The concept of who is a person of color seems rather straightforward, in how it could be defined as anyone who is not white. But whiteness itself is a social construct, and reddit as a whole, being an American website, tends to follow the American conception. I'm not going to claim to be able to examine who is a person of color and who is not, since I lack the necessary knowledge. I'm not even sure my own conception of what it means to be white in the US is correct, since I'm not American. I would just like to explain my understanding and ask for help to learn more, before participating in the floating feature.

Now, are Latin Americans white? Most Americans, and even the Latinos themselves would say that no, they are not white, but instead people of color. But this presupones that Latin Americans are a race, instead of an ethnicity, and most Americans understand Latinos to be brown skinned, with dark hair and other features. The consequence of confluating race with ethnicity and/or nationality has led to claims that White Latinos don't exist, or that they are somehow less valid than the Mestizo majorities. In the actual Latin America, extensive race-mixing during the colonial era and beyond led to a more fluid understanding of race that is interwoven more closely with social class and nationality. Now, this is purely anecdotal, so feel free to ignore it, but as a Latin American person I would not consider myself a person of color, but Americans would not consider me to be white either.

In the colonial era of Latin America you have Spanish peninsulares, born in Spain; criollos, who are white and completely Spanish in heritage, but are socially inferior because they were born in the colonies; you have mixed-race mestizos, who enjoy some benefits due to their partial Spanish blood; you have racial minorities, such as the Natives and the Black slaves; you have, in fact, an entire classification depending on how "pure" your blood is: mestizos, pardos, zambos, castizos, etc. In general, the understanding of what it means to be white in the modern United States does not really apply to the racial structure of Spanish America at the time of independence.

Then, is Simon Bolivar a person of color? He was Venezuelan, who are Latin Americans, and if all Latin Americans are people of color, then that would mean that Simon Bolivar is a person of color too. But in heritage, he was fully Spanish, being a Criollo. Furthermore, he and other Venezuelan Mantuanos were seen by the pardo population of the Llanos as White oppressors, with frequent cries of "muerte a los blancos" (death to the whites!), during the war. The social construct of whiteness in 19th century Latin America was completely different to the social construct of whiteness in the modern United States, and that makes me wonder whether, for the purposes of this floating feature, Simon Bolivar and other Latin Americans count as people of color according to the American definition, which, I presume, is being used here.

Sorry if this is not allowed here, or if it would be better to discuss this topic elsewhere, but I was starting to write an answer about Simon Bolivar's slave nanny (an interesting character!) and his Black lieutenants, and I was going to start with a disclaimer about how Bolivar is not a person of color but instead white. Then, I wondered whether he would be considered a white person by Americans, who have a different understanding of what it means to be white and what it means to be a person of color. I decided to ask first in order to not make any mistakes, and further my own understanding of the topic. Please remove this if it's not adequate.

(Sources here)

The Many Faces of Aunt Jemima, Part One

The face of Aunt Jemima, a smiling, African American woman, on a box of pancake mix, bottle of syrup, or many other breakfast items, is a fairly ubiquitous part of American popular culture.

Many people don’t realize that the Aunt Jemima seen today on these products is a composite image, most recently updated in the 1980s, but that Aunt Jemima was originally based upon living African American women who modeled for the product dating to its earliest days.

There are ten women known to have played the role of Aunt Jemima from the 1890s through 1958. However, there are likely more who played the role and simply aren’t widely known, as it eventually became a role played by actors across the country at the same time as part of the brand’s marketing strategy.

How Aunt Jemima Came to Represent Pancakes

The origin story how Aunt Jemima came to represent a ready mix has its roots in minstrel shows popular in the 1880s and 1890s.

“Old Aunt Jemima” was a character in minstrel shows of the period. Although Aunt Jemima appeared as a character in minstrel shows in the Washington, D.C. area as early as 1864, the character wasn’t popularized until after the end of Federal Reconstruction.

Newspaper editor Chris L. Rutt, who was editor of the St. Joseph Gazette in Missouri, bought a flour mill in St. Louis in 1888. Because of a glut in the flower market, they developed what they called a “ready mix,” and sold pre-prepared pancake mix in white paper sacks. It is considered the first “ready mix” ever produced.

