Backintyme Essays

Most of us realize that only so-called White folks have historically enjoyed the full privileges of U.S. citizenship. And most of us know that the definition of “White” has widened over the centuries. But grasping these points does not avoid all historical pitfalls.

Describes the many triracial communities that have lived scattered throughout the U.S. southeast since colonial times. Session E3 of a series of contemporary issues topics on “The Study of Racialism.”

Explains how the features that determine U.S. “racial” classification are inherited. Session C3 of a series of molecular anthropology topics.

The United States is the only nation on earth that has preserved for over three centuries a genetically discontinuous enclave of mostly African ancestry within a larger population of European ancestry. The phenomenon demands study.

Few “racial” issues are as politically charged as the U.S. Black/White test-score gap. Over the past two decades, scientists have amassed a wealth of data about the phenomenon. And yet despite their findings, many American political and academic leaders continue to ignore reality and espouse counterproductive solutions to non-existent problems based on discredited theories. Conservatives claim that the gap is caused by the childhood peer pressure of Black oppositional culture. The evidence contradicts this notion. Liberals claim that it is due to class differences. The evidence contradicts this also. Many on both sides insist that the gap is at least partly genetic. This notion has been the most thoroughly demolished of all. The U.S. Black/White test-score gap is a topic where facts are ignored by powerless and powerful alike, by unlearned and academics alike, and by conservatives and liberals alike. The only people who admit to being baffled by the phenomenon are scientists who have spent years studying it. Here are the known facts about the U.S. Black/White test-score gap for those more interested in reality than in ideology.

U.S. racialism is dichotomous. You are legally either White or Black with no in-between. But real people are culturally and biologically continuous. Millions of Americans have grandparents of both cultures, and millions more have DNA markers from both Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. How has the U.S. legal system resolved the contradiction in order to decide whether a person of dual heritage is White or Black?

In this context, “myths” are counterfactual beliefs taught to the young in order to exemplify social standards that they will be expected to follow in adulthood. The U.S. endogamous color line is a rich source of such myths, believed by African Americans and non-Blacks alike. Ten color-line myths follow. Some come in two versions: Black and White.

This essay is about the word itself. Like a once-sharp tool ruined by misuse, it has become too blunted for intellectual discourse.

Why was the endogamous color line invented in the Chesapeake and nowhere else? Why was it invented at the turn of the eighteenth century and not before nor after? This essay presents several theories. It Was a “Divide and Conquer” Tactic suggests that it was a deliberately calculated solution to a unique problem of: too few yeomen, too many European laborers, and too little time. Other Voices presents a collection of alternative theories including: fair-skinned people have an instinctive loathing for those with dark skin tone, people of certain religions or cultures were taught to reject Africans, and it was related to the numbers of European women.

This essay traces the emergence of African-American ethnicity and the subsequent evolution of the color line in five topics: Origins of African-American Ethnicity explains how the imposition of a unique endogamous color line eventually led to the synthesis of a unique ethno-cultural community in the Jacksonian Northeast. African-American Ethnic Traits outlines the customs of the Black Yankee ethnic group to show that they gave birth to many of today’s Black traditions. The Integration versus Separatism Pendulum introduces a debate that has occupied Black political leaders since colonial times. The Color Line in the North contrasts the harsh enforcement of the intermarriage barrier in the free states with the more permeable systems of the lower South (as presented in the preceding three essays). The National Color Line’s Rise and Fall concludes this section on the endogamous color line by presenting two graphs. The first shows that which side of the endogamous color line you were on was most hotly contested in U.S. courts between 1840 and 1869. The second shows that the color line grew abruptly stronger during Reconstruction, was at its harshest during Jim Crow, and began to recover only around 1980.