WI/AHC - Consequences of the One-drop Rule being scrapped earlier or completely butterflied away

This is vaguuly racist and stupid, essentially what you saying is genocide is okay. Not only that you portray modern African societies as being primitive while displaying a complete ignorance of the politics of Rwanda, Burundi and the Congo. Can you even name the "tribes" who are enslaving and killing each other in the Congo today? Because you are actually making crap up to support an argument that favours racist Darwinism.
Seems more to me like nihilistic misanthropy. The belief that humans are destined to forever fight and kill each other until we just destroy ourselves and take the biosphere with us. That war is in our very nature and that evey single one of us is a potential monster just needing one bad day to fully embrace that animalistic, brutal side of us.
 
Not sure of the PODs involved to bring about such a scenario though what if the absence or earlier scrapping of the One-drop rule led to ATL African-Americans being divided along similar racial lines to much of Latin America between those of Black and Mixed backgrounds, with those of Mixed background potentially developing a more nuanced almost Dominican perspective of their own identity where their African roots is viewed merely as but one part of their ancestry?

In ancient Rome, freed slaves (rather unusually for an ancient state) received full Roman citizenship upon manumission, which some modern historians think was because the patres familiarum used to sleep with their slaves a lot, so a lot of manumitted slaves would actually be illegitimate children of their masters. So, maybe the POD could be that sleeping with slaves is more common/acceptable for American slave-owners (though I'm not really sure how common it was IOTL; if it was already common, this probably wouldn't work), and the slave-owners consequently seek to benefit their children by lobbying to remove/prevent one-drop type rules. No doubt the offspring of such relationships would still suffer from discrimination, social opprobrium, etc., but in strictly legal terms, they would (once manumitted) be no worse off than anyone else.
 
...maybe the POD could be that sleeping with slaves is more common/acceptable for American slave-owners (though I'm not really sure how common it was IOTL; if it was already common, this probably wouldn't work),
It was common and so this won't work. Not differently than it did OTL anyway--with Thomas Jefferson's children for instance. They were freed but only on his deathbed. It was unusual for any to be freed for this reason. And it was so common that modern African Americans are overwhelmingly mixed blood; people who in South Africa would have been called Coloured rather than Black (which there meant pure African).

My impression is that the various Latin European nations developed their graduated perception of a spectrum from white ideal to purely savage blackness for two related reasons--one, they tended to send relatively few colonists out and even fewer of them women, whereas English colonists generally operated under the scrutiny of wives from the old country. Closely related to the fewness of French or Portuguese or even Spanish settlers versus subjugated Natives or imported slaves and their not bringing in wives from their home countries was that they developed aristocratic style and norms in their colonies versus the much more democratic (within the bounds of the European male colonists) English tendency. Of course the English started with a very hierarchical style as well, but the focus of English colonies on making fortunes and a free colonist could hope to put himself considerably ahead on a new clearance of land.

So--the fact that he has a wife from England, and thus family ties back in England too beyond his birth family, and children with his wife, does not exempt a typical slaveholder from the temptation to take advantage of his female slaves. (By the way if you want to read about these things from the pen of a much better writer than me, there is a lot of stuff about this in both Fredrick Douglass's writings and Harriet Beecher Stowe's). But it does mean that the children born of such unions are barred from enjoying full status as his sons or daughters by his legitimate marriage. There they are, his children; the wife sees it plainly enough and eventually the penny drops even with his white children. But at least his wife and white children know that these other children of their father can in no way intrude on their privilege and standing as his legitimate wife and children. Backing up his "white" wife's standing is her kin in England and the other white women of the colony. The slave owner hopes to find good marriages for his white daughters' good and security, and this depends not just on his wealth, but his overall social reputation. His sons might or might not be more on they own-but he certainly hopes, if a headstrong and bold son goes out and finds himself an unexpected wife, that she is a respectable white woman too, just as he hopes to present his own daughters to the world as.

If we have instead another type of colony, where women from the old world are not typically brought there, and that is run on strongly aristocratic lines, the men there will much more readily recognize their offspring with a slave woman as their own, and as a very small class of rulers in a large sea of subordinates can more or less govern as they see fit.

So in this situation, the dynamic you look to may indeed hold. But in a situation where a reasonably successful man is expected to be wedded to a wife from his own "white" community and not simply commanding the concubinage of some Native or enslaved African women, I think the same humane factors you cite go into reverse, hard. The father's sentiment is still there to be sure--and it is even possible that the half-siblings would on some natural level respond to the fact of their kinship with their darker brothers and sisters. It is even possible that instead of simple hate, spite or jealousy, at least unalloyed, the wife herself, seeing a bit of her husband, will at least have her predictable feelings of anger mixed with recognition of the loved one there-if not love for a husband that might well be poisoned by this reality of life, at least a recognition of something she sees in her own children duplicated in them.

