Blood (18 page)

Thinking on a similar level — that if you were from India, you couldn't possibly be Caucasian and you could not be considered a true British subject — played out in Canada too. Consider the
Komagata Maru
 steamship, which carried 376 British subjects (including two women and five children) from British India to the port of Vancouver. The ship arrived in Vancouver's Burrard Inlet on May 23, 1914. Some twenty of the passengers were eventually allowed to land in Canada, but the others were refused access, forced to remain on board the ship in deplorable conditions for two months, and eventually required to return to India.

At the time, Canada allowed British subjects to arrive in the country and become citizens, but because the migrants were mostly Sikhs from India, they were deemed not to be British. The B.C. Court of Appeal heard the case in 1914, ruling categorically against the would-be migrants. As James Walker notes in
“Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada
, lawyer J. Edward Bird argued on behalf of the would-be immigrants from India. Bird said they could not be defined under the category of “Asiatic race” that the Canadian government had permitted itself to exclude from the country on the grounds of being aliens. (In 1910, the Canadian Immigration Act allowed for the exclusion of “immigrants belonging to any race deemed unsuitable to the climate or requirements of Canada.”) Bird argued that the migrants were ethnologically Caucasians and racial cousins to the English. He told the judges that the migrants were indeed British subjects, that they should not be categorized as “aliens,” and that they deserved to be admitted to Canada, Walker notes.

The B.C. Supreme Court rejected the argument. Writing for the court, Justice Albert E. McPhillips said in the ruling: “It is plain that upon study of the question, the Hindu race, as well as the Asiatic race in general, are, in their conception of life and ideas of society, fundamentally different to the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic races, and European races in general . . . the laws of this country are unsuited to them, and their ways and ideas may well be a menace to the well-being of the Canadian people.”

McPhillips went on to say that an influx of Hindus (as he called them) from India “might annihilate the nation and change its whole potential complexity, introduce Oriental ways as against European ways, eastern civilization for western civilization, and all the dire results that would naturally flow therefrom . . . their proper place of residence is within the confines of their respective countries in the continent of Asia, not in Canada, where their customs are not in vogue . . .”

Thus nearly all of the Indian migrants were forced to leave Vancouver Harbour on July 23, exactly two months after they had arrived. When the
Komagata Maru
arrived yet another two months later in Calcutta, police moved in to arrest a number of the men. A riot broke out. The police began shooting, and nineteen passengers were killed.

In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the House of Commons, and the British Columbia Legislature issued apologies for the treatment of the people on board the
Komagata Maru
. But the apologies, and the possibility to help nearly four hundred desperate migrants, came ninety years too late. Well into the twentieth century, many British subjects — be they from India, the Caribbean, or elsewhere — were not to be considered true British subjects and not considered eligible to come to Canada, because they were not white.

The U.S. Supreme Court in its decision about Bhagat Singh Thind, and the B.C. Court of Appeal in its ruling about the Indian migrants aboard the
Komagata Maru
, were influenced — as millions of others have been — by the writings of those who have preached a doctrine of racial distinctiveness and of racial superiority. The courts in both countries declared that if you were from India, you couldn't be deemed Caucasian, British, or American. You could not simply leave your country and waltz into the United States or Canada. You were of the wrong blood.

Working for the Toronto Labour Committee for Human Rights in 1953–54, my mother, Donna Hill, crusaded against federal immigration policy. Canada, as a part of the British Empire, allowed British subjects to come to its lands. But it excluded Indians and blacks from the definition of
British
. Canadian immigration authorities kept a firm grip on who was allowed to enter the country.

In the early twentieth century, the Reverend Samuel Dwight Chown, a Methodist minister and Canada's leading churchman, wrote: “The immigration question is the most vital one in Canada today, as it has to do with the purity of our national life-blood … It is foolish to dribble away the vitality of our own country in a vain endeavor to assimilate the world's non-adjustable, profligate and indolent social parasites.”

