Provides a brief, helpful discussion
of “triracial isolate,” a social science term, noting at
the outset that “many of their members reject such labeling,
and they are not a single identifiable group. . . . The common attributes
of these communities have less to do with cultural bonds than with
similarities in experience and in living conditions that unite them
in their refusal to accept the United States binary racial project”
(p. 68). Daniel also notes, in defining this concept, that there are
approximately two hundred triracial isolate groups in the eastern
United States (especially the southeast); that they have varying amounts
of Native American, African American, and European American ancestry;
and that they tend to live (at least, they did during the formation
of the community) in the edges of towns and in isolate rural areas.
He characterizes them as pluralistic in terms of their stance toward
race, meaning that they believe an oppressed group should work to
“recover its own sense of itself and become more effective as
a collective force in the world. They envision . . . a process of
dissimilation that would create intergroup accommodation, or a mosaic
of mutually respectful, separate social and ethnic pluralities with
equal status both in law and in fact” (pp. 119-120).
The specific discussions of the Lumbee
are brief, recounting basic historical facts. In another section,
Daniel discusses an incident in 1954-1955 involving Allen Platt and
family, who moved from Holly Hill, South Carolina to Mount Dora (Lake
County), Florida. When Platt’s children started attending school,
their classmates speculated to their parents, who then talked to the
county sheriff, about their racial background. The White supremacist
sheriff visited the Platt home, urging the children to stay out of
school until the matter could be investigated. The principal, school
board, and superintendent agreed. The matter escalated into a court
case (Allen Platt et al. v. the Board of Public Instruction of
Lake County, Florida). The defendants’ case alluded to the
fact that on some public records, the Platts were called Croatian
(Daniel’s error for Croatan) Native Americans, “. . . and
Webster’s dictionary defined Croatians (sic) as people of blended
Native American, European American, and African American ancestry”
(p. 71). See PLAT001 for more details
on the Platt case.
