By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi Continued from last week President Warren Harding The rumors surfaced agai...
By
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
President
Warren Harding
The rumors surfaced again with renewed vigor when
Barack Obama emerged on the American political scene. In fact, the New York Times commissioned Beverly
Gage, a well-regarded professor of modern American history from Yale
University, to write a piece on Harding’s alleged hidden black heritage.
Writing in the New
York Times of April 6, 2008 under the title “Our first black president?”
Gage concluded that: “[…] many biographers have dismissed the rumors of
Harding’s mixed-race family as little more than a political scandal and
Chancellor himself as a Democratic mudslinger and racist ideologue. But as with
the long-denied and now all-but-proved allegations of Thomas Jefferson’s affair
with his slave Sally Hemings, there is reason to question the denials. From the
perspective of 2008, when interracial sex is seen as a historical fact of life
instead of an abomination, the circumstantial case for Harding’s mixed-race
ancestry is intriguing though not definitive.”
This cautious
admission of President Harding’s “black” parentage says a lot, especially
coming from a white historian from an Ivy League university.
Calvin
Coolidge
President Calvin Coolidge was elected vice president
and succeeded as the 30th President of the United States when President Harding
died in 1923 while on a speaking tour in California. If Harding is the most
probable past American president with a black African ancestry, Coolidge is
perhaps the least probable.
However, many
African-American historians think otherwise. Auset Bakhufu, author of Six Black Presidents: Black Blood:
White Masks USA, claims that Coolidge was, in fact, proud
of his African ancestry, a highly implausible proposition given the dishonor in
which blackness was held in 1930s America. Bakhufu claims that Coolidge’s mother
was “dark” but that he explained away the darkness of his mother’s skin by
attributing it to the fact of her mixed Indian heritage.
Bakhufu then relies on this alleged explanation to
assert that at the time Coolidge’s mother was born in New England, the American
Indians there had all been intermarried with black people. This interpretive
leap stretches my credulity to the limit. It is not clear to me how a person
can simultaneously be proud of his ancestry and strain hard to explain it away,
thereby denying it outright.
Black American
conspiracy theorists also claim that Coolidge’s mother’s maiden name was “Moor”
and that Moor used to be the generic name for all black people, especially in
Europe. That is wholly inaccurate. The only people Europeans called Moors were
North Africans, who aren’t black. Well, even if, for the sake of argument, we
agree that Moor referred to black, then white people whose last name is Black
(and they are many) must be part African too!
Dwight
David Eisenhower
The evidence proffered to support claims of the
African ancestry of Dwight David Eisenhower, America’s 34th president who
served between 1953 and 1961, is also weak and speculative. Black American
historians allege that Eisenhower’s mother, Ida Elizabeth Stover, was part
black and part white, which makes her— and all her descendants— “black,”
according to America’s unique racial typology.
But what is the evidence that Eisenhower, whose
official biography says he was an American of German descent, was “black”?
According to one conspiracy theorist, “Interviews made during the 50s uncovered
some very old people who long remembered referring to Eisenhower's mother as
‘that black Links gal’.”
Another piece of “evidence” is the picture of
Eisenhower’s mother on her wedding day published in his autobiography. Someone
claimed the woman “would not have been able to eat in restaurants anywhere in
the South before the end of segregation.” Well, I saw the picture myself and
the woman looked lily-white, as Americans like to say.
Of course, in my studies of American presidential
rhetoric, I discovered that Eisenhower was more obliging to African-Americans
than many past American presidents. He was, for instance, the first president
to deploy federal force to desegregate schools in the South. He was also the
first president to invite African-American leaders to the White House, and the
first to appoint a black person into an executive position in the White House.
But it’s not a persuasive argument to assert that a
president’s complaisance to a historically oppressed people is an outward
manifestation of his suppressed genetic relationship to the group.
Concluding
Thoughts
But why should it matter if any past American
president was part African? Why should this interest us in an age when
scientists, scholars, and DNA analyses continue to explode the myth of racial
exclusivity? Well, it is partly because while these progressive developments
are taking place, we are also witnessing what appears like the recrudescence of
nineteenth-century scientific racism on the fringes. But that’s a topic for
another day.
Another reason why this is important is that America
is a nation that is heavily invested in racial symbolisms. It will elevate the
sense of self-worth of African-Americans if they can convince themselves (even
if they can’t convince others) that some past American presidents share an
ancestral linkage with them.
I also think
it’s a creative inversion of the logic of one-drop rule. Most so-called black
Americans are not simply African; they are an embodiment of a multiplicity of
racial identities. They are “black” only because a racist power structure
pronounced them so. As Langston Hughes, the eminent “African” American poet,
once wrote, "You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of
different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word
'Negro' is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In
Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore, black. I am
brown."
However, even though in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court
unequivocally invalidated the one-drop rule, it continues to be employed in
self-definition and the definition of others.
Concluded
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