One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race [Hardcover]

Scott L. Malcomson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2000

Why has, a nation dedicated to freedom and universal ideals continually produced, through its obsession with race, an unhappily divided people? Scott L. Malcomson's search for an answer took him to communities across the country and deep into our past. From Virginia colonists "going native" onward, Malcomson argues, Americans, in their mania for self-invention, pioneered an idea of race that gave it unprecedented moral and social importance. A parade of idealists, pragmatists, and opportunists -- from Ben Franklin to Tecumseh, Washington Irving to Bobby Seale -- defined, "Indian," "black," and "white" in relation to one another and in service to the aspirations and anxieties of each era. Yet these definitions have never been gladly adopted by the people they were meant to describe. To escape the limits of race, Americans have continually attempted to escape from other races -- by founding, all-black towns, for example -- or to nullify race by confining, eliminating, or absorbing one another. From Puritan enslavement of Indians to the separatism we enact daily in our schools and neighborhoods, Americans, have perpetually engaged with and fled from other Americans along racial lines. By not only recounting, our nation's most distinctive and enduring drama but helping us to own it -- even to embrace it -- this redemptive book offers a way to move forward.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this exhaustive, introspective study of America's obsession with color, nobody escapes author Scott L. Malcomson's probing. The obvious white supremacists share scrutiny with the Indians, Hispanics, and African Americans who have turned inward in their reaction to racism and called for their own noninclusive territory. The book's imposing size and scope--it roves from early assimilation attempts by Indians to the Harlem Renaissance to white flight through the ages--may put off some who mistake it for a stale textbook. That would be a shame. Malcomson writes with a lyrical, storytelling quality. He mixes solid reporting with his own thoughtful speculation in tracing the histories of Indians, whites, and blacks in this country. Woven through this vivid narrative are the author's conversations with descendants of his own ancestors, who commingled in marriage and love with Cherokees and former slaves. Raised by a seemingly colorblind Baptist preacher father, Malcomson writes of his dismay as a boy as he and his friends began to "think with our skins" and separate by race as they grew older. "These were roles prepared by the American generations that had gone before; the past was forming us, and so we would carry that past into the future. I have never ceased regretting that process, because it diminished each of us." It's clear how Malcomson feels about what he calls America's "tragic drama," but he avoids preaching and gains credibility in doing so. His account is worthy reading for anybody who believes the drama's ending has yet to be written. --Jodi Mailander Farrell

From Publishers Weekly

In a breathtaking and unusual treatment of the artifice and hypocrisy that has surrounded racial differences in America from its earliest settlement to the present, this massive work offers stunning insights with a subtle hand. The first three parts of the book deal with "indianness," "blackness" and "whiteness" respectively, followed by a fourth, which aims to reconcile the previous sections. The opening exploration of the opportunistic ways that philosophers, politicians and white society have defined Indian identity and land rights is haunting and powerfulDas is the chapter on "the Indian as slaveholder," which reveals the life of black slaves on a Cherokee reservation and their march on the Trail of Tears beside their "masters." But the rest of the book does not deliver upon the promise of the first 100 pages. Although the focuses on America, Malcomson journeys back into the medieval and the ancient world to find the defining moment when skin color was associated with good, evil and slavery. At times, this wide-ranging approach yields surprising insights (for example, Malcomson offers a thoughtful discussion of Shakespeare's outlook on blackness). However, he also includes long-winded digressions that are not securely anchored in his larger argument. Malcomson (Empire's Edge: Travels in South-Eastern Europe, Turkey and Central Asia) reveals the creation of "race" as a tool to obtain power, suppress the newly created powerless and justify immoral claims to land and property. Although not fully realized, his ambitious study of race and American identity is to be commended for dragging our racial conundrums further into the light of day. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1st edition (October 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374240795
• ISBN-13: 978-0374240790
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,753,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in 1961 in California, Scott Malcomson grew up in Oakland and graduated from Berkeley, where he first learned journalism while writing and editing for The Daily Californian. Malcomson moved east in 1984 and began writing for the mainstream and alternative press in New York City, particularly The Village Voice. Among the many publications he has written for are The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, Transition, Lettre Internationale, Film Quarterly, ArtForum, Colors and The Nation.

Malcomson's writing has tended to focus on literature, American history (particularly race), and foreign affairs. He has worked in Africa and Latin America, the Pacific Islands, Turkey and Central Asia, and throughout Europe and North America. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a longtime member of PEN.

Malcomson has published four books, all available from Amazon: Tuturani: A Political Journey in the Pacific Islands; Empire's Edge: Travels in Southeastern Europe, Turkey and Central Asia; One Drop of Blood; The American Misadventure of Race; and Generation's End: A Personal Memoir of American Power after 9/11 (forthcoming in August). He is currently foreign editor at The New York Times Magazine.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Insightful but a lot of busywork, January 4, 2001

By 

Charlie Riley - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (Hardcover)

This book is in deep, deep need of a ruthless editor. There's no doubt that Malcomson's prose is well crafted, no doubt that he makes good, often innovative, insights into the issues of race and racial identity in America. Yet I found myself saying "Oh, get ON with it" several times in each section. Malcolmson covers big areas of race chronologically, each area separately, so that this reads like three or four separate books; some of the areas overlap so much that I wondered if there were massive printing errors and I was reading the same section in two places. In terms of pacing and placement, I think the last section in the book should have been the first. Malcolmson's account of his own upbringing and experience of race would have made a better setup than conclusion.

