Friday Dead Racist Blogging: This Probably Doesn't Deserve My "Language" Tag Edition

It was common for racists to take anything they could conceivably associate with race and claim that this tenuous connection was certain. Race, for instance, defined not only skin color and other physical features, but also culture, civilization, thoughts, morality (or lack thereof), religion, etc. And for any of these, they also had to demonstrate (at least to their own satisfaction) that that of whites was superior to that of blacks.

So it was with language:

Another important influence came to the blacks through their contact with the English language. The peculiar richness of this speech, the call it institutes upon the mind for contextual thoughts makes it to the savage perhaps the most educative of tongues. It cannot be compassed by any lowly people without a decidedly developing effect. The negro has mastered this language in a very remarkable manner, and without deliberate instruction by any form of schooling, and by so doing has given better proof of his natural capacity than by any other of his accomplishments in this to him very new world. . . .

The struggle of the African with the difficulties of our incompleted [sic], open-structured English speech is one of the most interesting features of his history. His inherited habits of mind framed on a very limited language, where the terms were well tied together and where the thought found in the words a bridge of easy passage, gave him much trouble when he came to employ our speech where the words are like widely separated stepping-stones which require nimble wits in those who use them. It would require a separate essay to deal with this interesting subject, so I can only note a few of the most instructive examples of the devices to which the negroes have resorted in their difficult task. . . . Our verb with its imperfect denotation of time and number gives them at first much trouble; to help themselves they have adopted some new but imperfectly defined tenses; "gwine done," "gone done," "done gone," seem to me to be natural efforts to give clearness to our indices of action, which we are able to supply from our grasp of the context,--a mental habit to which the lower races with difficulty attain. . . .

--From Nathaniel Shaler, "The Nature of the Negro," Arena, Vol. III (December, 1890). Reprinted in I. A. Newby, The Development of Segregationist Thought, pp. 58-59. Ellipses are Newby's.

I also recall reading something about how black languages were inferior because they didn't have many words in them--not enough to properly translate the Bible into. I can't recall who said it, but I think it might have been Charles Carroll.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Social Stigma Edition

I couldn't come up with any better title. Anywho, a few days ago Greg Laden blogged about a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled "How social status shapes race". The abstract mentions,

We show that racial perceptions are fluid; how individuals perceive their own race and how they are perceived by others depends in part on their social position. Using longitudinal data from a representative sample of Americans, we find that individuals who are unemployed, incarcerated, or impoverished are more likely to be seen and identify as black and less likely to be seen and identify as white, regardless of how they were classified or identified previously. This is consistent with the view that race is not a fixed individual attribute, but rather a changeable marker of status.

Though it's a new paper, this certainly isn't news--at least, the idea that "how they are perceived by others depends in part on their social position" isn't new. We've known that since before the Civil War. In fact, it was the basis of court decisions trying to decide people's race. From an 1835 South Carolina case, State v. Cantey:

We cannot say what admixture of negro blood will make a colored person, and by a jury one may be found a colored person while another of the same degree may be declared a white man. In general, it is very desirable that rules of law should be certain and precise; but it is not always practicable, nor is it practicable in this instance, nor do I know that it is desirable. The status of the individual is not to be determined solely by the distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man. But his admission to these privileges, regulated by the public opinion of the community in which he lives, will very much depend on his own character and conduct; and it may be well and proper that a man of worth, honesty, industry, and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste. It will be a stimulus to the good conduct of these persons, and security for their fidelity as citizens.

Emphasis mine.

A 1914 case, Tucker v. Blease, quoted the above section and gave it this introduction:

The law recognizes that there is a social element, arising from racial instinct, to be taken into consideration between those with and those without negro blood. The statutes and provisions of the Constitution hereinbefore quoted show that the law not only recognizes a classification, but makes it mandatory, and provides a penalty for failure to observe the laws in this respect, in the instances therein mentioned. The decisions prior to the abolition of slavery show that the classification between white and colored persons did not depend upon the extent of the mixed blood.

Again, emphasis mine.

So a person's legal race, which was supposedly defined in terms of blood and ancestry, was recognized to actually be based (in part at least) on social status. Two people with the same amount of black "blood" could be legally assigned to different races based on whether they exhibited particular good traits or were considered to be in good social standing, his "reception into society."
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Double standards becoming a two-edged sword

Or something like that.

I have occasionally mused that a working definition of homophobia would be "pretending that every word you just said does not apply equally well to straight people." Double standards, of course, are not unique to homophobia. Racists were full of them: if whites didn't cry from pain, they were stoic, whereas if blacks didn't cry from pain, they didn't actually feel pain; if blacks committed suicide, they would be declared insane, but if whites commit suicide they're just curious; if whites slaughter people, they're bold and noble conquerors, but if blacks kill other people, they're barbaric savages; etc.

So it was with relish that I read part of the book Challenge to the Court: Social Scientists and the Defense of Segregation, 1954-1966 by historian I. A. Newby. Here Newby is discussing the book Race and Reason, A Yankee View by Carleton Putnam, which was widely and enthusiastically received by racists and segregationists (and is in fact still being sold by such organizations as American Renaissance). Newby's book was published originally in 1967, six years after Race and Reason.

One test of the cogency of Putnam's logic is to take his admonitions concerning Negroes and apply them to segregationists in Mississippi, among whom Race and Reason was well received. "The capacity for a free civilization involves many attributes," Putnam wrote, "self-control (which, among other things, includes resistance to emotionalism), self-reliance, self-responsibility, willingness to bear the burdens of others without casting upon others the burdens on should bear one's self, willingness both to accept the verdict of majorities and to concede the rights of minorities, willingness to obey the law even when it hurts, willingness to support rather than to raid a treasury, emphasis upon the importance of the individual." Judging by the recent history of race relations in Mississippi, most Mississippi segregationists are not notable for "self-control" or "resistance to emotionalism." Nor is "self-reliance, self-responsibility, [and] willingness to bear the burdens of others without casting upon others the burdens one should bear one's self" the best way to describe their exploitation of Negroes. The reference to a "willingness . . . to accept the verdict of majorities and to concede the rights of minorities" is even more to the point. Mississippi segregationists have shown little concern for the rights of the Negro minority in their midst, nor are they willing to accept "the verdict of majorities" in those areas of the state where Negroes outnumber whites. Like John C. Calhoun before him, Putnam forgot that there are several kinds of majorities and minorities, and to be valid a defense of majority rights must be applicable to all majorities and consistent with the rights of all minorities. The admonition to Negroes "to obey the law even when it hurts" is particularly ironic in view of Putnam's defense of Mississippi, a state which has systematically subverted or ignored not only the Brown decision but the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and the civil rights acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1965. Finally, it should be noted (according to the Library of Congress Legislative Reference Service) that for every $218 paid by Mississippians in federal taxes, the federal government spent $327 in the state in 1959-61. And of every $1,000 in Mississippi income, $286 came from the federal government. It would seem that Mississippians do not always live up to Putnam's admonitions to support rather than raid the public treasury.

A great take-down.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Blaming the Victim Edition

Plessy v. Ferguson allowed "separate but equal" to remain the law of the land, and so for the decades that followed we had segregated facilities and institutions under the premise that they would provide equal comfort and utility to each race. This of course was a fantasy--facilities for blacks were regularly inferior to those for whites. Why did this happen? Let's ask Congressman Frank Clark of Florida:

While on this phase of the subject, Mr. Speaker, I desire to refer to the unsupported, bald declarations of gentlemen that negroes are not supplied with accommodations equal to those furnished to white people upon railroads in the South. Why gentlemen will persist in these statements I can not understand. Let me suggest something here that in all probability these gentlemen have never thought of. On our Florida railroads--and I presume it is the same in other Southern states--the cars furnished for negro passengers are just as good as those furnished for white passengers. I am free to admit, however, that they do not long remain as good, as comfortable, and as clean as do those set apart for white passengers. You will not have to search long for the reason of this change. The average negro is perfectly happy when he finds himself eating a watermelon or going on a railroad excursion. The railroad companies in the South cater to this weakness of the negro for riding on trains, and scarcely a week passes in the summer time that a negro excursion is not "pulled off" in every neighborhood. They flock to these excursion trains by thousands and of course the cars set apart for the negroes on the regular passenger trains are used for negro excursions.

