Many people have been distressed to learn that the word mulatto is derived from the Spanish for 'young mule.' Of course this is not very flattering. But the word itself denotes a history that should not be discarded, which is what will likely happen if the word is viewed as insulting. To try and avoid this, I will define a synonym with a different etymology.

Any modern English dictionary will derive the word mulatto as follows:

mulatto: < Sp mulato young mule < L mulus mule, + atto < Sp ato < ?)

The Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins: The History of more than 8,000 English Language Words, by John Ayto, allows us to extend this derivation a bit further:

The [word for the] 'donkey-like animal' [13] comes via Old French mul from Latin mulus, which was borrowed from a pre- Latin language of the Mediterranean area; Albanian musk 'mule' is related.

(The numbers in square brackets refer to the century in which the word first came into usage.)

This book does not mention the word mulatto. But from Webster's dictionary we learn that mulatto had its origin in 1593. I suspect it was a word applied more in jest rather than with malicious intent. The mule, the product of a horse and donkey, would have been the most conspicuous example of hybridism in 16th century European society. There was also the belief that Europeans and sub- Saharan Africans were different species. The fact that the mule was sterile would later be thought to hold true for the offspring of the two human populations. But this notion probably had its origin in 19th century North America.

There is a second English word mule (pronounced similarly), which the Dictionary of Word Origins is able to trace:

Mule the 'slipper' [16] is probably an adaptation of Latin mulleus, which denoted a sort of red or purple shoe worn by high-ranking magistrates in Rome. This was short for mulleus calceus 'red shoe,' and mulleus itself appears to have been derived from mullus 'red mullet' (ultimate source of English mullet [15]), which in turn came from Greek mullos, a relative of melas 'black.'

The mule of the slipper is thus ultimately a color word like black. Nothing stops us from deriving a synonym of mulatto from this source, thus

mullato: a red (person). mull < L mullus red < G mullos, + ato < L -atus a singular suffix.

The pronunciation is virtually the same as in the traditional form, though it would properly preclude the stressed first syllable myoo which Webster's gives as a valid alternative. However, the spellings are different. In the new coinage there are two ls and one t. While in the traditional form with the etymology of 'young mule' there is one l and two ts.

Despite the fact that they are pronounced similarly, these are two distinct words. They are synonyms, not cognates, sharing the same meaning but not the same etymology.

This particular derivation of mullato is not without basis. The word and color 'red' has often been associated with persons having European and sub-Saharan African ancestries as in the southern Caribbean--Grenada, Trinidad and Guyana. In Jamaica, the word and color used is 'brown.' In America, there is one tradition of using the word and color 'yellow,' as in "Yellow Rose of Texas" and "high yellow." Webster's dictionary concurs with the Jamaican usage, giving one meaning of mulatto as "of a light-brown color, as resembling the skin of a mulatto."

A possible dictionary entry might read: Mullato, n. 1. a person with Caucasian and sub-Saharan African ancestries. 2. a synonym of mulatto, but alternately derived to avoid its derogatory etymology. (< L mullus < G mullos red, + ato < L - atus a singular suffix.)

Not everyone will be pleased with the reference to color. But it could be argued that ultimately it is neutral, being based in actual description, something no realistic person would refute. And in any case, the aspect of color is muted since this is merely its etymology, not its meaning. Mullato simply denotes a specific segment of the mixed-race community as does hapa, Eurasian, etc. If the word is rejected without some kind of replacement, we lose the ability to refer to this community as a separate entity.

CONTENTS:

Totemism

Idolatry

Monotheism

Race
    Origin
    Claim
    Fallacy

Mixed race
    The mullato
    Historical context

The conformity to ancestral identity, and the rebellion against it, are the central dynamics of society. Within this conflict all religion, and all history, have unfolded.

Earliest societies would make the first and most momentous rejection of the constraints of ancestral lineage, one which all subsequent societies have recognized as fundamental to what it means to be human -- the prohibitions against incest. By denying to themselves incestuous relationships, earliest societies rejected the inherent impulse to propagate the purest form of ancestral lineage. This renunciation was the primordial choice which set in motion human culture. For it was upon the kinship categories defined by the incest taboo that the totemic culture and identities of earliest societies were erected. Traces of such identities can still be found in the animal and plant National symbols of the modern State and in the animal mascots of sports teams.

