Beth Gray’s August 23, 2002, letter to the editor at Interracial Voice rightly denounced Philip Roth's ominously titled book, The Human Stain. Ms. Gray’s letter responded to A.D. Powell’s report that the book is being made into a movie. It is a tale pronouncing (despite denials, the mention of the semen spot on Monica Lewinsky’s dress) that a latent "drop" of "black blood" in a middle-aged "white," Jewish college professor’s ancestry constitutes a Human Stain -- "stigmata" of his "black" Negroid racial identity (allegedly). As Beth said, "Ugh!"

And I am intrigued with Beth’s observing that, "Segregation replaced slavery, and 'one drop' replaced segregation."

But I do not think that all three -- slavery, segregation, and now post-1960s "one drop" -- evince the same continuous, intolerant "white" racism. Although the divisive consequences may work the same way -- and "one-drop" certainly was the brainchild of segregationist "whites," starting in the 1890s -- I am convinced that post-1960s, "one-drop" was no longer the insistence of "whites." Instead, "one-drop" nowadays might better be characterized a "black backlash."

"White" racism did not compel Philip Roth to write a twenty-first century novel depicting a "white" professor letting himself be branded a racist and forced into retirement, rather than to reveal his attenuated "black" ancestry. Roth’s "passing for white" melodrama is set at least 35 years -- even 50 years -- too late. This is true notwithstanding his claimed basing on the life of the famous, late New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard, on whom this questionable "stain" was not set until he had been dead five years.

After World War II, which ended in 1945, "white" America largely forgot "one-drop." Hoards of "white" youngsters in my own post-war "baby boom" generation failed to grasp why our schools in the South were segregated. We saw the ubiquitous Jim Crow segregation around us seemingly based on mean-spiritedness, or based merely on irrational customary cruelty. Many of us had heard our own family legends of a remote Indian ancestor. Surely, most of us by far rejected the "one-drop" "stain" or "taint" notion, even if we heard it explained occasionally. We and many of our parents, too, simply lacked the morbid fear of "black blood" which had swept over our great-grandparents’ generation.

I seriously doubt that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or the ‘60s civil rights movement he led, would have made headway in any other generation but ours (and our parents’). Anyway, largely in response to King’s charisma "we" post-World War II young "whites," in 1964 and 1965, gladly destroyed the "protective" segregation apparatus which our great-grandparents had erected around "white" racial identity. This identity was keyed on "One-drop’s" defining a "pure white race" (albeit tolerant of a "drop" of Indian "blood"). Segregation had been erected some 70 years before (see Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)), based on the clear historical evidence that our contacting Negroes would result in our gradual "amalgamation" -- with "them."

The same inevitable racial amalgamation-degeneration principal which Joseph A. Comte de Gobineau described in 1857 -- deeply further poisoned by the likes of American slavery-apologist doctors Samuel George Morton and Josiah Clark Nott, who suggested "blacks" were "proximate species" whose "tainting" blood, they assured (e.g. in Nott’s 1854 book), would degenerate "white blood" inversely to a "black" ancestor’s remoteness, leading to hybrid sterility and eventual extinction -- had frightened our great grandparents’ generation into erecting Jim Crow racial segregation barriers. The same had warped Hitler. He spouted de Gobineau, Morton, and Nott’s "one-drop" degeneration theories in his book. (See Perez v. Sharp (1948) 32 Cal.2d 711, p. 739 (conc. opn. of Carter, J., quoting from Mein Kampf). )

But in contrast, our generation began seeing, so to speak, in the light of the atomic flashes illuminating Japan, that de Gobineau’s and Hitler’s racism (as our own) was the chimera with which we had been engaged fighting World War II. We glimpsed in that light racism underlying the most costly war in history. Thus, the post-war United Nations (UNESCO) early concerned itself with simplifying the world map of "races."

And so it was that "white" America, in its heyday of post-war "white" majority, and enjoying its "white" superpower hegemony, overturned the de Gobineau et al.-inspired Plessy decision, which was the keystone of segregation. That is, the all-"white" United States Supreme Court, within the decade, handed down Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

Brown decisively threw out Plessy’s "separate but equal" doctrine, which had constitutionally legalized segregation ever since 1896. Thirteen years later the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) effectively abolished "one-drop," when the High "all-white" Court found a constitutional right to marry interracially. This put in fast-forward the destruction of any "pure white race." It definitively marked the end of the era of segregation and American apartheid. Yet this monumental post-World War II demographic revolution caused barely a yawn among anyone but the Klannish fringe element of aging or die-hard segregationists, who made it known they abhorred the "passing" of "their great race." Southern resistance plunged following the 1964-65 civil and voting rights acts ending segregation. The country’s amazing apathy toward the Loving decision showed the white supremist ideologues understood that by losing segregation they had lost their "white race."

There use to be talk, by the 1970s, of a "white backlash." I never saw evidence of it. But I think new "One-drop" evidences a clear "black backlash." That is, as "black" (& later other "minority") leadership assessed their growing access to political empowerment, they began pinning on themselves the badges of race and victimhood, which "white" America would just as soon forget. "Black leaders" embraced "one-drop" in order to consolidate and rally a "black race" political party. It now operates very powerfully within the Democratic party. What is the "reparations" demand, for instance, if not evidence of a partisan "black backlash"? And what is "black" racial identity founded on if not on moribund "one-drop" -- on its compulsory racial identities -- "stigmatized black" versus "pure white"?

If a "white backlash" ever appears it will no doubt have been provoked by over 30 years of the "black backlash." I will have to disagree with Beth’s trilogy, implying as stated that slavery, segregation, and now "one-drop" form a continuum of racist "white" prejudice. I see a more complicated history than that. And I fear that needless pandering of "one-drop," as Mr. Roth’s book and movie, The Human Stain, does will make "race"-history more complicated still.

George Winkel

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