The Stain of White: Liaisons, Memories, and White Men as Relatives

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Family/Parenting, History, Media Archive, Social Science on 2011-11-12 01:17Z by Steven

The Stain of White: Liaisons, Memories, and White Men as Relatives

Men and Masculinities
Volume 9, Number 2 (October 2006)
pages 131-151
DOI: 10.1177/1097184X06287764

Janaki Abraham, Assistant Professor Women Studies
Jawaharlal Neru University

During British colonial rule some matrilineal Thiyya women in North Kerala, India, had liaisons with British men. While the response of the caste (here, a Backward caste) to these liaisons shifted over time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century many women who had liaisons and their families were excommunicated. A “white connection” became a stain and kinship with the white man was denied or shrouded. This article looks at the ways in which both the liaisons and the denial of the white man as father or relative were located within practices of matrilineal kinship. Furthermore, this article seeks to understand how these liaisons are remembered today and how the presence of the white man as a relative is layered over by processes of forgetting and remembering.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Review: Giller winner recounts struggles of mixed-race jazz musicians in prewar Europe

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Canada, Media Archive on 2011-11-11 06:01Z by Steven

Review: Giller winner recounts struggles of mixed-race jazz musicians in prewar Europe

Ottowa Citizen
2011-11-09

Julian Gunn

Half-Blood Blues By Esi Edugyan, Thomas Allen, 2011.

I remember waiting for a bus and listening to a literary podcast when I heard that Victoria, B.C. author Esi Edugyan’s second novel, Half-Blood Blues, had made the Man Booker Prize long list. The book had already received strong support: Lawrence Hill, Austin Clarke and other literary figures wrote glowing responses.

The book was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker but lost out to Julian Barnes. It was also shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Writers’ Trust Award. And it won the Giller Prize this week.

Half-Blood Blues binds together disparate human behaviour — celebration, community and violence — in telling the story of a band of jazz musicians struggling to exist in Berlin on the cusp of the Second World War.

American and German, dark-and light-skinned, gentile and Jewish, the members map complex racial and national identities. The musicians aren’t targets only because of their skin colour or religious identity; they’re also playing “degenerate” music, according to the SS. That’s a double whammy…

…Hiero is Hieronymus Thomas Falk, a German citizen with a Rhinelander mother and an African father whose precise story shimmers elusively in the history of colonialism and war. “He was a Mischling,” Sid explains, “a half-breed.”

Sid himself is “straight-haired and green-eyed” and light-skinned enough to pass, but ambiguously: “a right little Spaniard,” he says wryly. Though he’s a foreigner, he’s often safer than his friend in Hiero’s own country. Hiero, Delilah and Sid move through a shifting triangular relationship where music plays as important a role as love….

Read the entire review here.

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“Free People of Color” in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County, a Case Study

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Slavery, United States, Virginia on 2011-11-10 22:59Z by Steven

“Free People of Color” in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County, a Case Study

Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners
2011-11-10

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Back in 1977, when I was a junior in college, history became a personal venture for me when an African American friend told me that his ancestors were from Virginia, but that he had always heard that they were not slaves. African Americans from Old Virginia who had never been slaves? That got my attention!

A brand new history major, I decided on the spot to research my friend’s family history. Soon I was delving into microfilmed and published records from colonial Middlesex and Gloucester Counties of Virginia, where I did indeed find the ancestors of my friend—and many more—living as “free people of color” in colonial and antebellum Virginia. The following is their story.

During the transformative years of 1680-1730, as slavery overtook servitude as the favored system of labor among planters in the English colonies of America, a small but significant population of free people of color emerged in Virginia’s Gloucester and Middlesex Counties. We know very little about their individual lives beyond their names, racial designations, and ages as recorded in church and court records. We know, for example, that Elizabeth Morris, a servant of Middlesex County, was of mixed ancestry because the vestry book of Christ Church Parish described her in 1706 as “A Mulatto Woman.” (Note 1)

That same vestry book identified Elizabeth’s white master and mistress as “gentleman” Francis Weeks and his wife, Elizabeth. The Weeks family owned a number of slaves, raising questions about why Elizabeth was not also enslaved. Perhaps her mother was also a servant, or perhaps Elizabeth was the child of an enslaved woman and a white slave master who subsequently freed her…

…But even in this deliberately bi-racial society, a third category of race and status intruded: that of free person of color, with ”color” often meaning light brown. Elizabeth Morris’s designation as a “Mulatto,” which technically meant half African, half European, should not be taken literally. Virginia officials used the term rather loosely; it might mean that an individual was born to a mixed-race couple, or simply that one or both parents were of mixed ancestry. Mainly, it meant that a person’s skin was lighter in tone than that of enslaved Africans being forced into the colony in ever greater numbers…

Read the entire article here.

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Playwright discusses biracialism

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2011-11-09 02:18Z by Steven

Playwright discusses biracialism

The Dartmouth
2006-01-18

Ashley Zuzek, The Dartmouth Staff

William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., author of the play “Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers,” discussed the psychology of racial duality during a Tuesday night discussion at the Hopkins Center and emphasized the need for Americans of mixed blood to identify with a single race rather than getting lost between the two.

Having mixed blood, Yellow Robe said, “has created a psychology that no one has dealt with. People go into this panic of being too native or not being native enough.”

Yellow Robe, who is both Native American and African American, described the difficulty of being biracial during his discussion, “Claiming Our Relations.”

While Yellow Robe identifies more with his Native American ancestry than his African American ancestry, he is not ashamed of his mixed race.

“I honor it and I never deny it,” he said. However, he cautioned that people of mixed race should not “straddle both paths,” and that he has never regretted identifying with his Native American side…

Read the entire article here.

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White and mixed-race youths rank high in alcohol, substance abuse

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, New Media, United States on 2011-11-08 23:01Z by Steven

White and mixed-race youths rank high in alcohol, substance abuse

Los Angeles Times
2011-11-07

Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times/For the Booster Shots blog

The first-ever survey of adolescent alcohol and drug abuse to recognize youths of mixed race or ethnicity has found that such kids hover closest to white adolescents in the rate at which they suffer substance abuse disorders. That is not reassuring, because white adolescents are among the most likely ethnic and racial groups to have substance-use disorders.

Of all ethnic groups, Native Americans were found to suffer the highest rates of drug and alcohol abuse and dependence—about 15% in a given year. African American adolescents were among the least likely to abuse or be dependent on drugs or alcohol: on a yearly basis, roughly 5% of black teens fit the criteria for substance-use disorder—almost as low a rate as prevails among adolescents of Asian or Pacific Islander ethnicity (3.5%).

Latino youths—the fastest-growing ethnic group in this age cohort—fell below white and multi-ethnic adolescents in their rate of substance-use disorders, but not by much: 7.7% qualified as having dangerously abused or been dependent on drugs or alcohol in the past year.

The survey was published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Between 2005 and 2007, researchers plumbed the drug and alcohol use patterns of 72,561 adolescents between age 12 and 17. They conducted computer-assisted interviews with adolescents  about their use in the past 12 months of alcohol and a wide range of illicit drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and opioid painkillers taken for non-medical reasons…

Read the entire article here.

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Race, Reproduction and Family Romance in Moreau de Saint-Mery’s Description. ..de la partie francaise de l’isle Saint Domingue

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, Slavery on 2011-11-08 04:41Z by Steven

Race, Reproduction and Family Romance in Moreau de Saint-Mery’s Description. ..de la partie francaise de l’isle Saint Domingue

Eighteenth-Century Studies
Volume 38, Number 2, Winter 2005
pages 227-246
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2005.0008

Doris Lorraine Garraway, Associate Professor of French
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

This paper analyzes the colonial jurist and historian Moreau de Saint-Méry’s racial classification system with an aim to disclose its ideology of family romance and reproduction. By examining the sexual allegory implicit in the tabular demonstration of métissage, I argue that Moreau’s racial science represents a sexual fantasy for white colonials whose libertine practices threatened the fragile demographic balance of colonial society. Moreau de Saint-Méry revises Enlightenment ideas about racial degeneration and infertility to arrive at an original hypothesis for the biological reproduction of colonial humanity, one that places the control of such procreation squarely in the hands of white men.

The publication in 1797 of the colonial jurist and historian Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue represented a milestone in Enlightenment racial theory. Within the first volume of the encyclopedic account of the colony on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, there appeared a systematic classification of human variety in the colonies, unprecedented in its scope and detail. Expanding on previous taxonomies of De Pauw and Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and borrowing from eighteenth-century innovations in algebra and statistics, Moreau devised an exhaustive tabular, arithmetic and narrative typology of “nuances of the skin” along a continuum between white and black. Comprising nearly twenty pages, this attempt to delineate and classify human color variation in the colony of Saint-Domingue represented much more than an experiment in Enlightenment rationality or the science of amalgamation. By meticulously theorizing the genealogical progression between black and white, Moreau de Saint-Méry fixated on the one difference that carried political consequences in Saint-Domingue—that between white and non-white, or “sang-mêlé” (mixed-blood).

