"Loving" Movie Brings Up Centuries Old Travesty of how Indigenous and African People Were Erased From History

“I am not black.” Mildred Loving

As soon as Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement hear the words, “I am not black” come from a person with a visible volume of melanin content, it evokes generations of pain, often voiced in anger. Colorism is as pervasive today as it has ever been in the United States. Long before Spike Lee’s “wannabees and jiggaboos”, before paper bag tests, dark skinned families shunned their light-skinned family members out of shame and light-skinned family members shunned their dark-skinned families to “pass” in European culture. Before there was even an America, there was the legislation that in a significant way, set those wheels in motion.

Pre-Colonial Africans in the Land that Would Be America

When the first English landed on the shores of what would become the Virginia colony, they were met by people who looked distinctively different than themselves due in large part to their darker complexion and other physical features. Per other European colonists, specifically the Portuguese, Spanish and French that preceded the English, the indigenous people had been joined with people of African descent in shared resistance against the Europeans for more than 100 years before the establishment of the Jamestown colony. Even many of those Africans who came as indentured servants assimilated into the indigenous tribes of Virginia.

Some Africans attempted to assimilate into the English culture and become colonists. For a brief time, they enjoyed the same benefits as English citizens. Public records reflect an Angolan colonist named Anthony Johnson receiving tax exempt status in 1653 for his non-laboring wife, the same way that English men received for the women in their households. He also received a tax break when his plantation experienced a fire. By 1668, however a new law was passed that stated, "Negro women not exempted from tax," in a series of legislation passed over several years that were designed to erode the rights of Africans in the judicial evolution into the slave code of 1705.

The Extinguishment of Aboriginals and Invention of Negroes and Blacks in Colonial America

Although the brutally oppressive language of the slave code is often most discussed, it is the time-honored tradition of legal precedent that plagued the Loving’s and engenders continued community anguish some four hundred years later. The defining legal moment that marked a turning point in America’s tragic intersection with ethnicity was passed in 1682. According to the University of Virginia’s, “Virginia Center for Digital History”, the law effectively “joined Native Americans and Africans into one racial category-"negroes and other slaves." Hence the American negro was officially created. Certain to make sure that no one would ever again be confused as to who was to be considered a negro, the legislation went on to name the members of the ethnic groups that would cease to exist and no longer be formally or informally recognized. Steps, had already been taken to remove references to national identities on the African continent from the sociopolitical lexicon. Negro, a word that found its origins in the 16th century Spanish and Portuguese cultures to describe people with darker complexions, was by then generally accepted over anything related to one being African, which had not been used in legislative for decades. What became necessary was to also include others, whether native born or imported who had assimilated into the indigenous populations and any offspring that had come from those unions into the classification of negro. As such, the legislation went to great specificity to name Negroes, Moors, Mollattoes or Indians and determined them to be “deemed and taken to be slaves to all intents and purposes, any law, usage or custome to the countrary notwithstanding.” From the moment the ink dried, the creation of a new people, known as “Negro” was reified and the law shifted its attention to enforcement of the institution of enslavement.

“And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid that all servants except Turkes and Moores, whilest in amity with his majesty which from and after publication of this act shall be brought or imported into this country, either by sea or land, whether Negroes, Moors, Mollattoes or Indians, who and whose parentage and native country are not christian at the time of their first purchase of such servant by some christian, although afterwards, and before such their importation and bringing into this country, they shall be converted to the christian faith; and all Indians which shall hereafter be sold by our neighbouring Indians, or any other trafiqueing with us as for slaves are hereby adjudged, deemed and taken to be slaves to all intents and purposes, any law, usage or custome to the countrary notwithstanding.” Source: Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, vol. 2, pp. 491-492

Thomas Jefferson and the Legitimization of America’s Land Transfer

A century later, the next generation of leaders today often called the founding fathers, set about to make sure that no claim to the land upon which they had settled could ever be made. The genocide of indigenous people was vital to that effort and the forced amalgamation of the melanin-based ethnic groups had served to get through the foundational period of the colonies but wasn’t not seen as a permanent solution in the establishment of the new nation. No one understood better than Thomas Jefferson that it was far more difficult to walk back history once it has been solidified in the minds of the population, than it is to document that which you intend to withstand the test of time.

