Lecture #23: Color Lines, Part 1: Fractal Landscapes of Race and Ethnicity

Suggestions for Additional Reading:

Many of the maps in today's lecture are drawn from two sets of documents that are available as PDFs you can download from the Internet. Doing so would undoubtedly be helpful to illustrate a number of the themes and ideas in the notes below.

The best available recent demographic atlas is the Census Atlas of the United States (2000). You can download individual chapters in PDF format from this web page:
https://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/
Many of the maps in today's lecture came from Chapter 3 on "Race and Hispanic Origin":
https://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/3_Race-and-Hispanic-Origin.pdf
You should also download the equally helpful maps in Chapter 9, on "Ancestry":
https://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/9_Ancestry.pdf

There is, unfortunately, no comparable atlas for the Census of 2010. To see the most recent census maps akin to those in the atlas above, you'll need to download copies of the short PDF "Census Briefs" for major racial groups in the United States, which are linked from this web page:
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/decade/decennial-publications.html#par_list
Each of these briefs has useful maps depicting that spatial distribution of that group.

Fascinating to explore is the racial dot map of the United States, based on the 2010 Census, prepared by the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. You can access it here:
https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/
There's more information about how it was created here:
http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-Map

A powerful online mapping tool for visualizing census data can be found at this website:
http://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Overview
for which the page most relevant to today's lecture is here:
https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Race-and-Ethnicity

The U.S. Census doesn't ask questions about religious beliefs, but you can explore the geographical distribution of different faith traditions in the privately produced U.S. Religion Census, whose website gives you tools for generating a wide range of maps:
http://www.rcms2010.org/maps2010.php

All of the data underlying the maps and documents linked above depends on the statistical work of the U.S. Census. How the census constructs, categorizes, enumerates, and analyzes its definitions of race and ethnicity has a long, complex history of its own. For a relatively brief overview of some of the issues involved, the following Wikipedia entry is helpful:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States_Census
along with this Wikipedia summary of U.S. census data relating to this topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States

For the explanation given by the Census Bureau itself of how it defines race and ethnicity (as it is required by law to do), see
https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html

For a fascinating visual history of how the racial categories of the census have changed since 1790 (based on an interactive visualization produced by the Census Bureau itself in 2015 that has since been removed from the Web), see:
https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/11/a-complete-history-of-census-race-boxes/413716/
The same data are presented differently here:
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/interactives/multiracial-timeline/

If the history of the census itself interests you, the two best recent scholarly studies are:

Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (2nd ed, 2015).

Paul Schor, Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation (2017).

Finally, for maps of Wisconsin's ethnic and racial history, the Wisconsin Cartographer's Guild, Wisconsin's Past and Present: A Historical Atlas (1998) remains invaluable.

 

I. Urban, Rural, and the Indispensable But Problematic Chloropleth Map

I want to spend much of today thinking about broad distributions of race and ethnicity in the U.S. Let's start with this U.S. Census map of urbanized areas and urban clusters
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/
To be an "urbanized area," the population of an area needs to be greater than 50,000; "urban cluster" in the Census refers to areas with populations between 2,500 and 50,000. (The census has been defining "urban" almost from the start of the republic as settlements of 2,500 or above. This has the very real virtue that it makes the statistical time series consistent over time...but most people today would think of a community with 2,500 people as a pretty small town. That very fact is evidence of how much our definitions of "urban" have changed over time.)

Compare U.S. Census maps of urban clusters with maps of United States voting patterns in the U.S. in the last four presidential elections, where we see pretty starkly the divisions between urban and rural areas. Here's the 2016 presidential election as an example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2016_Nationwide_US_presidential_county_map_shaded_by_vote_share.svg
For an analysis of the ways this map can mislead, see
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/07/30/presenting-the-least-misleading-map-of-the-2016-election

If you compare this election map with a 2010 census map of non-White populations in the U.S., and you'll see the urban/rural map largely repeat itself. Today's lecture is about boundaries between racial groups: the landscapes and places and geographies that get categorized as "White" or "non-White" ... but it's also about all the ways in which either/or dichotomy masks an extraordinary amount of diversity and variety within each of these two monolithic categories. I want to how how crude these categories are, while recognizing at the same how important and powerful they have been historically.