The rejection of the totemic identities would give birth to historical society. For the first time society became organized around non-kinship relationships. This revolution would earn humankind's undying appreciation and the epithet 'civilization.' Yet its symbols of State -- from Baal in Mesopotamia to the Sun-god in Aztec Mexico -- were subject to a massive program of demoralization. Its execution of criminals and prisoners of war under the symbols of the State were demonized as human sacrifice, even though the modern guise of this -- the death penalty -- is very much a central part of present society. But the civilizations of idolatry only received what they themselves had meted out. In their contest for succession, they had done the same to the culture of totemism, casting this as savage and primitive. Waging a similar campaign against idolatry, monotheist civilization would in turn suffer the same fate.

Monotheism was the ancient world's way of rejecting the provincial allegiances and concerns of idolatry and so asserting a more universal identity. In ancient Egypt, Moses would claim this 'universal' vision for his newly discovered hypodescent lineage, attributing it to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He would instill in the degraded and marginalized Hebrews the devotion to a vision that embraced the fullest potency (or omnipotence) and fullest rationality (omniscience) of the universe.

Monotheism also possesses a spiritual dimension. The two components of this, the model of divine revelation and the principle of animism, had long existed in primitive society before they were taken up by monotheism and given unitary status. Animism is the necessary premise of divine revelation, but like the idea of the aether which was supposed to pervade all space, it was abandoned because it could not be detected. As a result, no serious thinker today (working within a scientific paradigm) would invoke the model of divine revelation, though there is no shortage of its usage among believers in the occult. Whatever credibility it has is confined to its historical contexts, and any attempt to elevate it above its present trivial concerns is immediately labeled as fraudulent, thus ensuring that it will never again be used in a profound way. The last and truly great thinker to employ this model was Arabia's prophet Mohammed. But even then -- fourteen hundred years ago -- there were those who saw it for what it was. In Europe, this model would be entirely undermined and replaced with its scientific counterpart.

But even with its revelatory model and animistic principle, monotheism could not escape its profane reality. Universal identity is never a far cry from the assertion of ethnic superiority. The claim of the ancient monotheist was that the entire universe validated the existence and actions of his own ethnic group. Hence its aim -- like that of its modern successor, the assertion of racial superiority -- was also to destroy all dissenting allegiances and claims.

An invention of the Egyptians -- first promoted by the Pharaoh Akhenaton -- monotheism would be put to its finest use by the enslaved Hebrews. Judaism is a religion of ethnic salvation. With ethnic cohesion forged by monotheism, the Hebrews were able to possess the land of Canaan in what, to the native inhabitants, could only have been a program of ethnic displacement. This would be repeated in our own time by the more secular Zionism. But the realities remained the same: persecution in a foreign land -- in the modern instance, pogroms in Russia, forced conversion in Spain, Holocaust in Germany -- followed by the displacement of a settled population.

Religion in its origin is never about spirituality or ritual but the dynamic relationships between social groups, the spiritual dimension merely being the symbolic language of these relationships. The Jews have provided the world with both the finest ideology and example of ethnic preservation. By all accounts they should have been absorbed into the larger populations with which they have come in contact with over their long history. Their success in retaining their distinction has been envied and mimicked by countless others, sometimes -- as with Europeans -- to the detriment of the Jews themselves. Theirs is the example of choice for claims of chosen-ness and programs of ethnic displacements -- whether by Dutch Boer in South Africa or English Pilgrim in North America.

In Canaan, Jewish history would nurture the idea of an ethnic savior or messiah. Because Jesus did not fulfill this role he was rejected. Christianity rebelled against the ethnic platform of Judaism with a very passionate ethos of individual salvation. Its emphasis on individual salvation, however, would allow it to penetrate Europe's own ethnic boundaries.

After Christianity, the assertion of a universal identity and its alter-ego of ethnic superiority would be made again among the Semitic peoples, this time by the Arabs. With Islam, monotheism, now fully matured and uncompromising, would come full circle to the land of the pyramids more than 2000 years after it had left in the possession of the Hebrews. This monotheism of Islam would conquer the Semitic world, while Christianity had already taken root in Europe.

Origin
In time Europe would renounce Christianity, but in its racial consciousness -- awakened by colonial contacts -- it would preserve the religious experience which the Renaissance and Enlightenment abandoned in ritual form. Because the religious impulse now inhabited the raw social reality of race, the earlier forms became so many rituals, so many cults. There was no longer the need to insist on the monopoly of one; the absoluteness which had belonged to Christianity, now belonged to race.

