Part Eight: The Unraveling. What the record would show if the reclassification had never happened

Disclosure: Len Bagley is the founder of Bagley Enterprises, which owns True News, and deputy chief minister of PAAN Ministry, the Private Aboriginal American National Ministry. This is analysis: Part Eight of his published series. It introduces a longer paper whose reading of the historical record differs from mainstream historical and genetic scholarship.

Part Seven of this series laid out how the word Negro was attached to the people of this land at contact and carried, name by name, to the label African American. Part Eight introduces the paper that follows that trail one document at a time: The Unraveling, a companion volume to my earlier paper, Separating the African from American. The full paper is free to read on academia.edu: academia.edu (link)

The colonial clerks named people by place. Those brought from the coast of Guinea were written negros da Guiné. The people already here were written negros da terra and negros de la tierra: Negroes of the land. The land was later dropped from the name, and the Negro was kept.

The method is simple. It does not argue. It subtracts. For each law, ruling, registry practice and federal rule that moved a population from the category that carried aboriginal standing into one that names another continent, the paper states what the document is, what it did, and what the record would contain if it had never been enacted. The difference between the two columns is the operation.

Some of what the ledger contains

In 1670 Virginia law treated people brought into the colony by sea differently from people who came by land. In 1682 that distinction was repealed.

In 1705 Virginia declared "negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves" to be real estate, and defined a mulatto to include "the child of an Indian." The word Africa does not appear anywhere in the volume of Virginia's statutes that covers 1684 to 1710.

In 1924 Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act. Under the registrar Walter Plecker, Indian designations were struck from the state's vital records, and the state's counted Indian population fell from 779 in 1930 to 198 in 1940. Six Virginia tribes needed an act of Congress in 2018 to win the recognition their own state's records had been altered to deny.

The 1940 federal census instructed enumerators to count a person of white and Indian descent as Indian at one-fourth Indian blood, but to count a person of Negro and Indian descent as Negro unless the Indian blood "very definitely predominates." The same ancestry received two different results, depending on the other half of a person's descent.

In 1977 a federal statistical directive made Black and American Indian separate boxes, and in 1997 the Black category became "Black or African American." In 2016 Congress struck the word Negro from two federal laws that still used it to define minorities, and inserted African American; in the same text, American Indian became Native American.

What the paper asks for

The paper does not ask anyone to accept a conclusion on faith. It asks for the one comparison that has never been run in the open: documented pre-1900 lineages from the Negro track, tested against the pre-contact remains of the Southeast and the Eastern Woodlands that are already held and catalogued by American institutions. It argues that when a government has removed the records a claimant is now required to produce, the claimant cannot be asked to produce them.

Nothing in the paper claims that every Black American shares one history, or that no one arrived from Africa. It claims that aboriginal and indigenous lineages were reclassified on paper, that the paper trail is real, and that the test that would settle the question has not been done.

Read the full paper on academia.edu: academia.edu (link)

Permanent archive copy (Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23623027): doi.org (link)

The rest of the series: truenews.bagleyenterprises.net (link)

Originally published by True News: https://truenews.bagleyenterprises.net/stories/418