Blood involves desires to control and dictate responsibility, rooted in the relatedness of one person to the next. But why does one drop of non-White blood automatically identify you with a lesser race?
Blood, as a tangible substance, represents the source of life, being necessary for the living to survive. Symbolically, it represents power and place in society, while racially, it means the difference in types of people. Most commonly, it represents the bonds of kinship and the toll that such bonds have on human relationships. In this short piece, I examine the nature of these meanings of blood, challenging the interlocking contours of race and kinship.
Defining Kin in Blood
“Those are the two that are really our blood,” said my father, referring to my brother’s children. My brother, a father of five, like our father, had fathered three children biologically. The first two were with a high school girlfriend, and the latter with his current girlfriend. In addition to that, he had adopted his ex’s second child when she was just an infant and raised her as his own, as well as recently taking parental responsibility for her youngest.
This decision was not minor, considering that it was recent, and he had a newborn in the household. And since she was not his blood, what responsibility did he have to the child, or for either of them for that matter? On the other hand, how could he justify taking responsibility for one child lacking his DNA but not the other?
With his comment, my father was praising my brother’s decision as the definition of true manhood, while also emphasizing that responsibility comes with blood. For him, blood signified the ultimate responsibility, endless support and care for another person. He exemplified this ideology my entire childhood as he made countless and sometimes unnecessary sacrifices for our extended family.
There were always family members borrowing money, living with us, and asking for favors. My father also asked for favors and borrowed money, but the difference between him and others was that he sometimes did not have the resources but was committed to giving anyway. This was my initiation into the depth of responsibility, into the level of kinship blood represents.
My father always believed that blood, as is said of love, conquers all. No relationship trumps blood. Being a man meant taking care of your blood. However, it also meant that the blood of my blood is my blood. If you are related to family, then you are family. He praised my brother for accepting responsibilities beyond the call of duty and doing far more than DNA dictated.
Such ideologies led me to question kinship and the limits of legitimate fatherhood and its correlation with the many ways that blood is utilized to justify inequality. Blood ties are loosely tied to DNA, but more so, they are the products of kinship. Racially, we think of blood as a definite indicator of identity. We say that it means everything, that it’s “thicker than water.”
Loyalty
I remember the first time my father accused me of betraying my kin. I was no older than seven or eight. My brother, being the menace that he was at the age of four or five, loved to tag along wherever I went and do whatever I did. Most times, I did not mind, but when I wanted to play with children my own age, he insisted on playing as well. But sometimes, we did not want to include him in the games we played, seeing as how he was smaller and more often demanding. As a result, I would often try to get rid of him.
I learned that being Black meant deserving less and that, like my ancestors and many who dared to be of mixed ancestry, it only took a little bit of Black to make you inferior. One drop of Black blood not only made you Black. It rendered you worth less.
One afternoon, I was playing with the next-door neighbor, my best friend at the time, when my young brother wanted to join. I pushed him away, yelling at him to “leave me alone and go play somewhere else.” He started to cry and went to tell my aunt that I was being mean. She scolded me, and since he had tattled on me, I retaliated.
My reaction got me further scolded. My aunt made us spend the rest of the day indoors, and eventually, when my father came home from work, he scolded me again. “You never put anything or anyone else above family! That’s your blood, son. Nothing is thicker or more important than blood.”
Socially, my father articulated the common cultural sentiment that kin (or blood) is the most important bond of all. Through the substance of blood, you share the closest biological relationship with kin, and therefore, you owe them the most loyalty. You have a responsibility and duty to those people.
In that moment, my brother was my closest kin, and I should have placed his desires and needs above those of my friends. And more importantly, I should “naturally” care about his feelings and want to spend more time with him than my friends. Such were the laws of my childhood and my foundational reconciliation between kinship and loyalty.
As I grew older, these relationships became more racially defined. The laws of kinship that one commonly associates with family extend to a degree of racial identity and sociopolitical solidarity. In fact, one of my earliest memories of budding racial consciousness was around the same time as the incident with my neighbor friend. It was around 1998. My brother, cousin, and I accompanied my aunts to downtown Greenville, Mississippi, to do some shopping, grab books from the local library, and handle a few other errands. My aunt Stella decided to treat us to ice cream, so we went to the local downtown ice cream parlor.