Imagine a nice, new passenger coach, packed with dirty, greasy, filthy negroes, down South, in midsummer, and you can readily understand why that car does not long remain as good, as clean, and as desirable as a similar car occupied exclusively by white travelers. It is said of Sam Jones, the great Georgia revivalist, that on one occasion a certain Northern gentleman asked him if there was very much difference in the instincts of a "nigger" and a white man. Sam replied that he didn't know as to that, but of one thing he was absolutely sure, and that was that there was a vast difference in the "out stinks" of the two.

--Quoted in I. A. Newby, The Development of Segregationist Thought, p. 94

It was commonplace for whites to blame blacks for the discriminations whites inflicted on them, but it was rarely so blatant and so unabashedly declared.
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Zombie racist of the day

(Well, technically zombie racist of nearly four months ago)

The Virtuous Woman, who informs us that "Slavery Is Not Wrong".

The Bible tells her so, you see:

With the issue of Slavery Christians are often put in a corner because they are trying to defend God and at the same time the bible nowhere directly attacks slavery. The bible does not condemn slavery. So Christians try to act like Job's friends and try to defend God in a rather foolish way by condemning slavery, as if God forgot to do it Himself in the bible. I think this is a very unwise thing for a Christian to do because if slavery was wrong, God would have said so himself. But He doesn't say its wrong.

It's true, the Bible doesn't say slavery is wrong. That should be a good indication that the Bible is an antiquated product of barbarians, and it should be treated as such rather than as the quintessence of morality and virtue. But no, Christians like her start with their conclusions ("the Bible is the word of God, and God is the arbiter of morality"), and try to fit fit everything else into that. Ergo, atrocities like slavery, genocide, and child murder are good because God says so, and God is good. Well, those trying in any way to be consistent say so... the others just ignore all the horrible things God commands in the Bible. Or they don't know about it.

But I wonder if she just lifted her arguments straight from John Fletcher's Studies on Slavery. Compare this:

I understand that there is so much evil in slavery, when masters abuse their slaves. That is wrong. The bible condemns treating others in an evil way. So this is not the issue. But slavery in itself is not wrong. Just as husbands can abuse wives, does it mean marriage is evil? Or parents can abuse their children, does it mean parenting is wrong? Because masters can be evil to their slaves, it doesn't mean that slavery is wrong. Just as wives are to be submissive to their husbands, likewise slaves are to be submissive to their masters.

...If the bible would have condemned slavery then the gospel itself would have been robbed of its meaning on some way. If slavery is wrong, then wives should not submit to their husbands, children should not obey parents, women should became equal to men and preach in churches ( which is forbidden in the bible by the way), and mostly no one should call Jesus their master or submit to the authority of God.

with this:

Or will he venture to extend his argument, and say that the command of marital and filial obedience proves nothing in their favour; since we are commanded to yield a like obedience to the king, although that king be the wicked Phocas? The fact is, the mere character of chief magistrate, of husband, of parent or slaveholder, is quite distinct from the character which their acts may severally heap upon them. It is, therefore, quite possible for us to reverence and obey the king, yet hold in contempt the person who fills the throne.

Civil government, the relations of parent and child, husband and wife, and slavery itself, are all ordinances of Divine wisdom, instituted for the benefit of man, under the condition of his fallen state. But because these relations are in accordance with the ordinances of God, it by no means follows that the abuses of them are so.

Suppose those who wish to abolish the institution of marriage should present the same argument in their behalf which Dr. Wayland has in this case, it will surely be just as legitimate in the one as the other. But will not Dr. Wayland readily say that there is no parallel between the particular relations compared? We doubt not, he would consider it too stupid to even require refutation.

See? Slavery is okay, because if we had to treat all humans equally, that might also apply to women.

Or how about this?

Such men would fashion the traffic to suit themselves, and would, doubtless, make their business an exceedingly wicked one. But none of the enormities named, or that could be named, constituted a necessary part of the institution of slavery, or necessarily emanated from it. What enormities have wicked men sometimes committed in the transportation of emigrants from Germany and Ireland? Wicked men, intrusted with power, have, at least sometimes, been found to abuse it. Is it any argument against the institution of marriage, because some women have made their husbands support and educate children not their own? Or, because some men murder, treat with cruelty, or make their wives totally miserable and wretched? None of these things were any part of the institution of marriage, but the reverse of it.

Christian morality: stuck in the nineteenth century. Or earlier.

Via Pharyngula, via Evolved and Rat/i/onal.

[Edit] I am reminded of something else. The Virtuous Slaveholder says "I have had disagreements with some Christians as they say slavery is wrong, its as if they are implying that God forgot to put that in the bible, but i disagree."

Indeed! Well, let's not leave it at that--what else do people do that suggests God might have made a mistake? Oh, right: they believe in racial equality.

If God Almighty had intended these two races to be equal, He would have so created them. He made the Caucasian of handsome figure, straight hair, regular features, high brow, and superior intellect. He created the negro, giving him a black skin, kinky hair, thick lips, flat nose, low brow, low order of intelligence, and repulsive features. I do not believe that these differences were the result of either accident or mistake on the part of the Creator. I believe He knew what He was doing, and I believe He did just what He wanted to do.

We believe in God, and we are willing to accept His work just as it fell from His hands. But these people who profess to believe that "a white man may be as good as a negro if the white man behaves himself" are not satisfied with God's work in this regard. They are quite sure that they can make a better job of it than did the Creator, hence we find them attempting to remove the black man from the menial sphere for which he was created, and where he may be useful, to a higher circle for which he is entirely unfitted and where he is perfectly useless.

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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Goldilocks Origin Myth Edition

I was planning on posting something else today, but since it's Native American Heritage Day, let's post something about Native Americans. But what? Hmm.

Well, to celebrate Native American heritage, let's post a racial myth of theirs:

Earthmaker made the world with trees and fields, with rivers, lakes, and springs, and with hills and valleys. It was beautiful. However, there weren't any humans, and so one day he decided to make some.

He scooped out a hole in a stream bank and lined the hole with stones to make a hearth, and he built a fire there. Then he took some clay and made a small figure that he put in the hearth. While it baked, he took some twigs and made tongs. When he pulled the figure out of the fire and had let it cool, he moved its limbs and breathed life into it, and it walked away. Earthmaker nonetheless realized that it was only half-baked. That figure became the white people.

Earthmaker decided to try again, and so he made another figure and put it on the hearth. This time he took a nap under a tree while the figure baked, and he slept longer than he intended. When he pulled the second figure out of the fire and had let it cool, he moved its limbs and breathed life into it, and it walked away. Earthmaker realized that this figure was overbaked, and it became the black people.

Earthmaker decided to try one more time. He cleaned the ashes out of the hearth and built a new fire. Then he scooped up some clay and cleaned it of any twigs or leaves, so that it was pure. He made a little figure and put it on the hearth, and this time he sat by the hearth and watched carefully as the figure baked. When this figure was done, he pulled it out of the fire and let it cool. Then he moved its limbs and breathed life into it, and it walked away. This figure was baked just right, and it became the red people.

From this page, in theory originally from the book Indian Fireside Tales by Dorothy Moulding Brown, which was also cited in Race: The History of an Idea in America.

I like to think of this as the Goldilocks theory of human creation. Blacks were cooked too long; whites were cooked too little; but Indians were cooked just right.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Heartless Doesn't Even Begin to Cover It

And we here beg leave to remark that we shall, in all instances, draw our proofs from the enemies of the institution. We quote from Berbick's Notes on America, page 20, and reported in vol. xvi. of the Christian Observer, published in London, May 10th, page 109:

"I saw two female slaves and their children sold by auction in the street; an incident of common occurrence here, though horrifying to myself and many other strangers. I could hardly bear to see them handled and examined like cattle; and when I heard their sobs and saw the big tears rolling down their cheeks at the thought of being separated, I could not refrain from weeping with them."

This may have been very cruel in the white man; but who has ever heard of a negro in Africa displaying such a strength of tenderness and sympathy as here manifested? And how are we to account for it in this instance, if not by the regenerating influence of a few generations in American and Christian slavery? However slow the action, the condition of the mental faculties was improved and the moral condition ameliorated.

--John Fletcher, Studies on Slavery, pp. 156-7

...I've read some pretty heartless, callous, and frankly evil things from dead racists, but I really think this takes the cake. Slavery, according to Fletcher, is a net plus because it gets blacks to cry when we tear apart their families.
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Coincidentally, I also mentioned the Hottentot Venus two years ago today

Providentia has a sobering post up about the "Hottentot Venus", Saartjie Bartman.

Via Greg Laden.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Why Won't Jesse Helms Just Hurry Up and Die? Edition

Alternate title: Ding Dong the Witch is Dead Edition.

I was planning on posting something else for today's DRB (well, actually, I was planning on just saying "fuck it" and shutting the blog down). But with the news of Jesse Helms' passing, I feel obligated to post, as have so many others (and there's a big round-up here).

I was unprepared for this development, so I'm basically just cribbing the same quotes as on all those pages, and some earlier stuff, too. So here goes:

While working on the primary campaign against Frank Porter Graham, Helms helped create an ad that read, "White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." Another ad featured photographs Helms doctored to illustrate the allegation that Graham's wife had danced with a black man.

Wikipedia summation of the portion of the FAIR article citing the Charlotte News and Observer article "To Mold a Nation - Part 1", 26 August 2001.

Here are some of Jesse's more fair-minded quotes:

On homosexuals: "degenerate, morally sick wretches."

On blacks: "Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."

On black civil-rights activists: "communists and sex perverts."

His record on race is, in fact, a step below deplorable. In his 1990 U.S. Senatorial campaign, in which he ran against a black man named Harvey Gantt, he eagerly used the politics of race to his advantage.

Helms' campaign ran this television ad: On the screen a pair of white hands appears. The hands crumple up a rejected job application while a voice-over intones, "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."

"Prehistoric Republicans bid adieu", Daily Nebraskan, 10 September 2001

Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced.

New York Times Magazine, 8 February 1981

She's a damn lesbian. I am not going to put a lesbian in a position like that [assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development]. If you want to call me a bigot, fine.

Part of that can be found in this MSNBC article.

I was a senior when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Roughly 2,000 of us joined a vigil on the quad for several days. The vigil was an instrument of our grieving and a voice for racial justice on Duke's campus. Higher wages and union recognition for the non-academic employees—cooks, food-servers, maids, and janitors, most of whom were black—became the focal issue. We sat peacefully and largely silent day and night, studying for finals, listening to Dr. King's speeches and singing "We Shall Overcome" every hour. To this day I count it as a major event in my spiritual formation.

Jesse Helms came on the television and said that all of the students sitting on the quad at Duke should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to "marry a Negro" (Duke students were practically all white in those days). Unless the student's parents approved of that prospect, Helms advised, he or she should go back to class. We all took the words as vindication for our cause.

From this article.

And this is just skimming the surface; that man had a lot more hate he shared with the world.
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Sunday Dead Racist Blogging: Comics Edition

Apparently in the early '60s, George Wallace had a mini comic printed during his campaign for governor of Alabama. Mostly it's about how he's such a swell guy, his background, and how he'll fight for the people of Alabama against that horrible federal government who wants to meddle in their affairs.

It kinda glosses over all the black people of Alabama that he would not be fighting for, of course.

You can read it here.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Secret Negro Presidents Edition

With Obama as the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, this November could bring about the election of the first African American president in history.

Unless you're of the opinion of John McLaughlin.

You make it sound as though this was the first time we've had a black president. ... Warren G. Harding was a negro!

McLaughlin is hardly alone in believing that Warren "Awesome Middle Name" Harding was black (or rather, that his great-great-grandfather was). This rumor surrounded Harding and his siblings throughout his life, and was published in newspapers nationwide just a few days before the 1920 presidential election. Douglas Daniel wrote in his essay "Ohio Newspapers and the 'Whispering Campaign' of the 1920 Presidential Election" (citations omitted):

Francis Russell reported in his Harding biography that a spiteful neighbor began the rumor after Harding's great-great-grandfather caught him stealing from his corn crib. Historian Robert K. Murray noted Hardings' ancestors lived near blacks after migrating in 1826 to central Ohio from Pennsylvania, which might have generated stories of intermarriage. Regardless of its validity, the rumor followed Harding throughout his life. As children growing up in the Ohio hamlet of Blooming Grove a few years after the Civil War, Harding and his brothers and sisters were taunted at times about being black.

The racist jeers continued even after he reached adulthood and began publishing the Marion Daily Star. A rival editor blasted Harding in print in May 1887: "We have no desire to draw the color line on the kink-haired youth that sees fit to use his smut machine only as a receptacle for a low order of adjectives--as nature did it for him." An editor at another Marion newspaper reportedly published the allegation of mixed blood while Harding was courting Florence De Wolfe, the daughter of a prominent Marion businessman. Nonetheless, they were married in 1891.

Harding's political career began in 1898 when he was elected to the first of two terms in the Ohio Senate. He was elected lieutenant governor in 1902 and later defeated for governor in 1910. He was concluding his first term in the United States Senate when he won the presidential nomination on the tenth ballot. The allegation that the Harding family was part black had surfaced in every Harding campaign for public office. However, Daugherty, his political ally, contended it had no impact, with the possible exception of the gubernatorial race that he lost in 1910, because voters considered it a lie. Harding rarely talked about the rumor, once telling a friend: "How do I know, Jim? One of my ancestors might have jumped the fence."

Several of the circulars that appeared during the 1920 campaign were linked to William Estabrook Chancellor. Once a superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C., he taught economics, politics, and social science at the College of Wooster, which is located about fifty miles south of Cleveland. In favor of Wilson and the League of Nations and against blacks and Jews, Chancellor wrote and distributed circulars and posters about Harding's genealogy. One circular stated that Harding's father was a mulatto and his grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-grandmother were black. Harding biographer Samuel Hopkins Adams contended Chancellor printed the circulars because he "had an obsession on the Negro question."

So there you have it. If you're a senile old loon like McLaughlin, you may believe that Obama will be our second black president, not our first.

Of course, if you're like J.A. Rogers or Auset Bakhufu, you might even believe that Obama'd be our sixth or seventh black president. And that's not even bringing Clinton into it.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Guilty Until Proven... Well Actually, Just Guilty Edition

This week's DRB is actually not worthy of mentioning so much because of the racism but because of another aspect of the man's thought. Thomas Nelson Page, in The Negro: The Southerner's Problem (1904), as part of his discussion of the problem of lynchings, wrote:

The charge that is often made, that the innocent are sometimes lynched, has little foundation. The rage of a mob is not directed against the innocent, but against the guilty; and its fury would not be satisfied with any other sacrifice than the death of the real criminal. Nor does the criminal merit any consideration, however terrible the punishment. The real injury is to the perpetrators of the crime of destroying the law, and to the community in which the law is slain.

