The Study of Racialism

We in this group should know: U.S. American society has a long history of disparaging -- if not hating -- the idea of "race mixing." (E.g., see
Josiah Clark Nott, Types of Mankind (1855)
http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/sgml/moa- ... id=AJA7398
Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916)
http://www.churchoftrueisrael.com/pgr/pgr-toc.html
Theodore G. Bilbo, Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongrelization (1947)
http://www.churchoftrueisrael.com/tyc/tyc_toc.html .)

This theme is clear, well known, in white supremacist doctrine demanding "white purity" of "blood." But is "one drop rule" ODR black identity not its own, mirror image of racism? What is ODR denial of any racial "blood" admixture but "just black" if it is not denial of "admixture" -- if it is not outright racism basically -- just as white supremism is?

Is not the ODR "just black" racial simplification in fact racial consolidating (if not a "purifying" principle)? Is it not clearly a racist sense of wagon-circling, excluding "others," denouncing racial "mixture," and tell-tale, hateful racism in the mold of white supremacy?
George

mixedmom: Black identified multiracials who wholly embrace a black only socio-political identity are choosing not to include their other ethnic heritages as a part of their social identity even if they may merely mention Native American or white ancestry. There's a difference between merely mentioning white ancestry (to explain why your eyes are green but not daring to get any closer than that to your white heritage) and saying, "I'm multiracial because I'm Irish and African-American".

Ty: true, I must also add that everyones 'black' identity isn't as much 'social-political' as it is a 'cultural' identity. And example is model Tyson Beckford (his grandmother is Chinese, his mother is hapa(Jamaican & Chinese) He says he is Black, yet he seems to have incorporated part of Chinese heritage into his life (from things I have read of him) He even has Chinese artwork tattoed on his arm, which signifies something personal to him. Question: Does someone have to identify as 'multiracial' (call themselves) multiracial or biracial in or to show they embrace all parts of their heritage?



mixedmom: I agree with your point about the whites who merely mention Native American ancestry as a point of interest but don't embrace that ethnicity as part of their socio-political identity. This is a good point. Many whites do this.



Ty: That is interesting. I wonder how much of it is, a few very staunchly political Black identitied people, who are very much vocal in their 'black only' identity who 'speak louder' than everyone else. I'm saying this partly because with a lot of the 'black' identified people I grew up with it didn't seem to be 'political' as it just was what 'we/they' were called, we didn't know why, just that was what it was. I personally feel that people can have dual identities. Many people are on journeys of identity, some start out as one thing and change to another. I know some 'mulattoes/biracial' who don't identify with the black or white, but see themselves as something totally knew, yet other who see themselves as both and incorporate the heritage of both into their lives. Those are really 2 different form of identity.

To this very day, I remember growing up and hearing 'black' people say 'a black and a white, makes a puerto rican' there are many black people who still think along those lines. Of course that isn't true in and of itself, but that tells alot about weither or not someone believes 'a black and a white makes a black'

George wrote: This theme is clear, well known, in white supremacist doctrine demanding "white purity" of "blood." But is "one drop rule" ODR black identity not its own, mirror image of racism? What is ODR denial of any racial "blood" admixture but "just black" if it is not denial of "admixture" -- if it is not outright racism basically -- just as white supremism is?

Is not the ODR "just black" racial simplification in fact racial consolidating (if not a "purifying" principle)? Is it not clearly a racist sense of wagon-circling, excluding "others," denouncing racial "mixture," and tell-tale, hateful racism in the mold of white supremacy?
George

Ty: Yes, it is racism, a mirror of white supremacy or racism, it might be a different degree of it, but it is. I believe as long as there is a 'whiteness' there will be a 'blackness', white racism breed black racism, the Klan birthed the Nation of Islam. That is the country we live in.

Robert wrote: You make a good point but it goes both ways. There are one droppists in every group, weather they are black, white, multiracial etc. If you saw someone like bob marley or lenny cravitz you would not consider them to be multiracial would you? You wouldn't be able to see that they were mixed if they didn't identify themselves as such.


This is very true, there is a look that is stereotypically biracial(mulatto) darker mulattoes, kinky hair mulattoes & mulattoes with stronger w.African features are overlooked, manytimes by 'multiracial or biracial' identified people who are very much 'against the ODR'

I was talking to one such woman, and mentioned actress Rachel True mixture and the woman shrugged her off as being 'more or less 75-85%' black, (she didn't know Rachel is biracial)

This may be off-topic, but people who spout percentages are one of my pet peeves. There is no doubt, of course, that the more West African you look, the rougher time you have of it anywhere in the New World, especially in the United States. Even high blood pressure among men correlates with skin tone due solely to the added lifetime hassles that very dark complexion brings. But looks are not solely dependant upon percentage of ancestry, nor even to admixture ratios.

