Should I Start a Third Blog?

THEIR HEADS ARE THE SAME IN EVERY INDEFINITE PANEL. IGNORE WHAT YOUR EYE TELLS YOU AND LISTEN TO ME INSTEAD.
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In the first half of the twentieth century, American eugenicists were trying to deal with the concept of mixed races. Up until then, people had been classed definitively according to the degree of intermixing: a half-black/half-white person was a mulatto, a quarter-black person was a quadroon, an eighth-black was an octoroon, a sixteenth-black person was a quintroon or hexadecaroon, and so on. (Interestingly, the same was not true of Native American mixes, due to something called the 'Pocahontas exception': many high-class Virginian families claimed Pocahontas as an ancestor. Since rich white people couldn't be Indians, the Virginia General Assembly declared that people were white as long as they were four generations removed from their Indian ancestry.) But in the 1900s, this wasn't cutting it anymore. People were still intermixing, regardless of the fact that their offspring wouldn't be white. Something had to be done.
Since 1865, the new field of eugenics had been growing. Eugenics is basically the idea that social intervention can improve on nature. The idea is that you control breeding and development to some degree in order to produce better people. For example, if people with haemophilia (or any other hereditary disease) are not allowed to reproduce, your society can eliminate haemophilia. Of course, in racist climates, when entire peoples are mistakenly believed to be inferior, it can lead to systemic discrimination and genocide.
So in 1916, a man named Madison Grant wrote a book called The Passing of the Great Race--the 'Great Race' naturally being the white race. In it, he wrote:
The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.Obviously, if you have all these white people founding families of Indians and negroes and Hindus and Jews, the Great Race will be in jeopardy.
The idea didn't really take off until a eugenicist name Walter Plecker formulated his one-drop theory, that became the one-drop rule. The one-drop rule basically states that anyone who has one drop of African blood--anyone who has a black ancestor anywhere in their family history--is black. Plecker wanted to eliminate interracial relationships, because
[t]wo races as materially divergent as the white and negro, in morals, mental powers, and cultural fitness, cannot live in close contact without injury to the higher.Now not only are white people becoming non-white, they're becoming inferior. What is to be done?
Fortunately, the American government never instituted a policy based on the one-drop rule; unfortunately, the ideas of invisible blackness have persisted and contributed to racial tensions in the United States for decades.
A world away in Australia, the government did interfere: however, their policy was based on something akin to the Pocahontas exception. They believed the implied opposite of Plecker's theory--that is, that mixed breeding will elevate the status of the poorer race; in this case, the Australian Aborigines. Neville held the post of Chief Protector of the Aborigines, allowing him complete control of every Native Australian. He believed that if a person had one-eighth or less 'black' blood, they could be considered white, and allowed to mingle with other whites.
To this end--making everyone in Australia white--he disallowed marriages between mulattoes and full-blooded Aboriginals, forcing them instead to marry white people. He instituted a policy, similar to the Canadian residential school system, in which half-blooded children were removed from their Aboriginal parents and taken to religious and government boarding schools. As in the Canadian case, the children were forbidden contact with other Aboriginals, punished for speaking their language or traditions, and generally denied any semblance of their culture in an effort to make them white.
Again, it is fortunate that more enlightened attitudes eventually prevailed. Neville was not able in his twenty-five years in charge of Australian Natives to completely remove their culture or people from the world.
Which finally brings to me why I wrote this post. Which attitude is worse? Eugenicists would have you attempt to breed out the flaws--and, along with the flaws, any distinctions that might have been made. Adolf Hitler attempted to destroy outright the Jews, the Gypsies, homosexuals, and those with mental or physical disabilities. The Australian government attempted to fully integrate and homogenize its people, in the process nearly destroying the Native culture. American slavery made blacks out to be an inferior race, and the shocks are still felt today. All these are terrible things that we might not want to even think about, but many have been ongoing until only recently. Which is worse? To attempt to murder an entire people, or to attempt to integrate them entirely into your own people, committing cultural genocide?
We can pray that these things will never happen again, but if you look around, they're still happening, and we, as enlightened people that can do something about it, don't do anything.
We suck.
***
Man, I had a nice 'maybe-it's-funny-but-then-it's-an-enormous-post-about-depressing-topics' dialectic going on there.
2 Comments:
AND THEN I DIDN'T EVEN SAY ANYTHING.
the eyebrows make it. you quintroon you!
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