Europe's racial consciousness would enshrine its attitude toward monotheism in the famous label "Dark Ages." This epithet was really the end result of a long and intense struggle through which the new identity of race was able to wrest supremacy from monotheism. It was the new society's opinion of the thousand year reign of Christian monotheism in Europe, a Golden Age as far as monotheists were concerned, but from the perspective of the triumphant notion of race a period of great ignorance and greater intolerance.

Race has been the raison d'être of Europeans. Their most defining invention, it characterizes European civilization in the same way that monotheism characterizes Semitic civilization. In the form of social Renaissance and religious Reformation, race was Europe's rejection of monotheism's Semitic and foreign influence. It led Europeans to seek an ancestry in the Greeks and Romans and declare that here, and not in Christianity's Semitic ancestry, lay their true origins and nature.

Europeans were the first to wake up to a vision beyond the confines of ethnicity, the social category underlying monotheism. This vision would nurture the most prolific culture of rationality. But its relationship to the monotheism it had replaced was not one of reason versus faith as has been portrayed, but rather one of greater and lesser degrees of rationality. Or greater and lesser degrees of faith, for its evidential basis, like that of monotheism, is nonexistent. This has not prevented the Europeans' obsession with racial identity from exceeding even the Semitic obsession with monotheism. Anyone falling outside its laws of purity is instantly purged from the community, stripped of its identity and thereby denied its support. The only reason that this identity does not appear to be the religion that it really is, is because it is still vested with fullest reality. The stereotypic religious nature is simply a lower degree of reality, which race by virtue of its supremacy imposed upon monotheism.

In America the religious experience of Europeans would take on even more entirely a racial character. The close proximity to new populations and cultures -- in particular, native American and sub- Saharan African -- would demand this. While in Europe racial identity was defined relative to Semitic ancestry, in America it would be defined relative to sub-Saharan African ancestry. Its one-drop rule declared that any traces of sub-Saharan ancestry destroyed one's white identity.

In the past this rule was enforced by violence. This has since been replaced with the moral authority of its victims. But the aim remains the same. Hence one is told that to reject this rule is to condone the slavery of the sub-Saharans which is the great inhumanity of recent history. Yet how does this moral authority compare to the world's traditional moral codes and their treatment of oppressed populations?

Christianity's rebellion was already preceded, by as much as five hundred years, in at least one other civilization. In India, the Buddha had rebelled against the birth-purity doctrine of the brahmans. Buddhism would appease the low- and non-caste population by rejecting caste identities in its doctrine of anatman. The Buddha himself never attempted to abolish the caste system, which in its lowest echelons was outright slavery. He simply made it a virtue to remove oneself from it.

Islam took a similar course. It appeased the real slaves in its midst by pronouncing all believers figurative slaves. Like the American South, Islam allowed individual manumission of slaves but left the system of slavery intact. It is no surprise then that with the entire Arab world involved, slavery never knew the finality that it did in the Americas.

The Arabs, like the American Slave South, did not enshrine the one- drop rule. Both the Arabs (especially the North Africans) and the American South, though living in close contact with sub-Saharan Africans, were segments of larger Caucasian populations. The North (both in Europe and America), more removed from contact with blacks, tended to enforce the one-drop rule. Another Caucasian population which did not insist on this rule was the Afrikaners of South Africa.

Caucasian populations which treated blacks harshly -- the American Slave South, the Arab world of slavery, Apartheid South Africa -- tended to evolve conditional definitions of society's most prestigious identity. While those segments of the population which insisted on the basic inhumanity of slavery and apartheid -- Northern Europe and the American North -- were more likely to believe in the one- drop rule and the basic separation of the races which this belief entails.

In America during the Civil War, the intent of the North was not to end slavery. The North fought the Civil War to preserve the Union (a Union in which blacks were not accepted as valid members), and to preserve the absolute definition of white identity. The American South, the home of black slavery, more and more allowed a conditional definition of white identity. Slavery, too, did not occur in absolute racial terms. Without the intervention of the North, the line between black and white would have become more and more blurred, so that the South would have become a land of mullatos, but a land in which white-identified mullatos held power, much like the Caribbean.

On all fronts where Caucasians encountered other races before the consolidation of racial identity, they have assumed a white identity despite mixing: the Slavs on the east with Mongoloids; the Semites and Latins on the south with black Africans; the Dutch Afrikaners in South Africa with black Africans and East Indians; in the New World, the Iberians with American Indians and blacks; and in the Southern United States, the Northern Europeans with American Indians and blacks. Clearly, a Caucasian identity has always applied to populations that are mixed.