In today's lecture, we'll be looking at a lot of census maps, so you may want to download at least one of the atlases linked in the "Suggestions for Further Reading" above. I'd recommend grabbing this one and perusing its maps as you review the notes below:
https://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/3_Race-and-Hispanic-Origin.pdf
It's for the 2000 census, but there's unfortunately no comparably useful volume for the 2010 census. You won't regret having it at your fingertips on your computer as you review these notes. And...it's free!

Let's start by thinking about where different racial groups in the United States are concentrated—landscapes where certain racial groups are more commonplace. I'll start by showing you maps of how different racial groups are distributed across the American landscape--and, of course, each of these maps is the result of complex histories of the journeys that have brought different groups to different places in North America. I trust that in these maps you'll see patterns that we've talked about all semester, though we haven't necessarily called out race as we've done so. Instead, we've talked about Indian Country, different imperial systems, about bounding property, about trade routes, and other landscape phenomena that have shaped where different groups of people have wound up living.

One word of caution: it is an inherent weakness in most of the maps I'll show you today (characteristic of chloropleth maps in general) that they trick our eyes into placing much greater emphasis on large areas with few people in them than on small areas that have many people in them. In most of the maps I'll show, groups that are concentrated in cities will be much less visible on a national map than groups that are concentrated in large rural counties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choropleth_map

 

II. Mapping Race Across the Landscape

If you look in the atlas of census maps for some of the most important racial groups in the United States, here are some of the major patterns you'll see:

African Americans: one of the most important regions of majority African-American populations is the "Black Belt"—a broad band of counties stretching across the interior of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia—that we already encountered in the 1820s-1840s as we watched the Cotton Belt emerge. The U.S. South in general jumps out as having large concentrations of African Americans, as is also true of many northern U.S. cities, as a result of northward migrations out of the Jim Crow South that we'll explore in the next lecture.

Native Americans: Here we see the rural landscapes of Indian Country as marked by the reservations that were created by the U.S. government over the course of the nineteenth century. As we saw in that earlier lecture, there are a great many different tribal identities grouped together under the categories "American Indians" and "Alaskan Natives," which have the effect of obscuring those different tribal identities and histories. As we'll see, this happens with other racial categories as well: they flatten cultural differences and historical experiences in all sorts of problematic ways, including not just for people of color but for Americans whose diverse ethnic identies disappear inside the seemingly homogeneous category "white" -- a privileged category in American racial hierarchies, unquestionarly, but one that obscures myriad histories and identities as well. This should be one of the big lessons you draw from today's lecture. Notice also that large numbers of Native Americans who live off reservation in metropolitan areas: one of the biases of these maps is to assign native peoples, erroneously, almost entirely to rural areas.

Latinx and Hispanic Americans: notice again the erasures in this mass category, which includes New Mexican Hispanics, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, and different national groups from Central and South America. This map shows Latinx and Hispanic concentrations in areas of historic Spanish colonial settlement, and areas of Arizona, New Mexico, and California transferred to the U.S. by the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo. We also see concentrations of groups like Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in parts of the Northeast, and Cubans in southern Florida.

Asian Americans: Once again we should begin by noticing the diversities beneath this category, which Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Asian Indians, Pakistanis, Cambodians, Filipinos, Hmong, Vietnamese, and others … a flattening of different cultural traditions under this racial category, derived from an entire continent whose peoples come from radically different cultures, geographies, and histories. On census maps, Asian Americans appear concentrated on the East and West coasts of the U.S., but when we look at different groups within this seemingly singular category, we see that each group has quite distinct geographical distribution the represent quite different histories of migration and racial exclusion.

Whenever we talk about groups whose populations tend to concentrate in urban areas, it's important to remind ourselves of the distortions created by chloroplath maps, in which an entire county is categorized with a single color, even if the people it represents are in fact are gathered in just one section of that county). It's worth comparing these with dot maps, in which dots represents individuals or small groups of people who share common characteristics. Both maps serve useful purposes, but it's important to keep their respective strengths and weaknesses in mind. Again, I hope the crudeness of these categories is coming through, as are the visual effects of different mapping choices.