22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good first draft of a book, October 17, 2001

By 

Frank (Stockton CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (Paperback)

Malcomson emphasizes the idea that the new USA needed a racial identity - "to the extent that Americans wanted a national identity as a people, rather than human beings that happened to be in America, that identity almost had to be racial.... `American' identity would be a white identity."
While this is true in large part, it largely ignores the huge impact of the colonies' religious identity (which had driven the founding of several colonies) by curtly stating the unattributed fact that "in 1790 only about one in ten white American was a member of a formal church." Whatever relationship actual membership in a "formal church" may have to do with American's personal beliefs, there is ample evidence that a common core of publicly-expressed religious beliefs formed the basis of the "American" character in 1790.
Malcomson likewise downplays the cohesive unity brought about by the struggle against Britain, joint membership in a new country, and the adherence to the ideals of the Declaration. This emphasis on the preeminent racial nature of "American" identity is somewhat at odds with his other theme that "being white meant, above all, not being black."
While the book is subtitled "The American Misadventures of Race," the book could benefit from some discussion about the role of race in other civilizations and countries. What, in other countries, is similar to, or different from, the US experience?
While Malcomson does a good job in analyzing popular culture's take on race in many cases, this could improve. There's no mention of the effect of Defoe's 1719 _Robinson Crusoe_ - the first English novel, and full of the racial assumptions of the time (during 28 years on the island pondering why God abandoned him, Crusoe never considers it could be because of his involvement in the slave trade; nor does Crusoe give second thought to his assumption that Friday will be his servant after leaving the island). D.W. Griffith's 1915 "Birth of a Nation" is barely mentioned.
Malcomson's attitude toward religion is inconsistent. At one point, he tries to argue that religion did not support slavery, writing that pro-slavery advocates "desperately ransacked the Bible to find comfort for slaveholders ... [with] harried thumbings of the Bible." Yet it isn't too hard to find the Bible's tacit approval of slavery, its general comments on separation of peoples, and even direct commands such as "Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters." Nor does Malcomson mention the approval that many churches gave to slavery, and the typical segregation practiced by churches, which certainly lent legitimacy to feelings of white superiority. Billy Graham astonished some church members when he refused to allow segregated seating in his crusades after 1954: in some areas, formalized church segregation continued through the 1960's.
Yet, ignoring the church's segregation through the 1960's, Malcomson suddenly decides the church is segregated in the 1970's. He writes, "When, as a teenager, I left Oakland, I also left the church.... I could not choose to be in a white church. That would be like choosing a white school (or a white town).... [In the black church,] the music is undeniably better, there's more to eat at socials, and grief is not treated as a ... character flaw. Where the white church is a lake, the black church is an ocean."
First, where is the discussion about _why_ some churches are "white" ?? There are many reasons besides intended segregation that a church may wind up to be predominately white. Second, what right does Malcomson have to generalize from his own experience to the idea that the "black" church is everywhere superior to the "white" church?
Why does Malcomson think that "when I was a teenager" is a date every reader should recognize? (By reading other passages, Malcomson was apparently a teenager in the 1970's.) In another passage, Malcomson strangely dates an event by the year when "Grandma was closing in on death."
Malcomson frequently picks on the negative: he spends seven pages describing the 1849 California constitutional convention debates on whether to admit free blacks to California, yet he does not give the end vote and its margin, nor any relevant language of the California constitution.
The book, published in 2000, essentially ends its narration of American racial history in the mid 1970's, with the observation that whites then tried to move away from their racial past, as other races moved toward theirs.
One major current issue on race in America is "reverse discrimination." Malcomson doesn't even mention cases such as Baake. Is it right for blacks to receive benefits based on race? Malcomson's only comment, somewhat on point, is that "races in America have functioned so much as families do, and once you are in the family you receive your part of the inheritance, and the American past becomes your past."
Earlier Malcomson discusses the attempt of abolitionists in the 1840's to keep blacks from forming black groups or holding black conventions, on the principle of equality. "The beyond-race principle lacked a historical element. Perhaps that is in the nature of a principle. But in the case of race in America, it could have strange consequences, because race, being itself historical, resists ahistorical explanation."
Where are the author's thoughts on the solution to our racial problems? How long must the correction of our "family" problem continue? One would hope that someone who had done so much research would have some thoughts, but they're not presented.
This is a worthwhile book to read, because it will make you think. Yet it has a lot of gaps in it, is overly long in many sections, and its stream-of-consciousness organization (as Salon states) is "unorthodox if not downright infuriating."

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thought Provoking, April 16, 2006

By 

Shirley A. Blair Keller (Three Rivers, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (Paperback)

I have had a hard time getting into this book. Malcomson wades into detail, droning on and on. My own lack of discipline confronted me, but interest in the subject kept me turning the pages and I am very glad I did. As other reviewers point out, this isn't a perfect book, but for my money he took on a subject that we sorely need in this country if we are ever to move forward to see ourselves as one entity, human beings. I thank him for that. I think this would be a great book, along with Takaki from UCB's book "A Different Mirror," to be on the shelves of history classes through out our country, even in its imperfections. Racism is an artificial classification. Skin is decided in the gens, like eye color, etc. To base anything on it is ridiculous. But man's inhumanity to man is a reality, using whatever means necessary to carry out power. Just look around the world and watch it carried out today in every continent. This book is a step in enlightening a part of American history that was left out of my history books as a kid. I hope others will tackle this subject so that we can accept that we have always been multicultural, multireligious, and various colored peoples from the beginning. We haven't always told the truth of our inheritance as a nation. I applaud anyone who tackles this subject and highly recommend reading this book. I might also add that with DNA testing available now, we might find we are more connected than we have all dared to admit in the past.