In India, where Aryan met Dravidian, the brahmans -- the priestly caste -- were the most removed from the native population. They would claim racial purity at the expense of all the other castes, even the ruling kshatriyas, insisting on an atman which was subject to rebirth, the precursor to the black and African-American identities which are the products of hypodescent. Judging from the accusation of the brahmans, the kshatriyas had allowed much interbreeding between themselves and natives -- at least more so than the brahmans. As the caste which legitimately wielded force, supplying the army and the kings, the kshatriyas are reminiscent of more modern Caucasian societies -- both North and South African and American South -- which endorsed slavery or other inhumane treatment of blacks, but did not insist on an absolute racial distinction.

Interestingly, the Buddha did not criticize the kshatriyas, the caste which carried out the subjugation and brutalization of the low- and non-castes. He was himself a kshatriya. Instead the Buddha condemned the brahmans -- the caretakers of the society's moral code -- for denying him a brahman identity. This brahman identity was the precursor to our own modern white identity. And in fact, the brahmans claimed to be the fairest caste. Like modern white identity, brahman identity also claimed to be universal, yet restricted access to this universality according to birthright.

Buddhism would share many similarities with Christianity. Both promoted an intense individualism. But equally similar were the communities -- Jewish and brahman -- from which they dissented. These were heavily ritualized and lineage driven. Both these rebellions are surprising in that they condemned a nonviolent population in one case (the brahmans) and an oppressed in the other (Jewish); and found their greatest support among those parts of the societies which wielded physical force -- the kshatriyas and (much later in the case of Christianity) the Romans who at the time Jesus lived were the colonial masters of the Jews. This would be as if the Buddha had lived during the time of slavery in the United States and had been embraced not by the Free North but by the Southern Slave Power. This of course would make the abolitionist North the mirror reflection of the brahmans.

Clearly, moral authority does not come from the mere fact of being oppressed or of being nonviolent. This is just as true in the American case. The one-drop rule has been played out in two arenas. The first was violence. Within this context it produced Ku Klux Klan and Nazi identities. This context has since been discredited. Within a physically nonviolent arena, the one-drop rule produced the morally violent black and African-American identities -- identities which are intrusive and destructive of one's deepest privacy and intimacies. The two types of identities are logically equivalent. Neither type allows consent. Both are presumptive and imperialistic. And the sole purpose of both is to enforce the exclusive status of unmixed white by promoting the one-drop rule with its assumption that the ancestries of the sub-Saharan races cannot assimilate to (and thus cannot reproduce) modern civilization.

The examples of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam clearly show that the moral foundation of the American racial ideology is a false one. The claim that black American slavery is the great inhumanity of recent history merely gives expression to the one-drop rule which singles out blacks as a universally quarantined population. The same conditions of oppression existed in the midst of the world's most revered moral systems.

Claim
The racial language that evolved in ancient India would (as with the ancient Hebrews) become the religious language. Rebirth -- a concept which originated among the kshatriyas -- referred to hypodescent (lower- caste) lineage. This concept was not the mystical one it has come to be. The metaphysical application -- meaning the non-caste -- came to eclipse its caste meaning. But certainly it always had, from the very beginning, a social status application. In Buddhism (itself a kshatriya response to brahmanism), rebirth was rejected in the doctrine and practice of anatman (non-identity). Anatman itself culminated in nirvana, the extinction of the immoral tendencies -- bias, hatred and ignorance -- which the adherence to birth-identity (atman) gave rise to.

The ancient brahmans' claim of racial superiority cannot be separated from their claim of moral superiority. The first was useless without the second; in fact the first was only made for the purpose of the second. Culture is the prize for which humankind vies. We find this in both ancient and modern racial claims. But the moral life and culture 'produced' by claims of racial superiority (and its inverse, the claim of racial essence) are necessarily appropriations, idealizations which are never reached nor can ever be reached. Its literatures are literatures of fantasies. Its great ideas, distortions and half-truths. Its sublime art, depictions of eternal non-truths.

This has never been more true than in the black and African- American identities produced by the one-drop rule. Entire histories, races and geographies have been fabricated upon this false concept of kinship and birthright. The true nature of this racial language is religious, like that of all others before it, a status which in our modern society divests it of its claim of reality and relegates its dogmas to the realm of myth, as can easily be shown.

