For example, one ritual challenge of Roman Catholicism and some other churches is whether the bread and wine on the altar actually become mystically transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Your giving the evidential response "of course not" would label you a non-member of these faiths. Similarly, a ritual of Western education is that our solar system has nine planets. Schoolchildren must respond thus in order to be satisfy their teachers, even though few astronomers consider Pluto any more of a planet than, say, Titan, Ganymede or Ceres.
The author takes a risk here. Those who point out the counterfactual nature of rituals are often accused of wicked intent. Explaining that Pluto is not really a planet arouses the wrath of elementary schoolteachers. Discussing transubstantiation would have gotten you burned at the stake a few centuries ago. And showing that millions of non-Hispanic White folks have recent Black ancestors seems somehow un-American. So, dear reader, if the topic makes you want to summon the Holy Inquisition, please understand that the author means no disrespect. I agree that rituals are important. I just want to set the record straight.
In reality, a Black mother will produce an unending series of White descendants whenever she has a child who switches "race" at maturity, labeling himself White upon leaving home, thereby labeling his future offspring White as well. That such race-switching never happens is, of course, ritualistic cant. In fact, the actual rate can be measured.
It is a straightforward task to download and count how many young Americans in each decennial census labeled themselves as
White or Black. One can also count, for each age cohort, the drop in Black-labeled respondents matched by a rise in White ones.
In other words, counting how many White individuals had been labeled as Black in the prior census -- usually by their parents as children. These are the Americans who switched "race" in that decade.
For completeness, the graph also shows other researchers' findings. The square dots reflect the estimates of Robert S. Stuckert in "The African Ancestry of the White American Population," Ohio Journal of Science 55, no. May (1958): 155-160. These were based on assumptions regarding intermarriage, but match the findings of John G. Burma, below. The first triangular dot from the left reflects Hornell Hart's work in "Selective Migration as a Factor in Child Welfare in the United States, with Special Reference to Iowa," University of Iowa Studies in Child Welfare first ser., no. 1 (1921). The second triangular dot is that of John G. Burma in "The Measurement of Passing," American Journal of Sociology 52 (1946): 18-22. Burma is also cited in F. James Davis, Who is Black? (University Park PA: State University of Pennsylvania, 1991), 22, 56 and in Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980), 103, 207. The third triangular dot belongs to E.W. Eckard in "How Many Negroes 'Pass'," American Journal of Sociology 52 (1947): 24-28.
This is because genes are immortal, even genes for European appearance. They are transmitted from generation to generation forever as long as lineage continues. Also, genes are digitally encoded like computer files. They are not analog like audiocassettes. Hence, they copy perfectly, time after time, whenever cells divide. They never lose strength, they are never diluted, and they never wear out. When a given gene is present in only one copy (from only one parent) then it may express itself in some blended fashion (like the complexion of a first-generation biracial). But even when unexpressed, blended, or blurred, the original gene is as strong as ever. Sooner or later it will match up, inside the cells of a descendant, with its like from the other parent and the original appearance will reemerge.
Every time that a non-Hispanic U.S. child is born of one European-looking and one African-looking parent, a half-person's share of White genes are injected into the Black community. This is because non-Hispanic Black Americans traditionally label all of their children "Black" regardless of the other parent. (To be precise, African-American parents report 99.33 percent of their biological children as census-Black; statistically "all.") In contrast, Hispanics in the United States tend to label all our kids "White," except for the 10 percent or so for whom such a label would obviously be hopeless.) And so genes for European appearance accumulate in the African-American community. When they just happen to recombine, perhaps generations later, the luck of the draw produces a physically European-looking child from light-complexioned biracial parents. Such a child will inevitably consider switching "races" at maturity. And every time that a young adult actually takes this step, one person's share of White genes are extracted from the Black community. The two flows must match.
They must match because genetic information is neither created (except via mutation) nor destroyed (except by extinction); it is passed on from generation to generation. If genes for European appearance did not flow out as fast as they flowed in, the Afro-American population would gradually whiten and so vanish via genetic assimilation, as did the Afro-Iberian population of 1600, the Afro-Mexican population of 1700, and the Afro-Argentine Population of 1800. As researcher Gunnar Myrdal put it, a half-century ago:
Gary B. Mills, in "Miscegenation and the Free Negro in Antebellum 'Anglo' Alabama: A Reexamination of Southern Race Relations," Jounal of American History 68, no. 1 (1981): 16-34, reports that European-looking biracials were routinely accepted into early 1800s White Anglo Alabama society, despite their openly acknowledged free Black ancestry. Antebellum Alabama thus resembled the better-known French Louisiana, Spanish Florida, and Barbadian South Carolina of the early 1800s.
Caroline Bond Day and Earnest Albert Hooton in A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University, 1932) report on page 5 that thirty-five out of the 346 families studied had members who had switched. In addition, fifty other families were dropped from the study because so many members had switched that it became impossible to tabulate the data. This comes to more than one family in every five (20 percent) having race-switching members.
Virginia R. Dominguez in White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University, 1986) reports on page 203 that more than a third of the families in the four-block area that she studied in detail "have members who pass for white." Dominguez's number (33 percent) may be higher than Day's (20 percent) for two reasons. First, the rate of race-switching had risen from 1932 to 1986. Second, Day studied Atlanta, while Dominguez studied New Orleans, where Creole "race" labels have always been negotiable.
