“Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be `white’ – they would be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh and others engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity.” — Cornell West, “Race Matters”
In the beginning, in this country, there were no white people.
Of course, the land was originally the sole province of 64 major Indian tribes stretching from coast to coast.
But even after Columbus, even after scores of Europeans came rushing to our shores, after the first slave ships docked in Jamestown Harbor in 1619 and after the Mayflower, there was no such thing as white people.
Instead, there were Brits and Scots. French and Spaniards. Dutch and Germans.
“The Europeans were considered to be different races,” says Jeff Passel, a demo-grapher with the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “Differences between the Italian race and the German race were considered to be as different as those in the African race. Italians, Jews and Poles were seen as races that were difficult to amalgamate into the American population.”
So if you were a member of one of the 15 African nations whose citizens were kidnapped and shipped to the New World, your dark skin did not automatically stamp you with slave status for life. You could work yourself free, eventually enjoying the fruits of your labor.
At first.
When America was in its infancy, Europeans conquering the New World believed fiercely that they had a manifest destiny to enslave anyone who wasn’t a Christian. Which worked in theory, except that slaves were able to convert to Christianity and become free. For economic reasons, Colonists needed a more dependable and long-term way to designate whom it was acceptable to enslave.
What better method than skin color? After all, it was an imprimatur that marked you for life. So by the mid-17th Century, laws began to be passed in Virginia and elsewhere defining blacks as slaves. Slavery, meanwhile, became a legally permanent status that could be passed on to one’s children and one’s children’s children.
Soon, black became synonymous with slavery and subjugation. And with that, the concept of white people was born.
It was then that as a nation, we started seeing things in black and white.
But last month’s spate of revelations about our founding fathers — DNA evidence proving that Thomas Jefferson sired at least one slave child and rumor alleging that George Washington did the same — demonstrates that our racial picture could use some fine-tuning.
Indeed, their personal lives, rumored and real, illustrate just how tangled are the roots of our national family tree, and how the darker branches remain obscured in shade. Those branches remain obscured because we’re in denial.
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The great divider
Race is the great measuring stick in this country. It is used to define–and divide–virtually every aspect of American lives.
However, what is black, or white, really? Biology doesn’t recognize race as a reality; science demonstrates that we’re all descended from a single female ancestor. A single, African female ancestor.
The thing is, race is a social construct, an exceedingly fluid fabrication that changes from nation to nation. Latin American countries, for example, celebrate the mestizo, the interracial mingling that created a new breed of folks, neither white nor black nor Indian.
But Americans deny such mingling. We don’t like to acknowledge that we’ve been, to borrow Jefferson’s phrase, “amalgamating” from the very start. Or that the biracial products of those interracial unions often blended into white society. In many minds, blackness still bears the taint of all things negative. And to be white is to be pure.
Still, while we paint ourselves in stark shades of black and white, underneath the simple, two-toned veneer, is a complex, multicolored palette.
With the upcoming 2000 census, where, for the first time, Americans will be able to check more than one racial category, creating up to 63 possible ancestral combinations, perhaps we will begin as a nation to acknowledge our tangled roots.
It is imperative that we do so. With the number of interracial marriages growing at a rapid rate–from 150,000 in 1960 to 1.4 million in 1995–those roots will become even more intertwined, the branches even darker.
Will any of this change the national discourse on race? Perhaps not.
But it should.
Because despite the fact that we draw a strict racial line in the sand, it hasn’t always been so simple.
A new breed of American
In the beginning, African slaves and European indentured servants worked side by side in the fields, knowing that they were working toward eventual freedom. Says Noel Ignatiev, a fellow at the W.E.B. Dubois Institute at Harvard University and visiting professor at Bowdoin College: “They played together, worshiped together and ran away together.”
And they mated together, Indians, Africans and Europeans, creating a “new” breed of mixed race people. There were harsh repercussions for miscegenation, but that didn’t stop people from getting together.
But a united contingent of enslaved folks of all colors threatened to undermine the authority the master class had over the Colonies. Eventually, there were new laws passed in the land: If you had any traces of African ancestry, you were considered black, which meant that you and your kin were slaves for all eternity.
For many African slave women, part of that subjugation included sexual abuse at the hands of their white masters. In time, there were almost no slaves who could boast a “pure” African bloodline. It was not uncommon, and often, expected, for some white men who owned slaves to have two families, one white, the other black. Often, biracial offspring were treated better than other slaves; sometimes they were freed, educated and given property. Sometimes they owned slaves themselves.
The result was an intraracial color caste system that left a legacy that continues to wound many African-Americans, light and dark, for whom a lighter skin represents a bitter heritage of rape, slavery, illegitimacy and privilege.
“You don’t want to claim people who think that your presence in their family dishonored them,” says Annette Gordon-Reed, associate professor of law at New York Law School and the author of “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.”
