Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Epilogue: Formulating a National Self

Epilogue: Formulating a National Self It should not be surprising that mixed-race characters engaged the discourse of nation and citizenship in the United States. One need only consider how the U.S. census has grappled with the categorization of mixed-race peoples to recognize how race continues to be integral to defining national identities , histories, and social agendas. Indeed, the history of the attempts of the U.S. census to define and categorize race might be read as a narrative of national identity formation. As Clarence Lusane points out, racial categories have been defined differently in nearly every U.S. census. In 1790, the first U.S. census categories consisted of free white males, free white females, all other free persons (by sex and color), and slaves. The 1850 census added a special box for color and specified that enumerators were to leave the box blank for white persons, but they were to enter “B” for blacks and “M” for mulattos.1 The instructions to enumerators demonstrate how whiteness was equated with citizenship; it needs no designation because it is what defines American. In contrast, black and mixed-race individuals required designation and explanation. As Melissa Nobles points out, though the census has been presented as unbiased measurement, it participates in the construction of race as it relates to citizenship: “[C]ensuses help form racial discourse, which in turn affects the public policies that either vitiate or protect the rights, privileges, and experiences commonly associated with citizenship.”2 The addition of the designation for mixed-race people in the 1850 census expresses the ways in which the notion of mixed race presented problems for racial ideologies that supported white supremacy and segregation. Nobles argues that this sudden interest in recording biracial people was sparked by polygenesis theories that argued that people of different racial groups had separate biological origins. If black and white people had different origins, then mixing the two groups could not produce healthy populations. Theories that pur- ported to explain the infertility or high mortality rates of mixed-race people were used to substantiate the theory of polygenesis, and they ultimately were used to argue for the necessity of segregation and antimiscegenation laws.3 The administrators of the 1850 census constructed categories to provide evidence for the necessity of racial subjugation in order to ensure the legitimacy and even necessity of oppressive measures against people of African descent.4 That census administrators attempted to document the decline of mixed-race people points to the threat that hybridity posed to popular racial ideologies. In 1890, the beginning of a decade marked by escalating lynchings intended to punish real or imagined trespasses of the color line, census designations for people of African descent increased to include “quadroon,” and “octoroon.” Collectors were directed to “be particularly careful to distinguish between blacks, mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons.”5 The expansion of these categories expresses the national anxiety about the unintelligibility of race. This series of categories and the unending possibilities of additional categories that loom at its edges convey the desire to name the not-American in order to define the American. The attempts of census recorders to locate and order blackness make apparent the dread of the unidentifiable other that can pass for white. The census of 1920 was the last to include categories for mixed-race people. In 1930, census enumerators were instructed that anyone mixed with “Negro blood” should be counted as Negro, except in the case of a NegroIndian mixture in which “Indian blood predominates and the status of an Indian is generally accepted in the community.”6 Hence, the census adopted what is commonly known as “the one-drop rule.” These guidelines signify the desire to designate blackness, visible or invisible, as the most important racial category to mark individuals as different from both the white population and other nonwhite populations. In addition, the instructions concerning individuals of black and Native American backgrounds implies both the readability of race and an intriguing disregard for the crossing of boundaries between these two severely oppressed groups. But blackness remains an unforgivable stain on both the national conscious and the national body. If the direction of each census tells us something about the conceptual relationship between race and nation at any given time, we might ask what the 2000 census tells us about current racial ideologies. It was the first census in U.S. history in which respondents were allowed to identify more than one racial category to which...