"I think it was Noel A. Cazenave from UConn that I'm quoting, but I could be wrong on that... but I heard someone say this years ago at a Black History Month discussion. and I paraphrase... They call us rapists, but you look at the colors we come in, and the facts don't fit the crime."
Horribly racist. Terribly tragic. The whites who don't want history as this taught now are doing a great disservice to the U.S.A.
If you can't be honest about the history of your country you can't be honest about yourself. Or about much of anything of great import.
Initial search led to this. Oh, and must say - well, feel like saying anyway - as happens often the original intention was not to post this whole article. Then, i couldn't - well again, didn't - stop. ;-)
Lydia Maria Child introduced the literary character that we call the tragic mulatto1 in two short stories: "The Quadroons" (1842) and "Slavery's Pleasant Homes" (1843). She portrayed this light skinned woman as the offspring of a white slaveholder and his black female slave. This mulatto's life was indeed tragic. She was ignorant of both her mother's race and her own. She believed herself to be white and free. Her heart was pure, her manners impeccable, her language polished, and her face beautiful. Her father died; her "negro blood" discovered, she was remanded to slavery, deserted by her white lover, and died a victim of slavery and white male violence. A similar portrayal of the near-white mulatto appeared in Clotel (1853), a novel written by black abolitionist William Wells Brown.
A century later literary and cinematic portrayals of the tragic mulatto emphasized her personal pathologies: self-hatred, depression, alcoholism, sexual perversion, and suicide attempts being the most common. If light enough to "pass" as white, she did, but passing led to deeper self-loathing. She pitied or despised blacks and the "blackness" in herself; she hated or feared whites yet desperately sought their approval. In a race-based society, the tragic mulatto found peace only in death. She evoked pity or scorn, not sympathy. Sterling Brown summarized the treatment of the tragic mulatto by white writers:
White writers insist upon the mulatto's unhappiness for other reasons. To them he is the anguished victim of divided inheritance. Mathematically they work it out that his intellectual strivings and self-control come from his white blood, and his emotional urgings, indolence and potential savagery come from his Negro blood. Their favorite character, the octoroon, wretched because of the "single drop of midnight in her veins," desires a white lover above all else, and must therefore go down to a tragic end.(Brown, 1969, p. 145)
[INSERT: Not being of those times it is virtually impossible to even come close to imagining how those white writers could come up with those thoughts. Then again, seeing and feeling how some whites think today, it becomes fairly easy to imagine how some whites of those times could be so horribly racist back then.]
Vara Caspary's novel The White Girl (1929) told the story of Solaria, a beautiful mulatto who passes for white. Her secret is revealed by the appearance of her brown-skinned brother. Depressed, and believing that her skin is becoming darker, Solaria drinks poison. A more realistic but equally depressing mulatto character is found in Geoffrey Barnes' novel Dark Lustre (1932). Alpine, the light-skinned "heroine," dies in childbirth, but her white baby lives to continue "a cycle of pain." Both Solaria and Alpine are repulsed by blacks, especially black suitors.
Most tragic mulattoes were women, although the self-loathing Sergeant Waters in A Soldier's Story (Jewison, 1984) clearly fits the tragic mulatto stereotype. The troubled mulatto is portrayed as a selfish woman who will give up all, including her black family, in order to live as a white person. These words are illustrative:
Don't come for me. If you see me in the street, don't speak to me. From this moment on I'm White. I am not colored. You have to give me up.
These words were spoken by Peola, a tortured, self-hating black girl in the movie Imitation of Life (Laemmle & Stahl, 1934). Peola, played adeptly by Fredi Washington, had skin that looked white. But she was not socially white. She was a mulatto. Peola was tired of being treated as a second-class citizen; tired, that is, of being treated like a 1930s black American. She passed for white and begged her mother to understand.
Imitation of Life, based on Fannie Hurst's best selling novel, traces the lives of two widows, one white and the employer, the other black and the servant. Each woman has one daughter. The white woman, Beatrice Pullman (played by Claudette Colbert), hires the black woman, Delilah, (played by Louise Beavers) as a live-in cook and housekeeper. It is the depression, and the two women and their daughters live in poverty -- even a financially struggling white woman can afford a mammy. Their economic salvation comes when Delilah shares a secret pancake recipe with her boss. Beatrice opens a restaurant, markets the recipe, and soon becomes wealthy. She offers Delilah, the restaurant's cook, a twenty percent share of the profits. Regarding the recipe, Delilah, a true cinematic mammy, delivers two of the most pathetic lines ever from a black character: "I gives it to you, honey. I makes you a present of it." While Delilah is keeping her mistress's family intact, her relationship with Peola, her daughter, disintegrates.