Arab Americans: Because this group doesn't fit the traditional census definitions of race, it often doesn't get mapped as a racial category at all. The most recent census summarywe have for people of "Arab Ancestry" is from the 2000 census (listed at the end of this paragraph); there is none for 2010 census, and the census will not include a Middle Eastern or North African category in 2020. One of the largest concentrations of Arab Americans in the U.S. is located in the area around Dearborn, Michigan. The best recent census document describing the demographics and geographical distribution of Arab Americans dates back to the 2000 census:
https://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-23.pdf

As has so often been true throughout this course, a theme to keep track of in all of these maps is the fact that they are fractal in nature: as we zoom in, the patterns of geographic difference--the uneven distribution of different racial groups-- continues to express itself on all scales. (In the comparative census maps, it's also important to note that the census has used a difference percentage scale for each group to indicate its distribution relative to itself as opposed to the national population overall--a standard cartographic problem that applies to the scales of all maps.) You have to zoom in pretty close to see the boundaries that these maps begin to suggest—and maps do little to tell us about the lived experiences of racial different, or the legal distinctions drawn between groups of apparent racial different. The University of Virginia's racial dot map that is part of next week's reading assignment is an excellent place to explore this phenomenon:
https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/

You'll find useful information about all of these groups in Wikipedia, though you need always to remember the fractal nature of these racial categories and the need to probe more deeply than the main entries to get a full sense of the complex histories they represent. For examples, try:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Native_Americans_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Asian_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Americans
(Again, these are merely tip of the iceberg.)

 

III. Mapping Ethnicity: Hidden Histories of "Whiteness"

I offer up census these maps to help illustrate how the Census represents race in the United States. With that as our background, I want to dive into one of the most complicated and problematic racial categories on all on these maps: White. The racial groups that do or do not count as "White" has changed radically over the course of U.S. history. "White" is much more complicated and ethnically diverse than this far too simple label seems to imply.

To understand ethnicity, one question the Census asks: "What is this person's ancestry or ethnic origin?" (That was the question that yielded the data underlying the map I showed for Arab Americans.) When we ask this question for people who self describe as "White," we begin to see a much more complicated picture that has immense implications for ethnic and regional diversity in the making of the American landscape.

As a starting point, it's interesting to note that a relatively small fraction of white Americans answer this question by saying "American." Those who do have long been concentrated in the Tennessee and Kentucky area, and more generally in the American South.

Individuals who describe their ancestry as English are common in New England, of course, but also concentrated in Utah—a product of the Mormon success at proselytizing in England during the second half of the nineteenth century. But "Mormon" is most typically used as a religious category rather than as an ethnic category, even though various religious categories (Jewish being another important example) have adherents who also think of themselves as belonging an ethnic category. Another category that also maps onto ethnicity is of course language, as exemplified, for instance, by French Canadians in northern New England whose ancestry derives from Quebec, and Cajuns in Louisiana.

Notice also the conflation of class categories and racial categories: French-Canadians living in Maine are an example of this, since French-Canadians in northern New England often worked in the textile mills and were regarded as lower class and racially inferior. The same was true of the Irish, who typically worked the most menial jobs, belonged to a suspect minority religion, and were considered by WASP Americans to be racially inferior: not truly "white." One of the oddities of U.S. history is that some groups who were not considered "white" in the 19th century became "white" during the 20th century. As those other racial histories have been erased, we lose track of the history of the nation. We begin to lose track of all the complexity of ethnic and racial groups and class hierarchies, and the ways those categories co-construct each other.

