Cultural inversion and the one-drop rule: an essay on biology, racial classification, and the rhetoric of racial transcendence.

• Author: Post, Deborah Waire
• Position: Symposium: Defining Race

The great paradox in contemporary race politics is exemplified in the narrative constructed by and about President Barack Obama. This narrative is all about race even as it makes various claims about the diminished significance of race: the prospect of racial healing, the ability of a new generation of Americans to transcend race or to choose their own identity, and the emergence of a post-racial society. (1) While I do not subscribe to the post-racial theories that have been floated in the press and other media, (2) I do believe that something of great cultural significance occurred which made the candidacy and the election of Barack Obama possible. This essay is an attempt on my part to consider what that change might have been by examining the relationship between science and social change, language and cultural categories, and the role law has played, if any, in dismantling the structures of racism.

What I have to say has very little to do with biology, except to the extent that racial classification is a cultural practice that sometimes deploys biological arguments strategically. Early in the Twentieth century sociologists and anthropologists noted that in the United States, race was more a matter of caste than class and that, unlike other caste systems, it is not cultural, but "biological." (3) In a racial caste, one sociologist argued, "the criterion is primarily physiognomic, usually chromatic, with socio-economic differences implied." (4) Another noted that "American caste is pinned not to cultural but to biological features--to color, features, hair form, and the like." (5) Biology was used in this early sociological literature on race in a way that made it synonymous with physical appearance or physical characteristics. In politics and legal discourse at the time, racial purity was about "blood" and rules of descent.

Caste has been described as a "categorical barrier to social mobility" (6) but it is much more than that. It is a hierarchical structure supported by law and a system of taboos, the violation of which evokes horror, not simply anger or outrage. (7) The obvious example was the "taboo placed on the sexual contact of Negro men and white women." (8)

A caste system is rigid and the social consequences extreme. The existence of a caste system depends not only on a denial of the complete humanity of the members of the lower class but also the existence of prejudice as an "emotional fact connected to the emotional life of each person who experiences it." (9) W.E.B DuBois explained racial caste using the metaphor of a glass tomb where, if one of those entombed were to break through the glass "in blood and disfigurement" he would find himself "faced by a horrified, implacable and quite overwhelming mob of people frightened for their own existence." (10)

That was seventy years ago, before legal reform dismantled the prescription of racial endogamy or, rather the proscription of racial exogamy, eroding the very foundations of racial caste in the United States. Structural support for racial caste--the laws that made interracial marriage illegal and void and the rule of descent that we know as the "one drop rule"--has been dismantled. The structural integrity of racial caste may have been compromised by this development, but a caste system cannot be completely eradicated if racial prejudice continues as a social fact, as a part of the 'emotional life' of a people. The question then is whether the mental and emotional tenacity of the caste system persists.

In this article, my thesis is simple. If racial caste has been upended by changes in legal rules that created a hierarchical racial structure, its demise also has been hastened by the use of symbols, a strategy of cultural inversion with respect to the meaning of race. The operative terms of a centuries-old debate have been inverted. Instead of policing racial purity with arguments about blood and biology or the modern version of them, DNA and genes, these instruments of exclusion, the tools of white supremacists and segregationists, have been used effectively, most recently by Barack Obama, to demonstrate the physical connection between groups that are still treated discursively, politically and socially, as racially distinct.

1. MARRIAGE RULES, HYPODESCENT AND THE BIOLOGY OF RACIAL PURITY

   Barack Obama refers to himself as a black man who is the son of a white woman from Kansas and an African man from Kenya. (11) He is able, as he said in his speech in Selma, Alabama, to lay claim to the civil rights struggle in the United States simply because his parents' marriage would not have been possible but for the right to end de jure segregation and the anti-miscegenation laws. (12) Though he has been faulted for the chronological inconsistencies in his metaphor, (13) he is also incorrect in assuming that anti-miscegenation laws were anathema to blacks in the same way as de jure segregation of public accommodations and education. Blacks resented anti-miscegenation laws, but with some notable exceptions, they did not embrace the idea of marriage with whites. (14) It may be that the elimination of anti-miscegenation laws, the rules forbidding racial exogamy, liberated both blacks and whites from a legal system that ensured the continued existence of a formal racial hierarchy.

