I thought racial purity laws were long gone

It was reported in the news that Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas introduced H.R. 40 in the U.S. Congress on Jan. 4, 2021 to study the subject of reparations for slavery and its after-effects. A similar bill last year was reported to have a projected cost of up to $13 trillion. Sen. Everett Dirksen once said about government spending, “A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you have real money!” A trillion is 1000 billion. The senator would blush.

In 2020 the California Legislature passed AB 3121, which created the California Reparations Task Force with nine members to study the subject of reparations for African Americans which has now had several meetings taking testimony from various experts. It has been suggested that African Americans should get free child care and free tuition in community colleges and state run universities.

I think studying the subject will be interesting.

After the end of slavery many of the states in this country continued laws and policies designed to perpetuate widely different treatment of the races. The so called “Jim Crow” laws and anti-miscegenation laws which forbid whites and African Americans to marry were designed to further this divide. One interesting aspect of that history was definitional. Who is African American and who is white?

Many states put the standard at 1/16th. Thus, if one of your great-great-grandparent was African American then so were you. Never mind the other 15. A couple of states chose 1/32. And Virginia in 1924 decided if there was any African American ancestor, then so was every descendant. That was the “one drop” rule.

Blessedly, all of that went away since World War II.

But with $13 trillion or free tuition available for the taking, we will need a definition of who gets a check or a tuition voucher. Will it be enough, for instance, to simply claim to be African American like a couple of university professors have done to advance their careers? Will family rumor be enough as Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently claimed regarding Native American ancestry? Or will we once again legally establish a fraction or percentage of DNA that separates the recipients?

There is a precedent for setting a blood purity standard today. The only remaining place in our country where this kind of purity standard still exists is with Native American tribal membership. Tribes have to decide who is a member of the tribe and each tribe gets to set its own standard of genealogy. Decades ago the amount of heritage tended to be set pretty low so as to increase the size and political clout of the tribe. Once gambling money started rolling in, the standards tended to go up to reduce the number of people who divided the profits.

Who would have ever guessed that people could be venal when money is at stake?

It will be very interesting to watch the political influence, lobbying and campaign contributions on both sides of the reparation issue. Certainly, nobody is going to write a check for $13 trillion or give free tuition to just anybody. So any kind of reparations is going to be limited. So, like the Native American tribes, there will be pressure to exclude some people.

Perhaps recipients will have to prove they have an ancestor that was a slave. The California Task force is directed to emphasize people who are the descendants of enslaved people. Will one out of the 16 great-great-grandparents be enough? Will we re-adopt the “one drop” rule? That probably won’t work because African Americans often have difficulty finding genealogical records. Will we adopt the rule that any African American heritage at all is sufficient to qualify whether or not there is a slave history? What about African American citizens who are recent immigrants? Would the simple color of their skin qualify them for reparations even though they may not have been born or even raised in the United States?

This same bill was introduced by Representative Jackson-Lee in the previous Congress and she had 140 co-signers. Speaker Pelosi doesn’t appear to have moved it out of committee and it will be interesting to see if it moves now that the same party controls the whole shebang. California is actively discussing the subject.

Silly me. I thought racial purity laws were long gone. One of the members of the Task Force, Dr. Amos Brown, was a civil rights demonstrator who was arrested along with Dr. Martin Luther King as a lunch counter sit-in in 1961. As I recall, Dr. King said something about “the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.” I guess we’ll see whether that phrase still has meaning or whether it is reversed. I have a hard time picturing Dr. King running 23andMe blood tests on people to determine who gets government benefits.