But the cold social imperative is at work; if the white wives of planter society relax and simply accept male privilege--well, they have no choice about that; back in England too their husbands and sons would no doubt get away with carrying on with prostitutes or women of their own class who are running serious risks of social standing, with little more than some exasperated sighs and moral lectures going in one ear and out the other; they can retaliate but as the dependent class in a patriarchal "covering" relationship their own standing depends on maintaining appearances. They can't get a sympathetic hearing from a male-dominated society--some pity and sympathy perhaps, but no one is going to turn the family fortune and heritage over to them in retaliation. They are counseled to forgive. In England where the bastard children might be expected to largely go away, they might even sort of forget. No prospect of forgetting on the plantation though; as the children of slaves, the husband's children are his slaves, his property--his potentially especially valuable property in fact. He can't banish them, typically--he might sell them off young perhaps. But he won't get full value that way. No, she has to live with them. But what she can do is draw the line very firmly--black children and white children are not the same status, for if they were they would not only undermine the family wealth with excessive inheritance claims, they would undermine the wife's status as the sole Mrs. on the plantation, compete with her daughters and sons in the marriage market. She must tolerate their presence, their endless rebuke by existing of her own imperfection and inadequacy as the sole woman in her husband's eyes, but she need not--and socially speaking must not!--allow them the same level of status as her white children. In this, she has the backing and support of the whole white plantation society. All the women of her class are with her on this, and their husbands who might hesitate, perhaps, about their own offspring will be as one with their wives about the offspring of other planter men.

We should remember that while a prosperous planter with many slaves is a big deal socially in his colony, the very fact of the wealth and social success he and his wife aspires to throws them into a different level of society. With moderate success they can vie for position in the colony as a whole, putting them into competition with richer and older families with stronger aristocratic ties back in England; considerable success enables them to actually travel back to Britain and throw themselves and their children on the general social circles there, which are genuinely aristocratic. The planter may be in effect a more than manorial lord among his abject slaves at home, but in the larger society they are low and aspiring middle class people. The middle classes are where the notable drive for extreme moralism in early modern society comes from because they are suspended in the middle; they are high enough to have a lot to lose by losing status, plunging down into a level of abject powerlessness and contempt they themselves had enforced, but lowly still compared to those they aspire to climb to the level of, generation by generation. This fear of falling socially hones the habits and manners they desperately strive to impart. And since people are fallible but sympathy might spare them a fall if they can keep up appearances, hypocrisy abounds and grows as in a hothouse. Men especially are forgiven all sorts of failings, if they can keep them masked and quiet, and the plantation of owned slaves is a wonderful playground for sowing wild oats discreetly--well, except for the hard evidence running about the slave quarters, but if that is normally found on most plantations, then everyone is pretty much on a level. A plantation with no mixed race kids around might be taken more as evidence of limited sexual adequacy or drive, or peculiar interests on the part of the patriarch than as moral rectitude--at any rate such invidious thoughts must be some consolation for men of some conscience who know their own indiscretions are in plain evidence back at their own place.

As part white, the offspring are valuable for particular markets, being more "presentable" they make potentially better house slaves and personal servants. If the hard line is maintained, they are in fact economic assets, if brought up right. The fact that first-generation African slaves will recognize them as children of privilege and treat them badly helps enforce discipline in their peculiar niche as slaves too.

One role a substantially white looking yet still visibly black young woman might pay her master--her father or grandfather in likely fact--top dollar for is in a brothel.

Again if you think I'm fantasizing all this, go read Douglass or Stowe. By the time I got around to reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, I knew that Stowe had sources for every outrageous seeming situation she novelized--between knowing historic facts about plantation life and her own footnotes in the appendix citing her sources, I was amazed (since I generally avoid reading much 19th century literature) at how vividly her book read, in highly journalistic style. All ripped from the headlines of her day, at least if one read abolitionist journals.

This hypothesis, of the presence of wives from the home country transforming and in a sense reversing the dynamic of bonds of sympathy with one's own children, is also brought up in discussing the transformation of the style of British rule in India and Africa in the 19th century. In older days service in the various chartered profitable Companies was a dangerous adventure for a young man on the make, who would travel to India (in closer Africa, much of the adventure was playing Russian Roulette with deadly fevers in many of the key ports--there were plenty of terrible plagues in India too but the odds of surviving with nothing worse than malaria were somewhat higher) and there make local liaisons, and to an extent immerse himself into and play roles in native society. When the Raj reined in the Company as a free agent and sought to professionalize the service, they sent men over with wives and any children they already had, and the nature of relations with Indians changed drastically. The dynamic of class-conscious aspiring middle class wives in a patriarchal relation of dependence with their husbands, whom they kept in daily sight, completely changed the style of rule of India, and pretty much immediately set in motion the desire and organization of independence.

and the slave-owners consequently seek to benefit their children by lobbying to remove/prevent one-drop type rules. No doubt the offspring of such relationships would still suffer from discrimination, social opprobrium, etc., but in strictly legal terms, they would (once manumitted) be no worse off than anyone else.

