Early racial intermixing began as unions between white colonists and slave women

Evidence

What had driven the transformation of Saint-Domingue from a relatively open society into one saturated with racial discrimination? For Raimond, the response was simple: sex. Early in the colony’s history, he argued, the European men who came to the colonies “burning with the desire to make a fortune” but “weakened by the heat of the climate, often sick, and deprived of the aid wives of their own color could have given them,” turned to “African women.” These slave women cared for them assiduously, hoping to gain “the greatest recompense, their liberty.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 219

Categorization

• XREF: Raimond’s origin account of interracial union parallels how colonial ‘creole’ societies elsewhere trace founding intimacy; useful for comparing to the honor-and-marriage dynamics in other settler histories. — connects to: Racial conflict coexisted with intimate colonial relations rather than arising later — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 904; English colonial slavery was racial and hereditary while earlier Indigenous slavery was transitory — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 475; Early colonial advocates endorsed racial intermarriage but later abandoned it — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 80 (+3 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Racial conflict coexisted with intimate colonial relations rather than arising later — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 904; English colonial slavery was racial and hereditary while earlier Indigenous slavery was transitory — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 475; Early colonial advocates endorsed racial intermarriage but later abandoned it — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 80 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Interracial unions with enslaved women created the free-colored class. #expands (0.93)
• Black-white racial collisions predated modern slavery by a thousand years #complicates (0.76)