AHC: A more "Brazilian" South

Is it possible to make the American South have more "Brazilian" attitudes toward race? In particular:

-Interracial marriage is more accepted by society, with more mixed-race children of planters inheriting from their parents and moving into the upper class

-More acceptance of upper-class blacks and mixed-race people, such that southern society divides more along class lines than racial ones

-Following abolition, freed slaves are accepted into society and Jim Crow doesn't occur.

-By 2014, the majority of southerners are of mixed race, and "black" and "white" are meaningless catagories (or at least, much less meaningful than OTL).

Basically, I'm wondering how you can get the South to handle race relations the way Brazil and other Latin American countries did.
 
Simple, look at what caused that pattern to emerge in Latin America, and replicate it. Namely to create an imbalance along gender and race lines; the base of colonization in Latin America was with single men of European descent (instead of OTL's family groups exhibited in British colonies), leaving them no alternative but to have families and/or children with either the local Amerindians or (in regions including them) African workers/slaves. Some will tell you that religion plays into it, and to a degree it does in that an organized doctrine encourages a more inclusive local social hierarchy, but otherwise I feel this distinction is not so important.
 
So basically make it so class determines colour ("money whitens") as opposed to colour determining class/social standing? Perhaps diminishing the number of white settlers and increasing the need for use of mixed-race illegitimates (on the part of colonists and colonial administration) would help: the illegitimates would succeed to the "white" positions inherited by their fathers; those who didn't would be seen as still "black"...etc.
 
The entire cotton belt is colonized heavily by the French and Spanish, leaving the whole region culturally similar to Louisiana, with a Catholic Creole aristocracy and a legal heritage including the Code Noir. As a result, slavery is heavily regulated, with slave-owners subject to many restrictions. Attempts to repeal these regulations are opposed by the creole elite, because the laws are closely entwined with the Catholic religion. Slaves and their descendants routinely achieve freedom and varying degrees of political and economic power. The system is byzantine and densely layered, producing a large number of racial categories that cannot be reduced to a black/white duality. As a result, racial relations tend towards a stratified pigmentocracy. In the United States as a whole, racism carries sectional and sectarian associations: the north is white and Protestant, the south is brown and Catholic.
 
Simple, look at what caused that pattern to emerge in Latin America, and replicate it. Namely to create an imbalance along gender and race lines; the base of colonization in Latin America was with single men of European descent (instead of OTL's family groups exhibited in British colonies), leaving them no alternative but to have families and/or children with either the local Amerindians or (in regions including them) African workers/slaves. Some will tell you that religion plays into it, and to a degree it does in that an organized doctrine encourages a more inclusive local social hierarchy, but otherwise I feel this distinction is not so important.

So basically make it so class determines colour ("money whitens") as opposed to colour determining class/social standing? Perhaps diminishing the number of white settlers and increasing the need for use of mixed-race illegitimates (on the part of colonists and colonial administration) would help: the illegitimates would succeed to the "white" positions inherited by their fathers; those who didn't would be seen as still "black"...etc.

The entire cotton belt is colonized heavily by the French and Spanish, leaving the whole region culturally similar to Louisiana, with a Catholic Creole aristocracy and a legal heritage including the Code Noir. As a result, slavery is heavily regulated, with slave-owners subject to many restrictions. Attempts to repeal these regulations are opposed by the creole elite, because the laws are closely entwined with the Catholic religion. Slaves and their descendants routinely achieve freedom and varying degrees of political and economic power. The system is byzantine and densely layered, producing a large number of racial categories that cannot be reduced to a black/white duality. As a result, racial relations tend towards a stratified pigmentocracy. In the United States as a whole, racism carries sectional and sectarian associations: the north is white and Protestant, the south is brown and Catholic.

All very possible, btw. Could be a little tricky to pull off well, especially with a POD past 1800, as most *antebellum immigration to the South occurred before then, but it still can be done.

One thing I'd like to add is that a more "Brazilian" South might also make it rather harder for any *Fire-Eater types to gain widespread public sympathy later on, whenever the debate on eliminating slavery comes up(as many of them IOTL were truly hardcore white supremacist types, even for the day, nearly all of whom came from states or areas most heavily dominated by WASPs. Then again, whichever ones do still gain prominence might become even more extreme.).....but then again, there is a possible trade-off in that it might take a little longer for slavery to disappear than it did in our world(remember, IOTL it wasn't until 1890 or so that the Brazilians finally got rid of it!), perhaps around 1880-90 or so, and I'd suspect that this might be largely due to adaptation of "Code Noir" type regulations in this scenario.
 
That's a good point, it does bring up the dilemma of whether it's better for slavery to endure longer if it means less binary racism and/or more color blindness, or for freedom to be granted while hardening racial tensions and possibly prolonging attitudes of bigotry. Like a great many things, it all boils down to choices and consequences.

At any rate, a POD between 1800-1850 isn't impossible to pull off but it is very VERY tricky. A POD somewhere in the 1700s however shouldn't be that difficult to pull off without drastically changing a whole slew of other events in North America (of course butterflies will flap, but the immediate future up till past the Revolution I don't see being done away with for example). Go much earlier than that and you can achieve the purpose of the OP but then you have bigger butterflies to deal with, and all kinds of changes to history to take into account.
 
