Mixed Race Studies

All Things Being Equal: The Promise of Affirmative Efforts to Eradicate Color-Coded Inequality in the United States and Brazil

National Black Law Journal
Volume 21, Number 3 (2009)
41 pages

Tanya M. Washington, Associate Professor of Law
Georgia State University

The contrasted contexts of the United States and Brazil provide an intellectually fascinating framework for the consideration of race conscious remedies to racial inequality. “Any comparative examination of race relations hinges on the question of racial inequality: in what ways are blacks disadvantaged in relation to whites in each society . . . ?” A casual observer may compare the United State’s insistence on racial assignment and history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination with Brazilian historical aversion to racial classification and history of de facto discrimination and conclude that race and color enjoy more conceptual and legal relevance in the former context than in the latter.

Introduction

The contrasted contexts of the United States and Brazil provide an intellectually fascinating framework for the consideration of race conscious remedies to racial inequality. “Any comparative examination of race relations hinges on the question of racial inequality: in what ways are blacks disadvantaged in relation to whites in each society… ?”1 A casual observer may compare the United State’s insistence on racial assignment and history of de jure and de facto racial discrimination with Brazilian historical aversion to racial classification and history of de facto discrimination and conclude that race and color enjoy more conceptual and legal relevance in the former context than in the latter.  This conclusion, in turn, would inform a judgment as to the relative necessity and efficacy of the administration of affirmative action in both nations. Instead of using the apparent differences between legal definitions of race and color in the two countries as a reference point for comparing the utility of affirmative action as a means of eradicating color-coded inequality, this article uses as its point of departure, the similar ways that racial and color-based inequality have been manufactured in the United States and Brazil.4 “Because they share the same battle against insidious systems of racial hierarchy, it is sensible for both Americas to… focus upon the commonality of the historical legacy of slavery and its outgrowth in the continuing societal efforts to maintain privilege…” “North and South America… share a societal use of segregation for the promotion of supremacy. The segregation of education has been a key to this agenda of privilege.” Within the context of education, this piece treats affirmative action as a crucible, revealing racialized narratives, polarities, hierarchies and constructs, which have created and maintained the color-coded inequality that characterizes both American and Brazilian social, political, and economic realities…

…A substantively different construction of affirmative action, called by the same name, is being implemented in Brazil. Brazil has historically been described as a Racial Democracy, a national ideology that shares with colorblindness a resistance to the legal relevance of race. As this ideology yields to a national narrative that recognizes color-coded realities,16 the Brazilian government is utilizing the most aggressive form of affirmative action, quotas, to both remedy significant racialized social, economic and political disparities and to achieve substantive economic, social and political equality for its citizens. Brazilians opposed to affirmative action practices and policies, echoing objections raised by affirmative action detractors in the United States, charge that racial assignment and classification for the purpose of including some and excluding others (i.e., the legalization of racial classifications) is divisive,17 destabilizing, and impossible in a nation that has existed without categorical racial identities. This article considers whether a diversity focused affirmative action policy would provide a more politically palatable framework for race-conscious governmental action, and offer a justification that is more concentric with the Brazilian orientation towards difference, than a remediation focused policy.

The growing awareness of racial disparities as a catalyst to and justification for efforts to achieve substantive equality in Brazil and the growing reticence in the United States to the use of race conscious means of facilitating substantive equality, provide a unique opportunity for a comparative analysis of the ways in which racism and colorism construct social, economic and political inequality for Afro- Brazilians and Black Americans and the extent to which affirmative action can provide an effective vehicle for reform in both nations. Part I of this article begins with an examination of the history and evolution of the significance and uses of race and color that have informed the current climate of raceblindness in the face of racial inequality in both nations. This section explores the ways in which the legend of Racial Democracy continues to pervade perceptions of race and challenge efforts to remedy racial inequities in Brazil and the ways in which the ideology of colorblindness has provided a jurisprudential framework inherently hostile to race-conscious efforts to achieve substantive equality in America.

Part II of this article highlights racial disparities in both nations and identifies racial polarity, which expresses fixed and diametrically opposed valuations of whiteness and blackness, reflected in white-to-black color hierarchies that operate in both the United States and Brazil, as their chief article contrasts colorblindness in the United States and Racial Democracy in Brazil architect. In keeping with this theme, race and color are considered throughout this piece within a binary (black/white) framework, which underscores the central thesis that black-white racial polarities, in concert with normative whiteness, create substantive social, economic, and political inequality in both countries.

