Joined: 24 Sep 2008 {Posts: 102 } Location: Santiago, DR
Posted: Mon 13 Oct 2008 15:15 Post subject: When will One Dropping be a thing of the past in the US?
I have a sincere question that I hope receives some good answers:
What needs to happen or what can we do so that "one dropping" is all but discarded as a way of classifying people, ie will we ever be able to get away from this racial classification in the US?
Maybe with the increase of the mulatto class white and blacks will have to rethink or discard these notions? Especially if whites become a minority in the next 50 years I would expect that the national "opinion" or "identity" would move to reflect the increasing racial ambiguous population.
At least here in the Dominican Republic, intermarrying with other factors have caused color designations such as black and white to lose any insinuated or other meaning other than physical classification for the most part. In fact this is really what happened in the DR starting sometime after the Spanish established a colony there in the 15 century. Eventually because of the influx of slaves and also Haitians in later years and intermarrying the whites were relegated to a minority class. By far the majority of the population is classified as mulatto, with a significant if minor indigenous Indian component. Here is a statement regarding the census done more than 200 years ago.
Jose Alvarez de Peralta writes that, at the time of the treaty between Spain and France on June 3, 1777 at Aranjuez, the Dominican population was, not counting the Haitian side, 400,000. The break down was as follows:
blancos (white)........................................... ..................100,000
Mestizos de Raza India y Blanca........................................100, 000
Mulatos........................................... ..............................70,000
Mestizos de Raza India y Negro..........................................60, 000
Negros............................................ ..............................70, 000
Per the recent census figures whites are at 16 percent, blacks 11 and mixed at 73%.
Based on this type of "model" maybe we can expect the US to be much more progressive in terms of racial attitudes in maybe 300 years or so? Not too encouraging to say the least.
Maybe I've answered my own question but I would like to here what other people think.
Posted: Mon 13 Oct 2008 18:25 Post subject: Re: When will One Dropping be a thing of the past in the US?
chip wrote:
Per the recent census figures whites are at 16 percent, blacks 11 and mixed at 73%.
Please provide a Dominican Republic source for those numbers. I am skeptical that they come from any census. I suggest that the DR census has no such categories. You have 24 hours.
Joined: 24 Sep 2008 {Posts: 102 } Location: Santiago, DR
Posted: Mon 13 Oct 2008 19:53 Post subject: Re: When will One Dropping be a thing of the past in the US?
fwsweet wrote:
chip wrote:
Per the recent census figures whites are at 16 percent, blacks 11 and mixed at 73%.
Please provide a Dominican Republic source for those numbers. I am skeptical that they come from any census. I suggest that the DR census has no such categories. You have 24 hours.
This is my source. I suppose the term "census" was incorrectly used, I apologize, the correct term should be "population racial demographics". Here is the link.
Posted: Mon 13 Oct 2008 20:25 Post subject: Re: When will One Dropping be a thing of the past in the US?
chip wrote:
No offense, but please point out where I stated or implied the study(census) originated from the Dominican Republic.
Numbers about "racial" classification within the DR which do not originate from within the DR are questionable at best. The best you can say about them is that they reflect how some non-Dominican would classify Dominicans.
The problem is that the findings you published lack credibility. Since the DR has not had a "racial" category in its census for many decades, any such numbers must come from someone's guess. Since no scholar within the DR has published any such estimates, they must come from outside the DR.
The specific numbers that you cited originally came from a publication titled "CIA Fact Book," which is published by the U.S. federal government. The agency has rebuffed repeated requests by scholars to identify where those numbers came from and what they mean.
We know that the numbers cannot refer to DNA. If "mulatto" means anyone with detectable markers from both Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, then the number of "mulattoes" in the DR would be 100 percent.
We also know that the numbers cannot refer to ethnic self-identity. If "black" means anyone who self-identifies as a member of the "black" endogamous ethnic community in the DR, then the numnber of "blacks" in the DR would be 0 percent--there is no such endogamous ethnic community in the DR.
Scholars suspect that the CIA fact book numbers reflect some federal bureaucrat's attempt to estimate the numbers of Dominicans who would be seen within each category by the average American tourist's eyeball. The problem with this hypothesis is that the "mulatto" percentage should then be zero, since the U.S. is unique in the hemisphere as lacking an intermediate caste.
Joined: 24 Sep 2008 {Posts: 102 } Location: Santiago, DR
Posted: Mon 13 Oct 2008 20:43 Post subject:
My point in referencing the "census" wasn't anything other than try to give an idea of what the composition is today compared with the 1777 numbers to show how intermarrying here in the DR has progressed and changed the "racial" composition.
Furthermore, my message, I believe, was straightforward and positive to say the least - basically that racial classifications have lost their meanings over time (which I assume to be a good thing). Also, wouldn't it appear by simple introspection that naturally the DR would have no official racial designations in their census?
I understand this forum has some pretty strict rules comparatively speaking, and I understand and subject myself to them as well - given the highly volatile and charged subject of race. However, at least in my case if the message is positive - as I believe supporting racial integration to the fullest - I think this should be taken into account.
Posted: Mon 13 Oct 2008 22:37 Post subject: Re: When will One Dropping be a thing of the past in the US?
chip wrote:
I have a sincere question that I hope receives some good answers:
What needs to happen or what can we do so that "one dropping" is all but discarded as a way of classifying people, ie will we ever be able to get away from this racial classification in the US?
Maybe with the increase of the mulatto class white and blacks will have to rethink or discard these notions? Especially if whites become a minority in the next 50 years I would expect that the national "opinion" or "identity" would move to reflect the increasing racial ambiguous population.
At least here in the Dominican Republic, intermarrying with other factors have caused color designations such as black and white to lose any insinuated or other meaning other than physical classification for the most part. In fact this is really what happened in the DR starting sometime after the Spanish established a colony there in the 15 century. Eventually because of the influx of slaves and also Haitians in later years and intermarrying the whites were relegated to a minority class. By far the majority of the population is classified as mulatto, with a significant if minor indigenous Indian component. Here is a statement regarding the census done more than 200 years ago.
Jose Alvarez de Peralta writes that, at the time of the treaty between Spain and France on June 3, 1777 at Aranjuez, the Dominican population was, not counting the Haitian side, 400,000. The break down was as follows:
blancos (white)........................................... ..................100,000
Mestizos de Raza India y Blanca........................................100, 000
Mulatos........................................... ..............................70,000
Mestizos de Raza India y Negro..........................................60, 000
Negros............................................ ..............................70, 000
Per the recent census figures whites are at 16 percent, blacks 11 and mixed at 73%.
Based on this type of "model" maybe we can expect the US to be much more progressive in terms of racial attitudes in maybe 300 years or so? Not too encouraging to say the least.
Maybe I've answered my own question but I would like to here what other people think.
Unfortunately, the "one drop" myth is beloved by the American "black elite," who give legitimacy to that racist concept. During the years when "Interracial Voice" and "The Multiracial Activist" campaigned for a "multiracial" option for the census AND the freedom to choose one's own racial/ethnic identity, the main and most fanatical opposition came from blacks (the NAACP, for example).
Quote:
'Sellout'
A book excerpt by Randall Kennedy.
Newsweek Web Exclusive
May 4, 2008 | Updated: 12:33 p.m. ET May 3, 2008
Chapter One: Who Is 'Black'?
"How difficult it sometimes is to know where the black begins and the white ends."
-Booker T. Washington, "Up From Slavery" (1901)
Soon after declaring his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, Senator Barack Obama was asked on the television program "60 Minutes" when he had "decided" that he was black. One of the reasons the interviewer posed this question is that Obama's mother was a white American and his father a black Kenyan. Obama, moreover, had had little contact with his father; he was raised mainly in Hawaii by his mother and her relatives, in settings far afield from conventional black American communities. Against this backdrop, some observers have questioned Obama's racial standing. "Obama isn't black," the journalist Debra J. Dickerson asserts, because "in our political and social reality [black] means those descended from West African slaves." Rather, Dickerson continues, "by virtue of his white American mom and his Kenyan dad . . . [Obama] is an American of African immigrant extraction."
Obama responded to the question on "60 Minutes" by distancing himself from the idea that he had "decided" to be black. He focused on three other considerations: his appearance, the response of onlookers to his appearance, and his shared experience of those responses with others also perceived to be "black." "[I]f you look African American in this society," he remarked, "you're treated as an African American." In 1940, W. E. B. DuBois quipped that "the black man is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia." Obama updated that view, noting that when he tried to catch taxis, drivers were not confused about his race; they all too often refused to pick him up for racially discriminatory reasons, just as they all too often sped by other "black" men.
[Note that the standards of physical appearance and reactions of others does not apply when the mixed person has a European phenotype (like the late Anatole Broyard). Broyard's choice is not respected by blacks. He is demonized for allegedly "passing for white."]
Discussion of Obama's racial identity is a highly publicized instance of a feature of American race relations that is often ignored or misunderstood though it has deep historical roots. Many people believe that determining who is "black" is rather easy, a task simplified by the administration of the one-drop rule. Under the one-drop rule, any discernible African ancestry stamps a person as "black." A principal purpose of this doctrine was to address "the problem" of children born of interracial sex who would bear a mixture of physical markers inherited from ancestors situated on different sides of the race line. White supremacists hoped that by definitively categorizing as "African," "black," "Negro," or "colored" anyone whose appearance signaled the presence of an African ancestor, the one-drop rule would protect white bloodlines. It mirrored and stoked Negrophobia by proclaiming that even the tiniest dab of Negro ancestry was sufficiently contaminating to make a person a "nigger." Many white racists have believed what a character exclaims in Thomas Dixon's novel "The Leopard's Spots"—that "a single drop" of Negro blood "kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lip, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal passions."
Many champions of black advancement, however, have also become devotees of the one-drop rule (bereft, of course, of its white supermacist intentions). In her richly detailed defense of the doctrine, Professor Christine B. Hickman writes:
"The Devil fashioned [the one-drop rule] 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 had 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."
[Hickman doesn't mention other attractions that the "one drop rule" has for those American blacks who believe that "passers" are depriving blacks of the genetic benefits of "white blood."]
