Actor and musician John Christopher “Johnny” Depp

Is it any wonder that most “Old Mix Americans” eventually declared their heritage under simplistic or ridiculous “race” or color labels?

If there was ever any doubt that in the USA, “white” has always been a social category masquerading as a legitimate biological category, consider the following:

Why are Americans who claim mixed ancestry always on the receiving end of vitriolic attacks from all sides?

When public figures such as Senator Elizabeth Warren or Johnny Depp mention, claim, honor (or trade upon?) their ethnically-mixed ancestry, all hell breaks loose.

The American right wing howls, because as the inventors of “identity politics”, their forefathers decreed that the world is divided between Black, Red, Brown or Yellow Asian, and White pseudo-scientific “races”.

In this universe of the far right, to be “Black” means a person must be descended from the slaves of “White Folks”.

This is of course a caste or social rank thing…

To be “White” in this conjured reality, a person needn’t be “White” per se, in the sense of actual skin shade.  Being “White” means “not being provable or seen as descended from slaves“.

To be “Indian” requires a person to be frozen in time, to be a living relic of the frontier era and John Wayne films.  Again, ethnicity is defined in terms related to so-called “White Folks”.  “Indians” are symbols, icons.   Their symbolic meaning resides in their having been “worthy adversaries” for “White Folks” to excel against.

The American left is equally blameworthy, projecting all manner of neo-hippy imaginings and spiritual nature longings upon indigenous peoples.  This is simply an American version of what the great Palestinian writer Edward Said once described as “Orientalism”, in which the West projects its own innermost desires onto other cultures.  Modern “Indians”, at best, are allowed to appear in films, media, and memes always mouthing wise platitudes about “The Great Spirit/The Environment/Mother Earth” and other suspiciously “liberal” concerns.

This tragic deformation of history and culture – and this reductive attitude to ethnicity – makes exceedingly coarse men like Donald Trump call women like Elizabeth Warren “a little Pocahontas“.

This state of play also makes the left (and many American Indians) scream “cultural appropriation”, when anyone seen as “white” claims indigenous ancestry.

This is because as stated at the beginning of this post, “white” is a social category rather than a biological or “racial” category.  Racists only pretend that “race” exists in the scientific realm so they can act as Pontius Pilate, washing their hands of responsibility for the thing they’ve created to justify human wickedness.

Fake science becomes a sort of Deus ex machina. 

“We didn’t invent race!  Nature did.  It’s not our fault nature made some races inferior to others.”

*****

In the USA, Johnny Depp and Elizabeth Warren are both considered pretty much “white”.

BUT BECAUSE IT’S A CULTURAL OR SOCIAL CATEGORY, NOT A GENETIC OR BIOLOGICAL CATEGORY, believers in “blood” race categories get extremely angry.

Consider this from Wikipedia:

<In interviews in 2002 and 2011, Depp claimed to have Native American ancestry, saying: “I guess I have some Native American somewhere down the line. My great-grandmother was quite a bit of Native American. She grew up Cherokee or maybe Creek Indian. Makes sense in terms of coming from Kentucky, which is rife with Cherokee and Creek Indian”.

Depp’s claims came under scrutiny when Indian Country Today wrote that Depp had never inquired about his heritage or been recognized as a member of the Cherokee Nation. This led to criticism from the Native American community, as Depp has no documented Native ancestry, and Native community leaders consider him “a non-Indian” and a “pretendian”.>

What goes unsaid here is that Depp probably made no formal claims or enquiries about his folkloric indigenous ancestry, because he knows that he is not “culturally” Creek or Cherokee.

Are there plenty of “wannabe” Indians in the USA?  Sure.  But the more serious readers of history who note their indigenous ancestry are not the same as “wannabes” who practice a tawdry cultural appropriation.

And if self-appointed gatekeepers decide that “documented” indigenous ancestry is a pre-requisite for mentioning family folk memory, then half of Southern Appalachia will be forced to join the many multi-ethnic fools who claim “Scots-Irish” ethnicity.  And many do.

Depp is correct (even if by accident) in noting the historical fact of a large indigenous presence in Kentucky, even after “White” colonisation.  This writer has no idea whether Depp is aware of the likely “Black Dutch” Craft/Kraft family in his ancestry – people quite likely descended from German Sinti (Romani Gypsies).  His ancestry is also rife with Baileys and Coopers, families also quite likely to have English Romani roots.  This writer also suspects his Reno (Renaud?) and Whitaker people have roots in early mixed-ethnic Virginia and the Carolinas.

