Invention of the white race // 'inbreeding' and 'miscegenation'

[Katha Pollitt]

Re Yoshi's comment on fears of 
white blood" becoming weak, diluted etc at turn of century -- Was it
black blood that was supposed to be responsible for this? I don't think
there was much black-white intermarriage back then (even today it's only
2% of all marriages--,much lower than white-Asian, or anglo-Hispanic).
Wasn't it marriage of native-borns with irish, slavs, jews etc that the
racial purity folk were worried about? After all, the strict immigration
controls those people favored wouldn't affect the black-white thing,
since the blacks were already here.

  I thought Michael Schudson's article in Lingua Franca about donna
Haraway's "Teddy Bear patriarchy" teased these two strands of racialism
apart rather well. She saw The Natural History Museum as a panorama of
white  supremacy versus black primitivism (as we would read it today),
but he argues that in its historical context the object of the narrative
laid out in the museum dioramas was, if anyone, immigrants. I thought it
was strange that she never replied to his critique, which at least on
the face of it, seemed to me quite devastating.