Before, and no doubt after the civil war, Louisiana thought the term “sang-mele” (1/64 african ancestry) was legally significant. This may have been a French legalism.
But the terms octoroon and quadroon didn’t appear on the US census until 1890. In 1900 they were replaced with “Negro or Negro Descent”-- which might well have been related to the “One Drop” rule.
What second punch tweet?
It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again. A nazi in a suit is still a nazi.
Apparently, Spencer got punched twice that same day, but only one of the assaults went viral.
I took a 6 month break from social media and now I’m confused, did a section of the population get mind wiped while I was gone?
I mean I’m pretty sure everyone who didn’t already know found out he was a racist wazzock about the time he got memed while explaining his meme pin.
Sang-mele means “half-blood” and was used generally for people considered mixed-race. It’s not a legalism, it was a common name to call people not considered white. Calling someone with 1/64 african ancestry “sang-mele” would be deeply committing to a racist idea of “White purity”.
There really is no “maybe” about these terms when it comes to why they were used. They were used to call people “not-white” both legally and socially, in support of the racist belief that some black heritage made a person inferior.
Octoroon and Quadroon gained currency in English because of slave-traders, and were kept in people’s vocabularies because of later racist State laws designed to separate “non-whites” from “whites”.
It’s always been a racist framing, and people used it for racist purposes. The terms didn’t self-form from happenstance as a neutral legal nicety.
This feels like the third time I’m telling you. Octoroon was popularised in english by slave-traders and the slave trade. It wasn’t a pop-culture reference or rarified legalism. It was a basic racist trope, reinforced in common life to support a system of racist social control. It was also restated by racist “moral philosophers”, but they were selling a way of thought already ascribed to by everyday slavers.
As you say, Spencer wasn’t quoting an abolitionist play, or the census, when he said “They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octaroons.”
He was using it in the original common and racist way, to support the idea that anything not “purely white” is inferior.
Yeah I heard the other guy was pissed.
google books reveals no instances before the 1850s.
the oed points to that play.
surely there must be some evidence of it being used–perhaps alongside quadroon-- in the slave trade. I doin’t discount the fact that such people were bought and sold as slaves. I’m simply speculating that the word is part of the vocabulary of white supremacy, rather than the slave trade.
You think the play, which opened in 1859, and which is about how people used the word octoroon in connection to slavery, invented the word first? That they named the play a brand-new-word that no one would have heard before? To protest society defining people as Octoroons, a concept and word somehow invented at that moment?
You demand evidence it was in use earlier? What about Two Years Before the Mast?
Also:
You think those are unrelated lexicons? How could you think those are non-overlapping lexicons? ? ?
Now, Octoroon wasn’t a chosen or professed identity, it was always a racial construction policed by white people and used in english to describe slaves, so I don’t know how it could be an either/or situation.
Correct, and it goes a wee bit deeper than just the One Drop Rule;
Such distinctions were used as a method of determining which slaves were best suited for the fields (darkies) and which slaves were “presentable” enough to serve in the “Masssa’s” house (high yellow mulattos, quadroons, octoroons, etc.)
For instance, due to my pale complexion and long loosely coiled hair, back in the antebellum days, I likely would have been relegated to being a “high yellow house negress.”
“Lucky” fucking me, huh?
What’s even more messed up is that particular historical colorist division is still negatively affecting the Black community, to this very day.
And on top of all that, I get to listen to others outside my demographic “expertly” pontificate on a subject which isn’t at all “philosophical,” ‘esoteric’ or “merely of historical interest” to me; it’s my reality, my everyday lived experience, 365.
ok fine. That’ll do. (of course, the context there refers to the proportion of Spanish blood necessary to raise one’s social standing)
your first suggestion was a modern day misprint-- google books combined two books with wildly different publication dates.
I caught that, since I double-check. They way you do when you completely delete your earlier claims, but still demand I research them.
But getting back to Richard Spencer:
hmm. yep. sorry about that. Perhaps, I should have taken the hint when discourse refused to thread the discussion properly.
Here’s the “expert” I was reading.
“Race, Reproduction and Family Romance in Moreau de Saint-Mery’s Description. …de la partie francaise de l’isle Saint Domingue”
A profoundly disturbing embrace of pseudoscientific ideas, all in the service of injustice.
I was pretty young when I saw School Daze in the theater but it always had an impact on me. At the time I thought, “They’re all black. What does the specific shade of their skin matter?”, until I realized that it did according to some people.
Obligs:
