One Drop of Blood

Dates Covered: -
ISBN: 0374240795
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Our Take

In one form or another, every major historical force has a yang to its yin. Scott L. Malcomson exhibits an able command of these opposing forces in One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race. He also has a fine ear for historical irony, and he wields it to great effect. Such a sense is useful for a man asking where the concept of race came from. A fair amount of his definition of the varied races comes from economic factors imposed on them; for example, American Indians only became such after a plague killed off most of them and the encroaching colonists found it easy to pigeonhole the varied tribes into one group of "other". Prior to that, he asserts, the concept of race was a fairly unknown phenomenon. At what point, he asks, was there a "white" or "black" or "Indian"? His answer is, not until recently.

In order to convince us that early civilization had an ill-defined sense of race, he freshly examines accounts of Sir Francis Drake and others that recount efforts to found racially-blind societies in the colonial Americas. He notes that from the earliest colonies, racial mixing was prevalent:

In the seventeenth-century social economy the possibility of a fusion of populations cannot but have occurred to many. We may assume that Thomas Morton's Merry Mount produced some light-hued Indians or dark whites ... Many tribes allowed fur traders, all of them men, to marry into Indian society.

[It is worth mentioning that Morton's Merry Mount was actually a party thrown by serious drinker Thomas Morton around a maypole. We giggled, nonetheless.] Malcomson's point is that in a society that swiftly became racially mixed, an identity based on ethnic purity was a fallacy, and it is an observation that shows up continually throughout the course of his book. Thus, as the concept of race was born, it was already being rendered irrelevant. In a gradual shift of racial identities, not only did the classification of "white" and "black" and "Indian" arrive, but swirled around whatever factors folks found convenient. As the concept, if not its targets, stuck, people groped for cultural and behavioral factors to keep it relevant.

Nobody was really innocent of this:

Lincoln felt that, ideally, America should be white. He explained to a black delegation in 1862 that the white and black races could not coexist in the nation, adding that the presence of blacks in America was currently causing white people to fight each other. The next year, in March, Lincoln met with Indian leaders. He had not known many Indians. He began by explaining that the world is round. ("We pale-faced people think that this world is a great, round ball.")

Lincoln later went on to suggest that "I can only say that I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race except by living as they do," and that "Although we are now engaged in a great war between one another, we are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren." What Lincoln was trying to say is that Indians were ignorant of the ways of the world, that the only way they could survive and maintain a sense of self would be by emulating the whites, and that somehow the whites were less violent, even though they were busy killing each other like it was going out of style.

Such is the essence of whiteness. That is, not believing oneself to be warlike, or lazy, or primitive. No being Indian. Not being black. Indeed, whiteness has had such a fluid definition over the past few centuries that no other definition could do: the Irish and Italians only became white about a hundred years ago; the Jews have done it even more recently. Colonizing Portuguese considered themselves white, but would be hard-pressed to be anything other than Hispanic in today's America. With such imprecise borders of self-definition, whiteness had to content itself with not being something else.

For example, a nineteenth-century Californian named Noriega de la Guerra wrote,

that it should be perfectly understood in the first place what is the true significance of the word 'white'. Many citizens have received from nature a very dark skin; nonetheless, there are among them men who have heretofore [under Mexican government] been allowed to vote; and not only that, but to fill the highest public offices. It would be very unjust to deprive them of the privilege of citizens merely because nature had not made them white. But if, by the word 'white' it was intended to exclude the African race, then it was correct and satisfactory.

Malcomson argues this point quite eloquently. While spending most of his time on Indian laws and tribal interactions in the first part of the book, he later quotes African-American literature extensively and speculates the roles of white minstrel shows in blackface are indicative of an anchorless people looking for a culture. For example, the song Dixie was performed by a minstrel show depicting a feed slave who wanted to return South, where he wouldn't have to deal with the difficult choices that accompanied liberty. It has since been adopted by the South, mostly by whites, as a testimonial to their love for their land. (Although Malcomson is too wise to venture down the pop-cultural path, many arguments could be made suggesting the roots of most "white" cultural icons started as "black" ones.)

He's largely right on the question of a vacant white identity, although by the time he gets there he's already used his best ammunition. The opening section on the plight of American Indians (and, to be sure, their internal bickering helped no one) contains the strongest historical data; the following section on U.S. blacks dips less into laws and interactions and more into the artistic tone surrounding the development of a cultural identity. A few awkwardly-written episodes detail Malcomson's own experiences with contemporary groups (notably among them a racist white Oklahoman family that worships "Walker, Texas Ranger"), but seem forced and out of place. Likewise is the last section of the book, a rambling semi-autobiographical diatribe that discusses the racial evolution of Oakland, California.

One of Malcomson's chief assertions, that race as an intellectual concept didn't gain a solid foothold until the sixteenth century, seems a bit impetuous at first glance. And indeed it is, for later on he himself comments on various historical precedents of racial awareness stemming from a variety of cultures. Aristotle comments on the inability of northern Europeans to organize themselves politically; he then says Asians are lazy. Likewise, a tenth-century Iraqi writer reports the Iraqis to be "neither half-baked dough nor burned crust, but between the two," referring, respectively, to light-skinned northern neighbors and southern, darker ones. With increased trade and exposure between peoples, is it really so hard to imagine that they might observe skin color differences?

These stumblings do not invalidate Malcomson's fine research and the breathtaking conclusions he makes earlier in the work. Through cultural and historical data, he takes a long, hard look at how the idea of race was created, why it spread, and what it means for us today. In all, it's not a bad effort for a white guy.

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