Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World

Introduction: Race and Identity in the New World

1 Introduction Race and Identity in the New World FRANKLIN W. KNIGHT R ace and identity constitute an important dimension of political discourse throughout the world in the twenty-first century. Both concepts are closely affiliated with ethnicity. This should hardly be surprising. The process of globalization has dramatically intensified in the past few decades and increasingly more people are on the move. At the same time, the increase in national boundaries has accentuated national designations as well as the identities of individuals. Presently national identities are proliferating as new nation-states are created. These newly designated states represent convenient labels for groups that simultaneously may already have had one or more other identities. Some of these identities may be racially derived. Some identities are based on ethnicity. Some are merely geographical. Multiple identities assumed greater importance after the eighteenth century when language began to be more precisely defined. By then the number of nation-states was less but the problem of race and identity, as the contributors point out in this volume, became increasingly exacerbated. It should not be surprising that problems of race and identity are extremely acute throughout the Americas. The American experience created a sharp break in the history of the modern world, bringing into the European consciousness a vast productive region with diverse peoples never before identified by anyone.This was noted emphatically by the Abbé Raynal when he began his influential multivolume history in the eighteenth century: “No event has been so interesting to mankind in general,and to the inhabitants of Europe in particular, as the discovery of the New World, and the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope. It gave rise to a revolution in commerce, and in the power of nations; as well as in the manners, industry, and governments of the whole 2 F R A N K L I N W. K N I G H T world.” While Raynal and other of his admirers like Adam Smith focused on the commercial , epidemiological, botanical, and political revolutions that followed in the wake of the European expansion, they overlooked an equally important demographical revolution also taking place. Between the late fifteenth and the late eighteenth centuries several groups of Europeans, led by the Spanish and Portuguese, had established overseas colonies and empires throughout the Americas, destroying or pushing aside the indigenous inhabitants. Europeans moved overseas to these newly discovered locales in large numbers. But their numbers were dwarfed by the Africans transported to provide the greater proportion of the physical labor required to establish viable colonies.At the same time, both immigrant and indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a newly created population of offspring that resulted from the mixing of all the groups. The gradual integration of the Americas into the European-Asian-African world systems had profound, long-term global consequences. The Europeans renamed the newly discovered hemisphere America; they called the indigenous inhabitants Americans . Without their knowledge and consent the original population obtained a new permanent identity. But the American experience was influential not only in the construction of new identities but also in the transformation of language as well as the cosmography of the Europeans. The Americas would have reciprocal impact on the rest of the world. Eventually they developed an autonomous self-consciousness that started to manifest itself politically with the independence of the United States from Great Britain in – and the independence of Haiti from France in –. Haiti and the United States of America represented pioneer forms of state formation. They also became models and catalysts for new political identities. The United States currently manifests a virtual obsession with the hyphenated identity. Many citizens want to reflect their origins in their identity and the simple term “American” is commonly being expanded. The result has been a plethora of “hyphenated Americans”: Irish Americans, Anglo-Americans, Chicano Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, Black Americans, Afro-Americans, African Americans (these three representative of the same ethnic group), Arab Americans, Iraqi Americans, Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Italian Americans, and German Americans . The list seems inexhaustible. With the Census Bureau insisting on a baffling, inscrutable, and changing array of ethnic designations about every ten years, the country has become a veritable demographic alphabet soup. The result, however, does not necessarily clarify identity. Nor is the United States alone.The disintegration of the Soviet Union unleashed the previously controlled and superficial...