The Atlantic - Latest Comments in High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

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Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

cmholm — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:57:11 -0000

...and the ghost of Alex Haley watches, laughing.

I suppose it has been a while since the mini-series and book were foremost in the public eye. But regardless, this sort of thing stopped surprising me after our previous church's preschool director wondered aloud what the Jews used for scripture.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

TW Andrews — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:35:05 -0000

I think the sort of naivety of which this is a very extreme example is a way more common than most people think, particularly for people like your friend from Kansas, or myself when I was fresh out of High School, who have simply had no significant--and sometimes literally--contact with black folks growing up.

When the point is raised that most black people have white ancestry, I think "Of course. That's pretty obvious, I wonder why I didn't realize that before?" but until it was pointed out, it wasn't part of my cognitive conception of black folks, and certainly wasn't something I knew that everyone else also was aware of. It's not that I would have argued otherwise, it's just nothing that ever came up.

This is obviously ignorant, but I think it's a pretty common sort of ignorance for a substantial group of people. An interesting question is, to what degree is ignorance like this racist?

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

Suzii — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:18:19 -0000

From my perspective, having one parent who's white and one who wasn't, it's no more possible for any American to be "half white" than to be "half pregnant." Whiteness in America is defined by the absence of anything else.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

adamnvillani — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:19:54 -0000

It's not just in the U.S. In college I was talking with a student from England, and apparently there was some kind of large gap in his history classes where they jumped straight from Henry VIII to the 20th Century, skipping over the part where Great Britain conquered the world.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

arvay — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 08:34:38 -0000

The real mind-altering concept would be when whites are told in some major ways who their ancestors are.

The San people, sometimes called "Bushmen" are the original human stick. They have the greatest genetic diversity of any human group.

No matter how blond or light you are -- here is your EVE.

http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/san-people-of-southwest-africa1.jpg

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

The Ninja Zombie — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:53:11 -0000

Race is like temperature. You can come up with an absolute, algorithmic procedure for assigning people to races based on genetype or phenotype. The procedure itself will have a low probability of miscategorization, and can be algorithmically (with no social input). Basically, give enough genotypes or phenotypes to a computer, and the computer will spit out the clusters.

The only thing that is arbitrary is the labeling of the clusters. The computer might say "1, 2, 3" (ORDER BY SIZEOF(cluster)), while humans would say "chinese, indian, white." The Farenheit-like "scale" of racial categorization does exist and is used for forensics.

I fully agree that many past decision rules were both crappy (high probability of misclassification) and constructed for social reasons. But that does not mean race itself is a social construct. Similarly, before the thermometer was invented, there might have been some crappy socially constructed temperature scales (e.g., "coat weather", "shirt weather", "shorts weather").

Incidentally, the clustering algorithm does a very good job of categorizing American blacks as mixed-race -- they lie within the convex hull generated by several African clusters and European clusters, but well outside any African cluster. A smaller (but significant) number of white-looking Americans fall outside the white cluster but inside this convex hull as well.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

st louis woman — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:20:13 -0000

'Could a certain trait, like lighter skin, remain in a family's genes even if it hadn't been reinforced, (through an interracial marriage), for many generations? Or did so many slaves have children with their owners that unless an African-American, (in modern times), has children with a native-born African, they end up automatically reinforcing the trait by having children with another descendent of slaves?'

Well, yes, there are that many. And not just with owners, but with lovers and spouses, too. I'd also like to point out that not every black person in the U.S. during that time was a slave. There were, and had always been, free blacks.

But I also want to add that to imply that the only way whites & blacks intermingled was through force is leaving out another chapter of the story. Not for one moment do I downplay the reality of rape and exploitation, but for example, in my family we also have a white ancestor who lived with his black common-law wife, (It was illegal for them to marry) acknowledged and raised their children, and they remained together-in the South in the 1800s. And there is a 'black' side' and a 'white side' in the family-in the same town. Typical? No, but absolutely not an isolated incident.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

deva — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:55:15 -0000

This meant to respond to Ninja Zombie above.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

deva — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:53:56 -0000

But of course, race is not like temperature. If you say someone is "black" and your tropical girlfriend says "white," that difference of opinion has social and legal consequences. Not to mention that there has yet to be, thankfully some might say, a Fahrenheit-like scale of racial categorization. Such a thing would be immensely creepy and very like the scientific racism of anthropologist, sociologist, and biologist who insisted in the first half of the 20th century that there were static categories labeled Mongoloid, Negro, Aryan, what have you.

The idea that phenotypical and biological characteristics cluster is not revolutionary and if that's what you mean by race is not socially constructed, so be it. But I think you deliberately misunderstand the meaning of the phrase socially constructed. It doesn't mean humans don't have diverse biological markers that can be loosely grouped, it means there is no such thing as a "white" person or a "black" person or a "colored" person outside the context of however we've defined those things socially and legally. Take the "one drop rule," for example. Now, reverse it. See, same people with the same biology all of a sudden are in different "racial" groups. The decision rule is a construct. That's the point.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

msb — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:46:52 -0000

I don't know of any abolitionists doing this, but lots of defenders of slavery, North and South, accused abolitionists of desiring it, though the word they used was "amalgamation". E.g. Douglas accused Lincoln of it during their senatorial debates. Ironic to think of Southerners condemning interracial sex while practising it for fun and profit.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

msb — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:26:59 -0000

@ Lebecka

The third of Queen Margrethe's 4 names is Thorhildur (Icelandic, as Iceland was Danish when she was born). She has a nice web site (http://www.kongehuset.dk/publi....

On TNC's topic, I really understood the mixed-race nature of American black people when I first saw numbers of Africans (first trip to Europe), even though I knew about what Florence King, in "Southern ladies and gentlemen", called "the unrestricted access of Southern gentlemen to people's ancestresses". I grew up amidst loud Southern anxiety about "miscegenation", but it took this European experience to make me realize that what they were objecting to was interracial sex that was voluntary on both sides.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

Gerhard Kleinhans — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:07:52 -0000

I always thought it strange that Americans, who practically wrote the book on racism, never caught on to the South African idea of a 'Colored' middle category especially for those pesky little offspring of grandfather who turned into a serial rapist whenever he had too much moonshine.

Not that the extra category solved many problems: I was born into a lower white working class family (but after a holiday in the sun, calling me tanned would be an understatement), and most of my school years the rich kids gave me that knowing look, that one that means the doors of privilege have just slammed shut on you. So no matter the categories, in practice people always had to steal surreptitious looks to someone's hair, or cuticles, or shape of nose to help determine their class position within the overriding racial categories.

The reaction of my Dutch friends (white or back) whenever the subject of growing up in apartheid SA comes up is quite funny - they often go into some embarrassed stupor, where you can see they desperately want to ask 'Well, are you white or black?' but cannot get themselves past their awareness of how wrong such a question would be. Quite funny.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

ST — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:22:49 -0000

I don't know, this sounds very convenient with regard to Paddy. Plenty of Europeans had never seen Africans, it didn't stop them from enjoying the carnival exhibitions of the Khoikhoi women.

I don't know, I haven't studied it in detail, but I'm pretty sure the Irish would have been a rung above any black American, whatever the Harper's cartoon shows.

And there certainly was some racial ugliness on the part of some of the suffragists, but if they decided to refocus their efforts on their own cause when it appeared that black men would just join in the general oppression of men not allowing women the vote (before Jim Crow derailed things) -- I can't say I blame them.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

The Ninja Zombie — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:20:28 -0000

We might assign all sorts of different labels and values to different things at different times, but that doesn't make the underlying thing socially or artificially constructed.

It's like saying temperature is socially constructed. Yeah, I say "comfy" while my tropical girlfriend says "cold". Does that make temperature a social construct? Daniel Gabriel Farenheit thinks not.

