As for what the case said about Canada, my mother got to the heart of the matter: “Canadians always seemed to feel that they were so much better than the Americans because of racism, even though we had it here too. Excluding British subjects who were not white shows that Canadian social attitudes were still really backward at that time, and that many people believed that Canada was basically for whites.”
IT WOULD BE NAIVE to conclude that the equation of blood and race is a thing of the distant past, or confined to eighteenth-century European thinkers obsessed by notions of racial superiority. The idea may offend many of us today, but defining people’s racial identity along lines of blood — and holding them to it — has been serious business since Europeans began settling in the Americas.
In eighteenth-century Mexico, criollos — people of Spanish origin who were born in the New World — were concerned that they were situated one step down the social totem pole from Spanish-born people who had settled in the country. Therefore, they enacted rules regulating and restricting every aspect of the lives of Indians, blacks, and mixed-race people, who were to be positioned several rungs down from them on the ladder of social hierarchy. This caste system, or sistema de castas, was designed to ensure that the elite criollos were not associated with the tainted blood of miscegenation (the mixing of racial groups through marriage and procreation).
“Mestizos” was a term used to describe Mexican people with mixed Spanish and Indian heritage. Octavio Paz, the late Mexican Nobel Prize–winning poet and essayist, once wrote: “If the criollo, born of Spanish blood, was the victim of ambiguity, the mestizo, born of mixed blood, was doubly so: he was neither criollo nor Indian. Rejected by both groups, the mestizo had no place either in the social structure or in the moral order. In the light of traditional moral systems — the Spanish, based on honor, and the Indian, based on the sacredness of family — the mestizo was the living image of illegitimacy.”
As a person of biracial ancestry myself, I’m always a bit wary of the stereotype of the mixed-race person who is forever troubled by the quality of his or her blood. However, there can be no disputing that the most influential classes of people in eighteenth-century Mexico bent over backwards to place peoples of mixed ancestry within a rigid social hierarchy.
Ilona Katzew has written an art history book on the subject, titled Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. Just as in the United States, Canada, Jamaica, Brazil, or any other region where people of many backgrounds found themselves together, it didn’t take long for people of one background to end up in bed with those of another background. In Mexico, indigenous peoples, Spaniards, and Africans begin having sex — and babies — as early as the sixteenth century. “This resulted in a large number of racially mixed people known collectively as castas,” Katzew writes. “By the end of the eighteenth century, approximately one quarter of the total population of Mexico was racially mixed.”
The fixation with the sistema de castas spilled into the paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico, and this forms the heart of Katzew’s book, which contains portraits of the men, women, and children so rigidly defined in Mexico’s racially mixed society.
Casta paintings often feature sixteen distinct representations of racial mixing. Sometimes each scene occupies its own canvas or copper plate, and at other times all sixteen are squeezed checkerboard-style into a single frame. Each image shows a man and a woman of two separate races, as well as their child. Each image bears an inscription defining the races of all three subjects in the painting. Juan Rodríguez Juárez, one of the best known casta painters, produced bold, lively portraits, each with mother, father, and child. A list of just a few of the inscriptions in his paintings demonstrates the Mexicans’ (and the Spaniards’) obsession with racial taxonomy. One is inscribed: “Spaniard and Indian Produce a Mestizo.” Another: “Spaniard and Mulatta Produce a Morisca.” And another: “Mulatto and Mestiza Produce a Mulatta Return-Backwards,” which emphasizes social regression. (Mestizo and Mestiza are the Spanish masculine and feminine nouns indicating people of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry. Morisca is the feminine noun indicating, in this case, a person reputed to have one black and three white grandparents.) There are many names employed to keep track of all the racial variations: Albino, Coyote, Wolf, and so forth. However, there seems to be the possibility to become white again, in Mexico, if a family really works at it by correcting one step into racial impurity by another back toward the state of “perfection.” This is shown by another painter, José de Ibarra, who made two revealing canvases that should be seen back to back. The first shows “From Mestizo and Spaniard, Castizo.” This castizo child (who, by these arbitrary definitions, would have one Indian and three Spanish grandparents) looks confident, happy, and very nearly white. The next intermarriage offers one final possibility of improvement, showing two finely dressed adults with an aristocratic, demanding son: “From Castizo and Spaniard, Spaniard.”
In case you have trouble figuring out how the arithmetic equations work between whites and blacks and their children, a seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit missionary by the name of José Gumilla offered a four-step formula. As Katzew notes, Gumilla wrote:
From European and black, a mulata is born (two fourths each part);
From European and mulata, a cuarterona is born (one fourth mulatto);
From European and cuarterona, an ochavona is born (one eight mulatto);
From European and ochavona, a puchuela is born (entirely white).