Peola is the antithesis of the mammy caricature. Delilah knows her place in the Jim Crow hierarchy: the bottom rung. Hers is an accommodating resignation, bordering on contentment. Peola hates her life, wants more, wants to live as a white person, to have the opportunities that whites enjoy. Delilah hopes that her daughter will accept her racial heritage. "He [God] made you black, honey. Don't be telling Him his business. Accept it, honey." Peola wants to be loved by a white man, to marry a white man. She is beautiful, sensual, a potential wife to any white man who does not know her secret. Peola wants to live without the stigma of being black -- and in the 1930s that stigma was real and measurable. Ultimately and inevitably, Peola rejects her mother, runs away, and passes for white. Delilah dies of a broken heart. A repentant and tearful Peola returns to her mother's funeral.
Audiences, black and white (and they were separate), hated what Peola did to her mother -- and they hated Peola. She is often portrayed as the epitome of selfishness. In many academic discussions about tragic mulattoes the name Peola is included. From the mid-1930s through the late 1970s, Peola was an epithet used by blacks against light-skinned black women who identified with mainstream white society. A Peola looked white and wanted to be white. During the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, the name Peola was an insult comparable to Uncle Tom, albeit a light-skinned female version.
Fredi Washington, the black actress who played Peola, was light enough to pass for white. Rumor has it that in later movies makeup was used to "blacken" her skin so white audiences would know her race. She had sharply defined features; long, dark, and straight hair, and green eyes; this limited the roles she was offered. She could not play mammy roles, and though she looked white, no acknowledged black was allowed to play a white person from the 1930's through the 1950's.
Imitation of Life was remade in 1959 (Hunter & Sirk). The plot is essentially the same; however, Peola is called Sara Jane, and she is played by Susan Kohner, a white actress. Delilah is now Annie Johnson. The pancake storyline is gone. Instead, the white mistress is a struggling actress. The crux of the story remains the light-skinned girl's attempts to pass for white. She runs away and becomes a chorus girl in a sleazy nightclub. Her dark skinned mother (played by Juanita Moore) follows her. She begs her mother to leave her alone. Sara Jane does not want to marry a "colored chauffeur"; she wants a white boyfriend. She gets a white boyfriend, but, when he discovers her secret, he savagely beats her and leaves her in a gutter. As in the original, Sara Jane's mother dies from a broken heart, and the repentant child tearfully returns to the funeral.
Peola and Sara Jane were cinematic tragic mulattoes. They were big screen testaments to the commonly held belief that "mixed blood" brought sorrow. If only they did not have a "drop of Negro blood." Many audience members nodded agreement when Annie Johnson asked rhetorically, "How do you explain to your daughter that she was born to hurt?"
Were real mulattoes born to hurt? All racial minorities in the United States have been victimized by the dominant group, although the expressions of that oppression vary. Mulattoes were considered black; therefore, they were slaves along with their darker kinsmen. All slaves were "born to hurt," but some writers have argued that mulattoes were privileged, relative to dark-skinned blacks. E.B. Reuter (1919), a historian, wrote:
In slavery days, they were most frequently the trained servants and had the advantages of daily contact with cultured men and women. Many of them were free and so enjoyed whatever advantages went with that superior status. They were considered by the white people to be superior in intelligence to the black Negroes, and came to take great pride in the fact of their white blood....When possible, they formed a sort of mixed-blood caste and held themselves aloof from the black Negroes and the slaves of lower status. (p. 378) Angelo Movie Poster
Reuter's claim that mulattoes were held in higher regard and treated better than "pure blacks" must be examined closely. American slavery lasted for more than two centuries; therefore, it is difficult to generalize about the institution. The interactions between slaveholder and slaves varied across decades--and from plantation to plantation. Nevertheless, there are clues regarding the status of mulattoes. In a variety of public statements and laws, the offspring of white-black sexual relations were referred to as "mongrels" or "spurious" (Nash, 1974, p. 287). Also, these interracial children were always legally defined as pure blacks, which was different from how they were handled in other New World countries. A slaveholder claimed that there was "not an old plantation in which the grandchildren of the owner [therefore mulattos] are not whipped in the field by his overseer" (Furnas, 1956, p. 142). Further, it seems that mulatto women were sometimes targeted for sexual abuse.
According to the historian J. C. Furnas (1956), in some slave markets, mulattoes and quadroons brought higher prices, because of their use as sexual objects (p. 149). Some slavers found dark skin vulgar and repulsive. The mulatto approximated the white ideal of female attractiveness. All slave women (and men and children) were vulnerable to being raped, but the mulatto afforded the slave owner the opportunity to rape, with impunity, a woman who was physically white (or near-white) but legally black. A greater likelihood of being raped is certainly not an indication of favored status.
