Whiter than white

I've been brooding over a suggestive phrase from Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me: "people who think they are white."

Part of that thinking of reflects the centuries during which slaveholders and their male relatives freely raped the women under their control, producing mixed-race children. Mary Chesnut tartly remarks in her diary: "The mulattos one sees in every family ... resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds." 

We think that Thomas Jefferson was drawn to Sally Hemings because of her strong resemblance to his deceased wife--who was also her half-sister. 

The One Drop legislation in Southern states, on the premise that one drop of Black blood made one Black, established categories, such as Mulatto (half-Negro), Quadroon (quarter-Negro), Octoroon (eighth-Negro), to establish the legal status of white and not-quite-white. It's reasonable to suspect that many "people who think they are white" today could be disconcerted by the results of a DNA test. 

But going beyond that, we have to realize that "whiteness" is as much a cultural matter as a biological one, perhaps more so. 

Though I have not resorted to Ancestry.com or a DNA test, it's pretty sure that my people were Scotch Irish and English, settled in Appalachia for a century and a half or more. Importantly, they were Protestant. White and Protestant was the badge of the True American from the beginning. 

Anyone not white and Protestant was suspect. Benjamin Franklin worried about all those Germans settling in the Pennsylvania Colony. In the mid-nineteenth century all those immigrating Irish Catholics were widely discriminated against, and after them the darker-skinned Italians and Eastern Europeans. But all of them discovered over time as they acculturated that in American you can earn whiteness. It is even possible for Jews to become honorary whites. (Henry Kissinger springs to mind.) 

The consequence is that we see opposition to immigration coming from people who think they are white, descended from immigrants who were thought not to be white, or at least not quite white like the True Americans.

There is an odd corollary that to be a True American you must be white and also live in the Heartland, the place where The New York Times sends reporters to talk to people in diners. The reason is that the True Americans long ago bought into the Jeffersonian fantasy that cities, at least large, multicultural cities, are places of corruption and that virtue resides among the farmers and small towns distant from those cities. 

The places where the people who think they are white live.