Of course! Only guilty people are lynched, because being lynched is a sure evidence of guilt. Hence, all blacks who were lynched were guilty of raping white women, or some other atrocity, merely by virtue of the fact that they were lynched.

The parallels between this and the modern belief that anyone accused of a crime is guilty (a la Edwin Meese) or that anyone in Guantanamo must be an American-hating terrorist are disturbing.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: You Won't Find That in the Declaration of Independence Edition

Thomas Jefferson... didn't have that high an opinion of black people. But it could've been worse! Imagine if the Declaration of Independence went something like this:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, sling shots and knives.

We hold these truths to be self evident that all whites are created equal with certain human rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.

In every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers. The conduct should not be dwelt upon because of dead niggers. The conduct should not be dwelt upon because behind them they have an ancestral background of Pigmies, head hunters and snot snot suckers.

My friends it is time we wised up to these black devils. I tell you they are a group of two legged agitators who persist in walking up and down our streets protruding their black lips. If we don't stop helping these African flesh eaters, we will soon wake up and find Rev. King in the White House. LET'S GET ON THE BALL WHITE CITIZENS

This text was found in the Montgomery Advertiser, as well as on leaflets distributed around the State Coliseum on February 10, 1956. That's when James Eastland gave a speech for the White Citizens Council before 12,000 people; those words were also part of his speech, although the order was apparently switched around.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Lurking in the Bushes Edition

But the social intercourse between the races in the South, which was so helpful to the blacks, has now practically ceased. The children of this generation no longer play and frolic together. White ladies no longer visit Negro cabins. The familiar salutation of "Uncle" or "Auntie" is no longer heard. The lady's maid sleeps no more by the bedside of her mistress. The Southern woman with her helpless little children in solitary farm house no longer sleeps secure in the absence of her husband with doors unlocked but safely guarded by black men whose lives would be freely given in her defence. Bat now, when a knock is heard at the door, she shudders with nameless horror. The black brute is lurking in the dark, a monstrous beast, crazed with lust. His ferocity is almost demoniacal. A mad bull or a tiger could scarcely be more brutal. A whole community is now frenzied with horror, with blind and furious rage for vengeance. A stake is driven; the wretched brute, covered with oil, bruised and gashed, beaten and hacked and maimed, amid the jeers and shouts and curses, the tears of anger and of joy, the prayers and the maledictions of thousands of civilized people, in the sight of school-houses, court-houses and churches is burned to death. Since the abolition of slavery and the growing up of a new generation of Negroes, crimes that are too hideous to describe have been committed every month, every week, frequently every day, against the helpless women and children of the white race, crimes that were unknown in slavery. And, in turn, cruelties have been inflicted upon Negroes by whole communities of whites, which, if attempted during slavery, would have been prevented at any sacrifice. I do not hesitate to say that more horrible crimes have been committed by the generation of Negroes that have grown up in the South since slavery than by the six preceding generations in slavery. And also that the worst cruelties of slavery all combined for two centuries were not equal to the savage barbarities inflicted in retaliation upon the Negroes by the whites during the last twenty years.

--George T. Winston, "The Relation of the Whites to the Negroes", Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18, July 1901, pp. 108-09. Originally an address at the fifth annual meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Gee. Why on earth would white women be afraid of blacks after being told that they lurk in the darkness in order to snatch up and devour rape women? Blacks just served as a bogeyman for grown-ups.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: They All Look Alike Edition

Londo: I don't know how they see out of them anyway. Tiny, beady, squinty little things aren't they?
Drazi Ambassador: Ambassador...
Londo: No the Maker has not been kind to you. Must be terrible trying to fly at night without running into entire planets.
DA: Are you saying the Centauri do not know what ships are patrolling their borders.
Londo: No, of course we know. The Maker has gifted us with great big eyes, and great big scanners, and great big, ah ... well that is no concern of yours.

Babylon 5, "Rumors, Bargains and Lies"

White people must have terrible eyesight. That's because they can't seem to tell apart people of any other race. Not Chinese:

The Chinese seem to be incapable of understanding our religion; but still less are they capable of understanding our political institutions. To confer the franchise upon them would be to put the balance of power on the Pacific into the hands of a people who have no conception of the trust involved, and who would have no wish to use it rightly if they had--would be to give so many additional votes to the employers of Chinese, or put them up for sale by the Chinese head centers in San Francisco. At least one Chinaman has already been naturalized, and though none of them have any intention of remaining here permanently, if it would pay them to acquire votes and they could be protected in voting, there are none of them who would object to being naturalized every hour in the day. The swearing required is nothing to them, and as for identification, all Chinamen look alike to the unpracticed eye.

Not Puerto Ricans:

For voting, the law requires one year in the state, four months in the county, one month in the district. But it is impossible to check, even if the holdover handout officials would want to. The Puerto Ricans all look alike, their names all sound alike and if an inspector calls in one of the swarming flats in the teeming tenements, nobody speaks English.

And not blacks:

The features reflect the inner nature, and they are more or less distinctly developed as we ascend or descend in the scale of being. The features of the white reflect all the higher and nobler as well as baser qualities of the mind. The negro has more or less of a dead conformity. On visiting a plantation of them at the South, it is difficult to tell one from another. The flat nose, enormous lips, and protuberent jaws, together with his flat, indistinct and shapeless features, strikingly approximate to the lower animals, and they are as utterly incapable of reflecting certain emotions as so much flesh and blood in any other part of the body. If the Creator, therefore, gave the negro the higher capacities that the Abolitionists claim, it is very evident that He denied him all opportunity to reflect them in his countenance.

It's a wonder that whites managed to do much of anything when they apparently can't see a damn thing.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Tom Brady is a Racist! Edition

I chose that title just to see how many hits I'd get from people Googling Tom Brady of the New England Patriots to see if he's a racist. So for those of you who do find this page because of that search, you can stop reading now--I wouldn't even know that Tom Brady existed were it not for Family Guy. The person I'm actually going to discuss is Tom P. Brady, and his pamphlet Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation ...America Has Its Choice. This was originally an address before the Sons of the American Revolution in Greenwood, Mississippi, the author informs us in a prefatory note, and later transcribed and published by the Association of Citizens' Councils.

But what is "Black Monday"? Well, in this pamphlet at least, it refers to Monday, May 17, 1954--the date the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in Brown v. Board of Education. Since tomorrow is the 54th anniversary of the decision, I felt it would be worthwhile to look back at what certain people thought of it at the time. Let's start with the appellation, Black Monday. In the foreword, Brady writes:

"Black Monday" is the name coined by Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi to designate Monday, May 17th, 1954, a date long to be remembered throughout this nation. This is the date upon which the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its socialistic decision in the Segregation cases on appeal from the States of Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

"Black Monday" is indeed symbolic of the date. Black denoting darkness and terror. Black signifying the absence of light and wisdom. Black embodying grief, destruction and death. Should Representative Williams accomplish nothing more during his membership in Congress he has more than justified his years in office by the creating of this epithet, the originating of this watchword, the shouting of this battle cry.

Black Monday ranks in importance with July 4th, 1776, the date upon which our Declaration of Independence was signed. May 17th, 1954, is the date upon which the declaration of socialistic doctrine was officially proclaimed throughout this nation. It was on Black Monday that the judicial branch of our government usurped the sacred privilege and right of the respective states of this union to educate their youth. This usurpation constitutes the greatest travesty of the American Constitution and jurisprudence in the history of this nation.

Not much for hyperbole, is he? Yes, the Supreme Court "usurped the sacred privilege and right of the ... states ... to educate their youth" by commanding that they actually educate all their youths, and not just the white ones. Strange, that. You'll notice also that he keeps calling the decision "socialistic"--this is because he was rather unabashedly trying to tie it to Communism and say "See? This is what Stalin would have wanted, so it must be bad. Because Stalin was evil, because he was an atheist and evil."