The mulatto woman was depicted as a seductress whose beauty drove white men to rape her. This is an obvious and flawed attempt to reconcile the prohibitions against miscegenation (interracial sexual relations) with the reality that whites routinely used blacks as sexual objects. One slaver noted, "There is not a likely looking girl in this State that is not the concubine of a White man..." (Furnas, 1956, p. 142). Every mulatto was proof that the color line had been crossed. In this regard, mulattoes were symbols of rape and concubinage. Gary B. Nash (1974) summarized the slavery-era relationship between the rape of black women, the handling of mulattoes, and white dominance:
Though skin color came to assume importance through generations of association with slavery, white colonists developed few qualms about intimate contact with black women. But raising the social status of those who labored at the bottom of society and who were defined as abysmally inferior was a matter of serious concern. It was resolved by insuring that the mulatto would not occupy a position midway between white and black. Any black blood classified a person as black; and to be black was to be a slave.... By prohibiting racial intermarriage, winking at interracial sex, and defining all mixed offspring as black, white society found the ideal answer to its labor needs, its extracurricular and inadmissible sexual desires, its compulsion to maintain its culture purebred, and the problem of maintaining, at least in theory, absolute social control. (pp. 289-290)
George M. Fredrickson (1971), author of The Black Image in the White Mind, claimed that many white Americans believed that mulattoes were a degenerate race because they had "White blood" which made them ambitious and power hungry combined with "Black blood" which made them animalistic and savage. The attributing of personality and morality traits to "blood" seems foolish today, but it was taken seriously in the past.Charles Carroll, author of The Negro a Beast (1900), described blacks as apelike. Regarding mulattoes, the offspring of "unnatural relationships," they did not have "the right to live," because, Carroll said, they were the majority of rapists and killers (Fredrickson, 1971, p. 277). His claim was untrue but widely believed. In 1899 a southern white woman, L. H. Harris, wrote to the editor of the Independent that the "negro brute" who rapes white women was "nearly always a mulatto," with "enough white blood in him to replace native humility and cowardice with Caucasian audacity" (Fredrickson, 1971, p. 277). Mulatto women were depicted as emotionally troubled seducers and mulatto men as power hungry criminals. Nowhere are these depictions more evident than in D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation (1915).
The Birth of a Nation is arguably the most racist mainstream movie produced in the United States. This melodrama of the Civil War and Reconstruction justified and glorified the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, the Klan of the 1920s owes its existence to William Joseph Simmons, an itinerant Methodist preacher who watched the film a dozen times, then felt divinely inspired to resurrect the Klan which had been dormant since 1871. D. W. Griffith based the film on Thomas Dixon's anti-black novel The Clansman (1905) (also the original title of the movie). Griffith, following Dixon's lead, depicted his black characters as either "loyal darkies" or brutes and beasts lusting for power and, worse yet, lusting for white women.
The Birth of a Nation tells the story of two families, the Stonemans of Pennsylvania, and the Camerons of South Carolina. The Stonemans, headed by politician Austin Stoneman, and the Camerons, headed by slaveholder "Little Colonel" Ben Cameron, have their longtime friendship divided by the Civil War. The Civil War exacts a terrible toll on both families: both have sons die in the war. The Camerons, like many slaveholders, suffer "ruin, devastation, rapine, and pillage." The Birth of a Nation depicts Radical Reconstruction as a time when blacks dominate and oppress whites. The film shows blacks pushing whites off sidewalks, snatching the possessions of whites, attempting to rape a white teenager, and killing blacks who are loyal to whites (Leab, 1976, p. 28). Stoneman, a carpetbagger, moves his family to the South. He falls under the influence of Lydia, his mulatto housekeeper and mistress.
Austin Stoneman is portrayed as a naive politician who betrays his people: whites. Lydia, his lover, is described in a subtitle as the "weakness that is to blight a nation." Stoneman sends another mulatto, Silas Lynch, to "aid the carpetbaggers in organizing and wielding the power of the vote." Lynch, owing to his "white blood," becomes ambitious. He and his agents rile the local blacks. They attack whites and pillage. Lynch becomes lieutenant governor, and his black co-conspirators are voted into statewide political offices. The Birth of a Nation shows black legislators debating a bill to legalize interracial marriage -- their legs propped on tables, eating chicken, and drinking whiskey.
Silas Lynch proposes marriage to Stoneman's daughter, Elsie. He says, "I will build a black empire and you as my queen shall rule by my side." When she refuses, he binds her and decides on a "forced marriage." Lynch informs Stoneman that he wants to marry a white woman. Stoneman approves until he discovers that the white woman is his daughter. While this drama unfolds, blacks attack whites. It looks hopeless until the newly formed Ku Klux Klan arrives to reestablish white rule.
