Posted: Mon 11 Apr 2005 04:54 Post subject: Lust Across the Color Line and the Rise of the MULATTO Elite
Staples seems to use about 75% or more of his columns to promote the "one drop" myth. Eston Hemings Jefferson became legally 'white" when he was manumitted. Even Madison and Sally were listed as "white" in a Virginia census. We're talking about people who were very NON-BLACK and often WHITE. Staples tries to promote the idea that miscegenation improves the "black" and leaves the "white" pure. I'd like to see some of us write to The New York Times about their one-sided presentation of the "one drop" issue.
Lust Across the Color Line and the Rise of the Black Elite
By BRENT STAPLES
The 1998 DNA study that linked Thomas Jefferson to the final child of his lover Sally Hemings has settled one argument and fired up another. Most historians who had argued that Jefferson was too pure of heart to bed a slave have re-evaluated 200 years of evidence and embraced the emerging consensus: that Jefferson had a long relationship with Hemings and probably
fathered most, if not all of her children.
Having acknowledged the relationship, these historians are now trying to explain it. This has sent them scrambling back to the 19th-century accounts of life at Monticello by two former slaves: Jefferson's former servant, Israel Jefferson, and the founder's son, Madison Hemings. This represents the rehabilitation of Madison, who was being vilified as a liar even 10 years ago.
Madison's memoir, based partly on family history conveyed to him by his mother, is as close to the voice of Sally Hemings as we will ever come. But neither of these brief accounts, published in an Ohio newspaper in 1873, reveals anything about the intimate texture of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. They tell us a great deal, however, about the circumstances that created the black intelligentsia that sprang to life during Reconstruction and that dominated African-American cultural, intellectual and political life through the first half of the 20th century.
This black intelligentsia did not spring fully formed from the cotton fields. It had its roots in the families of mixed-race slaves like the Hemingses, who served as house servants for generations, often in the homes of white families to whom they were related. Employed in "the big house," these slaves often learned to read, at a time when few slaves were literate. They also absorbed patterns of speech, dress and deportment that served them well after emancipation.
Many of them were set free by their guilt-ridden slave owner fathers long before the official end of slavery. The Hemings children were all free by 1829 - or more than a third of a century before slavery was finally abolished. Not surprisingly, mixed-race offspring who were well educated became teachers, writers, newspaper editors. They formed the bedrock of an emerging black elite and were disproportionately represented in the African-American leadership during Reconstruction and well into the 20th century.
Not all of these mixed-race children fared so well, however. Many were sold or passed on as chattel to relatives in their fathers' wills. This was in fact the case with Sally Hemings, one of several children born to a mixed-race slave named Betty Hemings and a white lawyer and businessman named John Wayles - the father of Thomas Jefferson's wife, Martha. When Wayles died, Martha inherited some of her enslaved half siblings, including Sally Hemings.
Sally Hemings was just a child when she accompanied Jefferson and his daughter to France for more than two years. Madison tells us in his memoir that his mother became pregnant by Jefferson in France, where she was considered free. She refused to return to America, he said, until Jefferson agreed to free all of the children born of their relationship.
Madison recalls that he and his siblings were favored at Monticello, and allowed to spend their time in the "great house," where they could be close to their mother. Madison further asserts that they knew of Jefferson's plans to emancipate them. "We were free from the dread of having to be slaves all our lives long, and were measurably happy," he says.
Jefferson's favoritism, however, did not include affection. Jefferson's black children, who seem never to have received so much as an embrace or a peck on the cheek, watched in what must have been painful silence as the great man doted on his white grandchildren. Madison says, "We were the only children of his by a slave woman."
The "great house" at Monticello offered abundant opportunities for encounters with the great minds of the day. Israel Jefferson, for example, recalls being present when Jefferson and Lafayette debated the question of slavery.
Raised in such a context, the Hemings children - and others like them - were probably better prepared for middle-class life than most people, either black or white. Indeed, historians who have followed the Hemings descendants through time have found that the cultural capital acquired by Hemings children at Monticello translated into upward mobility.
Historians who are now searching for ways to understand the Jefferson-Hemings relationship have several models from which to choose. Some masters developed caring, de facto marriages with enslaved women and tried to leave their children money and property in their wills. Other masters were serial rapists or plantation potentates who made harems in their slave quarters and were profoundly indifferent to their offspring.
