Did the five-generation family known as the Grayson’s chronicled in detail by Claudio Saunt in his non-fiction book, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American deny their common origins to conform to “America’s racial hierarchy?” Furthermore, use “America’s racial hierarchy as a survival strategy?” I do not agree with Saunt’s argument whole-heartedly. I refute that the Grayson family members used free will and made conscious choices regarding the direction of their family and personal lives. In my opinion, their cultural surroundings significantly shaped their survival strategy and not racial hierarchy. Thus, I will discuss the commonality of siblings Katy Grayson and William Grayson social norms growing up, the sibling’s first childbearing experiences, and the sibling’s political experience with issues such as chattel slavery versus kinship slavery. “Tracing a single Native American family from the 1780’s through the 1920’s posed a number of challenges,” for Claudio Saunt, author of Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family. (pg. 217) A family tree is comprised of genealogical data that has many branches that take form by twisting, turning, and attempting to accurately represent descendants from the oldest to the youngest. “The Grayson family of the Creek Nation traces its origins to the late 1700’s, when Robert Grierson, a Scotsman, and Sinnugee, a Creek woman, settled down together in what is now north-central Alabama. Today, their descendants number in the thousands and have scores of surnames.” (pg. 3) I will focus on the surname Grayson for the purpose of this essay. I will focus on the two siblings that were the offspring from the coupling of the Scotsman, Rober... ... middle of paper ... ...families. Katy eventually left her black family behind and married another man. He was said to be part Scotsman and part Creek. The reason she left her first relationship behind is unclear. “A transformation took place in 1817 when Robert gave his daughters Elizabeth and Katy a number of slaves, out of “natural love and affection” and for their “better support and maintenance.” Did Katy not want to be a mother of black Creeks, or did she prefer to be a master of black slaves?” (pg. 25) William remained faithful to his kin and emancipated them. I will reiterate that the two sibling’s cultural environments influenced their survival strategy and not racial hierarchy. Free will and personal choices overrode the prevailing class warfare of the period. Works Cited Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family
Post-emancipation life was just as bad for the people of “mixed blood” because they were more black than white, but not accepted by whites. In the story those with mixed blood often grouped together in societies, in hopes to raise their social standards so that there were more opportunities for...
Owen, Narcissa, and Karen L. Kilcup. A Cherokee woman's America memoirs of Narcissa Owen, 1831-1907. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.
Lasch-Quinn, Elisabeth. "Family." Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History. Ed. Mary Kupiec Cayton and Peter W. Williams. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001. Student Resources in Context. Web. 6 Mar. 2014.
Robert Staples in Sociocultural Factors in Black Family Transformation: Toward a Redefinition of Family Functions goes on to further analysis and critique Moynihan’s report. Staples identify several flaws within his argument, including that the fact that African Americans are not a monolithic unit (19), the numerous reasons for fatherhood absence, and the socioeconomic factors that shape the structure of African American families (21). Staples main critique of the Moynihan report is that marginalization of the Black community is not due to the dysfunction of Black families, rather the economic basis is the fundamental cause that needs to be considered (23). For the most part, I would agree with Staples in saying that economic oppression is the cause of dysfunction within families. While reading Part One of The Black Family, the notion of respectability politics came to mind and how the role of hegemony plays in sociocultural relations. The influence of hegemony has shifted many of us into considering one-singular truth and Western ideologies have led to the shaping of ideas, mindsets, and cultures, all the way to family to dating and sexual patterns, African American culture is compared to European American
Laurence Hill’s novel, The Book of Negroes, uses first-person narrator to depict the whole life ofAminata Diallo, beginning with Bayo, a small village in West Africa, abducting from her family at eleven years old. She witnessed the death of her parents with her own eyes when she was stolen. She was then sent to America and began her slave life. She went through a lot: she lost her children and was informed that her husband was dead. At last she gained freedom again and became an abolitionist against the slave trade. This book uses slave narrative as its genre to present a powerful woman’s life.She was a slave, yes, but she was also an abolitionist. She always held hope in the heart, she resist her dehumanization.
