The Changing Face of Race : The Blood of Government by Paul Kramer (2006)

In a February 2003 publication of The American Historical Review, Martha Hodes delves into what she describes as a "capricious exercise of racial categorization in everyday life" (Hodes 85).  Using correspondence, interviews with living descendants, and government- as well as privately-owned documents, she traces the lives of Mr and Mrs William Smiley Connolly in the 1870s. Hodes chooses this couple because they are two different races and together, lived in two different racially stratified economies: American and the Cayman Islands. The outcome was not entirely expected.

Hodes' thesis is the title of her work: "The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race." While racial distinctions were present in both nations, the marriage of a white New England woman to an African Caribbean man takes on different meanings based on where you are, what the class structure is, and the relative level of socioeconomic improvement gains from relocating. Hodes asserts that "the power lies within the ability of legal, economic and social authorities to assign and reassign racial categories to oppressive ends" (85). In the case of the Connollys, Eunice was a widowed mother who worked alongside Irish and possibly, black women during a time when white women in New Hampshire were typically married and tucked away at home. This protected status of white womanhood was a very different reality of Eunice's life and she suffered social slights for her impoverished, unmarried state. "Smiley" Connolly was a well-off sea captain from privilege on an island that recognized not just dual races, but a spectrum of color too, and mysteriously, where race and color intersected with class. Smiley was of a complexion and an economic status that enabled having a white American wife be a benefit to both Connollys in the Caymans while a burden in New Hampshire.

Stuart Hall, cultural theorist

How is it that two contemporary societies, can respond to race so differently? In both, white is superior to black. Both are former slave societies. Both are capitalist in nature. But there is a historical component that blurs the lines in the Caymans. The way that race evolved there was structurally different in that economic status could transcend color and a hierarchy of colors were recognized and intertwined with wealth. Famed cultural theorist Stuart Hall similarly loquaciously refers to the "laws of motion" of capitalism in his paper "Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance" (331, 1980) to describe how derivations of Marxist capitalism forms in different places. In his effort to delineate the different types of capitalism we see, he urges that we recognize what he terms a 'historical premise" and a 'materialist premise" with which to examine race in post-slave societies. The former provides the range of lived racial experiences, while the latter is a pedantic analysis of the ideological structures that create race in a particular place. Hall stresses that 'articulation' of race by the dominant class is dissipated to the dominated class(es), conveying the ideology of the oppressor to the oppressed (335). It is through the arguments that Hodes and Hall propose that allow for a discussion on the changing face of race.

Such discussion can arise from reading The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006) by Paul Kramer. The book traces the racial birth of the "Filipino" as a result of U.S. colonial intervention in the Philippines following Spanish rule. The result was an exporting of American racist ideologies through businessmen, military and policymakers. They would represent the "dominant" class in the Philippines, while the people of the nation were divided "racially" into those who were Catholic versus those who were non-Christian ("savages"); the elite versus rural populations; those who had been "Hispanicized" by the Spaniards versus those who had not. This spectrum is the historical premise that Hall wrote of and indicates that the Filipino race evolved in a vacuum that while similar to other race creations, is by no means identical. Many pages of Kramer's book is devoted to the idea that at the beginning of the twentieth century, "Filipino became the new black." The name and concept of a  "Filipino" was imagined by the dominant class who indiscriminately hurled slurs pedestrian ("nigger!") and novel ("gu gu!). Another theme is that of the 'White Man's Burden' from the title of an 1899 ode to Anglo imperialism by Rudyard Kipling. American colonists considered it a self-sacrifice to supervise populations like blacks and Filipinos and guide them to self-sufficiency, if ever; a situation Kramer calls "calibrated colonialism." This mentality coupled with the behavior and expectations of Americans in the Philippians served to further articulate U.S. sovereignty among the colonized.

Or at least that was the idea. In the course of the book, we learn that in this time and place, Filipino nation-building efforts frustrate those of the Americans', further making this a deviant case of race evolution. Could the result have been predicted? Should it be viewed solely under a historical premise? While 'Filipinization' grew among the dominated classes, American efforts to protect their borders from cheap Filipino goods and labor without naturalizing the population could not be sustained. The Filipino had transcended nation, much like the Connollys, and with limited immigration status, could position herself for a different racial experience in the United States. Over less than one hundred years, the world saw the birth, classification and reclassification of the "Filipino," the fluid face of race.

To underscore the fluidity of race, consider that both Hall and Hodes understood it's properties and wrote their papers 23 years apart over events that are more than 100 years and many tens of thousands of miles apart. That race cannot be contained or defined but is constantly being redefined is both its strength and its weakness.


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