Whatever the facts of his ancestry, and whatever Depp’s motivations, he is quite correct in his assessment of the ethnic makeup of the old families of Eastern Kentucky, and it was the mixed-ethnic brown underclass traders, trappers, longhunters, and earliest squatters arriving in Kentucky and Tennessee from Virginia and the Carolinas who were most likely to intermarry with indigenous peoples.

American history is a mess.  Anyone who wants a simple version wants a bullshit version.

#BeforeWeWereWhite  #JohnnyDepp  #KentuckyHistory

Left: Portrait of Lovey Saylor made with camera lucida; right: illustration of man using camera lucida

Historians and genealogists digging through 19th century documents and family records will often stumble across images of people rendered in a curious style.

These portraits are neither freehand drawings, nor are they early photographs.

These pictures were made using an old optical drawing aid called a “camera lucida“, patented in the early 1800s, but clearly a development arising from the much older “camera obscura” of the 1500s.

This apparatus essentially involved using a lens to project an image of the sitter directly onto a flat surface where paper or canvas was placed, allowing the artist to trace and shade the subject with no need to be looking up constantly.

This of course allowed the artist to produce quite accurate images at greater speed than by conventional drawing or painting.

Because the camera lucida was also quite portable, artists were not bound to work by appointment in a workshop or studio.

Itinerant artists were thus able to offer relatively true-to-life portraits for a price well below that of oil or watercolor paintings, in the comfort and privacy of the customer’s home.

#BeforeWeWereWhite #ArtHistory #portraiture #CameraLucida

George Washington’s dentures

Friends and other people often ask me “What’s this thing with you and history?”

As if history is for fusty old geeks or weirdos – something to lump alongside stamp collecting, or being a Goth after the age of 50 (no offence intended to philatelists or middle-aged fans of The Cure).

When I was about 14 years old, my junior high school had try-outs for the annual school play.

That year, the play was a musical called “Let George Do It“, a typical piece of heartland American fluff purporting to tell the life of the first President of the USA, George Washington.

I went to the try-outs, and got “first stand-by”, or understudy.

My older brother got the actual part.  Any middle-kid with an older, more senior sibling will know how that felt…

Our school was in Phoenix, Arizona, and our school productions always went on the road.  That year, we were going to perform in a most unusual place.

The Hopi Indian Reservation in NE Arizona.

The distance between 1978 and 2022 is huge, and only the wisdom of age eventually made me look back with a combination of shame and horror at what American kids were indoctrinated, trained and employed to do back in the day.

Like some insane scene from a David Lynch film, we children were dispatched to impoverished Indian reservations as an all-singing, all-dancing propaganda corps for telling the vanquished all about the wonderfulness of their conquerors.

A breathtaking level of coarse and arrogant hubris, utterly impervious to irony.

George Washington was notorious for suffering from bad teeth.  By the age of 57 he was left with only a single tooth – a tooth which was removed to make way for the dentures which he wore for most of his latter years.

American schoolchildren of my generation took it as a cultural touchstone or piece of historical iconography that George Washington had wooden teeth.  This “factoid” was as true as the story of Pocahontas‘ deep infatuation with Captain Smith…

This is the weakness, the failure, of pseudo-history and foundational mythology.  By being so specific in their construction of a false history, the bluffers inadvertently reveal their hand.

The only reason American schoolchildren were taught about “wooden dentures”, was because the reality was too brutish and nasty for “The Father of a Nation”.

You see, George Washington wore dentures made from teeth extracted from animals and the mouths of his slaves – living and dead.

Unlike the purveyors of the “wooden teeth” story, historians rely on documentary evidence when constructing biographies.

And it’s all still there, in the letters and accounts of Mr. Washington himself.

May 8, 1784:

[paid 6 pounds 2 shillings to]

“Negroes for 9 Teeth, on acc[oun]t of the French Dentis [sic] Doctr Lemay [sic].” 

Of course, this sort of living cannibalism practiced by the wealthy upon the poor and disempowered is still with us today – whether it be the black market in organs, or the use of “surrogacy farms” in poorer countries, where young women are paid a relative pittance to carry and bear children for wealthy westerners.

A certain type of people need gods and heroes.  And it is those people who are most likely to bend facts and commit violence in defence of what they believe their gods and heroes represent.

In reality, gods and heroes are simply reflections of how some people wish to see themselves, and how they wish the world worked.