For the time being, however, the last word on this issue should go to Madison Hemings, who flatly and dispassionately describes the relationship as a bargain, in which his mother consented to share Jefferson's bed in exchange for the emancipation of her children. That she had the courage to articulate this deal - and stand firm on its terms - makes her more than a mere concubine. It makes her the architect of her family's freedom.
Posted: Mon 11 Apr 2005 12:55 Post subject: Re: Lust Across the Color Line and the Rise of the MULATTO Elite
Powell wrote:
Staples seems to use about 75% or more of his columns to promote the "one drop" myth.
Help me to see the one-dropism in the article. I cannot see it.
To me, the article speaks to two points: First, are the neglected stories of strong competent women who carved out niches for their families. Sally Hemings is a good example of this, although I think that there were better examples in the lower South (Kingsley, Delille, Duplantier). This is a minor quibble.
Second, the article stresses that some slaveowners treated their female slaves as harems and ignored their slave-born children (thus letting them languish in slavery). Others, the article says, had de facto monogamous marriages with former slave women, manumitted their children, and funded their start in life.
I have two problems with this latter argument. First, it defies the author's own woman-in-control thesis. It gives all the choice and power to the men. In fact, this was not always the case. Zephaniah Kingsley tried hard to follow the second path (harem, enslaved children), but he came to love a woman who was far smarter and better-educated than he was. She independently carved out a rich slave-trading empire that, among other things, funded her de-facto husband's shipping company (as well as launching their children into the highest Florida society).
The bigger problem I have is that the author recklessly confuses endogamous group membership with socio-economic class. There were many Black children of slave mothers and slave-owning fathers who became wealthy landowners by inheriting from their fathers -- see John C. Inscoe, ed. Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865-1950 (Athens: University of Georgia, 1994) for examples. -- And there were many White children of slave mothers and slave-owning fathers who were accepted by society as White, but who remained poor nonetheless.
The confusion between endogamous group membership and class is serious because it suggests that all Whites are rich and all Blacks are poor. This sort of thinking is what leads to the affirmative action idiocy of rejecting the college applications of intellectually bright White children from poor blue-collar familes, and accepting intellectually mediocre students from wealthy professional Black families instead.
Posted: Mon 11 Apr 2005 18:32 Post subject: Lust Across the Color Line
Brent Staples has written MANY columns for the New York Times and the great majority of them appear to be about mixed race whites who are labeled "black" by Staples without qualification. I know from experience that the New York Times won't print letters that contradict him on the issue of racial classification. He is a firm believer in promoting the idea that anyone (with the tacit exception of Latinos, Arabs, etc.) with "black blood" is only "passing as white" if they claim that identity.
The Real American Love Story
Why America is a lot less white than it looks.
By Brent Staples
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 5, 1999, at 12:28 AM PT
The PBS broadcast last month of An American Love Story--a 10-hour film about an interracial family--spawned a great deal of chatter to the effect that mixed-race couplings were the wave of the future. In fact, they are the wave of the past. Interracial marriages accounted for only 2.2 percent of all marriages in the Current Population Survey of 1992, a gain of only two-tenths of a percent over 1980, and the number of mixed couplings actually decreased slightly in 1991. The census pattern suggests that slightly more interracial couples will fall into each other's arms in the coming years but that there will be nothing resembling a dramatic acceleration of marriage across the color line.
But America already has almost 400 years of race mixing behind it, beginning with that first slave ship that sailed into Jamestown harbor carrying slaves who were already pregnant by members of the crew. Americans have grudgingly accepted the fact that sex between masters and slaves such as Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was frequent, leading to a many-hued race of people who do not look African at all, even though they call themselves "African-American." Outside of recent African immigrants to the United States, there are virtually no black Americans of purely African descent, which is to say no black people who lack white ancestry, left in this country.
Four centuries of race mixing have had a similar impact on Americans who define themselves as white. Convincing estimates show that by 1950 about one in five white Americans had some African ancestry. This inheritance most often arrived at the bedroom door in the form of a fair-skinned black person who had slipped over the color line to live as white. Put another way, most Americans with African blood in their veins think of themselves as white and conduct themselves as such--and check "white" when they fill out census forms.
