Conclusion

The concluding chapter finishes the book at the time of the U.S. Revolution and shows that Mulattoes and others of mixed ancestry had struggled throughout the colonial period for freedom. During the Revolutionary era, many of the Founding Fathers and other EuroAmericans deprived “Mulattoes,” “Negroes,” and other people of color of the same freedoms they sought from the British empire. This concluding section wraps up larger themes of the book around racial fluidity and hypodescent. It also explores further implications for how British colonists defined interracial mixture and negatively labelled people they perceived to be of mixed race as a deplorable group that were affiliated with early ideas of hybrid degeneracy. Still, people of blended heritage fashioned themselves as a group deserving of respect and the same liberties as Europeans and EuroAmericans in the early United States. Ultimately the fight for independence and equal recognition by mixed-heritage people was part of the larger freedom struggle by other poor and free people of color.