One Drop of Blood The American Misadventure of Race

by Malcomson, Scott

• ISBN13: 9780374527945
• ISBN10: 0374527946
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-10-17
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Why has a nation founded upon precepts of freedom and universal humanity continually produced, through its preoccupation with race, a divided and constrained populace? Scott Malcomson's search for an answer took him across the country--to the Cherokee Nation, an all-black town, and a white supremacist enclave in Oklahoma--back though the tangled red-white-and-black history of America from colonial times onward, and to his own childhood in racially fractured Oakland, California. By not only recounting our shared tragicomedy of race but helping us to own it--even to embrace it--this important book offers us a way at last to move beyond it.

Author Biography

Scott Malcomson's previous books are Tuturani: A Political Journey in the Pacific Islands and Borderlands: Nation and Empire. From 1984 to 1996 he worked at The Village Voice in a variety of jobs, including a seven-year stint as senior editor at the VLS.

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 Future State'' Some Twenteith-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)
Acknowledgements	569	(2)
Index	571