Drawing the Line

BRIAN BALOGH: Peter, Ed, when we look back across American history, in many ways there’s nothing more common than people passing for something they’re not. We look at lots of poor people who’ve passed for wealthier people. We look at Jewish people who have tried to pass for Christians. Yet, racial passing seems to carry with it a taboo that is unparalleled by these other examples. I’d love for you to explain to me why that is.

PETER ONUF: Well, Brian, I’d start off by suggesting that people are always sorting themselves and each other out. And in hierarchical societies, external markers are the way they do that sorting. And skin color is the way in which races, as they’ve been socially constructed through the ages, has been defined.

BRIAN BALOGH: Not really that many ages, just in the last couple hundred years.

PETER ONUF: Yeah, it’s become a very powerful marker. And interestingly, it’s become a powerful marker as other markers have lost their salience.

BRIAN BALOGH: Did it happen as soon as the slave ships showed up in 1619?

PETER ONUF: I think it quickly does become associated with enslaved condition of African enforced immigrants to America. It’s a way of sorting out. And, of course, in all early colonial societies, there is a lot of mixing and that makes it all the more compelling.

It’s really important to emphasize, I think, the role, the laws, that the state plays in enforcing distinctions that don’t really come out of nature. And one of the reasons for this is because you’re looking at a spectrum. Because of the mixture of the races, there is no purity, but you need to legislate it. You need to define it.

ED AYERS: Well, let me present you guys with a problem though, given all that. The most hierarchical situation in all of American history, of course, is chattel slavery. And it flourishes, of course, in the first half of the 19th century. And I would imagine that the period of greatest racial mixing, Brian, is actually under slavery, and it’s under conditions of sexual violation of enslaved women by white men. And so, Peter, how would that fit into your model of hierarchy and race?

PETER ONUF: Well, it’s interesting. Because just as individuals want to sort themselves out on the right side of any divide that is pass, so too Americans, when they declared their independence, wanted to overcome the characterization from Britain and European countries that colonizers were always exploiting their slaves and slave women, indigenous peoples, and that it was a mongrel population. What Americans needed to do to refute that was to assert that they were racially pure. They were truly European, you might say.

ED AYERS: Well, it helps explain some of the great schizophrenia at the heart of American history, in some ways. At the same time that people are insisting evermore on whiteness, and measuring it, and coming up with sciences to prove it, the racial intermixing that’s going on is of a very high amount.

PETER ONUF: But you could deny that, Ed, if it was clear what status was according to the law.

ED AYERS: Yeah. So the racial mixing would be evident to people, but it would not be with consequence.

PETER ONUF: Right. Because they would be exceptions. They’d be anomalies. They wouldn’t see them, in effect.

ED AYERS: They would even be personal failures of white men who would allow themselves to do that.

PETER ONUF: Exactly right. And as you know, there are many, many white slaves, slaves who could have passed for white, many who did pass for white because of all this mixture of the races. But legally, that fact was denied culturally and socially as well.

ED AYERS: Well, here’s the amazing thing, guys. I believe that racial mixing underwent a sudden reversal with emancipation, which was exactly the opposite of what the critics of emancipation had in order. As soon as slavery’s over, Peter, without having slavery hold things in control, then you had black people and white people marrying each other. The old phrase, “would you want one to marry your sister,” and all this sort of stuff.

Well, it turns out that was a lot more likely to happen under slavery than it was under freedom because black people could get away from white men. They could actually retreat into their own farms and homes.

BRIAN BALOGH: They had a bit of autonomy.

ED AYERS: Yeah, exactly.

BRIAN BALOGH: Well, along with emancipation, Ed, comes a remarkable effort to recover black history, to recover a positive identity associated with being African American and not being enslaved. So just for starters, the vast majority of African Americans who don’t want to pass– because you’re not talking about passing from slavery to freedom, you’re talking about two sets of racial groups.

ED AYERS: That’s very interesting. And at the same time, there’s another process that’s going on, which is what whiteness might be is changing. The same decades, a huge influx of people that today we unproblematically identify as white, but that people at the time weren’t sure were– Italians, Poles, Jews.

BRIAN BALOGH: Right.

PETER ONUF: Right.

ED AYERS: So guys, I don’t really hear a straight line through American history.

BRIAN BALOGH: Nope.

ED AYERS: We started out simple and ended up complex. We didn’t start out bifurcated now with the United Colors of Benetton.

[LAUGHTER]

So Peter, how do you reconcile this natural sorting that you talked about and this history that we just talked about.

PETER ONUF: Well, Ed, we haven’t stopped sorting. I think that’s the important thing to keep in mind. We’d like to think that we don’t live in a world that’s defined by race, by external markers. We’d like to think that it’s all up to us and our character and our ambition.

But that impulse to sorting that goes back that we can see how unnatural and artificial it was in the 17th and 18th and even the 19th century. Well, that impulse has not gone away and it’s taken new forms that are hard for us to recognize. Is it really a non-hierarchical world, or are we in the midst of the emergence of new forms of hierarchy?