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The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South

The economist Howard Bodenhorn has produced a series of excellent articles that examine skin color stratification and the status of mixed-race individuals in the nineteenthcentury U.S. South. The Color Factor brilliantly summarizes and builds upon this work, offering a diverse, yet coherent look at the many facets of color stratification in the antebellum U.S. South. Bodenhorn’s work serves as an important corrective to recent research on skin color stratification in the United States, which, unfortunately, tends to focus myopically on present trends and fails to consider the trajectory of color stratification from its deep roots in early U.S. history and slavery to its persistence in the present day. The Color Factor convincingly shows— with a truly astounding set of rigorous quantitative analyses—just how advantaged mixed-race and lighter-skinned African Americans were in terms of their wealth, their height, on the labor market, in the marital market, and even on the plantation. Bodenhorn begins by making important comparative connections between how race and color was understood in the antebellum U.S. South and Brazil. As he correctly points out, the one-drop rule was not necessarily dominant throughout the early United States. In fact, according to evidence he presents on antebellum Virginia, there was widespread recognition of mixed-race categories and even color gradations in official court records. The 35 color categories he identifies in Virginia court records— including terms such as copper, olive, gingerbread, and bright—bear a striking resemblance with the panoply of color categories Marvin Harris noted in Brazil (pp. 5–6). Nevertheless, in contrast to what others have claimed to document in Brazil, Bodenhorn finds no evidence of racial fluidity in the antebellum United States—a period in U.S. history where the one-drop rule had yet to be accepted. Linking Virginia court records to the 1850 and 1860 federal census, he uncovers that skin color was the primary determinant of being enumerated as black or mulatto and that high prestige occupations, wealth, literacy (a proxy for education), and social status had no effect on individuals being enumerated as mulatto instead of black. Deep similarities between the U.S. and Brazil need not blind one to persistent differences in characteristics of ethnoracial schemata that go back for centuries. There are many intriguing findings in The Color Factor; I will highlight only a few. Bodenhorn reports that lighter-skinned slaves were significantly more likely to work in the master’s house, in the kitchen, or at a skilled trade. He is careful, however, to point out that most plantations had both light and dark-skinned working in the master’s house. In contrast to some existing literature, Bodenhorn tempers the notion that lighter-skinned and mixed-race slaves were more likely to find freedom because they were the sons and daughters of slave masters. Instead, following what he calls an economic approach, he finds that mixedrace slaves were better prepared to negotiate their freedom and more readily accepted into free society. Nevertheless, it was the case that mixed-race slaves were more likely to be freed through selective manumission, and they tended to be freed at younger ages than black slaves. This meant that net of a series of controls, mulatto slaves spent roughly 9 percent less of their lives enslaved compared to black slaves who were eventually freed. There were also differences between free black and mulatto families. Strikingly, in 1860 Baltimore, for example, black-black marriages were 110 times more likely than black-mixed marriages. Color homogamy was substantial. Mulatto families were larger, and they were able to support larger families because of their wealth advantages. Mulatto men and women worked in far more prosperous and prestigious occupations than black men and women. Furthermore, mulatto men were far less likely than black men to be employed as farm laborers; and mulatto-led families were significantly more likely to own land than black families. Reviews 39