Breen and Innes' Myne Owne Ground is a book that seeks to address period in US history, according to the authors, an unusually level of freedom was achieved by formally bonded black Americans. As such, the book aims to bear witness to have faith in period of historical possibility, while locating this period, and its decline, firmly within the overall narrative of slavery. The authors claim that in order to do this, it is necessary to consider the lives of their subjects according to the understanding of freedom denoted by the period in question. Given this, any review of the book should focus on how it is able to provide a convincing description of what the authors term genuinely “multi-racial society,” together with the manner in which this
In the case of Amanda America Dickson, “her personal identity was ultimately bounded by her sense of class solidarity with her father, that is, by her socialization as David Dickson’s daughter, her gender role as a lady, and her racial definition as a person to whom racial categories did not apply.”1 This may mean that her freedom was less proscribed by race because she was not a male seeking political advantage. Some people of mixed-race in the nineteenth century South managed to create a personal identity and
C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow looks into the emergence of the Jim Crow laws beginning with the Reconstruction era and following through the Civil Rights Movement. Woodward contends that Jim Crow laws were not a part of the Reconstruction or the following years, and that most Jim Crow laws were in place in the North at that particular time. In the South, immediately after the end of slavery, most white southerners, especially the upper classes, were used to the presence and proximity of African Americans. House slaves were often treated well, almost like part of the family, or a favored pet, and many upper-class southern children were raised with the help of a ‘mammy’ or black nursery- maid. The races often mixed in the demi- monde, and the cohabitation of white men and black women were far from uncommon, and some areas even had spe...
Thornton, Russell, Matthew C Snipp, and Nancy Breen. The Cherokees: A Population History Indians of the Southeast. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
As the United States developed and grew, upward mobility was central to the American dream. It was the unstated promise that no matter where you started, you had the chance to grow and proceed beyond your initial starting point. In the years following the Civil War, the promise began to fade. People of all races strived to gain the representation, acknowledgement and place in this society. To their great devastation, this hope quickly dwindled. Social rules were set out by the white folk, and nobody could rise above their social standing unless they were seen fit to be part of the white race. The social group to be impacted the most by this “social rule” was the African Americans. Black folk and those who were sympathetic to the idea of equal rights to blacks were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan. (Burton, 1998) The turning point in North Carolina politics was the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898. It was a very bold and outrageous statement from the white supremacists to the black folk. The Democratic white supremacists illegally seized power from the local government and destroyed the neighborhood by driving out the African Americans and turning it from a black-majority to a white-majority city. (Class Discussion 10/3/13) This event developed the idea that even though an African American could climb a ladder to becoming somebody in his or her city, he or she will never become completely autonomous in this nation. Charles W. Chesnutt discusses the issue of social mobility in his novel The Marrow of Tradition. Olivia Carteret, the wife of a white supremacist is also a half-sister to a Creole woman, Janet Miller. As the plot develops, we are able to see how the social standing of each woman impacts her everyday life, and how each woman is ...
Robert Rogers was born in Methuen, Massachusetts on November 7th, 1731 to a family of immigrants from Ireland, James Rogers and Mary McFatridge Rogers (Anderson, 2005). Robert was in the middle of the pack among his 4 brothers and 2 sisters (Ross, 2009). When Rogers was 8 years old, James Rogers, always considering himself as a lucky man, uprooted his family and move north to the Great Meadow area of New Hampshire where James help founded a small settlement the call “Munterloney” (Ross, 2009). A unsettled area in New Hampshire, Robert spent most of his childhood in this large Indian Territory where he learned traits like carving splint brooms from the local Indians (Ross, 2009), a trait well known by children in the this outskirts towns of
Bibliography: Bibliography 1. John Majewski, History of the American Peoples: 1840-1920 (Dubuque: Kent/Hunt Publishing, 2001). 2.
The twentieth century was a time of tremendous change that commenced with WWI and the Great Depression. While WWI brought countless deaths, the Great Depression affected both urban and rural Americans. Yet, underlying these devastating events was the abuse of black Americans. Both whites and blacks had to cope with the major occurrences of the time, but blacks also faced strife from whites themselves. During the early part of the twentieth century, white Americans Russell Baker and Mildred Armstrong Kalish gained kindred attributes from their families, especially in comparison to that of Richard Wright, a black American. The key differences between the experience of whites and blacks can be found within the mentality of the family, the extent to which they were influenced by their families in their respective lives, and the shielding from the outside world, or lack thereof, by their families. Through the compelling narrations of these three authors, readers can glimpse into this racially divided world from the perspective of individuals who actually lived through it.
In efforts to examine how genealogy evolved into its modern manifestation, Weil’s, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America is a “genealogy of genealogy.” Family Trees is a study of genealogy in America and its reciprocal effects on society. Weil divides his book into four chronological regimes of genealogy in America, each presented with their own set of problems. These problems did not just disappear after each
In his book, The Miseducation of the Negro, Carter G. Woodson addresses many issues that have been and are still prevalent in the African American community. Woodson believed that in the midst of receiving education, blacks lost sight of their original reasons for becoming educated. He believed that many blacks became educated only to assimilate to white culture and attempt to become successful under white standards, instead of investing in their communities and applying their knowledge to help other blacks.