North Africa -- bordered on the west by the Atlantic, on the east by the Red Sea, on the north by the Mediterranean and incorporating the Sahara -- is as much a continental arena as is Europe, and equally as large. This area shares its greatest continuity -- geographically, climatically and racially -- with the Arabian peninsular, the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean. This explains why Egyptian and Abyssinian civilizations never advanced into the sub-Saharan arena (an area the size of South America), but instead fed into and were fed by the civilizations of Arabia and the Mediterranean. This is in contrast to the civilizations of Greece and Rome which easily moved northward into Europe.

The name African applied to the Caucasoids (Egyptian and Berber) of North Africa and (Cushitic) of Ethiopia and Somalia. There is no reason to doubt that this type is indigenous to the region. Sub- Saharan racial types are not anymore closer to early humans than are Caucasoid types. In fact, they may be more distant -- or one might say, more evolved. The skin complexion under the heavy body hair of our earliest ancestors would very likely have been as fair as we find in present-day Caucasoids. And the body hair itself would have been more straight than curled as we see today in most primates and mammals in general. The evidence clearly supports the conclusion that the two characteristics most associated with sub-Saharan Africans -- high melanin production and tightly curled hair -- were a later adaptation.

The distinction between Berber, Arab and ancestral Egyptian can hardly be any different than that between Celt, Anglo-Saxon and French. Though it is often claimed that the original Egyptians no longer exist, the truth is that the original Egyptians cannot be found because they were never substantially different from the other Semitic populations. The original Egyptians as much absorbed their Arab cousins as the Arabs absorbed them. Even the monotheist culture which the Arabs brought with them had its origins in Egypt.

Genetically, North and sub-Saharan Africans are many times more removed from each other than Europeans are from Asians. And North Africa is a part of the African mainland in much the same way that Europe is a part of the Asian mainland. And the migrations and cultural and racial mixing that have gone on between North and sub- Saharan Africans are not anymore than have gone on between Asians and Europeans. Yet Asians do not claim to be Europeans or lay claim to European civilization, though they have more legitimacy to do so than sub-Saharan Africans have to claim North African civilization and identity.

The continental arena of the Middle East has always seen itself as an independent racial entity. It is really only through the efforts of a small portion of this population -- the European Jews -- who because of cultural and racial assimilation with Europeans, have dictated that Semites and Europeans share the same racial category. And in fact, Arab-Americans have petitioned the U.S. Government to assign the peoples of the Middle East a separate racial category. Semites have probably as much genetic distance from ethnic Europeans as Asians do. The decision to include them in the same category as Europeans is more political than racial, giving to the Jews greater leverage in their traditional feud with the Arabs. In a white category, the Arabs are outnumbered, whereas the Jews would be outnumbered in a purely Semitic or Middle Eastern category.

Many blacks, because they think that Arabs do not have an ethnic view of themselves, often attempt to include Arabs in some sort of pan-African race. The Arabs for their part, because they view themselves as caretakers of Islam, never explicitly reject these racial advances. Blacks are very naive. The Arabs are as concerned as any other to preserve their ethnic identity. Historically, the Arab world took in more sub-Saharan slaves than did the Americas, and over a much longer period. Yet there is not the evidence of this that one would expect. A relatively small group, the Arabs should have lost their racial type through miscegenation with their slave population. Where did all the mixed race go? It turns out that the common practice was to castrate the male slaves in preparation for their servitude in Arabia. The small amount of mixing that one sees would have come from the mating of female slaves with Arab males. But even this, one would expect, should have been more, for the Q'uran permitted sexual intercourse with slaves. Hence there must have been some widespread social condition which had the clear effect of controlling the mixed-race population.

Fallacy
This claiming of the Semitic world by blacks is simply one more application of the one-drop rule which dictates that anything Caucasian in the vicinity of black, becomes entirely black. It is the inevitable compliment to Europe's age-old narcissism.

Modern history has been driven by the desire of Europeans to define an exclusive status for themselves against a lumpen vision of the rest of humanity. One could hardly be surprised to learn that Europe was the only continent to name itself. In their arrogance, the Europeans have lumped a variety of races into one pseudo-race with the misleading and inaccurate word black. Later the appropriation of the name African on behalf of the sub-Saharan races sought to assume the identity of North African Caucasoids in a truly juggernaut, but certainly only mythical, race.

A similar effort is going on at present with an even larger federation of races conjured up by the term people-of-color. This is the ultimate stage in Europe's quest for exclusiveness, for it is now opposed to all the rest of humanity. Yet if the word black is a valid category for the sub-Saharan races, then the word white would legitimately include Mongoloids and native Americans, in addition to Semites and as many mullatos as may be designated black. This latest phase of Europe's lumpen vision is doomed to failure because the legitimacy of the one-drop rule is maintained, thus preserving the universal isolation of the sub-Saharan ancestries. Yet despite this isolation, it is the sub-Saharan races which have been most affected by this indiscriminate vision, that have been least able to recover a certain independence of identity.

