Why They Hate Obama: Miscegenation and Other Nightmares of the Racist Political Imagination

[chemp]

Ideas that now seem like crackpot notions of race were, not long ago, regarded as common sense, and found themselves codified in law. The "one-drop rule" asserted that a single drop of black blood in an otherwise white citizen rendered that person black. Blackness was widely viewed as a contaminant that sullied white purity. (In antebellum America, white slave owners got around this problem by either denying the ordinary practice of raping and impregnating black women, or by justifying this predation as a racial improvement of the population of black slaves.) The rule was adopted by numerous state legislators in the first third of the 20th century, and used as the basis for Jim Crow laws.

In 1924 Dr. Walter Plecker, a public health advocate who worked for Virginia's Vital Statistics Department, said, "Two races as materially divergent as the White and Negro, in morals, mental powers, and cultural fitness, cannot live in close contact without injury to the higher." It wasn't until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court proclaimed Plecker's Virginia Racial Integrity Act and the one-drop rule unconstitutional. This decision, which eliminated the ban on interracial marriage, bore the wonderfully apt title of Loving v. Virginia.

Sadly but not surprisingly, such legal victories have not kept Plecker's sentiments from being embraced by contemporary guardians of racial boundaries. And, Barack Obama, the child of a black African father and a white American mother, is for these folks the very embodiment of what must not be brought together.

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[my2sense]

1. K & R

[chemp]

2. Whaa -Hoo

My first post to the greatest page!

You like me. You really like me!

[KitSileya]

3. Isn't it in Louisiana that if you're 1/32 African American,

you cannot claim to be Caucasian in you passport etc. They still keep to the rule that if one of your great great great grandparents were African American, so are you.

[barbtries]

4. i never claim race at all

i only subscribe to human. when i'm forced to answer i put other.

[KitSileya]

5. America's obsession with blackness is rather unique

If you're a quarter Asian, you can choose to say you're white or Asian, if you're a quarter Native American, the same, but if you have one thirtysecond part African American heritage, that's what you are, still, according to some states. Nowhere else in the world have they been that strict about race, not even with the Jews in Hitler's Germany - in fact, the strict division of race as fear of miscegenation was pretty uniquely European and European American, and it came with the advent of slavery.

As for the fear of African Americans in positions of power, to drag my post on topic, is for a large part something most Americans learn in history class, where their history textbooks tell them that after the Civil War, African Americans took over the governing of the Southern states, but since they were so newly out of slavery, they botched the job something good. Which is a lie. But that's what's taught in American classrooms, so it must be true, and any attempt to change those texbooks mee wih the bullheadedness of the Republicans and dinos who'd like to still refer to the Civil War as the war of Northern aggression, but have realized that being so overt is not acceptable, but covert propaganda is still ok.

As for race, I don't have to claim any, as I'm Norwegian, and we don't have any such posts to fill out on government forms.

[barbtries]

6. i envy that

i don't think it should be on any demographic list, ever. maybe in regard to what pre-natal tests to run.