The Birth of a Nation set the standard for cinematic technical innovation -- the imaginative use of cross-cutting, lighting, editing, and close-ups. It also set the standard for cinematic anti-black images. All of the major black caricatures are in the movie, including, mammies, sambos, toms, picaninnies, coons, beasts, and tragic mulattoes. The depictions of Lydia -- a cold-hearted, hateful seductress -- and Silas Lynch -- a power hungry, sex-obsessed criminal -- were early examples of the pathologies supposedly inherent in the tragic mulatto stereotype.
Mulattoes did not fare better in other books and movies, especially those who passed for white. In Nella Larsen's novel Passing (1929), Clare, a mulatto passing for white, frequently is drawn to blacks in Harlem. Her bigoted white husband finds her there. Her problems are solved when she falls to her death from a sixth story window. In the movie Show Boat (Laemmle & Whale, 1936), a beautiful young entertainer, Julie, discovers that she has "Negro blood." Existing laws held that "one drop of Negro blood makes you a Negro." Her husband (and the movie's writers and producer) take this "one drop rule" literally. The husband cuts her hand with a knife and sucks her blood. This supposedly makes him a Negro. Afterward Julie and her newly-mulattoed husband walk hand-in-hand. Nevertheless, she is a screen mulatto, so the movie ends with this one-time cheerful "white" woman, now a Negro alcoholic.
------ [White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots "Human Zoos: America's Forgotten History of Scientific Racism" [...] Warnings from conservative pundits on Fox News about the existential threat facing a country overrun by immigrants meet with a similar response. “Massive demographic changes,” Laura Ingraham has proclaimed .. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/laura-ingraham-white-nationalist-rhetoric , mean that “the America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” in much of the country: Surely this kind of rhetoric reflects mere ignorance. Or it’s just a symptom of partisan anxiety about what those changes may portend for Republicans’ electoral prospects. As for the views and utterances of someone like Congressman Steve King .. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/steve-king-nearer-the-throne/519336/ .. (“We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies”), such sentiments are treated as outlandish extremism, best ignored as much as possibl [...] The seed of Nazism’s ultimate objective—the preservation of a pure white race, uncontaminated by foreign blood—was in fact sown with striking success in the United States. What is judged extremist today was once the consensus of a powerful cadre of the American elite, well-connected men who eagerly seized on a false doctrine of “race suicide” during the immigration scare of the early 20th century. They included wealthy patricians, intellectuals, lawmakers, even several presidents. Perhaps the most important among them was a blue blood with a very impressive mustache, Madison Grant. He was the author of a 1916 book called The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe. [...] Harding’s vice president and successor, Calvin Coolidge, found Grant’s thesis equally compelling. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping .. http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=hearth;rgn=full%20text;idno=6417403_1366_002;view=image;seq=15 . [...] Endorsing Grant’s idea that true Americans are of Nordic stock, Coolidge also took up his idea that intermarriage between whites of different “races,” not just between whites and nonwhites, degrades that stock. P - Perhaps the most important of Grant’s elite admirers were to be found among members of Congress. Reconstruction struggles; U.S. expansion in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii; high levels of immigration—each had raised the specter of white people losing political power and influence to nonwhite people, or to the wrong kind of white people. On Capitol Hill debate raged, yet Republicans and Democrats were converging on the idea that America was a white man’s country, and must stay that way. The influx of foreigners diluted the nation with inferiors unfit for self-government, many politicians in both parties energetically concurred. The Supreme Court chimed in with decisions in a series of cases, beginning in 1901, that assigned the status of “nationals” rather than “citizens” to colonial newcomers. P - A popular myth of American history is that racism is the exclusive province of the South. The truth is that much of the nativist energy in the U.S. came from old-money elites in the Northeast, and was also fueled by labor struggles in the Pacific Northwest, which had stirred a wave of bigotry that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Grant found a congressional ally and champion in Albert Johnson, a Republican representative from Washington. A nativist and union buster, he contacted Grant after reading The Passing of the Great Race. The duo embarked on an ambitious restrictionist agenda. [...] “It was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.” Hitler and his followers were eager to claim a foreign—American—lineage for the Nazi mission. P - In part, this was spin, an attempt to legitimize fascism. But Grant and his fellow pioneers in racist pseudoscience did help the Nazis justify to their own populations, and to other countries’ governments, the mission they were on—as one of Grant’s key accomplices was proud to acknowledge. According to Spiro, Harry Laughlin, the scientific expert on Representative Johnson’s committee, told Grant that the Nazis’ rhetoric sounds “exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,” and wrote that “Hitler