It is exceedingly difficult for many people to grasp that there are only about a dozen genes that determine "racial" appearance in the American eye. This is out of the hundreds of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) that differ between modern subSaharan Africans and modern Europeans. (Out of the three billion nucleotides that all humans have in common.) External "racial" appearance is as much due to sheer luck as to admixture ratios.

Frank, my neck got stuck looking at that pic from the side

just kidding,

It's interesting that when you look at the pics of the mother and daughter from the side profile you see how much they look alike, (eyes, the nose and mouth)

True, there are many other things that can suggest ethnic admixture: feet, hands/fingers, buttocks, short torso/long legs, same proportioned torse/legs,

Yeah. I scanned it in sideways and then posted it without thinking through that it would show up sideways. As soon as I realized it, I cut it in two and rotated both halves.

You mean the first-generation mix? Yes. In fact, the lack of a closeup photo of the little girl (second generation) makes it hard to see her family resemblance to her mother and grandmother, but I am sure that it is there.

Absolutely. We are simply talking about family resemblances, after all. What irritates me is that Americans tend to fixate on the few traits that are seen as "racially" significant in the United States and ignore everything else. And so they come up with these off-the-cuff percentages based on trivial features.

I printed this one out to read later on. You essays were actually what drew me to the ODR yahoo group to begin with, always a pleasure to read your your essays Paco

WhatÂ’s in a name? You mentioned earlier,

This assumption is also true for lighter skinned folks who claim a black identity even with obvious non-black admixture. If my quadroon son calls himself white instead of multiracial, is he denying his black heritage even if he acknowledges black cousins?

The label(s) that we choose to identify our social/cultural identity reveal our ethnic choices for what we’re embracing. The specific term “multiracial” isn’t necessary to show that one embraces their dual Chinese/Black heritages but since Chinese ancestry is never assumed to be a part of black heritage, a black label only presents black heritage, then the Chinese heritage becomes something that gets tagged on later.

Hapa, Mulatto, Mestizo, multiracial etc are labels that say it all at the same time.

mixed mom: Hapa, Mulatto, Mestizo, multiracial etc are labels that say it all at the same time.


yeah, well it gets the ball rolling at least. Hapa for example doesn't tell what that persons ancestry his full (it does mean this person is part Asian) but then Hawaiians are included in that -and they actually connect more with (Native-American) peoples, then their are Indians (who are lumped in with: Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and other than some Indians who are Buddist, and India being a part of Asia, really don't have connection with the others.

Then there are those who are 'Black/Native' Black Indians is a common term, the historic term is Mustee'

I hope we are not stuck in this recursive, re-active loop until a time when "White" America is so incisively enlightened that it unilaterally leads "Black" America away from its ODR racism. Doubtless it would fit the mold of white supremacist prejudice to assume the Negro is incapable of ever leading anything -- not even his own liberation.

The civil rights movement remembered for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, leadership broke out of this recursive, re-active loop, and it attacked racial segregation. Here were undoubtedly the most obvious talismans of "race difference" then. The MLK civil rights breakout attacked the underlying laws and customs. It was not a "Klan birthed" or NOI style of tit-for-tat reaction -- which would have put up "Black only" signs over some drinking fountains. That sort of thing.

Unfortunately, the civil rights movement effectively ended with the life of Dr. King in 1968. And actually, his effectiveness as a daring leader of anti-racism had slowly fizzled after 1965. MLK drifted into anti-war controversy, and almost aimlessly into liberal redistribution politics.

I think Dr. King's golden opportunity slipped quietly through his fingers in June 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia decision was handed down virtually unnoticed. MLK enjoyed worldwide following. He could persuasively have declared "different races" over then and there. I wonder, too; what if he had investigated the rumors of Strom Turmond's biracial daughter, and explored the possibility of a sort of armistice with the Arch Segregationist? On the Loving Supreme courthouse steps, MLK and Thurmond might publicly have legitimated Thurmond's daughter Essie Mae, while simultaneously burying the hatchet of segregationism. Quid pro quo might have delivered Dixie's "black" voters to Thurmond's Republican (historically abolitionist) Party; thereby executing an end-run around Yankee Democrat "races"-classifying civil rights legislation. These were the states' rights-killing Second Reconstruction constraints that the "white" South hated wearing so. There was potential for the most remarkable horse-trading, I imagine. (Naturally, for his betrayal contracts would have been put out on King from every direction. But just think ...!)

