Posted: Tue 17 Jan 2006 08:17 Post subject: Salon.com claims "one drop" always existed
The following historically incorrect letter was an "editor's choice" letter on Salon.com:
Quote:
A couple of interesting things written here.
First, David Byrne being referred to as an "art-school geek from Up North". I bet that would amuse him.
Second, the claim that a person who is "at least three-fourths or more white...cannot be truthfully called 'black' or 'African American.'"
A person with any recognizable African ancestry is still considered "Black" or "African American" today, in 2005. I teach at a school that is evenly divided between black and white students. Any student, no matter what skin tone, no matter what ancestry, is considered "Black" or "African American" if there is any trace of African features, or African ancestry. In 1872 that was, if possible, even more true.
After all, that was part of the point of the kind of racism that was practiced by most whites at that time. That was part of the justification for slavery. Whites were "pure" and blacks were "impure." The smallest amount of black blood was enough to taint someone. The terms quadroon and octoroon refer to people with one-quarter and one-eighth black ancestry, respectively. Such people did NOT rank as first class citizens. Even in the post-WWI 1940s a person who had as little as one-sixty-fourth black ancestry, who could "pass" for white, would suffer discrimination if that small percentage were to be discovered.
So while mischling2nd's argument may be true from a strictly logical perspective, functionally it is completely incorrect.
Posted: Fri 20 Jan 2006 09:01 Post subject: Re: Salon.com claims "one drop" always existed
Powell wrote:
The following historically incorrect letter was an "editor's choice" letter on Salon.com:
Biff Usually wrote:
A couple of interesting things written here.
First, David Byrne being referred to as an "art-school geek from Up North". I bet that would amuse him.
Second, the claim that a person who is "at least three-fourths or more white...cannot be truthfully called 'black' or 'African American.'"
A person with any recognizable African ancestry is still considered "Black" or "African American" today, in 2005. I teach at a school that is evenly divided between black and white students. Any student, no matter what skin tone, no matter what ancestry, is considered "Black" or "African American" if there is any trace of African features, or African ancestry. In 1872 that was, if possible, even more true.
After all, that was part of the point of the kind of racism that was practiced by most whites at that time. That was part of the justification for slavery. Whites were "pure" and blacks were "impure." The smallest amount of black blood was enough to taint someone. The terms quadroon and octoroon refer to people with one-quarter and one-eighth black ancestry, respectively. Such people did NOT rank as first class citizens. Even in the post-WWI 1940s a person who had as little as one-sixty-fourth black ancestry, who could "pass" for white, would suffer discrimination if that small percentage were to be discovered.
So while mischling2nd's argument may be true from a strictly logical perspective, functionally it is completely incorrect.
Is this educator who seems to think World War I ended in the 1940s trying to say his being historically all wrong is irrelevant to his functional correctness, his claims that the ODR always existed? The protagonist in the futuristic sci-fi novel 1984 described his job -- falsifying history in support of the Party-line. Is this the job Biff does -- on his poor students?
Not yet down Biff's Memory Hole, I have an old school history book which indicates the post-Civil War years (roughly 1865-1889) were relatively a generation-long honeymoon for the remission of racism against the newly emancipated freedmen -- in the South.
Quote:
During the 1880's, visitors to the South from the North and from Europe were impressed by the way Negroes and whites mingled in public facilities such as streetcars, theaters, and soda fountains. A Negro newspaperman, returning from the North to his birthplace in South Carolina in 1885, found less discrimination in traveling and eating arrangements than in New England. The conservative whites, often former planters, who dominated southern politics for a time were quite ready to give Negroes a dignified, although subordinate, place in southern life. In return the Negroes generally voted for the "quality folk" in elections. But in the decades before and after 1900, there were successful efforts, varying in degree from state to state, to segregate Negroes both by law and custom and to deprive them of political rights. Segregation extended to "virtually all forms of public transportation, to sports and recreations, to hospitals, orphanages, prisons, and asylums, and ultimately to funeral homes, morgues, and cemetaries."
(Bragdon & McCutchen, History of A Free People, The Macmillan Co. (1967), pp. 539-540.)
This is not all. Louisiana, in 1869, had passed legislation to desegregate steamboat passenger accommodations. The U.S. Supreme Court in Hall v. De Cuir, 95 U.S. 485 (1878), struck down Louisiana's law on grounds it trenched on interstate commerce, exclusively Congress's domain. In another case, State of Mississippi's 1888 railroad-car segregation law was defied by the railroad company, by its conductor; resulting in convictions confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Louisville, New Orleans and Texas Ry. Co. v. Mississippi 133 U.S. 587 (1890). I can almost hear Biff Usually defending the PC "always" ODR saying, "Quotes from history [& law, & Thomas Jefferson, & ...?] are fine, as far as they go."
It is true there was Reconstruction era vigilante-violence centering on voting. The Ku Klux Klan first came into being then bent mainly on preserving southern "white" political power through terrorism. Nonetheless, there apparently were numerous interracial marriages during the post-Civil War years. Signs are that intolerant racism entered the prostrate Reconstruction South carried down from the North. Evidence of Jim Crow yen to impose segregation did not appear in the "black"-belt Deep South before the late 1880s, at least a decade after Reconstruction ended. (E.g., My grandmother, who was very close, almost as a parent to me, was born in 1889. Her Mom, in childhood, a generation earlier, had lived for a time among, and she and her sister both remembered playing together with freedmens' children, some of whom may have been of their Alabama family's own former slaves.)
The Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), opinion on page 552 supports this recollection of late 19th-Century racial tolerance as it surveys the various state laws defining the location of the "color line" in 1896. (Id., at 552.) In Virginia, for instance, a quadroon as late as 1910 could be a "white" person. A Mulatto could be "white" in Ohio and Massachusetts in 1896. (My dear grandmother was 8 in 1896 when Plessy was decided.) The "educator" who thinks WWI ended in the 1940s would do well to the read the freely available Plessy opinion and try to not misguide students.
What typically happens is, antiracist fulminations about antebellum America thoroughly confuse slavery with "the races." Just so, hoards of these denouncing "educators" proclaim that racism caused/excused slavery. Actually, slavery is so ancient that no one knows its origin. The partus sequitur ventrum doctrine, making servility the inheritance of any man's child by a servile mother, was enacted in Virginia in 1662. It functioned on servility (slavery later), not on "color." Subsequent legislation was "color"-conscious (e.g., Virginia's ban on "white" intermarriage 1691). But the purpose of early racial "color"-conscious legislation was to stabilize slavery, not to indulge in racial hatred. Sadly, the draconian laws had predictable social effect. Moreover, within a century Enlightenment "science" had racism on steroids. At the time of drafting our U.S. Constitution in 1787, the idea of "different races" of peoples as taxonomic "subspecies" of Man was a brand new quasi-scientific idea. (Linnaeus 1758; Blumenbach 1775.) Only then did the idea of racial difference (inequality) "scientifically" justifying a whole human "race" of natural slaves ("negro race") start sinking in.
The Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), Supreme Court decision was the first high court finding that "black" people exist "different", justifying their inequality with chattel slavery. The Dred Scott opinion looked back to the Constitution's drafting (1787) to find the understanding of racial "difference" had coalesced by then in "the two world races." This simply was the constitutional law the Dred Scott Court found. It honestly stated the "difference" of "the two different races" understood as Enlightenment "science," in mid-19th-Century America: Negroes had
Quote:
... been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.
(Id., at 407.) Less than a decade later, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) made citizens of non-Indians and guaranteed legal equality without any word about race. So it was the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Court found two "different races" (Dred Scott's same "black & white" taxonomy) having "separate but equal" rights. Again, in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), our Supreme Court found two "different races." Child psychology books informed the Brown Court that the "black" children mysteriously required seating next to "white" children in order to learn school lessons. Again, in Grutter v. Bollinger, [No. 02-241] 539 U.S. 306 (2003) our Supreme Court found Dred Scott's "different races" whose presence in representative numbers (carefully denying it's a "quota") on college campuses for threshold "diversity" will remain somehow necessary for educational quality for at least the next 25 years into the future.
Dred Scott v. Sanford remains our "different races" law . The post-Civil War constitutional amendments overturned Dred Scott on slavery matters. But its finding "the races," as "different" as black and white in America is untouched. Enlightenment "science" remains our "different races" American law today!Dred Scott rules today, saying (I paraphrase) -- "The human race has no commonality, sameness, or unity, hence no equality that anyone needs to recognize." Certainly not Solon.com or its "educator."
George
Posted: Tue 07 Feb 2006 18:15 Post subject: Re: One Drop Supporter Biff
srb71 wrote:
Funny that he considers himself a conservative.
I am ashamed to reveal my political ignorance, but I honestly cannot see the heritage-versus-accuracy issue as related to the U.S. conservative-versus-liberal dichotomy.
Take Robert E. Lee, for example. Most Americans (including professors who have studied the Civil War) teach that he was a great military commander, a paragon of human compassion, and a beacon of honor and integrity. In fact, even the most cursory investigation reveals that he was an incompetent general, that he demanded to whip his slaves personally rather than delegating the task to his overseers, because he personally enjoyed it, and that he did not hesitate to lie under oath. Today's saintly image was deliberately crafted after the real man's death in order to reconcile North and South after Reconstruction. Everybody knows this (including the professors to teach the myth), but everyone tacitly agrees that factual accuracy is irrelevant to the teaching of heritage.
Similarly, as shown by Wikipedia which has reverted to the myth, most Americans (including professors who have studied slavery and racialism) teach that slaveowners invented the ODR to increase their human property. In fact, even the most cursory investigation shows that the ODR did not become popular nor legislated until 1910-1920 in order to buttress the cruelties of the Jim Crow era of terror and oppression. Today's connection of ODR with slavery was deliberately crafted after the civil rights movement in order to blame long-dead White Southerners for today's racism and identity politics. Everybody knows this (including the professors to teach the myth), but everyone tacitly agrees that factual accuracy is irrelevant to the teaching of heritage.
In both of these heritage-trumps-accuracy issues (and in similar issues that I have studied), I have been unable to see any difference between conservatives and liberals (or between Blacks and Whites, for that matter). Such counterfactual hertitage myths appear simply to be part of the U.S. national mythology, embraced by all.
I know that A.D. disagrees with me on this, and John McWhorter would eat me alive, since he apparently equates professorial prevarication (or stupidity) with liberalism. But I just cannot see the connection.
Posted: Wed 08 Feb 2006 00:16 Post subject: John McWhorter
I don't see any disagreement with Frank here. Both "liberals" and "conservatives" lie about "race" and the ODR in particular. I have said that ordinary "whites" with no racial agenda are more open to reason on the issue than the professional "gatekeepers" of knowledge.
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