How did so much "black" blood get into so many "white" people? Consider the story behind the 1967 case of Loving vs. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court overturned laws in 17 states that forbade black people and white people to marry. Richard Loving was white and Mildred Jeter was black. In 1958, weeks after the two were married, the Caroline County sheriff dragged them from their marriage bed and jailed them for the crime of being married. The Lovings were then exiled from Virginia under pain of imprisonment. In banishing the couple from the Old Dominion, the Caroline County judge said from the bench: "Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, Malay, and red and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix."
This statement would have been ludicrous anyplace but was especially laughable in Caroline County--and in the Lovings' hometown of Central Point, which had been an epicenter of race mixing for at least 200 years. There were many such centers in the South. In cities such as Charleston, S.C., and New Orleans, for example, white families and their fair-skinned black relatives lived so close together that they bumped into each other on the street. Mixed-race people were initially treated as a "new people" who existed in the space between white and black and deserved a status not quite as high as whites but higher than that of black people in general. This special status began to dry up just before the Civil War and evaporated when slavery ended and free blacks competed with whites for jobs and political power. White Southerners became obsessed with drawing an impossible line that would preserve white "racial purity"--another way of referring to white political dominance. The "one-drop rule" defined as black anyone who had any black ancestry at all, even if that ancestry was invisible to the naked eye or in the genealogical record. Those who fell on the black side of the law often lost the rights to vote, to hold high-status jobs, and to defend their persons and property in the courts.
The revocation of special mulatto rights accelerated the practice of passing for white. Central Point was locally known as the "passing capital of the world." Passing for white was so common there that a section of Central Point had actually been named "Passing.'' Some Central Pointers lived as negroes at home but crossed the line to seize white privileges just an hour or two away in Richmond, Va. Local children were often taken for white during excursions to nearby towns, where they shopped in stores that did not serve blacks and were admitted to the "white only" sections of movie houses.
Having learned the rewards of whiteness early, these children grew up, moved away, and continued the charade. Those who entered the armed forces, which were segregated until 1948, were often classified as white and attached to all-white units. This made for dicey moments when brown-skinned classmates from Central Point turned up in all-black units. Some of these former classmates kept the secret, but a few exposed the passers as frauds. Neither Britain nor France had laws that forbade interracial marriage, and people in those countries had no clue what the Yanks were going on about when they argued over who was really white or really black. To the French and the British, race was defined by what you looked like: If you looked white, well then, you were.
Back in Caroline County, soldiers who were passing were sure to travel home alone to prevent their white buddies from knowing who and what they were. The passers from Passing married white spouses, moved into white jobs, took up residence in white neighborhoods. When the couples returned to Central Point to visit, the town went along with the masquerade. Families ditched brown-skinned friends and relatives, and children stayed out of school to avoid being seen on the colored bus headed to the colored school. Principals and teachers stuck to the script. One of them told Ebony magazine in 1967 that blacks in Central Point had "infiltrated the white race more than any other group of Negroes. When a student plays hooky from school for a week and says an in-law is visiting the family, we understand. The kids just can't afford to catch the Negro school bus without giving away the racial identity."
This infiltration was common not just in Virginia but all over the United States. The most interesting document listed in the amicus briefs for Loving vs. Virginia is a statistical study called "African Ancestry of the White American Population" by Robert Stuckert, a sociologist and anthropologist from Ohio State University. Stuckert's statistical models are tough going, but eye-opening for what they show. Simply put, he examined census and fertility data to arrive at estimates of how many white Americans had African blood lines and how many fair-skinned blacks had crossed over the line to live as white. Stuckert's tables show that during the 1940s alone, roughly 15,550 fair-skinned blacks per year slipped across the color line--about 155,500 for the decade. Stuckert estimates that by 1950 about 21 percent of the whites--or about 28 million of the 135 million persons classified as "white" in the census--had black ancestry within the last four generations. He predicted that the proportion would only grow in the coming decades. The belief that one's ancestors are "racially uniform" is a basic American fiction, Stuckert wrote, but a fiction nonetheless.
Brent Staples is on the editorial board of the New York Times and is a member of Slate's book-reviewing team.
This article brings up an interesting point. Considering only the craft of writing (about the one-drop rule), how do you best describe a person who switches from the Black group to the White?
Say, for instance, that John Doe is born into a Black family, His parents both self-identify as Black. But each parent actually has a 50-50 Euro-African mix of the few genes that determine the few traits (skin tone, hair, facial features) that Americans see as "racially" important. That is, both parents are a bit more African-looking than Halle Berry. Due to the random recombination of meiosis, their baby, John, comes out with a 10-90 Euro-African mix of those same traits (a statistically reasonable outcome). That is, he looks utterly European. Like half of Americas children in such a situation, John switches to self-identifying as White shortly after high school. He marries a European-looking White woman and has European-looking kids.
