Posted: Mon 27 Jun 2005 22:40 Post subject: Re: Why Did One-Drop Become Nationwide Tradition?
Frank Sweet wrote:
[S]urely judges and juries did not think that you can inherit African genes by eating, shaking hands, scheming a prank, or by a non-ancestral relative's actions? But the record makes it clear that the one-drop rule was never about biological ancestry.
Frank graciously offered to share with us a draft of his January 2006 essay, “Why Did One-Drop Become Nationwide Tradition?”
http://backintyme.com/essay060101.htm
Again, he writes a splendid essay.
However, maybe Frank will like to revisit a couple of sub-themes in this essay. For one, Frank states explicitly that the Jim Crow One Drop Rule (ODR) during the U.S.A.’s 1900-1930 Jim Crow reign of terror targeted “white” people of that endogamous group. Frank goes on describing several trials that expelled “white” families to the “black” side of the endogamous “color line.”
Needless to say, this overwhelmingly endogamous “color line” still exists very conspicuously as named “different races,” regardless segregation is no longer enforced or even legal anymore in schools or employment. (Racially discriminatory “steering” and such segregating practices in the housing industry became illegal in 1968; but these laws go mostly unenforced. The explanation comes to mind that census “race” data helps to gerrymander “minority-majority” voting districts -- political blocs -- dampening activist ardor to integrate neighborhoods.)
My problem with Frank's declaring the ODR exclusively targeted "white" persons is implying that the ODR, its enforcers, were indifferent to regional "blood" ancestry. They were not. In fact, the opposite. They were obsessed with racial biological ancestry. If Frank found court cases that he thinks presented insufficient evidence of "black blood" in the accused persons, I think Frank has uncovered excessive zeal enforcing the ODR, not novel "race" doctrine indifferent to racial ancestral "biology."
I think anyone reading Frank's essay could almost lose sight of the fact the Jim Crow ODR enforced the endogamous "color line." "White" people found too close to the "line" sometimes got pushed across it by this hysterical zeal. The Spencer v. Looney, 1914, Virginia case Frank opens with seems to depict someone's taking personal revenge against another family by exploiting the injudicious hysteria. (Btw: Something functionally similar happened in the 1980s' rash of cases of alleged child molestation at Calif. day care centers. Such a case arose on a hillside near my law office.) Anyway, readers may be confused, I think, by Frank's implying that the ODR impacted only "whites." Clearly, the ODR was central to an endogamous caste system that redefined "white" people as "black" by invisible distant ancestry; which by definition had to be found to exist, however minute or remote. The ODR thus had to tangentially impact visible "blacks" by super-stigmatizing them as pariah. (See Bohannan cite, post.) Black leadership was asleep at the wheel if it saw one-drop legislation as "a White-on-White squabble."
In a spirit of fairness, Frank summarizes our John M. Hartley's suggestion that the "black" exodus north resulted in the ODR forcibly expelling a few unfortunate southern "whites" to the "black" endogamous side. I think this alternative hypothesis is wrong for several reasons. "White" southerners may have been too jumpy about "black blood." Doubtless they were newly obsessed with eugenic nationalism and the ODR. (Perhaps as German Nazis, too, a few decades later?) Southerners were not indifferent, though, as I remember growing up there after the War. They did not equate poverty to Negro lineage willy-nilly. John's suggestion evokes Carl Marx. However, I think the U.S. South was not transplanted nineteenth century European or Marxist class struggle. I think the U.S. South was a different model, one nearer India's castes. However, even that model is challenged. Northwestern University Anthropologist Paul Bohannan, for instance, writing in 1963 (Social Anthropology, Passim: Holt, Rinehart, etc., at pp. 205-206), opined the "blacks" existed outside of a caste system. "'Race,'" Bohannan wrote, "is the modern Western idiom for pariah groups." (Id. at 206.) This chimera (Bohannan's characterization) of "other" dehumanizing rings true, I think, for the 30-year reign of terror that Frank focused on. Moreover, the ODR poured special opprobrium on racial "mix." The ODR's furious enforcers clearly felt more threatened by "passing whites" (alleged "white blacks") than by unambiguous Afro-Americans. They stated this plainly.
