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Vendaval -> RE: Is it because he's black ? (5/6/2010 1:08:09 PM)
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The fear and hypocrisy of miscegenation, codified in law.
AHR Forum: Amalgamation and the Historical Distinctiveness of the United
States
Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of
Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States
DAVID A. HOLLINGER
"Comparativists have often commented on the uniqueness to the United States of this principle of hypodescent.24 The principle is widely taken for granted in the United States right down to the present, and is even defended as a political strategy in some contexts by organizations speaking for the interests of African Americans.25 But the principle originates in the property interests of slaveholders. Children begotten upon slave women by their owners or by other white men would grow up as slaves, adding to the property of the owners of the women and preserving the amazingly durable fiction that male slaveholders and the other white males in the vicinity were faithful to their wives. The principle was sharpened during the Jim Crow era, when opposition to social equality for blacks was of course well served by a monolithic notion of blackness accompanied by legislation that outlawed as miscegenation black-white marriages but left less strictly regulated any non-marital sex in which white males might engage with black females. As Tocqueville famously remarked well before the Civil War, "To debauch a Negro girl hardly injures an American's reputation; to marry her dishonors him."26
Some of the slave era and Jim Crow regimes did employ fractional classifications, providing that "Octoroons," "Quadroons," and "Mulattos" be separately counted and allowed distinctive rights and privileges in some jurisdictions.27 But this fractional approach was hard to administer, invited litigation, and blurred lines that many whites wanted kept sharp. In 1894, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson mocked a law that stipulated as the fraction of black ancestry that decided one's race.28 "Mulatto" was
dropped from the federal census after 1920, and more and more state governments went the way of the Virginia statute, which as revised in 1924 classified as white only a person "who has no trace whatsoever of blood other than Caucasian."29"
http://history.berkeley.edu/faculty/Hollinger/articles/amalgamation_and_hypodescent
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