The Study of Racialism

These two poems were written after reading the posts on President Warren G. Harding and the 5 Black Presidents. The whole thing struck me as ridiculous and sad.

The first poem “Ode to the ODR” plays upon the ridiculousness of one-dropping the presidents. Its sentiment is heavy sarcasm, though there is a touch of humor or tongue in the cheek quality, especially in the title. The style is descriptive and it employs somewhat elaborate metaphors. The source of many of the metaphors should be familiar--J.K. Rowlings “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”

The second poem “The OD rule” has more of a lyrical quality--at least it reaches a higher pitch--and the language is simpler. The emotions depicted are sadness and empathy for those who feel they need the one-drop rule. It conveys the contradictory nature of the ODR and the emotional toll those contradictions take.

For best effect, be sure to view the photos in the 5 Black Presidents post.






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Recent book: A Brief History of Social Identity: From Kinship to Multirace.

The above poem was inspired by the 1934 version of the movie Imitation of Life. The movie tells the story of two single mothers, one white and one black, and the impact that their life choices have on their relationships with their daughters.

Both mothers are hard working, but the similarity ends there. The white mother is fiercely independent and entrepreneurial. The black mother is content to be a servant all her life, even though she has the opportunity to be independent and entrepreneurial herself.

The white mother gives up the great love of her life to protect her relationship with her daughter. The black mother does not give up her “great love”, her servile relationship to the white mother. As a result, her daughter, who is a white multiracial, becomes (we are to believe) slavishly attached to whiteness, and so constantly tries to reject and deny all aspects of her black heritage.

The multiracial character, Peola, eventually learns to accept her blackness (or reject her whiteness), but only after tragedy. This, after all, is a “passing” movie, which means it is anti-“passing.”

In the 1959 remake, the white mother is no longer able to renounce her great love – now changed from a romance to the prestige life of fame – and also loses her daughter and romantic interest. This loss may not have been as poignant as that of the black mother’s, but it reinforced the main theme of conflict between a superficial “prestige” life – of fame or whiteness – and the more real life of personal relationships.

In the 1934 version, the “imitation” that the title refers to is primarily the relationship to whiteness of the black mother and her multiracial daughter. But it also refers to the white daughter’s relationship to her mother’s romantic interest. In the 1959 remake, the white mother now shares this life of “imitation” by being overly concerned with ambition and fame.

The plotlines of the white characters are believable: romance and ambition. That of the black mother and her daughter is less so because the more believable “imitation” is of an essentially white character being authentically black.

The question posed at the end of the first part of the poem (Of fathers) was actually the first to be written of the entire poem. It was the question I asked myself after watching the movie: how can people condemn a person for denying the existence of another, when they are busy denying the existence of that person? Knowing and depicting the dilemma of the multiracial character, how could she be deprived of all options?

In poetry one may pose a question and leave it unanswered for emotional impact. But one still seeks an answer. The best answer I am able to find seems so nihilist that I can only express it in the form of a question.

We are all aware that in nature life can only survive by taking life. Is it analogously true that the human animal can only love by hating? Is it an inexorable dialectic of life that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?

The movie was quite sympathetic to the black cause, even preachy in one part. It is this good intention of the movie which is identified with the salvation of the Judeo-Christian tradition, to many the ultimate example of good. But the movie’s good intention was compromised by what I thought was the “cruel” treatment of the multiracial character. And so the poem identifies her with those ritual animals in the Judeo-Christian tradition that have been the moral dump of the human society.

The second part of the poem (Of mothers) employs simpler language; there are no historical allusions. Unlike the first part, which expresses sympathy (implicitly for the multiracial character, and explicitly for various ritual animals), the second part is heavily sarcastic. We have the speaker (the multiracial character, Peola) accepting the one-drop rule, but fully conscious that it is a “double-edged sword” which destroys the integrity of both parties.

The Imitation of Life might have been a celebration of the triumph of the one-drop rule. Yet, nearly forty years later, Toni Morrison found it necessary to return to the problem of the multiracial in her novel The Bluest Eye (1970). It seems the multiracial problem was not settled, after all. The central idea in both novel and movie is the same, that the whiteness possessed by multiracials in the black community mesmerizes blacks and brings them tragedy.

The central character in The Bluest Eye goes by the name of Pecola, reminiscent of Peola in the Imitation of Life. (I think its quite possible the movie provided some, if not much of the inspiration for the book). This Pecola is a little black girl. This does not change the dynamics of the story. Her mother is also a maid who adores her white employer’s daughter. Here the mother is unappreciative of her own daughter, unlike in the Imitation of Life. But the over-appreciation of whiteness by both mothers, and the over-exposure of both children to whiteness, alienates the children (in pathological terms) from blackness.

This Pecola also yearns to be white, but being black it brings tragedy to her, as it did to Peola’s mother in the Imitation of Life. Blackness in both works is vulnerable to whiteness. (In the black community, multiracials cause tragedy to blacks. But when multiracials venture into the white world, as in the 1959 remake, tragedy befalls them.)

Multiracial characters do appear in the novel. There is a young girl with long plaited hair, but very haughty. And it is a multiracial man, quite proud of his white heritage, who callously completes Pecola’s undoing as though he were performing a great work of dark wizardry.

The Imitation of Life showed the multiracial as redeemable. Toni Morrison’s novel abandoned this explicitly, yet such a portrayal of depravity also helps to reinforce the one-drop rule by making a multiracial awareness less attractive to the reader.

LMartin

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
http://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=100



This Longfellow poem, published in 1842, I think, pertains racially to hypodescent rather than the ODR "one drop rule" exactly -- 1/4-part "black blood" identified a "mixed" person unlikely to be considered "white" in most U.S. states then. Longfellow, an abolitionist, doubtless was more conscious of -- more concerned with -- another antebellum racial concept. That would be the partus sequitur ventrum rule passing inherited slavery down the line through slave mothers. The partus rule dated back to Virginia Colony legislation of 1661. Partus abrogated common law, passing to children their free English father's social status. The 1661 act made these Mulatto children like their mothers, instead -- servants, slaves. The partus rule effectively passed all servile mothers' children into inherited slavery. The Atlantic slave trade filled American slaves with African "blood." The Negro look was becoming dominant by 1661, as mentioned in the partus act's preamble. (Wadlington, The LOVING case; Virginia's Anti-Miscegenation Statute in Perspective, 52 Va.L.Rev. 1189, 1191 (1966).)


The partus rule's continuous working was able to, and did, "breed" slavery in an infinitely reducing ("dropping") ancestral "founder" sense implying an ancestral "nigger woman," however long ago, who started a slave's blood lineage. Breeding too, is a racial concept, in some sense "unfree." (Race means "roots." Does race imply "breeding," unfree? Compare racial.) Modern people look back on this and fail to distinguish (even historians) between historically wavering racial prejudice -- its hypodescent "blood fractions" for Mulatto, Quadroon, Octoroon and so on, which ended in legislating the 20th Century ODR -- and slavery's partus rule which was unconcerned with "color" even in "white" slaves.


The remembered existence of "white" slaves is mentioned on page 196 of this U.S. Supreme Court opinion: Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922). "... [T]he word 'free' was originally used in recognition of the fact that slavery then existed and that some white persons occupied that status." (Ibid., my emphasis.) The Court denied citizenship to a Japanese because he was not born racially Caucasian -- "white." (Very next year the Court found itself having to give up Caucasian as "scientific" definition of "white." United States v. Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923), also a very interesting case to read.)
George


Supreme Court opinions available on-line at:
http://www.findlaw.com/casecode/supreme.html

A sampling of the lyrical fare from IV's Poetry Corner: