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Mulatto American (also mulatto ) is legally considered to be an individual with mixed black and white heritage. However, some individuals who were designated mulattos may have a slightly more mixed parentage,including Native American blood or someone whose ancestors are also mixed white and black. Also known as half-caste or mixed race.Someone who has Mulatto parents and or Mulatto and Black or Mulatto and Caucasian Someone who call him or her self light skinned black.

Mulatto of Americans/Canada

The Blue Vein Society The "Blue Vein Society" When U.S. slavery was at its zenith, a Mulatto Society known as "The Blue Vein Society" came into being.

The original "Blue Veins" were organized in New England. Their primary objective was to establish and maintain "correct" social standards amongst a people whose social condition, by virtue of their White bloodlines, was unlimited. American and International Mulattoes

FOR CENTURIES, some of the most searing, explosive and divisive descriptive terms in the black community have not been the "N" word, but rather the colorism words such as "mixed," "high yellow," "light," "bright," "fair-skinned," "almost white," "passing," "mulatto" and "fair," to name a few.

And if you mix any of those colorisms with descriptions of the hair being "good" (meaning naturally fine and straight like Caucasians'), or capable of "blow" (meaning to be able to blow in the wind) you have the formula for a pathetic prophetic syndrome that has haunted blacks for centuries and has been manipulated by whites to divide blacks.

In Alex Haley's "Roots," we were awestruck by what we saw and read of the dramatic re-enactment of an African birth where the black baby was raised and held high to the heavens for everyone's glory.

But in Susie Nickens-Ludlow's "Carry Me Back," mulatto children were raised to the light to be examined to see if the skin around their fingernails was pink, not tan, and to see if their strands of hair separated.

That's how they who were "colorstruck" determined if the child would be "light" with Caucasian characteristics, equipping them with the ability to "pass" over blackness into whiteness.

Nickens-Ludlow, 80, a retired school teacher now living in Oakland, takes you inside the closet of the "light-skinned" world of black America in "Carry Me Back," her historical memoir describing the difficulties of being part white, part Indian and part African-American.

The memoir will help you understand why some of America's most articulate and ardent black activists have been "fair-skinned Negroes" who have been treated unfairly by whites and often despised by blacks.

"Carry Me Back," her own self-published family history, provides detailed proof that blacks came to this country before slavery as free people of color.

She traces her mulatto Nickens lineage back to 1660, when Richard Yoconhanocan, an Indian American known as "Black Dick," married Criss, a mixed-race woman of black and white descent. Her African-American Brown family lineage was traced back before 1800, when an unknown slave married Mariah Brown-Berry of black and Indian-American descent.

The two sides of the family, which have gotten progressively darker in skin color over the years, have yielded the newest offspring, after many hundreds, by the name of Mikkail Muhammad.

Nickens-Ludlow helps you understand why free people of color, usually lighter in skin color than those enslaved, were scorned by whites and resented by slaves, when she describes how they lived an insular life, developing their own institutions, social clubs, churches and family associations.

They often married among themselves to keep the "color as close to white as possible" to help to remain free because if one were caught while traveling by horseback or in a carriage by a white without their "free papers" of identification they would be sold into slavery.

The lighter one was in color the less likely to be considered a slave. These were America's first cases of "riding or driving while black." Nickens-Ludlow explains how Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and some of the other founding fathers could have organized their "love relationships" that produced the mulatto children as she explains how her great grandmother, a free mulatto woman had a long love relationship with a rich white farmer named Colvin. Colvin allowed the children from this relationship to carry his name. The Colvin, Tapscot and Grigsby families, who were all predominantly Caucasian "with a tint of Negro and Indian mixture" formed an enclave, isolated from the general black communities to perpetuate the color line. They propagated "a distinct race of Americans," said Nickens-Ludlow, "with straight to wavy hair and blond to black hair color." All their skin colors ranged from white to light brown.

The Nickens/Brown full-color family portrait foldout shows clearly the results of how the "almost white" family members were inbred. "Who am I?," she asks. "I am not a European American, nor African-American nor an American Indian. I am an American."

Her descriptions of the steep criteria for determining membership in the post-slavery black aristocracy would even be difficult for most of today's whites to qualify.

She chronicles her life in Washington, D.C., where she taught before remarrying and moving to Oakland where she served on the Oakland Museum and the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame boards. "I wrote about my life to make it interesting; after all I've lived for 80 years and God has blessed me with good health," she says.

