F. James Davis

NEWSFLASH: Americans have some very strange ideas about race! (If you're not American, this may not be news to you). We define black and white in ways unlike any other country or culture on earth, often happily oblivious to our singularity, and we often react with puzzlement or even anger when our definitions are challenged, or we are confronted with other ways of looking at the matter. That this is true of both the white and black communities in the United States is no doubt puzzling for people from abroad, but acceptance of the "one drop rule" - known also as hypo-descent, the one-drop rule is the idea that anyone with any amount of African heritage is black, regardless of the amount of said heritage, or of other factors such as culture or appearance - is widespread, making it one of the unchallenged orthodoxies of modern American life. Professor F. James Dixon, who taught sociology for many years at Illinois State University, sets out to document the history of the rule - how it first came to be, and how it came to dominate our culture - and its application in contemporary American culture and politics in this excellent study of the subject.

Examining the history of miscegenation in the early English colonies in North America, Dixon documents the varied approaches to racially mixed people utilized by authorities in different locales, from Virginia, which passed the first anti-miscegenation law in 1662 – initially, racially mixed children of black mothers became slaves, while racially mixed children of white mothers were born free, until the law was revised in 1681, penalizing white mothers of racially mixed children with six years of indentured servitude, and their offspring with thirty (the status of black mothers and their racially mixed children remained unchanged) – and which came eventually to embrace the one-drop rule; to South Carolina, which was founded in 1670 by immigrants from the Barbados, who brought with them Caribbean (and also Latin American) ideas about mulattoes – a racially mixed group that traditionally acted as a buffer between black and white, with a higher status than the black community, and a lower one than the white. South Carolina did not pass its first anti-miscegenation law until 1717, and mulattoes were allowed to vote in colonial affairs until 1721. Unlike so many of the other states in the south, South Carolina and Louisiana resisted the one-drop rule until the time of the Civil War, something which can be seen both in the legal cases of the time – records show a number of trials to determine racial identity, in which persons of known African descent were declared white, because they were recognized as such by the white community – as well as statutes such as the Louisiana Civil Code of 1808, which established a tripartite definition of race (ie: black-colored-white), and prohibited colored people from marrying either blacks or whites.

According to Dixon, these different approaches to defining racial identity were eventually erased by the coming of the Civil War, as slave states sought to shore up the legitimacy of the peculiar institution. The one drop rule began to receive increasing support in the white community because it was perceived to defend the idea of slavery, with the notion of “black blood” being some kind of taint (and all those possessing any such blood being by definition black) dovetailing perfectly with the view that all blacks were naturally slaves. It also served as a convenient way of sweeping the double-standards that pertained in the south, vis-à-vis miscegenation – ie, the fact that it was considered acceptable for white men to have sexual relations with black women (something that often involved exploitation and coercion), but was utterly anathema for white women to have sexual relations with black men – under the carpet, as the racially mixed children of white fathers could be relegated to the black community, serving as no threat to the dominant white community. In the face of this shift, and the resulting loss of in-between status, those mulatto groups that had existed as separate communities, with their own separate identities prior to the Civil War began to self-identify more and more as black, something that only accelerated after the war ended, and the white and black communities became true economic competitors for the first time.

With the end of the military occupation of the south in 1875, and the subsequent rise of the Jim Crow system, in which separation of the races was strictly enforced, both legally, through segregation statutes upheld by the Supreme Court - the doctrine of “separate but equal” being established in 1896 through the Plessy vs. Ferguson case – and extra-legally, through the activities of such racial terror groups as the KKK, whose lynching campaigns remain a blot upon our national history to this day, acceptance of the one drop rule continued to grow in America. As the white community became obsessed with issues of racial purity in the early years of the twentieth century, living in fear of “invisible blackness” – the presence of blacks passing as whites, and the secret black heritage of some members of the white community – the black community began to embrace the diversity of their own group – as Dixon points out, the “black” community in the United States embraces individuals whose appearance ranges from very dark to very light - building, through movements such as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, a distinct African-American ethnic identity, one that was neither African nor Euro-American, but a distinct mixture of the two, and one built implicitly upon acceptance of the one-drop rule. This orientation toward the rule in the black community was further buttressed by the pride-building of the 1960s, with any orientation away from African heritage, by those of mixed ancestry being seen as betrayal.

