
          Transformed Color
          Reviewed by Dunbar, LeslieLeslie Dunbar
          Vol. 11, No. 5, 1989, pp. 19-20
          
          The Mississippi Chinese by
James W. Loewen, with a preface by Robert Coles. (Prospect Heights,
Ill.: Waveland Press, 1988, second edition. Paper, xii, 257
pp. $8.95.)
          Whatever has set off the South from other societies, set off its
politics, social order, its culture even including its literature and
music, has been owing to the black presence, and its subordinated
status to the white race. Consequently, what to do with, how to think
about, other peoples, ones neither clearly black nor white, has always
been a distracting question, wherever such peoples appear. The
pre-Civil_War division between free persons and slave implied at least
the potential of there being a class between or beside the two colors,
but after freedom that possibility hardly existed; whites would not
allow even some of their own offspring to have a separate status, like
the "colored" of South_Africa: it must be black or all-white.
          But other peoples there have long been. Perhaps as widely known as
any, despite their small number, are the Chinese of the Mississippi
Delta, and that because of fumes Loewen's book, which first appeared
in 1971 and is now in a second edition, with a preface by Robert
Coles, good photographs, and an afterword by the author that brings
the story to date. It sparked a widely shown documentary film, a very
instructive issue of Southern Exposure (July/August
1984), and other studies.
          But as well, on the other side of their state, there are the
Choctaw Indians, quietly (for the most part) living outside the
currents of Mississippi history. Other Indian tribes and groups are
about the region; one group of them, the Lumbees of Robeson County,
North_Carolina, and vicinity, is many times more numerous and every
bit as interesting as the Delta Chinese. There is also a scattering of
small groupings, whose origins seem more cloudy even than are those of
the Lumbees and the Mississippi Chinese: twenty-six years ago, in the
pages of New South, one of this magazine's predecessors, the estimable
Ira Kaye wrote of one such, the Turks of Sumter County, South
Carolina.
          In more recent days, other new groups have appeared, and with no
mystery about their comings. The Cubans of southern Florida (unlike
the long established ones of Tampa) arrived with verve and
muscle. Other Hispanic and Asian peoples seem in small numbers to be
everywhere about.
          It is tempting to tender another contrast with South_Africa. That
mad country is obsessed with separateness, holding even Afrikaans- and
English-speaking whites at a distance from each other, trying to hold
each black tribe from the others, holding the Indians and the colored
from everyone else, everybody pushed into an assigned and graded
place. Our South, on the contrary, has wanted but one division and
distinction--either white or black--and some inner social force drives
other peoples one or the 

other way, unless they are Indians who stay
on reservations.
          So it has been with Jewish Southerners. Some of them resist, but
blacks clearly have decided that Jews are simply white, differing from
other whites no more than Catholics or Episcopalians differ from
Baptists. By and large, save for a few social anachronisms, so have
decided whites. And so, as Professor Loewen shows us, it has become
with the Delta Chinese, and even more dramatically. When they first
appeared, in the 1870s and 1880s, they were treated as Negros. By the
1970s, they were "white." They had made the transition in a special
way: by selling groceries to blacks.
          How this happened Loewen, who is a sociology professor at the
University of Vermont, tells authoritatively and well. I suspect many
readers will, as I did, find its story of the Chinese mainly of
interest as bring a prism reflecting sharper understanding of the
situation of the Delta's blacks. Thus does the old division
concentrate our thoughts!
          One chapter in particular tells not only a lot about the Chinese
but also about whites and blacks, about the United_States and blacks,
about the place of the poor of our country. It is chapter five, its
title is "Opposition," and Loewen regards it as his "most important
single contribution to the theory of race_relations." Its
conclusion can be briefly stated, though without doing justice to its
merits. The argument is that the upper stratum of Southern society
determines its values, including its racial norms and
practices. Against the commonplace charge that discrimination, and
worse, are the fault of poor whites, never of "good people," Loewen
stands resolute. "I was not trying to prove the lower class free of
prejudice. Rather, I attempted to show that status pressures impinge
upon the lower white strata from the white status structure." In
short, "racism originates in the upper class." Whether or not
this is a theoretical discovery, it is a clear-eyed observation; and
whether or not it can be applied to other situations in other
societies, Loewen makes the case convincingly that it is a truth about
our South.
          As benefits of one of the protegee of that great and good man, the
late Ernst Borinski (Loewen taught for a number of years at Tougaloo
College), Loewen has written a book not only sensitive and keen but
concerned for the humanness of its subjects. The book is sound social
science. It is not a book one cannot put down, but it is one that
rewards the reader who keeps at it.
          
            LESLIE DUNBAR is the book review editor of
Southern_Changes.
          
        