The one-drop rule helped to funnel into one racial camp people who might otherwise have been splintered. It is because of the one-drop rule that some of the most significant leaders among African Americans are considered "black" or "Negro" despite their "white" ancestry; here I think immediately of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois. Long denounced as a method for protecting whites against the taint of Negro blood, the one-drop rule is now embraced by some devotees of black unity as a way of reinforcing solidarity and discouraging exit by "blacks" who might otherwise prefer to reinvent themselves racially.
Despite its evident significance, however, the one-drop rule has never been an unchallenged guide to racial definition. For a long period, several states formally defined as "white" individuals with known "black" ancestors. Until early in the twentieth century, several states, including Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, statutorily decreed that an individual was considered white so long as he or she did not have more than one-eighth Negro "blood." In Virginia, until 1910, a person could be deemed white as long as he or she did not have more than twenty-four percent Negro blood. Not until 1924 did the Old Dominion adopt the one-drop rule. True, in many places, the mere appearance of being a Negro was sufficient to trigger mistreatment, regardless of one's genealogy or the words of some arcane statute purporting to define racial status. Still, the assigning of racial identity by white authorities has occasioned far more controversy than is generally realized.
Just as some "whites" have adopted rules of racial identification at variance with the one-drop rule, so, too, have some "blacks." Light-skinned descendants of interracial unions have at various times attempted to set themselves apart from those with darker hues. They have labeled themselves differently, for example, eschewing "black" or "Negro" in favor of "FMC"—"free men of color"—or similar formulations. They have created social organizations that resolutely excluded those deemed to be "too dark"—those darker than a light-brown paper bag or those in whose wrists one cannot discern blue veins. They have insisted upon marrying people who were as light as, or preferably lighter than, themselves. The one-drop rule lumps all "colored" people together regardless of the extent to which they are partially white in appearance or ancestry. But some light-skinned people of color have rejected that formula and insisted upon distinguishing themselves from "real" Negroes. Consider the case of William Ellison, who was born into slavery in 1790 in South Carolina. Allowed to purchase his freedom (by a white man who may well have been his biological father), Ellison amassed a sizable fortune, bought and sold slaves, contributed funds to pro-slavery vigilantes, aided the Confederacy, and then, after the Civil War, supported the opponents of Reconstruction. Today many people would describe Ellison as "black" despite his obvious multiraciality. Yet Ellison "did not consider himself a black man but a man of color, a mulatto, a man neither black nor white, a brown man."
Between 1850 and 1920, the United States Census demarcated a category for the "mulatto." Enumerators were initially given virtually no guidance; they used their own judgment, mainly based on appearance, to determine who was "black" as opposed to "mulatto." In 1870, census officials noted that the "mulatto" category included "quadroons, octoroons and all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood." In 1890, officials supplemented the "white," "black," and "mulatto" categories with two new classifications that had previously been subsumed within the definition for mulatto. They admonished enumerators to:
"e particularly careful to distinguish between blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons. The word 'black' should be used to describe those persons who have three-fourths or more black blood; 'mulatto,' those persons who have three-eighths to five-eighths black blood; 'quadroon,' those persons who have one-fourth black blood; and 'octoroon,' those persons who have one-eighth or any trace of black blood."
At no point were enumerators provided with a methodology for extracting this information or discerning these differences.
The idea of the mulatto has been a gathering point for a wide variety of racial prejudices, fears, myths, and speculations. For one thing, throughout American history there has been a tendency on the part of whites and blacks to favor mulattoes and other mixed-race colored people over plain "blacks." This tendency has been fueled, in large part, by the logic of white supremacy: since whiteness has been perceived to be superior to blackness, lighter complexions have been accorded more prestige than darker ones. Hence the saying: "If you're black, go back; if you're brown, stick around; if you're white, you're alright."
The baleful efflorescence of racist sentiments in the post-World War I era prompted the Census Bureau to simplify its stratification of the American pigmentocracy. After 1920, the Bureau ceased enumerating mulattoes. It adopted the one-drop rule, declaring that persons of "mixed blood" would be "classified according to the nonwhite racial strain . . . [A person] of mixed white . . . and Negro . . . is classified as . . . a Negro . . . regardless of the amount of white blood [he carries]." Under the new regime, writes Professor Joel Williamson, "all Negroes did look alike. On the one side, there were simply Negroes, and on the other the melting pot was busy making everyone [else, except Asians] simply white. Obviously the Bureau was quite willing to add its strength to the effort to create a simply biracial America."
Although skin color is undoubtedly the most salient signal of racial identity in America, other actual or imagined bodily features have also been seen as distinctive markers of Negritude. These include the shapes of heads, feet, lips, and noses as well as the texture of hair. Adjudicating the race of plaintiffs suing for their freedom, a Virginia judge asserted in 1806 that:
"Nature has stamped upon the African and his descendants two characteristic marks, besides the difference of complexion, which often remain visible long after the characteristic distinction of color either disappears or becomes doubtful; a flat nose and a wooly head of hair. The latter of these characteristics disappears the last of all; and so strong an ingredient in the African constitution is this latter character, that it predominates uniformly where the party is in equal degree descended from parents of different complexions."