In the decades leading up to the Haitian Revolution, whites faced increasing challenges to their economic and political supremacy from the growing class of free people of color. As established slaveholders, planters, entrepreneurs, skilled laborers, artisans, and military leaders, they had acquired considerable wealth and property in land and slaves. As such, they aspired to the same political recognition and elite titles and offices held by whites. While mulatto activists such as Julien Raymond traveled to Paris to petition the royal government on behalf of free people of color, those at home sought to improve their position by building social networks, sending their children to be educated in France, adhering to French moral codes regarding marriage and legitimacy, and, in some cases, marrying their daughters to white men. The social ambitions of free people of color did little to quell the long-standing controversy over the prevalence of interracial sexual relationships in Saint-Domingue. In addition to engaging in sexual relations with slave women, elite white men frequently sought free women of color to serve as ménagères, their live-in housekeepers and lovers. In the late eighteenth century, colonial writers sensationalized mulatto women as icons of sensual pleasure and sexual excess, figures both loved and blamed for the luxury, indebtedness and moral laxity of the colony. Yet this stereotype concealed the fact that free women of color were among the most entrepreneurial and financially independent women in the colony, owing to their connections to white benefactors and their prevalence in urban marketing and commerce. While interracial marriage was never officially outlawed in the colony, the colonial leadership made many attempts to suppress the practice and in the end settled for a series of punitive measures against “misallied” white men. More difficult to control, however, was the massive increase in the population of free people of color in the last decades of French rule. In the two decades prior to the revolution, their numbers increased at nearly twice the rate of whites in the same period, such that by 1789 each population amounted to approximately 30,000 persons.

Faced with the population increase, social ambition, wealth and political demands of free people of color, the white elite responded with an extraordinarily oppressive regime of racially exclusionary laws intended to halt their advancement. Free people of color were forbidden to wear luxurious clothing, take the name of a white person, carry arms, practice certain professions and hold public office. By 1785, Moreau de Saint-Méry had become a leading figure of colonial jurisprudence. Born in 1750 to the white Creole elite of Martinique, Moreau had risen through the ranks of the magistrature to become a counselor on the Superior Court in Cap-Français, Saint-Domingue, and premier historian of colonial law. He was also a prominent figure of the colonial Enlightenment, holding memberships in the colonial Chamber of Agriculture and the Cercle des Philadelphes, later named the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences. This organization made Cap-Français a center of scientific debate, comparable in its time to Philadelphia and Boston. Moreau’s rise in the colonies was concomitant with his growing notoriety on the French political and cultural scene. In the 1780s, he took a leading role in the pre-revolutionary assemblies in Paris as a spokesperson for the colonial elite, arguing polemically against mulatto rights and the proposals of the Société des Amis des noirs. His address of May 12, 1791 provoked Robespierre’s famous speech calling for the end of the colonies should they compromise revolutionary principles…

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Redrawing the Color Line: Gender and the Social Construction of Race in Pre-Revolutionary Haiti

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Europe, Media Archive, Slavery, Social Science on 2011-11-07 22:12Z by Steven

Redrawing the Color Line: Gender and the Social Construction of Race in Pre-Revolutionary Haiti

Journal of Caribbean History
Volume 30, Numbers 1 & 2 (1996)
pages 28-50

John D. Garrigus, Associate Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

This article examines the social and political construction of race in French colonial Saint-Domingue. After 1763 white elites redefined the category “free coloured” using negative images of femininity rooted in French political discourse. This engendering of racial stereotypes solidified a racial hierarchy that whites found alarmingly fluid. Planters’ councils and the governors they opposed evoked images of sexually powerful women and effeminized men to explain colonial despotism and disorder. In the late 1780s, however, free men of colour deliberately asserted their civic virtue and virility, challenging these stereotypes and eventually destroying the colonial racial hierarchy.

By 1789 French Saint Domingue was home to the largest, wealthiest, and most self-confident free population of African descent in the Americas. Comprising close to half the colony’s free population, these gens de couleur won civil equality with whites from the French Legislative Assembly in April 1792 and their political demands helped produce the Haitian Revolution. Why did such an extraordinary population emerge in this colony?