No, really. The inside cover bears this bit of text underneath portraits of Jefferson and Stalin:

Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Stalin were both instrumental in the establishing of secular governments. Both men made mistakes and both men are dead. Their respective governments survive them.

Jefferson's government is founded on a firm belief in God, the dignity of the individual and on the institution of capital. Stalin's government is based on atheism, the absolute sovereignty of the State, and collectivism. Jefferson's government is the father of freedom and liberty. Stalin's government is the master of regimentation and slavery. Jefferson's government symbolizes light, truth, peace and life. Stalin's government represents darkness, deceit, war and death.

The principles upon which these two governments are founded are irreconcilable. They cannot be fused any more than can day exist in night. The twilight of the martyrdom of man will result. They are now engaged in a mortal conflict, and only one can survive. "Choose you this day whom ye will serve."

The United States of America had nothing at all to do with slavery, no sir! That's what commies do.

There's that much insanity, and we haven't even actually started the speech yet.

The pamphlet's main portion starts with a section labeled "The Three Species of Man". I can't be sure if he was a polygenist or just was stupidly using the word 'species' in place of 'race', but I'm kinda leaning towards the former given this passage:

So, at some time in the distant past, we need not be concerned about the exact date, during the earth's eternal pilgrimage about our sun, the insurgence of vertebrates and mammals took place. Man was created last, and it was then that the origin of all our problems occurred. This creation, as detailed in "The Conquest," by Dr. Breasted, took place in the "Great Northwest Quadrant." This territory embraced "All of Europe, all of Africa north of the Sahara. Its eastern boundary extended to the Ural M1ountains, which divide Europe and Asia, and a line parallel to the 60th Meridian east of Greenwich, extended from the Ural southward into the Indian Ocean. In addition, it includes the Near East, which embraces Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia and Arabia. This is the original home of the Great White Race, Homo Caucasius."

"On the east of and adjoining the Northwest Quadrant, in the secluded plateaus of high Asia, there arose and developed a man with straight and wiry hair, round head, almost beardless face, and a yellow skin, Homo Mongoloideus."

"South of the Northwest Quadrant, separated from the Great White Race by an impassable desert barrier and to the west by unconquered seas, lay the teeming black world of Africa, the home of Homo Africanus. Isolated to themselves, their evolutionary development was very homogeneous. They are wooly-haired, long-headed, dark-skinned Negroids."

He seems to be quoting someone (Charles Wallace Collins and his book Whither Solid South to be precise) to say that people sprung up fully-formed in their respective habitats, and hence are members of different species with different taxonomies. Or he could just be butchering biology, or both. He certainly thoroughly butchers biology and evolution in the following paragraphs, where he discusses how far the white and Asian "species" had progressed in history, describing it as an "evolutionary march" and a "marvelous and complex evolutionary development." Then he goes on to discuss blacks in his made-up evolutionary context, spouting nonsense like "the negroid man ... evolved not", and "he did not evolve simply because of his inherent limitations."

Brady then spent several pages trying to show that amalgamation with blacks had destroyed Egypt, India, the Mayans, and he does so by quoting James Densons Sayers' Can the White Race Survive? solely and repeatedly. Nothing shows your mastery of history like quoting a man who thinks that only blacks and whites exist and everyone else is just a product of black-white couplings.

Brady's abhorrence of miscegenation and its supposed consequences is hard to overstate. He refers to it as "the white man [drinking] the cup of black hemlock", and countries which he believes are in a dilapidated state because of such miscegenation as having "the mark of the beast":

The mark of the beast is apparent today, even to the most casual observer, in the various types in Mexico, the Yucatan Indians, the Hondurans, the North Central Americans and Caribs. The Proto-Negro sign withs its accompanying destruction cannot be disputed.

This might also be Sayers' influence, as in the following section ("Purity of Jewish Blood", where he continues quoting Sayers), he writes

The word negro does not occur in the religious writing, but the word Ethiopian (negroid Egyptians) is present and later came to mean negro. Frequently "the beast" is referred to. To lie before the beast was prohibited and punishable. The beast too was required to sit in sack cloth and ashes and repent. (Jonah, 3rd Chapter; Exodus, 22:19; Leviticus, 18:23; 20:15, 16.)

And we already know that Sayers thought 'the beast' meant 'Negro'.

Much later he returns to the topic of miscegenation in a seemingly-random two paragraphs, which have no relation to the preceding or following paragraphs:

The loveliest and the purest of God's creatures, the nearest thing to an angelic being that treads this terrestrial ball is a well-bred, cultured Southern white woman or her blue-eyed, golden-haired little girl.

The maintenance of peaceful and harmonious relationship, which have been conducive to the well-being of both the white and negro races in the South, has been possible because of the inviolability of Southern Womanhood. Cases of moral leprosy and degeneracy have produced sporadic instances of amalgamation of whites with negroes. It is such instances as these which produced the negro hybrids of America.

This of course explains the whole real reason behind his, and many others', resistance to Brown--they didn't want whites and blacks mingling, or at least not white women and black men. Their supposed peace and harmony was based on white women not having sex with black men... however that works. So by providing black schoolboys access to white schoolgirls, the Supreme Court threatened the peace and harmony of the South. Generally because the white men would then kill the black men.

Of course, Brady had to include a masturbatory, self-congratulatory paean to whites in the midst of his nonsense (separate from the above paragraph on white women), so he talks about Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Milton, Galileo, and so on, and gives a special nod to the biologists whose works he so thoroughly and unabashedly mangles to support his preconceived notions of how the world works. "The true miracles," he says, were not the discovery of the New World by Columbus but were those which "were to be discovered by Darwin, Huxley, Hall, Mendel, and their contemporaries." Maybe if he actually read Darwin, though, he wouldn't have been talking about "three different species of man" in the next paragraph, since Darwin was a monogenist. Or maybe he did read Darwin and just dismissed him when he felt like it, since he had a higher authority to rely on for his racism--God!

The Supreme Architect of the Universe saw fit that there should be, and are today, on this planet, three distinct species of man. If God had deemed it wise and just that there should be only one specie of man on this earth, the laws of heredity and the stimuli of environment would have produced this uniform man. There are those today who would improve upon the handiwork of the Divine Architect and would cause the amalgamation of all races if they had the power to do so. If the Omnipotent Creator had willed it, this single specie of man would have been located over all the face of the earth. The three species of man would not have been placed in different locales.

Of course, by this logic, if God had intended to prevent people of different races from having kids, he would have made it so that they couldn't, so clearly God's plan is for everyone to go out and have a multiracial baby, and Brady was being blasphemous for trying to stop that. Right?

The next bit is your typical racist claptrap. Blacks are incompetent savages who are unable to do anything; slavery was good for them but I don't support it but really the abolitionists were the evil ones and hey the South wasn't responsible for slavery anyways because all we did was keep buy and keep slaves, we didn't sell them; whites like me are so awesome, just look at how many accomplished whites I can list off the top of my head, and the fact that I don't know of any accomplished blacks means that they must not exist; Reconstruction was hell brought to earth because Negroes had civil rights and we hadn't taken them away yet. And finally, he gets to the court case in question, starting his discussion of it by essentially accusing the court of being 'judicial activists':

The Supreme Court does not possess the legislative power. When a case comes before the Court, as does a case before any court, the issue is joined, arguments are made and a decision rendered. That decision binds the parties to that particular case. The legislative power of the Federal Government is vested in the Congress of the United States. The Supreme Court has no power to make a decree which could have the effect of an Act of Congress. The Supreme Court can, of course, exceed its powers and violate the Constitution and invade the province of Congress and that of the state legislatures--as has frequently been the case. Has the Supreme Court the power to establish by decree a national segregation policy which would bind all of the forty-eight states--a power which Congress itself does not possess?

This is the true question which "Black Monday" actually decided.