Yet, the very words used as labels for races—"white," "black," "red," "yellow," and "brown"—highlight the centrality of complexion in American racial consciousness. Skin color has long been the main physiological feature of the uniform that is widely seen as racially identifying the wearer.
So long as procreation stems from parents of the same race, appearance and lineage are typically congruent. Interracial unions give rise to added complexity. Interracial amalgamation will produce some individuals whose features diverge from those commonly ascribed to the races of their ancestors. When conflict arises between looks and lineage, it is the former that usually emerges as the more influential of the two. As Professor Robert Westley observes, "no one who is visually apprehended as Black . . . turns out to be white. . . . The judgment of Blackness is fixed, immediate, irreversible." [b]In notable instances whites have been willing to grant what Professor Daniel Sharfstein terms "racial amnesty" to individuals who appeared to be white. The key to such amnesty, however, has been the appearance of the individuals in question; if they looked obviously "colored" there has been no controversy. They are labeled "colored" or "black" or "Negro" and that is the end of it. Only if they possessed physical traits that might lead them to be seen as white (or something else nonblack) would space be opened allowing for wiggle room in determining their racial placement.
Consider the early nineteenth-century North Carolina case Gobu v. Gobu, in which a white girl found an abandoned baby whom she claimed as her slave. When this enslaved boy grew to maturity he sued for his freedom. No one knew the identity of his biological parents. In appearance, according to the court, he was "of an olive colour, between black and yellow, had long hair and a prominent nose." Judge John Louis Taylor expressly states that if he had recognized the plaintiff as "black," the plaintiff would have borne the burden of proving that he was not a slave. In Judge Taylor's words: "I acquiesce in the . . . presumption of every black person being a slave." But the plaintiff was not "black"; he was of "mixed blood," meaning that his mother might have been white or an Indian. Given these possibilities, and the absence of any other pertinent evidence, the judge required the slaveholder to bear the burden of proving that the plaintiff was properly enslaved. The judge decided, in short, to give the plaintiff the benefit of the doubt—a benefit withheld from anyone deemed by appearance to be "black."
Neither appearance nor lineage nor the concatenation of the two exhaust the menu of ingredients that have figured into determinations of race. Consider the lawsuit in South Carolina in 1940 in which Virginia Bennett challenged the will of her deceased father, Franklin Capers Bennett. While leaving Virginia unmentioned, the will bequeathed Franklin's entire estate to his second wife, Louetta Chassereau Bennett. Virginia attacked the validity of Louetta's marriage to Franklin, asserting among other things that the union had violated the state's antimiscegenation law. According to Virginia, Louetta was colored, inasmuch as she was more than one-eighth Negro, and was thus prohibited from marrying Franklin, a white man. Virginia's motivation was clear. She wanted to obtain portions of Franklin's estate that would be lost to her if her father's marriage to Louetta was upheld.
The Supreme Court of South Carolina rejected Virginia's challenge. It ruled that Louetta was not a Negro, despite the presence of "some Negro blood in her veins," because she possessed a reputation as a white person—in the court's words, she had been "generally accepted as white"—and because she had long "acted white," by doing such things as marrying a white man, attending a white church, sending her children to white schools, and voting in political primaries open only to whites.
The ruling in favor of Louetta Bennett, despite her "negro blood," was firmly rooted in precedent. As far back as 1835, the South Carolina judiciary had weighed considerations other than complexion and lineage in determining racial identification. "We cannot say what admixture of negro blood will make a colored person," Judge William Harper declared. "The condition of the individual is not to be determined solely by a distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and [by] his having commonly experienced the privileges of a white man."
In the process by which individuals are racialized, they have little or no control over certain factors—the color of their skin, the identity of their ancestors, the judgments of others, the ascendant protocols of racial categorization. Barack Obama, for instance, has no control over one of the most significant aspects of his case: the fact that some American-born Negroes decline to acknowledge as "African American" or "black" African-born Negroes or their progeny. Professor Valerie Smith notes that "Obama's 'black credentials' have been questioned as much because of his Kenyan father as his white mother." Those who have raised questions on this score emphasize the centrality of slavery in America to their definition of "blackness": to them, a "black" must have an ancestral tie to enslavement in America—clearly a circumstance over which an individual today has no control.
Joined: 24 Sep 2008 {Posts: 102 } Location: Santiago, DR
Posted: Mon 13 Oct 2008 22:51 Post subject:
AD Powell.
Thanks you very much for the interesting and informal article.
The positive that I take out of it is it appears that the "one drop rule" appears to not be as static and have as much precedence as I once thought - which means maybe that things can change with this regard.
As far as many in the AA community rejecting the addition of a mulatto class, I find this troubling to say the least. I fail to see the positiveness and forward looking attitude that we need as a country to move forward.
Joined: 10 Aug 2006 {Posts: 119 } Location: Somewhere...
Posted: Thu 23 Oct 2008 15:27 Post subject:
chip wrote:
divana wrote:
It's best to look at all of those experiences together to ensure that too much emphasis is not being placed on nationalism, to the exclusion of other issues.
Ironically, I would say far and away that most references I have read (like in the news) on this topic attribute the "dynamic" to classic "white" vs black" racism as opposed to nationalism. Nationalism rather than being considered as a cause is all to readily excluded as an influence because I believe it does not fit the model so many Westerners are accustomed to and comfortable with.
