Failed Mongrel Prophet

G-Man · **Joined:** Sat 27 Nov 2004 21:42 **Posts:** 3028

I came across this post at Gene Expression. They even quote an article from Kiini Ibura Salaam about racism (or is it colorism?) in the Dominican Republic that we discussed here some time ago. The poster quotes Salaam to show that race mixing will not end racism. Anyway, I thought this was something some here would find interesting.

Quote:

Since Chet told me that he was going to start his own weblog after his guesting stint is over at GNXP SB, and that that weblog would focus in part on Austrian economics, I decided to look up von Mises on Wiki out of curiosity (I was a libertarian, I know von Mises, but I am not one of the 132 people in the world alive today who has read all of Human Action). I found out that von Mises was a consultant for the Pan-Europa Movement, which was headed by one Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi. This man was a mischlinge, his mother was Japanese! Here are some of his opinions:

"The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals."
...
"Instead of destroying European Jewry, Europe, against its own will, refined and educated this people into a future leader-nation through this artificial selection process. No wonder that this people, that escaped Ghetto-Prison, developed into a spiritual nobility of Europe. Therefore a gracious Providence provided Europe with a new race of nobility through spiritual grace. This happened at the moment when Europe's feudal aristocracy became dilapidated, and thanks to Jewish emancipation."

Being an F1 hybrid Coudenhove-Kalergi couldn't comprehend that the nature nature of genetical inheritance implies that heritable variation will be maintained. This also means that ills like racism will still be around despite admixture. Consider this description of the problems of racism in multiracial Dominican Republic:

In one Dominican family, one child can be considered black and the other white. Though siblings, their different skin colors make them two different races. Because of this unique structure, I was forced to live and deal with prejudices in new ways. I could not avoid problems by living with a "black" family. There were no black families. I had to live within a community that rejected me.

South Asians can relate to the fact that intrafamilial variance on phenotype does not negate societal preferences for particular looks.

posted by Razib | 8:39 PM | Comments (11)

fwsweet · **Posted:** Fri 08 Dec 2006 21:13

That reminds me of Charles W. Chesnutt.

What reminds me of the great author is not that individuals displaying the full range of human variation will always be born, due to DNA's digital encoding, even if intermarriage becomes the norm. That point has been beaten into the ground in these parts.

I am reminded of Chesnutt because of the question of "racism" in a society with an endogamous color line versus "colorism" in societies without one. Obviously, people cannot oppress their own children, siblings, or parents on the basis of their victim's ancestry. Equally obviously, they can mistreat them because of their looks. Many books have argued that one form of injustice (mistreatment for one's ancestry, versus mistreatment for one's looks) is worse than the other. The former leads to state-enforced terrorism but spawns solidarity and resistance. The latter leads to acquiescence (and the advice to marry light) but your lighter-skinned relatives will always take you in.

Chesnutt believed that the latter prospect was America's destiny. In his 1900 essay "The Future American" he saw that intermarriage was legal almost everywhere and, in certain regions, even common. With great hope in the future he foresaw that as Americans intermarried an increasing fraction of the population would have African as well as European ancestry. He affirmed that he lived in the best of times because America was on the verge of abandoning racism (ancestry-based mistreatment). He glossed over the likely perpetuation of colorism (appearance-based mistreatment) or perhaps he thought it less wicked. In any event, he joyfully believed that in 1900 he had the good fortune to be alive and writing at the dawning of a new age, when Americans would embrace all their ancestries.

It is the saddest essay I have ever read.

As you all know, Chesnutt was dead wrong. Over the next ten years intermarriage was outlawed throughout the nation. The one-drop rule was made law in the decade after that. The nationwide lynchings rose to one per week for months on end. Chesnutt became increasingly disillusioned. Eventually even the President of the United States proudly wore a klansman's robe.

Chesnutt lived until 1932. By then he had abandoned his writing career because his market had dried up. His work had become too bitter for the public to swallow. The following short story is an example of his later work. It is so true that it will make your skin crawl. Read The Doll (1916).

zsana · **Joined:** Sat 05 Feb 2005 04:17 **Posts:** 1032

Charles W. Chesnutt

http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID ... GgodZDHm_A

Quote:

Before Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, before James Weldon Johnson and Nella Larsen, Charles W. Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with searching explorations of the meaning of race and innovative use of African American speech and folklore. Rejecting genteel Victorian hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and "passing," Chesnutt exposed the deformed logic of Jim Crow with novels and stories of formal clarity-creating, in the process, the modern African American novel. Here is the best of Chesnutt's work in the largest and most comprehensive edition ever published, presenting for the first time the full range of his achievement as a writer and social critic.

The Conjure Woman (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public as a writer of "conjure" tales, stories that explore black folklore and supernaturalism. That same year, he published The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line, stories set in Chesnutt's native North Carolina that dramatize the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction at the turn of the century. His first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) tells, as no previous novel ever had, of racial passing. The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt's masterpiece, is a powerful and bitter novel about the harsh reassertion of white dominance in a southern town at the end of the Reconstruction era, based largely on the Wilmington race riot.

Nine uncollected short stories, including conjure tales omitted from The Conjure Woman, round out a selection of the author's fiction. Eight essays highlight Chesnutt's prescient views on the paradoxes of race relations in America and the definition of race itself.

Werner Sollors teaches Afro-American Studies and English at Harvard University. His most recent book is Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature.

The Chesnutt Women

http://www.uncfsu.edu/fsuwomen/chesnuttwomen/index.htm

Quote:

Charles Waddell Chesnutt, an accredited author, is the most famous member of the Chesnutt family. What some people might not know is that the Chesnutt Family contained some very strong, brave, successful and independent women.

The Study of Racialism

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