breathedout | Entries tagged with racism

African Americans and their allies tried to create their own opportunities [in the wake of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery] by establishing dozens of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the late 1860s. Antiracist educators and philanthropists who viewed southern Black students as intellectually equal to White students were almost certainly involved, but they were not nearly as numerous or as powerful as the assimilationist educators and philanthropists. These assimilationists commonly founded HBCUs "to educate... a number of blacks," and then "send them forth to regenerate" their people, who had been degenerated by slavery, as one philanthropist stated. Black and White HBCU founders assumed New England's Latin and Greek curriculum to be the finest, and they only wanted the finest for their students. Many founders assumed "white teachers" to be "the best," as claimed in the New York National Freedman's Relief Association in its 1865-1866 annual report. HBCU teachers and students worked hard to prove to segregationists that Blacks could master the "high culture" of a Greco-Latin education. But the handful of "refined," often biracial HBCU graduates were often dismissed as products of White blood, or as extraordinary in comparison to the ordinarily "unrefined" Black.

Not all the HBCUs founded in the aftermath of the Civil War adopted the liberal arts curriculum. African Americans "had three centuries of experience in general demoralization and behind that, paganism," the 1868 founder of the Hampton Institute in Virginia once said. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the former Union officer and Freedman's Bureau official, offered teaching and vocational training that tutored acceptance of White political supremacy and Blacks' working-class position in the capitalist economy. Hampton had a trade component that aimed to work its aspiring teachers hard so that they would come to appreciate the dignity of hard labor and go on to impress that dignity—instead of resistance—onto the toiling communities where they established schools.

For all their submission schooling, Hampton-type HBCUs were less likely than the Greco-Roman-oriented HBCUs to bar dark-skinned applicants. By the end of the century, a color partition had emerged: light-skinned Blacks tended to attend the schools with Greco-Roman curricula, training for leadership, and darker-skinned Blacks ended up at industrial schools, training for submission. In 1916, one estimate found that 80 percent of the students at the HBCUs offering a Greco-Roman education were light-skinned or biracial. The racist colorism separating HBCUs was reflected in Black social clubs, in housing, and in the separate churches being built. Across postwar America, there emerged Black churches subjecting dark-skinned visitors to paper-bag tests or painting their doors a light brown. People darker than the bag or door were excluded, just as light-skinned Blacks were excluded from White circles.

—Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

I didn't know this about the color bar at historically Black colleges. My ignorance is slightly surprising to me since the single required-reading novel for all first-years at my own college was Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the first section of which takes place at an all-Black college modelled on Booker T. Washington's Hampton-style skilled trades school The Tuskeegee Institute. As the narrator's lightness comes up elsewhere in the book (such as when a White woman in the Communist group who recruits him whispers to her fellow Party member that she wishes he were darker and therefore more of a "real Negro" to suit their tokenist agenda), I'm a little bit surprised it didn't come up with regard to his school, either in the text itself or in class discussions. (That I remember, anyway. It's been a while since college.)

Now I'm thinking about other depictions of post-Civil War higher education for Black people. What precisely does the prospect of Oberlin mean, for example, when Denver is studying to get in there in Toni Morrison's Beloved? Just based on its current curriculum I assume that Oberlin leaned toward the classical/Greco-Roman model; I know it began as a Whites-only college and only admitted Blacks later (but still pre-Civil War: Wikipedia says 1835). I don't know if it was one of the universities with a color bar in place, but if the dominant ideology was assimilationist (Black students who studied the Classics were, in the minds of those espousing this rhetoric, supposedly aspiring to "turn themselves White"), it does sort of underline the isolation from her community of origin that's being proposed to Denver, when she's encouraged to study for entrance there. Which in turn plays interestingly with how isolated Denver has historically been WITHIN that community (for most of the book she's essentially housebound due to ostracism), and the way the resolution she finally manages to achieve, happens as a result of reaching out & connecting.

(CW for discussion of multivalent racism)

In the 1820s, the American Colonization Society [which advocated deporting American Blacks to the newly-established US colony Liberia] grew into the preeminent race-relations reform organization in the United States. [Thomas] Jefferson was again endorsing colonization, and calculating segregationists were beginning to see it as a solution to Black resistance. Altruistic assimilationists figured that it was a way to develop Black people in both America and Africa. In 1825, a twenty-eight-year-old Yale alumnus, Ralph Gurley, became the new ACS secretary. He held the position until his death in 1872, while also serving twice as the chaplain of the House of Representatives. Gurley had a vision: he believed that to win the minds and souls of Americans to the colonization cause, it had to be linked to the Protestant movement. His timing was good, because the Second Great Awakening was at hand as he began his ACS post.