Well, I would agree with you overall as far as the bolded. But who exactly are Westerners?
It's best to look at all of those experiences together to ensure that too much emphasis is not being placed on nationalism, to the exclusion of other issues.
Ironically, I would say far and away that most references I have read (like in the news) on this topic attribute the "dynamic" to classic "white" vs black" racism as opposed to nationalism. Nationalism rather than being considered as a cause is all to readily excluded as an influence because I believe it does not fit the model so many Westerners are accustomed to and comfortable with.
Well, I would agree with you overall as far as the bolded. But who exactly are Westerners?
Hi Divana - My apologies for this: I was splitting the topics while you were posting! I can't move this particular post to the new thread. Would you mind re-posting your question in the new thread?
Joined: 24 Sep 2008 {Posts: 102 } Location: Santiago, DR
Posted: Thu 23 Oct 2008 15:46 Post subject:
sagascend wrote:
You've actually asserted different things throughout your posts, which led me to the original question. You've said that race is not significant in the DR, that the racial classification system is based on appearance, and that either colorism, classism and now nationalism [b]best explains identity expression in the DR.
I don't think you have understand my posts if this is your assumption - please read again. It might be helpful to try to get away from the whole "identity expression" idea as a way of understanding Dominicans and how they see themselves. I do honestly believe too after many conversations with Westerners who have never lived here nor spoken the language that this is a very difficult concept for most to grasp.
sagascend wrote:
Nationalism is a recent human phenomenon, it has really not been found throughout human history. If you mean that xenophobia or cultural chauvanism has always existed, I'd likely agree with that.
Of course nationalism is relevant, as it is to all modern societies since it is the primary organizing principle (for geography) these days, but I'd question the notion that Dominican nationalism can explain even 50% of why Dominicans self-identify as they do.
Whether one chooses to believe the theory that nationalism is a recent phenomenon is superfluous to the topic at hand. It is clear this is the main component of the dynamic between Haitians and Dominicans. Like I stated before, most with a Western perspective will have difficulty understanding this phenomenon, bottom line.
However, you are certainly welcome to your opinion and mine, but to my credit, I actually have the benefit of witnessing classic white vs black racism in the southern US and the "so-called" racism here in the DR first hand for almost four years and they are leagues apart in terms of character and manifestations.
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1876 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Thu 23 Oct 2008 17:55 Post subject:
Well we are getting a president who is a one-droper so...I don't think it will end with my generation or the one above me (Obama's) likely my kids or grandkids,, but I feel it will end.
Posted: Mon 12 Jan 2009 17:09 Post subject: Re: When will One Dropping be a thing of the past in the US?
True Powell...but with a growing mixed race population in the united states and an ever faster growing Latino popultation that embraces "multiracialism" the concept of the "black elites pro one dropist mindset" will inevitabley fade away. I "guesstimate" another 30 - 75 years, let's just say 40. Let them enjoy it while they can I say..
Powell wrote:
chip wrote:
I have a sincere question that I hope receives some good answers:
What needs to happen or what can we do so that "one dropping" is all but discarded as a way of classifying people, ie will we ever be able to get away from this racial classification in the US?
Maybe with the increase of the mulatto class white and blacks will have to rethink or discard these notions? Especially if whites become a minority in the next 50 years I would expect that the national "opinion" or "identity" would move to reflect the increasing racial ambiguous population.
At least here in the Dominican Republic, intermarrying with other factors have caused color designations such as black and white to lose any insinuated or other meaning other than physical classification for the most part. In fact this is really what happened in the DR starting sometime after the Spanish established a colony there in the 15 century. Eventually because of the influx of slaves and also Haitians in later years and intermarrying the whites were relegated to a minority class. By far the majority of the population is classified as mulatto, with a significant if minor indigenous Indian component. Here is a statement regarding the census done more than 200 years ago.
Jose Alvarez de Peralta writes that, at the time of the treaty between Spain and France on June 3, 1777 at Aranjuez, the Dominican population was, not counting the Haitian side, 400,000. The break down was as follows:
blancos (white)........................................... ..................100,000
Mestizos de Raza India y Blanca........................................100, 000
Mulatos........................................... ..............................70,000
Mestizos de Raza India y Negro..........................................60, 000
Negros............................................ ..............................70, 000
Per the recent census figures whites are at 16 percent, blacks 11 and mixed at 73%.
Based on this type of "model" maybe we can expect the US to be much more progressive in terms of racial attitudes in maybe 300 years or so? Not too encouraging to say the least.
Maybe I've answered my own question but I would like to here what other people think.
Unfortunately, the "one drop" myth is beloved by the American "black elite," who give legitimacy to that racist concept. During the years when "Interracial Voice" and "The Multiracial Activist" campaigned for a "multiracial" option for the census AND the freedom to choose one's own racial/ethnic identity, the main and most fanatical opposition came from blacks (the NAACP, for example).
Quote:
'Sellout'
A book excerpt by Randall Kennedy.
Newsweek Web Exclusive
May 4, 2008 | Updated: 12:33 p.m. ET May 3, 2008
Chapter One: Who Is 'Black'?