Part III of this article contrasts colorblindness in the United States and Racial Democracy in Brazil and addresses how racial and color-based inequality are both masked and manufactured at the intersection of racial polarity and resistance to an acknowledgement of the legal relevance of race in both nations. This section of the article then focuses on the prospects of a Brazilian affirmative action project based on educational diversity and its transformative possibilities for creating substantive equality. It highlights how Brazil’s Constitution and its affirmative action legislation accommodate and instigate responses to racial inequality that challenge normative whiteness. This article ends on an optimistic note, concluding that an educational diversity focused affirmative action project may be a more effective tool with which to disrupt racial polarity in Brazil and dismantle the consequent color hierarchy that creates and perpetuates substantive inequality.

…The prospect of freedom for the slaves inspired insecurity among white Brazilians, and created the need for structures and policies that would maintain their status as the ruling elite. Responding to this exigency, the Brazilian government engaged in large scale immigration of European whites and encouraged miscegenation in order to improve the racial balance between blacks and whites. The “whitening” of the Brazilian population, through miscegenation, was believed to have a civilizing effect on the Brazilian population of observable African ancestry and reinforced normative whiteness (i.e., whiteness as the value standard). A popular slogan of the day, “Marry White to Improve the Race,” captured the pervasive sentiment.

Gilberto Freyre, credited with popularizing the idea of Racial Democracy in the 1930s and 1940s, studied at Baylor University in Texas in the early 1900s and reacted with horror to the Jim Crow institutions and practices he witnessed during his visit, including a lynching.

The shock of Freyre’s encounter with the racial hostility and segregation of the United States led him to construct a vision of Brazil’s past (and, by extension, its present and future) that proved deeply appealing to many Brazilians. Scientific racism and its Brazilian variant, the whitening thesis, had viewed Brazil’s history of slavery and miscegenation, and the racially mixed population which was its legacy, as shameful obstacles that had to be overcome if Brazil were to enter the community of civilized nations. Freyre… rehabilitated that past, recasting it as the basis of a new national identity independent, for the first time in Brazilian history, of European norms and models…. Freyre’s writings thus became the basis of a new, semi-official ideology propagated in public proclamations, schools, universities, and the national media…

Read the entire article here.

Julianne Jennings: The mixed blood of Indians explained

The Providence Journal
Providence, Rhode Island
2009-01-30

Julianne Jennings
Willmantic, Connecticut

EUROPEAN EXPLORERS discovered a land inhabited by an agricultural people who grew corn, beans and squash and who had a sophisticated system of government that, some would argue, would later be adopted by the United States. The settling of a hostile “wilderness” and the near-extinction of Native Americans is now an annual American celebration called Thanksgiving. Every year, school-age children are taught the legend of the first encounter between Indians and the Pilgrims.

Included in the mythical story is a description of what an “authentic” Indian looked like and how he or she behaved. These false images are promulgated in children’s literature and in film and have become the death of many Native Americans who do not fit the popular stereotype, especially Indians who live along the Eastern Seaboard and whose physical features reflect blood mixing.

In New England, after the Pequot War (1636-1637) and the King Philip’s War (1675-1676), the Pequots were either executed, forced into indentured servitude in colonial households, divided among other Eastern tribes, or shipped to Bermuda and the Caribbean as slaves. Today, eight out of ten Native Americans are of mixed blood as a result of slavery and post-slavery intermarriage, particularly in New England. Further, the infamous “one-drop rule,” which is also tied to the colonial slave system, decreed that a single drop of black blood, or a single ancestor who was African, in an individual of mixed race defined that person as black.

After the Pequot War and the King Philip’s War, slavery was a booming business in Bermuda in the late 1600s. The English conducted a census of the population living on the island. There were five categories of race: white, negro, Indian, mulatto and mustees. Mustees were people who were of mixed race but passed for white. During the late 1700s another census was conducted. There were still five categories; however, Indians were now classified as “colored.” After emancipation in 1834, the classification of mustees were dropped, people of color were either negro, colored or mulatto, depending on their features, skin color and hair texture…

Read the entire article here.