Who’s Black?: One Nation’s Definition is a fascinating book, one which answered questions I didn’t even know that I had. I originally sought it out in order to better understand the history of the one drop rule, as I am working on a paper about a trilogy of young adult novels, published from 1909-1912, that references issues of racial passing, and the notion of black blood as a “taint” in otherwise “pure” white people. But Dixon’s work provides more than just a history of how the rule came to be – it also offers a detailed comparison to other racial identity schemas throughout the world, from those that pertain in South Africa (the book was written in 1991, when Apartheid was still in effect) to those seen in Latin America. The book demonstrates that the definition of black used in the United States, which denies the existence of mixed race people and creates a black-white dichotomy, is the product of a particular set of historical circumstances, rather than a self-evidently correct way of looking at the matter. It also very clearly demonstrates how race is often more of a social construct, rather than a biological one. Finally, it shows how this idea is still very much with us, how it is often still vigorously enforced, particularly within the black community, how it often causes problems for people of mixed ancestry, and how it has come into conflict with other definitions, as the population of the United States has become ever more diverse.

This last is particularly interesting, I think, as it highlights some of the underlying causes of incidents I myself have witnessed in the past, and which have puzzled me. I vividly recall an argument between an African-American and a Latino co-worker of mine, in which the former claimed that a dark-skinned Panamanian woman (who clearly had some African ancestry) was black, while the latter vigorously objected, saying that she was mulatto, and a Latina. There was anger on both sides of that argument, as I recall, and looking back on it now, with the benefit of Professor Dixon’s analysis, I see that my African-American co-worker was operating from the assumption that anyone with black ancestry who didn’t self-identify as black was denying who they “really” were, probably for racist reasons; while my Latino co-worker was operating from the assumption that a mixed person was neither black nor white, and that their ethnic identity as a Latino was more important, in any case. My Latino co-worker was probably also irritated at the feeling that racial definitions that were not part of his culture were being forced upon him, something I have also seen expressed by Native American peoples. That’s certainly the impression I got, when watching Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS documemtary Black in Latin America, which examines communities with African heritage in a number of Latin American countries, from Cuba to Peru. I recall being vaguely uncomfortable with the way Gates framed his entire investigation, and how he set up his interviews, and came away with the impression that he was being a little blind to his own very American assumptions about race. It’s only now that I can put my finger on the specifics: like so many other Americans, Gates assumed his own cultural definitions – in this case, the “one drop” definition of blackness – were self-evidently correct, and proceeded to investigate why other cultures didn’t conform to those definitions. Rather than starting with open-ended questions – what does having some African ancestry mean here? why do some mixed-race communities in Latin America identify with certain aspects of their heritage, such as their native identity, rather than others? Why do some mixed race communities identify as something separate from either “parent” community? – his questions came from a place of judgment – ie: why don’t people here define themselves as black, if they have African heritage? Why do they deny their identity?

Informative and thought-provoking, this book gave me far more than I was expecting, clarifying some of my own confusion on how race is defined here in the United States, and giving me the opportunity to ponder my own opinions on the subject. The author has no strong editorial stance on the issue, although I think he probably hopes the nation will go in the direction of Hawaii, with its acceptance of people of mixed racial heritage. For my part, I’m moving toward the idea that our definition of race in this country is akin to our definition of gender or of sexual orientation: we’re far more comfortable with dichotomies involving discrete oppositional categories (so much easier to think about, and to organize) than with the chaos of multiple groups and identities. I think the reality, however, is that race (like gender and sexual orientation) is probably more of a spectrum, with few people on one pole or the other. Recommended to readers interested in the definitions of race that pertain in the United States, and for a history on the "one-drop" rule.… (meer)