Sensing Race, Sensing History

Historically Speaking · May/June 2006 Sensing Race, Sensing History Mark M. Smith • n March 6, 1907 white residents of Albany, Georgia, ran Peter Zeigler out of town. Zeigler "had been here for a month and palmed himself off as a white man." Citizens had been fooled, even at close quarter: "He has been boarding with one ofthe best white families in the city and has been associating with some of Albany's best people ." Luck failed Zeigler, it seemed, when "[a] visiting lady recognized him as being a Negro who formerly lived in her city, and her assertion was investigated and found to be correct." But Zeigler returned to Albany "accompanied by a party composed of relatives and influential friends from his native state of South Carolina" who verified that he was, in fact, white. Peter Zeigler went from being white to black to white because his "race" could not be reliably fixed. Instances of "black" people passing into "white" society, of whites mistakenly tagging black people as white (or, indeed, taking whites for blacks) are rife in southern history. And it is surely tempting to frame such instances as illustrating the fundamentally illogical system of segregation, one premised on the putative absolute difference between "black" and "white." But there is more to this matter than, literally, meets the eye. To end analysis with the observation that the Peter Zeigler episode and others like it reveal the operational and intellectual instability of race in a period that touted the necessity and existence ofracial permanence begs too many pivotal questions. How did such a system recover from such episodes? How did it function for over half a century if it was so fragile, illogical , and built on a distinction that was itself a fiction? These and other questions are central to the history of the American South and to the study of history generally. Segregationists, as well as antebellum slaveholders, readily admitted that race could not always be seen, that identity was not always detectable by eye alone. Because the architects of segregation operated in a context—and with a history— that increasingly cast into doubt the reliability of vision as the preeminently authenticating sense, race was not simply visual. New, widely disseminated technologies and ideas—photographs , microscopes, germ theory—at once empowered the eye and exposed the limitations ofunaided vision. Things small, far, and near could not always be detected or reliably interpreted by the naked eye. Formal segregation was born precisely in a moment that destabilized the idea that seeing was believing. Witness the very foundation of state-sanctioned segregation, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In Plessy the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Louisiana's 1890 statute providing "separate but equal" accommodations for black and white passengers on its railroads. In an event designed to test the 1890 law, Homer Plessy, a visually "white" "black" man (he was seven-eighths "white"), refused to sit in a colored car and was subsequently brought before the Judge ofthe Criminal Court ofNew Orleans, John H. Ferguson. Plessy's attorney, Albion W. Tourgée, made the powerful point that because Plessy was visually "white," his race could not be reliably ascertained by the train conductor, the person responsible for sorting out and categorizing race on a daily basis. As is well known, Tourgée's argument had little purchase with the U.S. Supreme Court. But the Plessy case did profile an important if often overlooked fact: modern segregation was based on a case involving a black man who was not visibly black, who had to tell whites his race, who, in effect, told white eyes that vision alone was unreliable when trying to fix and anchor racial identity. Similarly, the widely accepted argument that just one-drop ofAfrican blood was sufficient to constitute blackness—formally embraced by Virginia and other states in the 1920s—reveals the uncertainty of seeing racial identity. After all, the one-drop rule relied on genealogy to ascertain race, the testimony of lineage, not of sight. The one-drop rule is itself, then, powerful evidence of the growing irrelevance of the eye in authenticating race. So, how on earth did white Southerners at the turn ofthe century determine...