Colored Aristocracy: the Song

Recently I learned of a traditional song called "The Colored Aristocracy."  Most likely it was composed for a popular dance craze called the Cakewalk, a genre whose music is an ancestor of ragtime and jazz. The cakewalk is long gone, but "Colored Aristocracy" lives on as an old tyme and bluegrass song.     Just type in "Colored Aristocracy" on Youtube and you will have several examples of contemporary musicians playing the song on guitar, banjo, fiddle and various combinations of instruments. The Carolina Chocolate Drops, a black old tyme music group, even named one of their CD's  "Colored Aristocracy."  You can also check out the Carolina Chocolate Drops on Youtube, a real sweet treat for the ears.

    The name intrigued me.  I looked up "Colored Aristocracy" on-line to uncover its history.  Of course, no one remembers who first composed the song, or even to which racial/ethnic group(s) that composer(s) belonged.   No one is even sure if "Colored Aristocracy" is the original title.  At one time, in the version of political correctness of the mid 1900s, it was called  "Southern Aristocracy."  In the distant past it was also known as "Uppity N***er Aristocracy,"  which fit the practice of black American cakewalk dances that parodied the pretentions of upper class whites and upper class blacks. 
    But the title "Colored Aristocracy" persists, not "Negro Aristocracy," or "Black Aristocracy," or "African American Aristocracy."  Check out all the white (to all appearance) musicians performing the song on Youtube, who all call it "Colored Aristocracy." No other title really fits, which leads me to believe that the "Colored" title is the real title of the song, based on the social context in which it arose in pre-Civil War America.

     
Colored Aristocracy: the People

    There really were aristocrats of color in colonial America.  They were often the descendants of Spanish, French, Portuguese, British or other European conquistadors, adventurers, pirates and their wives of color, white women being in short supply.  Many owned plantations and  provided the finest European educations for their children.  They only married each other or pure Europeans of equal or higher status.  These aristocrats of color often looked more white than black or Indian, after several generations of choosing the lightest-skinned spouses. 
    In Jamaica, these Creole aristocrats represented up to twenty percent of slaveholders. In Haiti, the proportions were similar. When slavery ended in these places, the Creole slaveholding families often fled to Charleston, South Carolina or New Orleans, where they were able to still live as free people, at least for a time.  
    In uppper Mexico, which later became the U.S. Southwest, Spanish conquerors had also helped create a class of mixed-blood landowners who had European, Native America, and sometimes African ancestry.   When white Anglo adventurers from the U.S. South ventured into Mexican Texas or California they  elevated   themselves by marrying into these Spanish-speaking, landowning families. (At the same time U.S. politicians were justifying takeover of upper Mexico because even the elites of Mexico were "useless half-breeds.")  This process continued even after the Civil War, when landless Confederate veterans established themselves through skillful marriages to lanowning Native American women in Indian Territory. 
    The fur-producing regions of the Great Lakes also created succesful  dynasties of color.  Rochester and Buffalo, New York, started as fur-trading posts owned by African-descended men and their Native American wives. The Bonga family of Minnesota was started by a French-speaking African, Pierre Bonga, his posssibly black wife and their sons, who married Ojibwe (Native American) wives.  DuSable, a Haitian Creole and his Native American wife operated the trading post that became Chicago. (Their daughter married a Frenchman.)There was even a black man from Puerto Rico trading with the Indians on Manhattan before the Dutch arrived. 
    Often times the first people to speak a European language in a region were people of color. As the earliest of the part-European entrepeneurs, they were the first to get rich and become an aristocracy.  

Colored Aristocracy:  the legacy

   Considering the various aristocracies of color that have existed you would think they would hold a place in the popular imagination, but the exact opposite is true. Only a remnant exists, even among the black-identified population. They seem to have disappeared, even when once being the leading families of several regions at the peak of their influence.  
    Part of the problem are the  narratives  with which we look at the past.  One narrative portrays the conquest of the Americas as a great white drama with non-whites as mere pawns in the game. Another similar narrative has whites as all-evil and people of color as all-virtuous victims. Another narrative attempts to portray colored slaveowners as all-black but secret soldiers of a pan-African movement, as some kind of "black pride." 
    Another reason for the disappearance of the aristocracies of color is this: the flood of Anglo settlement and the obsession with racial "purity" meant that elites wisely  chose the path of white or Indian identity as a matter of survival.  It made no sense to lose one's  family's wealth and land over distant non-white ancestry when it was much easier to emphasize the Spanish, French, British, or Indian portion of the family's origins. 
    But the memory of the Colored Aristocracy (ies) lives on in many families of many color, in the culture of our nation, and in a  really cool song. Check it out on Youtube. And check out the Carolina Chocolate Drops, too, also on Youtube.        

      

 

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