Black and White: The Relevance of Race-Unfinished Business

The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi chapter at Agusta State University
Activities for Fall 2001
2001-10-05
5 pages

Christopher Murphy
Department of History and Anthropology
Augusta State University, Augusta, Georgia

Several centuries ago, as Europeans first explored the distant, unknown reaches of the globe, it became clear that populations around the world differed enormously in appearance and behavior. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the emerging study of anthropology undertook to carefully measure and describe these physical variations and scientifically classify the “races” of humankind, as they were called, based on the results.

Initially, the criteria of racial classification were based on relatively rough and ready observable traits: skin color, body configuration, facial features, hair form, measurements of skull shape and volume and so on. Eventually, anthropologists recognized a people’s customary learned patterns of behavior as separate from their physique. Among social scientists customary behavior came to be called culture and physical characteristics came to be known as race…

…Anthropologist Conrad Kottak has pointed out an interesting aspect of social race attribution connected to interracial mating. When such matings occurred, the offspring was routinely assimilated to the race of the minority parent, a phenomenon Kottak calls “hypodescent”. This practice was undoubtedly caused in part by the fantasy fear of whites that interracial unions would somehow “dilute” or “corrupt” the racial qualities which many of them believed had led to their dominance. If whites were superior people, the founders of modern civilization as they liked to believe, only disaster could follow from such intimacy between the races.

Preventing all sexual contact between races and consequent miscegenation proved impossible, but putative racial purity had more than one line of defense. By clearly identifying the mixed race offspring as “Black” with the disabilities that status then carried, hypodescent ensured that these individuals could not enter the white world since the races lived in parallel, but unequal, social universes. If not for this practice, which was reinforced by law in some states and custom everywhere until after the Civil Rights movement, it might have been possible that the child’s status would follow that of the superordinate parent…

Read the entire paper here.

Why Do We Consider Obama to Be Black?

New America Media
Commentary
2008-10-25

Ronald Takaki (1939-2009), Emeritus Professor of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Berkeley

A historical look at the the persistence of the “one drop” rule.

Editor’s Note: Historian and scholar Ronald Takaki uncovers the origins of the “one drop” rule that was key to defining race early in America’s history, and ponders whether we will ever move past it – even with a mixed race presidential candidate. Takaki, emeritus professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (updated edition to be published by Little, Brown in December).

Barack Obama is the son of a white mother and a black father. In Latin America, he would be identified as “mulatto” or half white and half black, and in South Africa as “colored” or between white and black.

Why are all African Americans, regardless of their mixed racial heritage, identified as black? What are the origins of the uniquely American “one drop” rule?

The first 20 Africans were landed in Jamestown in 1619. Yet, the planter class did not rush to bring more laborers from Africa. The elite wanted to reproduce an English society in America. By 1670, only 5 percent of the Virginia population was African.

Six years later, the planters abandoned their vision of a homogeneous society. During Bacon’s Rebellion, armed white and black laborers marched to Jamestown and burned it to the ground. After reinforcements of British troops had put down the insurrection, the planters turned to Africa as their primary source of labor: they wanted workers who could be enslaved and disarmed by law based on the color of their skin. The African population inclined upward to 40 percent.

The planters also stigmatized the complexion of the African laborer. They had earlier passed a law which law provided that the child of a slave mother would inherit the status of the mother, regardless of the race of the father. Thus a child of a slave mother and a white father would be a slave.

After Bacon’s Rebellion, the elite passed another law which enslaved the child of a white mother and a black father.

These two laws gave birth to the “one drop” rule. To be black, even part black was to be a slave, and to be a slave was to be black…

Read the entire article here.

Remembering Mildred Loving, Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

Counterpunch
2008-05-09

Mark A. Huddle, Associate Professor of History
Georgia College and State University

Fighting “Anti-Miscegenation” Laws

On May 2, Mildred Loving died from complications of pneumonia at the age of 68.  The unassuming Mrs. Loving would have scoffed at the notion that she was a hero of the Civil Rights Movement.  But for millions of Americans the Loving v. Virginia (1967) case—which outlawed bans on interracial marriage—has resonated to the present as their declaration of independence. 

The Lovings’ story began in June 1958 when they were married in Washington, DC.  Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Delores Jeter of Central Point, Virginia crossed into the District to evade their state’s Racial Integrity Act, a law that defined the marriage of a white man and African American woman as a felony.  Five weeks later on July 11, the newly-married couple was rousted from their bed by the Caroline County, Virginia sheriff and two deputies and arrested for violating the 1924 law.  In a plea agreement, they pleaded guilty in return for a one-year suspended jail sentence and an agreement not to return to the state together for twenty-five years. 

