āwhy do you keep bringing up racism when you talk about the Seam inhabitants, theyāre Melungeon, they arenāt Blackā
Iām going to hold your hand when I say this:
The Melungeon ONLY EXIST BECAUSE OF SYSTEMIC RACISM. Thatās the ONLY REASON itās even a term for us to use to identify this group with!
There used to be this fun thing called the one drop rule, or blood quantum laws. āOne dropā of negro in your bloodline could see you lose any standing in polite white society, or at worst, see you enslaved! A great example of a common way people hid Black ancestry was by claiming indigenous ancestryā hard to trace, and more ānobleā to claim (ever heard someone saying their greatx-grandma was a Cherokee princess? Yeah.)
The Melungeons are traced back to a group of families in 1800s Appalachia who were mixed-race. The term āMelungeonā is actually a slur for them, coming from the French word for āmixedā (mĆ©lange, thanks @midwesternfields for reminding me I left that out). They were part white, yes, but they claimed mixing with Native American tribes, Portguese, even the ancient Phoenicians (whichā¦ donāt get me started).
The thing isā they did DNA tests on the descendants in the past twenty years. The majority of these descendants were found to only have European and African ancestry, not Native American (one or two families were the exception). Being Black was so dangerous and shameful that they claimed a whole new ethnic term for themselves. And Iām not saying thatās bad. I understand why people would do that in that situation. And I agree that they have formed a regional culture of their own in the past 200 years.
The problem is yāall trying to pull the āIāll accept the Seam people are brown but itās because theyāre Melungeon, not Black!ā
Be so ffr. Youāre continuing the same racist rhetoric that led to the whole reason they needed to create the term in the first place! You do not have one without the other.
Yes, the Seam population is not largely written as āBlackā in the manner District 11 clearly evokes with dark-skinned kinky-haired farm laborers who work at gun point and with the threat of whippings, who have overseers and recognize Lou-Lou as theirs from a plantation hymn. But the commonality is there: Louella McCoy from the Seam had a near enough body double in the form of a Black girl from the fields of District 11 because Louella McCoy and enough of the Seam has African ancestry, because the regional population of Appalachia has it too, even if they still donāt like acknowledging it.
And then maybe you should consider why the easier group to think of as āBlackā is the one compared to plantation slaves and field laborers, and not miners despite that history, too.
Anyways. Racism and colorism are a key point of the Hunger Games books and you donāt have one without the other.
this has been another tea time with hawk āļøš¦
