Telling whites they are black is not a task for the tactless; and Shirlee Haizlip makes every effort to be kind. After getting her quarry on the line, she identifies herself as a cousin – long-lost, she explains, as a result of a “family secret.” After they have chatted long enough to achieve a certain intimacy, Haizlip divulges her news: that their great-grandfather was once a slave. Invariably the reaction is the same. The person on the other end asks, “A black slave?”
That’s not an idle question. In America – still – one drop of “black blood” is enough to change one’s complexion.
“The Sweeter the Juice,” Haizlip’s first book, documented her search for an aunt and ultimately an entire branch of the family that had “become white.” She’s now working on a sequel about her relatives who discovered they are not quite as white as they thought. One newly found cousin confided that when trouble recently broke out among some blacks, she said, “There they go again.” She then reminded herself, “I can’t say that anymore because they are me.”
Americans have always defined themselves largely on the basis of race. The nation’s first citizenship statute, passed in 1790, limited naturalization to “aliens being free white persons.” That law (though amended to grant citizenship rights to blacks after the Civil War) stood until 1952. It forced generations of nonwhite petitioners, including natives of India and Japan, to try to prove – as late as the 1940s – that they were “white.”
Even many people who seemed indisputably white were not automatically welcome. Congress severely restricted immigration in 1924 of so-called “inferior” races from southern and eastern Europe. In due course, of course, Italians and Romanians were deemed to be perfectly acceptable. As F. James Davis, a sociologist and author of “Who Is Black?” observed, “other racial minorities . . . can be absorbed if they become one-fourth or less of that ancestry.” But because people are so accustomed to classifying anyone with any African heritage as black, he says, most Americans “don’t even think” to view blacks the same way as other immigrant groups.
The definition of black was not always so rigid. Though some colonies passed laws penalizing white men and women who became sexually involved with blacks, all free mulattoes were not considered black. Prior to the Civil War, several Southern states allowed people of mixed black-white descent to be defined either as white or as something between black and white. After the war, tolerance for racial ambiguity and mulatto privilege gradually evaporated. In the ensuing decades, white Southerners passed laws that lowered and ultimately decreased to zero the percentage of “black” genes whites could have.
In Virginia during the 1800s, someone with less than one-fourth “Negro blood” could be white. In 1910, the state codified what had already become custom: white was defined as having less than one-sixteenth “Negro ancestry.” By 1924, urged on by white supremacists, legislators prohibited whites from marrying anyone with “a single drop of Negro blood.” Other states, in the North as well as in the South, adopted a similarly restrictive view.
Though many of the racial-classification statutes no longer exist, the tradition continues. As recently as 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a lower-court ruling forcing a Louisiana woman with negligible African heritage to be legally defined as black.
This history surprises – and shames – many Americans, but it positively bewilders many new immigrants. Latinos in particular are confounded by a system that does not reflect the complexity of race as they understand it. Samuel Be-tances, a sociology professor at Northeastern Illinois University, points out that many Latinos are more strongly attached to their cultural or language enclaves than to their presumed racial “interest groups.” They “don’t understand why race is so important to African-Americans,” he says.
The Latin American experience doesn’t exactly offer reassurance that more fluid racial categories are better. Latino cultures aren’t characterized by bitter racial bickering, but they are far from colorblind. An array of Latin American terms have arisen to describe various racial combinations, with the most pejorative ones reserved for people of dark hue and pelo malo – or bad (meaning kinky) hair. Status in some Latin societies is so linked to color that mejorando la raza – bettering the race – is taken to mean marrying someone lighter in order to have whiter children. Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano observes: “In the Dominican Republic there are a lot of black people, but you never see ‘black’ listed as skin color on their identity card . . . It would damage the possibilities for work, for a social life.”
Such attitudes are familiar to African-Americans, too. Having been penalized for being black, having been bombarded with cultural messages saying that “light makes right and might,” many black Americans resist the idea of adding yet more categories of color. “I very much oppose diluting the power and the strength of numbers as they affect legal decisions about race in this country,” said civil-rights activist Julian Bond.
Labeling may be a symptom and not the problem itself. “Suppose from the beginning race was considered, but it was considered for purposes of inclusiveness,” argues Theodore Shaw, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. “Then it wouldn’t have this history of odiousness.” Changing racial designations certainly will not erase America’s exclusionary history or reverse attitudes shaped by centuries of racial stereotypes. In the end, what we call people matters a lot less than how we treat them; and until we can figure out a way to treat them as if race doesn’t matter, any new designations will, in time, become as loathsome as the old.