I did not see Frank clearly explain that the ODR hysteria in the 1900-1930 years arose from the endogamous "color line" ruled by "different races" pseudo-science. Unfortunately, the essay as written seems to simplify the ODR phenomenon to "a White-on-White squabble" -- or class struggle. Moreover, John's alternative hypothesis misses the mark, I think, just as does modern activism "deconstructing racism." This is because "battling racism" places the onus entirely on "white" people, their alleged "racist attitude." (Calling for driving down "white privilege.") I think the actual causation was a pseudo-scientific belief regime constructed on what grew into eugenics. This pseudo-science regime of belief in lineal "different races" (inherently unequal) was not "white" obsession only. Moreover, I still have not seen any national campaign against this pseudo-"biological" allegation of mystical collective "group difference" at all!
Also, Frank argues the ODR, in the Jim Crow wave of terror, was "the ideological self-preservation of the Jim Crow mentality itself" -- by keeping "whites" "in line." Amazingly, Frank finds, "This does not suggest that some nefarious conspiracy ... plotted Jim Crow."
Frank Sweet wrote:
This does not suggest that some nefarious conspiracy plotted this solution to the problem of preserving Jim Crow. It is simply a routine and well-studied manifestation of group ideological self-preservation. [¶] ... the purpose of the one-drop rule was to keep Whites from defending Blacks. At the same time, its purpose within the Black community was to define the borders of ethnic membership.
I disagree. I think the ODR's purpose was to define the "color line" bordering both "white" and "black" endogamous group membership. I think the insufficient evidence cases, such as Looney, supra, reveal community fury, not novel legal principal. I have appealed criminal convictions suffered the same way, on raw local fury and insufficient evidence.
As for "nefarious," my theory (not included in the essay) lets "whites" slightly off the "white guilt" hook by laying most blame at the feet of eugenic pseudo-science. (Laid at the feet, too, of science that let itself be accomplice to "race science" via ambivalence and intellectual timidity that continues.) And my theory "humanizes" the Jim Crow reign of terror and the "blame" for all evil flowing from spurious "race difference," by observing that "blacks" overwhelmingly perceived themselves racially "different." Nearly all believed, regardless that the system dehumanized them. And "black" political leadership never even informed dehumanized, self-devaluing "blacks" that they were being scammed with the "race difference" legend. Wouldn't this step logically precede general societal reform leading to wholesale quitting of the arbitrary racial classifications? (Naturally, racial discrimination follows legislating "difference" -- as Government classifies every individual's "race.")
Unlike Frank, I think the Jim Crow reign of terror was a nefarious plot. History records the names of people who erected America's apartheid. Their stated motives were pithy. (E.g., read Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), laying foundation for Jim Crow. Plessy's never-refuted theme was incompatible "difference," even in a perfectly "white" Octoroon. The mid-20th century's overturning the doctrine of "separate but equal" never reached Plessy's core finding that non-fusible "different races" exist as defined by state statutes.
Plessy v. Ferguson maj. wrote:
The object of the [14th] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races ....
Id. at 544, see generally pp. 543-544, 551-552.) The ODR architects of Jim Crow arrogated themselves the legal right to ban other people's marrying, having children -- and before that their meeting as social equals or bonding. Panicked by warped pseudo-scientific dogmas, they stuck their ignorant noses in the very works of our human evolution. Not only was that nefarious legislative scheme afire with chauvinistic hatred (i.e., racism), but the era's scientists and doctors who could have figured it out for themselves and braked the juggernaught, tugged it along, instead.
I think it is therapeutic, and just, to blame dead people for problems they deliberately, by design, imposed on our generation -- every bit a conspiracy. (That was 100 years ago roughly.) However, my purpose is to bury the "blame" with them. And fix the problem.
George
I am grateful and a bit stunned whenever someone of George’s erudition and wit reads one of my essays closely enough to find its flaws. It is sobering and a bit scary to a writer to learn that someone “out there” considers his work important enough to inspect it in depth. Unfortunately, I have run out of ways to express my gratitude since I have already given George billing in the very first paragraph of the first (Acknowledgements) section of my forthcoming book Legal History of the Color Line. And so, “Thank you, George.”
Four points in George’s analysis stand out: whether ODR enforcers were indifferent to biological ancestry, whether Blacks suffered as much as Whites from ODR enforcement, whether ODR enforcement was scientifically supported, and whether ODR enforcers deliberately conspired.
