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

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri May 29 18:41:19 PDT 1998


Katha wrote:
>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?

Some eugenicist lit on 'white trash' contains reference to that. I'm posting from a school computer lab and don't have my library around me, but I'll try to dig it up later.


>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).

Marriage is one thing, sexual intercourse quite another.


>Wasn't it marriage of native-borns with irish, slavs, jews etc that the
>racial purity folk were worried about?

Both I think.


>After all, the strict immigration
>controls those people favored wouldn't affect the black-white thing,
>since the blacks were already here.

Sometimes nativists used the political rhetoric that elevated blacks above euro + asian immigrants, but only in the most back-handed 'compliments' of sorts, to the effect that those immigrants were 'even worse than negros.'


>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.

I haven't read either, so I can't comment on them, but 'black primitivism' operating as a subtext or framing device for the narrative of 'feeble-minded' immigrants (or 'feeble-minded white trash') might be a better way to look at this case or the history of racialization in general, since, after all, race is a matter of complex social relations, not that of black-white dichotomy alone.

Yoshie



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