David A. Hollinger | Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

1 Ê Peggy Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of 'Race' in Twentieth-Century America," Journal of AmericanHistory 83 (June 1996): 64–65; Robert A. Pratt, "Crossing the Color Line: A Historical Assessment and Personal Narrative of Lovingv. Virginia," Howard Law Journal 41 (1998), as rpt. in Kevin R. Johnson, ed., Mixed Race America and the Law (New York, 2003),56–59.2 Ê Hannah Arendt, "Reflections on Little Rock," Dissent (Winter 1959): 79. This incident is analyzed by Werner Sollors, "Of Mulesand Mares in a Land of Difference; or, Quadrupeds All?" American Quarterly 42 (June 1990), esp. 173–77.3 Ê Sidney Hook, New Leader, April 13, 1959.4 Ê An important example of open opposition to miscegenation laws during the 1960s was William D. Zabel, "Interracial Marriageand the Law," Atlantic (October 1965): 75–79.5 ÊLoving v. Commonwealth of Virginia, 388 U.S. 1; 87 S.Ct. 1817; 1967 U.S. Maryland repealed its miscegenation statute just priorto the court's action. Fourteen states in the Far West and upper Middle West repealed their statutes between 1952 and 1966.6 Ê Polling data are reviewed in one of the most carefully detailed monographs yet addressed to the history of ethnoracial mixture inthe United States, Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison, Wis.,1989), esp. 192–93.7 Ê Martin Kilmjin, "Trends in Black/White Intermarriage," Social Forces 72 (1993): 119–46.8 Ê A. Leon Higgenbotham and Barbara K. Kopytoff, "Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and AntebellumVirginia," in Werner Sollors, ed., Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (New York,2000), 138–39. Higgenbotham and Kopytoff quote the South African minister of the interior's presentation to the assembly of thatcountry in 1949, in which the minister urges opponents of the proposed legislation to consider the fact that "thirty out of the fortyeightstates of the United States" have "found it necessary to take legislative steps" of exactly the sort he proposed for South Africa.9 Ê Sollors, "Introduction," Interracialism, 6. Sollors cites Heinrich Krieger, Das Rassenrecht in den Vereiningten Staaten (Berlin,1936).10 Ê Phillips's most famous utterance on this theme was his address on the Fourth of July, 1863, in Framingham, Massachusetts, inwhich he endorsed, and called by the name of "amalgamation," that "sublime mingling of the races, which is God's own method ofcivilizing and elevating the world." The history of the pre–Civil War discourse about amalgamation has recently been clarified byLeslie M. Harris, "From Abolitionist Amalgamators to 'Rulers of the Five Points': The Discourse of Interracial Sex and Reform inAntebellum New York City," in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York,1999), 191–212.11 Ê Sidney Kaplan, "The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864," in Kaplan, American Studies in Black and White: SelectedEssays, 1949–1989 (Amherst, Mass., 1991), 47–100. Kaplan's classic analysis of the "miscegenation hoax" was first published in1949. For a recent, authoritative study of the hoax and of the entire discourse about "amalgamation" and "miscegenation" during theantebellum and Civil War eras, see Elise Lemire, "Miscegenation": Making Race in America (Philadelphia, 2002), esp. 115–44.Lemire argues that the literary depiction of black-white intimacy helped create the very categories of black and white as thesecategories had come to be popularly understood in the United States by the time of the Civil War.12 Ê Even W. E. B. Du Bois used "miscegenation" interchangeably with "amalgamation" and "racial mixing." His learned essay of1935, "Miscegenation," intended for an encyclopedia but not published during his lifetime, is available in Sollors, Interracialism,461–73.13 Ê Philip Gleason, "The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion?" American Quarterly 16 (Spring 1964): 20–46. Invocationsof the figure of the melting pot in our own time have largely forgotten the element of anti-Anglo aggression entailed in some of itsearly formulations. In the climactic scene of Israel Zangwill's play of 1909, The Melting-Pot, a major agent in the popularization ofthe concept, the Jewish immigrant hero envisages a future in which Mayflower descendants will be transformed in the fiery crucibleand made equal to more recent immigrants from many lands.14 Ê Among the few who did this was Zangwill himself, in a fleeting reference at the very end of his play in one of his lists of the
