Blurring the Lines of Race & Freedom: Mulattoes & Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America by A.B. Wilkinson (review)

In Blurring the Lines of Race & Freedom, A.B. Wilkinson adds to a growing field of scholarship questioning the genesis of ideas and production of race and social differences in the trans-Atlantic world. Wilkinson’s detailed examination looks at the ways mixed-heritage people—or individuals with at least two ancestors from predominantly African, European, and Indigenous backgrounds—shaped legal and cultural understandings of interracial mixture in British North America. He focuses on the meeting of communities around the Tidewater Chesapeake, the Carolina Lowcountry, and the English sugar and coffee plantations in the Caribbean. Despite legislators in these regions governing monoracial categories of colonial subjects as “white,” “Indian,” or “Negro,” Wilkinson convincingly argues that people from these blended ancestries and their families complicated racially bound labor systems of enslavement and indentured servitude. In so doing, they slowed down elites’ establishment of a solid racial hierarchy from the seventeenth century until the eve of the American Revolution.

Wilkinson’s sources range across multiple genres that reveal Anglo-Americans’ increasing hostility towards people of blended ancestries and interracial relationships. His interrogation of hundreds of fugitive slave and servant advertisements shows some of mixed-heritage people’s strategies for performing freedom and racial passing. Wilkinson uses many court cases showing that mixed-heritage people could successfully challenge the conditions of their labor arrangements through freedom petitions, particularly when Anglo-Americans’ racial thought was in its infancy and when colonial authorities held more lenient notions of hypodescent, a concept that served as a forerunner for the United States’s one-drop rule and miscegenation laws. Whether someone achieved manumission or lessened indentured service contracts was often based on perceptions about an individual’s proximity to European heritage, and most likely passed on through their mother’s lineage.

Proceeding chronologically, the first half of Wilkinson’s book looks at the English origins and maintenance of racial hypodescent ideology. Since the earliest settlement foundings along the Tidewater Chesapeake, colonists sought to govern interpersonal and sexual relationships of African, European and Indigenous inhabitants, but were quickly confronted with questions about the efficacy of their enforcement. Usually, the English deferred to most inhabitants’ “socially inferior lineage,” however, hypodescent was a malleable concept that authorities enforced asymmetrically based on local attitudes towards racial difference and freedom. While nearly every English colony from New England to Antigua and Bermuda had laws governing interracial sex and procreation, colonists’ relationships to mixed-heritage neighbors largely determined whether administrators prosecuted offenders. Individuals, families, and communities, even in the colonies with the harshest penalties (e.g., Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina) depended on one another for mutual survival, and so it was not uncommon for colonists to hold contradictory opinions about whether mixed-heritage couples and families should have been penalized.

The book’s second half moves from the legal and social foundations of racial hypodescent to a focus on people of mixed-ancestry’s life struggles, self-identification, and cultural ties. Wilkinson argues that mixed-heritage operated at the crossroads of a “racial middle ground,” allowing people to emphasize certain racialized traits over others depending on their lineage, labor status, cultural contexts, regional location, and perceptions about physical appearance (129). For instance, mixed-heritage fugitives escaping bondage tended to avoid association with African ancestry when possible and instead worked to pass as “white,” “Indian,” and, most of all, free. Wilkinson points out that exclusive focus on runaway advertisements offer a male-centered view of racial passing practices. He expands on less investigated realms of mixed-heritage identity construction, particularly with regard to how women of color perceived themselves, married and forged sexual relationships and other domestic partnerships, and raised and pursued freedom for their heirs through the courts. The acute hostility enslavers, bondholders, and overseers inflicted on mixed-heritage women was precisely because of the possibility that one day they could birth free “white” children. As a...