I've outlined the dynamics at work against a relaxed acceptance of mixed race children; I also want to stress that these rules are not something that people sit down around a table and dispassionately agree to, as though they were playing a board game. In one sense they are indeed arbitrary rules, but there is blood in this sport. The first generations to stumble into them are making them up out of a mix of emotional and rational calculation as they go, but children (on both sides the racial divide line) born into this snake pit grow up with these situations as vivid, present realities. I distinguish between culture and society, though lately I've been lapsing into the common shorthand that more or less equates them. But I see "society" as something distinct from culture. Culture is just an aggregation of facts and opinions, words on paper, pictures and songs out of context. It is in a sense stuff, and easy to appropriate selectively. But society is what one expects people will do in reaction to various situations. It is rules with muscle and teeth in them, evolved a the structure of a social system. Children, and people generally, interpret both culture and immediate interpersonal situations in terms of the social rules they have internalized by experience and example. The culture peculiar to their own society generally reinforces and supports the social machinery.

In a society that has evolved "one-drop" binary racial perception for instance, such as the USA, it is not really a choice to see or unsee the socially defined racist categories. They are presented, exemplified, in millions of ways, and their weight is hammered in by social situations. If our society presents black people as extreme Others versus white, and a white person grows up with all contact with black people strongly limited and regulated, then they will learn to internalize the Otherness as a simple fact. Now it does happen that messages get mixed, that the society being based on one invidious fiction layered atop others fails to convey a fully logical message, and that bright children can and do see through the Emperor's nonexistent clothes and ask sharp, incisive questions sometimes. Sometimes they see what they "should not" see and unsee what they should to function smoothly. Generally speaking when the kids innocently ask these obvious questions they get very strongly emotionally charged answers. They might be hit in order to shut down dangerous lines of inquiry, or stop them from saying the wrong things in risky company. Generally speaking this punctuated patches serve to hammer the kid more or less back into social shape--even if questions and doubts rattle around loose at least they now understand there are hard, serious lines to watch out for when approached, and that lesson might be enough to divert their thinking away from them.

Now I for one find that there are ways of tricking myself around the hard categories being raised as a white person in the USA has tended to hammer into
my head. It takes more than just reading some simple factual deconstruction. But being able catch myself having what, stepping sideways and looking at the true situation, is clearly a trained racist reaction and not an authentic judgement of the true situation at hand, or to look at a picture of someone everyone knows is "black" and see them in a different continuum I happen not to reflexively so label, demonstrates to me that the mind-forged manacles are just a sort of Jedi mind trick, and not a direct projection of objective reality. I also have recently had the experience of seeing a cartoon character (Lana, in Archer) first as a white woman then suddenly when some completely extraneous cue was supplied (specifically, Archer's mother calling her black, under her breath, in the context of her being not a suitable relationship for Archer) seeing her in that category henceforth.

The Jedi mind trick is not entirely under control--I think it is good to at least know it is there, which many people do not, probably to an extent deliberately shying away from facing that troublesome insight IMHO. But I honestly don't remember being deliberate about it on any level before my own revelatory experiences, which came long long after I had a huge corpus of fact to contradict the racist reflexes of American social training.

So anyway when a society has evolved a social mechanism like this, the irrational categories at work have the appearance of objective fact, just as if you grew up with virtual reality goggles glued to your face and every object had little captions placed over them, you might think these letters are somehow objectively real, to be read by anyone who looks. People do not vote or legislate to institute or remove things like the one-drop rule. They emerge as social solutions and become conditioned as social imperatives and approaching such a society and asking them to change the rule is like asking them to suddenly start seeing chickens as a kind of eagle, or considering wood to be a sort of gas. The person saying it sounds simply insane, living in a strange world and not playing with a full deck.

The point of one drop perception, versus the continua in other racist systems, is that one perceives any amount of Africanness at all as an irrevocable and categorical assignment of the person seen into a single racial category. White is defined as having no blackness at all, any amount of perceived blackness is definitive. If someone can be brought to understand that that is an arbitrary and trained reflex that does not map meaningfully onto any sort of objective fact, a defender of the system can respond it most certainly does map onto the social roles we have in our society and the skill of seeing blackness when it is there is pretty important to functioning normally in this society. A more reasonable person, in my opinion, who gets it through their head that racial perception is a social mechanism, can and should start dealing with people differently, knowing falling back into easy perceptions is a lapse of perception and a choice to affirm and enforce the social structure, versus of course knowing being outside the lines is to be subversive which is objectively dangerous--it just seems to me the danger is morally required to erode and weaken this system. But if you ask me, "since it is arbitrary, why not change your perception of on or off black or not, to a spectrum of more or less whiteness versus blackness, I would and do say--what is the moral point of that? I don't know if there is a way I can do it or not, but why try, when that perceived spectrum is just as much an arbitrary structure, just as much a mental trap, and just as invidious and limiting as the binary system? If I go on perceiving all "black" people as being in the same category distinct from mine, but I also admire, like or even love some of these black people, then I think I am doing better by far than if I somehow switch over to seeing people are more or less brown. Now the scale includes me, and that is good, but it has an implicit value judgement placed on dark versus light, and that is a step backward from where I was. I say if you can perceive both are arbitrary, strive to subvert and discredit both systems, rather than try do decide if one or the other is better or worse. Both of them are mental traps, mind forged manacles distorting our thinking, so away with both say I.

