Old Mix Americans

Tiffany Trump (the less well-known “other” child), whose ancestry includes “non-white” Locklears of the Lumbee people

An Old Mix American is a person with many of their direct ancestral lines already present in the Americas by the 1600s.

Old Mix Americans are characterised by having multiple ancestral lines derived from non-European population groups – people who would have usually been considered “non-white” or “persons of color” under the British colonial (and later US American) racial caste system.

It is important to note that many of these “persons of color” also arrived from Europe.  Many European Romani and Jewish people, for example, were often perceived by the dominant “white” caste as “non-white”.

The majority of Old Mix Americans are now found scattered throughout the USA and often choose to present as “white”, following decades of intermarriage with European-Americans.

Many population groups ancestral to Old Mix Americans still survive in rural places where the European-American influence has been less pronounced, and each community or extended kinship group has its own unique ethnic history.

The largest and most well-known Old Mix American groups include the Lumbee of North Carolina, the Redbones of Louisiana and Texas, and the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia.

Often described as “tri-racial isolate” communities under American “race” classifications (which traditionally only allowed for “white”, “black”, and “indigenous” categories), the ancestry of these groups can include people from a myriad of backgrounds – indigenous North American, indigenous South American, indigenous Caribbean, North African, sub-Saharan African, Jewish, Malagasi, Sami, Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, Romani, East Indian, and Asian.