Chown's words reflected a wide swath of Canadian twentieth-century thinking, so my mother had her work cut out for her when she went to bat for a twenty-six-year-old Trinidadian man named Harry Narine-Singh, who found himself in a mess of trouble when he showed up in a Toronto army recruiting office in 1954, offering to enlist in the Canadian forces. Narine-Singh, who had been in Canada on a visitor status, was ordered deported after an immigration official by the name of C. Schreiber determined that he was an “East Indian” from “Trinidad, British West Indies.” The official later presented Narine-Singh with the explanation that he was not permitted to be in Canada because he was “Asian.”

In
“Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada
, James Walker explains what happened next: “Harry protested that he was not an ‘Asian': his family had been in Trinidad for five generations, and he had never even visited Asia; in fact he had never been anywhere except Trinidad and Toronto. Schreiber insisted the Narine-Singhs [Harry and his wife, Mearl] were Asian by ‘race.'”

My mother enlisted a lawyer to represent Narine-Singh and his case was fought through the courts, but a year later the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the deportation order. Narine-Singh and his wife were required to leave the country.

I asked my mother, a white American who moved with my black father from Washington, D.C., to Toronto in 1953 and soon became a passionate naturalized Canadian, what she remembered about Narine-Singh's case. My mother was retired and eighty-five years old at the time of our interview in June 2013, but her mind was clear. She said she didn't remember exactly what was said in court about Narine-Singh, because by the time of the ruling in 1955, she had left her job to have her first baby (my brother, Dan) and begun raising a family. “As a woman at that time, I was not able to have a family and keep my job,” she said. My mother had passed along the reins at the Toronto Labour Committee for Human Rights to Sid Blum.

As for what the case said about Canada, my mother got to the heart of the matter: “Canadians always seemed to feel that they were so much better than the Americans because of racism, even though we had it here too. Excluding British subjects who were not white shows that Canadian social attitudes were still really backward at that time, and that many people believed that Canada was basically for whites.”

IT WOULD BE NAIVE
to conclude that the equation of blood and race is a thing of the distant past, or confined to eighteenth-­century European thinkers obsessed by notions of racial superiority. The idea may offend many of us today, but defining people's racial identity along lines of blood — and holding them to it — has been serious business since Europeans began settling in the Americas.

In eighteenth-century Mexico,
criollos
— people of Spanish origin who were born in the New World — were concerned that they were situated one step down the social totem pole from Spanish-born people who had settled in the country. Therefore, they enacted rules regulating and restricting every aspect of the lives of Indians, blacks, and mixed-race people, who were to be positioned several rungs down from them on the ladder of social hierarchy. This caste system, or
sistema de castas
, was designed to ensure that the elite
criollos
were not associated with the tainted blood of miscegenation (the mixing of racial groups through marriage and procreation).

“Mestizos” was a term used to describe Mexican people with mixed Spanish and Indian heritage. Octavio Paz, the late Mexican Nobel Prize–winning poet and essayist, once wrote: “If the criollo, born of Spanish blood, was the victim of ambiguity, the mestizo, born of mixed blood, was doubly so: he was neither criollo nor Indian. Rejected by both groups, the mestizo had no place either in the social structure or in the moral order. In the light of traditional moral systems — the Spanish, based on honor, and the Indian, based on the sacredness of family — the mestizo was the living image of illegitimacy.”

As a person of biracial ancestry myself, I'm always a bit wary of the stereotype of the mixed-race person who is forever troubled by the quality of his or her blood. However, there can be no disputing that the most influential classes of people in eighteenth-century Mexico bent over backwards to place peoples of mixed ancestry within a rigid social hierarchy.

Ilona Katzew has written an art history book on the subject, titled
Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico
. Just as in the United States, Canada, Jamaica, Brazil, or any other region where people of many backgrounds found themselves together, it didn't take long for people of one background to end up in bed with those of another background. In Mexico, indigenous peoples, Spaniards, and Africans begin having sex — and babies — as early as the sixteenth century. “This resulted in a large number of racially mixed people known collectively as
castas
,” Katzew writes. “By the end of the eighteenth century, approximately one quarter of the total population of Mexico was racially mixed.”

