Redbone and Melungeon

Abstracted from Wikipedia (a resource you all apparently need to become more familiar with):

"Redbone" is a Southern dialect term for Americans of mixed ethnic ancestry, generally two or more of the following in any proportion: Northern European, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Native American and African. The term undoubtedly originated in the South, where race was an emotional issue yet the white population mixed with minorities more than they admitted.

The word Redbone was most often used for light-skinned children born into African-American families with dark skin. Its etymology is cited as the observation, "They're so light you can see their blood flowing." Sub-Saharan Africa has been invaded, exploited, occupied and colonized by nearby Europeans, western Asians and North Africans for millennia so that the "racial purity" of the African people is more a political term than a biological one. It's unremarkable for African-American couples to produce light-skinned children without having any known non-African ancestry, a phenomenon that to this day causes controversy and confusion.

People identified as Redbones traditionally speak English and are not neccesarily Creole or Cajun, nor mixed with any other heritage. Close scrutiny reveals only vague differences between the culture of the referenced people and the dominant Euro-Americans surrounding them. The term was more common in the nineteenth century in east Texas and other parts of the South, but later generations continued to reference the descendants of these racially obscure people, to the extent that some of those descendants began to classify themselves as "redbone."

"Melungeon" is simply another epithet originally used in similar fashion in Tennessee and Kentucky, but its usage has been recently expanded by genealogy marketers and tourism promoters. Its history can be traced to about the same era, which also produced the terms "moor", "brass ankle", etc., all of which have been associated with the same large group of family surnames. No specific surnames are cited and no etymology is given for "melungeon."

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My take is that these words are legacies of America's racist past and we'd all be better off leaving them in the history books. The study of these relics is the fair province of linguistics because they have much to teach us, but let's try to maintain their status as academic.

 

Nothing is quite as "bad" as the N-word. But it's like calling somebody a half-breed. What's the point? Do we really need to comment on each other's ethnic ancestry, especially when it's so obscure that all we're really saying is, "You're a real American from the Melting Pot, I can't even tell where your ancestors came from."

 

Melungeon... hmm... shift the accent to the third syllable and it sounds French but doesn't look French. Wait a minute, if you replace that U with an A, it still sounds French and now it looks French. Melangeon as in melange, a mixture. Sure enough, there's a French word melangeon that means "mixed breed."

There was a huge French community in the South--the Louisiana purchase and all that. Melungeon is an anglicized French word.

 

Don't know. The article was not well written and did not have many citations. Did they make slave chains out of brass in those days?