This program of racial containment is championed not by the sub- Saharan races themselves, but by an amorphous population partly drawn from these groups, but through its slavery in America suffering an even greater dose of miscegenation with Europeans. This doubly miscegenated population has fashioned an identity for itself that belies its racial context. Though promoting itself as (black) African, its connection to actual African populations (biologically and culturally) is rather tenuous. Its absorption of the values of its former slave masters has been so complete as to make its assertion of an African identity vacuous. To the same extent that other races devalue sub-Saharan ancestry, to the same extent does this population overvalue the ancestries of all other peoples, so eager it is to accommodate these within a pseudo-African identity.

One will often hear this population accusing whites of stealing its culture, in so doing undermining any white attempt to claim a mixed race experience. Yet because it is itself mullato, this population claims everything Caucasian -- even biology. This is simply re-labeled black without the slightest qualms. Thus Russian culture is claimed through the famed writer Alexander Pushkin; West Indian mullato culture through the writers H. G. Delisser and Edgar Mittelholzer; and pre-Columbian American civilization through the complete fabrication of an African colonization of America. Its most insistent claim is of course Semitic culture -- the original Jews, Moors, Libyans and Egyptians. It goes without saying that this claim ignores the fact that the modern Jews, Moors, Libyans and Egyptians are all Caucasoid types.

The critical element in all such claims is the complicity of mullatos. If mullatos did not give their consent, such claims could not be made, for it is they who supply the true biological boundaries of this pseudo-race. Within it one can find a representative type of every race on earth. Thus they say there is no biological delineation between black and white. Of course this is true when you use the mixed race as your example of black.

The reason for blacks' hysterical claim on mullatos is that black and African-American identities are inseparable from the one-drop rule. In other words, these identities are the one-drop rule. By contrast, a Chinese identity is not dependent on Eurasians identifying as Chinese. But black and African-American identities cannot continue to exist without mullatos subscribing to them.

Hence the fanatical dedication of the black mullato population to the ethnic program of the one-drop rule. The mere taunt of "nigger" by the most marginal member of the unmixed white population is all that is needed to have the poor victim invested against his will with a full blown black identity, no matter how Caucasian this person is in fact. Yet if being called a nigger (a colloquial, disrespectful form of negro) makes one black, then black is the same as nigger. The blacks would hardly agree with that. But their logic reveals more than they would care to admit. Black identity is a racial slur because it is produced not in free will, but by the one-drop rule; the same rule which this population uses to claim all its historical personages for its pseudo-African race.

This rule and its necessary identities carry all of the negative meanings of the word nigger used as a racial slur. Both notions deny free will by confining its victims to a narrow stereotype. Both are based in the same racial falsehood: that sub-Saharan African ancestry can never go beyond an aboriginal cultural expression. It is this level of social expression -- so-called primitive or savage culture -- which the word nigger, used as a racial slur, is meant to denote. It is this same idea that the one-drop rule preserves -- that African ancestry, no matter how remote or undetectable, can never lose a specific cultural character -- and of course that character is supposed to be uncivilized and uncivilizable.

Many will object that black and African-American identities carry a positive meaning even though produced by the one-drop rule. But so also is the word nigger used in a non-racial and positive sense by probably a majority of blacks. Yet the middle class, for whom it is an abomination, does not give the slightest consideration to the fact that among the working class this is a legitimate word. Why then should the mixed race care that many people think black and African- American identities are positive? The traditional rejection of these identities by the mixed race is as morally justified as the blacks' rejection of the word nigger: black and African-American identities, because these are synonyms for the one-drop rule, are racial slurs.

It is because the one-drop rule denies that complete assimilation can take place that there is the need to claim ancient civilizations for blacks. If one held that the one-drop rule was false, then it would be obvious that sub-Saharan Africans could accomplish anything that other populations have. But because this rule puts a barrier on cultural assimilation, blacks must be seen as having created civilization in the past, since according to the one-drop rule they cannot fully reproduce those cultural traits that are responsible for modern civilization. The one-drop rule is thus a mechanism of regression, denying all present, real action and evoking a world of historical fantasy in its victims.

