Race Mixing, Sex, and Slavery....
Back when I was in College 10 years ago I took an African American Studies course, which 70% was basically about slavery, and I HATE learning about slavery and slaves, unless they were extraordinary by MY standards. I hated learning about slave masters, white people, slaves, plantations, cotton, whippings, lynching, and boats - ALL of that shit got on my nerves.
All of it was totally uninteresting and depressing. I only got interested in the out of control phenomenon of race mixing in those times. That’s how they classified it, “Out of Control”. I read a statistic that during The Reconstruction period, there were over a Million mulattos, quadroons and octoroon slaves all over the world. And I presented a hypothesis to my professor as to why there were so many, and he argued that I was dead wrong!
See, I proposed that the out of control Phenomenon of race mixing had little to do with sex, rape, or even love. This was institutional Race mixing for financial gain and psychological control. Black people have the hardest time believing that maybe, just maybe, some of this race mixing in slavery times wasn’t physically forced. Now don’t get me wrong, it was all forced, but not always physically forced.
So fast forward 10 years, I’m watching a documentary on the BBC that proved that my Hypothesis was RIGHT. The documentary stated that it was more profitable to sell Mixed Race slaves because they wanted slaves that could be multi functional, docile, and also fit well into society, and the Phenomenon was called “The Tar Brush”.
This is how the “Tar Brush” worked....
If a slave girl agreed to breed with her Master, his family member or his friends; she would gain her freedom or be paid financially for her domestic work. The slave girl would usually be around 13 or 14, so she would still be too young to be on her own, so she’d usually just continue working for her Master, while her offspring were sold off. Some slave girls would have 10 and 12 kids by their slave masters. It was a booming business.
The practice still continued all they way up to 1960 in Australia with the Aborigines. The British would go into those villages and steal the girls and breed them with white men. A FABULOUS movie staring Kenneth Branagh goes into great detail about the practice of “forced mix breeding”. It’s called "The Rabbit Proof Fence".
It's sad but really good!
All of it was totally uninteresting and depressing. I only got interested in the out of control phenomenon of race mixing in those times. That’s how they classified it, “Out of Control”. I read a statistic that during The Reconstruction period, there were over a Million mulattos, quadroons and octoroon slaves all over the world. And I presented a hypothesis to my professor as to why there were so many, and he argued that I was dead wrong!
See, I proposed that the out of control Phenomenon of race mixing had little to do with sex, rape, or even love. This was institutional Race mixing for financial gain and psychological control. Black people have the hardest time believing that maybe, just maybe, some of this race mixing in slavery times wasn’t physically forced. Now don’t get me wrong, it was all forced, but not always physically forced.
So fast forward 10 years, I’m watching a documentary on the BBC that proved that my Hypothesis was RIGHT. The documentary stated that it was more profitable to sell Mixed Race slaves because they wanted slaves that could be multi functional, docile, and also fit well into society, and the Phenomenon was called “The Tar Brush”.
This is how the “Tar Brush” worked....
If a slave girl agreed to breed with her Master, his family member or his friends; she would gain her freedom or be paid financially for her domestic work. The slave girl would usually be around 13 or 14, so she would still be too young to be on her own, so she’d usually just continue working for her Master, while her offspring were sold off. Some slave girls would have 10 and 12 kids by their slave masters. It was a booming business.
The practice still continued all they way up to 1960 in Australia with the Aborigines. The British would go into those villages and steal the girls and breed them with white men. A FABULOUS movie staring Kenneth Branagh goes into great detail about the practice of “forced mix breeding”. It’s called "The Rabbit Proof Fence".
It's sad but really good!
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