Lawrence Graham in Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1999) reports on page 378 that it is unusual to find a family in his social circle that does not have a member who has become White. Graham's number (over 50 percent) may be higher than Day or Dominguez because Graham's circle is the Black community's socio-economic crème de la crème (no pun intended). Graham even quotes the old nursery rhyme "If you're light, your all right / If you're brown, stick around / But if you're black, get back."
Marsha Dean Phelts, An American Beach for African-Americans (Gainesville: University of Florida, 1997) reports that virtually every family in this once-exclusive posh resort town has members who became White (100 percent). This may be an exaggeration but, like Graham, Phelts is writing about the Black upper crust. Specifically, she tells of Jacksonville Florida in 1900, a wealthy and -- before Jim Crow -- a traditionally biracial population. (See "The Richest Woman in Florida" at http://interracialvoice.com/sweet2.html.)
Jerald and Sandra Tanner in "Death of the Anti-Black Doctrine" The Salt Lake City Messenger, Issue No. 41 December 1979, and in "Blacks Receive LDS Priesthood" in Issue No. 39 July 1978 of the same magazine, report that the Mormon Church had to change its doctrine regarding Blacks because of its enthusiasm with genealogy. By encouraging its members to research their ancestry, the Latter Day Saints provide outstandingly useful resources for everyone interested in genealogy. But they also discovered that many if not most Mormons -- indeed, many if not most Americans -- have African ancestry if you go back more than a few generations. To read this article online, go to http://www.bible.ca/mor-blacks-racism.htm and search for the name Robert P. Stuckert (The Salt Lake City Messenger cites Stuckert's Time Magazine, June 30, 1958, page 47 article on White Americans' African ancestry).
Finally, the above numbers should also surprise no one who is literarily inclined. Tens of thousands of youngsters face such a choice every year, and yet the topic is so taboo that few publishers will touch it. Hence, one expects that the few existing sources of non-judgmental experience would have huge but unheralded readerships. And so they do. James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), the tale of a man who successfully switched from Black to White although he questioned his life's choices on his deathbed, has been continually in print for 85 years and is now stocked by Amazon.com in six different bindings.
Every society has its rituals -- behaviors or beliefs that prove membership. Rituals resemble sentries' passwords. They comprise a challenge and a response designed to test whether you are friend or foe. Hence, ritual responses are not factual or useful -- just the opposite in fact. If the correct response were intuitive or obvious a challenged stranger could produce it by sheer luck, and so it would not work to prove membership.
This essay discusses one of the rituals that test whether you are an American -- the affirmation that a Black person cannot have White descendants. Of course, no educated person on earth really believes such nonsense. But that is precisely the point. It is by parroting such an obvious falsehood that Americans prove we are red white and blue to the core.Numbers From IPUMS
Assuming that you are not an employee of the U.S. Census Bureau of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the easiest way to access raw census data is to visit www.ipums.org. The U.S. Census Bureau sells machine-readable public use microdata series (PUMS) files for each census. The one for the 2000 census is scheduled for release in 2002 or 2003. A consortium of colleges led by the University of Minnesota has consolidated these files from 1850 through 1990 into an online database of detailed census data called Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). The IPUMS database enables researchers to study detailed demographic data on individual citizens while at the same time keeping each person's identity secret. Online user manuals, data dictionaries, and query language guides at the IPUMS web site explain how to extract data samples.
Download the data and tabulate the results. You will find that about two percent of Black-labeled young adults take this race-switching step in every census decade. This comes to about sixty thousand young adults every year who resolve henceforth to call themselves White. Seen another way, it means that just over two million White adults alive today started life as Black children. Add up the numbers since 1850 and you will find that about nine million Americans have taken this step over the past century and a half. Over the years, this multitude has produced many tens of millions of descendants, all of whom today unknowingly consider themselves White. The above graph is the result of downloading, tabulating, and plotting this information to show the population of such citizens since before the Civil War. It shows how many White adults had previously been recorded as Black children (as a percentage of the Black population in that decade).Conservation of Genes
The graph should surprise no one who is mathematically inclined. A moment's thought reveals that these numbers must be so. Over time, the rate of Black-to-White race-switching in the United States must numerically equal the birth rate of first-generation biracial children.
The effect of passing, whatever its extent, is to neutralize the effect of miscegenation on the genetic composition of the Negro people. It is even possible to conceive of a temporary condition in which the rate of passing would exceed the rate of addition of new white blood into the Negro group so that there would be a tendency for the American Negro group to become more negroidized. For more, see An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972) 134.
In fact, photographic studies of college yearbooks show that the African-American community has not gotten steadily lighter or darker on average over the past century and a half. And it certainly has not vanished, as it has in many Latin American countries. Hence over time, the two rates must match. For details, see Williamson (1980), cited above, 127-28.
Consequently, over the centuries, one expects the rate of U.S. race-switching to numerically rise and fall in step with the birth rate of first-generation biracial children. And the actual numbers show that it does. Inflow in this graph shows how many European genes are injected into the African-American community each decade by the birth of first-generation biracial children. Outflow shows how many European genes leak out of the African-American community each decade, carried out by European-looking young adults who switched "race."Anecdotal Evidence
Anecdotal evidence of the Black-to-White outflow rate is not as persuasive as census numbers (at least not to me), but it is more fun to collect and tell about. Many books on the histories of local African-American communities have chapters on race-switching.
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