When I was kid, I always thought it was weird how much white racism, basically, revolved around keeping white women from having sex with black men. I'd be reading some book on black history, where people would be devoting, say, the right of black people to vote. And, inevitably, some white segregationists would say something like "If we let them vote, they'll be marrying your daughters!!! And they'll take over the country!!!" And I think, "Whaaa??" Talk about your non-sequitur.
But then I was talking about this with Kenyatta this morning, and it all suddenly made sense. She nodded to Barack Obama and laughingly noted, "They were right."
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
That's why they hate gay marriage, too. People are afraid gay men will marry their daughters and produce gay offspring who will marry more daughters and then one day the entire world will be homosexual. Wait...
Seriously, I think there's also some fear for hetero men who might have lesbian daughters. Just to think there's hot lesbo action out there but IT'S MY DAUGHTER AUUUGH! GOD! NOOOOO!! What a cognitive dissonance!
Actually according to Dennis Leary's series "Rescue Me" having a daughter involved in hot lesbo action is preferable to the alternative. No pregnancy.
He celebrated when his estranged wife told him the daughter was involved with another girl. Better than teen pregnancy.
As for the true meaning of miscegenation I suggest one delve into the Tao of "Blazing Saddles".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJkHykGRXrw
This notion that a taboo against miscegenation is some white thing is a bit over the top. I know a very successful Harvard educated (I think she might even be friends with Michelle) black woman (who was my boss for a while). She was single and didn't want to be for the simple reason that she couldn't find a black man to marry. She was a great boss and in no way racist that I could see, but she limited her potential mate pool to black men. No one ever thought for a second she was racist for this desire. After all, in matters of the heart people love who they love. Still, I always found it weird that a supremely bright and successful woman would limit herself in this way.
Doesn't it come from the old joke that in the U.S. is a country where a white woman can give birth to a black baby. See how Obama is called black even though his mother was white and even though he was raised by his white grandparents.
In the Jim Crow Era, having black grandchildren would have been considered a bad thing since they would have had a different legal standing than white grandchildren.
That's the reason why some racists are against affirmative action. They're afraid that some minorities will get an education, start getting the notion that they can run things, and next thing you know, they're running the country.
The correct spelling is "non sequitur", with a 'u', not an 'o'. If you had gone to one of those fancy prep schools you described visiting the other day, you would know this. And you would be no smarter, no wiser, and no better educated in any useful way. But you would know this. (Think it would be worth $50K per year?)
"This notion that a taboo against miscegenation is some white thing is a bit over the top."
Again, I don't know who said this.
Jim,
It would have been money well spent! Fixing now.
As for the true meaning of miscegenation I suggest one delve into the Tao of "Blazing Saddles".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJkHykGRXrw
Damn you, IrishPirate, you beat me to it!
Just another black literature recommendation: Langston Hughes penned a wonderfully insightful and funny Simple story on the topic of miscegenation in the late 1940s/early 1950s (if I recall) that made the obvious point (the kind that Jesse B. Semple was so good at making) that if white men simply acknowledged the gender equality and the right of white women to choose their partners (white or black or whatever), the miscegenation paranoia would be over. The Simple stories really are overlooked masterpieces of wit and wisdom.
Low Tech cyclist,
not the first or last time I've been damned.
If you want to see some more politically incorrect humor from that era check out the "Kentucky Fried Movie" on YouTube.
They have some interesting takes on "Mandingo", race relations,sex and my favorite skit "Catholic Girls in Trouble".
Is this a European caucasian thing?? I've heard the "immigrants taking our jobs and women". Most of it as a child, so it's not that relevant now...but it's scary...why would i want a job as a white supremacist??!
Its a good example of when an opponent's "Slippery Slope" to a "Parade of Horribles" isn't so horrible. For example, whenever I hear people say that if we remove "Under God" from the Pledge of Allegience we end up removing "In God We Trust" from our currency, ending the prayers before the sessions of Congress, and the statement "God save this honorable Court" before the opening of Supreme Court argument. My response is always: "Yeah. Sounds fine to me."
The downside of regular employment is that I don't have enough time to hang out and be semi-witty anymore. At least not until the kids are in bed and by then it's 9:00 and no new shit is going on.
Otherwise, I would have beat IrishPirate's ass to that Blazing Saddles scene.
What am I supposed to do for fun now?
Couldn't prove it by me: hardly any black men have felt empowered enough by the right to vote to try to marry me, and I've got this chiffarobe in the house that I need help busting up. If you know what I mean.
Richard Pryor as the first black president:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_cdbByTeNE
Coates is up on Fresh Air.
Larry Wilmore on the Daily show had a similar conclusion right after the election: when Black men and White women get together, it's good for everyone.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=209423&title=Black-Liberal-Guilt
I wish he was on more often.
JimB,
I only had a garden variety public school education and I not only know how to spell non sequitur, but I also know what it means...
Have a good day -- too much hate on the net today.
I'd always thought sex/masculinity was only a problem for the battle against sexism, until I learned how intermingled race panic has always been with fears of what they called "amalgamation" in Lincoln's day.