Imagine that you, as a writer, are tasked with telling his story to the intelligent but uninformed mass of American readers. What words do you use?
You cannot say that John the baby was born White. The public is increasingly coming to see endogamous group membership as akin to ethnic self-identityas a matter of personal choice. (See the last section of my essay, Features of Today's One-Drop Rule.) A baby cannot make such a choice and it is a given that the parents see him as Black, despite his looks. Hence, if you do not want to confuse your readers, you should not say that he is "White" at this point. The best you can do, it seems to me, is to say that he is a European-looking baby who is a member of the Black community. In short, he is a White-looking Black baby.
But when you are writing about John as an old man, with a White wife and White children, White grandchildren, and White great-grandchildren, you con no longer call him a "White-looking Black man." This would plunge your readers back into the same pit of ignorance from which you are trying to lift them. If you call John a "White-looking Black" at this point, you would morally have to explain why you do not call the other 74 million White Americans with measurable recent African admixture (one-third of the White population) "White-looking Blacks" as well.
And so, as a writer, you must at some point in the biography of John Doe stop calling him a White-looking Black and start calling him a White adult who was once a Black child. How do you pull off this semantic trick for your readers?
Obviously, Mr. Staples badly screws up this task. I would hope that everyone in this discussion group would do a better job of it than to call John a "White-looking Black" to the day he dies. I would also hope that most educated writers anywhere would do better than to write that his descendants forever merely "lived as White," as Brooke Kroeger says of Eston Hemingss descendants on page 28 of _Passing: When People Cant be Who They Are_ (New York, 2003).) But where and how do you make the terminology switch?
It is an interesting question. I would love to hear suggestions.
[Note to ODR members who are college students in history, the humanities, or sociology: If you are writing a paper for a grade, you should call John and all of his descendants "White-looking Blacks" throughout your paper. The current U.S. academic canon in those departments is that Blackness can never be washed away and is never voluntary. So save your understanding of this topic for the real world, where factual knowledge is rewarded, not punished. If you are in biology, genetics, medicine, or pharmacology, you may address the problem factually. If you are in anthropology, you should sound out your professor first.]
Posted: Tue 12 Apr 2005 17:37 Post subject: What to call them
I have thought a great deal about the poverty-stricken vocabulary of the United States when it comes to describing racial mixtures.
I would call the child you describe a WHITE MULATTO. "White" describes his appearance and "Mulatto" describes both his descent and social status. After he becomes an adult, I would say that he is a white man of mixed ancestry who was FORMERLY a white mulatto or member of the "Mulatto Elite" (those who identified as superior or exotic varieties of Negro). If both his parents looked white, I would say that he was a mixed white born of two mixed white parents. If his parents accepted the "Negro" label, I would say he was a white member of the "Mulatto Elite." Why this emphasis on physical whiteness? I have seen too many attempts to explain away the whiteness of someone claimed as "black" by eliminating that person's white ancestry, even comparing them to Michael Jackson. If you say that someone is "black," the first impulse is to look for physical blackness or try to explain the incongruity. Most Americans are not schooled in this "one drop" abstraction.
Here is the Miramax attempt to explain the incongruity:
Miramax made a mint on The Crying Game in part because reviewers were successfully enjoined to protect the secret of Jaye Davidson's gender. But perhaps realizing the confusionif not outright incredulitythat would arise from the revelation that Anthony Hopkins was playing an African American, the famously micromanaging studio flashed critics the signal to out Coleman in their reviews. A mailing was dispatched with photocopies of Brent Staples's New York Times editorial-page piece on the paper's late book critic Anatole Broyard, a light-skinned black man who reinvented himself to the degree that his wife and children remained unaware of his (and their) heritage. A cover letter provided another nudge: "The history of 'passing' is something that we hope that you will include in your coverage of The Human Stain." As opposed to something, say, on the history of white actors playing black roles.
The producers of the 1934 "Imitation of Life" movie tried to explain the incongruity:
However, the New Yorkers disagree as to what exactly this subject matter is. They write:
It is not, as we see it, a problem of miscegenation that is, the act of miscegenation has occurred so remotely in the ancestry of the characters that it need not concern us. The girl's father and mother are both negroes though the father had white blood which gives the girl the appearance of a white person.
