The March 3, 2007, special election vote by the Cherokee Nation to remove citizenship from intermarried whites and descendants of freed African slaves has raised renewed examination of “blood politics.” As columnist Steve Newcomb points out in Indian Country Today, “The Cherokee Nation has received a great deal of heated criticism for its decision to eject the black freedman from their national rolls.” In a related column, Professor Eric Cheyfitz notes that “Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chad Smith invoked the criteria of ‘blood’ as that which defines the boundaries of Indian nations. And yet in the same explanation, Smith denied the charge of racism….”

Some observers correlate American Indian citizenship disputes with struggles over resources, especially casino revenues. Whatever the motivations, identity politics is visible well beyond an American Indian context, in a variety of situations around the world. The Cherokee vote is an opportunity to look at assumptions behind notions of “race.”

The basic irony of racial politics in the modern world is that blood purity myths are sustained among mixed-blood peoples. The reality today is that humanity is a mixed-blood species. Race politics is a lie told within this truth.

Take a look at some blood myths within the American context:

1. Black blood, the blood of the slaves imported from Africa, is very strong; a few drops are sufficient to make someone black. The “octoroons” of American slavery are an example of the mythical power of black blood: one-eighth black blood overcame seven-eighths white blood. This kind of thinking was very useful to white male slave-owners, who could increase their slave property by having intercourse with their female slaves. The labor-pains of these women produced more slaves to labor for the master.

2. Red blood, the blood of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, is comparatively weak in relation to white; a single dose of white blood was sufficient to make someone a “half-breed”; one more dose produced the one-fourth blood-quantum that became a common federal definition of Indian identity. The 1887 Dawes Allotment Act used this standard to dismember the Cherokee Nation and remove land from Cherokee control.

3. White blood is perhaps the most mythical of all; its purity and strength, though powerful in relation to “red” blood, are vulnerable to virtually all others. This was the reasoning behind anti-miscegenation laws criminalizing interracial dating and marriage nearly into the 21st century. (In a strange variation on color, the rarest form of white blood is blue blood, a type of divine origin preserved among the nobility; it is so weak it has to be protected against mixture with non-noble whites.)

Blood myths parade as biology, but they are ideologies wrapped in the language of genetics. Racism is a type of politics that pretends to be a part of nature. Whether in Bosnia or the Cherokee Nation, under colonialism or a slave regime, in domestic or international arenas, race politics is the same. Mixed-blood humanity is burdened with racial metaphysics.

In a 1909 naturalization case [In Re Halladjian, 174 Federal Reporter 834], a federal court admitted four Armenians to United States citizenship, over an objection of the federal government that the petitioners were not “white.” The judge’s reasoning, based on extensive analysis of history and statutes, is still startling, almost a century later:

We find, then, that there is no European or white race, as the United States contends, and no Asiatic or yellow race which includes substantially all the people of Asia; that the mixture of races in western Asia for the last 25 centuries raises doubt if its individual inhabitants can be classified by race…. We find, further, that the word “white” has generally been used in the federal and in the state statutes, in the publications of the United States, and in its classification of its inhabitants, to include all persons not otherwise classified…. [845]

The judge saw white privilege as it is: an historical construct, a catchall category rooted in politics, not biology. Further, in response to the government’s argument that “white” referred to “the prevailing ideals, standards, and aspirations of the people of Europe,” [837] the judge stated:

… a reasonable modesty may well remind Europeans that the origin of their letters was in Phoenicia, the origin of much of their art in Egypt, that Asia Minor claimed, at least, the birthplace of the first great European poet, and that the Christian religion, which most Europeans believe to have influenced their civilization and ideals, was born in Palestine. [840]

Imagine how much less conflict we would see today if this “reasonable modesty” were borne in mind! We would have to acknowledge that “race” and “blood quantum” are tools for oppression, with no redeeming social value, for the Cherokee Nation or any other nation or people.

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I wrote an earlier version of some of these thoughts for Interracial Voice, in response to the O.J. Simpson case: O.J.’s Blood