The couple moved to Washington, started a family, and struggled to make ends meet.  Eventually the isolation from family and friends proved too much.  In 1963 Mildred Loving contacted the American Civil Liberties Union which agreed to take the case.  Eventually Loving v. Virginia was argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on April 10, 1967.  Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the opinion of the Court on June 12.  Warren put the question succinctly:  did the “statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications” violate the “Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment?”  The Court concluded that the Virginia law directly contradicted the “central meaning” of those constitutional safeguards and was therefore unconstitutional.

The Lovings were always quick to note that while they were glad their case proved so helpful to so many people their main concern was the welfare of their own family.  “We are doing it for us,” Richard Loving told an interviewer in 1966.  But the Loving decision eventually impacted millions. 

So-called “anti-miscegenation laws” were one of the more tenacious vestiges of Jim Crow.  The last state to strike anti-miscegenation statutes from its organic law was Alabama which waited until 2000 to do so.  In the decades since the ruling, there has been a marked increase in mixed race marriages and by the 1990s we were in the midst of an interracial baby-boom.  Also of particular importance to the growth of the mixed-race population was the Immigration Act of 1965 that eliminated many of the racist immigration restrictions from earlier legislation and contributed to the “browning of America.”  Census 2000, the first to allow Americans to check more than one box for racial identity, counted 7.3 million people, about 3 percent of the population, as interracial.  The most striking fact of all from the data is that 41 percent of that mixed race population was under the age of eighteen…

Read the entire article here.

Greg Carter to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #191-Greg Carter
When: Wednesday, 2011-02-02, 22:00Z (17:00 EST, 16:00 CST, 14:00 PST)

Greg Carter, Assistant Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Greg Carter is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His book, The United States of the United Races, a survey of positive ideas about racial mixing in the United States is forthcoming from New York University Press.

‘Land of our Mothers’: Home, Identity, and Nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India, 1919–1947

History Workshop Journal
Volume 54, Issue 1
pages 49-72
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/54.1.49

Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London

This paper explores the symbolic and material intersections of home, identity and nationality for Anglo-Indians (previously known as ‘Eurasians’) in the period between the Montague Chelmsford Reforms and Indian Independence. Community claims for a legitimate heritage were articulated through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and were closely tied to political attempts to gain a legitimate stake in national life. The paper examines public debates about home, identity and nationality with reference to the two main Anglo-Indian leaders of the twentieth century, Henry Gidney and Frank Anthony. While a British imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, political debates about home, identity and nationality largely erased the figure of an Indian maternal ancestor and instead focused on Mother India and on the domestic roles of Anglo-Indian women. The political recognition of both women and the home was an attempt not only to domesticate Anglo-Indian women, but also to domesticate a new national identity that regarded India more than Britain as home. But the home life of Anglo-Indians remained more British than Indian and political attempts to foster national loyalty to India as motherland were contested on a domestic scale. The mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was thus both manifested and erased in public debates about the future and status of the community.

…This paper is about India as ‘land of our mothers’ at a time when questions of home, identity and nationality were bound together in complex and contested ways for Anglo-Indians and other minority communities in India. Through my focus on a distinct community of mixed descent, I examine the ways in which national identity was embodied in gendered and racialized ways that reflected and reproduced a dual affiliation to both Britain and India as home. Community claims for a legitimate heritage were articulated through images of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland, and such claims were closely tied to political attempts to gain a legitimate stake in national life. For this reason, I analyse public debates about home, identity and nationality, drawing on political representations by Anglo-Indian leaders and on articles and letters published in the Anglo-Indian Review. I focus on the period from the Montague Chelmsford Report of 1919, which laid the foundations for Indianization in government employment and political representation, to independence in 1947. This also allows me to contrast the policies of the two main Anglo-Indian leaders of the twentieth century. Henry Gidney led the community from 1919 until his death in 1942, when he was succeeded by Frank Anthony, who served as president of the [All-India Anglo-Indian Association] AIAIA and as a nominated member of parliament representing community interests from 1942 until his death in 1993. Rather than render spaces of home as more symbolic than actual in forging a national identity, I argue that political attempts to foster a greater national loyalty to India as motherland rather than Britain as fatherland were contested on a domestic scale. Anglo-Indian homes continued to be imagined as more British than Indian despite political attempts by Gidney and Anthony to identify the community as a nationalist minority. Rather than explore the home merely as a feminized space, I am interested in how it also came to be shaped by a masculine imperial heritage. While a British imperial lineage was imagined through the figure of a British forefather, political debates about home, identity, and nationality largely erased the figure of an Indian maternal ancestor and instead focused on Mother India and on the present and future political roles of Anglo-Indian women within and beyond the home. While ideas of home and identity were potent sites in shaping ideas of nationality, the mixed descent of Anglo-Indians was thus both manifested and erased in public debates about the future and status of the community…

Read the entire article here.

The Planter’s Fictions: Identity, Intimacy, and the Negotiations of Power in Colonial Jamaica

University of Victoria, Canada
2010
127 pages

Meleisa Ono-George

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Art In the Department of History

By the latter quarter of the eighteenth century, as the movement against the slave trade increased in Britain, Creoles, those of British ancestry born in the West Indies, were increasingly criticized for their involvement in slavery. Simon Taylor, a Jamaican-born planter of Scottish ancestry who lived most of his life in the colony, attempted to negotiate competing and often contradictory sensibilities and subject positions as both British and Creole.

One of the central challenges to Taylor’s negotiation of identity was his long-term relationship with Grace Donne, a free mixed-race woman of colour. An examination of their relationship highlights the ways binary discourses and exclusionary practices devised to create and reinforce rigid racial boundaries were regularly crossed and blurred, even by an individual like Simon Taylor, a person well placed to benefit from the policing and maintenance of those boundaries.

Table of Contents

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE
• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• DEDICATION
• 1. IDENTITY, INTIMACY AND PERFORMANCE
• 2. SIMON TAYLOR AND HIS WORLD.
• 3. A RELATIVELY PRECARIOUS POSITION
• 4. “WASHING THE BLACKMOOR WHITE”: INTIMACY AND POWER
• 5. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction: Identity, Intimacy and Performance

Here lie the remains of the Honorable Simon Taylor, a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man. Who after an active live, during which he faithfully and ably filled the highest offices of civil and military duty in this island, died.
—Inscription on Simon Taylor’s gravestone, Lyssons, Jamaica.

Shortly after his death in the summer of 1813, the body of Simon Taylor was exhumed from its burial place at his Prospect Pen estate near Kingston, Jamaica, and moved sixty kilometers away to another family estate in St. Thomas-in-the-East. The means by which his body was carried to St. Thomas created a stir in the sugar colony. The body of Simon Taylor, one of Jamaica’s wealthiest settler at the time of his death, was moved to its final resting place on the back of a mule-drawn cart. The Lieutenant-governor of Jamaica, Edward Morrison, wrote in a local newspaper that the whole process “was done in not a very decent manner.” It was an insult to the memory of Simon Taylor, a leading figure and planter in the colony, for his body to be carried to its final burial on a “common mule cart.” During his life, Taylor had worked to embody the very definition of respectability in the colony. The son of a Scottish merchant and Jamaica-born mother of British ancestry, Taylor was born in St. Andrews parish, Jamaica on December 23, 1738. Besides a short period when he attended Eton College in England as a child and studied business in Holland, Taylor spent most of his life in Jamaica where he worked his way up the ladder of colonial society from an estate attorney to the owner of several plantations and over two thousand slaves. From custos and head of the militia to his involvement in the Jamaican House of Assembly, his administrative roles in Jamaica established him firmly within the plantocracy, a small group of large plantation owners who controlled most of the wealth and political life in Jamaica. To many of the colonial elite Taylor was, as his gravestone reads, “a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man.” The focus of this study however is not Taylor’s embodiment of colonial respectability, but rather the ways in which his life reflected the conflicts and complexities of eighteenth century Jamaican slave society. Using the letters of Simon Taylor written to his family, friends, and business associates from 1779 until his death in 1813 as my principal primary source, this thesis will explore colonial identities and the place of interracial intimacy in slave society. I begin this project by setting out the main theoretical arguments that frame and inspire my work. These arguments revolve around three main ideas—the precarious nature of racial and national identity formation in the colony; the colonial anxieties that developed in Jamaica; and the importance of examining social performance and intimacy in order to understand representations of identity and claims of power and cohesion. These are the themes woven throughout this chapter and the focus of this project…

…The multiple and conflicting understandings of difference that proliferated in the late eighteenth century suggest the need to move away from a binary model of analysis of race to one that engages with the spaces in-between—the “uncertain crossing and invasion of identities” that occurred in Jamaica, and the contradictions and anxieties that emerged from this crossing. Boundaries established in racial discourse that separated the “races,” although at times firm, were incomplete and routinely crossed in day-to-day interactions between individuals. The large number of mixed-race people in Jamaica by the end of the eighteenth century and the substantial amount of property bequeathed to them by their white fathers attests to how frequently racial divisions were blurred. As Catherine Hall argues, “it is not possible to make sense of empire either theoretically or empirically through a binary lens: we need the dislocation of that binary and more elaborate, cross-cutting ways of thinking. Although the language of self/other and master/slave is very useful in understanding national and racial identity formation and power, such dichotomies cannot fully capture the complex and nuanced interactions of people, especially in colonial “contact zones” like Jamaica. “Cross-cutting ways of thinking” are needed in the examination of Jamaican slave society in order to understand the detailed hierarchies of race and difference and the complicated movements and exchanges between individuals in the colony…

…Chapter three examines Simon Taylor’s relationship with his housekeeper, Grace Donne. The framework of intimacy will allow me to explore and illuminate the contradictions between the ideals of British respectability that Simon Taylor attempted to maintain, especially under a metropolitan gaze, and his feelings of affection towards Grace Donne and his mixed-race family. In addition, I will attempt to situate Grace Donne, a free woman of colour who lived with Simon Taylor for thirty-six years, as a central actor in his life, despite her conspicuous absence from his letters. I use the story of Simon Taylor and Grace Donne as a case study to show the ambiguities inherent in Jamaican slave society and to highlight the ways in which intimate interracial relationships threatened to undermine the hierarchies needed to maintain slave society. On occasion, sentiment as much as skin colour or class was the basis on which alliances were fashioned, boundaries crossed, and power negotiated…

Read the entire thesis here.

The Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans and the U.S. Census

Michigan Law Review
Volume 95, Number 5 (March 1997)
pages 1161-1265

Christine B. Hickman, Associate Professor of Law
California Western School of Law

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• I. Treatment of Mixed-Race People: The Early Legal Record
  • A. The First African Americans and the First Race Mixing
  • B. Mulattoes: Black by Law
  • C. A Study in Contrasts: Exclusion of Mulattoes from De Crèvecoeur’s “New Race of Men”
  • D. The Census and the Mulatto Category, 1850-1910
• II. Proposals for a Multiracial Category: Critiquing the Discourse
  • A. The One Drop Rule: The Misapprehension of the Historical Context
    1. Misperceptions of the One Drop Rule: Gotanda’s Theories of Racial Purity, Objectivity and Subordination in Recognition
    2. The One Drop Rule and “Buying into the System of Racial Domination”
    3. Lessons from the South African Experience
  • B. Rebiologizing Race
    1. The Collapse of Biological Race
    2. Proposals for a Broad Genetically Based Multiracial Category
    3. The Proposal for a Majoritarian Classification System
    4. Biological Passing for Black
    5. The Harlem Renaissance and Cultural
    6. Race, Biology and the Law: The Racial Credential Cases
  • C. The Dangers of Redefining Black: Distancing.
    1. Finding Solutions for the Lighter Part of the Race
    2. Sanitizing our Attacks on Racism
    3. Conclusion
• III. From the One Drop Rule to the Discourse on Race
  • A. There is Race
  • B. Race as a Metaphor
  • C. Essential vs. Cultural Concepts of Race
  • D. Race as a Choice
    1. Appiah, Lee, and the Choice of Our Racial Identity
    2. Choice Today
    3. The Choice of Our Race by Daily Actions
• IV. A Proposal for the Census
  • A. The Broad, Blood-based Multiracial Category
  • B. Counting Loving’s Children on the Race Line
    1. Multiracial Status as Race
    2. The False Choice Between Race and Multirace
    3. The Multiracial Category on the “Race” Line: Guaranteed Inaccuracy
  • C. A Line of Their Own.
• Conclusion

For generations, the boundaries of the African-American race have been formed by a rule, informally known as the “one drop rule,” which, in its colloquial definition, provides that one drop of Black blood makes a person Black. In more formal, sociological circles, the rule is known as a form of “hypodescent” and its meaning remains basically the same: anyone with a known Black ancestor is considered Black. Over the generations, this rule has not only shaped countless lives, it has created the African-American race as we know it today, and it has defined not just the history of this race but a large part of the history of America.