should be made honorary member of the Eugenics Research Association.” [...] What the Nazis “found exciting about the American model didn’t involve just eugenics,” observes James Q. Whitman, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). “It also involved the systematic degradation of Jim Crow, of American deprivation of basic rights of citizenship like voting.” Nazi lawyers carefully studied how the United States, despite its pretense of equal citizenship, had effectively denied that status .. http://aeon.co/ideas/why-the-nazis-studied-american-race-laws-for-inspiration .. to those who were not white. They looked at Supreme Court decisions that withheld full citizenship rights from nonwhite subjects in U.S. colonial territories. They examined cases that drew, as Thind’s had, arbitrary but hard lines around who could be considered “white.” P - The Nazis reviewed the infamous “one-drop rule,” [that emphasis added here, July 8 2021] which defined anyone with any trace of African blood as black, and “found American law on mongrelization too harsh to be embraced by the Third Reich.” At the same time, Heinrich Krieger, whom Whitman describes as “the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law,” considered the Fourteenth Amendment a problem: In his view, it codified an abstract ideal of equality at odds with human experience, and with the type of country most Americans wanted to live in. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=152073813] ------
Lost Boundaries is a book by William L. White (1948), made into a movie in 1949 (de Rochemont & Werker). It tells the story of a troubled mulatto couple, the Johnsons. The husband is a physician, but he cannot get a job in a southern black hospital because he "looks white," and no southern white hospital will hire him. The Johnsons move to New England and pass for white. They become pillars of their local community -- all the while terrified of being discredited. Years later, when their secret is discovered, the townspeople turn against them. The town's white minister delivers a sermon on racial tolerance which leads the locals, shamefaced and guilt-ridden, to befriend again the mulatto couple. Lost Boundaries, despite the white minister's sermon, blames the mulatto couple, not a racist culture, for the discrimination and personal conflicts faced by the Johnsons.
In 1958 Natalie Wood starred in Kings Go Forth (Ross & Daves), the story of a young French mulatto who passes for white. She becomes involved with two American soldiers on leave from World War II. They are both infatuated with her until they discover that her father is black. Both men desert her. She attempts suicide unsuccessfully. Given another chance to live, she turns her family's large home into a hostel for war orphans, "those just as deprived of love as herself" (Bogle, 1994, p. 192). At the movie's end, one of the soldiers is dead; the other, missing an arm, returns to the mulatto woman. They are comparable, both damaged, and it is implied that they will marry.
The mulatto women portrayed in Show Boat, Lost Boundaries, and Kings Go Forth were portrayed by white actresses. It was a common practice. Producers felt that white audiences would feel sympathy for a tortured white woman, even if she was portraying a mulatto character. The audience knew she was really white. In Pinky (Zanuck & Kazan, 1949), Jeanne Crain, a well-known actress, played the role of the troubled mulatto. Her dark-skinned grandmother was played by Ethel Waters. When audiences saw Ethel Waters doing menial labor, it was consistent with their understanding of a mammy's life, but when Jeanne Crain was shown washing other people's clothes audiences cried.
Even black filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux made movies with tragic mulattoes.Within Our Gates (Micheaux, 1920) tells the story of a mulatto woman who is hit by a car, menaced by a con man, nearly raped by a white man, and witnesses the lynching of her entire family. God's Step Children (Micheaux, 1938) tells the story of Naomi, a mulatto who leaves her black husband and child and passes for white. Later, consumed by guilt, she commits suicide. Mulatto actresses played these roles.
Fredi Washington, the star of Imitation of Life, was one of the first cinematic tragic mulattoes. She was followed by women like Dorothy Dandridge and Nina Mae McKinney. Dandridge deserves special attention because she not only portrayed doomed, unfulfilled women, but she was the embodiment of the tragic mulatto in real life. Her role as the lead character in Carmen Jones (Preminger, 1954) helped make her a star. She was the first black featured on the cover of Life magazine. In Island in the Sun (Zanuck & Rossen, 1957) she was the first black woman to be held -- lovingly -- in the arms of a white man in an American movie. She was a beautiful and talented actress, but Hollywood was not ready for a black leading lady; the only roles offered to her were variants of the tragic mulatto theme. Her personal life was filled with failed relationships. Disillusioned by roles that limited her to exotic, self-destructive mulatto types, she went to Europe, where she fared worse. She died in 1965, at the age of forty-two, from an overdose of anti-depressants.
Today's successful mulatto actresses -- for example, Halle Berry, Lisa Bonet and Jasmine Guy -- owe a debt to the pioneering efforts of Dandridge. These women have great wealth and fame. They are bi-racial, but their statuses and circumstances are not tragic. They are not marginalized; they are mainstream celebrities. Dark-skinned actress -- Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Bassett, Alfre Woodard, and Joie Lee -- have enjoyed comparable success. They, too, benefit from Dandridge's path clearing.