This article contends that the size, wealth, and self-confidence of this group were partly the result of new social and legal definitions of race formulated in Saint-Domingue after 1763. As this frontier society became the centerpiece of the French empire after the Seven Years’ War, prejudice established a deep and apparently permanent gulf between “whites” and “people of colour.” This new legal and social discrimination was deeply influenced by politicized French gender stereotypes, which whites used to reinforce a new, biological conception of racial difference. Old colonial families were relabeled gens de couleur. After 1769 whites considered free people of mixed African/European descent to be not merely “between” whites and blacks, but morally and physically inferior to both races. This exaggeration of the difference between white and brown colonists reinforced the ambiguous category “free people of colour” and served as an effective target during the French Revolution for wealthy “mulattos” and “quadroons” eager to claim full citizenship.

At the heart of the new racism were conflicts over Saint-Domingue’s political and cultural identity. After the Seven Years’ War new immigration from Europe and the increasingly “civilized” tone of elite colonial society raised the question of how “French” Saint-Domingue could become. Could a slave plantation colony produce a civic-minded public of the sort said to be emerging in France at this time? Many colonial planters, magistrates, and merchants wanted to believe it could. These elites appropriated metropolitan political discourse to explain why free Dominguan society differed from France. After the Seven Years’ War they began to describe free men and women of colour as passionate, narcissistic, and parasitic, terms used in France to vilify powerful women at court. This redirected and highly politicised misogyny helped solidify the ambiguous category gens de couleur, placing these families and individuals firmly outside respectable colonial society. The new image of people of mixed ancestry answered troubling questions about white behaviour in Saint-Domingue and seemed to guarantee that an orderly, rational colonial public could emerge. Grafting a stereotyped effeminacy onto emerging biological notions of race legitimised the disenfranchising of free people of colour, some of whom were indistinguishable from “whites” in wealth, education, distance from slavery, even physical appearance. In Saint-Domingue’s rough-and-tumble seventeenth-century buccaneer society, race was not the obsession it would later become. Early censuses did not distinguish between “whites” and “mulattoes,” but between free and enslaved residents. Before the massive importation of slaves for sugar work, children of mixed African/European descent were apparently considered free from birth. Even in 1685, the metropolitan authors of France’s slave law, the Code Noir, were more concerned about sin than race and racial mixture. The Code ordered colonial officials to confiscate mixed-race children and slave concubines from their owners, but stated that if a master married his slave mistress, she would be automatically free, as would the children of their union. Under the original terms of the Code Noir, ex-slaves enjoyed all the rights of French subjects…

For example, as he charted the somatic varieties produced by different combinations of African and European “blood,” Moreau also described distinct moral qualities. Blacks were strong and passionate while whites were graceful and intelligent. Therefore, mulattoes, who were one-half black, were stronger than quarterons, who were only one-quarter African. According to Moreau, African appetites for physical pleasure were especially pronounced when combined with white qualities. Mulattoes lived for sexual gratification, and the offspring of a mulatto and a black had a “temperament impossible to contain.”

Convinced that black women had strong psychological and physical inclinations to be mothers, Moreau believed that mulatto and quadroon women had difficulty giving birth, due to their physical and moral deficiencies. Men of mixed descent were similarly flawed. Mulattos were often intelligent and attractive, but they were lazy, beardless, foppish, and sensual, according to Moreau. Nor did free coloured military service challenge this image:

It seems that then [in the ranks a mulatto] loses his laziness, but all the world knows that a soldier’s life, in the leisure it provides, has attractions for indolent men … A mulatto soldier will appear exactly to the calls of day, perhaps even to those of the evening, but it is in vain that one tries to restrict his liberty at night; [the night|] belongs to pleasure and he will not indenture it, no matter what commitments he has made elsewhere…

Read the entire article here.

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The Multiracial Identity Movement: Countless Ways to Misunderstand Race

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, My Articles/Point of View/Activities, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States on 2011-11-04 04:15Z by Steven

The Multiracial Identity Movement: Countless Ways to Misunderstand Race

MixedRaceStudies.org
2011-11-04

Steven F. Riley

In Jen Chau’s essay, “Multiracial Families: Counted But Still Misunderstood,” in the October 31, 2011 issue of Racialiscious, reveals just how much race is misunderstood by some activists within the multiracial identity movement and exemplifies why the movement—in its current form—is incapable of leading us into a post-racial future.

Part of the “quiet” that Ms. Chau is experiencing is due to the realization that President Barack Obama is not the multiracial messiah some had thought he would be. He is neither a messiah, nor is he—as he has stated on multiple occasions—multiracial.  Unfortunately, in many ways, the policies of our first black President differ little from our previous white President (George W. Bush). Is this the “black-white mix” we were hoping for? Perhaps the quiet is the palatable disappointment in President Obama’s first three years office. What part of “race is a social construction” does she not understand?  As succinctly stated by Professor Richard Thompson Ford,

“Because race is a social category and not a biological or genetic one, Obama’s mixed parentage does not determine his race. Mixed parentage may influence one’s appearance, and a person whose appearance is racially ambiguous can influence how she is perceived. In such instances, race may be a question of personal affiliation to some extent. And mixed parentage may influence how one chooses to identify. But for the most part, society assigns us our races. At any rate, Obama’s appearance is not ambiguous, and he unquestionably identifies as black.” (Emphasis is mine.)

A good first step would be to for activists respect Obama’s identity as they would like us to respect theirs.

My theory—which differs considerably from Ms. Chau’s—is that the “quiet” is due to fact that multiracial-identity movement is simply not the progressive force she and others think it is; and we—including activists themselves—are beginning to recognize that.  In many ways, the multiracial-identity movement mimics the tactics, ideologies and demagogueries of the right-wing conservative adherents that it claims to fight.

The problems with the movement are numerous, but they can be narrowed to three major issues: 1) Race as biology, 2) Ahistoricity, and 3) the refusal to discuss the role of white supremacy within the discourses of multiraciality.

After nearly a century of scientific acknowledgment that there is no such thing as “race” as a biological concept, why do some in the movement still pursue issues dealing with so-called “multiracial medicine?”  A truly progressive movement would preface all of its statements with the fact that “race” in short, was a concept used to justify the extermination and enslavement of non-Europeans.

Another deficiency in the multiracial movement is its unwillingness to acknowledge that so-called “racial mixing” in the Americas is a five-century—not four decade—aspect of our history.  Thus even if “race” were a biological concept, we are all most certainly “mixed” by now.  Rather than making hypocritical (demanding the freedom to self-identify for some but not for others) pronouncements on President Obama’s heterogeneous background, multiracial activists should also consider the heterogeneity of the First Lady Michelle Obama, the overwhelming vast majority of black and Latino Americans, and yes, a significant segment of white Americans. In 1927, 40 years before the mythological baby-boom that was allegedly brought about by Loving v. Virginia and just seven years after the last 20th-century census that would enumerate “mixed-race” people (Ms. Chau seems to have forgotten the seven past censuses starting in 1850 that counted mixed-race individuals), anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, revealed that,

“The word “Negro” is, biologically, a misnomer, for the African Negroes, brought to the United States as slaves, have crossed in breeding with the dominant White population, as well as with the aboriginal American Indian types with whom they came into contact, so that there is today only a small percentage of the American Negroes who may be considered Negro in the ordinary sense of the term.” (The emphasis is mine.)

When an early 20th-century anthropologist—in the midst of an overtly racist era—can show more insight that 21st century activists—in the midst of the so-called “Age of Obama” era—we have a serious problem.

Lastly, the most deafening “quiet” within the multiracial movement, is its silence on the role of white supremacy in the continuing oppression and shaping of identities here in United States and around the world.  It is the ideology of white supremacy that created the notion of race as biology, then racialized and dehumanized, enlslaved, and exterminated people around the world for centuries—and continue to do—to preserve the current Eurocentric hegemonic paradigm.  As Professor G. Reginald Daniel has warned,

“We should be especially concerned about any half-hearted attack on the Eurocentric paradigm in the manner of interracial colorism that merely weakens rather than eradicates the dichotomization of blackness and whiteness, while leaving intact the racial hierarchy that maintains white privilege.”