The question of what the USA would be with the other mode is answered first by pointing out the whole social structure of the British North American colonies would have had to be profoundly different; there would not be a USA at all as we know it, and what existed in its place would have its own strengths and virtues, and its own running social sores and grotesqueries. It is pretty much a question of cutting the OTL English colonies off, pulling them up by the roots, and planting something quite different in their place, and taking it from there. England probably cannot plant such colonies, or anyway starting with them would lead to a later rush of settler colonists who will shift their evolving perceptions over to one drop later
 

CalBear

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America was not a white supremacist society. It was a society built and created by whites. The first immigration act of the founding father's was to say only white Christians should be allowed to immigrate. Just like other nations were built for a tribe or ethnic group. All societies have done this. The founding group benefits the most
Well, thanks for stopping by.

Not only are you wrong, you are also expressing things in a way that is is, frankly, vile.

We divorce you

To Coventry with you.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
America was not a white supremacist society. It was a society built and created by whites. The first immigration act of the founding father's was to say only white Christians should be allowed to immigrate. Just like other nations were built for a tribe or ethnic group. All societies have done this. The founding group benefits the most
Well, thanks for stopping by.

Not only are you wrong, you are also expressing things in a way that is is, frankly, vile.

We divorce you

To Coventry with you.
 
It was common and so this won't work. Not differently than it did OTL anyway--with Thomas Jefferson's children for instance. They were freed but only on his deathbed. It was unusual for any to be freed for this reason. And it was so common that modern African Americans are overwhelmingly mixed blood; people who in South Africa would have been called Coloured rather than Black (which there meant pure African).

My impression is that the various Latin European nations developed their graduated perception of a spectrum from white ideal to purely savage blackness for two related reasons--one, they tended to send relatively few colonists out and even fewer of them women, whereas English colonists generally operated under the scrutiny of wives from the old country. Closely related to the fewness of French or Portuguese or even Spanish settlers versus subjugated Natives or imported slaves and their not bringing in wives from their home countries was that they developed aristocratic style and norms in their colonies versus the much more democratic (within the bounds of the European male colonists) English tendency. Of course the English started with a very hierarchical style as well, but the focus of English colonies on making fortunes and a free colonist could hope to put himself considerably ahead on a new clearance of land.

So--the fact that he has a wife from England, and thus family ties back in England too beyond his birth family, and children with his wife, does not exempt a typical slaveholder from the temptation to take advantage of his female slaves. (By the way if you want to read about these things from the pen of a much better writer than me, there is a lot of stuff about this in both Fredrick Douglass's writings and Harriet Beecher Stowe's). But it does mean that the children born of such unions are barred from enjoying full status as his sons or daughters by his legitimate marriage. There they are, his children; the wife sees it plainly enough and eventually the penny drops even with his white children. But at least his wife and white children know that these other children of their father can in no way intrude on their privilege and standing as his legitimate wife and children. Backing up his "white" wife's standing is her kin in England and the other white women of the colony. The slave owner hopes to find good marriages for his white daughters' good and security, and this depends not just on his wealth, but his overall social reputation. His sons might or might not be more on they own-but he certainly hopes, if a headstrong and bold son goes out and finds himself an unexpected wife, that she is a respectable white woman too, just as he hopes to present his own daughters to the world as.

If we have instead another type of colony, where women from the old world are not typically brought there, and that is run on strongly aristocratic lines, the men there will much more readily recognize their offspring with a slave woman as their own, and as a very small class of rulers in a large sea of subordinates can more or less govern as they see fit.

So in this situation, the dynamic you look to may indeed hold. But in a situation where a reasonably successful man is expected to be wedded to a wife from his own "white" community and not simply commanding the concubinage of some Native or enslaved African women, I think the same humane factors you cite go into reverse, hard. The father's sentiment is still there to be sure--and it is even possible that the half-siblings would on some natural level respond to the fact of their kinship with their darker brothers and sisters. It is even possible that instead of simple hate, spite or jealousy, at least unalloyed, the wife herself, seeing a bit of her husband, will at least have her predictable feelings of anger mixed with recognition of the loved one there-if not love for a husband that might well be poisoned by this reality of life, at least a recognition of something she sees in her own children duplicated in them.

But the cold social imperative is at work; if the white wives of planter society relax and simply accept male privilege--well, they have no choice about that; back in England too their husbands and sons would no doubt get away with carrying on with prostitutes or women of their own class who are running serious risks of social standing, with little more than some exasperated sighs and moral lectures going in one ear and out the other; they can retaliate but as the dependent class in a patriarchal "covering" relationship their own standing depends on maintaining appearances. They can't get a sympathetic hearing from a male-dominated society--some pity and sympathy perhaps, but no one is going to turn the family fortune and heritage over to them in retaliation. They are counseled to forgive. In England where the bastard children might be expected to largely go away, they might even sort of forget. No prospect of forgetting on the plantation though; as the children of slaves, the husband's children are his slaves, his property--his potentially especially valuable property in fact. He can't banish them, typically--he might sell them off young perhaps. But he won't get full value that way. No, she has to live with them. But what she can do is draw the line very firmly--black children and white children are not the same status, for if they were they would not only undermine the family wealth with excessive inheritance claims, they would undermine the wife's status as the sole Mrs. on the plantation, compete with her daughters and sons in the marriage market. She must tolerate their presence, their endless rebuke by existing of her own imperfection and inadequacy as the sole woman in her husband's eyes, but she need not--and socially speaking must not!--allow them the same level of status as her white children. In this, she has the backing and support of the whole white plantation society. All the women of her class are with her on this, and their husbands who might hesitate, perhaps, about their own offspring will be as one with their wives about the offspring of other planter men.

We should remember that while a prosperous planter with many slaves is a big deal socially in his colony, the very fact of the wealth and social success he and his wife aspires to throws them into a different level of society. With moderate success they can vie for position in the colony as a whole, putting them into competition with richer and older families with stronger aristocratic ties back in England; considerable success enables them to actually travel back to Britain and throw themselves and their children on the general social circles there, which are genuinely aristocratic. The planter may be in effect a more than manorial lord among his abject slaves at home, but in the larger society they are low and aspiring middle class people. The middle classes are where the notable drive for extreme moralism in early modern society comes from because they are suspended in the middle; they are high enough to have a lot to lose by losing status, plunging down into a level of abject powerlessness and contempt they themselves had enforced, but lowly still compared to those they aspire to climb to the level of, generation by generation. This fear of falling socially hones the habits and manners they desperately strive to impart. And since people are fallible but sympathy might spare them a fall if they can keep up appearances, hypocrisy abounds and grows as in a hothouse. Men especially are forgiven all sorts of failings, if they can keep them masked and quiet, and the plantation of owned slaves is a wonderful playground for sowing wild oats discreetly--well, except for the hard evidence running about the slave quarters, but if that is normally found on most plantations, then everyone is pretty much on a level. A plantation with no mixed race kids around might be taken more as evidence of limited sexual adequacy or drive, or peculiar interests on the part of the patriarch than as moral rectitude--at any rate such invidious thoughts must be some consolation for men of some conscience who know their own indiscretions are in plain evidence back at their own place.

As part white, the offspring are valuable for particular markets, being more "presentable" they make potentially better house slaves and personal servants. If the hard line is maintained, they are in fact economic assets, if brought up right. The fact that first-generation African slaves will recognize them as children of privilege and treat them badly helps enforce discipline in their peculiar niche as slaves too.

One role a substantially white looking yet still visibly black young woman might pay her master--her father or grandfather in likely fact--top dollar for is in a brothel.

Again if you think I'm fantasizing all this, go read Douglass or Stowe. By the time I got around to reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, I knew that Stowe had sources for every outrageous seeming situation she novelized--between knowing historic facts about plantation life and her own footnotes in the appendix citing her sources, I was amazed (since I generally avoid reading much 19th century literature) at how vividly her book read, in highly journalistic style. All ripped from the headlines of her day, at least if one read abolitionist journals.

This hypothesis, of the presence of wives from the home country transforming and in a sense reversing the dynamic of bonds of sympathy with one's own children, is also brought up in discussing the transformation of the style of British rule in India and Africa in the 19th century. In older days service in the various chartered profitable Companies was a dangerous adventure for a young man on the make, who would travel to India (in closer Africa, much of the adventure was playing Russian Roulette with deadly fevers in many of the key ports--there were plenty of terrible plagues in India too but the odds of surviving with nothing worse than malaria were somewhat higher) and there make local liaisons, and to an extent immerse himself into and play roles in native society. When the Raj reined in the Company as a free agent and sought to professionalize the service, they sent men over with wives and any children they already had, and the nature of relations with Indians changed drastically. The dynamic of class-conscious aspiring middle class wives in a patriarchal relation of dependence with their husbands, whom they kept in daily sight, completely changed the style of rule of India, and pretty much immediately set in motion the desire and organization of independence.



