{"id":25242,"date":"2012-09-08T00:42:21","date_gmt":"2012-09-08T00:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=25242"},"modified":"2017-05-28T21:29:19","modified_gmt":"2017-05-28T21:29:19","slug":"but-by-forcing-blacks-of-all-complexions-and-blood-percentages-into-the-same-boat-the-law-ironically-laid-a-foundation-of-black-unity-that-remains-in-place-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=25242","title":{"rendered":"But by forcing blacks of all complexions and blood percentages into the same boat, the law ironically laid a foundation of black unity that remains in place today."},"content":{"rendered":"

Now, I have always believed that what is now widely considered one of slavery\u2019s worst legacies\u2014the Southern \u201cone-drop\u201d rule<\/a> that indicted anyone with black blood as a nigger and cleaved American society into black and white with a single stroke\u2014was also slavery\u2019s only upside. Of course I deplore the motive behind the law, which was rooted not only in white paranoia about miscegenation<\/a>, but in a more practical need to maintain social order by keeping privilege and property in the hands of whites. But by forcing blacks of all complexions and blood percentages into the same boat, the law ironically laid a foundation of black unity that remains in place today.<\/strong> It\u2019s a foundation that allows us to talk abstractly about a \u201d black community\u201d as concretely as we talk about a black community in Harlem or Chicago or L.A.\u2019s South Central (a liberty that\u2019s often abused or lazily applied in modern discussions of race). And it gives the lightest-skinned among us the assurance of identity that everybody needs to feel grounded and psychologically whole\u2014even whites, whose public non-ethnicity is really ethnicity writ so large and influential it needs no name.<\/strong> Being black may still not be the most advantageous thing in the world, but being nothing or being neutral\u2014the rallying cry of modern-day multiculturalists\u2014has never made any emotional or real-world sense. Color marks you, but your membership in black society also gives you an indestructible house to live in and a bed to rest on. I can\u2019t imagine growing up any other way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Erin Aubry Kaplan, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0 (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2011), 16.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now, I have always believed that what is now widely considered one of slavery\u2019s worst legacies\u2014the Southern \u201cone-drop\u201d rule that indicted anyone with black blood as a nigger and cleaved American society into black and white with a single stroke\u2014was also slavery\u2019s only upside. Of course I deplore the motive behind the law, which was rooted not only in white paranoia about miscegenation, but in a more practical need to maintain social order by keeping privilege and property in the hands of whites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11782,11766,11783],"class_list":["post-25242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-erin-a-kaplan","tag-erin-aubry-kaplan","tag-erin-kaplan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25242"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54048,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25242\/revisions\/54048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}