"How difficult it sometimes is to know where the black begins and the white ends."
-Booker T. Washington, "Up From Slavery" (1901)
Soon after declaring his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, Senator Barack Obama was asked on the television program "60 Minutes" when he had "decided" that he was black. One of the reasons the interviewer posed this question is that Obama's mother was a white American and his father a black Kenyan. Obama, moreover, had had little contact with his father; he was raised mainly in Hawaii by his mother and her relatives, in settings far afield from conventional black American communities. Against this backdrop, some observers have questioned Obama's racial standing. "Obama isn't black," the journalist Debra J. Dickerson asserts, because "in our political and social reality [black] means those descended from West African slaves." Rather, Dickerson continues, "by virtue of his white American mom and his Kenyan dad . . . [Obama] is an American of African immigrant extraction."
Obama responded to the question on "60 Minutes" by distancing himself from the idea that he had "decided" to be black. He focused on three other considerations: his appearance, the response of onlookers to his appearance, and his shared experience of those responses with others also perceived to be "black." "[I]f you look African American in this society," he remarked, "you're treated as an African American." In 1940, W. E. B. DuBois quipped that "the black man is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia." Obama updated that view, noting that when he tried to catch taxis, drivers were not confused about his race; they all too often refused to pick him up for racially discriminatory reasons, just as they all too often sped by other "black" men.
[Note that the standards of physical appearance and reactions of others does not apply when the mixed person has a European phenotype (like the late Anatole Broyard). Broyard's choice is not respected by blacks. He is demonized for allegedly "passing for white."]
Discussion of Obama's racial identity is a highly publicized instance of a feature of American race relations that is often ignored or misunderstood though it has deep historical roots. Many people believe that determining who is "black" is rather easy, a task simplified by the administration of the one-drop rule. Under the one-drop rule, any discernible African ancestry stamps a person as "black." A principal purpose of this doctrine was to address "the problem" of children born of interracial sex who would bear a mixture of physical markers inherited from ancestors situated on different sides of the race line. White supremacists hoped that by definitively categorizing as "African," "black," "Negro," or "colored" anyone whose appearance signaled the presence of an African ancestor, the one-drop rule would protect white bloodlines. It mirrored and stoked Negrophobia by proclaiming that even the tiniest dab of Negro ancestry was sufficiently contaminating to make a person a "nigger." Many white racists have believed what a character exclaims in Thomas Dixon's novel "The Leopard's Spots"—that "a single drop" of Negro blood "kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lip, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal passions."
Many champions of black advancement, however, have also become devotees of the one-drop rule (bereft, of course, of its white supermacist intentions). In her richly detailed defense of the doctrine, Professor Christine B. Hickman writes:
"The Devil fashioned [the one-drop rule] 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 had 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."
[Hickman doesn't mention other attractions that the "one drop rule" has for those American blacks who believe that "passers" are depriving blacks of the genetic benefits of "white blood."]
The one-drop rule helped to funnel into one racial camp people who might otherwise have been splintered. It is because of the one-drop rule that some of the most significant leaders among African Americans are considered "black" or "Negro" despite their "white" ancestry; here I think immediately of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois. Long denounced as a method for protecting whites against the taint of Negro blood, the one-drop rule is now embraced by some devotees of black unity as a way of reinforcing solidarity and discouraging exit by "blacks" who might otherwise prefer to reinvent themselves racially.
Despite its evident significance, however, the one-drop rule has never been an unchallenged guide to racial definition. For a long period, several states formally defined as "white" individuals with known "black" ancestors. Until early in the twentieth century, several states, including Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, statutorily decreed that an individual was considered white so long as he or she did not have more than one-eighth Negro "blood." In Virginia, until 1910, a person could be deemed white as long as he or she did not have more than twenty-four percent Negro blood. Not until 1924 did the Old Dominion adopt the one-drop rule. True, in many places, the mere appearance of being a Negro was sufficient to trigger mistreatment, regardless of one's genealogy or the words of some arcane statute purporting to define racial status. Still, the assigning of racial identity by white authorities has occasioned far more controversy than is generally realized.
Just as some "whites" have adopted rules of racial identification at variance with the one-drop rule, so, too, have some "blacks." Light-skinned descendants of interracial unions have at various times attempted to set themselves apart from those with darker hues. They have labeled themselves differently, for example, eschewing "black" or "Negro" in favor of "FMC"—"free men of color"—or similar formulations. They have created social organizations that resolutely excluded those deemed to be "too dark"—those darker than a light-brown paper bag or those in whose wrists one cannot discern blue veins. They have insisted upon marrying people who were as light as, or preferably lighter than, themselves. The one-drop rule lumps all "colored" people together regardless of the extent to which they are partially white in appearance or ancestry. But some light-skinned people of color have rejected that formula and insisted upon distinguishing themselves from "real" Negroes. Consider the case of William Ellison, who was born into slavery in 1790 in South Carolina. Allowed to purchase his freedom (by a white man who may well have been his biological father), Ellison amassed a sizable fortune, bought and sold slaves, contributed funds to pro-slavery vigilantes, aided the Confederacy, and then, after the Civil War, supported the opponents of Reconstruction. Today many people would describe Ellison as "black" despite his obvious multiraciality. Yet Ellison "did not consider himself a black man but a man of color, a mulatto, a man neither black nor white, a brown man."
