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!
]]>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".
]]>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.
]]>Again, I don't know who said this.
Jim,
It would have been money well spent! Fixing now.
]]>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJkHykGRXrw
Damn you, IrishPirate, you beat me to it!
]]>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".
]]>Otherwise, I would have beat IrishPirate's ass to that Blazing Saddles scene.
What am I supposed to do for fun now?
]]>http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=209423&title=Black-Liberal-Guilt
I wish he was on more often.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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
This is some funny sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet.
]]>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.
]]>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 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
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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".
]]>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."
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>