Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization [Paperback]

Arnold R. Hirsch (Author), Joseph Logsdon (Editor)

Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Louisiana State Univ Pr; Louisiana Paperback edition, 1992 edition (July 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807117749
• ISBN-13: 978-0807117743
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #386,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredibly Insightful Account of a Complicated Subject, January 23, 2009

By 

Kathy F. Cannata "Rev. Dr. R. Cannata" (New Orleans, LA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Paperback)

This is an anthology of papers given by a variety of scholars (professors of history, urban affairs, etc.) and civil rights activists at an academic symposium in 1992. It is very nicely bound, indexed and packaged by LSU Press.

As an outsider who moved to New Orleans to work with rich and poor, black and white, the unique racial climate of New Orleans is baffling. One native New Orleanian summarized it best for me: New Orleans is the most integrated segregated city in America.

On one hand, outsiders are always struck by an amazing degree of racial interaction not seen elsewhere in the South nor in most of the North. Blacks and whites live next to each other in every neighborhood in the city, rich or poor. (The only exceptions being the all black Lower 9th and the all white Lakeview, both of which remain greatly disrupted since the Storm). Blacks and whites socialize and mix freely in all the music clubs, at the Mardi Gras parades, and in the restaurants. Interracial marriages are more common here. White people support and vote for black political candidates (Obama took 70% of the white vote in New Orleans). And yet, there is enormous economic and educational disparity between the races. Any black New Orleanian can share heart breaking stories of racial discrimination.

It is such a complicated and seemingly contradictory racial landscape in New Orleans. This book was tremendously helpful in enabling me to begin to sort this out. Like so many other strange things about New Orleans, to understand New Orleans we need to abandon our conceptions of it as a Southern city, and in some ways even an American city. Its culture was set on a distinctively French trajectory at the beginning, and the continual wave of immigrants have more often been changed by New Orleans than have changed it. This book helped me see how differences between French and English colonial policies and attitudes explain the uniqueness of the city's racial history.