In 1889, Rutt claimed to have seen a minstrel show featuring a song by minstrel composer and performer Billy Kersands called “Old Aunt Jemima,” featuring an actor playing the part of the bandanna-adorned Aunt Jemima still familiar today.

Although Rutt claimed he believed that the performers were minstrel performers known as Baker and Farrell, it is possible he witnessed a performance including a vaudeville actor named Pete F. Baker—who played the role of Aunt Jemima in blackface.

The song and the Aunt Jemima character were, according to his own accounts, Rutt’s inspiration for naming the brand. The first official model for the brand was hired the following year, in 1890.

Nancy Green

The first African American woman to portray Aunt Jemima was Nancy Green, a woman born in to slavery in 1834 in Montgomery County, Kentucky.

R.T. Davis Milling Company hired her to represent the Aunt Jemima ready mix brand in 1890.

In 1893, Green introduced the product a the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where she actually cooked pancakes in a display.

Following the 1893 exposition, she became a cook and for the prominent Walker family in Chicago, who became familiar with her through the exposition.

Her work at the expo was so successful, Green was given a medal and certificate by the exposition’s organizers—and a lifetime contract to portray Aunt Jemima for the R.T. Davis Milling Company.

Her lifetime appointment was the zenith of a nationwide publicity campaign that included personal appearances and merchandising. The company was ultimately renamed Aunt Jemima Mills in 1914, and Davis remained on the job until 1923.

Quaker Oats bought the R.T. Davis Milling Company in 1926.

Multiple Actresses

Some sources claim that Quaker didn’t use another actor to portray the role of Aunt Jemima until ten years after Green’s death. This, however, is incorrect.

After Green’s death, the company actually used multiple actresses to portray the role of Aunt Jemima at the same time, some assigned to work regionally around the nation. A few had their images used in print advertising and on product packaging.

Lillian Richard

Richard was hired to portray Aunt Jemima in 1925.

Born in Hawkins, Wood County, Texas and raised in nearby Fouke, left East Texas for Dallas in 1910, and in 1925 was offered a job by Quaker Oats as one of the Aunt Jemima models, and she demonstrated the products in stores around the South.

Richard continued in the role until suffering a stroke in 1948. She eventually returned to her hometown of Hawkins, and was recognized locally as a celebrity for her work.

(There are over 100 footnotes for this piece, and it was too difficult to include them here, properly formatted. You may find a version with the footnotes here.)

Etta Moten Barnett: From Soapbox to Broadway (PART 1)

Five years before Marian Anderson made history breaking barriers for female African American performers after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., another young, African American woman from Weimar, Texas was breaking barriers of her own for African American singers and actresses: she became the first African American female to perform, solo, at the White House, for the president and first lady. Around the same time, she became the first African American woman cast in a motion picture in a role other than that of a domestic servant. Throughout her life, Etta Moten Barnett broke many barriers and gained significant fame as a musician, actor, and philanthropist. By the time of her death at 102, she would be recalled as one of the most important African American women of the 20th century.

Early Life

Etta Geraldine Moten was born November 5, 19012, in Weimar, Texas, to Freeman F. Moten and Ida Mae Norman. Freeman F. Moten lived in Colorado County as early as 19004, and married Ida Norman on February 5, 1901. Ida Mae Norman was raised in Columbus, and was working as a washerwoman and living with her mother, a widow, and her younger sister in Columbus a year before her marriage to Freeman Moten. Some of the Norman family, including

Etta’s grandmother, later lived in Glidden, Colorado County, Texas. Freeman Moten (misspelled in some official records, including census records, as Morton), was listed as a boarder and minister in the 1900 U.S. Census. Freeman Moten was an African Methodist- Episcopal minister, and it is believed his first posting as a minister was in the Weimar area; he is listed (although once again with a misspelled name of “F. F. Maten,”) as a pastor of St. James African Methodist-Episcopal Church in Weimar. The church building, at the time of his pastorate and Etta’s birth, would have been located at the corner of North Street and Eagle Street in Weimar. The building is described as “a crude structure of unfinished boards, unpainted, but it had a steeple.” The building was blown down in a 1909 storm, and was later moved to 410 North St. Andrews Street (well after Moten’s time as pastor).