I've outlined the dynamics at work against a relaxed acceptance of mixed race children; I also want to stress that these rules are not something that people sit down around a table and dispassionately agree to, as though they were playing a board game. In one sense they are indeed arbitrary rules, but there is blood in this sport. The first generations to stumble into them are making them up out of a mix of emotional and rational calculation as they go, but children (on both sides the racial divide line) born into this snake pit grow up with these situations as vivid, present realities. I distinguish between culture and society, though lately I've been lapsing into the common shorthand that more or less equates them. But I see "society" as something distinct from culture. Culture is just an aggregation of facts and opinions, words on paper, pictures and songs out of context. It is in a sense stuff, and easy to appropriate selectively. But society is what one expects people will do in reaction to various situations. It is rules with muscle and teeth in them, evolved a the structure of a social system. Children, and people generally, interpret both culture and immediate interpersonal situations in terms of the social rules they have internalized by experience and example. The culture peculiar to their own society generally reinforces and supports the social machinery.

In a society that has evolved "one-drop" binary racial perception for instance, such as the USA, it is not really a choice to see or unsee the socially defined racist categories. They are presented, exemplified, in millions of ways, and their weight is hammered in by social situations. If our society presents black people as extreme Others versus white, and a white person grows up with all contact with black people strongly limited and regulated, then they will learn to internalize the Otherness as a simple fact. Now it does happen that messages get mixed, that the society being based on one invidious fiction layered atop others fails to convey a fully logical message, and that bright children can and do see through the Emperor's nonexistent clothes and ask sharp, incisive questions sometimes. Sometimes they see what they "should not" see and unsee what they should to function smoothly. Generally speaking when the kids innocently ask these obvious questions they get very strongly emotionally charged answers. They might be hit in order to shut down dangerous lines of inquiry, or stop them from saying the wrong things in risky company. Generally speaking this punctuated patches serve to hammer the kid more or less back into social shape--even if questions and doubts rattle around loose at least they now understand there are hard, serious lines to watch out for when approached, and that lesson might be enough to divert their thinking away from them.

Now I for one find that there are ways of tricking myself around the hard categories being raised as a white person in the USA has tended to hammer into
my head. It takes more than just reading some simple factual deconstruction. But being able catch myself having what, stepping sideways and looking at the true situation, is clearly a trained racist reaction and not an authentic judgement of the true situation at hand, or to look at a picture of someone everyone knows is "black" and see them in a different continuum I happen not to reflexively so label, demonstrates to me that the mind-forged manacles are just a sort of Jedi mind trick, and not a direct projection of objective reality. I also have recently had the experience of seeing a cartoon character (Lana, in Archer) first as a white woman then suddenly when some completely extraneous cue was supplied (specifically, Archer's mother calling her black, under her breath, in the context of her being not a suitable relationship for Archer) seeing her in that category henceforth.

The Jedi mind trick is not entirely under control--I think it is good to at least know it is there, which many people do not, probably to an extent deliberately shying away from facing that troublesome insight IMHO. But I honestly don't remember being deliberate about it on any level before my own revelatory experiences, which came long long after I had a huge corpus of fact to contradict the racist reflexes of American social training.

So anyway when a society has evolved a social mechanism like this, the irrational categories at work have the appearance of objective fact, just as if you grew up with virtual reality goggles glued to your face and every object had little captions placed over them, you might think these letters are somehow objectively real, to be read by anyone who looks. People do not vote or legislate to institute or remove things like the one-drop rule. They emerge as social solutions and become conditioned as social imperatives and approaching such a society and asking them to change the rule is like asking them to suddenly start seeing chickens as a kind of eagle, or considering wood to be a sort of gas. The person saying it sounds simply insane, living in a strange world and not playing with a full deck.

The point of one drop perception, versus the continua in other racist systems, is that one perceives any amount of Africanness at all as an irrevocable and categorical assignment of the person seen into a single racial category. White is defined as having no blackness at all, any amount of perceived blackness is definitive. If someone can be brought to understand that that is an arbitrary and trained reflex that does not map meaningfully onto any sort of objective fact, a defender of the system can respond it most certainly does map onto the social roles we have in our society and the skill of seeing blackness when it is there is pretty important to functioning normally in this society. A more reasonable person, in my opinion, who gets it through their head that racial perception is a social mechanism, can and should start dealing with people differently, knowing falling back into easy perceptions is a lapse of perception and a choice to affirm and enforce the social structure, versus of course knowing being outside the lines is to be subversive which is objectively dangerous--it just seems to me the danger is morally required to erode and weaken this system. But if you ask me, "since it is arbitrary, why not change your perception of on or off black or not, to a spectrum of more or less whiteness versus blackness, I would and do say--what is the moral point of that? I don't know if there is a way I can do it or not, but why try, when that perceived spectrum is just as much an arbitrary structure, just as much a mental trap, and just as invidious and limiting as the binary system? If I go on perceiving all "black" people as being in the same category distinct from mine, but I also admire, like or even love some of these black people, then I think I am doing better by far than if I somehow switch over to seeing people are more or less brown. Now the scale includes me, and that is good, but it has an implicit value judgement placed on dark versus light, and that is a step backward from where I was. I say if you can perceive both are arbitrary, strive to subvert and discredit both systems, rather than try do decide if one or the other is better or worse. Both of them are mental traps, mind forged manacles distorting our thinking, so away with both say I.

