Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

There is a passage in Democracy in America in which Tocqueville observes that in a mass of land spanning the width of the continent and extending from “the edge of the tropics” in the south to the “regions of ice” in the north, “the men scattered over this area do not constitute, as in Europe, shoots of the same stock.” On the contrary, “they reveal, from the first viewing, three naturally distinct, I might almost say hostile, races.” It was not simply the seeming incompatibility of the customs, origins, habits, memories, and laws — to say nothing of class positions — that separated the whites, blacks and Native Americans from one another: “even their external features had raised an almost insurmountable barrier between them.” This blunt observation prompts one of the book’s more striking asides, in which Tocqueville recounts pausing during his travels at the log cabin of a pioneer in Alabama, on the edge of Creek territory. Beside a spring he encounters a microcosm of American society in the nineteenth century: an Indian woman holding the hand of one whom he assumes to be the pioneer’s young daughter, followed by a black woman. The visual descriptions contain within them the two-pronged tragedy of the American experiment: “The Indian woman’s dress had a sort of wild luxury” that preserved and advertised what we would now call her totalizing alterity; “the Negro woman was dressed in tattered European clothes,” a simulacrum of the people who would never consent to accept her. Both women lavish attention on the five- or six-year-old white “Creole” girl, who already “displayed, in the slightest of her movements, a sense of superiority.” The Indian woman, in Tocqueville’s words, remained “free,” “proud,” and “almost fierce”; the black woman was “equally divided between an almost motherly tenderness and a slavish fear.” In both cases, the Native and the African, Tocqueville sees a cursed choice — the fundamental inability to overcome “the thousand different signs of white supremacy” firmly in place in the new world. Indeed, “nature’s efforts” to draw the oppressed and the oppressors close here only “made even more striking the wide gap between them.” There can be no serious discussion of American reality without the sober — and I would argue, dispassionate — acknowledgment of the historical fact of European dominance, which nearly obliterated the seemingly “unassimilable” Native and for centuries diminished the African to a state of wretchedness and isolation verging on inhumanity. Whereas the European — however lowly or removed from Anglo-Saxon Protestant norms — came by choice to this new land, retaining her ties to the old countries that shaped her, the Native and the African were left with nowhere else to go, not even in the realm of imagination or conjecture. For both, the link between emancipation and assimilation is inexorable. There might be many ways of belonging, but there was no possibility of not belonging in any way. Oppressed or free, they were here. Even their exclusion by white society did not release them from finding a way to live in and with America. Their misery was an American misery, as their happiness would be, if ever it were achieved. The question of how to make a genuine home has always been a question of how to blend into a society that was based on your subjection even if — and in fact, precisely because — you coincided with or predated its foundation. Yet there is nowhere else for you to be. The psychological reality of this dynamic presented itself fully formed in Tocqueville’s time and has remained alarmingly present through our own. Waves of “non-white” immigrants — from southern and eastern Europe, from Latin America, from Asia, and even sometimes from the Caribbean and the African continent, too — were able successfully to integrate into the national mainstream to the precise degree that they could distance themselves from the enslaved and otherwise unfree and their descendants already living here, whose social condition, often but not always, manifested itself in those conspicuous physical characteristics set in opposition to whiteness. One thing that united a multitude of disparate groups over the years was a diligence about separating themselves from black Americans. Without being glib about the