When I was young, lots of people would say that the ‘racial problem’ would go away with interracial marriage. They seemed to think everyone would look white and White, i.e. skin color and race. They did not adhere to the one-drop rule, so everyone would then be considered White. It seems they thought the color of the skin was the problem.
For them it might have been. Some people (see Stephen J. Gould’s comments on the attitudes of Louis Agassiz in his letters to his mother) are intensely bothered by either skin tones different from their own or at least by Black tones. Either way, the erasure of Black people was the answer for them. The possibility of a uniformly brown population seldom – though sometimes it did – came up.
The question for me is, did these people not adhere to the issue of caste? That is to say, would they really have been OK with Black people merged into the White race? In Japan the Eta or Burakumin are indistinguishable from other Japanese and so genealogy work is done before marriage to ensure no pollution; that is caste. Might not the same occur here if the not-to-be-wished-for outcome of the disappearance of Black people did take place?
As an aside, a great quote from an anthropologist refers to a kind of merging, but on the level of culture, not phenotype: We searched for survivals of African cultural traits in the wrong place, among Black people, when in reality that culture had been assimilated by Whites as well.
Note to self: get the exact quote.
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