The American Bible Society, the American Sunday School Union, and the American Tract Society were all established in this period, and they each used the printing press to besiege the nation with Bibles, tracts, and picture cards that would help to create a strong, unified, Jesus-centered national identity. A good tract "should be entertaining," announced the American Tract Society in 1824. "There must be something to allure the listless to read." Allurement—those pictures of holy figures—had long been considered a sinful trick of Satan and "devilish" Catholics. No more. Protestant organizations started mass-producing, mass-marketing, and mass-distributing images of Jesus, who was always depicted as White. Protestants saw all the aspirations of the new American identity in the White Jesus—a racist idea that proved to be in their cultural self-interest. As pictures of this White Jesus started to appear, Blacks and Whites started to make connections, consciously and unconsciously, between the White God the Father, his White son Jesus, and the power and perfection of White people. "I really believed my old master was almighty God," runaway Henry Brown admitted, "and that his son, my young master, was Jesus Christ."

As the revived Protestant movement ignited the enthusiasm of students, professors, clergymen, merchants, and legislators in New England, the American Colonization Society drew more people into its fold. While southern colonizationists sought to remove free Blacks, northerns sought to remove all Blacks, enslaved and freed. Northern race relations had grown progressively worse since the 1790s, defying uplift suasion. Each uplifting step of Black people stoked animosity, and runaways stoked further animosity. Race riots embroiled New York City, New Haven, Boston, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh in the 1820s. As racial tensions accumulated, the ACS continued to gain adherents to the cause. Its agents argued forcefully that White prejudice and Black slavery would be eternal, and that freed Blacks must use the talents they had acquired from Whites to go back and redeem unenlightened Africa. By 1832, every northern state legislature had passed resolutions of endorsement for the colonization idea.

Free Blacks remained overwhelmingly against colonization. Their resistance to the concept partly accounted for the identifier "Negro" replacing "African" in common usage in the 1820s. Free Blacks theorized that if they called themselves "African," they would be giving credence to the notion that they should be sent back to Africa. Their own racist ideas were also behind the shift in terminology. They considered Africa and its cultural practices to be backward, having accepted racist notions of the continent. Some light-skinned Blacks preferred "colored," to separate themselves from dark-skinned Negroes or Africans.

—Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (bolding added)

I was more familiar with the mirror-image politics around the popularization of "African American" in the 20th century, but didn't know this anti-colonizationist context for the early 19th century shift to "Negro" as a preferred identifier. Interesting.

Also, gotta love that White Jesus.

Boston's status as one of the key ports in the colonies left the city vulnerable to disease. On April 21, 1721, the HMS Seahorse sailed into Boston Harbor from Barbados. A month later, Cotton Mather logged in his journal, "The grievous calamity of the smallpox has now entered the town." One thousand Bostonians, nearly 10 percent of the town, fled to the countryside to escape the judgment of the Almighty.

Fifteen years prior, Mather had asked Onesimus[, an enslaved West African man Mathers's congregation had bought for him,] one of the standard questions that Boston slaveholders asked new house slaves—Have you had smallpox? "Yes and no," Onesimus answered. He explained how in Africa before his enslavement, a tiny amount of pus from a smallpox victim had been scraped into his skin with a thorn, following a practice hundreds of years old that resulted in building up healthy recipients' immunities to the disease. This form of inoculation—a precursor to modern vaccination—was an innovative practice that prevented untold numbers of deaths in West Africa and on disease-ridden slave ships to ports throughout the Atlantic. Racist European scientists at first refused to recognize that African physicians could have made such advances. Indeed, it would take several decades and many more deaths before British physician Edward Jenner, the so-called father of immunology, validated inoculation.

Cotton Mather, however, became an early believer when he read an essay on inoculation in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions in 1714. He then interviewed Africans around Boston to be sure. Sharing their inoculation stories, they gave him a window into the intellectual culture of West Africa. He had trouble grasping it, instead complaining about how "brokenly and blunderingly and like Idiots they tell the Story."

On June 6, 1721, Mather calmly composed an "Address to the Physicians of Boston," respectfully requesting that they consider inoculation. If anyone had the credibility to suggest something so new in a time of peril it was Cotton Mather, the first American-born fellow in the London's Royal Society, which was still headed by Isaac Newton. Mather had released fifteen to twenty books and pamphlets a year since the 1690s, and he was nearing his mammoth career total of 388—probably more than the rest of his entire generation of New England ministers combined.

The only doctor who responded to Mather was Zabadiel Boylston, President John Adams's great-uncle. When Boylston announced his successful inoculation of his six-year-old son and two enslaved Africans on July 15, 1721, area doctors and councilmen were horrified. It made no sense that people should inject themselves with a disease to save themselves from the disease. Boston's only holder of a medical degree, a physician pressing to maintain his professional legitimacy, fanned the city's flames of fear. Dr. William Douglass concocted a conspiracy theory, saying there was a grand plot afoot among African people, who had agreed to kill their masters by convincing them to be inoculated. "There is not a Race of Men on Earth more False Liars" than Africans, Douglass barked.

—Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Welp.

Observers of the [Viola Desmond] trial would have been struck by the absence of any overt discussion of racial issues. In the best tradition of Canadian 'racelessness,' the prosecution witnesses never explained that Viola Desmond had been denied the more expensive downstairs [theatre] ticket on the basis of her race. No one admitted that the theatre patrons were assigned seats on the basis of race. In an interview with the Toronto Daily Star several weeks [after the 1946 expulsion of Viola Desmond for sitting downstairs at the Roseland theatre despite management's refusal, due to her race, to sell her a downstairs ticket, theatre owner] Harry MacNeil would insist that neither he nor the Odeon Theatres management had ever issued instructions that main-floor tickets were not to be sold to Blacks. 'It is customary for [colored persons] to sit together in the balcony,' MacNeil would assert. At the trial, no one even hinted that Viola Desmond was Black, that her accusers and her judge were white. On its face, the proceeding appears to be simply a prosecution for failure to pay a provincial tax. In fact, if Viola Desmond had not taken further action in this matter, the surviving trial records would have left no clue to the real significance of the case.

[...]

[Reacting to the results of the trial in The Clarion newspaper, James Calbert Best] castigated Canadians for their complacency:

We do have many of the privileges which are denied our southern brothers, but we often wonder if the kind of segregation we receive here is not more cruel in the very subtlety of its nature. [...]

True, we are not forced into separate parts of public conveyances, nor are we forced to drink from separate faucets or use separate washrooms, but we are often refused meals in restaurants and beds in hotels, with no good reason.

Nowhere do we encounter signs that read 'No Colored' or the more diplomatic little paste boards which say 'Select Clientele,' but at times it might be better. At least much consequent embarrassment might be saved for all concerned.

—Constance Backhouse, Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950

A few more passages from Constance Backhouse's Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 (Chapter 7: "'Bitterly Disappointed' at the Spread of 'Colour-Bar Tactics': Viola Desmond's Challenge to Racial Segregation, Nova Scotia, 1946"), which I am TRYING to finish so that I will no longer have eight books on the go at the same time.

Although both Viola's parents had both Black and white forebears, her father was much darker-skinned than her mother, which created the perception of a mixed-race marriage:

Viola [Desmond]'s parents married in 1908, creating what was perceived to be a mixed-race family within a culture that rarely welcomed interracial marriage. It was not the actual fact of racial mixing that provoked such concern, for there was undeniable evidence that interracial reproduction had occurred extensively throughout North American history [ed: often as a result of the rapes of Black women by white men]. It was the formalized recognition of such unions that created such unease within a culture based on white supremacy. The tensions posed within a racist society by an apparently mixed-race family often came home to roost on the children born to James and Gwendolin Davis. Viola's younger sister recalls children taunting them in the schoolyard, jeering: 'They may think you're white because they saw your mother at Parents' Day, but they haven't seen your father.' Viola self-identified both as 'mixed-race' and as 'coloured,' the latter being a term of preference during the 1930s and 1940s.

As Viola grew up, she became an ambitious entrepreneur, traveling to Montreal, New York, and Atlantic City to train as a beautician since the available beauty schools in Halifax barred Black women from admission. Returning to Halifax, she went on to found Vi's Studio of Beauty Culture, not only offering beauty services to her clients but developing her own self-branded line of Black beauty powders and creams, which she sold through her shop, and traveling throughout the province to make her products and services available to people outside of Halifax. Backhouse writes:

Although [Viola's husband] Jack was initially supportive of his wife's choice of career, her ambitious business plans began to cause him some distress. He became concerned that all of the travel required was inappropriate for a married woman. Both spouses in Black families frequently held down jobs in the paid labour force, contrary to the pattern in white middle-class households. But middle-class Black women who sought work outside the home often faced bitter tensions within their marriages. Their careers tended to clash with society's prevailing ideals of gender, which required that men be masters in their own homes, ruling over dependent women and children. Even women who remained childless, such as Viola Desmond, found themselves subject to pressure to retire from the paid workforce.

At odds with her husband on this point, Viola Desmond held firm convictions that Black women ought to have greater access to employment opportunities outside their traditionally segregated sphere of domestic service. A few years after she set up her own studio, she opened the Desmond School of Beauty Culture, which drew Black female students from across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec.

From Constance Backhouse's Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 (Chapter 7: "'Bitterly Disappointed' at the Spread of 'Colour-Bar Tactics': Viola Desmond's Challenge to Racial Segregation, Nova Scotia, 1946"), a long excerpt that's relevant to my novel-research and which I also thought might be of more general interest as well:

Carrie Best, who was born and educated in New Glasgow [Nova Scotia, where the managers of the Roseland Theatre refused to sell Viola Desmond a ground-floor ticket on the basis of her race], was well acquainted with the egregious forms of white racism practiced there. A woman who defined herself as an 'activist' against racism, she did not mince words when she claimed there were 'just as many racists in New Glasgow as in Alabama.' She was thrown out of the Roseland Theatre herself in 1942, for refusing to sit in the balcony, and tried unsuccessfully to sue the theatre management for damages then.

