White men have won libel suits for mistakenly being called Negro, yet there is a strong belief among the majority of whites that for the Negro to have white blood is to adulterate his highest and best potentials. But the matter is even crazier than that, for another belief is simultaneously held: only Negroes with white blood begin to approach the white man’s biological, mental and moral standards. At the same time that the Rev. Thomas Dixon, Jr., was setting forth in his best-selling novel (_The Leopard’s Spots_) and his smash-hit drama (_The Clansman_) the proposition that the offspring of mixed parentage were degenerate, crafty, vicious and depraved, the superior attainments of Booker T. Washington were being accounted for by the fact that his father was white. The kind, gentle, loyal Negro mammies were always pure black; but all the colored tarts that ever lured white men to Lethean beds were “high yaller.” The term “half white,” forever loosely used, covers all degrees of blood mixture and all kinds of contrarieties. If there were rationality in the matter, then in keeping with the implication of the dominance of Negro blood over white blood in the accepted definition of Negro, the term would be “half black.” It makes no kind of sense that “half white” should mean an endowment of all the criminal tendencies _and_ a prodigy like Philippa Schuyler (whose mother is white) and Walter White (who is more than a quarter white) and the novelist Frank Yerby (who is perhaps an eighth) and Ralph Bunche (who is a thirty-second). It makes no kind of sense that an intelligent white woman on first seeing Paul Robeson, whose reputation was international and then unsmirched, should remark to her companion, “Why, I expected him to be black! I thought, you know, if they had white blood they generally turned out badly.” If that were the case, at least ten million of the fourteen million American Negroes would be bad ones. And if all those who have a drop of Negro blood confessed to it, there would be uncountable numbers more. For the fact is that many miscegenates pass over into the white race every day. A conservative estimate is that four million Negroes, with all their spermatozoa and ova, genes and chromosomes, have been absorbed into the white American blood stream in the last two decades. They have left scarcely a trace. Negroes throw up a protective wall of silence around individual passing. Thus it is well known among colored people that a certain famous moving picture star is the daughter of a Negro woman. The white but not the Negro public was shocked four or five years ago when a prominent New York lawyer made a courtroom confession of his tarbrushed parentage in order to clear himself for a share in a rich bequest. Many “white” people eminent in public life, in industry, in government, and the arts are known by Negroes to be Negro.