It's a Complicated Story (Part 2)

. . . by which I mean race in America.* I know, this is hardly a penetrating insight, but it’s on the mind regardless, what with Barack Obama reminding us that he has “brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents,” and some guy in Georgia responding by creating T-shirts that liken the candidate to Curious George. “This is not 1941 in Alabama,” the dude told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when confronted with the suggestion that comparing a black man to a monkey might be racist, “so get over it.”

True enough. It’s not 1941 in Alabama. The same guy, though, once created a sign that read, “I wish Hillary had married O.J.,” which suggests that fears of miscegenation have never really gone away. After all, what is O.J. Simpson if not, for some people at least, a kind of Nat Turner, a symbol of the black man rising up not just to murder whites, but white women? Virginian William Styron won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel in which the legendary slave-cum-preacher-cum-rebel is sexually attracted to a white woman whom he then murders. African Americans loudly protested.

Sure, he could have loved Margaret Whitehead, the actor Ossie Davis said at the time, but that’s not the point.

What I am disturbed about is that this is one of the areas about which I fear my country can be immediately psychotic and destructive. I have only to think back in the last hundred years to the more than 3,500 black men lynched in the South, the rationale of such activities being that these men constituted a threat to white womanhood . . . Are we that clear of our horror at the thought of a black male lusting after white flesh?

Not according to Cinque Henderson, an African American who wrote in The New Republic this week that “had Barack married a white woman, his candidacy would’ve never gotten off the ground with black people.” Regardless of whether he’s right, what’s interesting is the idea that the fear and skepticism of race-mixing is not limited to whites. Notice how Davis talks about “our horror.” Does his pronoun refer to Americans or just African Americans? He’s not clear, and perhaps that’s the point.

In his 2003 book Mulatto America, Stephan Talty argues that Native Americans were willing, at least at first, to mingle culturally with newly arrived whites. For obvious reasons, however, “the merging of black and white was more contentious.” As early as 1691, Virginia expressed its own skepticism of the idea by banning interracial marriage.

Still, Talty notes that “the ferocious responses to unions of black men and white women that have become a cliché of southern ‘honor’—the lynchings, the castrations, the pathological obsession with black rapists—date mostly from the Civil War period and onward; the institutionalized terror that ruled the South after the war was not the rule.” In fact, he claims that whites often looked out for their black neighbors who might have been unfairly accused, and that, in the end, it was white women and not black men “who bore the brunt of the society’s disapproval when they strayed from their assigned beds.”

Of course, interracial marriages weren’t always the union of black men and white women. Richard Loving was white, his wife Mildred black. When Mildred died this month, she left behind the legacy of Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court decision (handed down in 1967, the same year Styron’s novel was published) that banned discrimination in marriage based on race. She was also part of another legacy in Virginia, the “secret” mixing of the races. That provocative adjective “secret” comes courtesy of the New York Times, which wrote on Wednesday about the history of miscegenation in Mildred Loving’s hometown, tiny Central Point, Virginia.

Mixed-race folks have a history of settling there, apparently, making it difficult sometimes to tell the difference between black and white. But then that’s what nosy neighbors and Jim Crow laws were for. “Inside Caroline County, Virginia’s strict laws on segregation applied,” according to the Times. “But when [locals] ventured beyond Caroline County—where no one knew them—many of Central Point’s residents found it a simple matter to ‘pass’ as white.” They could use any movie theater or bathroom or lunch counter they pleased. They could even serve alongside whites in the Army.

“The community developed a system for protecting racial identities of Central Pointers who moved away and married into white families,” the Times continues. “When they took their white relatives back with them to visit, their younger brothers and sisters, who attended the colored school, just stayed home. This was well known to the teachers at the school, who apparently accepted the absences without question.”

Then there were people like Mildred Loving, whose heart forgot to play by the rules, making it impossible for her neighbors to look the other way. Somebody called the sheriff and he rousted her and her new white husband out of bed at two in the morning.