Yes, there's nothing in the case itself about constitutionality of state's actions at all.

He starts out by quoting some from the Attorney General's brief, mocking most of what he quoted, and then turns to the opposing briefs and several other sources for "warnings" of what would follow the decision:

In addition to giving the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the
amendment, and the enactment of the constitutional provisions and statutes of South Carolina, they also point out the grave dangers which are attendant upon the abolition of segregation in the schools of that State. These warnings the Supreme Court completely ignored.

These warnings basically consisted of the fact that whites would riot in the streets if blacks were allowed in their schools, so if you want peace and safety you'd better not rule against us. Brady quotes one of the briefs describing the testimony of a superintendent, putting in bold the conclusions

that there would not be community acceptance of mixed schools at this time; that there would be a probability of violent emotional reaction in the communities; that it would be impossible to have peaceable association of the races in the public schools; and that it would eliminate the public schools in most, if not all, of the communities in the State

I wonder how people think this is a compelling argument before the Supreme Court? "This law must be constitutional because we really, really, really wouldn't like it if you found it wasn't." Yet Brady laments that "The Supreme Court's mind was impervious to the pathos of this appeal and these arguments."

Later he says that while the Supreme Court should be respected, you shouldn't actually abide by what it says. In fact, if you do think that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the law and hence its decisions should be followed, then you're unpatriotic.

The Supreme Court should be accorded all the deference and respect possible because of the nature of the office. It should be given at least the esteem accorded Pontius Pilate. It should, however, be borne in mind that it is not infallible, and it is not clothed with "the divinity which doth hedge a king." To blindly submit to an erroneous decision which breaks all long established rules of law, violates the principles of stare decisis, and adopts sociological assertions instead of laws as its guide is not loyalty or patriotism. It is simple folly or ignorance. Since when has a fallacious opinion of the Supreme Court been above review or censure? There are those who confuse freedom of thought and criticism with subversiveness. Each decision stands on its own legs and if it is unsound, is not based on solid rules of law which have been in force and effect it should be so classified. If the result of the decision will be harmful to the bulk of the people of this country, will be calculated to foster those forces which seek this country's destruction, then to fail to resist the decision is morally wrong and the man who fails to condemn it and do all that he can to see that it is reversed is not a patriotic American.

Hm. If "each decision stands on its own legs and if it is unsound, is not based on solid rules of law which have been in force and effect it should be so classified", then why are you making such a big deal about stare decisis? Maybe he's saying that he can decide if a decision is unsound and thus should be ignored, but the court itself cannot. He later repeats the sentiment that the decision should be resisted because it's un-American, it's communistic.

Communism disguised as "new democracy" is still communism, and tyranny masquerading as liberalism is still tyranny. The resistance of communism and tyranny, irrespective of whatever guise they may adopt, is not treason. It is the prerequisite
of freedom, the very essence of liberty.

And then he continues quoting people who chastised the court for not realizing that the decision was wrong because it pissed off a lot of white people. One was an editorial from the Jackson Daily News in Mississippi:

"Human blood may stain Southern soil in many places because of this decision, but the dark red stains of that blood will be on the marble steps of the United States Supreme Court building.

"The Supreme Court is responsible for our being bloodthirsty savages, because surely we're not responsible for our own actions."

Brady also quotes Senator James Eastland, who seems as confused as he is:

"Let me make this clear, Mr. President: There is no racial hatred in the South. The negro race is not an oppressed race.

If it weren't so tragic that he actually believed that, that statement would be hilarious.

Free men have the right to send their children to schools of their own choosing, free from governmental interference and to build up their own culture, free from governmental interference.

Gee, if Eastland actually believed that, he would probably have approved of Brown v. Board because, well, it just concluded that yes, "free men have the right to send their children to schools of their own choosing, free from governmental interference." But of course Eastland doesn't believe that black people are free, or have rights, or that it's governmental interference when the state governments interfere with the right of black kids to go to school, or however the fuck he rationalized this in his own mind.

And he goes on and on about Communism, ranting about how "Marxian Christianity" and "Marxian Education" (the headings of two sections) are to blame for people thinking that blacks actually have rights. And they're to blame for miscegenation, which blacks go along with because they all recognize that they're stupid, inferior trash, and want to improve themselves by fucking whites. So some of his suggested solutions are "I. We must stop the influx of Communists in our country", "II. We must teach our children the truth about Communism, its infiltration of our country, and the facts of ethnology", "III. The Neo-Socialist and Marxian Christians should be exposed".

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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Pearly Gates Edition

What if the pearly gates weren't so pearly? What if they were more... jet?

So intense is the aversion even of many humane and educated persons in this city [Philadelphia] to the colored race, that apparently they would shrink back from the gate of Heaven, if it were opened by a coloured man shewed coloured people within.

--George Combe, Notes on the United States of North America, 1841, vol. II, pp. 63-64. Cited in William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots, 1960, p. 36.

Not a terribly insightful look into the minds of dead racists, I just liked the quote.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Biogenetic Edition

You may be wondering what the hell that title is about. Well, it's a reference to Ernst Haeckel and his (false) biogenetic law. You can read about it here.

I was just amused because I found a quote from someone who was arguing basically the same thing, and using the idea to rank the different races.

The probability may now be assumed that the human race sprung from one stock, which was at first in a state of simplicity, if not barbarism. As yet we have not seen very distinctly how the various branches of the family, as they parted off, and took up separate ground, became marked by external features so peculiar. Why are the Africans black, and generally marked by coarse features and ungainly forms? Why are the Mongolians generally yellow, the Americans red, the Caucasians white? Why the flat features of the Chinese, the small stature of the Laps, the soft round forms of the English, the lank features of their descendants, the Americans? All of these phenomena appear, in a word, to be explicable on the ground of development. We have already seen that various leading animal forms represent stages in the embryotic progress of the highest--the human being. Our brain goes through the various stages of a fish's, a reptile's, and a mammifer's brain, and finally becomes human. There is more than this, for, after completing the animal transformations, it passes through the characters in which it appears, in the Negro, Malay, American, and Mongolian nations, and finally is Caucasian. The face partakes of these alterations. "One of the earliest points in which ossification commences is the lower jaw. This bone is consequently sooner completed than the other bones of the head, and acquires a predominance, which, as is well known, it never loses in the Negro. During the soft pliant state of the bones of the skull, the oblong form which they naturally assume, approaches nearly the permanent shape of the Americans. At birth, the flattened face, and broad smooth forehead of the infant, the position of the eyes rather towards the side of the head, and the widened space between, represent the Mongolian form; while it is only as the child advances to maturity, that the oval face, the arched forehead, and the marked features of the true Caucasian, become perfectly developed."* The leading characters, in short, of the various races of mankind are simply representations of particular stages in the development of the highest or Caucasian type. The Negro exhibits permanently the imperfect brain, projecting lower jaw, and slender bent limbs of a Caucasian child some considerable time before the period of its birth. The aboriginal American represents the same child nearer birth. The Mongolian is an arrested infant newly born. And so forth. All this is as respects form; but whence colour? This might be supposed to have depended on climatal agencies only; but it has been shewn by overpowering evidence to be independent of these. In further considering the matter, we are met by the very remarkable fact that colour is deepest in the least perfectly developed type, next in the Malay, next in the American, next in the Mongolian, the very order in which the degrees of development are ranged. May not colour, then, depend upon development also? We do not, indeed, see that a Caucasian fetus at the stage which the African represents is anything like black; neither is a Caucasian child yellow, like the Mongolian. There may, nevertheless, be a character of skin at a certain stage of development which is predisposed to a particular colour when it is presented as the envelope of a mature being. Development being arrested at so immature a stage in the case of the Negro, the skin may take on the colour as an unavoidable consequence of its imperfect organization. It is favourable to this view, that Negro infants are not deeply black at first, but only acquire the full colour tint after exposure for some time to the atmosphere. Another consideration in its favour is that there is a likelihood of peculiarities of form and colour, since they are so coincident, depending on one set of phenomena. If it be admitted as true, there can be no difficulty in accounting for all the varieties of mankind. They are simply the result of so many advances and retrogressions in the developing power of the human mothers, these advances and retrogressions being, as we have formerly seen, the immediate effect of external conditions in nutrition, hardship, &c., and also, perhaps, to some extent, of the suitableness and unsuitableness of marriages, for it is found that parents too nearly related tend to produce offspring of the Mongolian type,--that is, persons who in maturity still are a kind of children. According to this view, the greater part of the human race must be considered as having lapsed or declined from the original type. In the Caucasian or Indo-European family alone has the primitive organization been improved upon. The Mongolian, Malay, American, and Negro, comprehending perhaps five-sixths of mankind, are degenerate. Strange that the great plan should admit of failures and aberrations of such portentuous magnitude! But pause and reflect; take time into consideration: the past history of mankind may be, to what is to come, but as a day. Look at the progress even now making over the barbaric parts of the earth by the best examples of the Caucasian type, promising not only to fill up the waste places, but to supersede the imperfect nations already existing. Who can tell what progress may be made, even in a single century, towards reversing the proportions of the perfect and imperfect types? and who can tell but that the time during which the mean types have lasted, long as it appears, may yet be thrown entirely into the shade by the time during which the best types will remain predominant?

--Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Mankind, 1844.

To wit: whites are the most advanced, perfect race, and so they progress in the womb from Negro to Malay to Indian forms, being born sort of Mongoloid, until finally they grow up to be white.

Of course, it's probably unfair to describe this as similar to Haeckel's idea, since Haeckel published thirty years after Vestiges' first edition.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Occam's Razor Disagrees II Edition

Last week I talked a little about Josiah Nott, and in the course of doing my reading for that post I found something that had to be shared.

It has been asserted by writers, that when the grade of Quinteroon is arrived at, all trace of black blood is lost, and that they cannot be distinguished from the whites. Now if this be true, most of the Mulattoes must cease to breed before they arrive at this point of mixture; for though I have passed most of my life in places where the two races have been mingling for many generations, I have rarely if ever met an individual tainted with black blood, in who I could not detect it without difficulty. These higher grades should be extremely common if the chain was not broken by death and sterility. How else can the fact be accounted for?

--Josiah Clark Nott, "The Mulatto a Hybrid--probable extermination of the two races if the Whites and Blacks are allowed to intermarry", American Journal of the Medical Sciences, v. 6, July 1843, p. 255

Apparently Nott couldn't fathom how he might meet a 'black' person who "cannot be distinguished from the whites", because every black person he ever met he could tell was black!

He hadn't caught on to the complete lack of logic in that statement two and a half years later, when he repeated it pretty much verbatim in the Southern Quarterly Review.
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Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Fuck You, Ben Stein Edition

One of my interests is the war waged against the theory of evolution by ignorant creationist hordes. I don't blog about it much because I'm not a biologist (of course I'm not a historian either, but that doesn't really stop me from bloviating on certain subjects). Demonstrating why creationist caricatures of evolution are, well, just that--caricatures--is somewhat beyond me.

However, creationists do not limit themselves to attacking the theory of evolution on its scientific merits. They often will also (or even solely) attack it for what they consider its implications to be, as in the mockery of a documentary that was released today, Flunked--I mean, Expelled. They will say, for instance, that Darwin was a horrible racist and that the theory of evolution itself is horribly racist (for instance, it leads directly to the Holocaust, says Ben Stein).

Biology I may know little about. But dead racists? Now the ball's in Farnsworth's court!

If we are to consider whether Charles Darwin was a racist, and whether the hypothesis he proposed is also racist, we should examine it not from today's standpoint, but from the standpoint of the mid-nineteenth century. What was the state of science and race back then?

For a long while, people had wondered how the separate races of man had come to be. The ancient Greeks had pondered the issue of what made black men, black, and generally concluded that it was the result of climate:

The story of Phaëton's driving the chariot sun wildly through the heavens apparently served as an explanation for the Ethiopian's blackness even before written records, and traces of this ancient fable were still drifting about during the seventeenth century.

The Æthiopians then were white and fayre,
Though by the worlds combustion since made black
When wanton Phaeton overthrew the Sun.

Less fancifully, Ptolemy had made the important suggestion that the Negro's blackness and woolly hair were caused by exposure to the hot sun and had pointed out that people in northern climates were white and those in temperate areas an intermediate color.¹

This idea was perhaps the prevailing scientific opinion on the question of the origin of races even centuries later:

In general, the most satisfactory answer to the problem was some sort of reference to the action of the sun, whether the sun was assumed to have scorched the skin, drawn the bile, or blackened the blood. People living on the Line had obviously been getting too much of it; after all, even Englishmen were darkened by a little exposure. How much more, then, with the Negroes who were "so scorched and vexed with the heat of the sunne, that in many places they cursed it when it riseth." The sun's heat was itself sometimes described as a curse--a not unnatural reaction on the part of those Englishmen who visited the West African coast where the weather was "of such putrifying qualitie, that it rotted the coates of their backs." This association of the Negro's color with the sun became a commonplace in Elizabethan literature; as the Prince of Morocco apologized, "Mislike me not for my complexion,/ The shadow'd livery of the burnish'd sun,/ To whom I am a neighbour and near bred."²

This seemed reasonable, but one ran into a problem when it became apparent that very different races existed in very similar climates across the globe...

Unfortunately this theory ran headlong into a stubborn fact of nature which simply could not be overridden: if the equatorial inhabitants of Africa were blackened by the sun, why not the people living on the same line in America? Logic required them to be the same color. As Ptolemy's formidably authoritative Geographica stated this logic, "Reason herself asserts that all animals, and all plants likewise, have a similarity under the same kind of climate or under similar weather conditions, that is, when under the same parallels, or when situated at the same distance from either pole." Yet by the middle of the sixteenth century it was become perfectly apparent that the Indians living in the hottest regions of the New World could by no stretch of the imagination be described as black. They were "olive" or "tawny," and moreover they had long hair rather than the curious wool of Negroes; clearly they were a different sort of men. ... Clearly the method of accounting for human complexion by latitude just did not work.³

...or that one race could span across many different climates...

We will, therefore, abstain from any further details, in order not to extend these remarks beyond the limits of general statements, and would only add one fact respecting the American Indians; as this race presents a most remarkable feature in the point of view under consideration. It has been satisfactorily established that over the whole continent of America south of the arctic zone (which is inhabited by Esquimaux), all the numerous tribes of Indians have the same physical character; that they belong to the same race, from north to south, and that the primitive inhabitants of the more northern or southern regions. In this case we have the greatest uniformity in the character of the tribes of an entire continent, under the most different climatic influences.⁴

Further, it was reasoned that if climate or environment effected a change in people, then putting people of one race in the region generally inhabited by people of another, then they or their descendants should gradually change to resemble the natives. That is, whites who lived in Africa should be transformed into blacks, blacks who lived in Europe should become white, and whites who lived in America should become Native Americans. But this was absurd--who had ever heard of such an occurrence?