A few random observations from the book:
* When New Orleans came into the Union it represented a challenge to 19th century America. In 1803 it was America's only Catholic city, French was the predominant language, its bawdy sensuality was unheard of, and it had the South's largest free black population. It was the infant republic's first attempt to impose its institutions and culture on a foreign city. The process of Americanization of New Orleans has never been completed.
* The authors try to place the racial history of New Orleans not so much in a counterpoint between North and South (in which case, New Orleans defies the categories and confuses the analysis), but rather in a counterpoint between the Franco-African protest tradition of New Orleans and the tragic racial mindset of Anglo-America (p. xii).
* When Alexis de Tocqueville made his famous sojourn to New Orleans he found a situation he regarded as utterly unique to America (including the North): "(I) found a mixture of all the nations..." His friend Etienne Mazureau reported, "you see here a mingling of all races. New Orleans is a patch-work of peoples." (p. 7)
NOLA had the largest concentration of free people of color anywhere in the South. And while Tocqueville found slavery in French Louisiana as ruthless as the Anglo-American South, he also was stunned by the status and achievement of free blacks in New Orleans.
* It was after returning from his trip to New Orleans that Tocqueville and Beaummont immediately began to promote the French emancipation movement that reached its fruition later in the Revolution of 1848.
* This shocked me: during the entire period of French rule only about 300 slaves were imported into New Orleans. The mass of slaves only came later in the 19th century with American rule.
* Jerah Johnson shows that Tocqueville was correct in styling French society in the Old Regime as "a sum of disunities." The old three estate divisions are wildly inadequate. The five-part division of new scholarship (old nobility, new nobility, clergy, bourgeoisie, and peasants) is also wildly misleading. Scholars have noted at least nine major divisions, not counting local and minor ones, just within the nobility alone. (p. 13).
* This sum of disunities is what constituted the French social ethos and set it off from that of England. (p. 14).
* The English solution to disunity was, broadly speaking, to impose norms and force conformity to them. Note, for example, the Elizabethan religious compromise.
* It was the high degree of conformity in English culture that left stubborn dissenters little choice but to emigrate to the colonies. Not so with the French, who lived with wild religious, philosophical, political and ethnic diversity.
* An example of this found in guilds. Despite periodic revivals, the trend was steady decay in England. Whereas in France they continued to flourish and multiply.
* JOhnson writes, "Most of Colonial Louisiana's history is better understood against its Canadian background." p. 19. NOLA looks much more like French Canada than like the rest of the U.S.!
* French colonial policy toward the native peoples (Indians) was to Franco-fy them and to blend with them; English policy was to anniliate them or failing that to segregate them.
* Cardinal Richelieu's 1627 charter of Canada stated that the Indians "will be deemed and respected to be natural-born Frenchmen, and as such may come to dwell in France when it shall seem good to them," and that they would "hold all rights of property and goods that subjects within France (held)."! (p. 21).
* In 1698 a famous French missionary wrote that "it is necessary that the Europeans should mix with (the Indians), and that they should live with them, and that they should dwell together."
* The French governor Colbert ordered that the French and Indians intermarry "that they may form one people and one blood." No such full-scale policy of intermarriage ever once existed between settlers and Indians in English territory, where segregation was the unwavering goal. Colbert wnet so far as to encourage marriage not only of French men to Indian women (the more common practice of mixing), but also of French women to Indian men. He went so far as to provide government sponsored dowries for women of one race who married men of the other! (p. 23).
* Gary Nash also notes, in contrast to the English colonies, the "greater flexibility and willingness" of the French "to accept native culture on its own terms..." (p. 24).
* The English decided to rid themselves of the Indian problem and launched a failed quarter-century long campaign to destroy the native peoples. When it failed, they drew up peace terms with the Indians that required them to remain in designated areas (reservations). This English segregationalist system remains the essence of the US govt's Indian policy to this day.
* This does NOT mean that the French were much more altruistic or less intolerant than the English. The French were just as self-serving and when the Indians did resist French policy the French were just as willing to destroy them as the English. But the circumstances were very different -- the English farming plans made resident Indians seem like an obstacle.
* When the English took Canada from the French in 1763 they immediately ended the French assimilationist programs and started a policy of separating the English group from the French and Indians. (p. 26).
* Yes, there are some counter examples -- one new French gov. (de Brisay) protested against the policy of integration in 1685. But the often quoted letter he sent back to France about this is misleading. It actually illustrates the radical nature of French policy in Canada and it is also a relatively isolated passage, according to Johnson. (p. 27).
* When the French settled NOLA in 1718 its first two leaders (Iberville and then de Bienville) both belonged to the very core of Canadian assimilationist tradition. (p. 31).
* There are striking parallels between early New Orleans and Canadian history and development.
* French and Indian blood intermingled freely, not only through concubinage but also through actual marriage. The New Orleans church actively promoted such interracial marriage. Louisiana's first cleric, Henri Rouleaux de La Vente, appointed vicar-general to the colony by the bishop of Quebec, not only defended but vociferously advocated French-Indian marriage. Iberville himself (New Orleans' founder) also advocated it. (p. 35).
* For the first decade of New Orleans, the black slave and Indian populations also increasingly intermarried.
* New Orleans allowed an all-Indian market to be held perpetually in the center of the city, which continued until 1867! In the 1880s, 15-20 Coctaw women continued this tradition at the Cotton Exchange, and the old Indian market went on irregularly at the French Market until the 1920s.
* In fact, the marked presence of Indians in New Orleans throughout the 19th century was so utterly unique to American cities in the East that almost all visitors who wrote accounts of their travels remarked on it. (p. 40).
* Almost all old black families in New Orleans have several not very remote Indian ancestors. (p. 40).
* The Code Noir of 1724 afforded slaves protections, some of which were unheard of at the time in North or South. They encouraged slave baptism, slave marriages, protected slave women from rape, respected slave holidays. Slave families were to be listed as units with value assigned to whole families, rather than breaking them up as was so common elsewhere. The codes prohibited forcing slave women to take mates (done elsewhere for 'breeding' purposes). Slaves were exempted from forced labor on Sundays and religious... Read more ›

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thorough and complete, December 1, 2011

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ice queen who "reads & forgets" (Kentucky) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Paperback)

If you have any questions about Mardi Gras, New Orleans, Creole culture, or anything southern, you NEED this book. A great reference source for too many subjects to name.

4 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars NEW ORLEANS, January 25, 2007

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Shannon Deason (Houston) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Paperback)

This an interesting book, well researched and fascinating. I get very tired of reading in the national news that Creole means light skinned black, it really refers to the the original European natives on New Orleans the Spanish, then the French. New Orleans is of course a city with a huge black population and they are natives as well, and as such Creoles, I suppose, and many have white creole ancestors without question, but when I say that my grandmother was part Creole, people look at me as say, uh your black?..Im like, uh no, my grandmother is of French and Austrian ancestry, it's so annoying, people need to get educated on the word and this book helps. And for the record if your African American..Im European American..if your black..im white...and just because im of the caucasion persuasion does not make me void of color..i have color..im an olive tan..sort of a beautiful bronze actually.