Derek Walcott Quotes
Miscegenation is not an idea that we would have in the Caribbean. It wouldn't come up because anybody could marry anybody, you know. I'm not saying that there aren't prejudices in the Caribbean, but the idea of the word 'miscegenation' is not something that we think of.
Walcott, Derek. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Edited by William Baer, University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
Bilbo was one of the worst racists who ever served in the Congress.
This was a bomb-shell statement at the time. Advocates for equality and desegregation usually tried to avoid this issue and Black leaders in particular were afraid of a backlash if they included this issue in the argument for equality. Du Bois did not run from the issue. His position was used by segregation leaders to show what “evils” would befall the nation if segregation was ended. See {586739}.
At the time he was not Church president. The Mormon Church has had a very complex history regarding race; Blacks for example were prohibited from leadership positions in the Church. While not the only racist church, Mormon racism was more nuanced. Mormons aggressively sought Blacks and other ethnics for conversion into the church and on a personal and social level did not exhibit the antipathy towards non-whites that so many in other religions did. Yet their theology prohibited Blacks from certain leadership positions. Other religious racism was personal and social but not theological; Mormon racism was theological and not personal. Reforms have changed things slightly but critics of the church leadership at the start of the 21st century pointed to the attitudes of the President of the Church.
This quotation illustrates one of the earliest major political dirty tricks. The pamphlet was published supposedly as a Republican campaign piece. The Democratic ploy was to turn votes from Abraham Lincoln to the Democratic candidate, George B. Mclellan. It also appears to be the first English usage of the word “miscegenation”. Lincoln was re-elected in spite of the Republicans being portrayed as radical race mixers.
Utah passed a strong law against interracial sex, but the punishment was not death. See {629151}. Young however saw interracial sex as an extremely serious problem. There was nothing in the Bible or the Book of Mormon that would account for this strong animus, so presumably it was personal. For many years Mormons converted and accepted Blacks, but they could not be priests or leaders of churches. That prohibition was ended and the Modern Mormon Church is free from racism in its doctrine.
The danger of racial and ethnic interbreeding was a fabricated myth. We now know that the danger can come from pure breeding and not obtaining enough genetic diversity. One reason that man has been so successful is that the species is the product of very extensive genetic diversity. For example EVERY human being on the planet had some genetic relationship to a Black African woman.
Russell like the rest of the Southern Congressional delegation, though members of the President’s own party were vehemently opposed to any civil rights legislation that would erode the legal racism and segregation that was prevalent in the South. The irony of Russell’s statement is that by Russell’s definition of a “mongrel race” the South was just that. And in a very real genetic sense all the great civilizations were characterized by interbreeding which is what Russell and other Southerners were paranoid about. The Southern institution of slavery was rife with the sexual abuse of the female slaves by the white masters and/or members of their family, overseers and other whites with power over the slaves. While many of the offspring were identifiable as mixed race (defined as Black by the laws at the time) many appeared to be white and light skinned enough to “pass” and did. A very large percentage of Southern white and black families had mixed blood in the family when Russell was complaining. More to the point, although it was not known at the time, we now know that every human being on earth can be genetically traced back through myocardial DNA to Blacks emanating from Africa. However, even using his narrow vision of race, his history was wanting. A number of great civilizations were of mixed race. One dramatic example was the great dynasties of Egypt. Cleopatra, herself, was from the union of Alexander the Great’s Greek General Ptolemy and the traditional line of Egyptian Pharos. Alexander’s Greek Soldiers interbred, as part of Alexander’s policy of occupation as suggested by Aristotle. All those societies thereafter were “mongrel” races at least in the ruling and upper classes. Actually the United States and the Soviet Union, the two super powers of the day both were ethnically and racially, highly diversified and both had a great deal of miscegenation. Scientists had made a very good argument that miscegenation strengthens a people—not weakens it.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the University of Alberta's first distinguished scholar in residence, where he taught undergraduate and graduate writing courses. He also served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