The question of what the USA would be with the other mode is answered first by pointing out the whole social structure of the British North American colonies would have had to be profoundly different; there would not be a USA at all as we know it, and what existed in its place would have its own strengths and virtues, and its own running social sores and grotesqueries. It is pretty much a question of cutting the OTL English colonies off, pulling them up by the roots, and planting something quite different in their place, and taking it from there. England probably cannot plant such colonies, or anyway starting with them would lead to a later rush of settler colonists who will shift their evolving perceptions over to one drop later

is it possible to save posts? this one is really good.
 

I have to say this is the most articulated response speaking on the nuance of a truly actualized ODR minded society I've yet seen on a history forum or really damn near anywhere save for a few historians I've enjoyed over the years.

It's brillant even, I think more than anything else people all to often underwrite/undermine/evade the question of white female agency in the plantocracy that greatly influenced the formation of ODR notions and ideals.

However this in all it's perfection denies the truths of Southern society and the multipronged approach English colonies and American states navigated racial barriers.

There is a critical component not spoken of which is "Black Yankee" ethnic identity and socio-cultural politic.

BackinTyme is an archive that delves is so much detail of Southern ideas and ideals vs clear reality of racial barriers.

Jamaica and Barbados deviated greatly from continental US racial politics early on. White Women were much more limited and in fact de facto and de jure law made possible and even encouraged those who were white or near White in both phenotype but most importantly in ideas of Whiteness to access its privileged position.

This, bound the initially Barbadian founded South Carolina and from there the rest of the South the first great racial compromise of the nation.

The question was never seriously given to say a "white slave" because no true white person would ever be a slave. But to the free born connected to the wealth and power of the plantocracy did in many ways gain the alignment and aligiance

.If the law is made as it now stands respectable families in Aiken, Barnwell, Colleton, and Orangeburg will be denied the right to intermarry among people with whom they are now associated and identified.

At least one hundred families would be affected to my knowledge.

They have sent good soldiers to the Confederate Army, and are now landowners and taxpayers. Those men served creditably, and it would be unjust and disgraceful to embarrass them in this way. It is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention.Every member has in him a certain mixture of... colored blood.

The pure-blooded white has needed and received a certain infusion of darker blood to give him readiness and purpose. It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless litigation, of scandal, horror, feud, and bloodshed to undertake to annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood. The doors would be open to scandal, malice, and greed; to statements on the witness stand that the father or grandfather or grandmother had said that A or B had Negro blood in their veins.

Any man who is half a man would be ready to blow up half the world with dynamite to prevent or avenge attacks upon the honor of his mother in the legitimacy or purity of the blood of his father
George Dionysius Tillman: state representative, state senator, and U.S. Representative. The brother of Governor Benjamin Ryan Tillman.

It's silly to assume contradictory realities and the internalization of negroe tarred genealogical realities weren't abound within the minds of most old families.

It was from this that ODR was really purported, one not truly ODR but one that was a close enough barrier to separate the social "chaff" from "grain".

No more than 1/16th black ancestry for any man not enslaved no matter the wealth or social standing.

But for the powerfully connected; maybe even less than 1/8th was acceptable. Think of those such as Henry Timrod the "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy" whose mother was a Quadroon, this was always made and illict by those privy to loopholes and "escape hatches" as G. Reginald Daniels wrote about in Critical Mixed Race Theories the "transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions of race."

I don't speak on my heritage in explicit detail much. But I will say that in my own family there are chasms made centuries and even decades ago that were entirely the matter of some census taker and mayor or official or business partner who made one family line one color and the other line some other color in SC., AL., MS, and elsewhere .

The lived experiences of the time was far more complex than people give credit for, ideology be damned.
 
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...However this in all it's perfection denies the truths of Southern society and the multipronged approach English colonies and American states navigated racial barriers.
I thank your snipped out kind accolade and apologize for imperfection; I was attacking the idea that the transitional spectrum model would work in Anglo America--and here you have your evidence it was actually a thing in South Carolina of all places! I'd never have guessed it. I hardly know everything and don't worry too much about imperfection--ignoring something I do know that invalidates the major point would be wrong. A correction that reveals a lot of new information to me is something I owe thanks for.

Now I did know, and even mentioned I think, that whatever hard binaryness might have prevailed in white society, in black society the question of degree of whiteness was and is pretty salient.

That it could lead to this sort of nuance in Carolina though is a revelation. I wonder what effect this might have had on Jonathan Edelstein's writing of Malê Rising which features a highly organized slave uprising in the Civil War, which conquers much of the lowlands and coordinates with the Union forces to knock SC out of the Confederacy and in on the Union side; the African-American "Circles" govern for generations to come--becoming a bit corrupt in their turn, but African American majorities rule the state indefinitely.

