Mixed Race Studies

Tales of the struggles, successes of the racially mixed [Book Review]

The Boston Globe
2011-05-21

Jan Stuart

In the final offering of Danzy Senna’s new short story collection, “You Are Free,’’ a racially mixed woman sits in a bustling LA fast-food joint over a plate of macaroni and cheese, counting the mixed-race couples enjoying their Sunday lunch.

A refined radar for other folks of multicolored heritage has bound Senna’s characters since her debut novel, “Caucasia,’’ in which a light-skinned black teenager named Birdie has a white Jewish identity foisted upon her by her white mother, who is on the run from a violent radical past. Birdie ultimately reclaims her blackness, along with her estranged black family, at the end of a bruising odyssey. “I had become someone I didn’t like,’’ she confesses. “Someone who had no voice or color or conviction.”

Senna established her voice and convictions forcefully with “Caucasia,’’ but the peace of mind intimated by her heroine’s hard-won closure has proven to be illusory. The predominantly mixed-race protagonists of “You Are Free’’ continue to wallow in the societal pressures and inner tumult wrought by their ambiguous skin color and racially fused DNA. And their turmoil is palpable. A couple’s polyracial family tree is “cultural chaos.’’ A character’s indeterminate features are perceived as “a confusion of races.’’ Interracial couples are self-mockingly pegged as “that mewling and defensive group.”…

Read the entire review here.

From the Curse of Ham to the Curse of Nature

The British Journal for the History of Science
Volume 40, Issue 3 (2007)
pages 367-388
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087407009788

Robert Kenny, ARC Research Fellow
The Australian Centre, School of Historical Studies
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

This paper examines the debate engendered in ethnological and anthropological circles by Darwin’s Origin of Species and its effects. The debate was more about the nature of human diversity than about transmutation. By 1859 many polygenists thought monogenism had been clearly shown to be an antiquated and essentially religious concept. Yet the doctrine of natural selection gave rise to a ‘new monogenism‘. Proponents of polygenism such as James Hunt claimed natural selection had finally excluded monogenism, but Thomas Huxley, the most prominent exponent of the new monogenism, claimed it amalgamated the ‘best’ of both polygenism and monogenism. What it did provide was an explanation for the irreversible inequality of races, while it maintained that all humans were of one species. This bolstered belief in the innate superiority of the Caucasians over other peoples. The effect was finally to sever British ethnology from its evangelical monogenist roots. More subtly and surprisingly, it provided support in Church circles for a move away from the ideal of the ‘Native Church’.

It is well known that Darwin’s Origin of Species avoided applying the mechanism of natural selection to the development of the human species. Darwin waited twelve years before publishing his Descent of Man in 1871. Others were not so reticent. Natural selection provoked debate in British ethnological and anthropological circles through the 1860s, debates enacted in the shadow of the American war over slavery and British colonial expansion. Just as much as they were prompted by the transmutation theory, the debates had their antecedents in competing views of human diversity: did the variety of human races represent a single species descended from a common ancestor, or did the variety indicate separate species of humans descended from uncommon ancestors? Before 1859 the monogenist camp was seen, particularly by its opponents, as having based its arguments on religious conviction as much as on science, while many polygenists also saw their position as at least as much in harmony with Christian Scripture. But, to the surprise of many polygenists, after 1859 many of the most famous Darwinians, who had little truck with religion as a source of scientific knowledge, proclaimed themselves monogenists.

In the standard historiography, particularly in the writings of George Stocking, these debates are characterized as involving a conflict between a ‘Darwinian’ camp, ensconced in the Ethnological Society of London, and the ‘Anti-Darwinians’ of the Anthropological Society of London.1 Such histories, aiming to elucidate the progress of the ‘Darwinian revolution’ within anthropology, have underplayed the fundamental shift that occurred in the predominant attitude of the Ethnological Society under the influence of the Darwinians. This shift turned a monogenism of practical equality of races into a monogenism that accepted an irrevocable inequality of races and was politically little different from the polygenism advocated by the leaders of the Anthropological Society. Such histories have also overplayed polygenists’ antagonism to Darwin’s theory—for many polygenists transmutation was a means to understand the plurality of races as a plurality of species. The aim here is to examine the mechanics of the shift in monogenism and to show that natural selection, at least as then perceived by many, challenged and fatally undermined both polygenism and orthodox monogenism at their foundations. In so doing it established a new ‘scientific’ argument for human inequality that was to have far-reaching and surprising effects…