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At any rate, a POD between 1800-1850 isn't impossible to pull off but it is very VERY tricky. A POD somewhere in the 1700s however shouldn't be that difficult to pull off without drastically changing a whole slew of other events in North America (of course butterflies will flap, but the immediate future up till past the Revolution I don't see being done away with for example). Go much earlier than that and you can achieve the purpose of the OP but then you have bigger butterflies to deal with, and all kinds of changes to history to take into account.

Wilcox has an "in between" happening in his TL, Union & Liberty, where the POD is in the early 1830s.
He uses a softened Indian removal and having Cuba in the Union, as a state, by 1850. The intermixing between Indians blacks and the large free black/mulato population that the US gets by adding Cuba complicates racial matters quite a bit. In addition the gulf states (Louisiana, plus two "Floridas" and two "Texas") in TTL retain a significant Latino/Spanish population. And while there is still a civil war over slavery; it is much shorter than OTL, a few Southern states stay loyal, as do a few prominent Southerners, and the existence of a pro-slavery party during the conflict makes it easy to point the blame on slaveholders. This allows for a radical reconstruction, and the redistribution of land afterwards. Thus the black population as a whole has a much better economic stand point from the get go, and while there is still racism in the "non-gulf" deep south, and de-facto segregation, Jim Crow style laws don't happen. The TL is now in the early 1900s and Wilcox had suggested that a "civil rights" style movement will happen much earlier than OTL.
 
I think you can't do it if the existing Declaration of Independence and US Constitution get widely accepted and adopted. You probably need the concept of hereditary nobility to make it work, which in turn probably requires an established church.

The USA's unimpressive record on race is largely due to the need to square rhetoric like "all men are created equal" with the practice of slavery and its successor institutions; the only way to do that is to declare the slaves "not men". And once that idea is entrenched and accepted, it's a long, slow process to get rid of. Brazil never had to declare its slaves, and thus its freedmen, "not men" because egalitarianism was not a goal or a virtue prior to 1880. Some men are born emperors, some fazenderos, and some slaves, and God gave each the trials he thinks appropriate to them and will judge them in part on how well they meet those specific trials. In short, if you want graceful, post-slavery harmony, you need american kingdoms, not american states that pretend to universal franchise and mostly avoid religious questions.
 
I think you can't do it if the existing Declaration of Independence and US Constitution get widely accepted and adopted. You probably need the concept of hereditary nobility to make it work, which in turn probably requires an established church.

The USA's unimpressive record on race is largely due to the need to square rhetoric like "all men are created equal" with the practice of slavery and its successor institutions; the only way to do that is to declare the slaves "not men". And once that idea is entrenched and accepted, it's a long, slow process to get rid of. Brazil never had to declare its slaves, and thus its freedmen, "not men" because egalitarianism was not a goal or a virtue prior to 1880. Some men are born emperors, some fazenderos, and some slaves, and God gave each the trials he thinks appropriate to them and will judge them in part on how well they meet those specific trials. In short, if you want graceful, post-slavery harmony, you need american kingdoms, not american states that pretend to universal franchise and mostly avoid religious questions.

In that case, you might want to have the landgrave system of the Carolinas actually work out and spread to the other Southern colonies so that an established hereditary nobility system is in place in the American Southern colonies
 
I once read that Iberian/Latin ideas of race and miscegenation borrowed heavily from the nearly 800 years of Arabo-Berber Muslim rule in Spain. As opposed to Anglo-Saxon colonization, Iberian colonization, like its Arabo-Islamic predecessor, was much more "pro" mixing and assimilating conquerors and conquered people. This goes back to the Bedouin Arabs adaptation of Persian-Byzantine bureaucracy and social structures whilst remaining the elite of the early caliphate-empires. Bref, I think you'd have to fundamentally change the characteristics of Anglo-Saxon America before this could happen.
 
I doubt it that factors into anything substantially; France also seemed to have little problem with miscegenation just like Spain (witness the Metis peoples, or the myriad Franco-Indochinese mixed-race persons from the colonial era), yet they never had the same Arab-Berber cultural influence that Spain or Portugal had but rather a similar ethno-cultural outlook to that of England (like most of Northern Europe). Frankly that's an excuse I've heard before, and it never not gets old. Germanic cultures are no less predisposed to multiculturalism than Latin cultures; the Dutch are another good example of this (and no, I'm not talking about the Boers!). As far as the organized religion thing goes, again that does work in favor of the OP but I would remind people that it need not necessarily be Catholicism. After all, the Anglican and Presbyterian Churches both have enough organizational tradition to work as a substitute (especially since the former could arguably be called "British Catholicism" instead of "Roman Catholicism"...yes it's a bit more complicated than that, but shut up :p).

EDIT: That landgrave concept listed up-page is a neat idea that could work. It might also help if the Southern colonies are only added later, after the North has already become independent and either conquers the South or somehow leverages them away from Britain out of a later mutual interest. ISTR a notion where the whole Southeast becomes part of Spain's "La Florida" that stretches from the Chesapeake to the Sabine, maybe that could be useful as a starting point (either instead of or before British colonization).
 
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katchen

Banned
The Spanish came very close to settling the entire Cotton Belt by some accounts. If a colony that they built in South Carolina had endured for a few more years in the 1500s, they might have done it.
 
The Spanish came very close to settling the entire Cotton Belt by some accounts. If a colony that they built in South Carolina had endured for a few more years in the 1500s, they might have done it.

Indeed, by those accounts they could've taken the whole region under settlement; witness the Ajacan mission on the *James River, and the Natchitoches settlement in northeastern *Louisiana.
 
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