Michael wrote:Are there any people who are not somehow descended from slaves? Only the elite slave masters of the world and their inbred offspring, i.e., The Queen of England, could make that claim.
It all depends on how you define "slaves." The word comes from the same root as Slavs, so there's no doubt it relates to "white" people in Europe. However, in our minds "slavery" is connected to "black" people, specifically Africans enslaved in the US. In practice and in the imagination, whiteness was associated with freedom. You're probably too young to remember the phrase, "Free, white and 21." So, blackness (or being black) defined the state of slavery.
Anyway, I disagree with Mike's point entirely. The longer the family line of a southerner, the more likely it is that he is or has "black" descendants. The more elite the family, the more likely to have "a n-- in the woodpile." Actually, that's much more accepted as common knowledge in the South than anywhere else. It wasn't necessary for anything extraordinary to happen for a white person to have black ancestors in the South.
Re: the Queen of England --and the South, though, here's a tidbit:
Race Matters: Was Queen Charlotte, Our City's Namesake, Black?
"Was Queen Charlotte, our city's namesake, black?
Her African heritage is part of the legends and facts that cling to the petite German woman who married "mad King George" and who inspired not only Charlotte, North Carolina, but at least eight other places in North America-- including our town.
Although she was German, Charlotte was directly descended from Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a member of the black branch of the Portuguese royal house. Whether her lineage affected her appearance is contested.
Historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom says that her features, as seen in royal portraits, were conspicuously "negroid" and reports that they were noted by numerous contemporaries including the queen's personal physician, Baron Stockmar, who described her at age 84 as "small and crooked, with a true mulatto face."
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, explains that Charlotte's ancestor, Margarita de Castro, descended from Portuguese monarch Alfonso III and his mistress, Mourana Gil, an African of Moorish descent.
The Wikipedia blog contains an ongoing argument, with one blogger writing, "This is precisely the kind of thing historians would love to cover up." Another objects, "The whole 'Queen Charlotte was black' thing is total garbage." A third answers, "It's apparent that racist sentiments seem to find their way into the simplist [sic] of arguments." "An African ancestry doesn't mean she's black." "It is actually quite certain that all European royalty has a slight amount of black ancestry." And so on.
De Valdes notes that in 1952 the English royal family referred to Queen Elizabeth II's Asian and African bloodlines as a justification for her coronation as head of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Elizabeth is a direct descendant of Charlotte.
The most decidedly African of her portraits were painted by Sir Allan Ramsay, an anti-slavery artist who was responsible for the majority of the paintings of the queen. A full-length Ramsay portrait of Queen Charlotte in its original Chippendale frame hangs in the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Could the queen's features have had significance to the Abolitionist movement? By the time of his portraits, Ramsay was married to the niece of Lord Mansfield, the English judge whose 1772 decision was the first in a series of rulings that ended slavery in the British Empire.
How was the young Charlotte depicted by her contemporaries? One English description glowed, "Her appearance... was pleasing beyond description... her whole person possessed of that inexpressible something that is beyond a set of features, and equally claims our attention. To be sure, she has not a fine face, but a most agreeable countenance, and is vastly genteel, with an air, notwithstanding her being a little woman, truly majestic."
On the other hand, historian J.H. Plumb described her as "plain and undesirable." When King George sent out scouts to engage his bride, none of them thought her beautiful, but they did agree she was healthy, amiable, and gay.
A poem that may refer to her African features was written in her honor for the royal wedding on September 8, 1762:
Descended from the warlike Vandal race,
She still preserves that title in her face.
Tho' shone their triumphs o'er Numidia's plain
And Alusian fields their name retain;
They but subdued the southern world with arms,
She conquers still with her triumphant charms,
O! born for rule-- to whose victorious brow
The greatest monarch of the north must bow.
The Vandals were a Germanic tribe, and Numidia was in northern Africa, so these lines are puzzling.
According to Margaret O'Bryant, librarian for the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, there are no original paintings or sculptures of the city's eponym on display in the Charlottesville area.
However, the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, known as the Queen City, has two sculptures of Queen Charlotte. A statue at the airport, installed in 1990, shows the queen in the middle of a reflecting pool, dramatically bent backwards as if buffeted by a gust from a jet engine. The other statue, located downtown, is quite realistic, showing a woman in her mid-thirties walking in her garden with two dogs.
The sculptor of the 1989 downtown work, B. Graham Weathers, researched his subject by going to England to see her many portraits. He says he found as many variations of her image as there were artists.
"I did not find the Negroid features of the wide nose, large lips, etc. I saw a small, young girl who had an overbite..." In an article in Citi Magazine, Weathers also comments, "To me it doesn't matter if she is black or not."
Whether Charlotte's African heritage matters, Charlottesville should acknowledge that she's part of our heritage and appreciate her interesting personality.
http://george.loper.org/trends/2006/Feb/995.html"A man is rich when he has time and freewill. How he chooses to invest both will determine the return on his investment."