As Henry Louis Gates reminded us all today the Great Emancipator himself was squigged by the idea -- even after he became friends with Frederick Douglass. (Had he lived, Douglass mught have invited him to the wedding with the lovely and quite white second wife.)
This has been your Probably Useless History Moment for today.
Looks like EVERYBODY is thinking about Blazing Saddles:
http://www.petercashwell.com/journal/2009/01/#000473
@Bruce:
Everyone who has "stuff" is afraid someone else is going to take it, and so these arbitrary classifications are imbued with invented meaning (black skin = bad person; white skin = good person) as a means to divide the world up and keep a closer eye on who can have our stuff. Human nature, in my opinion.
Whites in USA have had a good run of things, but they are just people like everyone else. They got stuff and don't want to let it go, so they band together and say blacks/chinese/jews/gays/etc can't have our stuff. Old as the hills.
-bakum
Blazing Saddles the Obama edition.
This is some funny sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYZDDSTsomE
To "themightypuck":
I think you actually hit on a major difference between the black woman who remained single because she couldn't find a black man to marry and the white paranoia regarding miscegenation. The woman you cite made an individual choice regarding relationships. In the case of segregationists, they tried to choose for everyone else.
russd,
You do realize that Jim B was joking, right? And it was a reference to a previous post of TNC's. Or maybe you were joking and I missed it.
It's always for the sake of the children, isn't it? Or for the defenseless helpless female who needs your manly strong arms, right?
Think how much anti-gay hysteria has been focused on trying to keep gay people away from children, or on the (never explained) terrible effect that gay marriage would have on straight marriage. It only makes sense that racist hysteria would be focused on keeping your women pure and your children your own. These things are never rational.
I was reading an article in the American HIstorical Review recently (I think perhaps the fall 2008 issue) in which the author argued that the concern about miscegenation (which was strongest after the civil war) originated in the need of white elites to disinherit their black formerly servile half-brothers and sisters. Which is to say, American slavery, like slavery in the Gold Coast of Africa during the same period, was partly informed by the kinship obligations of servile members of the family to non-servile. Post-emancipation, anti-miscegination laws were needed to deny the kinship of black and white souherners (you cannot claim to be your father's son when your father's relationship with your mother was illegal).
I suppose this doesn't really help us with the strange fear of black man-white woman relationships, except, of course, that socially acceptable, if illegal, black-white relations were always white man-black woman, and the opposite set-up amounted to (as a previous commentator quoting Langston Hughes suggests) a serious challenge to patriarchy. On the other hand, as I think many people have mentioned, the situation which I have described perhaps provides some historical background to the refusal of the black female boss to marry anybody but a black male, since legally black-women/white men were designed specifically to deny all inheritance rights to children produced by the union.
Well, I don't really know what I am talking about, except for that half-remembered article, but that came to mind.
Nitangae
I don't think you're going to get anybody reading this blog who is going to have any kind of comprehension of that attitude.
Fear of miscegenation comes from an assumption that blacks are genetically inferior and so mixed kids will be inferior and lots of mixed kids will result in an inferior population.
But folks reading this blog just don't get that on an intellectual or emotional level. It's a generational thing, I think. It just doesn't compute. We can read history books and read that people had that obsolete belief (like phlogiston or something) or even talk to elderly relatives who have such beliefs. But to us readers? Doesn't make any sense.
I think folks here might understand (but disagree with) opinions to favor in-marriage for ethnic reasons. Or for people to grok emotional reactions to assessing the safety of a (not-your-ethnicity) rough neighborhood.
But miscegenation fears? Does not compute.
Don't black women feel the same way about black men with white women? Remember the Latifah-led roundtable discussion about "zulu dick" from "Jungle Fever"?
Sorry guys, but I posted on this site, almost a year ago, that Mel Brooks was our nation's most prescient political satirest because of one of the funniest movies ever made, "Blazing Saddles." Glad y'all are catching up. One of my favorite moments in this vein is how Sheriff Bart helps the White citizens overcome their own racism and really work in their own self interest by uniting with the Black and Chinese rail road workers. Sound familiar? What's also interesting is that "Blazing Saddles" is a parody of a classic Jimmy Stewart movie, "Destry Rides Again," about a non-violent sheriff who cleans up a town run by crooked politicians and other thugs. How many other Jimmy Stewart roles did our President Elect channel during the long campaign, besides "Mr. Smith." I also think one the reasons Barack Obama won the town hall debate against McCain is that while the later was wandering around the stage and our President Elect was relaxing on his stool, he looked for all the world like Cary Grant in "North by Northwest."
wow! this post was so poorly written it could only come from a black woman.
I heard Coates on the radio today. Man, I think that guy is more racist than a lot of people that he hacks on. What a hypocrite!!! People are people, man. People are different and there's nothing wrong with that. Just be yourself and GET OVER IT!!!
Hate to get all anecdotal, but I have been privy to a related sentiment. White folks might have gotten all hot and bothered by the idea of black men taking "their" white women, but I have had several different black men tell me with pride that they have been with white women. Like it is some kind of prize. They have all been over 50. Maybe it was some kind of prize because it was "forbidden". It is all really friggin' creepy if you ask me. The underlying point is that both perspectives objectify women.
