Tracing Race

A Tour of the Racial Binary

Before looking at our cultural case studies, it is useful to give an overhaul of binary thinking in order to understand the changes that are taking place today. Understanding how these myths were built, sustained, policed, and defied is the story of American identity. Today's removal of Confederate statues and Confederate flags is part of our changing of the narrative. A hero is now taken as a villain; a flag becomes understood as a racial slur. I look here at the movements and philosophies that built and reinforced the binary.

The black/white binary in the United States is an edifice built over five hundred years and won't be dismantled easily. The idea that there are biologically different human "races" that we can label by physical type and also connect to superior and inferior traits such as intelligence, morality, physical prowess, and work ethic is an idea that was crucial to the building of American identity. Sometimes called biological essentialism, the conversion of a vast array of people from the continent of Africa with rich and distinct tribal cultures were reduced to one thing: an object called a N*gger. This distortion of a human with a distinct language, identity, and culture to a piece of cargo is made clear in figure 1.1 of a diagram of the Brookes slave ship.

Here the cold practicality of storing live humans (who all look identical to each other and are pictured with no distinguishing characteristics) is seen in a similar way to canned goods, stored for maximum profit. In fact, at first glance, you don't realize they are people; they are simply property to be exchanged. Once this creation of the black sprung out of the slave ship, it needed defending through propaganda, stories, songs, biblical proof, and pseudoscience.

In the early days of the founding, the notion of blackness and whiteness was deeply entrenched by the aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, in which enslaved Africans, Native Americans, and white indentured servants bonded together to protest the current governor of the colony; their uniting successfully into a political force left the English nervous about the potential of this new group. If these dispossessed groups formed an alliance, they would seize control — after all, many of them had reason to be dissatisfied with their status and were hostile toward the elites. A divide and conquer strategy was created and made into law with the Virginia slave codes of 1705.

Before that, people were referred to by their country of origin, their free or slave status, or by their Christian or "heathen" status. Theodore Allen in his The Invention of the White Race argues that the "white race" category was invented as a means of social control. From that point on, white indentured servants were encouraged to identify with the elites as fellow white people and not with blacks or Native Americans. Blackness became equated with slavery, contamination, and inferiority; and whiteness with freedom, privilege, and superiority. These codes forbid blacks and slaves from bearing arms, congregating in large numbers, exacted harsh punishments if they assaulted Christians or attempted escape, and black servants were made slaves for life. Later came antimiscegenation laws, forbidding blacks from marrying or having sex with whites. Blackness became a kind of contamination and the one-drop rule assured whites that they would always be separate even from those who were ambiguous phenotypically. Even in states where this was not translated into law, the belief that the mixing of races was unnatural became widespread. Any African ancestry made you black, so free men from Africa were suddenly pulled into the vortex of that chasm of blackness too. The rule of hypodescent ensured that any child born to a white parent and a black parent was automatically black — useful for slave owners to increase their property. The child always followed the condition of the mother, so this legislation was key for keeping the number of enslaved robust.

Although western art had shown the nobility and prestige of African people as evidenced in the five-volume collection The Image of the Black in Western Art (which includes sculpture, paintings, drawings of the vast array of black figures since the time of the pharaohs), these images were not seen by most of the inhabitants of the early colonies. Instead, the new drawings of black people were to entrench the belief that they were animal like and identical in character or more precisely in their lack of character. Figure 1.2 shows Nott's "scientific" drawing of skull shape, which attempted to connect blacks to monkeys, a trope about blackness that is still very much alive today.

Although the pseudoscientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries published extensive "evidence" to prove the fixedness of racial categories, these ideas were still being recycled as late as 1994 in The Bell Curve, which looked at, among other things, racial differences in intelligence. Long buried are the race scientists such as Linnaeus, Meiners, and Cuvier who created these first taxonomies of humans, along with their charts of flowers and animals, but their ideas still operate powerfully.

Once these categories were created for the purpose of justifying imperialism and slavery from the mid-seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, they needed to be controlled. Borders needed to be drawn and the law needed to have clear criteria for placing someone in or ousting someone from a racial category. Most white and black people were taught to believe race was something you could see whether it was in the moons of the fingernails or simply darker pigmentation on the skin. Because it was believed that different species were not supposed to interbreed or it would reverse evolution and degrade mankind into a mongrel race, many did. Jim Crow in the United States after the Civil War did its best to separate and reinforce this ban on miscegenation, but because of a high incidence of white men raping black women as well as illicit consensual relationships between races, a racially ambiguous people emerged. This necessitated creative legal ways to keep people in their human categories even if those categories were becoming less clear.

Along with this insistence on race came the struggle against the values placed on this concept. From early slave revolts like the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to more famous ones such as the one led by Nat Turner in 1831 to the sustained organization of the Underground Railroad for over several decades in the mid-nineteenth century, blacks and...