Everyone Is African (2 page)

Mildred Jeter was a woman of African American and Native American ancestry who in 1958 married Richard Loving, a man whose ancestry was European American. Both were citizens of the United States and residents of Virginia. They traveled to Washington, DC, to be married because, at the time, Virginia actively enforced the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which stated, “If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony.”
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According to this law, the definition of “colored” was derived from the so-called one-drop rule, meaning that any person whose ancestry was not entirely “white”—had even “one drop” of nonwhite blood—was legally considered to be colored. Mildred met Virginia's legal definition of colored, and Richard, the definition of white.

Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to their Virginia home. Late one night, police forcibly entered their house as they slept and arrested them for violating this law. They pleaded guilty in 1959, the judge stating, as quoted in the subsequent Supreme Court case, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
²

The case reached the US Supreme Court in 1967, nine years after their marriage, and the court ruled that Virginia's Racial Integrity Act violated the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution and was, therefore, unconstitutional. In the unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote,

There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.
³

At the time, sixteen states still had laws prohibiting interracial marriage, known as antimiscegenation laws. As Warren noted in his opinion, the court's decision rendered all of them invalid. Nonetheless, several remained on the books for years after this decision. The final antimiscegenation law in the United States was rescinded by ballot initiative in Alabama in 2000.
⁴
Similar laws in other countries had persisted late into the twentieth century, notably in South Africa under apartheid. The South African laws—the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act—were repealed in 1985.
⁵

Such laws were based on notions of racial superiority, assumed to be genetically inherited. Few features of humanity are as obvious as the wide array of inherited diversity visible in our outward features. It's also evident that people whose ancestry traces to a particular geographic region typically appear similar to one another and different from those whose ancestries are from other geographic regions. Moreover, we as humans have an almost innate propensity to compartmentalize nearly everything into discrete categories, even when lines that distinguish those categories are complex, blurred, or nonexistent. As an inevitable consequence, people have been subjected to categorization into what we now call human races throughout much of the past several centuries.

The word
race
in English has two distinct meanings derived from two independent origins.
Race
as the act of competitive running derives from the Old Norse word
ras
and is unrelated in both meaning and origin to the word this book addresses.
Race
, as an indicator of a group of people, animals, or plants of common genetic lineage, derives from the Old Italian word
razza
and has been conserved in languages with Latin roots, such as
race
in English
and French,
razza
in Italian,
raza
in Spanish,
raça
in Portuguese, and
rasa
in Romanian. Its earliest use in English, in the context of human races, dates to approximately 1500 CE, during the time of the Renaissance.

In modern times, the word
race
is used almost exclusively in reference to humans. We even use it at times to refer to the entire human species, as in
the human race
. But if we go back not too long ago, we find it used more often to denote genetically defined groups of animals and plants. And to understand how the idea of race came to be applied to humans, we need first to examine its earlier usage, especially with domesticated animals.

Until recent times, most people made their living growing crops, tending gardens, and raising animals. Some owned their own land, whereas others were tenant farmers or farmworkers, working on land that belonged to someone else. Whether wealthy or impoverished, most people were familiar with farm animals and were well aware of different types of these animals, which they often referred to as belonging to different races. For example, Charles Darwin uses the term
race
forty-three times in chapter 1 of his best-known book,
On the Origin of Species
, first published in 1859. On a few occasions he writes of racehorses, but in every other instance, his use of the word
race
denotes a genetically distinct group of animals or plants. The following sentence is a case in point: “When we look to the hereditary varieties or races of our domestic animals and plants, and compare them with species closely allied together, we generally perceive in each domestic race, as already remarked, less uniformity of character than in true species.”
⁶

Interestingly, only three times throughout the entire book does Darwin refer to humans with the word
race
. In one instance, for example, he recognizes the ignorance in his day regarding the cause of human variation: “But we are far too ignorant to speculate on the relative importance of the several known and unknown laws of variation…. I might have adduced for this same purpose the differences between the races of man, which are so strongly marked.”
⁷

In the nineteenth century,
race
denoted a broad grouping of related types of animals, whereas the term
breed
designated a more specific subgrouping, although there was much overlap between these two terms in practical use. For example, bulldogs, poodles, shepherds, hounds, terriers, and retrievers might be considered different races of dogs, whereas distinct subgroups within
a race, such as bloodhound, coonhound, basset hound, greyhound, dachshund, and beagle, were (and are) considered different breeds of hounds. In modern usage, the term
race
has mostly disappeared as a designation for animals. The American Kennel Club, for instance, refers to hounds collectively as a group, not a race.
⁸

The key distinguishing feature of both breed and race in animals is the ability to breed true, which means that individuals of the same breed or race consistently and predictably produce, generation after generation, offspring of the same type. For example, when two basset hounds mate, all their offspring consistently and predictably have the characteristics of basset hounds, such as long floppy ears, loose sagging skin, short legs, a relatively long body, short hair, and a baying bark typical of hounds. The term
purebred
is used to denote animals certified as members of a particular breed who do not have any recent ancestry from another breed, as documented by well-kept pedigree records. Animal keepers often take great care to ensure that the animals they raise are purebred, and that these animals mate only with members of the same breed, because purebred individuals typically command higher prices at market. A purebred horse with a known pedigree is much more valuable than one without. For dogs, pedigreed purebred puppies command high prices, whereas it is often difficult to find homes for mixed types.