"Don't black women feel the same way about black men with white women? Remember the Latifah-led roundtable discussion about "zulu dick" from "Jungle Fever"?"
It comes from an entirely different place and it is reactionary to the history of the overall devaluing of black women in our society. We are often left to feel undesirable.
Maya Angelou once said,
"As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them."
Also, Steven N:
I sorta didn't find that funny.
Interestingly this was apparently also part of why Jews in Medieval Europe had to live in ghettos. There was fears good Christian girls would be seduced by these hot Jewish studs and leave their religion. (In fairness I think Medieval Jews often would not have wanted their sons going off with Gentile women either)
As odd as that one might sound it makes a bit more sense to me to be honest. Although that might be because religion matters to me, while race seems mostly meaningless.
To them though race was pretty significant. William Jennings Bryan began his autobiography stating that he was glad to belong to "the best race, the Caucasian race" and although he was a creationist he was actually liberal on many things for that era. And also they were big on purity for their girls. A white girl was a great thing and a black man was some perpetually sullied animal/jester/serf in their minds. Interestingly some in the South back then didn't even really like white men sleeping with black women, for similar reasons, but purity" for men wasn't as important. Women kind-of held the bloodlines and the decorum.
Lastly people just tend to connect things to either sex or money. So black men were either going to take your job or your woman. I imagine somewhere in the weird world of Ron-Paulians there's probably people worried Mexicans will take their job or their woman.
Republicans' worst social fears are always realized; it's just that when these fears become realized, society has learned to accept them.
Kenyatta and Mick Jagger share a train of thought.
Jagger once said that all the folks of his parents' generation who were afraid that spreading "race music" to white kids would lead to loose morals...were right. And he sounded equally as pleased about it as Kenyatta did about the Obama/miscegenation thing in your retelling.
Nitangae raises an interesting point, and maybe that explains it, but I sense something more sinister.
It really seems to me that in many regards, white folks have been scared that black folks would treat white folk the way that white folk had treated black folk. For example, white folks were scared of giving gun rights to black folks because traditionally, white folks killed black folks when they felt like it. What if black folks then started killing white folks whenever they pleased? (Yes, yes, I know, the justice system's complicity in unequal treatment was probably a larger issue than gun ownership.)
It might be that "black men will sleep with our (white) women!" was code for "black men will rape our daughters the same way we have been raping their daughters for decades".
Kaitlin, you are living in the past! You just hang on to that hatred for all it's worth. You just take that hatred and chew on it and chew on it. It's people like you that are more racist than the people you claim are racist. You perpetuate and exacerbate the problem. Call it what you want but it ain't reality. It's amazing to me how people can talk themselves into believing whatever they want to believe. Don't you know there is good and bad in every race? Black people have it soooo bad and they have been sooo wronged. What about the American Indians? We don't hear too much about that. Why? Because the majority of them were killed off! GAIN SOME PERSPECTIVE. You are not the only people on this little planet.
"white folks killed black folks when they felt like it." KDS
TR: This is something of a blanket generalization. Even in the Deepest parts of the South whites weren't exactly the same as Nazis. At the very least, and exempting some wackos, they considered blacks to be akin to pack animals and I doubt they killed mules just whenever they felt like it.
To be honest I think most whites, even in the South, were a bit less cold than even that. I think it was more common for them to see blacks as naughty children. They may have even felt they loved blacks in the way you love a dog or an infant. They denied black people the right to ever be truly adult, or have the dignity of such, but I think few of them really wanted to deny them life unless they felt "threatened."
Wow! Thomas R. You have quite an imagination. Wow.
Why don't some of you whiners invent a time machine so you can go back in time and bring justice to some of those mean white people. But don't make me pay for their mistakes. I didn't have anything to do with their actions. Think about it. You are living in the past. Why don't you try looking toward the future? We are all modern day brothers on the same world: Earth.
I am sick and tired of hearing y'all complain. If you have a problem with this continent then maybe you should go back to your continent of origin. Please.
I hope it didn't sound like I was defending them. I'm mostly just going by what I've read by Richard Wright and pre-integration white Southerners. Plus my Dad is a segregation-era white Southerner.
The idea of seeing blacks as children, and "liking" them if they "stay in their place", is a pretty strong vein in much of it. One story I really remember sticking with me from "Uncle Tom's Children" was what you do with hats. If a white man had his hands full of boxes and a lady came in, another white man would take off his hat for him. A white man would also take off a black man's hat in this situation, but if the black man thanked the white man he'd get punched or beaten. The black man was not to be his equal and was not to speak to him in the thanking friendly way a white man could. Similarly my Dad used to say "do not speak unless spoken to" when referring to kids.
It was things like that that I hadn't thought of when young, but that occurred to me when talking to people and reading stuff from the era. A whole series of etiquette essentially existed even among the "good whites" that reinforced blacks as equivalent to white children or sometimes maybe pets. Something I really don't need to explain to people here, but the image I originally had was more of just constant torment rather than a series of systematic "tiny humiliations" intended to wear a person down.