Moyers: Bilbo said, “One drop of Negro blood placed in the veins of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and palsies his creative faculty.” Is it true that the Nazis thought the one-drop rule too extreme?
Whitman: They did indeed. They never proposed anything nearly as extreme as the one-drop rule. In fact the standard, the most far-reaching Nazi definitions of who counted as a Jew, matched the least far-reaching ones to be found in the American states. Virtually all American definitions of who counted as a black were far more draconian than anything found in any Nazi proposal. At the same time, the Nazi literature expressed real discomfort about the so-called one-drop rule, which, I have to say, was not found in every American state, as there were a variety of approaches in the US. But it was understandably notorious. The Nazis, difficult as it is to imagine, described the one-drop rule as inhuman, as “involving human hardness that’s going much, much too far, you couldn’t do that kind of thing,” they said. And their own definitions for who counted as a Jew, especially those that were ultimately attached to the Nuremberg Laws, were more restricted than anything to be found in American states at the time.