The parlor was White owned, but we had frequented it before. Our visits were met with mild or moderate tolerance, and the manager seemed to serve his Black guests with similar curtesy he provided for his White patrons. However, this time we visited, there were less tolerant patrons in the shop. The scene was giving shades of Jim Crow. Unbeknownst to us, these people were annoyed that Black people were buying ice cream in the same place as they were. Additionally, we were in the Mississippi Delta, where time seemed to stand still, and the customs of the Jim Crow era stood in the shadows, waiting for the opportunity to break free.
As we proceeded to the counter, eyes followed us, making sure that our melanated bodies were always within site. They proceeded to watch our entire transaction, like gazelles anticipating the attack of a hungry lion. Or better yet, they were the lion stalking its prey, waiting for the moment when we were truly vulnerable.
Nonetheless, when I think of that moment now, and with the wit of an anthropologist, I assume that the precarious nature of race must have given each interpretation proper validity. We were both lion and gazelle, and so were our White counterparts. On the one hand, our Blackness was something to be feared, and, as something feared, it must be eliminated or removed. On the other hand, we were conscious of the lingering stares and the danger they symbolized, while also being aware that there was something powerful about the hint of fear behind them.
Reconciling the Past and the Legacy of the One-Drop Rule
Race consciousness slowly trickled into my mind as a child from reading Black literature, a blessing and curse in the post-segregation segregated South. From the cornfields of rural Mississippi to the illusive panopticon of the Atlanta Metropolitan urban habitat, I learned both the cost and benefits of segregated education and sociocultural existence. Because of my roots in the humble, predominantly Black small town of Greenville, Mississippi, I learned pride in my Blackness and was exposed to folklore and earlier sources of Black pride that made me honor my own existence at an early age. However, both Greenville and Atlanta shared the role of educating me on the cost of difference and the double-edged sword of pride.
From the early days of middle and high school, I learned that racial difference meant the difference in opportunity and worth, a difference forged in blood and blamed on the biological determinism associated with DNA. I learned that being Black meant deserving less and that, like my ancestors and many who dared to be of mixed ancestry, it only took a little bit of Black to make you inferior. One drop of Black blood not only made you Black. It rendered you worth less.
The seeds of Plessy v. Ferguson and the shades of Jim Crow budded the roots of our recently desegregated society. And along with the rhetoric and discourse of post-racialism, we have become vulnerable to the rise of Trumpism, tea-party rhetoric, and other forms of rabbit conservativism that have shaped American politics.
Contemporary Iterations of Hypodescent
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) sets a legal precedent for hypodescent, but the culture of hypodescent was already prevalent. People were already assigning those of mixed-race heritage to “lesser races.” The institution of slavery required maternal hypodescent, a process that equated the status of the child with that of its biological mother. If your mother was Black, then you were Black, even if your father happened to be White. The race of the mother was the one that mattered. Her blood was the child’s blood, affording it the same fate or path as she. If she was free, you were free, but if she happened to be an enslaved person, then you were afforded a similar status.
Maternal hypodescent was a process that allowed White men to freely exercise their sexual dominance over White women as well as enslaved Africans. In reference to this history, it is easy to see how the contemporary moment remains plagued with the legacy of hypodescent (the one-drop rule).
In the contemporary moment, blood functions as a symbol of ethnoracial ideologies that supposedly make it simpler to resolve one’s identity. Blood gives us a place and a sense of purpose. It allows us to feel connected to others, taking the place of kinship. Or rather, blood serves as a placeholder for kinship, making blood relations or fictive blood ties special iterations of place-making.
Place-making manifests where the use or transformation of space occurs. Such spaces transform to accommodate a group believed to deserve or have the right to occupy said space. Like this process, kinship and blood ties suggest that we are responsible for finding or building space for those we call kin, whether physical, emotional, or metaphysical.
In practice, we make space for those who look like us or are believed to share a common ancestry. We are bound to find solidarity with those people who, by culture and perception, are rendered the same as us.
