ABSTRACT
Partisans of purity deem each nation, species, race, class, and kind a divinely created entity that should never be degraded by mixture. “Every genus is natural,” insisted the taxonomist Linnaeus, “not to be capriciously split or stuck” to another. Legacies of birth and breeding remain potent the world over. Even where equality is axiomatic, ancestry and kinship shape preferment. Attitudes toward purity and mixing stem from racial essences expressed in metaphors of blood and genes. Reviling Jews as African-Oriental mongrels, Hitler ascribed every global calamity to race mixing. Modeling racial purity laws on American anti-miscegenation acts, Nazis criminalized German-Jewish marriages. The horrible consequences of black and white mixture” were fearsome in the North, noted Horace Greeley’s New York newspaper, “but down in Dixie no such qualms exist; there the breeding of a brawny and salable mulatto boy, or of a saddle-colored girl, for the brothels of New Orleans, is something to brag of”.