The fixation with the
sistema de castas
spilled into the paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico, and this forms the heart of Katzew's book, which contains portraits of the men, women, and children so rigidly defined in Mexico's racially mixed society.

Casta
paintings often feature sixteen distinct representations of racial mixing. Sometimes each scene occupies its own canvas or copper plate, and at other times all sixteen are squeezed checkerboard-style into a single frame. Each image shows a man and a woman of two separate races, as well as their child. Each image bears an inscription defining the races of all three subjects in the painting. Juan Rodríguez Juárez, one of the best known
casta
painters, produced bold, lively portraits, each with mother, father, and child. A list of just a few of the inscriptions in his paintings demonstrates the Mexicans' (and the Spaniards') obsession with racial taxonomy. One is inscribed: “Spaniard and Indian Produce a Mestizo.” Another: “Spaniard and Mulatta Produce a Morisca.” And another: “Mulatto and Mestiza Produce a Mulatta Return-Backwards,” which emphasizes social regression. (
Mestizo
and
Mestiza
are the Spanish masculine and feminine nouns indicating people of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry.
Morisca
is the feminine noun indicating, in this case, a person reputed to have one black and three white grandparents.) There are many names employed to keep track of all the racial variations:
Albino
,
Coyote
,
Wolf
, and so forth. However, there seems to be the possibility to become white again, in Mexico, if a family really works at it by correcting one step into racial impurity by another back toward the state of “perfection.” This is shown by another painter, José de Ibarra, who made two revealing canvases that should be seen back to back. The first shows “From Mestizo and Spaniard, Castizo.” This
castizo
child (who, by these arbitrary definitions, would have one Indian and three Spanish grandparents) looks confident, happy, and very nearly white. The next intermarriage offers one final possibility of improvement, showing two finely dressed adults with an aristocratic, demanding son: “From Castizo and Spaniard, Spaniard.”

In case you have trouble figuring out how the arithmetic equations work between whites and blacks and their children, a seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit missionary by the name of José Gumilla offered a four-step formula. As Katzew notes, Gumilla wrote:

From European and black, a mulata is born (two fourths each part);

From European and mulata, a cuarterona is born (one fourth mulatto);

From European and cuarterona, an ochavona is born (one eight mulatto);

From European and ochavona, a puchuela is born (entirely white).

Hearing today of the
casta
system and paintings, a reader might declare it absurd and passé. Absurd, yes. Passé, no. We continue to embrace subtler means to define people by dint of their blood purity, or by degrees of mixture. It still influences the way we talk when we describe our neighbour as half black and half white, or our co-worker as one-quarter Irish, one-­quarter Japanese, and one-half Nigerian. How quaint. How exotic. How ludicrous. Human identity cannot be arithmetically quantified. You cannot break down blood into discrete racial parts. Each time we try to do it, we reveal the very looniest parts of our hearts and minds. And we open the door to mistreatment and injustice.

People commonly look to slavery in the United States or to apartheid in South Africa for examples of the lengths to which folks will go to establish racial hierarchies. There are more terms for people of African ancestry, and more terms for people of supposedly mixed blood, than could fill a three-hundred-page book.
Mulatto
is one of the most common ones, and it still makes its appearance from time to time these days. It is meant to refer to a person who has one black and one white parent, and is offensive to many because it derives from the Spanish word for the offspring of a horse and a donkey. There is
quadroon
(one-quarter “black blood”) and
octoroon
(one-eighth), and from there, the possibilities expand into ludicrous directions. On my shelf at home is one of the most bizarre books I have ever seen, called the
Dictionary of Latin American Racial and Ethnic Terminology
. It is by Thomas M. Stephens, and was published by the University Press of Florida. It has three parts, for terms that are either Spanish-American, Brazilian-Portuguese, or French-American and American French-Creole. It runs to 863 pages. One Creole term is
lèt kayé
, which means “person who is the colour of curdled milk.” Another is the Spanish-American term
calpamulato
, which can have various meanings, one of which is “offspring of a mulatto and an Indian; 25 percent white, 50 percent Indian, 25 percent black.”