So here are some maps of the ethnic diversities that vanish inside the homogenizing tendencies of whiteness: English, German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, Russian. You can examine these maps of ethnic ancestry for yourself in Chapter 9 of the excellent 2000 Census Atlas cited in the Suggested Readings above:
https://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/censusatlas/pdf/9_Ancestry.pdf
These maps remind us how sources of immigration to the U.S. have changed over time. European migration was dominant in the U.S. until the 1960s. Latin American migration began to rise in the 1960s, along with parallel increases in Asian and West Indian migrations

All of these migrations had complex historical causes that are truly global in scope. To study the history of North American immigration is quite literally to study the history of the entire world. In the nineteenth century, Germans migrated in large numbers following the failed liberal revolutions of 1848 (including many German Ashkenazi Jews), which helps in part to account for the progressive political traditions that German immigrants helped establish here in Wisconsin. The terrible potato famine in Ireland during the 1840s, which led to mass starvation among the Irish peasantry, likewise triggered large waves of Irish migration during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Severe weather, crop failures, and religious repression in Scandinavia led to mass out-migrations from northwestern Europe that wound up concentrating in the Upper Midwest. Pogroms in Russia sent waves of Russian Jewish to the United States in the early twentieth century. And so on.

Pick any of these groups that interests you, search for it in Wikipedia (you might also try adding the word "emigration" or "immigration" or "history"), and you're likely to find yourself being introduced to much more complicated stories about these groups than you probably knew. For examples that played especially prominent roles in the history of nineteenth-century Wisconsin, try any of these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_emigration_to_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Poles_in_the_United_States
But again: these are only the tip of the iceberg, as is true of almost every topic we've surveyed in this course.

Where did these immigrant groups arrive when they reached the United States? The largest port of entry on the East Coast, largely for immigrants from Europe, was Ellis Island in New York Harbor, which operated from 1892-1954.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island
The comparable entry port on the West Coast, largely for immigrants from Asia, was Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, which operated from 1910-1940.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Island_Immigration_Station
(There were other smaller ports of entries in other coastal areas of the United States, but these were the two most important.) Thinking in terms of landscape, it is not a coincidence that these gateways were islands. They had the advantage from the point of view of immigration officials of isolating, monitoring, and controlling would-be immigrants. Immigrants coming to Angel Island from Asia were more carefully scrutinized and regulated than those arriving at Ellis Island.

Chinese immigrants were met with extreme racial resistance, particularly as Irish and working-class unions in San Francisco saw Chinese immigrants in the 19th century as competitors for jobs. With the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, all Chinese immigration to the U.S. was legally forbidden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
But because Chinese immigrants had provided low-wage work in the U.S., the demand for workers of Asian descent continued—which helps explain the increase in the number of Japanese immigrants coming to the West Coast in the years following the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law. On Angel Island, individuals were gathered together and subjected to scrutiny similar to what happened on Ellis Island. As we can see in these pictures of the bunks, sometimes the duration of waiting at Angel Island stretched on for weeks. One of the more poignant sets of historical documents from this period are poems carved in Chinese or Japanese characters into the walls of the bunks, from those waiting to be released.

 

IV. Race and Ethnicity in Wisconsin

To underscore this lecture's theme about the fractal nature of racial and ethnic diversity as they're expressed on the American landscape, let's zoom in on Wisconsin. On some national maps of ethnicity, Wisconsin sometimes looks to be all German; Wisconsin is a high-concentration German state relative to the U.S. itself, and in the 19th century was the most German state in the Union. But that apparent homogeneity on a national scale is deeply misleading on the scale of the state or of individual counties or localities within the state. As we did with maps of race and ethnicity in the U.S. as a whole, we'll find the same thing to be true when we zoom in to the level of counties or cities within Wisconsin.

Here's an excellent collection of maps of different ethnic groups of European ancestry in the Wisconsin:
http://www.apl.wisc.edu/publications/ancestry_map_layout_final.pdf
(The PDF was generated with vector graphics, so you can zoom in on individual maps to examine them more closely.) It takes a little more effort, but you can generate contemporary maps of different racial groups at the county level in Wisconsin using this website from UW-Madison's Applied Population Laboratory:
https://getfacts.wisc.edu

What patterns can we discover about the racial and ethnic landscapes of Wisconsin?