By explicitly distinguishing miscegenation from what actually occurs in the script, the reading from New York attempts to clear up the confusion in Hollywood between interracial desire and cross-racial identification. In addition, however, it again suggests that identification is the more fraught issue here: "The big problem," they write, "is the subject matter as a whole." So big, in fact, that after the New York staff argues that miscegenation per se is not an issue in this case, they nonetheless urge Breen "to persuade the company to abandon its plan for production." While they provide no further explanation of "the big problem," one is suggested by their strained description of Peola's racial identity in the same memo: "The girl's father and mother are both negroes though the father had white blood which gives the girl the appearance of a white person." Choosing to apply the "one drop rule" in its traditionally unilateral direction, they here define the (absent) father with "white blood" as nonetheless "negro." "The big problem" that continues to surface does so at the site of the daughter's "appearance."
(10) The PCA struggles to identify Peola throughout its correspondence on the project. Indeed, it becomes increasingly clear that, far in excess of the question of her "remote ancestry," is the considerable problem she poses for systems of marking and securing racial difference. In addition to the description from New York cited above, Peola is described throughout the PCA's memos and letters as variously:
the white child of a colored mother [with] negro blood in her veins
the negro girl appearing as white
the half-white, half-black girl
the white skinned negro girl
[one of] the two negroes
a girl with some negro blood who is confronted with the temptation to pass herself off as white
a partly colored girl
the girl [with] the appearance of a white person
the daughter of the colored woman [who] can pass for white
[the] mulatto offspring
pretending to be white when black
a part negro girl who is tempted to pass as white [and]
a lightcolored negro girl who desires to go white25
The first thing to be noted about this remarkable catalogue is that no two items in it are alike. Three of these, three with significantly different connotations, appear in a single letter: "the half-white, half-black girl," "the white skinned negro girl" and one of "the two negroes." Such continual attempts to name Peola's racial identity reflect the PCA's desire to pin that identity down. Yet, the impossibility of ever doing so is suggested by the fact that none of these descriptions adheres, but each is displaced by yet another attempt. That Peola thwarts the PCA's own ability to clearly identify, delimit and secure racial difference begins to reveal what exactly the "inflammable racial question," or questions, are that Imitation of Life poses. Indeed, the PCA's perpetual (failed) attempts to define Peola would seem to beg the question as to the very meaning of "race" itself. The inflammable answer that the PCA's own readings of Imitation of Life threaten to invite, even if against the grain of that essentialist text, is that "race" is not fixed, or verifiable, but on the contrary is perpetually constructed through discourse.
(11) The PCA's ever-changing names for Peola expose the discursive construction of race in their deployment of four separate, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, categories to mark racial difference. Whereas "black," "white" and "colored" operate through a discourse of color, which is often, but not always, tied to "skin," "negro" works through a separate discourse of race (in the traditional/archaic anthropological sense) which is sometimes, but not always, tied to "blood."26 In attempting to account for Peola's racial identity, the PCA variously combines such signifiers of color, skin, race and blood and as a result often marks her doubly (as in "the negro girl appearing as white"), and even triply (as in "the white child of a colored mother [with] negro blood"). In the case of the memo which defines Peola as "the white skinned negro girl," as if to match the force of that double marking, the same memo extends the double syntax to describe Delilah as "the black negro." Peola prompts such multiple markings, in effect, precisely because she confounds the notion that these categories are continuous, that they exist in any natural or seamless relation. Thus, the "danger" of Peola's story comes into new light. Calling attention to the disjunctures between "race," "color," "blood" and "skin," Peola threatens to rupture the constellation of discourses which work to construct the fiction that "race" is a natural category and that bodily wrappings are tied to interior essences.