Before writing her story she was nervous that she wouldn't find all the family membe

The New Colored People culture for mulattoes, or people of mixed African and European descent

Societal acceptance of mixed-race marriages and offspring varies widely from person to person and region to region. In Nazi Germany, harsh race laws were enacted to establish racial purity. In the United States, especially the Southeast, marriage between African American and White American people has historically been looked down upon and legislated against. As recently as 2003, Taylor County High School in Taylor County, Georgia has held separate Prom celebrations for black and white students; however, some similar phenomena occur equally because of cultural differences and not specific prohibitions on marriage or dating. However, recent data suggests that multiracial marriages are becoming increasingly common in the United States. In 2000, The Sunday Times reported that "Britain has the highest rate of interracial relationships in the world".John Harlow, The Sunday Times (London), 9 April 2000, quoting Professor Richard Berthoud of the Institute for Social and Economic Research Apparently contradicting this, more recent census data shows the population of England (as a sub-section of the UK) to be 1.3% mixed-race (2001), compared with, for example, 1.4% in the U.S. (2002 estimates; see below). However, as most of the English population is of one race (white)—even more so than in the US—there are fewer opportunities for interracial relationships in England. In support of the report's conclusions, it can be calculated that 14.4% of English residents not identified as white are mixed-race, compared with 7.5% in the U.S.

The mixed race population of Canada, at 1.2%, is the fourth largest Mulatto population.

Censuses notwithstanding, any count of numbers of mixed-race people is subject to dispute. People may identify themselves as members of one single racial category despite having (potentially many) ancestors belonging to other categories, for various reasons. For instance, genetic studies of black Caribbean people show an ancestry that is on average 10% European and 90% African.Motherland: A Genetic Journey, BBC Documentary, 2003. This also stated that 25% of Afro-Caribbean people have a European ancestor in the paternal (Y-chromosome) line of descent. Also, a considerable portion of the U.S. population identified as Black actually have some Native American or European American ancestry. Up to one third of White Americans may have African ancestry. Much of these categorization phenomena occur due to current or past cultural stereotyping or segregation.

Multiracial individuals are often presumed to have an identity crisis because of not being able to answer questions such as "Are you Black or White?", perhaps due to having a sense of identity that is very different than people who claim to be of just one race. Most multiracial people cannot or do not identify with just one group. To complicate this furthe

Coloureds of Namibia, Walvis Bay

Today people of mixed descent are an integral part of most populations throughout Africa, but because of the nature of their descent, they are not truly integrated into any of the other cultural groups. This is also the case in Namibia. One of the differences between the Coloureds and the Rehoboth Basters is the fact that the Basters identify very much with the Rehoboth Gebiet, whereas the Coloureds have never inhabited a specific part of the country, and were not allocated a ‘homeland’, as was the case with other non-white population groups during South African administration of the territory. As a result they now live almost everywhere in Namibia, particularly in the urban areas.

Namibia's Coloured community, numbering just over 50 000, has its origins in the Cape Province of South Africa, although many are descendants from local intermixing. The Coloureds have a strong Caucasian strain and for the most part maintain a Western culture and way of life. They speak Afrikaans as a home language, although their accent differs considerably from that of the Rehoboth Basters.

By and large Coloureds are well educated and practise a wide range of professions, including the civil service, education and especially the building trade. While a small group of Coloureds practise stock farming in the south of the country, most of them live in towns such as Windhoek, Keetmanshoop, Lüderitz, Kalkveld and Karasburg. By and large the Coloureds are well educated and practise a wide range of professions such as the civil service, education and especially the building trade. A small number make a living as stock-farmers and a fairly large community lives in Walvis Bay, where they are fishermen or have their own businesses.

The Coloureds of south africa

Mulattos in South Africa They are considered Coloureds.

The idea of “Coloured” people developed partly to describe the complex position of those who were neither white nor members of groups that spoke African languages. In part, the ethnic category reflects the destruction of distinct Khoisan political structures and the decline of spoken Khoikhoi language. During the 18th century in particular, Khoikhoi people in the southern parts of South Africa were squeezed between white settlement and Xhosa groups, with Khoikhoi numbers reduced by smallpox and the loss of the range they required to run cattle, the basis of the pre-settlement Khoikhoi economy.

Khoikhoi people in the 17th and 18th centuries were thus faced with the choice of either becoming Xhosa — giving up their cattle and starting at the bottom of the Xhosa social hierarchy, but assuring that their children would grow up as free people within Xhosa society — or living as the equivalent of serfs within the dominion of white settlers, but keeping their cattle. A third choice involved going deeper into the inland areas, a choice taken by the ancestors of some of the Griqua. A significant number of Khoikhoi people made each choice.