When we think about arguments regarding blood, the primary focus tends to be on paternity or race, each of which is somewhat paternalistic. In this sense, blood involves desires to control and dictate responsibility, rooted in the relatedness of one person to the next. It determines the rules and structure of kinship. Who is responsible for whom?
Paternity involves how a father is related to his children and what responsibilities come with that relatedness, while paternalism enforces a relation of power associated with relatedness. As a man, the father is not only related to his children; he commands them. Racial paternalism is about assigning relational hierarchies to people to justify and enforce racism. Those who possess blood of certain types are deemed better or worse depending on the race associated with that blood. For instance, in America, the legacy of hypodescent established the rule that one drop of non-White blood automatically identifies you with a lesser race.
Beyond Racism and Attempting Solidarity
Racial pride, like hypodescent, is a double-edged sword. It shifts the ideology of hypodescent and the symbolism of blood to evoke positive meaning and purpose. Whereas hypodescent argues that non-White racial heritage makes you inferior, pride suggest you embrace Blackness as an asset and invoke the persistence of Black resistance as a form of empowerment. Similarly, racialized kinship allows Black people to reimagine blood as the root of sociopolitical solidarity. Also, like hypodescent, racialized pride possesses roots in the epistemologies and struggles of the recent past.
Mbembe (2017) argues that the African diaspora has simultaneously instituted a reimagined existence over time despite a castrated humanity. The goal of Black liberation, which begins with pride, self-determination, self-respect, and self-knowledge, transforms an internalized inferiority complex (inundated through centuries of oppression) into power. The castrated humanity finds the ember of empowerment, igniting the flaming phoenix of greatness. The processes and steps of liberation begin with overcoming identity judgment and solidifying a declaration of identity (Mbembe 207, 28).
In declaring identity, the subjugated races reclaim humanity through referential relations with the past. By drawing upon the achievements of ancestors, they reference a greatness within themselves to be revived and amplified, resulting in the restoration and healing of fractured humanity. They become whole again.
However, such imagined communities or imaginings of self can be corrupted or flawed. Drawing on the 19th-century epistemologies of Alexander Crummell, Mbembe suggests that racial pride depends on the logics of racial identity (and, to some extent, determinism) to reimagine and empower Black people. Such reimagination is the basis of Black reason.
By virtue of a relationship of kinship and filiation, Mbembe called on Black people to take advantage of their rights as inheritors. In his eyes, at least, the right to inherit the cradle of their ancestors in no way contradicted their desire to belong fully to the “land of their birth,” the United States. Claiming kinship with Africa and contributing to its regeneration was an act of self-love and self-respect (Mbembe 2017, 26).
Mbembe references the idealisms of Crummell to demonstrate the possible and historical reimagining of Black identity for African Americans who sought to undo the deeds of enslavement and the damage to Black humanities. Crummell believed that African Americans, as well as the other seeds of the diaspora, must repatriate Africa and establish it as a liberated homeland. He believed that they possessed the right to live on and occupy the continent due to their heritage and African blood. They were the deserving descendants of great ancestors. Nonetheless, his imagining of a new African state, forged in kinship, lacked consideration of sociocultural diversity and difference. In fact, religious differences, for example, were condemned.
Crummell developed an evangelical nationalism based on a Christian reimagining of Africa as a haven for the African diaspora. The continent would become home to the entire diaspora, who would exchange a sense of home and belonging for an African mega-state directed through the doctrine of Christianity.
Similarly, Elijah Muhammad and Marcus Garvey reimagined their own Abrahamic reformations of the race that would render Black people the masters of their own fates, a nation or nations of liberated, intelligent, powerful masses. Nonetheless, such imaginings rely too heavily on the symbolism of kinship and unity forged in blood. They remain idealisms that only partially reflect the realities of human relationships.
Blood, as defined by my father, was a symbol of loyalty and kinship that allows us to determine and navigate the meanings of familial kin or family. Meanwhile, the racialized forms of kinship, such as those of shop patrons in the ice cream shop or the racialized nationalism of contemporary conservations, represent the negotiation and definition of hierarchical human types, the tiposthat determine our human value.
References
Levine, Robert S, ed. Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader. Chapell University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
