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Purity of Blood and the Social Order
Of Blood and Power: An Introduction
Thomas C. Holt
| DURING the halftime break of a football game in Jackson, Mississippi, between Ole Miss and Kentucky in the fall of 1962, Ross Barnett, the governor of the state of Mississippi, rose to address the crowd. Responding to the imminent enrollment of James Meredith into the state university by federal marshals, Barnett screamed defiance at this violation of southern racial order, declaring it a breach that would lead inevitably to the "mongrelization" of the population. Barnett's nightmare scenario implied, no doubt unwittingly, that state power stood like a dam channeling subconscious private desires along their proper course.1 Fifteen years earlier, Theodore Bilbo, another governor of Mississippi, had articulated this fear much more directly. The survival of white racial purity could not be entrusted to the capricious tastes and amorous choices of white individuals, Bilbo admitted obliquely in one of the last speeches before his death, so racial boundaries must be sustained by the state, and for that task the South required the aid of the whole nation.2 At Ole Miss in 1962, however, the nation (as represented by the federal executive and the courts) stood aligned with black integrationists in opposition to the state of Mississippi. |
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It is bemusing to realize that in some respects Barnett and his fellow demagogues were right: the removal of state sanctions did open a breach for the exercise of private choices about marriage partners, and that has produced a substantial and growing mixed-race population in America. Four years after federal courts ordered James Meredith's admission to Ole Miss, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the antimiscegenation statutes still on the books in seventeen states. Between 1960 and 2000, the number of black-white marriages increased sixfold, and unions between whites and members of other racialized groups grew even more dramatically. These developments have now gained the attention of scholars seeking to gauge by them the contemporary measure and future course of race relations.3 |
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As these articles by María Elena Martínez and Guillaume Aubert show, anxieties over racial mixture—whether it would lead to the regeneration or degeneration of the social order, whether state power should be deployed to encourage or interdict it—have vexed racialized social orders since the dawn of the modern era. Spain, perhaps the pioneer of ethnic cleansing, made racial purification the basis of its national formation. But purity of blood, Aubert reminds us, was an idea that resonated in sixteenth-century French aristocratic circles as well. For them the target was not a competing ethnic group; it was a title-grubbing aristocratic elite who, benefiting from an endemic state financial crisis, was able to buy noble rank, thereby devaluing the original coin of the realm. |
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