   I was born in 1949 to a black man, the grandson of a runaway slave who took the Underground Railroad to Auburn, New York, (15) and a white woman who was born in Canada and moved to Rochester, New York when she was a child. I was born one year after the decision in Perez v. Sharp. (16) Perez was a decision of the Supreme Court of California invalidating that state's anti-miscegenation law. (17) President Obama was born twelve years later, in 1961, before the Supreme Court of the United States declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. (18) In 1948 there were thirty states that had anti-miscegenation laws and California was one of them. (19) In 1967 there were only sixteen or so states with anti-miscegenation statutes. (20)

   The distance between Perez and Loving is more than a matter of time. It is a yardstick that measures the ascent and decline of intellectual theories, the "scientific" theory of race, the oppositional ideas advanced by cultural anthropologists, and the contest between the two, and the persistence of the resistance, over decades, of the of African Americans, principally through the work of the NAACP, to anti-miscegenation laws. (21) It is a measure of the progress of the civil rights movement and the ideological distance covered in two decades.

   Ms. Perez, who was Chicana, attempted to get a marriage license to marry Mr. Davis, who was Black, and they were denied the marriage license because the marriage was prohibited by statute. (22) It is best to start with the concurring opinion of Judge Jesse Washington Carter rather than Judge Traynor's very wonderful majority opinion. In his concurring opinion, Judge Carter appears to scold the Petitioners, Perez and Davis, or their attorney, for citing to Mein Kampf:

   To bring into issue the correctness of the writings of a madman, a rabble-rouser, a mass-murderer [Adolph Hitler], would be to clothe his utterances with an undeserved aura of respectability and authoritativeness. Let us not forget that this was the man who plunged the world into a war in which, for the third time, Americans fought, bled, and died for the truth of the proposition that all men are created equal. (23) But Judge Carter was not angry at the Petitioners but at the State, and perhaps the dissent, whose arguments about racial superiority and inferiority were, as Petitioner's attorney pointed out, uncomfortably similar to those of Hitler. There can be no doubt that the Petitioner's strategy, at a time when the revelations of the genocide committed by the Nazi's was fresh in the minds of most Americans, was most effective.

   While Judge Carter cited the Declaration of Independence and the 14th Amendment, the Charter of the United Nations, Jefferson, Lincoln and the Apostle Paul, Justice Traynor, in the majority opinion, took on the medico-eugenics arguments that were advanced by the state of California and the dissent. Traynor challenged the factual basis for anti-miscegenation legislation, weighing in with emerging scholarship debunking the very idea of race and racial inferiority. He did not address--he did not need to address--the extensive citations by the dissent to precedent, including decisions of the United States Supreme Court and the highest courts in other jurisdictions, because these cases relied on the ideas and the scholarship he discredited. While the characterization of marriage as a fundamental right in Perez has been emphasized in recent scholarship, particularly as the debate rages over same sex marriage, Judge Traynor framed the issue as one which examined whether there was a "social evil" that anti-miscegenation statutes were designed to address. (24) If the eugenics arguments were discredited, if the theories about the medical and physical risks of intermarriage were unfounded, the statute could not be justified.

   As the dissenting judge pointed out, these beliefs about the mental, moral, and physical inferiority of non-white races, especially Blacks, were pervasive in the United States and had been in place for over one hundred years. (25) In the national debate about biological fitness, blood and its purity was invoked, repeatedly. What Traynor and this court did was, according to the dissent, to usurp the legislative function in determining what the facts were and whether they justified the policy expressed in the statute. After this case was decided, however, there were still twenty-nine states with anti-miscegenation laws. There was no stampede to invalidate similar statutes in other jurisdictions.

   Barack Obama was six years old when the Supreme Court decided the Loving case. The Loving...