Lash of the Tongue, Lash of the Whip

Abstract

This chapter looks simultaneously at the evolution of the language of race and at the racialization of both the judicial and military systems to analyze how racial categories were formed, inhabited, and transformed over time in French New Orleans. The representations of the social order that fueled the language of race both informed and were shaped not only by a discriminatory and violent royal justice that increasingly targeted slaves as the main offenders but also by the exclusion of free blacks from and then by their segregation within permanent militia units. When the Spanish took over the colony, they found a society in which race was more firmly embedded than at the beginning of the French period while fostering more tensions and contradictions.