The type of incidents that agitate the multiracial identity movement today are not the growing wealth disparities among racialized groups, or current vigorous attempts to curtail voting rights of minorities ahead of the 2012 General Election, but rather the freely chosen racial identity by the President or the chosen racial identity of the child of a Hollywood celebrity.  As Ms. Chau has stated, there are many ways that we have to fight racism and ignorance, yet the movement—particularly on the internet—is more interested in exploiting the bodies of young people by hosting “mixed-race” fashion shows that conjure-up images of Quadroon Balls from the early 19th-century or posting photographs of the allegedly “multiracial person of-the-day” in a self-aggrandizing exercise that Professor Rainier Spencer has coined as “miscentrism.”  At this rate, the multiracial-identity movement will be no more effective in combating racism and ignorance than a lukewarm decaffeinated soy-triple-shot no-fat latte at Starbucks.

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The Physical Form and Growth of the American Negro

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, United States on 2011-11-03 03:43Z by Steven

The Physical Form and Growth of the American Negro

Anthropologischer Anzeiger
Volume 4, Number 4 (1927)
pages 293-316

Melville J. Herskovits

(With 17 Tables and 17 Figures)

The series which is represented in this paper is made up of 5,539 American Negroes, comprising individuals of both sexes and all ages from one year to adult-hood, (this latter class including all persons who are twenty-years of age and above). The measurements, the averages and variabilities of which are given below in the tables, were taken, with the exception of one group, during the past three years in New York City; in Washington, D.C.; among the rural population of eastern West Virginia; at Nashville, Tenn.; and at Tuskegee, Ala. The exception which may be noted is a series of 351 individuals, measured by the late Professor [Felix] von Luschan in eight cities of the south of the United States, during the year 1915. This series is also composed of persons of both sexes and all ages, and, for the purpose in hand, is incorporated with the other series mentioned above.

It is important, in any consideration of the American Negro, to understand the use of the term. The word “Negro” is, biologically, a misnomer, for the African Negroes, brought to the United States as slaves, have crossed in breeding with the dominant White population, as well as with the aboriginal American Indian types with whom they came into contact, so that there is today only a small percentage of the American Negroes who may be considered Negro in the ordinary sense of the term. I have  discussed the extent to which this crossing has occurred, and the consequent hybrid character of the American Negro people of today, elsewhere, and it is therefore only necessary…

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Melville Jean Herskovits

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Biography, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2011-11-03 02:56Z by Steven

Melville Jean Herskovits

American Anthropologist
Volume 66, Issue 1 (February 1964)
pages 83-109
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1964.66.1.02a00080

Alan P. Merriam

Melville Jean Herskovits (1895-1963)

Melville Jean Herskovits was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, September 10, 1895, and spent his childhood there and in Texas. In 1920 he took his Ph.B. at the University of Chicago, and later came under the influence of Franz Boas, then at Columbia University, where he took an M.A. in 1921 and his doctorate in 1923. In 1924 he married Frances Shapiro, and their daughter, Jean, was born in 1935. He held the post of lecturer in anthropology at Columbia University from 1924 to 1927, and was at Howard University in 1925. In 1927 he moved to Northwestern University where he remained, as full professor since 1935, until his death February 25, 1963.

Facts of this nature tell us but little about a man who gave his intellectual life to anthropology, of his devotion to his field of study, or of the enormous integrity he brought to it. It is, rather, in looking at the fruits of his devotion that we see the scope and brilliance of his productivity and the constant theme of humanitarianism, based always on the facts of research, that marked his work.

From 1923-1927 Herskovits carried out his first major series of studies as Fellow of the Board of the Biological Sciences of the National Research Council; this was a detailed program of physical anthropology titled “Variability under Radical Crossing.” The project came to be centered about variability, homogeneity and heterogeneity, and the problem of Mendelian inheritance in race crossing; it began with early anthropometric studies of Negro boys in New York City and Riverdale, New York (#28, 37). In 1925, Herskovits pointed out the importance of the range of variability in studying a mixed racial grouping (#31: 70), and suggested that a significant means of understanding heredity in racial crossing could be achieved through the study of genealogies of individuals concerned (#121, 61). This led immediately to the question of homogeneity and heterogeneity (#39) in the American Negro population, and Herskovits concluded:

That the variability of family strains can be utilized as an indication of the homogeneity or heterogeneity of a population; that the Negro-White population of New York is of surprisingly great homogeneity of type; that in this instance, at least, the result may be taken as an indication of the heterogeneity of racial origin; and that there is not in this population great variation between families, but rather within them. (#43 : 12)

The concept of low variability in family lines and high variability within families of New York Negroes was so different from that generally prevailing that Herskovits sought a further explanation which he found in the element of social selection (#35, 63, 100)…

Read the entire article here.

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