The only identity which legitimately invokes the unified ancestries of sub-Saharan Africans is that of Rastafarian. A Rastafarian identity, because it is of a deliberately religious nature, is exempt from the charge of hypocrisy which is justifiably brought against black and African-American identities. A religious identity can place -- by definition does place -- its allegiance beyond race. A Chinese Muslim can look to Arabia as his true homeland. A Bantu Christian can look -- in fact is expected to look -- at the Holy Land as his true home. In the same way there is no conflict in Rastafarians claiming Ethiopia as the Promised Land, or remaking ancient Egypt and Israel after their own image. Europe did the same with the Semitic Jesus and the Chinese with the Indian Buddha.

Since black and African-American identities are identical to the one-drop rule, they will automatically abolish themselves when based in free will. They then necessarily become a Rastafarian identity. This identity is by definition based in freedom of choice. It does not contain that most innocuous presumption of black and African- American identities -- that it has the right to impose itself on others. That is because it does not contain the core of inferiority which is a necessary product of the one-drop rule.

The mullato
Redrawing the boundaries of identity is not new or uncommon. In Israel today, the Orthodox Jews are seeking to win legal authority to define more stringent standards of conversion for all Jews, which in effect would divest large segments of modern Jewry of its Jewish identity. In much the same way, mixed race invalidates the black and African-American identities of mullatos, identities which anyway are paid only lip service.

In rejecting the overarching black and African-American identities, mixed race has an abundance of parallels. For all of this century the nation of Tibet has resisted the imposition of a Chinese identity. The Chechnyans, a part of the former Soviet Union, have rebelled against the imposition of a Russian identity. Closer at home, the French speaking Quebecois are seeking to prevent themselves from being subsumed in an English Canadian identity. And just as the blacks try to prevent the mixed race from acquiring a separate racial identity, so do the whites deny the same to the people of the Middle East.

The distinguishing feature of the mixed-race experience lies in the reality of mullatos. No other group in history has been so rigidly defined. No other segment of the mixed-race community is subjected to the one-drop rule with such vehemence and outright tyranny; or claimed by its hypodescent ancestry with the hysteria that blacks claim mullatos; no other is as consistently betrayed by its white ancestry.

Yet a mixed-race identity cannot help but claim white ancestry, since by the one-drop rule the mullato is one hundred percent black. But the mullato can pragmatically claim white ancestry only in order, and in so far as it is necessary, to be mixed race. An oblivious white identity is no protection from the one-drop rule: unmixed whites will never resist the claims of blacks.

But neither is a roll-call of ancestries -- a check-all-that-apply principle -- a worthy solution. That is only a validation of the old stereotype that the mixed race are conflicted by their different ancestries. For the mullato, such an identity is doubly untenable because of the one-drop rule: black ancestry eclipses all others, in whatever combinations, in whatever proportions. Hence a mixed-race identity must exemplify the principle of e pluribus unum: out of many, one. The alternative, a roll-call of ancestries, promotes the idea that the separate racial categories are immutable and are preserved intact in a mixed-race person, thus forming the basis of that person's claim to the corresponding heritage and culture. It thus reinforces all the negative and false aspects of race.

The character of a mixed-race identity is not so much the celebration of identity, as its rejection; it is specifically the rejection of identity produced by the one-drop rule, not the rejection of identity in general. But the black and African-American identities that are the products of this rule are the last remaining forms of alienation and quarantine of any ancestry. At the same time, they are the ultimate expressions of racial stigma -- obtained in combination with every other ancestry, persisting in the smallest possible traces of ancestral lineage, and acquired without choice. As such they have no moral legitimacy. And it becomes a virtue to reject them.

Historical context
The significance of a mixed-race identity lies in its historical role. It is heir to two great currents of history. The first is Buddhism. It is here in the principle of anatman or non-identity that is found the moral and philosophical validations of a mixed-race identity.

But a mixed-race identity is also heir to the main thrust of social evolution. It is easy to see that identity has continually evolved throughout history. The cultural Big Bang of the incest taboo defined a specifically human consciousness and determined the direction that rationality was to take from then on: the rejection of ancestral lineage and the embracing of alien groups.

The totemic identities of primitive society would be superseded in early historical society by the provincial identities of idolatry. These themselves would be displaced in late ancient history by the ethnic identities of monotheism.

Monotheist identity would be replaced by race. This would be such a momentous occurrence that it would be described as a social Renaissance followed by a period of Enlightenment. Freedom of expression, of conscience and of religion were the means whereby the notion of race was consolidated among Europeans. Thereby all the diverse ethnic, religious and traditional forms were accommodated under one identity. Naturally, this program was not intended for the different populations that shared the same society: the blacks and Indians in America, or the Haitians under French rule.