[YOU SEE. Don't let anyone ever get away with telling you the U.S.A. - the world - is not a better place. We have a long way to go but in so many important ways - humane ways - the world is a better place. Too many individuals are still stuck in those much more racist times, still most individuals have grown with the times and moved on.]
The tragic mulatto was more myth than reality; Dandridge was an exception. The mulatto was made tragic in the minds of whites who reasoned that the greatest tragedy was to be near-white: so close, yet a racial gulf away. The near-white was to be pitied -- and shunned. There were undoubtedly light skinned blacks, male and female, who felt marginalized in this race conscious culture. This was true for many people of color, including dark skinned blacks. Self-hatred and intraracial hatred are not limited to light skinned blacks. There is evidence that all racial minorities in the United States have battled feelings of inferiority and in-group animosity; those are, unfortunately, the costs of being a minority.
[That applies to all countries, of course.]
The tragic mulatto stereotype claims that mulattoes occupy the margins of two worlds, fitting into neither, accepted by neither. This is not true of real life mulattoes. Historically, mulattoes were not only accepted into the black community, but were often its leaders and spokespersons, both nationally and at neighborhood levels. Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Elizabeth Ross Hayes,2 Mary Church Terrell,3 Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan were all mulattoes. Walter White, the former head of the NAACP, and Adam Clayton Powell, an outspoken Congressman, were both light enough to pass for white. Other notable mulattoes include Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, and Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and the grandson of mulatto Reconstruction politician P.B.S. Pinchback.
There was tragedy in the lives of light skinned black women -- there was also tragedy in the lives of most dark skinned black women -- and men and children. The tragedy was not that they were black, or had a drop of "Negro blood," although whites saw that as a tragedy. Rather, the real tragedy was the way race was used to limit the chances of people of color. The 21st century finds an America increasingly more tolerant of interracial unions and the resulting offspring.
1 A mulatto is defined as: the first general offspring of a black and white parent; or, an individual with both white and black ancestors. Generally, mulattoes are light-skinned, though dark enough to be excluded from the white race.
2 Elizabeth Ross Hayes was a social worker, sociologist, and a pioneer in the YWCA movement.
3 Mary Church Terrell was a feminist, civil rights activist, and the first president of the National Association of Colored Women.
Understanding Our Many Fergusons: Kill Lines – the Will, the Right and the Need to Kill
"I think it was Noel A. Cazenave from UConn that I'm quoting, but I could be wrong on that... but I heard someone say this years ago at a Black History Month discussion. and I paraphrase... They call us rapists, but you look at the colors we come in, and the facts don't fit the crime."
Noel A. Cazenave is obviously an interesting and thoughtful guy. Thanks for the introduction.
By Noel A. Cazenave, Truthout
Published September 29, 2014
The following is a condensed and revised version of a talk given on September 11, 2014, at a forum, sponsored by the University of Connecticut’s Africana Studies Institute, on the killings of Michael Brown and other African-Americans.
There seems to be a war raging in the United States for which there is no end in sight. A war, the outcome of which may well determine whether many African-American children will live to reach adulthood. More precisely, what is happening looks and feels like a race war that pits the right of African-Americans to have their young people live with dignity against the right of angry white policemen and vigilantes with guns to kill them.
My understanding of what is happening in Ferguson and elsewhere in the United States developed as the result of a perfect storm-like convergence of a number of influences. In the early spring of this year, while eating some good Southern cooking and talking with my sociology department colleague, Matt Hughey, and two other very accomplished racism scholars at Black Eyed Sally’s in downtown Hartford, I heard myself saying words that were shocking to my own ears. At that moment, in the wake of a spate of police and Stand Your Ground laws-justified, vigilante-style killings (e.g., Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride and Jordon Davis), I found myself articulating the need to conceptualize what increasingly seemed to be a sense of entitlement by many “whites” to kill “black” youth. This suspicion was further stoked not long afterward when I read an internet posting on the plans of a gun rights group of European-American men to march through a low-income, African-American neighborhood in Houston, Texas, brandishing assault rifles to demonstrate their right to bear such arms whenever and wherever they pleased.
I developed this idea further in a talk I gave to a group of mothers in Hartford whose sons had been killed as a result of gun violence. At that forum, held in the wake of the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Ezell Ford by European-American police officers on Staten Island, in Ferguson, Missouri, and in Los Angeles, California, respectively, I made the link between racism and poverty to both such African-American on African-American gun violence and to European-American police and vigilante killings and stressed the need for an effective social movement challenge to bring about the systemic change needed to better protect our youth, both from dangers within and outside of our communities.
