In The Man Who Adores the Negro, Patrick Mullen talks about the historical scholarship of discourse on race relations, black folklore, the construction and self-representation of race, and the inextricable nature of “blackness” and “whiteness” in social constructions of reality. Mullen talks about how whiteness and blackness are two sides of the same coin; each uses the other as a way to draw out assumptions about itself. This can be seen in fiction and folklore scholarship when “as white scholars wrote about African Americans as folk, they not only created images of blackness, they also constructed whiteness since concepts of the two races were oppositionally determined” (Mullens 2008:7). The construction of “folk,” initially conceived by Europeans as applied to the peasant class of whom they could romanticize for their quaintness while still defining themselves against them as modern, quickly moved to incorporate African Americans along with the marginalized lower class whites in its American applications. The simultaneous romanticization and marginalization of blacks in folk scholarship as a result of the hegemonic nature of relations and scholarly discourse is a persistent problem, although researchers are aware now more than ever of the constructs that influence our perspectives. In academia we combat these problems with reflexivity, but race relations in the United States remains a difficult topic in many fields, including folklore, anthropology, archaeology, and history.
The marginalization of African Americans as a group in archaeological research also has a long history. Nineteenth century biologists and archaeologists justified racial inequality through the “science” of biological differences between races, with methods such as craniometrics which consisted of taking measurements of the human skull and linking them to race. Measuring skulls was then linked to brain size, and subsequently intelligence. Around the same time, anthropologists were using cultural evolutionism to construct a progression of culture linked to race, with some groups at one end (savagery), and other groups (guess who?) at the pinnacle of civilization (See Chapter 2).
Throughout the early years of American historical archaeology, colonial plantations were being excavated with a focus on architecture, centered on the main house of a plantation. Slavery was not really explicitly addressed in the research design of colonial archaeology until the late 1960s, in conjunction with the Civil Rights movement and the New Social History. Along the lines of other forms of colonial American culture contact, when slavery was finally acknowledged at all, it was treated through the lens of “acculturation.” The term was often twisted to mean a one-way transmission of culture from Euro-Americans to slaves, where the more Euro-American goods were found in a slave context, the more acculturated that group was assumed to be (regardless of the context, use, or meaning behind the objects). While currently slavery is often interpreted from the archaeological record in terms of dominance and resistance, which at least affords more agency to slave than acculturation models did, this still frames African American actions in a framework governed by Euro-American perspective rather than in its own right. It seems impossible to get away from the hegemony of race relations. Using the term “resistance” only has meaning when place in opposition to someone to resist, a dominant power, a colonizer, a master. But how much was done as a conscious resistance to those in power, and how much was done simply because you do what you need to do to survive within your own context of cultural practice? The resistance/domination dichotomy does not seem universally applicable to all contexts of slave life, and therefore other framworks are needed to understand the archaeology of slavery and race relations.. Mullens explanation of the intertwining of white and black relations begins to illuminate why it is so hard to interpret one experience of plantation live without balancing the other perspectives.
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