Correctly, race is European race; race is whiteness. Everything else is its leavings, its pickings, its sloughing off. Race is the core belief of Europeans. It is their fundamental truth, their first axiom of reality. It is their center of gravity, the point from which they start and the point at which they arrive. In the interim they are lost. Without race they fall apart, they are purged from themselves, they become other than themselves. Black and African- American identities are the underside of race, the self-deprecating leftovers from the European banquet of narcissism. They are like the polytheism of the colonized, cloaked in the monotheist garb of colonial masters.

Race has played a monumental role in human history. It is the identity which has been vested with supreme reality for the past four hundred years. Yet despite its unparalleled accomplishments, racial identity contains a flaw which is even more irrational and detrimental to further progress than the divine creation which it rejected in the monotheist identities. This is its insistence that biology, even in its minutest parts, determines cultural expression. It is upon this one-drop rule that the monoracial identities depend for their survival and in which lies their only hope that history can be held back. But the rationality which the concept of race made possible has long since outstripped it, and science now looks back on its racial origins and discredits it. The monoracial identities have run their course. They are now only a source of distortion and denial. Their persistence can only exert a retarding influence on further rational inquiry and on society in general.

A mixed-race identity is clearly the logical successor to the monoracial identities. It is not restricted to the currently defined mixed race, and may be as legitimately asserted by currently defined monoracials. However, its cultivation by mullatos is critical. Recent history has seen the continual erosion of the concept of race till the populations of the world have been consolidated into only two exclusive lineages -- those originating in the sub-Saharan region of Africa and those originating everywhere else. The mullato is the natural product of this last great divide. Abolishing this social alienation requires a unitary mixed-race identity, one which does not validate stigma, and thus necessary identity, in the ancestries of the sub-Saharan races.

A mixed-race identity builds upon the great consolidation that race had forced upon the monotheist identities, in the same way that monotheism had consolidated the provincial identities of idolatry. Idolatry itself was a revolutionary consolidation of the kinship categories and their totemic identities which had followed upon the birth of human culture in the incest taboo. Mixed race is the final extension of this first social principle. It is the ultimate and only true universal identity.

It has been objected that a mixed-race identity reinforces race. This accusation is always made from the perspective of the monotheist identities which were relegated to the realm of myth by race. The monotheist identities have never quite accepted that fate. But in their attempts to undermine the reality of race and regain their former status as fullest definition of reality, they must compete with a mixed-race identity. As the direct successor to the monoracial identities, and without their crass overstatement, mixed race is the only identity capable of driving the great rationality of modern and future society. The monotheist identities have already proved incapable of this.

Mixed race is the end of race. Of course where there is no race there can be no racial harmony. But neither can there be any racial disharmony. Such things as racial harmony and racial tolerance only make sense where they are used to placate the victims of the racial hatred and racial violence so endemic to monoracial society. For the mixed race -- who have no race -- racial relations, and the entire culture erected thereupon, have no meaning.

The process of transferring reality from race to mixed race is a historical necessity, but it cannot be achieved without individual effort. The mixed race must learn to exploit every possible opportunity that would undermine the legitimacy of the monoracial identities. Inevitably these must be pushed into the background the same way they did the monotheist identities, and in similar fashion attributed a ritual or religious status.

The Evolution of Identity begins with the idea that totemism is not a religious phenomenon but merely a language of social group dynamics. This idea belongs to the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss also asserts that the modes of thinking of primitive peoples are the same as those in historical societies. It is thus quite logical to apply Levi-Strauss' ideas on totemism -- as The Evolution of Identity does -- to historical societies. This, however, makes irrelevant Levi-Strauss' rejection of totemism as a religious phenomenon, since religious phenomena in historical societies are thereby seen as languages of social group dynamics. Those wishing to read further on this may consult the very accessable Introducing Levi-Strauss by Boris Wiseman and Judy Groves, Totem Books, 1998. A good introduction to Levi-Strauss' own works is The Savage Mind, The University of Chicago Press, 1966.

The second theme running through The Evolution of Identity is that of historical change. The Hegelian dialectic of thesis => antithesis => synthesis has been rephrased as atman => anatman => atman. Identity (atman) defines periods of social conservatism and stagnation, while nonidentity (anatman) defines periods of social fluidity and change.

Another subject touched on in The Evolution of Identity is the Arab enslavement of black Africans. The main reference for this is Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes by Paul Bairoch, University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 146-7.