How can a reasonable man believe that any thing short of a miracle, could, in the temperate parts of Australia or America, change the white race into Australians or Indians. Both reason and fact are opposed to such a supposition. Observation and history alone can settle these points, and we have no record of such changes having occurred, or being now in progress.⁵

And again,

No one ever saw a Negro, Mongol, or Indian, born from any but his own species. Has any one heard of an Indian child born from white or black parents in America, during more than two centuries that these races have been living here? Is not this brief and simple statement of the case sufficient to satisfy any one, that the diversity of species now seen on the earth, cannot be accounted for on the assumption of congenital or accidental origin?⁶

No-one had ever heard of anything like a black man turning into a white one, or a white person giving birth to a black person (as an aside, it amuses me how much the above paragraph matches current creationist talking points). And studies had shown that the races existed perfectly unchanged thousands of years ago; Josiah Nott made numerous references to Egyptian monument which he alleged showed the races as they exist today, being just as distinct four thousand years ago. In fact, this image appeared in his book Types of Mankind:

Later on that page he writes "although the effigies we present are small, they portray a specimen of each type with sufficient accuracy to show that four races were very distinct 3300 years ago."⁷ If the races had remained unchanged for thousands of years--as far back as Bishop Usher had dated the Flood, and even before that! If the earth had only existed for so many thousands of years, how could one possibly think that the races had been diversified into the types present today in the minority of that time, yet remained unchanged for the majority of it? As Louis Agassiz put it, "five thousand years ago the negroes were as different from the white race as they are now, and that, therefore, neither time nor climate nor change of habitation has produced the differences."⁸

No, the conclusion that scientists came to was that the races had always been distinct:

[I]n 1846 ... [Samuel] Morton sent an account of his collection of crania to the newly formed American Ethnological Society. Emboldened by the work of his colleagues, here for the first time publicly, he clearly set forth his conclusions concerning the origin of races. Although he had already seen enough of the material Squier and Davis had turned up to be convinced that the Mound Builders were of the same race as the modern Indians, he did not believe that the Indians and the Mound Builders were descended from a single pair. On the contrary, he believed "that they have originated from several, perhaps even from many pairs, which were adapted, from the beginning, to the varied localities they were designed to occupy. . . . In other words, I regard the American nations as the true autochthones, the primeval inhabitants of this vast continent; and when I speak of their being of one race or of one origin, I allude only to their indigenous relation to each other, as shown in all those attributes of mind and body which have been so amply illustrated by modern ethnography."⁹

The human races, they theorized, had been created separately and specially adapted to the areas where they were found, much as they supposed animals were:

The circumstance, that, wherever we find a human race naturally circumscribed, it is connected in its limitation with what we call, in natural history, a zoölogical and botanical province,--that is to say, with the natural limitation of a particular association of animals and plants,--shows most unequivocally the intimate relation existing between mankind and the animal kingdom in their adaptation to the physical world. The arctic race of men, covering the treeless region near the Arctics in Europe, Asia, and America, is circumscribed in the three continents within limits very similar to those occupied by that particular combination of animals which are peculiar to the same tracts of land and sea.

The region inhabited by the Mongolian race is also a natural zoölogical province, covered by a combination of animals naturally circumscribed within the same regions. The Malay race covers also a natural zoölogical province. New Holland, again, constitutes a very peculiar zoölogical province, in which we have another particular race of men. And it is further remarkable, in this connection, that the plants and animals now living on the continent of Africa, south of the Atlas, within the same range within which the negroes are naturally circumscribed, have a character differing widely from that of the plants and animals of the northern shores of Africa and the valley of Egypt; while the Cape of Good Hope, within the limits inhabited by Hottentots, is characterized by a vegetation and a fauna equally peculiar, and differing in its features from that over which the African race is spread.

Such identical circumscriptions between the limits of two series of organized beings so widely differing as man and animals and plants, and so entirely unconnected in point of descent, would, to the mind of a naturalist, amount to a demonstration that they originated together within the districts which they now inhabit. We say that such an accumulation of evidence would amount to demonstration; for how could it, on the contrary, be supposed that man alone would assume new peculiarities, and features so different from his primitive characteristics, whilst the animals and plants circumscribed within the same limits would continue to preserve their natural relations to the fauna and flora of other parts of the world?

If the Creator of one set of these living beings had not been also the Creator of the other, and if we did not trace the same general laws throughout nature, there might be room left for the supposition, that, while men inhabiting different parts of the world originated from a common centre, the plants and animals now associated with them in the same countries originated on the spot. But such inconsistencies do not occur in the laws of nature.

The coincidence of the geographical distribution of the human races with that of animals, the disconnection of the climatic conditions where we have similar races, and the connection of climatic conditions where we have different human races, show, further, that the adaptation of different races of men to different parts of the world must be intentional, as well as that of other beings; that men were primitively located in the various parts of the world they inhabit, and that they arose everywhere in those harmonious numeric proportions with other living beings, which would at once secure their preservation and contribute to their welfare.¹⁰

In short, their theory held that "as a question of natural history, the investigation of the human races leads to the idea of a diversity of their origin, rather than to the supposition that they have originated from a common stock."¹¹

But it was more than just that different races had separate origins. The proposition of polygenesis held that they were completely different species, and ought--nay, must--be treated as such. For instance, the races were said to have different brain sizes, and therefore different levels of intelligence¹²:

That race appeared immutable meant that the characteristics attributed to the races--namely, inferiority, stupidity, laziness, and an incapacity for civilization in blacks--were also unchangeable.

If, then, the negro races stand at the lowest point in the scale of human beings, and we know of no moral or physical agencies which can redeem them from their degradation, it is clear that they are incapable of self-government, and that any attempt to improve their condition is warring against an immutable law of nature.¹³

This meant, to some at least, that the black man must be kept in slavery:

What disposition God, in his providence, will eventually make of these blacks, cannot be foretold; but it is our duty to provide for our own happiness and theirs, as long as we can. In dealing with this question, it will not do to be guided by abstract notions of liberty and slavery. We can only judge the future by the past; and as experience proves that the negro is better off in slavery at the South, than in freedom elsewhere, it is the part of philanthropy to keep him here, as we keep our children in subjection for their own good.¹⁴

And guess what demolished the idea of polygenesis? That's right--Darwin's theory of evolution.

"One good effect is already manifest," [Asa Gray] announced. Darwinism rendered irrelevant "the hypothesis of a multiplicity of human species." So far from providing for plural creations of man, Darwin described a process which made it possible to derive all categories of life from an original one and placed the organic kingdom on a self-sustaining basis. Or, as Gray put it, "the very first step backwards" into the Darwinian past "makes the Negro and Hottentot our blood-relations."¹⁵

Darwin himself was a monogenist¹⁶, and predicted that as a result of the acceptance of evolution, "the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death."¹⁷

One of the most widespread tactics used when setting up a group as something to be discriminated against, to be reviled, to be eliminated--indeed, it may be absolutely necessary to accomplish this--is to dehumanize them. You must ensure that people think of that group as "them" instead of "us", so you must rob them of our shared humanity: refer to them as animals, as a disease, as monsters, as demons, as barbarians, anything that prevents people from accepting them as human. This is key to getting people to go along with your plans for them. Evolution, however, definitively settled that all the races of man are indeed human, and that a man of one race is far more similar to a man of another race than he is different. It is very much anti-racist, especially when compared to the prevailing scientific attitudes of the time in which it was first presented.

1. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812, pp. 11-12
2. Ibid., p. 13
3. Ibid., pp. 13-14
4. Louis Agassiz, "The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races", The Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany 44
5. Josiah Nott, "Unity of the Human Race," Southern Quarterly Review, vol. 9, no. 17, January 1846
6. Josiah Nott and George Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. 58
7. Ibid., p. 85
8. William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America 1815-1859, p. 106
9. Ibid, p. 97
10. Agassiz, "The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races"
11. Ibid.
12. Nott and Gliddon, Types of Mankind, p. 450
13. Josiah Nott, "Nature and Destiny of the Negro," De Bow's Review, vol. 10, March 1851. This was originally a lecture by Nott, entitled "Natural History of Man Viewed in Connection with Negro Slavery."
14. Ibid.
15. Stanton, The Leopard's Spots, p. 186
16. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, pp. 181-82
17. Ibid., p. 184

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