An Essay On What They Call Us Read online

slave Isaac Jefferson as a bright mulatto woman, and Sally mighty near white. So if Betty was a mulatto, then Sally’s children would have been only one-eighth Black, or octoroons, and certainly, being “mostly White,” they could not be called Africans. It is obvious all the race-mixing that went on presented our Founding Fathers with a dilemma. What would happen if, because of the mixing, the result was thousands of slaves who were called Negroes, but who looked exactly like white people? If slaves were supposed to be black, what would happen if some of them started looking a little too white?

  There were laws prohibiting interracial marriage dating back to Colonial times, but these laws did little to limit the types of activity that created mixed race offspring. Of course, the children were almost always the result of a union between a white man and a Negro woman, given the time. But when in successive generations there was a progression from African, to mulatto, to quadroon, to octoroon and beyond, the question became: where must we draw the line, a definitive line between black and white?

  The “Problem” with Race Mixing

  When the Africans and their descendants were called slaves, the offspring of those slaves, regardless of complexion, were born into slavery and were defined as such, with rare exceptions. However, when these slaves became free, many of their lighter-skinned descendants escaped the stigma and discrimination by passing themselves off as white and blending, or mixing, into white society. Realizing as much, some Whites, even the most liberal among them, took umbrage at the thought of “inferior African blood” spoiling their supposed “lily-white, untainted” bloodlines.

  In the northern states during the early 1800s, where Africans were relatively free and the abolitionist movement was in full swing, anti-miscegenation laws were already in place, laws that prohibited interracial marriage and interracial sex, though the blood mixing continued in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Naturally, southerners argued that freeing African slaves would result in blood-mixing of preposterous proportions and the ruin of the white race.

  Pro-slavery southerners further argued that freeing four million Africans would lead to former slaves uniting and attacking to exact revenge on their former masters. For both reasons, abolitionist legislators and leaders devised plans to remove freed slaves from the South, to export them to Canada or return them to Africa. But the underlying question that remained as the leaders on both sides realized it was impossible to rid the country of the Africans they brought and bought: if these people could no longer be called Africans and they could no longer be called slaves, what exactly would they be called?

  Immediately prior to the Civil War, in 1857 the United States Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent brought into the United States and held as slaves (or their descendants, whether or not they were slaves), were not protected by the Constitution and could never be called U.S. citizens (Scott v. Sanford). After the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation however, Republicans in Congress enacted several measures to secure the civil rights of former slaves and free Africans by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and culminating that effort with the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment:

  All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

  The Negro

  Yet even before a name could be assigned to naturalized Africans by those in management, or the government, the group would have to be defined and confined to that definition. And so the term Negro came into usage, meant to denote all persons of African ancestry, including those whose blood was mixed with Europeans or Native Americans. This change in effect did away with “the child taking on the race of its mother,” especially since some working class white women in the North were having children by Africans.

  In the wake of the Civil War and emancipation came the realization that the Negroes, many of whom were unwilling to be sent back to Africa or up to Canada, and Whites – indeed American society would be best off if there was a separation between negroes and whites. The “Separate but Equal Doctrine” provided that Negroes were entitled to receive the same public services and accommodations such as schools, bathrooms, and water fountains, but states were allowed to maintain different facilities for the two groups.

  And so segregation was born, along with Jim Crow and the political disenfranchisement of the Negro, which included poll taxes, literacy and comprehension tests, residency and record keeping requirements – obstructions that made it difficult if not impossible for the majority of Negroes to vote on who would represent them and on issues involving their own interests. It was a de facto form of social colonization, purposed to isolate the group and to take away its voice.

  The Negroes were in their place within the definition, but there was still the issue of race mixing, which threatened that definition. The more diluted that African blood became through mixing, the harder it was to control and define the degree of mixing that was actually taking place, and with it the definition of what Negroes were. But how was one to know who the Negroes were, with all the mixing going on? How could parents protect their children from marrying a Negro who was “passing,” a Negro who may have looked and behaved like a white person, and yet was the descendant of an African?

  The U.S. Census Bureau and Racial Definition

  The answer involved the creation and function of the birth certificate, which in the United States did not come into existence until 1900, in part for that very purpose. In 1900, the U.S. Census Bureau designed standard birth cards and certificates, ostensibly to improve the accuracy of vital statistics. Not surprising, birth cards, first issued in1900, included the “race” of the child right after its name and gender. Finally, the government had a means to better define the Negro and to limit the degradation of that definition and its depiction. And so it was circa the early 1900s that the Negroes in America became “Colored.” “Colored,” which implied a racial mixture, was to some one step above “Negro,” and “less offensive,” since negro meant “black” in Spanish. The NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was established in 1909.

  A government issued document that defined details of every live birth made it possible to enforce laws in a growing number of states that prohibited interracial marriage and interracial sex. Birth certificates allowed federal, state and local governments to accurately determine just who the Negroes, or Coloreds were, and to keep them in their place.

  And then there was the “One-Drop-Rule,” which asserted that any person born with one single drop of black blood was to be considered Black. I have often mused that if the One-Drop-Rule was applied today, just what percentage of Americans would be considered “Black?” I invested hours of research into the notion, but I could not find a single study or analysis that examined what percentage of Americans had the least trace of African ancestry. As of July, 2009, the U.S. Census estimated there were 41.8 million “African Americans” in the United States, making up 13.6% of the population, but the government obviously was not applying the “One-Drop-Rule,” and the American government has, over the years, played with racial definitions to advance their own narrative, which serves to suit their own objectives. More about that later.

  The Racial Integrity Act, passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1924, required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth and divided society into only two classifications: white and colored. In supposition, South Africa and its apartheid policies may have been the model for such a law, which redefined and separated humans on the basis of race. The Boer South African government actually distinguished its Africans from its mixed-blooded Negros by defining as “colored�
�� persons of mixed racial descent or of certain other nonwhite descent, distinguished from Blacks, Asians, or whites.

  With such laws in place, racial mixing in America could finally be curtailed, or punished. And it was the ensuing anti-miscegenation laws that made celebrated American boxer, Jack Johnson, who was colored, a federal criminal, resulting from his relationships with white women, including marriage. More than all else, the federal persecution and prosecution of Jack Johnson and the media-driven humiliation of the white women involved were purposed to send a signal to America: interracial mixing would not be tolerated, regardless of wealth, education or celebrity. The racial definition of “Colored” was meant to hold.

  The “Colored” and Segregation

  “Colored” held through the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s. The “Colored” endured the Great Depression, which was worse for them, as they were the first to be laid off their jobs, had unemployment rates two to three times higher than whites, and received substantially less aid from government programs than other Americans. During those years, segregation became