As for taking solace in statistical distributions, I rather doubt anyone does this. Am I missing some subtext? Why did you ask this question?

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

Darren — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 00:54:49 -0000

Link posted without comment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M5G2nWP3xY

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

aleks — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:41:37 -0000

I always assumed the "Obama's not really black" media-driven-fake-controversy hookom was because none of his ancestors were African-American, not because he has one white parent.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

rikyrah — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:01:50 -0000

we have always been a multi-cultural community.

The multi-racialism of the Black community is why, when two Black folks get together, it's pretty much a genetic lottery, because you don't know what will be at play. Maybe the kid will look like you or the other parent, or maybe, you'll get a ' throwback' baby.

My maternal grandfather would have been comfortable walking the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, like the family name he carried. You know how we ' look' at folks and 'just know' - that wasn't him. Born on a slave plantation to his White looking mother. He married my maternal grandmother - 20 years his junior and ' Black as the Ace of Spades'. Between them, they had 15 children, ranging from dark chocolate to my aunt, who could have passed for a red-headed White woman. I don't believe the story of my family is all that unique for Blacks in America.

And neither is the story of the First Lady's family. To me, it's only a surprise to the ' willfully ignorant'.

I'm still waiting for someone to tell me when the ' one drop' rule was abolished.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

brucds — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:53:06 -0000

Hey, Jamilah - since this thread is pretty old I'm going to go completely off-topic, aside from mining the Korean-Oakland nexus on Telegraph, and suggest that if you haven't checked out that Korean BBQ restaurant down a bit from "Glamor Beauty" - I think it's 43rd and Telegraph - Sahn Maru, and try their "seafood pancake" (it's really more a seafood omelette.) My favorite dish on that strip of eateries.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

deva — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:30:55 -0000

The phrase race is socially constructed is not about distinguishing the variance of physical traits across peoples it's about the variable labels and values we assign to those traits across time and in different place.

My bigger question though is: why, pray tell, might you or anyone find solace in the ability to supposedly empirically distinguish between groups using multivariate statistical probabilities?

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

rosessupposes — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:22:24 -0000

It is starting to be covered more. The short and sweet answer is that most labor unions denied access to African Americans, and in response, many black workers became "scabs" or crossed the picket lines. Check out A. Philip Randolph--he was the founding leader of the Brotherhood of Pullman Car Porters, one of the most successful black unions, and was instrumental in getting the CIO to accept black members and then to refuse admittance to unions that did not accept blacks. The AFL was less ready to make such a rule, but had to accept it when they came together in the late 30s. Another interesting thing to look into is the Ford Strike of the late 30s. Ford offered decent wages to black workers, but also required that they live outside of Dearborn and gave them the less skilled labor. Lots of interesting tug of war in the strike.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

peacbe — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:43:27 -0000

I think to say, "some" African Americans have white ancestry is to underestimate the scope and lasting effects slavery has had. There is a reason why my grandfather's nickname was Red and my grandmother on the other side of my family had naturally straight hair. Without putting a percentage or number on it, it's safe to say many,most, a lot, a majority, of African Americans have white ancestry. You can say the same thing for African people from Brazil, Cuba, Panama, etc.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

SCF — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:30:55 -0000

As my personal example of white folks' ignorance, I recall an interview with some Va professor/historian around the time of the Did-TJ-have-sex-with-Sally-Hemmings? dustup. This guy said that until he saw the DNA evidence, he completely rejected the Hemmings' family claim. Why? Because TJ was a Virginia gentleman and a Virginia gentleman would not have sex with a slave. I was speechless.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

Bert — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:02:53 -0000

Strom Thurmond filibustered civil rights while he funneled money to his secret black daughter. Human beings really are astonishing creatures.

Re: High Yallers And Yo, Yo Darkskins

sporcupine — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:20:57 -0000

This white Southerner held her breath while she read the NY Times, watching for the paths of her own sorry ancestors. Mercifully, Bartow County was the only name I recognized, and that links only to the less wealthy, less guilty side of my family.