Between 1850 and 1920, the United States Census demarcated a category for the "mulatto." Enumerators were initially given virtually no guidance; they used their own judgment, mainly based on appearance, to determine who was "black" as opposed to "mulatto." In 1870, census officials noted that the "mulatto" category included "quadroons, octoroons and all persons having any perceptible trace of African blood." In 1890, officials supplemented the "white," "black," and "mulatto" categories with two new classifications that had previously been subsumed within the definition for mulatto. They admonished enumerators to:
"e particularly careful to distinguish between blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons. The word 'black' should be used to describe those persons who have three-fourths or more black blood; 'mulatto,' those persons who have three-eighths to five-eighths black blood; 'quadroon,' those persons who have one-fourth black blood; and 'octoroon,' those persons who have one-eighth or any trace of black blood."
At no point were enumerators provided with a methodology for extracting this information or discerning these differences.
The idea of the mulatto has been a gathering point for a wide variety of racial prejudices, fears, myths, and speculations. For one thing, throughout American history there has been a tendency on the part of whites and blacks to favor mulattoes and other mixed-race colored people over plain "blacks." This tendency has been fueled, in large part, by the logic of white supremacy: since whiteness has been perceived to be superior to blackness, lighter complexions have been accorded more prestige than darker ones. Hence the saying: "If you're black, go back; if you're brown, stick around; if you're white, you're alright."
The baleful efflorescence of racist sentiments in the post-World War I era prompted the Census Bureau to simplify its stratification of the American pigmentocracy. After 1920, the Bureau ceased enumerating mulattoes. It adopted the one-drop rule, declaring that persons of "mixed blood" would be "classified according to the nonwhite racial strain . . . [A person] of mixed white . . . and Negro . . . is classified as . . . a Negro . . . regardless of the amount of white blood [he carries]." Under the new regime, writes Professor Joel Williamson, "all Negroes did look alike. On the one side, there were simply Negroes, and on the other the melting pot was busy making everyone [else, except Asians] simply white. Obviously the Bureau was quite willing to add its strength to the effort to create a simply biracial America."
Although skin color is undoubtedly the most salient signal of racial identity in America, other actual or imagined bodily features have also been seen as distinctive markers of Negritude. These include the shapes of heads, feet, lips, and noses as well as the texture of hair. Adjudicating the race of plaintiffs suing for their freedom, a Virginia judge asserted in 1806 that:
"Nature has stamped upon the African and his descendants two characteristic marks, besides the difference of complexion, which often remain visible long after the characteristic distinction of color either disappears or becomes doubtful; a flat nose and a wooly head of hair. The latter of these characteristics disappears the last of all; and so strong an ingredient in the African constitution is this latter character, that it predominates uniformly where the party is in equal degree descended from parents of different complexions."
Yet, the very words used as labels for races—"white," "black," "red," "yellow," and "brown"—highlight the centrality of complexion in American racial consciousness. Skin color has long been the main physiological feature of the uniform that is widely seen as racially identifying the wearer.
So long as procreation stems from parents of the same race, appearance and lineage are typically congruent. Interracial unions give rise to added complexity. Interracial amalgamation will produce some individuals whose features diverge from those commonly ascribed to the races of their ancestors. When conflict arises between looks and lineage, it is the former that usually emerges as the more influential of the two. As Professor Robert Westley observes, "no one who is visually apprehended as Black . . . turns out to be white. . . . The judgment of Blackness is fixed, immediate, irreversible." [b]In notable instances whites have been willing to grant what Professor Daniel Sharfstein terms "racial amnesty" to individuals who appeared to be white. The key to such amnesty, however, has been the appearance of the individuals in question; if they looked obviously "colored" there has been no controversy. They are labeled "colored" or "black" or "Negro" and that is the end of it. Only if they possessed physical traits that might lead them to be seen as white (or something else nonblack) would space be opened allowing for wiggle room in determining their racial placement.
Consider the early nineteenth-century North Carolina case Gobu v. Gobu, in which a white girl found an abandoned baby whom she claimed as her slave. When this enslaved boy grew to maturity he sued for his freedom. No one knew the identity of his biological parents. In appearance, according to the court, he was "of an olive colour, between black and yellow, had long hair and a prominent nose." Judge John Louis Taylor expressly states that if he had recognized the plaintiff as "black," the plaintiff would have borne the burden of proving that he was not a slave. In Judge Taylor's words: "I acquiesce in the . . . presumption of every black person being a slave." But the plaintiff was not "black"; he was of "mixed blood," meaning that his mother might have been white or an Indian. Given these possibilities, and the absence of any other pertinent evidence, the judge required the slaveholder to bear the burden of proving that the plaintiff was properly enslaved. The judge decided, in short, to give the plaintiff the benefit of the doubt—a benefit withheld from anyone deemed by appearance to be "black."
