product of a mulatto and white, a quadroon. Many of these types of multiracial individuals could often pass as white, although some, like Dumas, still had the "kinky" hair that indicated black descent.
4. cctoroon or metis in Saint-Domingue referred to someone who was 1/8 black and 7/8 white. The well-known case of Homer Plessy in Louisiana was an instance of a metis of partial Saint-Dominguan roots whose case against Jim Crow will forever be remembered.
5. mamelouc, derived from Mameluk in Arabic, the word for Turkish slave soldiers used in the Arab Islamic world, was a less common term for a group of multiracial people 120 parts white, 8 parts black. As you can image, how anyone could be categorized into groups like these is beyond reason.
6. griffe would be the term for the offspring of a mulatto and a black, so about 1/4 white and 3/4 black in the 128 parts system. Some scholars, such as Colin Dayan, link the origin of this term to the animal kingdom, perhaps describing the hair texture of such people as resembling that of a griffon of some sort. Romaine-la-prophetesse, an early leader of a slave uprising in southern Saint-Domingue in the 1790s, was either a 'griffe' or mulatto and can be read about in this post.
7. marabou, a term that lacks clear meaning, was used to refer to dark-skinned multiracial people with less "Negroid" facial features or non-kinky hair textures. This word is still used in Haiti, as I have been labelled "marabou" by Haitians in Florida. The marabou would be somewhere between 40-48 parts white, the remainder black. Like the griffe, their facial features have great variety but are supposedly lighter-skinned on average than the griffe. How the hell anyone could differentiate degrees of mixed heritage like this is, again, beyond my capacity.
7. Sangmele or Sang-mele derives from the union of a white and a quarteron and would be overwhelmingly of European descent, such as 124 or 125 parts white.
8. sacatra referred to someone 1/8 white and 7/8 black and likely the offspring of a griffe and a black.
9. blanc referred to someone fully white, although this could be relative too since self-proclaimed 'whites' in Spanish Santo Domingo and Spain's credentials as full-blooded whites was challenged by Moreau and others.
10. grimelle or grimeau was another term used to refer to light-skinned multiracial people with strong "Negroid" facial features, the opposite of marabou. Ideally, the grimeau phenotype would likely coincide with metis or quarteron categories for Moreau, although skin color varies so greatly it is impossible to say.
11. jaune or grimaud are terms for 'yellow' and fair-skinned people
12.and many more exist for various types of facial features and hair textures in Haiti
Some of the terms have been abandoned or changed. For instance, marabou seems to imply some connection to Taino or East Indian admixture, particularly long hair. The marabou phenotype is widely celebrated in terms of Haitian female aesthetics while dark skin is still denigrated like elsewhere. Throughout Haitian history, conflicts between dark and light, black and mulatto, remained a fixture of postcolonial legacies that fueled civil war, poor distribution of resources, and class tensions. Serious scholarship has unveiled excessively the role of color and class in post-revolutionary Haiti. I recommend From Dessalines to Duvalier by David Nicholls.
No comments:
Post a Comment