History, Sex, Power, and the American Underclasses (whew)

William Conway Day with wife Nancy Parks [Cherokee]

Humans like sex.

It’s why there are over 8 billion of us on the planet now.

So far, so blazingly obvious.

Men, women, and folks in between have never been particularly picky or finicky in terms of “race”, ethnicity, or skin color in selecting sexual partners.

This is the reason almost every population group outside of Africa shares some DNA with the now extinct Neanderthal people.  It’s hard to believe there could have ever been a taboo on inter-ethnic sex in ancient times, when even INTER-SPECIES sex was clearly widespread.  We’ll probably never know the exact social dynamics involved – was this a case of free association, did Homo sapiens women take a fancy to muscular Neanderthal men, or were Neanderthal women taken captive and “integrated” by male Homo sapiens?

As far as sex in American history goes – 40,000 years later – there is a centuries-long pattern of interpersonal and social dysfunction surrounding this most natural of human needs.

BUT ONLY AMONG THOSE WHO ASPIRED TO SOCIAL RESPECTABILITY.

The aristocracy and elites have almost always been careful to maintain a public façade of “respectability”, while proceeding to do whatever they damn well pleased when out of the public eye – and often in flagrant view of the public, too, if their rank allowed them to get away with it.  Mistresses, consorts, courtesans, downstairs maids, you name it.

The truly poor also tended to do whatever the hell they wanted.  As people of “no account”, they were often exempt from social expectations, or at least largely ignored.

Social respectability has traditonally always been a particularly nagging problem for the “middling classes” aka “petit bourgeois” who simultaneously sought to distance themselves from the underclasses while attempting to climb the social ladder and find acceptance (or maybe even a place) among elite society.

I’m rambling.

My point is this.  Whatever the attempts to patrol sexual behavior by the religious or wider society, there has always been licit and illicit sex between willing (and often unwilling) partners in American history, and such sex crossed all ethnic boundaries.

Hannah Bonney, daughter of a humble shoemaker in Puritan-run Massachusetts, was charged with “fornication and bearing the child of a negro” named Nimrod as early as 1685.

But what most people today will not be able to wrap their heads around, after 400 years of entrenched racism, is the idea that Puritan society was far more obsessed with “class”, than with “race” or ethnicity.

What would have shocked Hannah Bonney‘s contemporaries far more than the color of her lover, was the idea that she would consort with someone from the ENSLAVED CLASS – WHILE OUT OF WEDLOCK!

It is only the development of a “racial caste system” over many decades during the late 1600s and early 1700s that would cause “enslaved” and “Black” to become almost synonymous in the minds of most free people.

Once a society is poisoned by the concept of “castes” – based in gender, religion, or “race” – then sex itself becomes polluted by a disturbing dynamic.

Power.

When sex is no longer a consensual frolic in the hay between willing partners, it becomes performative, in a social sense.

Who is watching to see if we are married?  Are we of equal social status?  What are people saying?  Cheap?  Masculine?  Coquettish?  Powerful?  Slutty?  Dominant?

In a society with free “White” males at the top of the social hierarchy, women, as underlings, cannot be allowed to freely choose their partners.

For a “White” woman to choose a “Black” man was (and among some weirdos still is) the ultimate rejection of the “White” patriarchy – BECAUSE ALL WHITE WOMEN SHOULD BE SUBSERVIENT TO WHITE MEN, AND MUST BE THEORETICALLY “AVAILABLE” TO ANY WHITE MAN AHEAD OF ANY BLACK MAN.

For a White female to choose ANY Black man for a partner – however talented, handsome, hard-working, or successful – was tantamount to telling every White male – poor, middling, or elite – that they were not above Black people, or indeed, not even above WOMEN.

This dysfunctonal “racial” and sexual politics has always been about power and control, and it is why conservatives in the USA are still often obsessed with controlling women’s bodies.

This is also why a much, much higher percentage of the mixed-ethnic children born in America over the past four centuries tended to be born to women of color and “white” men.

Within a “white” patriarchy, almost ALL women, of any “race”, color, or ethnicity must be potentially “available” to “white” men.

It was also the case that children born to a white man and a woman of color had a better chance of eventually “passing for white” than children born to a Black man and a white woman.

Think about it.  With men usually controlling property and the purse strings, imagine being a half-Cherokee woman from Western North Carolina in 1830.

Marry a white man, and your children would most likely be able to attend school and church, buy cheap land in Tennessee or Kentucky, inherit property, carry a gun, and vote.

Marry a man within the Cherokee Nation, and things were looking precarious.

Marry a Black man, and all bets were off…

This socio-sexual situation is almost certainly why a huge percentage of Appalachian families share folklore about a distant grandmother who was a “Cherokee princess”.

She wasn’t a “princess”.  She was a tough woman who made some tough choices.

The reason Southern Appalachia, The Ozarks, parts of The Deep South, and a few other places have often been described by “respectable society” as being home to “white trash”, is because for centuries these places harbored people who had been intermixing since the 1600s.  In being profoundly mixed-ethnic, such people were already so far down the social scale that there was little or nothing to be gained in playing by the rules of “respectable” society.

Places like Southern Appalachia made their own rules – about justice, about sexual relations, about honor.  It seems to have never occurred to outsiders that when they chose to view mountain people unfavorably through the lens of their own “respectable society”, they were being bigoted and ignorant of the many “ways of being” which were correct and entirely proper for people descended from Indigenous Americans, Africans, Romani, and the many other “brown peoples” who intermarried or simply co-habited with incoming European settler-colonizers.

It shouldn’t need saying, but how people have sex and with whom is nobody else’s damn business, as long as no one is being hurt.