Ideologies always cause more pain and death than facts.

This is why facts matter, and it is the reason I “do” history.

©2020, revised 2022

#BeforeWeWereWhite #GeorgeWashington #slavery #dentures

Cotton Mather, Puritan minister and pioneer of smallpox inoculation

Regular followers of this blog will know that as a history geek, I never neglect an opportunity to frame today’s events through an historical lens.

Which is why, upon the occasion of receiving a Covid-19 booster vaccine, my mind wandered back to the 17th century…

*****

Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister in late 17th and early 18th century colonial New England.

He was also a mover behind the infamous Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

In hindsight, we might be tempted to judge harshly, and call him a superstitious fool.

But Mather was operating largely within the knowledge and understanding of the world available to most Anglo-American Protestants at the time.

I’m less inclined to give him a “pass” as a slaveholder – after all, Quakers and others at the time were loud-spoken in their denunciations of human bondage, so no, slavery wasn’t just considered “normal back then” by everyone.

But even Cotton Mather, believer in witchcraft, was able to set aside at least some of his preconceptions, when faced with new evidence.

You see, a slave who Mather named Onesimus (from Hebrew scripture, of course), was an African with experience in the treatment of smallpox – a disease which was then ravaging European, African, and Native American populations.

The European introduction of smallpox and other European diseases to America is believed to have killed up to 90% of Eastern indigenous Americans, who had virtually zero natural immunity to these new pathogens.

During one particularly severe smallpox outbreak, Onesimus suggested that Mather try using an African method for protection from the disease. That method, improved over time, is what we would later call “inoculation”.

Cotton Mather was wise enough to set aside his sense of cultural and intellectual superiority, and listen to his “servant”.

Mather opened his mind to EVIDENCE.

If only modern anti-vaxxers possessed the humility and wisdom of a witch-hunting preacher from three centuries ago…

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #CottonMather #Onesimus #smallpox #puritans #SalemWitchTrials

Direct Maternal Lineage of Marilyn Monroe

Legendary film star Marilyn Monroe was born in 1926 to a mother who was first married aged only 14.

We can only speculate what role, if any, this child marriage played in the later mental health issues which would plague Gladys Pearl Monroe.

Gladys was actually born in Mexico to railway worker Otis Monroe and his wife Della Mae Hogan, with the family moving to California around the year 1900.

Her marriage at 14 to Jasper Baker was “stormy”, with many later accounts accusing Baker of extreme domestic violence. Gladys appears to have already been pregnant at the time of her first marriage, giving birth to their first child, a son named Robert Baker, at the tender age of 15.

Gladys Monroe managed to extricate herself from this marriage at the age of 20, already a mother of two children, but her children were taken away by Jasper Baker.

Gladys Monroe married again in Los Angeles at the age of 22, this time to a man called Martin Mortenson.

The exact hows and whys are unclear, but this marriage also broke down, and Gladys became pregnant by a work colleague (and married man) named Charles Gifford in 1926.

The child of this tryst, Norma Jeane, took the surname of her mother’s still legal husband, and was officially born as “Norma Jeane Mortenson” on paper.

Norma Jeane had what can only be called a desperate and difficult childhood, with “home” a constant rotation between intermittent spells with her birth mother, and time spent with foster parents, work colleagues of her erratic mother, and in orphanages.

Norma Jeane’s mother would spend her first spell in an asylum for the insane when Norma Jeane was only nine years old, after suffering what was then called “a nervous breakdown”. Gladys Monroe would later be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia…

Norma Jeane would take various quasi-paternal surnames before settling on her mother’s maiden name – the name by which she would become famous.

While guessing ethnicity from photos is a fool’s game of phenotype analysis, I am still posting this series of photos because I have some familiarity with the Hogan and Nance families behind Marilyn Monroe’s mother, and her mother before her.  They are my own distant relations (Norma Jeane is an 8th cousin).  Lest this seem like a wish for fame by association, I will point out that Charles Manson is a closer 7th cousin…

Both the Nance and Hogan families of Marilyn Monroe‘s maternal lineage are multi-ethnic, “Old Mix American” people, and it is hard to ignore the possibility that the tragic lives of Norma Jeane and her mother were the product of trans-generational trauma caused at least in some part by the low status of multi-ethnic women in American history.

This hypothesis pales to insignificance when we admire the sheer charisma and comic genius this oft-times lost little girl managed to give the world.

#BeforeWeWereWhite #history #MarilynMonroe #genealogy