…Polygenisms

Despite his monogenism, Hodgkin was a long-time friend of the most vocal polygenists of the time, Robert Knox and the American Samuel Morton. They were all Edinburgh students together. Notoriously implicated in the Edinburgh scandals of Burke and Hare, Knox enthusiastically argued that the mulatto offspring of a European-native coupling were non-productive in the same way as a mule. He held that even in Ireland there had been ‘no amalgamation of the Celtic and Saxon blood’. This was not a novel position, as the term implies—’mulatto’ is from the Spanish for young mule. It was commonly held by settlers in Australia that Aboriginal women who had once borne a child to a European were thenceforward unable to conceive with an Aboriginal man. This supposed fact was used by Samuel Morton to support his polygenist doctrines in America, where polygenism had a greater following because it could so easily be used to support slavery. It had enough currency that Darwin felt the need to mention its disproof as late as 1871 in his Descent of Man.

Morton was famous for collecting and measuring skulls to demonstrate the moral and intellectual differences between races. His work was well known on both sides of the Atlantic. As Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated in his Mismeasure of Man, Morton fudged the measurements to ‘prove’ the Caucasian brain was bigger. This proof became a commonplace—in the decades that followed many writers used the term ‘ larger-brained European’. Friendship notwithstanding, Hodgkin was unimpressed by this science of skulls. In 1849 he wrote, ‘Having myself paid some attention to the ethnological grouping of skulls, I must confess that I have found considerable difficulty in adopting points of characteristic difference; and in this difficulty I find an argument in favour of the unity of species. ‘ He found greater variety of cranial capacity, Morton’s measure of cognitive ability, between individuals within a local group than between distant groups…

Read the entire article here.

Hawaii is older, more racially mixed, census shows

Honolulu Star Advertiser
2011-05-19

Michael Tsai

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest demographic profile of the state, Hawaii is looking a little older, a tad whiter, perhaps a bit lonelier.

The bureau is scheduled to release today detailed demographic information collected last year in Hawaii and 12 other states.

The findings are consistent with continuing trends for aging, immigration and racial composition, household composition and population distribution…

…Statewide, the number of people who identified themselves as being of mixed race increased to 23.6 percent from 21.4 percent.

Of those who identified themselves by one race, African-American, Japanese and Chinese residents all recorded lower population totals from 2000 to 2010. Native Hawaiians remained level at 80,337 total, 5.9 percent of the population.

Meanwhile, white residents increased to 24.7 percent from 24.3 percent of the total population, a gain of 42,497 people…

Read the entire article here.

Reconceptualizing the Measurement of Multiracial Status for Health Research in the United States

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 8, Issue 1 (2011) (Special Issue: Racial Inequality and Health)
pages 25-36
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X11000038

Meghan Woo, Senior Analyst
Abt Associates Inc.

S. Bryn Austina, Director of Fellowship Research Training in the Division of Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine
Children’s Hospital, Boston

David R. Williams, Florence and Laura Norman Professor of Public Health; Professor of African and African American Studies and of Sociology
Harvard University

Gary G. Bennett, Associate Professor of Psychology and Global Health
Duke University

The assessment of multiracial status in U.S. health research is fraught with challenges that limit our ability to enumerate and study this population. This paper reconceptualizes the assessment of multiracial status through the development of a model with three dimensions: mixed ancestry multiracial status, self-identified multiracial status, and socially assigned multiracial status. We present challenges to studying multiracial populations and provide recommendations for improving the assessment of multiracial status in health research.

The campaign for racial purity and the erosion of paternalism in Virginia, 1922-1930: “nominally white, biologically mixed, and legally Negro”.