In that talk, I stated that as I continued to observe the killings by those from outside of our communities, I became increasingly convinced that they are acts of racial terrorism that the perpetrators see in their own perverted way as a form of morality enforcement that serves the same vigilante function that lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan used to serve – especially in the South. I added that such terrorism, what we might call the new 21st century version of lynchings, is intended to send a message that it is so-called white people who are in control and that black people had best stay in our place and to behave as white men with guns would have us to behave. Finally, I concluded that the underlying premise behind these “new lynchings” is that we African-Americans have no rights and that “white men,” whether in uniform or not, have the right to kill “black” people as they please, and that right will not be abridged by anyone. -- We found that the men who killed [women] justified their actions based on ownership norms that presumed that the penalty for attempting to leave such relationships was death. Because those men thought and felt that they owned their women, they concluded that they were entitled to do with them as they pleased if they violated certain rules, and such rights included the right to kill. -- In time I came to realize that what ultimately drove my questions was exhaustion; that old African-American legacy of being “tired of being tired.” It was the fatigue of having experienced what seemed like the daily, often outrageous, killings of unarmed people of African descent, mostly young men, since the highly publicized killing of Amadou Diallo and the acquittals of the men who killed him. With each new killing, I became increasingly convinced that there could be no act the nation’s white power structure would deem to be so outrageous as to say enough is enough; there must be systemic change.Finally, another likely influence I did not become aware of until later was a study I had done some time ago with Margaret A. Zahn on women who were murdered as they tried to escape physically-abusive relations. In that study, we found that the men who killed them justified their actions based on ownership norms that presumed that the penalty for attempting to leave such relationships was death. Because those men thought and felt that they owned their women, they concluded that they were entitled to do with them as they pleased if they violated certain rules, and such rights included the right to kill.
As I pondered the reasons for the repeated killings of African-American youth by European-American police officers and vigilantes, it became clear to me that a mix of racist stereotypes and emotions, hyper-masculinity and entitlement fueled their actions. And since the victims were usually, but of course not always, African-American or Latino-American boys or men, I suspected that in part what was going on was a highly racialized macho thing, an assertion of white-male dominance. I also realized that because they are normative, such actions are not only presumed justified, but also protected. That is, they are condoned not only because they are deemed to be acceptable, but also because they are actually thought to be good in that they serve some useful social function. This led me to conclude that like the lynchings so prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries, they articulated both a very rational and a highly emotional social-control norm that could best be described, again, as “the right to kill.”
INSERT: In the minds of the killers, and in some other white people's minds he obviously means.
Ironically, another factor that may be contributing to the increase in the number of police killings of African-American youth is the progress we African-Americans have made toward securing our full citizen rights. This is consistent with the fact that in the United States the lynching of African-Americans increased dramatically after the abolition of slavery. The progress today’s post-civil rights era African-American youth have experienced has resulted in their having a much greater sense of entitlement as citizens than their parents and grandparents. They actually expect to be treated as first-class citizens and will accept nothing less. Or to put it in very racist, Jim Crow-era terms: Today’s young African-Americans “don’t know their place.”
------ [Racists would see the progress mentioned there as increased threat. Increased threat of their being replaced by those of a different color. By inferior people who had no right to be in any way at all their master. Or equal. A palpable fear, loathing and distaste would inevitably come with the racists fear of being replaced by an inferior. Related:
White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots [...] “It was America that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.” Hitler and his followers were eager to claim a foreign—American—lineage for the Nazi mission. P - In part, this was spin, an attempt to legitimize fascism. But Grant and his fellow pioneers in racist pseudoscience did help the Nazis justify to their own populations, and to other countries’ governments, the mission they were on. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=152073813 .. and .. Fox News star Tucker Carlson's 'great replacement' segment used a new frame for an old fear [...] On Thursday .. https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-face-fox-news-just-gave-his-full-endorsement-white-nationalist , Fox News host Tucker Carlson seemingly answered whatever questions may remain about his willingness to carry water for these white supremacists. Carlson wailed that the Democratic Party was “trying to replace the current electorate” in the U.S. with “new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” That, according to Carlson, is “what’s happening actually. Let’s just say it. That’s true.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164306713] ------
There is all too often fatal conflict when that right to be treated with dignity collides with the highly-racialized and gendered right of European-American, male police officers to kill when challenged. This conflict is evident in the title of a Washington Post op-ed by a Los Angeles police officer who makes clear what he sees as the lesson of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri: “I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me.” Another police officer, who was on duty in Ferguson during the demonstrations and sometimes violent unrest after the Brown killing, was found to have said earlier to a right-wing group that he was “a killer” and that “if you don’t want to get killed, don’t show up in front of me.” Of course, there are many European-Americans who challenge the police about their constitutional and other rights who are not hurt or killed. Such warnings are racially specific.