Nor was she a stranger to the heroism of Black resisters. One of her most vivid childhood memories involved a race riot that erupted in New Glasgow at the close of the First World War. An interracial altercation between two youths inspired 'bands of roving white men armed with clubs' to station themselves at different intersections in the town, barring Blacks from crossing. At dusk that evening, Carrie Best's mother was delivered home from work by the chauffeur of the family who employed her. There she found that her husband, her younger son, and Carrie had made it home safely. Missing was Carrie's older brother, who had not yet returned from his job at the Norfolk House hotel. Carrie described what ensued in her autobiography, That Lonesome Road:

In all the years she lived and until she passed away at the age of eighty-one my mother was never known to utter an unkind, blasphemous or obscene word, nor did I ever see her get angry. This evening was no exception. She told us to get our meal, stating that she was going into town to get my brother. It was a fifteen minute walk.

At the corner of East River Road and Marsh Street the crowd was waiting and as my mother drew near they hurled insults at her and threateningly ordered her to turn back. She continued to walk toward the hotel about a block away when one of the young men recognized her and asked her where she was going. 'I am going to the Norfolk House for my son,' she answered calmly. (My mother was six feet tall and as straight as a ramrod.) The young man ordered the crowd back and my mother continued on her way to the hotel. At that time there was a livery stable at the rear entrance to the hotel and it was there my mother found my frightened older brother and brought him safely home.

This was but one incident in an increasingly widespread pattern of white racism, that exploded with particular virulence across Canada during and immediately following the First World War. White mobs terrorized the Blacks living near New Glasgow, physically destroying their property. White soldiers also attacked the Black settlement in Truro, Nova Scotia, stoning houses and shouting obscenities. Throughout the 1920s, Blacks in Ontario and Saskatchewan withstood increasingly concerted intimidation from the hateful Ku Klux Klan. But race discrimination had a much longer history in Canada.

( THE HISTORY OF BLACK SEGREGATION IN CANADA )

Feeling pretty cynical & discouraged about the domestic gag rule announcement, or—not even the domestic gag rule announcement, not this one; not this time more than any other; it's not like I'm surprised; but feeling pretty cynical & discouraged about the political role of reproductive healthcare as this threat and bargaining chip perpetually held over the heads of women and all people with uteruses and the desire for control over their own lives, who then have to beg, borrow and cheat in order to try to get cis men to care about their humanity; feeling pretty cynical and discouraged about how every time this stupid rule is put back in place, which is done as a display of pure power and political clout, it abrogates bodily autonomy and the ability of particularly low-income people to shape their own futures; feeling pretty cynical and discouraged about how transparent the administration—any administration! pick one! my favorite was the Bush II administration which reinstated this rule on their first day in office!—is in their lack of any genuine moral principles or investment in lowering abortion rates or bettering the health or well-being of infants, let alone the parents of those infants if the parents of those infants aren't white people with a household income of $200,000 or more a year.

It was sort of my formative "shit is more fucked than you knew" moment, when I was working for Planned Parenthood and that Bush II edict came down; and every time it comes back around I am punched in the guts by it all over again, so. That happened today, which was cool.

Would it have been feasible [in the early 1930s] to pass legislation banning 'masked meetings' or explicitly outlawing the [Ku Klux] Klan as an organization? The legislative response to the formation of the Communist Party of Canada is an interesting point of comparison. Canadian politicians took that organization to pose such a threat that they passed the 'infamous section 98' of the Criminal Code in the wake of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. Section 98 defined as an 'unlawful association' any organization whose purpose was 'to bring about any governmental, industrial or economic change within Canada' by advocating the use of 'force, violence, terrorism or physical injury.' Once the court declared an organization to be an 'unlawful association,' the police were authorized to seize and forfeit its property. Officers, representatives, and members were potentially liable for up to twenty years' imprisonment. Publishing, importing, or distributing books, newspapers, or other publications advocating such goals also netted offenders up to twenty years. Contemporaneously with the KKK Oakville raid [in which 75 Klan members burnt a cross in the main street and then demanded that white woman Isabel Jones leave the home of her Black fiancé Ira Johnson, and that the two sever their relationship], substantial lobby campaigns were being initiated 'coast to coast' to expand section 98 to outlaw the Communist Party by name.