Before Etta was of school age, she attended devotion at school with an older cousin, and a hymn she knew well was sung, and “she burst out lustily with her alto voice and it blended perfectly.” Etta began singing in church at an early age. Etta’s mother, often a soloist in church, guided her early singing career–in the churches her father pastored in Texas. Etta had to stand on a soap box in order for the congregation to be able to see her as she sang. “She had a deep voice and sang alto, graduating downwards to baritones and basses,” a 1943 newspaper report noted. “I can’t remember when I couldn’t read music,” Etta is quoted as saying in the same newspaper report. Although her church performances likely began at an earlier age, one source notes Etta was nine when she began regularly performing in church. In 1943, Etta told an interviewer she knew she had a voice when she was eight.

During this time, Etta attended a secondary school operated by Paul Quinn College in Waco, the school her father graduated from in 1898; she received a full scholarship to the institution because of her singing talent. In 1914, her father was transferred to a church in Los Angeles, California, and she attended school in Los Angeles for two years. The family then moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Her father bought a house for the family at 25th Street and Michigan Avenue.

Few glimpses in to Etta’s early life survive today. In 1943, acknowledging that “negro ministers are traditionally poor,” she noted her family always had enough to eat, but that it was far less easy to find money for music lessons.

High School and First Marriage

When the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, Etta attended high school at Western University, a historically black college offering combined high school and junior college courses in Quindaro, Kansas, just across the Missouri River from Kansas City, Missouri. Most of her focus at the school was on music. During summers, Etta performed with the Jackson Jubilee Singers, founded by her uncle, R.G. Jackson, a teacher at Western University. The singing group performed often on the so-called Chautauqua circuit, traveling versions of permanent Chautauqua clubs across the nation that existed to promote learning, education, and socialization, which were especially active in the American Midwest during the early twentieth century.

It was at Western that Etta met Curtis Brooks, who would become her first husband. Various sources list Brooks as a lieutenant, and others list him as having been one of Etta’s teachers. However, in an oral history interview given by Etta Moten Barnett and excerpted in a program for a tribute to her in Kansas City in the 1990s, she describes how she actually met Brooks, which involved part of her job in the campus dining room and kitchen, as head waitress, which included the duty of serving the teachers’ table, and for which she was required to keep inventory:

“We got to know all the teachers, the chefs got to depend on you, and, and you got something off your tuition. We shared the dining room with military personnel. We ate at one time, they ate at another, they cleaned up the kitchen and the dishes and we, students and teachers, did ours. As head waitress in charge of the dining room, I also kept count of things ordered in the kitchen. The chef Mr. Landor, sent me to the Academic Department where the head of the Business Department gave me assistance in keeping my books.

There was this young good-looking Second Lieutenant, Curtis Brooks. Things got very interesting between the two of us, looking over a shoulder, touching. Things began to happen without words, you know.”

Brooks asked for Etta’s father’s permission to marry, and it was granted. Etta was a senior in high school, and she left school to get married. Brooks operated a store in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, which primarily catered to Native American residents of the area.

The marriage to Brooks was short-lived. Trouble started fairly soon after they were married. “As soon as we were married things happened and we got to the real marriage stage,” Etta told an interviewer in the 1990s. “He said every time he hung his trousers on the bedpost I got pregnant,” Etta recalls. The couple had four children in seven years, one dying in infancy. Brooks was “quite a ladies’ man, which led to divorce,” Etta recalled.

The couple divorced, and Etta moved back to Kansas City to be with her family. She worked briefly as a saleswoman selling silk underwear door-to-door. After two weeks of that, Etta decided she wanted to complete her education and do different work.

