132 Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the Presentbecame black in the colonial era, economic advantage was
given to the master class, enabling the sexual promiscuity
of white males and the sexual oppression of black women
while normalizing the ownership of black women’s repro-
ductive labor.
In 1691, Virginia banned interracial sexual contact of
any kind, yet interracial sex between blacks and whites and
blacks and Native Americans was commonplace in the 17th
and 18th centuries. Th e Native American population had
drastically declined by the time Africans were imported in
any signifi cant number, and over time interracial relation-
ships with them would decline also. Th ere is extensive evi-
dence, however, of mixed-race children of Native American
and African descent in the 18th century, with many of the
early plantation estates established near or on well-worked
Indian lands. And much to the concern of the European
community, African Americans and Native Americans did
form alliances across racial boundaries, given that many
Native Americans were also enslaved. During and aft er the
18th century, laws concerning the enslavement of Native
Americans changed several times. Many states adopted laws
forbidding the enslavement of Native Americans, which led
many African Americans with Native American forbearers
to fi le freedom suits in court in the hopes of achieving their
liberation.
Aft er the American Revolution, racial prejudice against
blacks began to harden. Th e universal rejection of black
emancipation by Th omas Jeff erson, for example, was sus-
tained by the belief that if blacks were freed, an unaccept-
able blurring of racial defi nitions would occur in a society
of superior and inferior people. In 1787, Jeff erson wrote in
his Notes on the State of Virginia that these diff erences were
a complete obstacle to the black slave’s emancipation un-
less they were “removed beyond the reach of mixture” so
as not to pollute the purity of the Anglo-Saxon origins of
the American people. Additionally, Americans in the North
and the South believed that if blacks were emancipated, a
race war would occur that would lead to the extermination
of the inferior race.
Proslavery advocates used fears of racial mixing to
justify keeping slaves in bondage. By the 1830s they used
the word “amalgamation” extensively against abolitionists,
calling them “amalgamationists”; they claimed that aboli-
tionists encouraged the mixing of the races by promoting
social equality and freedom for the enslaved. Th ey usedPark, Robert, E. “Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups with
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Identity Formation in Early America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2005.
Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and
Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1 730– 181 0. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997.
Sobel, Mechal. Th e World Th ey Made Together: Black and White
Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1987.
Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Th eory & the Founda-
tion of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press,
1987.
Th ompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit. New York: Vintage
Books, 1983.
Th ornton, John. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic
World, 1 400– 1 680. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1992.
Walker, Sheila, ed. African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the
Creation of the Americas. New York: Rowman & Littlefi eld
Publishers, 2001.
Walsh, Lorena S. From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: Th e History of a
Virginia Slave Community. Charlottesville: University of Vir-
ginia Press, 1997.
Watson, R. L. “American Scholars and the Continuity of African
Culture in the United States.” Th e Journal of Negro History 63
(1978):375–86.
Amalgamation
“Amalgamation” was the fi rst term used to describe inter-
racial sexual contact. Early colonists believed that sexual
relations between people of diff erent races was disgraceful
behavior that shamed not only the English man or woman
but also the Christian Church. Th is was especially true
with respect to white–black sexual unions, which would
obscure cultural diff erences and undermine ideas of racial
superiority.
To be sure, laws enacted to prohibit amalgamation
were less concerned about white male off enses against
black women than they were about black men cohabitat-
ing with white women. Although all acts of illicit sexual
behavior out of wedlock were severely punished before
1662, the Virginia legislature made heritable bondage
certain and illicit sexual behavior race-based when they
ruled that the child of a black woman would always fol-
low the status of its mother. Because mixed-race people