(12) That the relation between color and race was very much at the heart of the question of "miscegenation" in the PCA's adjudication of Imitation of Life is implicit in a memo which records a meeting between representatives of the PCA and Universal. In that meeting, which I cited earlier, the PCA expresses their position that "the action of the negro girl appearing as white has a definite connection with the problem of miscegenation"a position which again doubly marks Peola as "negro" and "white" and ties that conflicted identity to miscegenation. Additionally, a producer attempts to appease the censors' objection by proposing that the film could "definitely establish that [Peola's] white skin was due to a rare but scientific fact that such a child might come of a line of definitely negro strain."27 That this suggestion is never again mentioned in the files is not at all surprising. Not only would such an explanation fail to allay the censors' greatest fears regarding identification and desire (she could still pass and viewers could still imagine that miscegenation had taken place "in spirit, if not in fact"), but it would also explicitly draw attention to the disjuncture not only between race and color, but further between these and "blood," or ancestry, as well. Attempting to keep in place the system of racial difference that depends upon the elision of these disjunctures, the PCA opts instead to ultimately insist on making Peola essentially "black." Thus, we see in their final correspondence on the subject that Peola is no longer described as "the white child" "with some negro blood," but increasingly becomes "a negro," "pretending to be white, when black." Foreshadowing the visual discourse of the film soon to come, this last description would seem to redefine "black" as not simply a color, but an essential identity.
(13) The problems Peola's identity posed to the censors who attempted to classify her in writing, already point to the even more complicated stakes that would arise in "picturiz[ing]" her. At least in writing the censors could doubly mark her as, in effect, looking white, but being black. Clearly such markings are put into a new state of crisis when projected through filmic images. That is, while the PCA's written accounts of Peola could counterbalance her exterior "whiteness" by reimposing an interior "blackness," that strategy would not suffice on film. This is especially the case in light of Hollywood's usual complicity in, indeed its contribution to, the cultural fiction that race is not only an essential fact, but a visually verifiable one. In Hollywood's system of racial difference, a system fully invested in a visual discourse of race in which the image (not blood or ancestry) guarantees racial identity, how does one safely project the image of a "negro girl appearing as white"?
Posted: Thu 14 Apr 2005 14:28 Post subject: DNA Tells Students They Aren't Who They Thought
This article is part of the problem with the word "black." Harrison, for example, obviously showed white ancestry as well as black but he denied it, based on the myth that "both" his parents were "black." "Black," to most Americans, means NO racial mixture. If you say you are "black," you are literally denying any other ancestry. Even the most obvious genetic reality is ignored. The individual DOES have some control over he is seen.
______________________________________
Quote:
April 13, 2005
DNA Tells Students They Aren't Who They Thought
By EMMA DALY
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - When Don R. Harrison Jr. was growing up in Philadelphia, neighborhood children would tease him and call him "white boy," because his skin was lighter than theirs. But Mr. Harrison, a "proud black man," was still unprepared for the results of a DNA test, taken as part of a class at Pennsylvania State University, to determine his genetic ancestry.
"I figured it would be interesting. I'm light-skinned and I wanted to know my whole makeup," said Mr. Harrison, a 20-year-old sociology major. But he was shocked by results showing him to be 52 percent African and 48 percent European: "which I had no clue about, considering both my parents are black," said Mr. Harrison. "So I'm half white."
Samuel M. Richards, who teaches Sociology 119, Race and Ethnic Relations, to 500 students each semester, said the DNA tests, which were conducted last year for the first time, were very popular with the class.
"Everyone wants to take the test, even students who think they are 100 percent one race or another, and almost every one of them wants to discover something, that they're 1 percent Asian or something. It's a badge in this multicultural world," he said.
About half of the 100 students tested this semester were white, he said, "And every one of them said, 'Oh man, I hope I'm part black,' because it would upset their parents.
"That's this generation," he said. "People want to identify with this pop multiracial culture. They don't want to live next to it, but they want to be part of it. It's cool."
The tests also help to deepen conversations about race, he said.
"When I teach I try to demonstrate to students how complex race and ethnicity are," Dr. Richards said. "My secondary goal is to improve race relations, and when people discover that what they thought about themselves is not true - 'I thought I was black, but I'm also Asian and white' - it leads them to have a different kind of conversation about race. It leads them to be less bigoted, to ask the deeper questions, to be more open to differences."
Mark D. Shriver, associate professor of anthropology and genetics at Penn State, took cheek swabs from about 100 student volunteers in Dr. Richards's class for the DNA tests.
Many students were surprised by the results of the test, which was created by Professor Shriver and his commercial partners at DNAPrint Genomics Inc. to measure genetic mixing in populations, because of the potential importance of racial or ethnic background to drug trials, and also because of the researchers' curiosity about their own ancestry. The company analyzed the test results free; the results will go into a database for Dr. Shriver's research.