Neither appearance nor lineage nor the concatenation of the two exhaust the menu of ingredients that have figured into determinations of race. Consider the lawsuit in South Carolina in 1940 in which Virginia Bennett challenged the will of her deceased father, Franklin Capers Bennett. While leaving Virginia unmentioned, the will bequeathed Franklin's entire estate to his second wife, Louetta Chassereau Bennett. Virginia attacked the validity of Louetta's marriage to Franklin, asserting among other things that the union had violated the state's antimiscegenation law. According to Virginia, Louetta was colored, inasmuch as she was more than one-eighth Negro, and was thus prohibited from marrying Franklin, a white man. Virginia's motivation was clear. She wanted to obtain portions of Franklin's estate that would be lost to her if her father's marriage to Louetta was upheld.
The Supreme Court of South Carolina rejected Virginia's challenge. It ruled that Louetta was not a Negro, despite the presence of "some Negro blood in her veins," because she possessed a reputation as a white person—in the court's words, she had been "generally accepted as white"—and because she had long "acted white," by doing such things as marrying a white man, attending a white church, sending her children to white schools, and voting in political primaries open only to whites.
The ruling in favor of Louetta Bennett, despite her "negro blood," was firmly rooted in precedent. As far back as 1835, the South Carolina judiciary had weighed considerations other than complexion and lineage in determining racial identification. "We cannot say what admixture of negro blood will make a colored person," Judge William Harper declared. "The condition of the individual is not to be determined solely by a distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and [by] his having commonly experienced the privileges of a white man."
In the process by which individuals are racialized, they have little or no control over certain factors—the color of their skin, the identity of their ancestors, the judgments of others, the ascendant protocols of racial categorization. Barack Obama, for instance, has no control over one of the most significant aspects of his case: the fact that some American-born Negroes decline to acknowledge as "African American" or "black" African-born Negroes or their progeny. Professor Valerie Smith notes that "Obama's 'black credentials' have been questioned as much because of his Kenyan father as his white mother." Those who have raised questions on this score emphasize the centrality of slavery in America to their definition of "blackness": to them, a "black" must have an ancestral tie to enslavement in America—clearly a circumstance over which an individual today has no control.
Posted: Mon 12 Jan 2009 17:27 Post subject: Re: When will One Dropping be a thing of the past in the US?
curious wrote:
True Powell...but with a growing mixed race population in the united states and an ever faster growing Latino popultation that embraces "multiracialism" the concept of the "black elites pro one dropist mindset" will inevitabley fade away. I "guesstimate" another 30 - 75 years, let's just say 40. Let them enjoy it while they can I say..
..
Latinos as a group don't appear to be enamored of "multiracialism." The majority here, which are Mexicans, by and large don't concern themselves with issues of race involving the U.S.'s black population, ODR, hypodescent, etc. The ones from the Caribbean basically subsume their multiraciality under a national ethnic identity. Latinos usually opt out of U.S. racial issues that involve the black and white populations. Their growth won't change that.
If this fades away, credit will be due largely to the growing black/non-black biracial population , their growing visibility, and their desire to assert themselves as mixed race.
I agree with curious on this one...
Latino's DON'T have to be "enamored" with multiracialism to affect the idea of one dropism. Just existing and being there is enough because it forces blacks to re-think the way they look at people. Instead of calling someone eh..I don't know "light skinned black" they might say "puerto rican"...then they might think well how did they become puerto rican..then they come to the conclusion that they are mixed. In the long run it runs across community and ethnic lines.
Another thing...I'm from the east coast and over here the defiinition of latino is very different from where you are from g-man. The first thing that comes up in the mind of people of waht latin menas is places like puerto rico, cuba, colombia, venezuela, and dominican republic as opposed to mexican which I know is the main thing out there in the west coast. Mexicans have a little bit of black blood in them but not enough to really make a indirect impact the way east coast latino's do, plust east coast latino's usually know or acknowedge they have some black ancestry in them somewhere aong the line.
Bottom line is latino's do help even if it's not the most impacting.
I think the most impact to it will be the emerging mixed race community. I think after latino's the mixed community is tied with asian americans as the second fastest group in growth.
I disagree with your statement about Latinos affecting the one-drop rule in a positive way.
Allow me to explain what I mean by this.
Maybe that is true where you live, but where I live, the majority of those who identify either as "Latino" or "Hispanic" make it VERY clear that they do not wish to acknowledge any African ancestry at all.
Many of the Latino/Hispanic people that I've encountered here in South Florida can be extremely racist. A friend of mine (who happens to be multiracial) has been called a "n*gger" more than once by Latinos in Miami. She is very fair and has white features, but has curly dark hair that she relaxes.
It seems that many of the Latino/Hispanic people where I live will associate with blacks, yet they also despise African features of any kind, especially hair. This doesn't make sense.
Again, this is true of the ones where I live...it is obviously different in your environment.
The majority of these Cubans are White-identified Republicans. They will be quick to tell you that they are "pure white" and ONLY white.
Most are very suspicious of me, a biracial person with a European phenotype who does not speak Spanish, is not African-American, and does not hate black people.
Some will probably consider that an inflammatory statement, so I apologize in advance.
I am not trying to generalize...I know that this is not true of all the Cubans in South Florida.
But from my personal experiences and that of the people I know, it is.
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