Now as the millennium approaches, social forces require some rethinking of this important, old rule. Plessy v. Ferguson, which affirmed the right of states to mandate “equal but separate accommodations” for White and “colored” train passengers, is a century old. Brown v. Board of Education, which effectively overruled Plessy and instituted the end of de jure discrimination, was decided over a generation ago. Nearly thirty years have passed since the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, invalidated any prohibition against interracial marriage as unconstitutional. Since the 1967 Loving decision, the number of interracial marriages has nearly quadrupled. This trend has even extended to Black-White couples, whose intermarriage rate has traditionally lagged behind that of other racial and ethnic groups. For the first time, opinion polls indicate that more Americans approve of interracial marriage than disapprove. The number of children born to parents of different races has increased dramatically, and some of the offspring of these interracial marriages have assumed prominent roles in American popular culture.

Some of these children of interracial marriages are now arguing cogently for a reappraisal of hypodescent. Their movement has sprung to public consciousness with the recent bid by multiracial organizations, over the objections of civil rights groups, to put a “multiracial” category in the “race” section of the forms that will be used when the next decennial census is conducted in the year 2000. This proposal has immense practical importance because the census provides the nation with its main source of racial and ethnic data. For example, implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 all depend on racial and ethnic statistics culled from the census, and the addition of a new category could change the count of the existing racial groups and alter the way these laws are implemented.

One wing of this new multiracial movement argues that a new “multiracial box” should be made available for the growing number of children of interracial marriages. Another wing of this movement, in books and law review articles, suggests that the addition of this category should be part of a wholesale redefinition of the racial identities of most Americans. The thinking of both wings of the multiracial movement is informed by their rejection of hypodescent and the “one drop rule.” To date, the participants in this discourse have emphasized the racist notions of White racial purity that gave rise to the one drop rule. They have concluded that the effects of this old rule are mainly evil and that the consequences of abandoning it will be mainly good. Based in part on such reasoning, the more activist wing of this movement has proposed several neat, symmetrical, and radical redefinitions of African-American racial identity. Under one such proposed definition, any Black person with White or Native American ancestry would become “multiracial.” Under another, any Black person with a “majority of [his] origins in the original peoples of Europe” would become European American.

My purpose in this article is to critique this discourse. I agree that the one drop rule had its origins in racist notions of White purity. However, many scholars have misunderstood the way that this rule has shaped the Black experience in America, and this misunderstanding has distorted their proposals for a new multiracial category on the census forms. As we examine the one drop rule and its importance in the current discourse, we should recall the famous exchange between Faust and Goethe’s Devil:

Faust: Say at least, who you are?

Mephistopheles: I am part of that power which ever wills evil yet ever accomplishes good.

So it was with the one drop rule. The Devil fashioned it out of racism, malice, greed, lust, and ignorance, but in so doing he also accomplished good: His rule created the African-American race as we know it today, and while this race has its origins in the peoples of three continents and its members can look very different from one another, over the centuries the Devil’s one drop rule united this race as a people in the fight against slavery, segregation, and racial injustice…

Read the entire article here.

A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Journal of American Folklore
Volume 124, Number 491 (Winter 2011)
pages 120-121
E-ISSN: 1535-1882 Print ISSN: 0021-8715

Sharon Downey Varner
Department of English
University of South Alabama

Hodes, Martha. A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2007.

This meticulously researched historical narrative is reconstructed from letters written by the subject and her family members. In A Sea Captain’s Wife, historian Martha Hodes brings to life the story of an obscure New England woman who marries a black man after the Civil War and takes up residence in the Cayman Islands. Hodes is a professor of history at New York University and the author of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century South.

Eunice Richardson, the subject of this book, was born a white, working-class woman in New England in 1831. She was first married to William Stone, a fellow New Englander, with whom she moved to Mobile, Alabama, for a period of time. Hodes speculates that it was in Mobile that Eunice first became acquainted with Smiley Connolly, an African American who would become her second husband.

Hodes leaves no stone unturned and no document undogged. Her storyteller’s bent, her understanding of the complex racial climate of the late 1800s, and her extensive historical knowledge combine to produce an engaging historical document that reads like a novel…

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