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The introduction presents the St. Domingue/Haiti to Louisiana migration case, which traces the integration of white and free black refugees and their descendants over the course of two hundred years. The St. Domingue refugees initially reinforced Louisiana’s triracial system. Then, over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the binary Anglo-American racial system came to dominate as the Anglo-American population grew and their racial practices asserted increased pressure on the Latin/Caribbean system. The introduction discusses the ways these immigrants and their descendants coped with contrasting understandings of race and draws parallels between this historical case and the situation of contemporary immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean who often resist the binary logic of the Anglo-American US system.

Chapter 6 examines the contemporary experience of Creoles of African descent. Changing conceptions of blackness during and after the civil rights and Black Power movements challenged Creole identity and made it more difficult for many Creoles of color to see themselves as distinct from other black Americans. These tensions are explored by examining the stories of Creoles of color as gathered from interviews and participant observation with Creole cultural organizations. These stories show three different responses Creoles of color have had to the pressures to assimilate to the binary US racial system: (1) adopt a black American identity; (2) pass as white; or (3) resist the categories of black and white. The chapter concludes by considering similarities between Louisiana’s Creoles of color and Latino immigrants of color who have experienced many of the same tensions and misunderstandings as they have struggled with Anglo-American conceptions of whiteness and blackness.

This chapter looks at narratives articulating Chinese caste elevation in the Mississippi Delta within academic studies, popular culture, film, and memoir. James Loewen's The Mississippi Chinese argues that when faced with a binary racial system that had no accommodation for a third race, the Chinese engineered a shift in status from “colored” to white in the course of one generation. The chapter highlights what becomes repressed in positing racial uplift in response to intermediate status. In contrast to European immigrant groups, the Asian's supposed caste rise can only be characterized as a registered incompletion, as near-whiteness. This incompletion is likewise reflected in the discourses that have sought to represent such status, the scholarship surrounding and generated by Loewen's thesis, including the 1982 documentary film Mississippi Triangle. The chapter thus examines what discursive contradictions were generated in the incomplete attempts to convince of African American disassociation, specifically, the repression of Chinese-Black intimacy.