Let's start with the Indian reservations we encountered in a much earlier lecture. Wisconsin has more reservations than any other state East of the Mississippi. Many of the residents of these reservations were or are themselves migrants, having chosen to move or having been forced to move west from lands they had previously inhabited in the eastern part of the U.S. African Americans have their greatest concentrations in the state in Milwaukee, Kenosha, Racine, Janesville. Hispanic populations constitute a very important workforce in Wisconsin's dairies and other farming areas, to a much greater degree than most Wisconsinites realize. Asian Americans are again concentated in Wisconsin's urban areas, as well as a sizeable Hmong population farming in the central part of the state. Here's a map of Wisconsin's European ancestry. The state has a large German American population, concentrated most in the Fox River Valley and the central part of the state centered on Wausau, and a concentration of people with Swiss ancestry around New Glarus. Scandinavian populations concentrate in the western parts of the state in the Mississippi and St. Croix valleys, with Finns concentrating on Lake Superior. Voting patterns in Wisconsin have been tied to ethnic identity reaching all the way back to the Civil War.

Never forget, by the way, that different ethnic groups are often tied to different religious traditions. A large majority of Wisconsin immigrants were Christian, but from quite different confessional traditions, with Catholics and Lutherans predominating.

Different streams of German migration came out of the different parts central Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. There are clusters of Swedes in the northwest part of the state—though if we generalize that out to the Midwest, we see that Finnish place names are scattered across Wisconsin and Minnesota. Furthermore, to see the real geography of Scandinavian migration to the United States, we have to view a map that stretches from Wisconsin across Wisconsin and Minnesota and the Dakotas northwest into Manitoba and Saskatchewan on the Canadian Prairies (as well as in the Pacific Northwest). Some of the biggest populations of Scandanavia chose to move to the U.S. and Canada in the face of famine and political discontent in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s.

The largest early African American population in Wisconsin was in the Milwaukee area, but there were also a few smaller African American settlements in other parts of southern Wisconsin. Hispanic populations were drawn to or brought to dairy-growing areas and to farms needing to hire migrant workers.

 

V. Race and Ethnicity in Urban Neighborhoods

Probably the most best-known place where race and ethnicity have been studied at the micro scale of the neighborhood is Chicago, led in the 1920s by the University of Chicago's sociology department, the famous "Chicago School of Sociology," which made intensive investigations in different ethnic neighborhoods of the city. A point to make about these neighborhoods: by 1930, because of migrations out of the U.S. South and because some of these neighborhoods were the only places where Blacks were permitted to live, we see a concentration of Black families on the South Side. In most immigrant neighborhoods, even areas that were perceived as being dominated by one or another immigrant group were in fact highly diverse in their actual population. The famous maps that Jane Addams published showing the ethnic diversity around her Hull House settlement house depict this in striking detail:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-early-infographics-illustrated-plight-americas-poor-180960414/

One point to take away is the jumble of different racial groups on Jane Addams' maps of neighborhoods. Also notice that the retail areas of a city where the stores serving a particular ethnic group (e.g. "Chinatown") served as a kind of "downtown" even for members of that group living in quite different parts of the city. The retail district often appeared more homogenous than was true of residential areas. People from many different ethnic groups often lived in a single neighborhood, as the Hull House maps so vividly demonstrate, so that maps that assign a given neighborhood to a single group are often quite misleading. The one exception to this rule were African-Americans, who experienced much greater forced segregation than other groups. I'll explore that story in much greater detail in the next lecture.

Milwaukee is the most racially segregated city in the United States. Attached to it is another interesting phenomenon: the differential concentration of policing activity in certain neighborhoods of Milwaukee means that arrests in that city (most frequently for violations of drug laws) occur far more frequently among African Americans than among whites. Rates for using and selling drugs are roughly comparable among black and white Americans (if anything, whites are more frequent users), yet black Americans are 2.7 times more likely to be arrested for violating drug laws. More than 40% of Wisconsin's entire prison population (in prisons scattered all across the state) comes from just two zip codes in Milwaukee.