So while many Xhosa people thus also share Khoikhoi ancestry, the white power structure designated them as Xhosa along with any other Xhosa-speaking person. The Afrikaans-speaking and increasingly diverse groups of black people who lived on white farms and in cities, on the other hand, were the descendants of the Khoikhoi serfs, the African and Asian slaves brought to South Africa from elsewhere, and the white settlers — and they spoke Afrikaans. The “Coloured” identity then became a way for whites to describe this group concisely as both not white, and not the same as African groups like the Xhosa and later, the Zulu and other groups.

The majority of people who came to be described as “Coloured”, then, shared three features that allowed some to describe them as an ethnic group in the anthropological sense:

  1. Khoikhoi family lineage and racial features
  2. traditional association with the Afrikaans language and the Dutch Reformed Church
  3. a historically complicated and ambivalent relationship with the related ethnic group of Afrikaners

This did not apply to all people who Apartheid described as “Coloured”, however; for instance, so-called Cape Malays were at least partly of Asian descent and were often Muslims. In fact, the description came to apply to a number of groups, including Cape Malays, Cape Coloureds, Basters and Griqua; some also included the Namaqua into this group.

In the 1950s and 1960s, laws prohibiting interracial sex and marriage, the proclamation of separate residential areas, the provision of separate schooling and other apartheid laws attempted to make the so-called “Coloureds” appear to be far more of a unified identifiable ethnic group than they were in reality. Indeed, many sub-classifications were required in the law to include all those that the government categorised “Coloured”. The political function of this group was to define “Coloured” people as distinct from Indian and Black people, with both small privileges and large policies of discrimination being designed specifically for each group.

Coloured people are spread across the country but the largest and perhaps most distinctive subgroup is that of the Griqua, numbering more than 300,000 individuals, with that of the Cape Coloureds (located in the Western Cape where there was strong influence from Malay slaves brought by Dutch colonists) being second largest, with an estimated population of 180,000. During the Dutch rule thousands of people were bought, tricked or kidnapped from various coastal regions around the Indian Ocean and brought to the Cape Colony to work as slaves, mostly originating in Java, southern India, Mozambique and Madagascar. The Asian influence had led to a slightly different language use and a strongly Muslim heritage among Cape Malays.

The absurdity of the systems of racial classifications were vividly seen in the convoluted criteria the government attempted to use to distinguish so-called Coloured people from people classified as being “purely” of African or European descent. * The Apartheid bureaucracy devised complex (and often arbitrary) criteria at the time that the Population Registration Act was implemented to determine who was Coloured. Minor officials would administer tests such as the so-called pencil test (testing the curliness of hair) to determine if someone should be categorised Coloured or Black, or Coloured or White. Different members of the same family found themselves in different race groups. Further tests determined membership of the various sub-racial groups of the Coloureds.

The most common language of South African Coloured people is Afrikaans, followed by English.

Many Coloured people do not much like the term Coloured to describe their community, but it continues in use for lack of a satisfactory alternative. Alternative expressions like “so-called Coloureds” (Afrikaans sogenaamde Kleurlinge) and “brown people” (bruinmense) and “brown Afrikaners” (bruine Afrikaners) or “brown South Africans” (bruine Suid-Afrikaners) have acquired a some popularity in recent years. Other so-called Coloured people refer to themselves as “black” in the terms of the Black Consciousness Movement, which extended black identity to so-called Coloured people and Asian people in South Africa.

However, the term Coloured is still widely used in South Africa, including by some organisations which opposed apartheid, for example, the Congress of South African Trade Unions. In the United Kingdom problems have arisen when teachers have come from South Africa, some of whom define themselves as Coloured, and prefer this term to “mixed race”; some British people consider the term Coloured to be pejorative or, at least, out-moded. But some people who identify as Coloured reject the term “mixed race” on the grounds that it suggests that they are somehow the exception to a general rule of racial purity — an idea not borne out by genetics or history.

Europe

There is an emerging mulatto communitiy in modern Europe. These mulattos are mainly the direct descendents of recent African immigrants as well as earlier West-Indian immigrants and European residents.

Famous Mulattoes

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External links

intermix

Multiracial affairs

Mulatte | Mulato | Mulato | Mulâtre | Mulatto | מולאטוס | Mulat | ムラート | Mulatt | Mulat | Mulato | Mulatti

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Mulatto American".

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