I conclude that enforcers were indifferent to biological ancestry because in the decade of peak ODR enforcement, between 97,000 and 130,000 Americans redefined themselves as White (despite having at least one Black parent). But only a few dozen cases were prosecuted and appealed. Even if only one out of every hundred cases was appealed, this still means that the authorities selectively prosecuted only one such situation out of every several thousand. Their statements on record show that they knew they were prosecuting only a tiny chosen fraction of such cases. Admittedly, their public rhetoric was meant to arouse support by goading the public into hysteria (or “paranoia,” as Joel Williamson puts it) over biological ancestry. But leaders’ public rhetoric does not always match their actual agenda. This may have been such a case. The ignorant public was obsessed with biological ancestry. But the educated elite knew that White Southerners were actually mixed.
That Blacks suffered far more than Whites at the hand of Jim Crow is a given. I regret that my words could give any other impression. Jim Crow (and its associated lynchings) was the inhumane oppression of a pariah caste (Blacks) by a ruling caste (Whites). Nevertheless, the cause-and-effect relationship between the hyper-enforcement of the color line during Jim Crow and the exiling of selected White families to Blackness is bidirectional. Such exile was a horrific fate only because Blacks were cruelly persecuted. Had this not been so, exile would have been a useless deterrent. Conclusion: the Jim Crow terror caused ODR enforcement because it is what made the threat of exiling White families to Blackness viable. On the other hand, the Jim Crow terror would have ended sooner had compassionate White families not been cowed into submission by threat of exile. So in this sense, ODR enforcement prolonged the Jim Crow terror.
Whether ODR enforcement was scientifically supported is hard to say. The heyday of scientific racialism had already ended by 1890. Peer-reviewed anthropological journal articles during the Progressive era focused on the cultural (learned) determinants of group (class, caste, ethnicity, race) formation and denied biological determinism. You can trace the transition in George W. Stocking, _Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology_ (New York,: Free Press, 1968). Indeed, today’s grotesque mismatch between what scientists tell each other and what popularizers tell the public began with Franz Boas, _The Mind of Primitive Man_ (New York: Macmillan, 1911) and the New York Times reviewer who said that the book was “the desperate attempt of a Jew to pass himself off as white.” I have wondered whether the 1910’s faddish surge in public enthusiasm for bio-race was not in fact a cognitive dissonance reaction to the start of science’s denial of the notion. Nevertheless, I cannot marshal evidence either way, so I left the subject out.
Finally, I agree that White elites deliberately conspired to create and enforce the Jim Crow terror. I further agree that ODR enforcement exiling White families to Blackness was also consciously planned. But as a historian I must also take a more distant view that explains why such ODR enforcement was concocted at that particular moment in history, and not earlier or later. Although society’s elite choose policies to further their ends, there are vaster currents in human affairs that determine what those ends are, and what means are available at any specific moment. Hence, I peg ODR enforcement to the Jim Crow terror and leave it to others (Williamson, Kennedy, Van Woodward, Berlin) to explain the Jim Crow terror.
Each of the above four points is a judgment call and I empathize with George or anyone else who disagrees. After all, I waffled back and forth on each point several times before choosing my position. (And I reserve the right to change my mind again.) I do think, however, that the four preceding paragraphs of explanation/clarification belong in the body of the essay itself, so I plan to add them. Thanks again, George.
Posted: Wed 29 Jun 2005 15:27 Post subject: The Jim Crow Terror
Quote:
Nevertheless, the cause-and-effect relationship between the hyper-enforcement of the color line during Jim Crow and the exiling of selected White families to Blackness is bidirectional. Such exile was a horrific fate only because Blacks were cruelly persecuted. Had this not been so, exile would have been a useless deterrent.
Of course, without the extreme persecution of blacks, no rational person would call an obviously white family "black" anyway.
Posted: Wed 29 Jun 2005 15:37 Post subject: Re: The Jim Crow Terror
Powell wrote:
Of course, without the extreme persecution of blacks, no rational person would call an obviously white family "black" anyway.
Excellent point! America's odd two-caste system is fundamentally irrational. To quote the promotional literature for my forthcoming Legal History of the Color Line,
Quote:
Genealogists were the first to learn that America’s color line leaks. Black researchers often find White ancestry. White genealogists routinely uncover Black ancestry. Molecular anthropologists now confirm Afro-European mixing in our DNA. The plain fact is that few Americans can truly say that they are genetically unmixed. Yet liberals and conservatives alike agree that so-called Whites and Blacks are distinct political “races.” When did ideology triumph over reality? How did America paint itself into such a strange corner?
Since it is irrational, and Jim Crow itself was psychotic, one can expect to find strange little eddies and ripples of irrationality all around it.
'
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