Color Bind

Louisiana reforms--sort of

"Louisiana was made the laughingstock of the nation," says Lee Frazier, a Democratic state representative from New Orleans. "Laughingstock" may be charitable: the source of embarrassment was a retrograde Louisiana statute, passed only 13 years ago, that stipulated that a person is "nonwhite" if his racial makeup includes more than one thirty-second "Negro blood." Last week Republican Governor David Treen signed a bill, drafted by Frazier, that repeals the 1970 statute and requires the state from now on to accept parents' designation of a child's race. The change is not retroactive, how ever, so the air in Louisiana has not quite been cleared. But for the first time in U.S. history, no state has any explicit racial calculus written into law.

Louisiana's one thirty-second standard had been originally intended as a reform. It superseded the state courts' long standing practice of defining a black as someone with "any traceable amount" of "colored" ancestry. The one thirty-second provision automatically made thousands of fractionally black Louisianians legally white. Aside from the plain repugnance of any such law, blacks in particular objected to the implication that to be white is preferable.

The Frazier law will not clear up some other outstanding legal problems, in particular those of Susie Phipps, though it was her well-publicized legal fight over her racial label that had prompted the legislative change. Phipps, 49, whose great-great-great-great-grandmother was an 18th century black slave, is "colored" according to the state of Louisiana. Phipps, who is married to a wealthy white crawfish merchant, only found that out in 1977, when she applied for a passport and learned that her birth certificate called her colored. She claims she has always considered herself white.

Her case was not resolved last week, since the repeal is not retroactive. Furthermore, an other new law, passed just prior to the repeal, provides that a citizen contesting his or her racial classification must present "a preponderance of evidence" showing that the birth certificate is wrong.

A state court judge in May upheld Louisiana's contention that Phipps is black, persuaded by the state's claims that, as a child, Phipps attended a black school and sat in the church section reserved for blacks. Her lawyer, Brian Begue, expects the state appeals court to rule in the fall. "This case is a testing ground," he says, "for deciding what makes you black--and whether you need to know at all." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.