All of those influences led me to conclude that such killings exist and persist because some European-Americans have organized strong ideational and institutional supports to protect what they deeply feel, if not consciously think, is their inherent right to kill what they judge to be morally-wayward African-Americans and other people of color. That is, the killing of “black” people is the ultimate entitlement that “white” people possess. This “right” is highly organized into systems of oppression like laws, law enforcement, politics, the economy and the media, and is fueled by strong negative emotions like hatred, loathing, anger, fear and racial entitlement. Such killings are justified by suppositions that certain moral codes have been violated. Those infractions can be as trivial as a teenager having his music turned up too loud or his not reacting quickly and deferentially enough to a rude, if not profane, command to clear the area. The sentiment that such violations are punishable by death is rooted in assumptions of white moral supremacy and control that go back as far as slavery and later the emergence of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the widespread deployment of terrorist tactics like lynchings.
Again, the underlying premise behind these “new lynchings” is that we African-Americans have no rights that “white men” – whether in uniform or not – are bound to respect and that they have the right to kill “black” people as they please. Such white power and black helplessness used to be demonstrated by our inability to protect our women from rape and our men from lynchings. Today, it is evident by our inability to protect our children from murder. This is what the Stand Your Ground movement that has swept the nation is about – the exploitation of white racist fear and animus by gun manufacturers and retailers like Walmart to sell lots of guns and ammunition. -- Angry and racially-bigoted European-American men with guns seem to believe that they have a right to kill when in their minds African-Americans cross a line that is nowhere close to the one that involves self-defense or the defense of the lives of others. -- So I have come to the conclusion that these killings can best be viewed through the analytical lens of rights in conflict. One way of looking at this conflict from the perspective of European-American police officers and vigilante-type individuals who kill African-American youth is as a very highly racialized and macho game of lines drawn in the sand. Here the lines in the sand are drawn in blood and the game is over when they get to shoot to kill with impunity.Indeed it is useful to think in terms of there actually being three lines:The will to kill line – based on highly racialized and genderized emotions of anger and hatred; the right to kill line – what that person can reasonably expect to get away with based on existing norms, laws, policies and practices, and their enforcement, and the need to kill line – rooted in a threat to that person’s life or the lives of others. In brief, the will to kill and the right to kill are the necessary and sufficient conditions for such killings. There need not be an actual need to kill.
Elsewhere on that field, our African-American youth are constantly trying to push forward the line of their right to not only live, but also to be treated with all the rights and dignity of first-class citizens. Unfortunately, as they do so, that right collides with the expected rights of others to kill them. When most of us think of the police and citizens’ right to kill we think of constitutional and other legal rights based on their need to defend the lives of themselves or others. Unfortunately, when we observe the actions and listen to the words of those men who kill we see that is not how things actually work. As Stand Your Ground laws make clear, they need not be near that need to kill line in order to kill. Angry and racially-bigoted European-American men with guns seem to believe that they have a right to kill when in their minds African-Americans cross a line that is nowhere close to the one that involves self-defense or the defense of the lives of others.
In their minds crossing that line may simply mean that a person doesn’t follow instructions, stop running, or when that person does anything else they see as challenging them and their highly racialized manhood. In brief, there is a huge difference between police and other individuals killing because they have to and because they can. I believe that the kill line is not set by law or constitutional rights. It is instead set by practice. When those men with the will to kill see that there are no real penalties for doing so, they increasingly pull the right to kill line away from the need to kill line. Ultimately, although a lot of anger, hatred and machismo may spark their actions, the real reason they do it is simply because they can. They know that it is highly unlikely that they will be charged, must less convicted of a crime. If they thought that such actions would land them in jail for long prison terms they wouldn’t do it, period.
Ultimately, it is power that explains oppression and it is only by changing power relations that people can end it. No oppressor is going to take his or her foot off of someone’s neck because it is the right, the rational and the reasonable thing to do as made clear by some wonderful sociological study. That foot can only be removed by us, and only if we muster the courage and the power to remove it. African-Americans and others fighting for social justice have learned from centuries of struggle that, to quote Frederick Douglas, “power conceded nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Let me close, therefore, by simply saying that we must realize that together we can be a powerful force for change. Well this is awkward.
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Noel A. Cazenave is a professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. Cazenave is currently completing a book entitled Conceptualizing Racism: Breaking the Chains of Racially Accommodative Language. His next book project is tentatively entitled The Right to Kill: White Racist Police and Vigilante Killings in the Twenty-First Century. More by this author…
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