When members of different breeds mate, their first-generation offspring often have a uniform appearance intermediate between their parents for some traits but more closely resemble one parent for other traits. These offspring are known biologically as
hybrids
, and when two hybrids mate, they often do not breed true. Instead, their offspring tend to vary in the traits they display. Darwin noted this phenomenon in the
Origin of Species
when he wrote, “The slight degree of variability in hybrids from the first cross or in the first generation, in contrast with their extreme variability in the succeeding generations, is a curious fact and deserves attention.”
⁹
He recounted in this passage a phenomenon that animal and plant breeders had known for centuries: the uniformity of hybrids and the variability of their offspring, or, in other words, the inability of hybrids to breed true.

It is no surprise that throughout the past several centuries, people have used the term
race
to describe groups of people in much the same way it was
used in past centuries to describe groups of animals. People with ancestry from a particular region of the world tend to share certain inherited physical characteristics, such as similar facial features and eye, hair, and skin pigmentation. The children of parents with similar regional ancestry typically inherit similar features, resembling their parents. However, the children of parents with substantially different ancestral backgrounds often have an appearance that is intermediate between that of their two parents. And in subsequent generations, the offspring may vary.

In part because of the obvious similarities between animals and humans for how traits are inherited, and in part because of cultural, political, and religious traditions, notions of racial purity and superiority have surged and ebbed yet persisted, crossing the boundaries of culture, geography, politics, and time. They are still with us today, and some of the most insidious actions based on notions of racial supremacy happened not long ago. They were the foundation of two related movements that became codified into law in various places and times: the eugenics movement and antimiscegenation.

In 1883, Francis Galton coined the term
eugenics
to denote the intentional genetic improvement of humans, much like the intentional breeding of animals and plants. The idea of direct selective breeding of humans was appalling to most, but discouraging or legally preventing people from procreating who were considered genetically unfit seemed much more acceptable. The eugenics movement thrived on a universal undercurrent of the supposed inherent superiority of the “white race”—people whose ancestry was northern European, British, or Scandinavian. Books and articles endorsing eugenics proliferated. For instance, Reginald Punnett, a famous British geneticist, wrote in 1913, “By regulating their marriages, by encouraging the desirable to come together, and by keeping the undesirable apart we could go far towards ridding the world of the squalor and the misery that come through disease and weakness and vice.”
¹⁰

The first eugenics laws in the United States requiring mandatory sterilization of people considered unfit to reproduce were implemented in 1907, and between 1910 and 1930, many US states and European countries instituted laws mandating involuntary sterilization of people in prisons and mental institutions. Along with mandatory sterilization laws came antimiscegenation
laws prohibiting interracial marriages, usually defined as marriages between “whites and nonwhites” or “whites and coloreds,” in an attempt to maintain the purity of the so-called white race. Under the guise of eugenic improvement and racial purity, and what the implementation of eugenic measures could supposedly do to improve human society, notions of racial superiority continued in popularity, but with a purported scientific foundation.

The worldwide popularity of the eugenics movement expanded during the first decades of the twentieth century, reaching its climax under the Nazi regime in the 1930s and ‘40s. A fundamental tenet of Nazism was the superiority of the so-called Nordic class of the Aryan master race, typified by light skin and hair, blue or green eyes, and Germanic origins, presumed to be associated with superior intellect and physical prowess. The Nazi regime exterminated millions of people because their genetic background was classified as subhuman (
Untermenschen
, literally “under-men”) and they were deemed a threat to the Aryan race. The majority of those who were killed were European Jews, approximately six million, although Roma (gypsies) and Slavic people, mostly Polish and Russian, were also killed, as well as people designated as homosexual and those with mental disabilities.
¹¹

Lesser known, but likewise intended to preserve and increase genetic integrity and superiority, were the Nazi antimiscegenation laws and the Lebensborn program. The antimiscegenation laws were part of the Nuremberg laws, which initially were anti-Semitic, defining people with four German grandparents as German, those with three or four Jewish grandparents as Jewish, and those with one or two Jewish grandparents as
Mischling
, meaning mixed or half-breed. The laws were complex but essentially required racial classification of people and discriminated against those considered non-Aryan. These laws were eventually extended to discriminate against gypsies and black Africans as unsuitable for marriage with a person defined as German.