It’s a complicated story, and rarely do these things have happy endings. When my adopted sister—biological mother black, biological father white—married her husband—white mother, black father, then deceased—she remarked that they were the only two black people in a church full of whites. Her voice hinted at both a kind of sadness and something else. Was it victory? I don’t think so. That’s too simple an emotion for Miscegenation Nation.

* This is the second time I’ve posted this image, but only the first time I’ve elaborated.

ELSEWHERE: Cross posted here.

IMAGE: Me and my sis

Comments

[Steven Augustine]

Brendan:

As a guy from a family that's been "race"-mixed for a couple of centuries (with blood relatives of "Negroid", "Caucasoid" and "Mongoloid" stock, as it was once popular to put it), I stick by my long-time assertion that the concept of "race", itself, is racist. It exists for no other purpose than to codify a hierarchy; it's not scientific (if it were, there'd be *thousands* of "races"), and, if it's truly about acknowledging the very real physical bodily (and, perhaps, personality) variations between subgroups of people, there are just as many differences between various "asians", say, as there are between all the so-called races.

But who would claim that humans are rational?

[Steven Augustine]

Oh, and:

Considering the fact that so-called blacks, demographically, are outnumbered by so-called whites by about ten to one, in North America, I should think it'd be statistically more likely to see a black/white couple than a black/black one, eh? Unless, of course, some sort of Apartheid were in effect...

[Steven Augustine]

"physical bodily"

Ooops... forgot to remove the one after replacing it with the other! laugh

[Brendan Wolfe]

Steven,

Thanks for the comments. I agree with you that race is an artificial construction, although I'm not sure what implication you mean for that observation to have on what I wrote. I will say this: I don't agree with your "long-time assertion that the concept of 'race', itself, is racist."

That race is artificially constructed makes it no less real, no less worthy a topic of social and historical scrutiny. For instance, it certainly isn't racist to observe that one person's skin is white, another's brown, and that this difference -- accidental and fundamentally insignificant though it may be -- has been at the center of one of the central dilemmas of our nation's history.

The freed slave David Walker, in 1829, issued his "Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World," in which he countered Thomas Jefferson's claim that black people, by virtue of being black, were "a distinct race" and an inferior one at that. Walker wrote:

"Are we MEN!! -- I ask you, O my brethren! are we MEN? Did our Creator make us to be slaves to dust and ashes like ourselves? Are they not dying worms as well as we?"

So he got it. But he also recognized that his "brethren" were the "Coloured" people. Was that racist? Or was that just a recognition of the facts on the ground, as they say?

I'm not convinced we totally disagree on this. Either way, the idea that it would make statistical sense for there to be more black/white couples than there are strikes me as an observation without a real point. So what? We don't live in that world.

[Brendan Wolfe]

I'm continuing to think about this, so let me add a couple things: You're right, Steven, that the physical differences between people can be such that skin color seems like a wildly arbitrary way of establishing a hierarchy. That arbitrariness was probably part of the point, of course.

But I wanted to get back to this idea of "race" as an unscientific "concept"; in other words, a social construct.

Something need not exist scientifically to exist. "All men are created equal" is a construct with no basis in science, either. As you noted, people are very, very different from one another in all sorts of ways, biologically and socially. Skin color is the least of it. Yet these particular words -- all men are created equal -- have meaning, and to the extent to which we all subscribe to them, they have real power and consequence.

The same is true with race, I think, although obviously that power and consequence has been near universally negative.

[Steven Augustine]

Brendan:

"The same is true with race, I think, although obviously that power and consequence has been near universally negative."

Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Any concept for which the consequences are "near universally negative" is about due for a re-think, I'd say.

What is the "one drop rule" but proto-Nazi nonsense? And yet, to this day, most American concepts of racial identity are framed by such obvious pseudo-scientific filters for keeping the "white" race "pure"; how is it that a child with one "white" parent and one "black" one... is "black" and not "white"? Or even a child with three "white" grandparents and one "black": black.

It's Eugenics, pure and simple.