The KKK's advocacy of white, Protestant supremacy did not seek to 'bring about any governmental, industrial or economic change within Canada,' and consequently did not run afoul of section 98 of the Code as then written. It is reflective of attitudes about racial and religious equality in Canada in this period that no one seems to have suggested expanding section 98 to encompass the advocacy of violent or terrorist methods in furtherance of racial and religious bigotry. Nor did anyone campaign 'coast to coast' to outlaw the Ku Klux Klan by name.

It was not only the letter of the law that distinguished between Communist and KKK activities. There were striking disparities in enforcement as well. In a spectacular show of criminal justice authority, Tim Buck and eight other white Communist Party leaders and activists were convicted of being 'members of an unlawful association,' contrary to section 98, in September 1931 in Toronto. Their convictions were upheld by the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1932. Prosecutions for seditious libel, disorderly conduct, obstructing police and unlawful assembly were routinely pursued against members of the Communist Party between 1928 and 1932 in Sudbury, Port Arthur, Fort William, and Toronto. The offence of 'disorderly conduct' was also pressed into service, with Communist soap-box orators convicted under the vagrancy law of 'causing a disturbance' in or near a street or public place 'by impeding or incommoding peaceable passengers.' To quell Communist rallies, police and city officials threatened that they would 'read the riot act.' The 'unlawful assemblies and riot' section of the Criminal Code allowed police to invoke 'the riot act' whenever twelve or more persons assembled a meeting that was likely to 'disturb the peace tumultuously.' This offence carried with it possible life imprisonment and permitted the police to shoot to kill.

The readiness of the authorities to use the full force of criminal law against the Communists presents a dramatic contrast to their recalcitrance in the face of Klan activities. When it came down to it, in the end the only charge laid against the four Hamilton Klansmen was 'disguised by night.'

—Constance Backhouse, Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada 1900-1950

On February 28, 1930, after burning a cross in the main street of Oakville, Ontario, a group of 75 masked and hooded Ku Klux Klan members converged on the home where Black (or possibly First Nations—his racial background was a point of contention) resident Ira Johnson was living with his white fiancée Isabel Jones. The Klansmen demanded that Jones return to her mother's house, and promise not to see Johnson again. To Johnson, they threatened to return if he continued to associate with Jones.

After much agitation on the part of the Black Canadian community, the initial complacence of the Oakville police was overcome enough to track down and prosecute three of the 75 white men who participated: although, putting aside many more serious potential charges, the defendants were only put on trial for "going disguised by night." Two of the them were let off entirely, and the third was found guilty and charged $50. Even this lenient verdict the Klan announced its intention to appeal. The two trials became an opportunity for both Black and white Ontarians to reflect on, among other things, interracial marriage: a practice against which, unlike in the US, there were no laws anywhere in Canada, but which was nonetheless discouraged and punished by other means. As quoted from Constance Backhouse's Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada 1900-1950:

[Black attorney and activist] Lionel Cross was one of a few lone voices to claim that Ira Johnson's and Isabel Jones's right to wed, and that interracial marriage in general, was a positive thing. 'The white people talk of racial purity,' he said scornfully. 'Yet it is a fact that sixty-five percent of the colored people of the South have white blood in their veins.' It was not the fact of racial intermixture that caused white consternation, but the legitimizing of the interracial sexual liaisons. Thousands of Black women had been forcibly coerced into sexual relations with whites during and after the decades of slavery in North America. The Klan did nothing to contest those non-consensual sexual connections. It was the voluntary, egalitarian unions between the races that alone provoked their ire. Asserting that there could be 'no biological reason against intermarriage,' Cross objected to the Klan's campaign of terror. The Oakville raid was not merely 'a question of intermarriage,' insisted Cross, 'but of constitutional right.'

[Black pastor] Rev. [H. Lawrence] McNeil was considerably less sanguine about this point. McNeil told the Toronto Daily Star that he held 'no brief for the promiscuous intermingling of the races,' and directed his complaint solely against 'the substitution of the purely authorized law enforcement agencies by such an intolerant organization as the Ku Klux Klan.' B.J. Spencer Pitt, the other Black lawyer who had pressured the attorney general to prosecute the Klan, was similarly inclined. 'Personally, I do not believe that intermarriage is advisable,' he indicated. 'Indeed, I would say from my own general experience and observation that such marriages lead more often to discord.' He was even willing to accede to a legislative ban on racial intermarriage: 'If the Canadian government saw fit to prohibit intermarriage of negroes and whites, I am certain that we negroes would abide by the law.'

Both McNeil and Pitt espoused egalitarian philosophies and demonstrated sustained anti-racist activism in the face of the Oakville raid. It is unlikely that they meant to be understood as suggesting that interracial marriages were problematic because of any inherent hierarchialization of racial groups. Their position is reflective of an affirmative pride in Black identity as a source of community, culture, and solidarity.( Cut because this got very long! )

Cross was debarred in 1937 for "conduct unbecoming a barrister and solicitor"; Backhouse doesn't go into details about the specifics of his debarring. Amid ongoing controversy, including the burning of Johnson's home to the ground (an incident which the Oakville police declined to investigate), Ira Johnson and Isabel Jones were married on 22 March 1930.

