Reinforcing the Zoo: the Colonial History of Marriage and Colorism (Part 2 of 3)

 Image Description: The thumbnail depicts a poster entitled on the top Exposition Universelle and Internationale De St. Louis (Etats-Unis). The bottom says Importance De L’Exposition. The body of the poster depicts a white woman with a red dress and red hair. Behind her is a stereotypical depiction of a native person.

    The zoo is not merely a perverse oddity of capitalist values. The zoo (as metaphor and otherwise) is what reinforces exploitation on a psychological and ideological level, in order to maintain that oppressive situation mentally and trick us into exploiting and brutalizing each other.

     The European imperialists employed this divide-and-conquer strategy as a matter of necessity: in most instances they were usually outnumbered by the people they were oppressing. Thus, it became necessary to turn groups and tribes against each other in order to maintain control. They did this in several ways. For example, some Native Americans were bribed to help re-capture runaway enslaved Africans. In Los Angeles, more than half of the soldiers who first settled the city in 1781 were free Africans in the service of the Spanish Empire, according to Jack Forbes.

     Color, economic position, gender and loyalty to empire were all factors in this hierarchical society. As Jack Forbes puts it to Listervelt Middleton: “in order to help maintain their power and their colonial system, they developed a caste system. The word caste is somewhat ambiguous, but what I mean is a class system…based on inheritable characteristics,” perhaps the most determinative characteristic being color.

     The Spanish caste system, with its various fabulated racial terms and designations (mestizo, mulatto, zambo, etc.) for every conceivable degree of “mixture.” These designations literally determined one’s level of freedom in colonial society, and was often gendered. For example, non-white women were not allowed to wear silk, nor pearls and other fine jewelry in Spanish.

     Thus, we can see the roots of what we call colorism today, which particularly affects Black women, in the Spanish colonial ideas of “whitening” (blanqueamiento) and “mixing” (mestizaje). These ideas served to reinforce the caste system with its pseudo-scientific racial designations mentioned above.

     Many Black thinkers have pointed out how colorism and featurism are manifestations of a racism that permeates Black communities as well as non-Black ones. I believe that our discussions around colorism, featurism and desirability will benefit from a deep understanding of this history of colonialism and the human zoos.

     Loyalty to empire mattered. Forbes again: “many of the individuals who participated in the conquest of Peru and Chile, for example, are mixed-blood sons of Spanish soldiers. But they grow up with their father or something, they think like a Spaniard, and they’re allowed to be a soldier and participate in the conquest. One of the early governors of New Mexico was married to a Mexican-Indian woman and his son later became prominent – he was mestizo.”

     The racist philosophy of colorism is very clearly still with us and is very clearly still a tool of social control. There has been a lot of recent discussion and scholarship about colorism, featurism, desirability and other standards of beauty and worthiness. For one example out of many, Dr. Sarah L Webb, who has been educating and speaking on this issue since 2011, has spoken on how we betray our sisters: “many light skinned women…don’t acknowledge their privilege. Which is a form of complicity. Ignoring the problem allows it to persist.” The critique of mestizaje (mixing) and blanqueamiento (whitening) in Latin America demonstrates our growing understanding and ability to fight these colonial systems of thought.

    As we have already seen in the example of the governor of New Mexico, marriage into prominent indigenous families was another way that European colonialists attempted to dominate, as demonstrated by Carey McWilliams in Southern California: An Island on the Land. In the conquest of Brazil, Portuguese men intermarried with indigenous people among prominent tribes and coasts in order to take advantage of their kinship ties.

     “Without realizing it, now they’ve got a new member of the family,” Jack Forbes explains. “He doesn’t have the same motive they have. But there are kinship obligations, by means of which this Portuguese guy gradually takes advantage of existing enmities that may exist…and uses his relatives against other Indian groups. And pretty soon, rewards them with guns and other weapons and goods for capturing other human beings.”

    This “tactic” of exploiting indigenous kinship ties is related to colorism, because once they had established some semblance of control, Europeans would attempt to lighten themselves.

     For example, in the Spanish context as described by Forbes: “[l]ater what happens is a lot of these prominent mixed-bloods marry Spanish women or lighter-skinned women who are brought over from Europe in a trickle, and they lighten themselves so that they become a light elite.” This group would come to be known as criollos.  

     Often Europeans would use these kinship ties and familial obligations to make war, take land and create distrust amongst people. This is something the United States replicated with their newfound colonies.

     Consider the case of the Suyoc people. At the 1904 St. Louis’ World’s Fair, a hundred northern Philippine people were displayed in the “Igorrote Village” as part of a wider Philippine exhibition organized by the U.S. government. The exhibition included “cultural artifacts, commercial merchandise, [and] a delegation of over 1,100 Filipinos representing in the Philippines.”

     Twenty-five of the people in the Village were Suyoc people. As Antonio S. Buanguan explains, the Suyoc participants at the fair traveled with two American brothers, both of whom were soldiers in the Philippine-American War, and one of whom married a Suyoc woman. Together, they recruited family and neighbors to go to St. Louis. Here again, we see marriage and kinship ties being exploited to create a colonial idyll and reinforce colonialism.

    I point to these examples to show why we must understand the ideologies and institutions underpinning modernity. They perpetuate the modern zoo, subjecting us to a play that has been running for more than 500 years. As Dionne Brand puts it:

“I noticed that I too lived in this modern zoo and re-enact each day a certain set of arguments, and suddenly being aware of the elaborate performances, I no longer wanted to have a part. They are horrendous. Those performances have used up generations of people, like a play being acted and re-enacted over time, the actors losing skin and bone, dying and being born again, inadvertently, to perform afresh these roles.”

The show must not go on.