A few weeks ago on another AskHistorians question, there was a discussion about race and racism in medieval Europe and during the crusades. I mentioned that when the crusaders arrived in Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, they encountered the King of Nubia, who happened to be staying there. I just wanted to expand on that a little bit, so hopefully it fits the theme of this week's feature! Here is the story from one of the crusaders, Robert of Clari:

"And while the barons were there at the palace, a king came there whose skin was all black, and he had a cross in the middle of his forehead that had been made with a hot iron. This king was living in a very rich abbey in the city, in which the former emperor Alexius [Alexios III] had commanded that he should be lodged and of which he was to be lord and owner as long as he wanted to stay there. When the emperor [the new emperor, Alexios IV] saw him coming, he rose to meet him and did great honor to him. And the emperor asked the barons: ‘Do you know,’ said he, ‘who this man is?’ ‘Not at all, sire,’ said the barons. ‘I’faith,’ said the emperor, ‘this is the king of Nubia, who is come on pilgrimage to this city.’ Then they had an interpreter talk to him and ask him where his land was, and he answered the interpreter in his own language that his land was a hundred days’ journey still beyond Jerusalem, and he had come from there to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. And he said that when he set out from his land he had fully sixty of his countrymen with him, and when he came to Jerusalem there were only ten of them alive, and when he came from Jerusalem to Constantinople there were only two of them alive. And he said that he wanted to go on pilgrimage to Rome and from Rome to St. James, and then come back to Jerusalem, if he should live so long, and then die there. And he said that all the people of his land were Christians and that when a child was born and baptized they made a cross in the middle of his forehead with a hot iron, like the one he had. And the barons gazed at this king with great wonder.” (pg. 80-81)

People today tend to imagine that everyone in medieval Europe was white, or even (in the most extreme cases) that medieval Europe was some sort of white nationalist utopia. And at first glance it seems that Robert of Clari’s story might support this - after all, “as a northern Frenchmen, he was unlikely to have met individuals from the lands below Egypt.” (Phillips, pg. 192)

A knight from northern France might be our stereotypical idea of a typical medieval person, but Europe and the rest of the medieval world was a much more diverse place than that. The king wouldn’t have been so strange in the crusader states in the Levant, where there were certainly Nubian and Ethiopian Christians. In Constantinople, Robert mentions the interpreter who could translate the king’s language; the interpreter probably translated into Greek and then another interpreter translated from Greek to French (although the possibility that this was a Nubian-French interpreter is pretty intriguing!).

According to Giovanni Ruffini,

“no one has guessed at the identity of this Nubian king. Given the chronology, it seems tempting to suppose that it was Moses George, who followed the example of several of his predecessors and left the throne in search of monastic, or at least pious, retirement.” (Ruffini, pg. 251)

The king knew about Rome and "St. James", which is Santiago de Compostela in Spain, a major pilgrimage site in the Middle Ages (and today as well). So maybe someone from a random village in northern France had never seen black people before, but if they ventured out into the world, to Jerusalem or Constantinople, or even closer to home in Italy and Spain, they definitely would have seen black people from Africa.

Sources:

Robert of Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople, trans. Edgar Holmes McNeal (Columbia University Press, 1936, repr. 2005)

Giovanni Ruffini, Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Jonathan Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (Pimlico, 2005)

Bozena Rostkowska, “The Visit of a Nubian King to Constantinople in AD 1203”, in New Discoveries in Nubia, ed. Paul van Moorsel (1982)

Welcome to the third installment of ‘History Upside Down’, our Spring 2020 Floating Feature and Flair Drive Series. This series it intended to shine a light on people often left out of the ‘standard’ histories, and give voice to the subalterns of history.

Today’s theme is Histories of People of Color, and we welcome anyone and everyone to share histories that fit the theme, however they might interpret it. Stories of triumph or tragedy, or cheerful or sad, all are welcome.

Floating Features are intended to allow users to contribute their own original work. If you are interested in reading recommendations, please consult our booklist, or else limit them to follow-up questions to posted content. Similarly, please do not post top-level questions. This is not an AMA with panelists standing by to respond. Such questions ought to be submitted as normal questions in the subreddit.

As is the case with previous Floating Features, there is relaxed moderation here to allow more scope for speculation and general chat than there would be in a usual thread! But with that in mind, we of course expect that anyone who wishes to contribute will do so politely and in good faith.

Coming up next in the series is The LGBT+ Histories Floating Feature on April 11th. Make sure to mark it on your calendar!