This week's readings heavily focus on the themes of race traitors and eugenics. Race traitors from each side of a mixed person can be argued for. With a mulatto, a person of white and black blood would desire to be considered only white, if possible. White elitists completely rejecting anybody that was not "pure" causation without any blood relation to anything else. Dr. Plecker, a public health advocate in the early twentieth-century, fought his hardest to put down people of color in any way possible. In J. Douglas Smith's Article, "The Campaign for Racial Purity and the Erosion of Paternalism in Virginia," Plecker removes colored children from white schools, publically released pamphlets publicizing his disgust towards people of color and harm they supposedly bring biologically, and, overall, kept the colored population socially and economically second-class citizens. He has such a strong passion for trying to tear colored people down that he went on to try and refine colored people from American Indian, and their mixes, to African American, and their mixes. It is mindblowing reading about someone doing so much hard to an entire group of a people, practically devoting his life to it. He lost court cases and his job, doing what he did. Luckily, by the end of the 1930s, white elites lost this fight, as the color line/boundaries began to fade, black activism rose and paternalism as a strategy for managing white supremacy eroded.
How has today's stereotypes an influence of eugenics, whether or not we want to believe or accept it?
Personally, do you think you are good at judging whether or not someone is of mixed race like Powell or Plecker claimed to be?
A question about the reading: Was Trinckle neutral, completely, or slightly against people of color? Smith's article made him sound like he tried to be considerate to the people of American Indian tribes, but only wanted to keep the eyes of the public unquestioning of his devotion to white supremacy.
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