First enacted in 1912 [in Saskatchewan], An Act to Prevent the Employment of Female Labour in Certain Capacities is politely titled in racially neutral phraseology. The actual text, drafted in rather ponderous prose, reads: 'No person shall employ in any capacity any white woman or girl or permit any white woman or girl to reside or lodge in or to work in or, save as a bona fide customer in a public apartment thereof only, to frequent any restaurant, laundry, or other place of business or amusement owned, kept, or managed by any Japanese, Chinese, or other Oriental person.' The statute is anything but racially neutral in its text, with the Japanese, Chinese, and 'other Oriental' communities explicitly targeted because of their race. The designated female group is also defined by race, as the prohibition is expressly restricted to 'white women.' Prior to this act, most racial designations in Canadian statutes purported to classify peoples of colour. Various enactments dealt with 'Indians,' 'coloured people,' the 'Chinese, Japanese, and Hindu.' Racial designations in law are typically assigned by whites to non-whites. While the property of 'whiteness' is clearly a definable asset from which all manner of privilege and power flows, it usually tends to disappear into invisibility in legal terminology. The 'White Women's Labour Law' thus constitutes a rather startling development. It appears to mark the first overt racial recognition of 'whiteness' in Canadian law.

—Constance Backhouse, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950

The so-called White Women's Labour Law was backed by a coalition of (a) all-white, nationalist trade unions looking to make it more difficult for Asian business owners to compete with white business owners, and (b) Protestant evangelical moral crusaders and white feminist women's groups trafficking in racist hysteria about the supposedly devious, weak and asexual Chinese male employer looking to push white female employees into the arms of opium addiction. It was actually even more restrictive than it seemed: while Asian employers were ostensibly left their pick of employees from the pool of white men and non-white women and girls, in practice the high wages commanded by white men priced them out of the market, First Nations people were largely unavailable due to their geographic isolation, and racist immigration restrictions limited the numbers of Chinese and other women (and men, but particularly women) of colour. So this law severely hampered Asian business owners' ability to operate at all, while also decreasing economic opportunities for the white women it purported to protect. The Saskatchewan law was quickly followed up by similar laws, or discussions of similar laws, in other provinces:

The province of Manitoba was so impressed by the Saskatchewan initiative that it adopted identical legislation on 15 February 1913. Due to opposition from the Chinese community, the law was never proclaimed. In 1914, the Ontario legislature passed a similar enactment, although it was not proclaimed until 1920. British Columbia sallied forth with its own version of the 'White Women's Labour Law' in 1919. In Alberta and Quebec, despite expressions of interest, no such act was passed. There was discussion from Nova Scotia municipal politicians about drafting a similar measure, but nothing came to fruition in the Atlantic provinces either.

ETA: The more I think about this, the more what stands out to me between the lines is that there was plainly a very activated, politically organized presence in the Chinese Canadian communities in many of these provinces, in order for so many of these initiatives to have been scuttled due to opposition. That is a VERY impressive result, when you think about all the other institutional obstacles these folks were facing (including immigration quotas that artificially limited their numbers), and about the strong coalition of political forces that were allied against them. At the same time, it also makes me think about the amount of mental/emotional/political/energetic space that it must have taken to mobilize against these kinds of initiatives as they were sweeping from province to province. The fact that so many of them were not proclaimed is a testament to the organizing ability of the Chinese Canadian population, but even in provinces where things only reached the "discussion" phase (as in Nova Scotia, Alberta, and Quebec), energy was no doubt still required to prevent them going any further. And that's energy that these people were unable to expend on whatever they would have been pursuing if they'd lived in a less hostile environment.

I've been so absorbed in writing my little ficlet cycle that I haven't been reading as much! But here's a fascinating couple of excerpts from Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, both concerning the desire, on the part of the British, to simultaneously regulate what they anecdotally considered rampant and unchecked unnatural vice on the part of their Indian subjects, and also conceal from said Indian subjects that, um, well actually British folks indulge in those vices too, since that revelation—unlike everything else the British were doing in India, apparently—might potentially undermine the image of Brits as morally unimpeachable, self-evident rulers.

Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, for example, in setting out to craft the Indian Penal Code in 1835, was adamant that such a code had to be absolutely clear, both in its definitions and its prescribed punishments, so as to survive translation into many Indian languages. It must be a unifying, equalizing force across all peoples on the subcontinent, readily accessible to, and accepted by, the common man, unlike the hodge-podge of top-down local laws already in existence:

Missing the enormous historical irony of his own words, Macaulay passionately claims that the primary reason for such a deplorable lack of legal models is that "all existing systems of law in India are foreign. All were introduced by conquerors differing in race, manners, language, and religion from the great mass of people."

