I am white. You are white. We are white. I am black. You are black. We are black. Today. One of these days, we'll be purer black or purer white, but today we are a mix. That's because we are not talking blood, we are talking talk. The talk hasn't settled out yet.
We, none or very few of us are pure blooded African. We can talk about race being a social construct, but the fiercest demarcation of white supremacy has always been blood. Thus the one drop rule. What I see happening in American racial discourse, since it is obvious that intermarriage is relatively easy, is an attempted ossification of race into something other than blood. So instead of a one-drop rule, there will be a one-issue rule. There will be some litmus test of black political purity and we'll call it racial politics but it won't really be. For example we could envision sentiment for Polly Kloss being 'white' and sentiment for OJ being 'black'. Then the revisionists will go and reify history according to their political correctness. But the message of blood will be subverted.
From the angle of black political partisans, those folks including me, who have inherited from our parents a hodge podge mixture of black nationalism, assimilation and multicultural ethics, we direct our concerns to issues like slavery as a mixed bag of evil. On the one hand, the example of slavery when contrasted with the current position of African Americans gives us a great deal of pride to recognize that we survived it all. There are more African Americans alive and well in this nation than it its total history. All of our cultural traditions are informed by this thriving survival. On the other hand we also blame all of our social dysfunctions from the unique racist aspect of slavery that poisons that culture, and are constantly forgetting and re-discovering the message of Carter G Woodson generation after generation. On the whole, however, we are clear that without the stain of slavery, we and America would be much better off. Our politics impels us to constantly remind America that our welfare is a leading indicator of the moral health of the nation.
But the particular subject of miscegenation presents us with a particularly pointed dilemma. When we look to blood, to the reality of who we are and what our families have been, what are we to do with our white ancestors. The answer has always been to cast them out as Other and as evil, and part of that particular evil of slavery. This is a problem.
The current controversy over Jefferson-Hemmings here at Cobb goes right to the heart of the problem. There's a way out, of course, but I think most people find that way particularly distasteful because it distorts their political truth with the facts of history. By history, I refer to Annette Gordon-Reed's study and references to that in the book on Jefferson that I am reading by Hitchens.
People will say, reflexively perhaps, that the significance of race should decline. But here we have a racination of Hemmings who could clearly pass for 'white'. She is made to represent what she does not adequately represent. Jungle fever. Rape.
So I bring it down to family, rather in the same way that Toni Morisson did in Jazz, because I can see that folks are getting confused as to how or why anyone would consider Jefferson Hemmings rather as bluntly and blithely as I do. The essential question that Morrison brings forth in Jazz is how willing blackfolks are to forgive the errant love of white ancestors. This is a specific instance of Baldwin's more general interrogation in "My Dungeon Shook" which hews well to Christianity's Golden Rule and that singular claim of anti-racists which is that we disable the social construct as a nation of equality under the law.
What to do with a whitey in the woodpile?
This should be no more complicated a question than that of love and marriage. Following Cobb's Rule Number Two: There is Marriage and there is everything else. Everything else doesn't count. So is it possible to love without marriage? If so, are you faithful to the love? Morrison shows us the simple fact that ordinary whitefolks don't control the operation of white supremacy any more than ordinary blackfolks. So how could a love between black and white during Jim Crow bear anything more than a child? It couldn't. A marriage wasn't possible and two families or ordinary people could not stand the social pressure. So blackfolks reject whitefolks and vice versa, both living in a system they don't control. And so a family is broken.
There is no difference from which direction the break is maintained. It is a loss to the family, just as civil war is a loss to a nation. Domination is not reconciliation.
So any relationship that cannot support marriage carries little forward from one generation to the next. I think it is more than conservatism but simple common sense that recognizes this. No society can long be functional without formal ties of blood. And so we find ourselves, those of us without some traceable family history, too bound to rhetoric. And so I'll repeat one axiom of the difference between social conservatives and social liberals: The Conservative uses the strength of family to guard against the dysfunctions of the State. The Liberal uses the power of the state to protect against the dysfunctional family. Is it any surprise then, that those cut loose from family for any reason, desire the most from the state, from unions, from corporations, from churches, from any establishment?
This is why I expect for racial rhetoric to become more shrill as time goes by. And I expect it will come most from those people lacking family, and those expecting most from the state as regards matters of politics. Those who can heal broken families will need less from politics and less from racial rhetoric. Now that our society supports marriage across Jim Crow lines, the strength of racial rhetoric becomes more and more ephemeral.
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