Hearing today of the casta system and paintings, a reader might declare it absurd and passé. Absurd, yes. Passé, no. We continue to embrace subtler means to define people by dint of their blood purity, or by degrees of mixture. It still influences the way we talk when we describe our neighbour as half black and half white, or our co-worker as one-quarter Irish, one-quarter Japanese, and one-half Nigerian. How quaint. How exotic. How ludicrous. Human identity cannot be arithmetically quantified. You cannot break down blood into discrete racial parts. Each time we try to do it, we reveal the very looniest parts of our hearts and minds. And we open the door to mistreatment and injustice.
People commonly look to slavery in the United States or to apartheid in South Africa for examples of the lengths to which folks will go to establish racial hierarchies. There are more terms for people of African ancestry, and more terms for people of supposedly mixed blood, than could fill a three-hundred-page book. Mulatto is one of the most common ones, and it still makes its appearance from time to time these days. It is meant to refer to a person who has one black and one white parent, and is offensive to many because it derives from the Spanish word for the offspring of a horse and a donkey. There is quadroon (one-quarter “black blood”) and octoroon (one-eighth), and from there, the possibilities expand into ludicrous directions. On my shelf at home is one of the most bizarre books I have ever seen, called the Dictionary of Latin American Racial and Ethnic Terminology. It is by Thomas M. Stephens, and was published by the University Press of Florida. It has three parts, for terms that are either Spanish-American, Brazilian-Portuguese, or French-American and American French-Creole. It runs to 863 pages. One Creole term is lèt kayé, which means “person who is the colour of curdled milk.” Another is the Spanish-American term calpamulato, which can have various meanings, one of which is “offspring of a mulatto and an Indian; 25 percent white, 50 percent Indian, 25 percent black.”
The Dictionary of Latin American Racial and Ethnic Terminology shows that as far as people of African descent are concerned, racial identity derives from the idea of blood. In Canada and the United States, the concept of “hypodescent” (also known as the one-drop rule) suggests that a person with any drop of “black blood” would be considered black and so defined for the purposes of slavery, segregation, and other forms of social oppression. Those who would profit from an economy based on the exploitation of slave labour clearly had an interest in defining black people with
as wide a net as possible. There is no need to cite a litany of outrageous laws to this effect. One will suffice: in 1934, the State of Tennessee defined the word Negro as encompassing “mulattoes, mestizos and their descendants, having any blood of the African race in their veins.”
I titled my second novel Any Known Blood to refer to a concept that the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal identified in writing about race in America during World War II. In volume one of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944, Myrdal — with his neatly idiosyncratic, foreign phrasing that did such a concise and jolting job of holding up a mirror so that Americans (and Canadians too) could see themselves — had this to say: “Everybody having a known trace of Negro blood in his veins — no matter how far back it was acquired — is classified as a Negro. No amount of white ancestry, except one hundred per cent, will permit entrance to the white race.”
Over the course of history in Canada and the United States, people with both black and white ancestry were not excused from the burdens of slavery, segregation, or racial discrimination if they were perceived to have some white blood. In their cases, white blood didn’t exist. It didn’t matter. It had been polluted. They were judged to be black, and were treated as such, because it was black blood that counted.
The apartheid regime in South Africa built its political base by separating people along lines of blood superiority (or inferiority, if they were black). South Africa tried to keep those deemed “black,” “coloured,” and “Indian” separate in every conceivable way from whites. Marriage and sex between blacks and whites was prohibited. There was always the pencil test, for those who wanted to have their race redefined: if a pencil fell straight through your hair to the floor, you could be reclassified from coloured to white. If the same pencil fell out when you shook your hair, you could switch from black to coloured.
This way of thinking was exemplified by the words and deeds of the late American politician Strom Thurmond. An avowed segregationist, Thurmond served as a U.S. senator for forty-eight years. He switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party over his opposition to the U.S. Civil Rights Act. He is famous for having declared, in a speech in 1948: “I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches . . .”
Why does the absurdity of racial definition become so clear in Thurmond’s case? Six months after he died, an African-American named Essie Mae Washington-Williams declared, and proved, that Thurmond fathered her in 1925. At the time, Thurmond was twenty-two, and he slept with and impregnated Carrie Butler, a sixteen-year-old black maid working in his parents’ house. Washington-Williams had to attend an historically black college, and Thurmond quietly provided funds for her education. For even a man whose most noted public statement was to insist on racial separation, Thurmond must have known deep in his bones that you cannot keep people apart, and that you bear a responsibility toward the things — and the people — that you help to create.
IT HAS BEEN IN THE economic interests of government agencies to expand the definition of black identity in order to maximize the economic benefits associated with slave labour, but it was not considered such a valuable idea to define all people with Aboriginal identity as “Indians,” due to the costs associated with providing services to Aboriginal people or recognizing their land rights.
Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act — one legislative act among many stretching as far back as the 1700s in what would become the United States — referred to blood in defining “colored persons” and “Indians”: “Every person in whom there is ascertainable any Negro blood shall be deemed and taken to be a colored person, and every person not a colored person having one-fourth or more of American Indian blood shall be deemed an American Indian.”