peoples that "the great Alchemist" would eventually make into one: "Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian—black andyellow"; Israel Zangwill, The Melting-Pot (New York, 1909), 199.15 Ê Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (Cambridge, Mass., 1960–82), 11: 299–300.16 Ê Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.,1998).17 Ê Slavery continued in Cuba until 1884 and in Brazil until 1888.18 Ê For an accessible, pointed discussion of the ambiguities of "Indianness," including an account of the popular practice of claiminga fractional Indian ancestry, almost always through one's grandmother, see P. S. Deloria and Robert Laurence, "What's an Indian?"Arkansas Law Review 44 (1991), rpt. in Johnson, Mixed Race, 312–18.19 Ê See the tables of the federal census as conveniently available in Norman R. Yetman, Majority and Minority: The Dynamics ofRace and Ethnicity in American Life, 6th edn. (Boston, 1999), 88.20 Ê Such cases of attempted white-to-black reclassification, while rare, are not unknown. They are often discussed in relation tominority-eligible entitlement programs. This phenomenon is addressed in Luther Wright, Jr., "Who's Black, Who's White, and WhoCares," Vanderbilt Law Review 48 (1995), rpt. in Johnson, Mixed Race, 181–83.21 Ê The standard history of the principle of hypodescent in the United States is F. James Davis, Who Is Black? (University Park, Pa.,1991). A readable popular account that increased public awareness is Lawrence Wright, "One Drop of Blood," New Yorker (July 25,1994): 46–55.22 Ê Barbara Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in Morgan Kousser, et al., Region, Race, and Reconstruction (NewYork, 1982), 149.23 Ê For the case of the Seminoles, see "Who Is a Seminole, and Who Gets to Decide?" New York Times (January 29, 2001): 1.24 Ê A recent example is the summary discussion by David Parker and Miri Song in the introduction to their edited collection,Rethinking "Mixed Race" (London, 2001), 13–14. A cogent account of the different histories of ethnoracial categorization andrelated public policies in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States is G. Reginald Daniel, "Multiracial Identity in GlobalPerspective: The United States, Brazil, and South Africa," in Loretta I. Winters and Herman L. DeBose, eds., New Faces in aChanging America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2003), 247–86.25 Ê See the comments on this issue by Christine B. Hickman, "The Devil and the 'One Drop' Rule," Michigan Law Review 95 (1997),rpt. in Johnson, Mixed Race, 104–10.26 Ê Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, trans. and ed. (Chicago, 2000), 590.27 Ê For a detailed account of the legal history of hypodescent prior to its sharpening in the early twentieth century, see Michael A.Elliott, "Telling the Difference: Nineteenth-Century Legal Narratives of Racial Taxonomy," Law and Social Inquiry 24 (1999): 611–36. For a similarly detailed account of the history of the U.S. Census's engagement with mixture from 1790 to the present, see AnnMorning, "New Faces, Old Faces: Counting the Multiracial Population Past and Present," in Winters and DeBose, New Faces, 41–67.28 Ê Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson (Hartford, Conn., 1894).29 Ê The text of the Virginia "Act to Preserve Racial Integrity" is available in Sollors, Interracialism, 23–24. Hypodescent, it shouldbe acknowledged, was not universally applied in all states even after 1924. Louisiana law, for example, was always more responsiveto degrees of African descent than the laws of most other states. The inconsistencies of efforts to impose fractional definitions in thelaws of various states is a major theme of Teresa Zackondik, "Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts, and RacialIdentity," American Quarterly 53 (September 2001): 420–51.30 Ê The definitive work on the literary history of black-white mixing is Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic
Page 2 and 3: efugee, said by friends to be hopel
Page 4 and 5: direct descendants of people who ha
Page 6 and 7: often received as a scurrilous atta
Page 8 and 9: ethnoracial mixture behaviorally by
Page 10 and 11: designed specifically for it but by
Page 12 and 13: themselves vigorously as a group, s
Page 14 and 15: this irony is another feature of th
Page 16 and 17: the census. This led Turner to refl
Page 20 and 21: Explorations of Interracial Literat
Page 22 and 23: history of denoting a permanent, ph
Page 24: ©2003 American Historical Associat

David A. Hollinger | Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question ...

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?