Friday Dead Racist Blogging: That's New Edition

I've been reading racists and about racists for a couple of years now, so I've seen quite a few statements of truly odious invective. But there have been only a few instances where I can recall reading something so inventive, so thoroughly beyond what anyone else had claimed, that I pause and say to myself "That's new." When I do, it means I have stumbled across someone who is plumbing hitherto-unexplored depths of racism.

Such is what happened to me last Saturday.

The book I was reading, The Black Image in the White Mind, by George Fredrickson, mentioned that white insurance agencies refused to sell policies to blacks. This in itself would not give me pause; many businesses refused to service blacks. This much they told us back in grade school.

But the reasoning behind it... that was very new to me:

Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro became a prized source of information and conclusions for anti-Negro writers for many years to come and also had the practical effect of helping to convince most white insurance companies that they should deny coverage to all Negroes on the grounds that membership in the race by itself constituted an unacceptable actuarial risk.

Emphasis mine.

As evidence, Fredrickson cites The Betrayal of the Negro:

Negro insurance companies evolved from secret fraternal organizations like the Masons, Odd Fellows, St. Luke's, True Reformers and Knights fo Pythias and others which did not have a secret ritual. Their development was made almost imperative by the refusal of most white companies to write policies for Negroes, or to charge them at the same rate as other policyholders. White companies were even less willing to write policies for them after Frederick L. Hoffman, in 1896, published his widely read Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro which sought to prove that Negroes were a poor insurance risk.

This book itself cites The Negro as a Business Man:

This fraternal insurance developed more rapidly, too, after the publication of works presenting the Negroes as poor insurance risks. Chief among these treatises was Frederick L. Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, published in 1896. The author endeavored to show that because of social diseases, living conditions, and other undesirable circumstances, companies would be unwise to insure Negroes.

I've read the book in question, and I certainly don't think that was the goal of the text, although Hoffman (the author) does say that we need to stop providing aid to blacks and let them fend for themselves. And instead of blaming anything on the environment, he spent several hundred pages explaining how innate race traits make blacks more susceptible to certain diseases, caused them to begin dying off, make them commit crime and lapse into other forms of immorality, etc.* A review of the book is available on-line here.

Hoffman was, however, the chief statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company of America, and in a letter published in The Ultimate Solution of the American Negro Problem, he writes, after detailing how "the physical condition of the race ... has deteriorated":

Our Company has not for a number of years insured Negroes except in cases where we were compelled to do so in compliance with the law. About fifteen years ago, beginning with Massachusetts, a number of Northern States passed anti-discrimination laws, which prohibited companies from charging a higher rate to Negroes than to whites, irrespective of the face of an excessive mortality. The Prudential has not since that time solicited risks among the colored population, but, of course, if such risks offer themselves voluntarily and can pass the required medical examination they are accepted, but such cases are very rare.

In a later work, he wrote of black insurees that "companies cannot be compelled to solicit this class of risks, and very little of this class is now being written."

In retrospect, it doesn't seem so shocking that an insurance agency would not insure a class of people they considered high risk; but still, this struck me as unique.



*Hooffman never explains why he thinks the fact that, for instance, the increase in disease in blacks after the Civil War shows it's an innate race trait of blacks to be susceptible to the disease. You'd think that their innate nature all of a sudden changed after emancipation, rather than their status of living.