To solve this problem, Macaulay (a foreign conqueror differing in race, manners, language, and religion from the great mass of people), set out to write clear, translatable laws, which he really spent some quality time thinking through:

Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.

Explanation: Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section.

The offence made punishable under this section requires that penetration, however little, should be proved strictly. Thus an attempt to commit this offence should be an attempt to thrust the male organ into the anus of the passive agent. Some activity on the part of the accused in that particular direction ought to be proved strictly. A mere preparation for the operation should not necessarily be construed as an attempt. Emission is not necessary.

Macaulay's code was then translated into a dozen local Indian languages, because it was supposed to apply to all subjects of the Raj, really everyone this time, one law for seriously all the people... welllll, except for white Englishmen, because I mean, good heavens, what scandalous impression of white Englishmen would that make on the Indians? What would they think of our national character??

"It is unnecessary to point out how desirable it is that our national character should stand high in the estimation of the inhabitants of India, and how much the character would be lowered by the frequent exhibitions of Englishmen of the worst description, placed in the most degrading situations, stigmatised by the courts of justice in India." Macaulay makes the point that Englishmen committing unnatural offences should not be tried in British India, for fear of the consequences of trial on public and civil life.

If they know we're sodomites, in other words, they'll think we're not civilized. Invading their countries, strong-arming their land into monocrops for export, forcing them into penury, using their sons as cannon fodder, etc.: all these things are all bound to make an excellent impression; a penis in a butt, on the other hand, even if it's just the tip, is surely a bridge too far.

A few decades later, the eager Victorian moralizers of the anti-vice societies were up against a similar catch-22 with regard to anti-pornography legislation:

For antipornography laws to be instituted in colonial India, standards of obscenity had to be carried over from Britain to colonial India. The very presence of antipornograhy laws in Britain translated not only into the questionable morality of the supposedly civilizing colonizers but also undermined the rhetorical force of Britain's ability to govern India. Thus there apears a discourse of contradictory lament int he official archives with respect to the question of obscenity and pornography in the Indian context. On the one hand, we read of colonial officials repeatedly complaining about the rampant perversion of Indian culture and speaking of the need to regulate such outpourings in discursive materials. On the other hand, there is equal despair at the thought of brown subjects "viewing postcards of naked white women, or of English-educated Indians reading works like The Lustful Turk or Venus in India."

Life is hard out there for a colonizer.

For English travel writer George Best, climate theory fell apart when he saw on an Arctic voyage in 1577 that the Inuit people in northeastern Canada were darker than the people living in the hotter south. In a 1578 account of the expedition, Best shied away from climate theory in explaining "the Ethiopians blacknesse." He found an alternative: "holy Scripture," or the curse theory that had recently been articulated by a Dominican Friar in Peru and a handful of French intellectuals, a theory more enticing to slaveholders. In Best's whimsical interpretation of Genesis, Noah orders his White and "Angelike" sons to abstain from sex with their wives on the Ark, and then tells them that the first child born after the flood would inherit the earth. When the evil, tyrannical, and hypersexual Ham has sex on the Ark, God wills that Ham's descendants shall be "so blacke and loathesome," in Best's telling, "that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde."

The first major debate between racists had invaded the English discourse. This argument about the cause of inferior Blackness—curse or climate, nature or nurture—would rage for decades, and eventually influence settlers to America. Curse theorists were the first known segregationists. They believed that Black people were naturally and permanently inferior, and totally incapable of becoming White. Climate theorists were the first known assimilationists, believing Black people had been nurtured by the hot sun into a temporary inferiority, but were capable of becoming White if they moved to a cooler climate.

George Best produced his curse theory in 1578, in the era between Henry VII and Oliver Cromwell, a time during which the English nation was experiencing the snowballing, conflicting passions of overseas adventure and domestic control, or, to use historian Winthrop Jordan's words, of "voyages of discovery overseas" and "inward voyages of discovery." The mercantile expansion abroad, the progressively commercialized economy at home, the fabulous profits, the exciting adventure stories, and the class warfare all destabilized the social order in Elizabethan England, a social order being intensely scrutinized by the rising congregation of morally strict, hyper-dictating, pious Puritans.

George Best used Africans as "social mirrors," to use Jordan's phrase, for the hypersexuality, greed, and lack of discipline—the Devil's machinations—that he "found first" in England "but could not speak of." Normalizing negative behavior in faraway African people allowed writers to de-normalize negative behavior in White people, to de-normalize what they witnessed during intense appraisals of self and nation.

—Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

I find this whole passage fascinating, but particularly the construction of Whiteness in politically tumultuous Elizabethan England, and the othering of Africans as a way for White folks to distance themselves from behaviors uncomfortably observed at home.

(Possibly obviously: content warnings for racism.)

