(ThyBlackMan.com) Even after the adoption of legalized segregation in the late 19th century, individuals who were as much as one quarter Black were classified as white. According to George Tillman a delegate to the South Carolina constitutional convention in 1895.
It is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention. Every member has in him a certain mixture of. . . colored blood. The pure-blooded white has needed and received a certain infusion of darker blood to give him readiness and purpose. It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless litigation, of scandal, horror, feud, and bloodshed to undertake to annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood.
The so-called “one drop rule,” mandating that anyone with any Black ancestry no matter how insignificant be viewed as Black, did not become widespread until decades later. It was only adopted when white reactionary rule felt threatened by the “New Negro” stalwarts, the Black veterans of WWI who fought back against the lynch mobs. If given the “one drop” litmus test today how many “whites” would pass muster?
About one-third of white Americans are of between two and twenty percent recent African genetic admixture, as measured by the ancestry-informative markers in their DNA. This comes to about 74 million Americans. Keep in mind that a significant percentage of white Americans are descended from Europeans who entered the country after Emancipation. Thus, this 74 million may comprise the vast majority of those descended from the pre-1860 white population.
Nonetheless, mainstream historians are comfortable with the assertion that every president before Barack Obama had not one Black ancestor, reminiscent of how, up until the advent of DNA testing, they discounted the possibility that President Thomas Jefferson fathered any of the six children of his constant companion, Sally Hemmings, whom he held in bondage. And, believe it or not, there are still some holdouts in that regard. As for Native American extraction, mainstream historians have not identified one president with any, and they say only one has served as Vice President, Charles Curtiss, Herbert Hoover’s VP.
Keep in mind that in Virginia in the 1930s, officials removed the classification Native American from state records and designated everyone as either Black or white. Also, authorities in New Orleans, for several centuries home to a substantial population of Creoles, individuals of mixed white, Black, and Native American ancestry, around the same time resolutely set about classifying everyone as either Black or white. And Charleston, South Carolina, once possessed a huge mixed race population that today no longer exists. Where did it go? Many doubtless became “white.” What difference does it make, one may ask, how one is racially classified? Is there any legal benefit or detriment to one’s assignment to the Black or white “race?”
Staff Writer; Arthur Lewin
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