The Necessity of European Government

As only a trained scholar, attorney and architect would, Jefferson carefully laid the foundation for history that marginalized most and retained a few to legitimize his argument that the indigenous people had either succumbed to their infirmities, forged welcome alliances with the new “Americans” or decimated themselves by merging with the African negro. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia”, Jefferson asserted that the “aboriginals” were a savage people who spoke many languages, but with no government could not even get along well enough to sustain themselves. Despite his minimalization of their ability to govern, he went lengths to extend the appearance of honoring the land transactions with the indigenous people as legitimate conveyances. In 1793, he wrote to then President Washington, “The Indians had the full, undivided and independent sovereignty as long as they choose to keep it, and this might be forever.” Just ten years later however, as America was rapidly expanding he said to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, “There is perhaps no method more irresistible of obtaining lands from them than by letting them get in debt, which when too heavy to be paid, they are always willing to lop off by a cession of land.”

The Minimalization of Sovereign State Status

Jefferson did seem to slightly lament the fact that they had “extinguished” so many of the tribes before they had an opportunity to properly record their existence. Somewhat of an archaeological enthusiast it also served his purpose to minimize the monuments and artifacts of the indigenous people to further legitimize the American land grab. “I know of no such thing existing as an Indian monument: for I would not honour with that name arrow points, stone hatchets, stone pipes, and half-shapen images.” In his typical scholarly fashion, he went on to identify the tribes that he thought were worthy of being acknowledged as legitimate aboriginal groups and specifically identified those groups who appeared to have the least features that were similar to negroes and who had maintained their cultural tradition.

The Illegitimacy of the Indigenous and African People as a People

To Jefferson, once those criteria appeared to be compromised, such as in the case of the Mattaponies who by then he said, had “more negro than Indian blood in them”, who had “lost their language, (had) reduced themselves, by voluntary sales, to about fifty acres of land”, who he claimed, were also were joined by the Pamunkies, who were “tolerably pure from mixture with other colours”, and as “some of the older ones among them preserve their language in a small degree,” “the last vestiges on earth, as far as we know, of the Powhatan language” he only needed to take a census of those groups that remained ‘pure’. For those, after exhausting the options to acquire their land through sales “transactions” and theft by the deception of debt he surmised another strategy to gain control of their land, which was to intermarry with them. “You will unite yourselves with us and we shall all be Americans. You will mix with us by marriage. Your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great Island.” Over the course of the next two centuries, as a strategy for gaining access to land rights, intermarriage between people of Indigenous descent with Europeans did happen. While those Indigenous people who intermarried with Europeans did not immediately lose their indigenous identity or ties to the land, even though relations between indigenous and African people had long preceded that of the Europeans no such acknowledgement of those unions were made.

Walter Plecker and the Racial Integrity Act

Just 15 years before Mildred Jeter was born in 1939, Walter Plecker, a eugenics enthusiast who was fascinated with Adolph Hitler and in 1935 complimented the German 3rd Reich for exterminating 600 children who were born of mixed German and Algerian ethnicity in Germany, wrote "I hope this work is complete and not one has been missed. "I sometimes regret that we have not the authority to put some measures in practice in Virginia." Unable to outright murder people, Plecker made it his business to continue the three-hundred-year-old commitment to maintaining the European hold on America by strictly enforcing the falsification of vital records to ensure that no evidence of indigenous ancestry was reflected in the public record. Walter threatened, cajoled and harassed any person of color who attempted to hold on to their indigenous ancestry when they gave birth or got married. He claimed that people were attempting to circumvent the law by claiming an ethnic identity other than one of African descent and was obsessed with maintaining “ethnic purity”. Even long after his death as late as 1971, hospitals would still refuse to allow a mother who appeared to be ‘negro’ to state her baby’s ethnicity as Indian or Native American. As such, due to the subversive acts started by the Virginia House of Burgesses, that were continued by Thomas Jefferson and carried on by Walter Plecker there is today, no such thing as an indigenous person in Virginia, the founding English colony of America who is understood to have as much as ‘one drop’ of African blood. By the time the Racial Integrity Act was fully repealed in 1975 and although Virginia officially apologized in 1979, the damage was already done. What Plecker’s pseudo-science did not accomplish, centuries of policy and legislation has consequently erased any indigenous identity from the cultural memory of these pre-colonial people. Strangely, despite the lengths to which the Commonwealth went to deny indigenous identity to most, the law was able to protect the rights of those who claim to have descended from the child that European settlers called Pocahontas.

Loving v. Virginia

By the time, Mildred Jeter was born in Central Point, Virginia, she had no chance of defending her Indigenous ancestry in the Commonwealth except by oral tradition. Even though she stated her indigenous descent on her District of Columbia marriage license, she had grown up culturally identifying with the negro community. Her father identifed himself as being of Indigenous and African descent, but her mother identifying as only indigenous, cited indigenous ancestry on their marriage license. Both were still culturally identified with and in the negro community. In Virginia, there were few alternatives for them to do anything other than identify as negro publicly, even if the family’s oral tradition had given Mildred a different understanding of her history. When the legal case was brought, the miscegeny laws could only address the interpretation of the law as it was written which assumed that there were no Indigenous people of color in Virginia. Given the unabating action that had occurred throughout history it was a fact, even if it wasn’t the truth. So even as Mildred Loving was vindicated in her right to marry a European man, she was also vindicated in the state’s default acknowledgement of her indigenous ancestry by the same decision.