Naturally I assumed the white former ruling class would sooner die for the most part and do mainly flee. No other Southern state enjoys African majority rule--North Carolina however is an inclusive if still white dominated state--because Lincoln is not assassinated there is a much curtailed general Reconstruction and the Reconstruction Amendments are limited--a slavery ban but no 14th Amendment Equal Protection clause. This dismayed me but trusting Jonathan I reasoned that perhaps in the longer run African-Americans in the USA generally would do better to have to rely on their deeds and struggle and not take false comfort in paper protections that would not be enforced until they took the power needed to give them body anyway. Without the Equal Protection clause, many fights of that nature would have to happen for many important issues to be resolved progressively.

Now then after your quote which I suppose was from a speech by a respected legislator on the SC legislature floor, I have to wonder whether some of those proud gentry families would face down the now powerful majority and assert their place in Carolina as well, appealing brazenly (I do judge them harshly--they were after all profiting from slavery) to their black blood for legitimacy. The Circles (Harriet Tubman a great leader among them, Edelstein has her leading nationally not just black but white people in a couple more noble causes before dying at nearly or over 100) would probably laugh in their faces, but might admire their spunk and let them show how they do without the privilege of owning people
....
Jamaica and Barbados deviated greatly from continental US racial politics early on. White Women were much more limited and in fact de facto and de jure law made possible and even encouraged those who were white or near White in both phenotype but most importantly in ideas of Whiteness to access its privileged position.
I hope, in view of what you are revealing here of your own family connection to all this, that it is not too harsh of me to say that what I wanted to focus on is that privileged position is privileged position. Speaking as someone who recognizes I have benefited from privilege myself and even been in situations where strict justice might have required me to speak up and lose opportunities but I kept quiet because I was pretty desperate despite my squandered privilege, my main admiration goes first to those who fight privilege and call it to justice.

But after all, why should a child who is adopted to the "white" end of the spectrum and invited to share in its privileges be judged any differently than another who happens to be, by accident in this place, entirely white, if both of them accept the privileges and identify with the master class? I would admire them more if they were swashbuckling revolutionaries, or quiet agents of subversion of the racial order. Overthrowing the whole racial order seems like the heroic and noble thing to me. But of course that was not so much a practical agenda at this time!

At the end of the day these fortunate people make their stand with the white people. Who are no different from me, I am no better and I can hardly imagine what I'd do and think in these ages. As it was in the post-Civil Rights age I grew up in, when media sources assured me racism was already a thing of the past it took me decades to shake off a lot of pretty poisonous and paralyzing stuff, despite my reading telling me otherwise than what I was reacting.
The lived experiences of the time was far more complex than people give credit for, ideology be damned.

Yes, I certainly have been pushing a relatively cartoonish picture.

Consideration of such complexity has so much potential to do something really stunning in AH. Shifts one imagines quite impossible, people one writes quite off, turn out to have astounding possibilities after all. Who would imagine an Oskar Schindler after reading a typical survey course on the Third Reich? But there he was.

Have your read JE's Malê Rising at all? I wonder if he knew the stuff you know, and if after reading it you can communicate with him in case he is interested in any revisions. I think you'll find him less cartoonishly minded than I am and a lot more of a writer as well as historian.

He also does good and important work in Real Life too very much unlike me.
 
Pretty difficult here, as there were so many whites and, unlike in the former Spanish colonies, there hadn't been a massive variety of Natives as well as Black Carribeaners (I think some tribes where dark skinned back then? Not sure) that would have expeditions made to allow some to by higher on the totem poll, while various Africans would be brought in as added labor. The English colonies sold enslaved Natives to the Caribbean, while many tribes fled or were driven off far from the coasts. Not too much mingling. In the South it used to be that enslaved Natives, Africans, indentured servants, and transported convicts worked side by side. The planters had to split them up so that they didn't find common cause and revolt against their oppressors. Hence some of the white supremacy. I think the one-drop rule might have also been brought aruond so that people would not be expected to free their relatives from slavery. Something Southern governments helped with laws making it increasingly difficult to free your slaves without bringing them to the North and leaving them there.
 
The question of what the USA would be with the other mode is answered first by pointing out the whole social structure of the British North American colonies would have had to be profoundly different; there would not be a USA at all as we know it, and what existed in its place would have its own strengths and virtues, and its own running social sores and grotesqueries. It is pretty much a question of cutting the OTL English colonies off, pulling them up by the roots, and planting something quite different in their place, and taking it from there. England probably cannot plant such colonies, or anyway starting with them would lead to a later rush of settler colonists who will shift their evolving perceptions over to one drop later

There was OTL a wide diversity among the United States. For example, in North Carolina, free Negroes could vote until 1835.
What was the OTL reason?
Which PoD could nudge this peculiarity even further, so that Northern Carolina sticks to free Negro franchise all the way past 1861, but still joins Confederacy, making free Negroes of North Carolina CS citizens?
 
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