Here's an online mapping tool that will enable you to display maps of different racial groups in Madison:
http://www.apl.wisc.edu/publications/2010Census_Madison.pdf
(it's large, so will take a while to download). Notice how highways, railroads, major institutional structures, and other urban "breaks" (to use the term we learned from Grady Clay earlier in the course) work to isolate particular groups, in this case African-Americans and Latinos.

 

VI. Symbols of Race and Ethnicity in the Landscape

All of these groups have left distinctive marks on American landscapes, expressing their histories, cultural values, religious beliefs, culinary traditions, architecture, and other aspects of their lives that express their own sense of identity. Often these become part of the ways these group market certain aspects of their traditions and culture both to each other and to outsiders in the form of cultural tourism in restaurants, grocery stores, and tourist destinations. Many of these leave distinctive marks on landscapes which then become associated with those groups.

A striking example in the West are the Mormons, who in many ways constitute both a religious and an ethnic tradition. The Mormon Church originated in upstate New York in the 1820s among people of New England Yankee stock. Followers of Joseph Smith made a forced migration from New York to Ohio to Illinois to Utah, and then missionized in western Europe, recruiting many immigrants to Utah from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. They are also part of a host of landscape changes. If you visit Salt Lake City, you'll see irrigation canals running right through the center of the city, a pheneomenon reflecting the long history of Mormons irrigating arid landscapes that inspired John Wesley Powell to write his Report on the Arid Lands in 1878. You will also notice that Mormon communities in the Great Basin tend to have a temple at their center of their town plan, a design originally conceived by Joseph Smith. Many Mormon settlements have an elaborate street-naming system that builds into each street name a location indicating the distance and direction to the temple at the center of the town plan.

The Mormons also remind us, as we've already seen in Wisconsin, that different ethnic and religious groups are often aligned with quite different religious traditions. Here's a helpful collection of maps showing the distribution of different religions and ethnicities across the U.S.:
https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/dominant-religions-in-the-us-county-by-county

Jews often aren't very visible on chloropleth maps like these because they're a relatively small population largely concentrated in urban areas, with by the far the largest concentrations in the Northeast, the West Coast, and Florida.

 

VII. Racial Intimacies: The Secret Life of Clarence King

We can also look at a Census map of multiracial individuals. One of the oddities of American racism is that it often doesn't take much blood to make you belong to an ethnic group of color. Sexual intimacy can wreak havoc with racial boundaries unless those boundaries are aggressively policed in the ways we'll see happening so horrifically in the Jim Crow South in the next lecture.

Here I offer you a curious example from historian Martha A. Sandweiss's Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (2009).

The story Sandweiss tells is about Clarence King, the first Director of the U.S. Geological Survey and the debunker of the Diamond Hoax whom we've already encountered in at least two other lectures earlier in the semester. King died in Phoenix, Arizona on December 24, 1901. On his deathbed he revealed a secret he had told almost no one during his lifetime: in 1887 or 1888 he had married a woman named Ada Copeland, an African American woman who once been a slave and had made her way north to New York City after being the Civil War.

King had married Copeland under the pseudonym James Todd, claiming an identity as an African-American Pullman porter. He and Copeland raised five children together, and his wife didn't know that her husband James was actually Clarence King until after he died. Unfortunately, Ada Copeland has left few traces on the historical record , which is one of several things that makes Sandweiss's book about King and Copeland's marriage so fascinating: it's a master class on doing history as a form of detective work.

King and Copeland's story reveals just how intimate the color line can be, and how complicated the boundaries it draws through the lives of human beings. One of King's wealthy friends, John Hay, had underwritten Clarence King financially for the last few decades of King's life. King died a pauper. Some of Clarence and Ada's children were fair-skinned enough to pass as white, again suggesting the complicated cultural boundaries of race. You can read a brief summary of King and Copeland's story here:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129250977

So once again we see the fractal nature of this challenging topic: from the nation to the region to the state to the county to the city to the neighborhood to the most intimate aspects of our homes and bodies. Race and ethnicity express themselves everywhere in the landscape, and in our own identities.

In the next lecture, we'll examine in much fuller detail the color line that has played a uniquely powerful role in shaping the meaning of race for all Americans no matter what their ethnic origin or racial identity: the boundary between black and white.