We could live in a different America now. Well, of course the past cannot be changed. But the beginning of that Different America still waits to happen (and it waits and waits ...). It could start any time. It could start now. If "black" people are also part of the human race (i.e., a fundamental equality principal) then "black" people might once again take up their own liberation just as they had once before under the bold leadership of the late MLK.
George

I think from what I've been seeing and hearing that there is a conscious thought of 2 different 'black' communities among African descendant people. A few weeks ago I attended a small convention, and one of the guest wrote a book called Wealthology, and a big key point he brought out was that there will have to be a 'split' from the 'black' culture/community that has such a negative stigma to it, that community automatically overshadows the other

Frank what book is that from? The pictures look old. BTW, aren't Khoisan people unrelated to Bantu Africans?

I scanned them in from pages 400 and 401 of C. Loring Brace and Ashley Montagu, Human Evolution: An Introduction to Biological Anthropology, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1977). My gut-feel (which I cannot prove) is that the photo is about 12 years older than that.

The relatedness of Bantu-speaking peoples and the Khoisan is an interesting question. The short answer is "yes, they are unrelated."

I still like the photo because the Khoisan are the genetic source of at least two features that Americans associate with Blackness: kinky hair and steatopygia. The Khoisan have the kinkiest hair on the planet. And, especially in women, fat reserves are stored in protruding buttocks rather than distributed around the body under the skin, as in Europeans and Asians. Both traits show a decreasing gradient from Khoisan country northwards all they way to, say, Senegal.

But four cautions demand a longer answer to the "relatedness" question. First, "Bantu" is a language family, not a genetic population. The Ituri pygmies, for instance, speak one of the Bantu languages. Second, as implied by the phenotype gradients mentioned above, there is no sharp genetic dividing line beween the Khoisan and West Africans. They were once definititely two populations isolated from each other for many tens of thousands of years. But the migrations that sprang from the invention of agriculture 10 kya pretty well stirred up the African genetic mixing bowl. Finally, as far as anyone can tell the Khoisan are the original H. sapiens. It is from them that the rest of us descended. And so, I guess you could say that they are related to all of us.

Come to think of it, somebody here in OneDropRule actually corresponded with C. Loring Brace recently (impressing me no end). Assuming that the man is still alive, perhaps they could could be persuaded to ask him if he recalls the photo's age.

I meant genetically. In Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steal there is a chapter titled "How Africa Became Black". I believe he stated that the Khoi-San peoples were genetically unrelated to Sub-Saharan groups and were displaced by them (the Zulu and Xhosa).

Yes, that is correct, especially in the context of of DiamondÂ’s narrative.

The Bantu-speaking peoples invented agriculture. They then spread south and east out of West Africa, eventually invading and overrunning Khoisan country, driving the Khoisan into the Kalahari. This was similar to the way that the Indo-Europeans overran Europe. (In Europe, the Basques are analogous to the Khoisan in Africa, being the remnants of the pre-agricultural or Paleolithic peoples.) But, as I said, such conquest is never a genetic one-way street, and detectable Khoisan genes flowed upstream back to West Africa. (The way that Khoisan clicks flowed upstream into the Xhosa and Kenya languages.)

The much earlier connection between the Khoisan and everyone else was unknown to Diamond, who wrote his book before 1997 and based his picture of Neolithic migrations on the best information of the time—linguistics. More detailed information became available after the human genome was decoded. Seven years after Diamond wrote his book, Ornella Semino and her team discovered that the Khoisan were the original ancestors of us all, including the Bantus and everyone else. Of course this descent happened many tens of thousands of years before the Bantu migrations began, probably before the Bantu language families even existed. Nevertheless, the picture that Diamond presents of the past ten thousand years drawn from linguistics has remained remarkably solid, confirmed by genetic data.

it's also funny, how they use the word hybrid, and generally a hybrid cannot reproduce?

In the sense of a mixture of different biological species, that is correct. After all, that is how "species" is defined. But I am certain that Brace and Montague did not mean it like that. I think that they were simply groping for a word that was more biologically precise than "mixture" or "blend" of populations. They could not use the word "race" the way we do around here as in ("interracial mixture") because they both spent their lives fighting to drive a stake through the heart of the "race" notion, long before antiracialism became fashionable among scientists.

One can be mixed all they want and profess their racial and ethnic affiliations accordingly. However light-skin is in a class by itself and no amount of self-identifying is ever going to change it.