Another FB post that belongs in the MFBTS (MF Blog, The Sequel):
Slate.com has an amusing article about how genetic testing can surprise many of those who have long histories in the United States. There is an even more wonderful book from 1928 or 1929 by the journalist George Schuyler,* who wrote a long pamphlet based upon his study of birth certificates throughout the South. What he found is that most Southerners who identified as "white" had some "negro" (the parlance of the time) ancestry. It was something Schuyler thought may help "white" Southerners understand about the malleability of "race." His analysis also fit in with those biologists standing athwart against eugenics and saying race is not biological but social construct, since we don't separate people with different color hair or eyes and other differences among human beings. For at the time, most people did not want to mix "blood" of whites and blacks and did not want to realize, it is all the same thing, human blood. Schuyler's point was that the blood was already mixed, and mixed deeply, and so...he was asking why the fuss about race. Youthful optimism on his part, I suppose, that people will react logically more than emotionally to information that contradicts their worldview.
Maybe some university press should re-print Schuyler's book because it is likely many of the records he went through are now lost, and his scholarship at the time was highly commended.
*Schuyler was an African-American journalist and novelist of the early to mid 20th Century. He began his career with African-American newspapers, most prominently the Pittsburgh Courier, and was self-identified as a socialist in the Debs and A. Phillip Randolph tradition. He became controversial after World War II for his strident anti-Communism and his later opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, and I use "opposition" mildly because it was really hostile. In fact, after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Schuyler penned an article, consistent with his attacks on King for getting the Nobel Peace Prize, as someone who brought forth more violence and who put at risk other African-Americans (he continued to use the term "Negro," even as that word had begun to be controversial) as white people would become violent at the attempt to overthrow Jim Crow racism. Schuyler was married to a woman who was "white" (remember, Schuyler's book), and they produced one child, a daughter who became a great pianist who toured the world, and who tragically died in a plane crash after playing a concert for American troops in Vietnam. Alicia Keys at one point owned rights to film her story, but it was never made. A pity.
