One Drop of Blood : The American Misadventure of Race

by Malcomson, Scott L.

• ISBN13: 9780374240790
• ISBN10: 0374240795
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781429936071
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-10-01
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)

Summary

Why has a nation dedicated to freedom and universal ideals continually produced, through its obsession with race, an unhappily divided people? Scott L. Malcomson's search for an answer took him to communities across the country and deep into our past. From Virginia colonists "going native" onward, Malcomson argues, Americans, in their mania for self-invention, pioneered an idea of race that gave it unprecedented moral and social importance. A parade of idealists, pragmatists, and opportunists--from Ben Franklin to Tecumseh, Washington Irving to Bobby Seale--defined "Indian," "black," and "white" in relation to one another and in service to the aspirations and anxieties of each era. Yet these definitions have never been gladly adopted by the people they were meant to describe. To escape the limits of race, Americans have continually attempted to escape from other races--by founding all-black towns, for example--or to nullify race by confining, eliminating, or absorbing one another. From Puritan enslavement of Indians to the dramas of separatism we enact daily in our schools and neighborhoods, Americans have perpetually engaged with and fled from other Americans along racial lines. By not only recounting our shared tragicomedy but helping us to own it--even to embrace it--this redemptive book offers a way to move forward.

Table of Contents

This Business of Angels	3	(6)
I. AN INDIAN COUNTRY	9	(114)
``All Things in Aboundance''
Colonial America as Eden	21	(18)
``A New Kind of Disorder''
A Cherokee Utopia and the Rise of Racial Separatism 1730--1830	39	(27)
``Welcome, Negro, Welcome''
The Indian as Slave and Slaveholder	66	(32)
``Grand and Great---the Further State''
Some Twentieth-Century Solutions to the Indian Problem	98	(17)
Homelands	115	(8)
II. THE REPUBLIC OF NEW AFRICA	123	(140)
``The Grand Ham''
Racial Imagination in the Old World	133	(27)
``Coal Black Is Better Than Another Hue''
Love and Race in Shakespeare's England	160	(25)
``We Can Be as Separate as the Fingers''
Segregation from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age	185	(35)
The New Negro
The Beautiful Despair of the Harlem Renaissance	220	(20)
``This Special Way of Life''	240	(23)
III. White Flight	263	(132)
``The Essence of Whiteness''
Spain, England, and the Colors of Empire	277	(15)
``The Freest of All Human Beings''
Westward Expansion and the Price of Liberty	292	(28)
The Ethiopian Opera
White Masks in Blackface Minstrelsy	320	(26)
``Old Racial Cries, Old Racial Ties''	346	(49)
IV. A Family in Time	395	(124)
A Present from John Sutter	403	(33)
Seize the Time	436	(29)
Have Mercy	465	(26)
Down to the River	491	(28)
Notes	519	(50)
Acknowldgements	569	(2)
Index	571