In a comment on this post on Richard Burton's theory of a climatic "Sotadic Zone" within which sodomy supposedly naturally occurred with great frequency,

chestnut_pod recommended Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning as a source for a run-down of this climate-based theory generally, and also for a good examination of the history of racist ideas in America. I've just picked it up and am so far finding it compelling—particularly Kendi's focus on the systems of power and oppression that racist thought is produced to justify. Anyway, he does indeed get into the climate theory adapted by Burton among (apparently) many, many others, starting with its basis in Aristotle (bolding added):

Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BCE, concocted a climate theory to justify Greek superiority, saying that extreme hot or cold climates produced intellectually, physically, and morally inferior people who were ugly and lacked the capacity for freedom and self-government. Aristotle labeled Africans "burnt faces"—the original meaning in Greek of "Ethiopian"—and viewed the "ugly" extremes of pale or dark skins as the effect of the extreme cold or hot climates. All of this was in the interest of normalizing Greek slaveholding practices and Greece's rule over the western Mediterranean. Aristotle situated the Greeks, in their supreme, intermediate climate, as the most beautifully endowed superior rulers and enslavers of the world. "Humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves; or, if one prefers it, the Greeks and the Barbarians, those who have the right to command; and those who are born to obey," Aristotle said. For him, the enslaved peoples were "by nature incapable of reasoning and live a life of pure sensation, like certain tribes on the borders of the civilized world, or like people who are diseased through the onset of illnesses like epilepsy or madness."

Kendi goes on to discuss a strain of thought he calls "assimilationist," which he identifies as one of the three main strains of thought on race in the US, and which he first traces to 14th-century North Africa, citing Ibn Khaldun and The Muqaddimah, "the foremost Islamic history of the premodern world," which also draws on Aristotle's climate theory:

"The Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery," Khaldun surmised, "because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals." And the "same applies to the Slavs," argued this disciple of Aristotle. Following Greek and Roman justifiers, Khaldun used climate theory to justify Islamic enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans and Eastern European Slavs—groups sharing only one obvious characteristic: their remoteness. "All their conditions are remote from those of human beings and close to those of wild animals," Khaldun suggested. Their inferior conditions were neither permanent nor hereditary, however. "Negroes" who migrated to the cooler north were "found to produce descendants whose colour gradually turns white," Khaldun stressed. Dark-skinned people had the capacity for physical assimilation in colder climate. Later, cultural assimilationists would imagine that culturally inferior African people, placed in the proper European cultural environment, could or should adopt European culture. But first physical assimilationists like Khaldun imagined that physically inferior African people, placed in the proper cold environment, could or should adopt European physicality: white skin and straight hair.

Kendi's focus in both of these passages remains strongly tied to the extant policy or practice which Aristotle and Khaldun were striving to justify: enslavement of specific other peoples. Which makes sense, since his overarching thesis statement is thus (including because I find it both useful and invigorating):

Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America. And this fact becomes apparent when we examine the causes behind, not the consumption of racist ideas, but the production of racist ideas. What caused US senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina in 1837 to produce the racist idea of slavery as a "positive good," when he knew slavery's torturous horrors? What caused Atlanta newspaper editor Henry W. Grady in 1885 to produce the racist idea of "separate but equal," when he knew southern communities were hardly separate or equal? What caused think tankers after the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008 to produce the racist idea of a postracial society, when they knew all those studies had documented discrimination? Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era's racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.

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Page Summary

Colorism in Historically Black Colleges & Universities
US Colonization Movement, Evangelical Protestantism, & the popularization of "Negro"
Anti-vaxxers in colonial Boston (CW for racism, slavery)
On the tradition of Canadian 'racelessness'
Interracial Marriage & Gender Roles in Interwar Nova Scotia
Anti-Black Racism in WWI-era Nova Scotia (and before)
Every time
Canadian prosecution of Communists vs. Klan members
Contrasting Black Canadian perspectives on intermarriage c. 1930
"The first overt racial recognition of 'whiteness' in Canadian law"
The mental gymnastics of colonial othering
The first major debate between racists had invaded the English discourse
Historical roots of the climate justification for ethnic & color prejudice

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Entries tagged with racism

Colorism in Historically Black Colleges & Universities

US Colonization Movement, Evangelical Protestantism, & the popularization of "Negro"

Anti-vaxxers in colonial Boston (CW for racism, slavery)

On the tradition of Canadian 'racelessness'

Interracial Marriage & Gender Roles in Interwar Nova Scotia

Anti-Black Racism in WWI-era Nova Scotia (and before)

Every time

Canadian prosecution of Communists vs. Klan members

Contrasting Black Canadian perspectives on intermarriage c. 1930

"The first overt racial recognition of 'whiteness' in Canadian law"

The mental gymnastics of colonial othering

The first major debate between racists had invaded the English discourse

Historical roots of the climate justification for ethnic & color prejudice