Who Decided What Race You Were?

Writing historical fiction is maddening because you can’t include everything you learn! You use what you need for your story, but have to let so much get away.

For instance, the Census Bureau has codified race legally since the Constitution created it. It’s always struggled to do so, and no wonder – working first in a slave nation, then one that continued with tortured fractional definitions. In 1890, for instance, part of a Bureau’s enumerators’ mind-boggling job was to decide whether a Black person was completely Black, or it not, was a mulatto – ½ black, a quadroon – ¼ black, or an octoroon – 1/8 black. But the Bureau didn’t trust the subject to tell the truth, or even to know. That judgment was left to what the enumerator saw, with no questions asked of the individual.

The brutal and infamous examination of Alice Jones Rhinelander’s racial identity in a court of law in 1925, eventually influenced the Census Bureau’s throwing out all fractional racial categories in 1930: Anyone with a perceptable trace of Negro blood was 100% “Black.” But that status was still defined by the enumerator’s personal observation. And the purpose of the clarification was to simplify racial distinction, in order to make Jim Crow laws easier to enforce on anyone – and everyone – who was Black.

Not until 1960 were individuals allowed to self-identify their own race for the US Census – at a time when “Black is beautiful” became the proud cry of a rising population.