The same act employed what has famously been described as the “Pocahontas exception,” declaring that when the blood was watered down, “Indians” would become white for the purposes of the rules of miscegenation: “It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this chapter, the term ‘white person’ shall apply only to such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons . . .” I have cited the Pocahontas exception to establish that, over the course of time, authorities have defined racial groups — limiting or expanding the range of people included — to suit their own needs and whims.
Defining Native Americans by means of blood quantum (the quantity of so-called Indian blood in their veins) has by no means disappeared today. Many writers and scholars have weighed in on this matter. One of them, the American Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University, notes in an article published in 2006 in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, “The U.S. Congress passed the Allotment Act of 1887, denying land rights to those Native Americans who were ‘less than half-blood.’ The U.S. Government still requires American Indians to produce ‘Certificates with Degree of Indian Blood’ in order to qualify for a number of entitlements, including being able to have one’s art so identified. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 made it a crime to identify oneself as a Native American when selling artwork without federal certification authorizing one to make the legitimate claim that one was, indeed, an authentic (‘one-quarter blood’ even in the 1990s) American Indian.”
The problem with equating authenticity to race is that it attempts to quantify a concept that is inherently absurd. To focus on the authenticity of the blood in our veins is to repudiate deeper realities: we construct and negotiate our own identities as acts of social performance from our first to our last days on the planet.
Examples abound in the United States of close adherence to blood quantum in establishing or refuting the identity of American Indians. The Cherokee Freedmen of Oklahoma, for example, have faced an ongoing battle for years to establish that they deserve citizenship and full rights in the Cherokee Nation. Their origin is partially African-American — the Cherokee enslaved their ancestors before the American Civil War. The Cherokee Nation included both Union and Confederate sympathizers. The black slaves of the Cherokee Nation obtained their freedom after the Civil War, and many became members of the Nation. However, in the 1980s, the Cherokee Nation began revoking the citizenship of the Freedmen, unless they could prove descent from ancestors formally listed as “Cherokee By Blood.” In 2007, Cherokee Nation voters approved a constitutional amendment that fully stripped the Freedmen of citizenship status.
American scholar Circe Sturm, who is of Choctaw descent, says that — as with most other Indian nations in the United States — you must have a “certificate degree of Indian blood” (CDIB) issued by the U.S. government before you can register as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. In her book Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Sturm writes: “This small white card, so critical to an individual’s legal and political recognition as a Cherokee tribal member, provides some ‘essential’ information: the individual’s name and degree of Indian blood, in fractions according to tribe. For instance, a fairly typical CDIB in Oklahoma might describe someone with multitribal Indian and Euroamerican ancestry in the following manner: seven thirty-seconds Cherokee, two thirty-seconds Kiowa, and two thirty-seconds Choctaw.”
Sturm explains that one does not have to have a certain blood quantum to qualify as a Cherokee, but one must establish a link to Cherokee ancestry in a list (called the Dawes Roll) of Indians assembled between 1899 and 1906 by the American government. The Cherokee Nation now includes more than three hundred thousand enrolled citizens, with defined degrees of Cherokee blood ran
ging from “full blood” to 1/2,048th. The definitions — including the most minute fractions — of Cherokee blood do give credence to the notion of purity. If one has a higher fraction, is one more Cherokee? Is a black person with dark skin more authentically African in origin than a sibling or friend who has African heritage but lighter skin? The very existence of the Cherokee Freedmen attests to the mixing of people of indigenous and African heritage. Does being of mixed heritage make one less African or less Cherokee? I would hope not. The process of mixing cultures should add to your family ancestry, not subtract from it.
In an article in the Kenyon Review in 2010, Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice says, “To be Indian in the twenty-first century is to be something other than Indian, as the only ‘real’ Indians are those locked in museums and nostalgic wet dreams of an imagined and idealized nineteenth-century Wild West.” Justice, who is chair of the First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia, asserts in the article that the Cherokee Nation has the right to determine its membership, but that it also has the responsibility to honour “long-acknowledged obligations to those whose ancestors served the Nation in both captivity and freedom.”
As for the effort by the Cherokee Nation to exclude the Cherokee Freedmen, some will argue that it is racist; others say that it is right and necessary and at the very least a simple reflection of a long history of formal government policies linking blood and race. I say that the struggle proves that we continue to link blood to race in contemporary society and politics.
Canada too has employed rigid definitions of racial identity. For example, the federal government issued instructions in 1901 to Canadian census takers, with regard to racial identity. The instructions included this explanation: “The races of men will be designated by the use of ‘w’ for white, ‘r’ for red, ‘b’ for black and ‘y’ for yellow. The whites are, of course, the Caucasian race, the reds are the American Indian, the blacks are the African or negro, and the yellow are the Mongolian (Japanese and Chinese). But only pure whites will be classified as whites; the children begotten of marriages between whites and any one of the other races will be classed as red, black or yellow, as the case may be, irrespective of the degree of colour.”
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