The test compares DNA with that of four parent populations, western European, west African, east Asian and indigenous American, and the company claims it is more than 90 percent accurate.
Many unexpected results can be explained by family history. Mr. Harrison, for instance, recalled a great-grandfather who "would cross for white, he was so fair."
"The white women apparently found him attractive, and black women would flock to him because light was in back then." Mr. Harrison added, "He worked on the railroad, and he looked white in a black-and-white photo."
Natasha Best, a 21-year-old public relations major, has always thought of herself as half black and half white, because her mother is Irish-Lithuanian and her father West Indian. But the test proved her to be 58 percent European and 42 percent African.
"I was surprised at how much European I was, because though my father's family knows there is a great-great-grandfather who was Scottish, no one remembered him," said Ms. Best, who grew up in Yonkers. "I knew it was true, because I have dark relatives with blue eyes, but to bring it up a whole 8 percent, that was shocking to me."
But Professor Shriver explained that although a great-great-grandparent would contribute on average 6.25 percent of a person's genes, any one ancestor might be represented at a higher or lower level in today's generation.
Modern migration patterns are also leaving a mark. Ms. Best and Mr. Harrison are members of the fastest-growing ethnic grouping in the United States, one that was acknowledged in the 2000 census for the first time: mixed race. Yet the two students identify themselves in very different ways.
"I am 48 percent white - genetically I am, at least, but not culturally. And the fact that I'm black is more important, because it's something I know. It's who I'm comfortable with," Mr. Harrison said.
"Some people think it's funny that I consider myself Irish and celebrate St. Patrick's Day," Ms. Best said, "because no matter how you cut it, when you look at me you don't think, there goes a white girl."
She has noted discrimination on both sides. "Black people have told me I shouldn't date white people," said Ms. Best, whose boyfriend is white. Some of her white friends say their parents, too, disapprove of interracial dating. "Other people have told me I'm not really black, or I think I'm better than other black people because I'm lighter."
Mr. Harrison, who says that as a child he molded himself to be more black, does not want this new information to change his identity. "Just because I found out I'm white, I'm not going to act white," he said. "I'm very proud of my black side."
But whatever his genes say, or those of Ms. Best, they will most likely be seen as black - at least by white Americans - for the rest of their lives.
"I think the test is really interesting; I had to know," said Ms. Best. "But it makes me question, why are we doing this? Why do people, especially in this country, want to know? Why are we, as a people, so caught up in race? Maybe we haven't progressed as much as we thought we had."
Joined: 30 Mar 2005 {Posts: 1082 } Location: New Jersey
Posted: Fri 15 Apr 2005 16:10 Post subject: Couldn't agree with you more...
Hello, Ms. Powell:
I couldn't agree with you more that there is nothing more ridiculous than the one-drop rule. I can recall meeting a woman (when I was a child) who identified herself as "Black." She didn't look the slightest bit African to me, so I found it odd. I recall asking my older brother about it, and he said, "There are very light-skinned Blacks, some of whom don't look Black at all -- but they are Black." This puzzled me, and I never quite accepted it.
In school, I recall learning about Plessy of the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case. We students were told he was a light-skinned Black man, who looked entirely White; but he was 1/32 Black, so that made him Black. I recall challenging the teacher about it, and was told that this is how things are. It didn't make the least bit of sense to me.
In my humble opinion, people (whether they are Hispanic, Anglo, or anything else) who are phenotypically White, but have some Black ancestry, are White, and should be able to identify as such, unless they choose to identify as mixed. Those who are phenotypically Black (and I mean truly Black-looking, not mixed-looking), but with some White ancestry, are Black, and should be allowed to identify as such, unless they choose toe identify as mixed. Those who look mixed, are mixed, and should be able to identify as such. Why does one small fraction of Black ancestry render someone as Black? It simply boggles the mind that the majority of Americans still believe this, and I just don't get it.
I don't like "Hispanic" or "Latino" being used as racial categories. They are most certainly not. A Latino can be of any race. Also, the argument that Latinos identify themselves by their culture and not racial appearance falls very weakly and definitely untrue. It is a convenient way to avoid the issue or hide Black ancestry or whatever. In fact, Latin American nations most certainly do identify the citizens by racial characteristics, and they have almost made an art form out of it! There are far more racial designations (running the whole spectrum of looks) there than here. Their system makes much more sense than ours; but the mere fact that it exists refutes any claims that Hispanics only identify by culture.
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