“But on the other hand, by not saying anything, you make whites comfortable. The silence hides the history of slavery. It’s not, `Gee, great, I’m related to someone white.’ It’s silence for the convenience of other people who want you to be ashamed.”
And why should a dark skin be equated with shame?
Jefferson’s mathematics
Thomas Jefferson certainly saw it that way. In fact, he was a study in contrasts: On the one hand, he discouraged black/white amalgamation, and on the other, he conceived of a genetic chart that detailed at which point along the miscegenation time line a black would become a mulatto, then quadroon, then octoroon, then white. “A third cross clears the blood,” he wrote.
Which means that Jefferson’s children with Sally Hemings, a quadroon (a quarter African) slave, became officially white, according to his calculations. After his death, all four of Hemings’ surviving children were either freed or allowed to escape, most passing into the ranks of “white” America. (Recent DNA evidence proved that Jefferson fathered at least one of her four surviving children, Eston Hemings.)
As Jefferson’s ambivalence indicates, in this country race has always been an exceedingly fickle concept. Ian F. Haney Lopez writes in his essay, “The Social Construction of Race,” tht “race may be America’s single most confounding problem, but the confounding problem of race is that few people seem to know what race is.”
Indeed, since the first census conducted in 1790, in which the races were broken down into the categories, “Free White persons, all other free persons, except Indians, slaves,” race has been measured on a capricious basis.
In 1890, for example, there were eight categories on the census: White, Black, Mulatto, Quadroon, Octoroon, Chinese, Japanese, Indian. But by the beginning of this century, the black, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon categories were melded into one–Negro.
Back then, you didn’t get to pick which category you thought best applied to you and your heritage: The census taker, employing the “eyeball test,” got to decide.
For other racial groups, things were no less arbitrary. In 1978, the federal government redefined what it meant to be Asian. How? It simply drew a line on the globe. Beforehand, if one lived east of the line drawn between Bangladesh and Burma, one was Asian; if you lived to the west of that line, you were white, that is to say, Caucasian.
Which meant that if you were from India (and an original Aryan), even if your skin was black, you were white. And if you were, say, Northern Chinese, even if your skin was white, well, you weren’t.
Under the 1978 directive, the line is now drawn between Iran and Pakistan. So if you’re Indian or Pakistani, well, now you’re officially Asian.
Choosing multiple categories
Time will tell if things become more or less confusing during the 2000 census, which will finally acknowledge the growing numbers of “biracial” Americans who do not want to be forced to choose sides by checking only one box.
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Census experts estimate that by 2050, the country will be divided roughly in half: 52 percent will be “white,”; 48 percent non-white. But within those groups, the slim “white” majority will include 10 percent “mixed race” whites. The non-white half will include 10 percent “mixed race” non-whites.
Of course, then, as now, race will be more a matter of identity than a biological reality.
Still, most Americans aren’t able to embrace such complexities. During the 1990 census, for example, 92 percent of Americans described themselves as either “black” or “white,” despite the fact that interracial unions — and their biracial byproducts — are rapidly re-constituting the country’s complexion.
On the same census, 52 percent of Latinos described themselves as “white”; 43 percent described themselves as “other race.” Only 3 percent described themselves as black, despite a clearly mixed-race legacy that includes African ancestry.
In her non-fiction book, “Paula,” Chilean novelist Isabel Allende describes her shock at discovering upon her arrival in the U.S. that in American eyes she was not, as she’d always thought, white.
A flawed perception
Racial categorizations may come and go, but one thing remains constant: In the New World, the perception remains that to have black blood is to be somehow polluted, to possess some fatal flaw.
Which is interesting, when you consider that to be black American is to be mixed race–experts estimate that anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of African-Americans can trace their heritage back to at least one European ancestor; 25 percent can claim an Indian ancestor. Many West Indians can claim Chinese and Asian Indian ancestry too.
To be a white American is also to be of mixed race. Experts estimate that millions of European-Americans have traces of African ancestry, just as some of Hemings’ “white” descendants recently discovered. Factor in the fact that many of the Europeans who emigrated to this country weren’t exactly “pure” to begin with, thanks to the Moorish influence on Europe, and you’ve got American goulash.
Harvard’s Ignatiev, who edits a journal called “Race Traitor,” and resists describing himself as white, declares, “There are tremendous social privileges attached to being white. Maintaining the fiction of pure European ancestry is about protecting their status of whiteness and all that it entails. Which means that you deny the reality that human beings when brought together will mate. That’s stronger than social codes or laws or anything else.”
And then there’s Julia Jefferson Westerinen, a descendant of the Sally Hemings/Jefferson union, a visibly “white” woman from Staten Island, N.Y., who proudly declares in People Magazine, “Since I got the letter (detailing the DNA evidence confirming my heritage), I am Scottish, Irish, English, French, Welsh–and African.”
It is a shame that for a “white” person to make such a declaration in this country remains a revolutionary statement.