Still, despite that corporate vindication for all Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement, the politics of ethnicity still opens gaping wounds. It is not only the issue of ‘black’ and ‘white’ marriage, but also of whether to identify as anything else simultaneously diminishes the pride of being of African descent. The very implication of ‘Indian in our family” or being of mixed cultural heritage to some is a slap in the face to all that it means to be black; a denial of the truth that ‘one drop’ is all it takes in America to relegate one to the bottom of the caste. It is a mixed bag; of rejection of false cultural norms that were assigned to Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement by force, but also of embrace as a defiant stand to be proud of the tradition with which they most identify.

Reconciling Science with History

Some believe that the matter was settled a few years ago, when a story by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. pointed out that most Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement have very little Indigenous ancestry. The reason they offer, is that Indigenous and African people largely never met one another in post-colonial America. Genetic research is still an evolutionary science. According to Joanna Mountain, a geneticist and senior director of research at 23andMe, determining the right angle to enter the gene pool of the US given the high percentage of migratory populations was a challenge. Until recently, “human population geneticists have tended to ignore the U.S.,” she said in a 2014 article in Science Magazine. “The country was “considered to be kind of messy in terms of genetics.” Today, the ‘complex genetic ancestry’ is less of a challenge due the company’s huge database of genetic information.

Anecdotal references to “hair and cheekbones” are superfluous in the context of documented legislative history. The argument against there being any significance to the Indigenous ancestry of people of African descent in the United States adopts the European political construct of blood quantum. That methodology has historically sought to belie the gravity of marginalization and oppression in the US, but in this case the science lines up perfectly. Per Gate’s report, if “you have 5 percent Native American ancestry in your admixture result, that means you had one Native American ancestor four to five generations back (120 to 150 years ago,). If you have 2 percent Native American ancestry, you had one such ancestor on your family tree five to nine generations back (150 to 270 years ago,). One percent of Native American ancestry means that this ancestor entered your bloodline six to 10 generations back (180 to 300 years ago).” Dating back to the November 1682, Virginia colony ethnic homogenization law is 334 years, placing the history of Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement safely within the parameters of the aforementioned percentages. What it is does not do however, is erase the travesty that occurred that year and every year before and until 1975.

“Eric Foner of Columbia University agrees that opportunities for mixing most likely would have occurred very early in American history: “Presumably, blacks and Native Americans would be in proximity to one another during the Colonial era—before Indians were pushed further inland. Some slaves escaped to find refuge with Indian tribes, especially the Seminoles.” Foner points to 17th-century New England, Virginia and Upstate New York as where mixing might have happened, because “many slaves were said to escape to Indian nations [located at these places] during the 17th and 18th centuries.” High Cheekbones and Straight Black Hair? 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: Why most black people aren’t “part Indian,” despite family lore. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., December 29, 2014

Researchers that Gates interviewed acknowledged that much of “the chances of mixing were greatest in the 17th and early-18th century, especially before the American Revolution.” A solely ‘quantum blood theory’ consideration of Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement without the benefit of sound historical analysis can only speak to ‘hair and cheekbones’ but it completely misses the most significant historical point. That perspective absolutely serves the intent of the colonial government, Jefferson and Walter Plecker which is to erase a diverse community of people from America’s history. Legislative history has proven and now science is verifying that the story of those people does not begin nor end with enslavement. Certainly, as the slave trade increased, and the remaining indigenous people were forced further into the United States, there was less interaction between indigenous and African people in the later centuries except as they were assimilated to the surviving tribes. Therefore, it’s not hard to understand why most today would not possess extremely high genetic values of indigenous blood, but that has nothing to do with yesterday. Gate’s report cites 19 percent of Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement still possess enough DNA to likely date back to the travesty of colonial legislative genocide. Flippant disregard of their history is to ignore American history, which is precisely what the progenitors of that miscarriage of justice intended.

What is safe to assume is that genetic memory is real. While language may be lost, cultural tradition may have been stripped away, the connection to a legacy that is perceived even if not fully comprehended is real. Until this reality could be uncovered, no amount of policy or legislation in time could erase what people understand about themselves, even if they could not come to terms with it. Were there no basis for the shared cultural identity of Indigenous and African people, there would have been no need for more than 300 years of relentless action taken to ensure that no trace of that connection would endure. And yet, it has endured in the hearts of their descendants.