Book Review
"White women, Black men"
Martha Hodes
5/5 stars
"The film content of West Coast Productions has been happening in the US for about four centuries now."

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The book is set between 1680 and 1880, and broken into two parts: before slavery and after slavery. The idea/observation is that mixed sexual relationships became a problem *after* the Reconstruction in the South, but that they experienced varying degrees of tolerance before that time.

This only deals with certain parts of "the South." For instance: not Louisiana, because there were a lot more mulattos there who were a separate class. (Roughly analogous to today's South African Coloureds.)

This book is a little bit wordy for the bit that it has to say (and that is what I have come to expect from books that are written on University presses), but it serves a very useful purpose which is: the debunking of myths that seem VERY entrenched in the black collective unconscious in the United States.

1. Many like to imagine that the presence of European ancestry in so many black Americans is ONLY because of the slave system. (And the theme of the Innocent Black Bed Wench with the Vile White Massa has been shown on television so many times that it is something beyond hackneyed.)


That's far from the case: Race mixing happened before / during / after the slave system. Sometimes the guy was white and other times the girl was.

2. NO, not every instance of a black guy with a white girl turned into an episode of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Apparently, these things were treated in a very matter of fact way in most cases before the Reconstruction. One partner happened to be black, and the other happened to be white.

3. No, the "one drop rule" was not a thing before the Reconstruction. And it seems that what race one person was depended very much on local context. (Are we talking about inheritance rights? Or the right of a cuckolded husband to be divorced?)

4. As quiet as it is kept: a) A lot of lighter skinned black people were (and are) very happy to disassociate themselves from their darker cousins; b) Some free people of color even owned slaves; c) The majority of white Southerners did not own slaves (and it is from this lower class of whites that a lot of black men found women). NO, it is not because of the done to death speculation that house slaves were chosen because they were light skinned and treated better than darker ones.

5. There was no easy way to make all blacks slaves nor all whites slave owners during the pertinent historical time period - - although current generations have done just that. (White indentured servants and free people of color slave owners created this impossibility.) So, most of these cases deal with the determination of status for the purpose of inheriting property or supporting children of disputed paternity. 

6. The KKK was not a one-trick pony. It is not only that they wanted to lynch and terrorize black people, but that they thought themselves the moral arbiter even of transactions between whites. (One Northern man who married a Southern woman had his horse disfigured. One Alabama white man was beaten for being cruel to his wife and told to "practice more proper customs in his domestic habits.")

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Second order thoughts:

1. As quiet as it is kept, apparently white ladies and black guys have been doing The Booty Up for many centuries. (I wonder if they were fat back then, too?) The earliest case in here is in 1681 of a married couple (Irish Nell and Negro Charles).

2. It's easy to surmise that even wwwaaayyy back then black guys were shopping on the discount rack for white ladies.  The author does note (p.49) that ".... And other lowly white women also consorted with black man, both slave and free" (Lindy effect: it has been three centuries, so I guess there's no reason it couldn't go on for another three.)

Appallingly (p.50), "Mulattoes are not a rare article and the wives and daughters of slaveholders are oftener are the mothers of them than are poor women." I guess that movie Mandingo may have had some basis in reality. 

3. There are just as many lustful women as there are men: for some of these cases, the women had three and four slave boyfriends at a time because one of them just could not keep up with her. In one case, one white lady was with her black boyfriend on the very morning of her wedding to a white guy and she gave birth to mulatto child nine months later. (p.127).

4. There are several actual court cases brought down where the black guy was accused of rape of a white lady--and acquitted (p.62)!

5. The average black American has between 19 and 29% European ancestry (it depends on which DNA testing service you follow), and 80% of black Americans do have at least some white ancestry. With this many interracial couplings, how can anyone be surprised that the lady was white in some fraction of them?

6. It's interesting that even (post-Reconstruction) Jim Crow/ anti-miscegenation laws did not reduce the number of black guy white girl couplings to zero. It seems like a very effective way to make somebody want to do something is to make it illegal--even in that case.

7. In spite of the amount of history that has passed, black Americans have learned little from it: people at the bottom are more likely to want to differentiate themselves from blacks than they are to see them as allies--the pronouncements of Idiot Academics be damned. (Caribbeans/Africans/Arabs/Mexicans/etc, as a rule in the United States, DO NOT like black people. Take my word for it.)

7a. The fact that these whites of that era wanted to find a way to distance themselves from blacks were white is coincidence: I live near Dearbornistan and Hamtramckistan, Michigan. Lots of Arab/Pakistani/Bangladeshi Muslims and ZERO of them with black men, so it's pretty clear that they don't want to be around black people all that much either.

8. Seems like there's always *somebody, *somewhere* interested in Black guys. Seems like white ladies have been loving in the black guys even at the risk of death.

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Verdict: This is a helpful and informative book, and it's probably worth it at the price of about $10. Or, the time that it takes for it to be interloaned.

Chapter synopses:

Representative cases (only a subset of all quoted within each chapter):

Chapter 2, Marriage. An Irish woman and a black man were married (in 1681) and their descendants became slaves. A few generations later they petitioned for freedom, and it is at this point that the status of the long dead Irish Nell came up. (Free or slave?)

Chapter 3, Bastardy. Polly Lane and Jim (no surname) were boyfriend and girlfriend back in 1825. Polly finds out that she is pregnant and cries rape. Jim X is eventually acquitted by a White governor after vocal support from White witnesses

Chapter 4, Adultery. Dorothea Bourne is married to a much older plantation owner, but she just cannot keep her hands off the Colored Help. She bears one or two kids but her actual husband, and another 4 (!) with some slave guy named Edmond from 1823. And even after all that, the court would not Grant her poor cuckolded husband a divorce.

Chapter 5, Color. The "one drop rule" makes for good television and a lot of nothing conversations, but the reality was nothing like that. Even by 1860, quadroons were considered "free persons of color." The case of Joseph Nunez makes us believe that what color someone was depended only on context. (If everybody in a certain city believes that this guy is white......then he for all intents and purposes is, and he will behave chemically that way.) The Franklin Hugly case was ruled in such a way as to allow a White family the polite fiction that the mother wasn't turned out by Some Black Guy. So, the mulatto child was "really" white. 

Chapter 6, Wartime. Set at the tail end of the slave system. The interesting case of Tempie James, who fell in love with the slave coachmen (Squire). When her parents would not allow the marriage, she ran away and purchased him, changed his last name to "Walden," changed her identity to "mulatto" (she drank whiskey mixed with some of husbands blood so that she could truthfully swear that she had Negro blood in her, p.138) and had 15 (!) children with him.

Chapter 7, Politics. This chapter is essentially written in Early Critical Race Theoryish. (It seems like the word "patriarchy" is used on every other page.) More objective texts written before the Woke Craze (think of authors like C.Vann Woodward) have essentially noted that: after the Reconstruction political power changed over to poor sharecropping whites and the fortune of blacks changed dramatically thence. Then (and going into the 1890s) was the time during which the Jim Crow/anti-miscegenation laws were passed. Nathan Bedford Forrest (Grand Wizard).

Chapter 8,  Black men, White women, and lynching. Seems that lynching only became popular after the Civil War. Rape was not even the most popular reason for lynching. (The purpose was to maintain an atmosphere of terrorism.) Ida Abercrombie and Peter Stamps. 

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Vocabulary:

1.Left hand marriage

2. "First step by construction" (p.120, legal term)

3. amative

Ida Wells-Barnett Quotes: 

1. "Dead men tell no tales, and living ones will not voluntarily do so when it means an exposure of their crimes."

2. "If Southern white men are not careful, a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women"