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 68, Number 1 (February 2002)
pages 65-106

J. Douglas Smith

In September 1922 John Powell, a Richmond native and world-renowned pianist and composer, and Earnest Sevier Cox, a self-proclaimed explorer and ethnographer, organized Post No. 1 of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. By the following June the organization claimed four hundred members in Richmond alone and had added new groups throughout the state, all dedicated to “the preservation and maintenance of Anglo-Saxon ideals and civilization.” For the next ten years Powell and his supporters dominated racial discourse in the Old Dominion; successfully challenged the legislature to redefine blacks, whites, and Indians; used the power of a state agency to enforce the law with impunity fundamentally altered the lives of hundreds of mixed-race Virginians; and threatened the essence of the state’s devotion to paternalistic race relations.

The racial extremism and histrionics of the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs have attracted the attention of both legal scholars and southern historians, particularly those interested in the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, the major legislative achievement of the organization, and Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed three centuries of miscegenation statutes in the United States. Historian Richard B. Sherman, for instance, has focused on the organization’s leaders, “a small but determined group of racial zealots who rejected the contention of most southern whites in the 1920s that the “race question was settled.” Sherman, who has written the most detailed account of the legislative efforts of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, has argued in the pages of the Journal of Southern History that the leaders of the organization constituted a “dedicated coterie of extremists who played effectively on the fears and prejudices of many whites.” Convinced that increasing numbers of persons with traces of black blood were passing as white, they made a “Last Stand” against racial amalgamation.

While Sherman is certainly correct that the Anglo-Saxon Clubs owed their success to the commitment of their leaders, their views and policies resonated with a much broader swath of the white population. The Anglo-Saxon Clubs did not merely manipulate the racial fears and prejudices of whites but also tapped into the same assumptions that undergirded the entire foundation of white supremacy and championed segregation as a system of racial hierarchy and control. The call for racial integrity appealed especially to elite whites in Virginia who were obsessed with genealogy and their pristine bloodlines. Lady Astor, for instance, reportedly informed her English friends that they lacked the purity of the white inhabitants of the Virginia Piedmont. “We are undiluted,” she proclaimed. Author Emily Clark satirized this prevailing view in Richmond when one of her characters remarked, “for here alone, in all America, flourished the Anglo-Saxon race, untainted, pure, and perfect.” White elites across Virginia gave their support to the Anglo-Saxon Clubs and allowed Powell’s message a hearing: state senators and delegates approved legislation; governors publicly advocated the aims of the organization; some of the most socially prominent women in Richmond joined the ladies auxiliary; and influential newspapers offered editorial support and provided a public platform for the dissemination of the organization’s extreme views…

…In addition to exposing a fundamental weakness in the system of managed race relations, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs unintentionally revealed the absurdity of the basic assumption that underlay their mission: it proved impossible to divide the state, or the nation for that matter, into readily identifiable races. The longer they waged their campaign, the more apparent it became that they could not divine the precise amount of nonwhite blood in a given individual. Furthermore, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs met a great deal of resistance from individuals and communities who rejected the clubs’ particular construction of racial identity. Communities across the state revealed a variability in race relations that confounded those most committed to a discrete, binary definition of race…

…Although Powell and Cox initially placed their efforts within the broader nativist context of the national debate over federal immigration policy, they soon ceased to mention immigration at all. (11) Instead, they focused their energies toward “achieving a final solution” to the “negro problem.” Their ultimate concern, as they suggested in lengthy articles in the Times-Dispatch, was to prevent “White America” from devolving into a “Negroid Nation.” Writing in July 1923, Powell argued that the passage of Jim Crow laws and the disfranchisement of blacks had “diverted the minds of our people from the most serious and fundamental peril, that is, the danger of racial amalgamation.” “It is not enough to segregate the Negro on railway trains and street cars, in schools and theaters,” the pianist declared; “it is not enough to restrict his exercise of the franchise, so long as the possibility remains of the absorption of Negro blood into our white population.” Powell acknowledged that Virginia’s laws already prevented the intermarriage of blacks and whites but warned that such laws did not necessarily “prevent intermixture.” He and his colleagues in the Anglo-Saxon Clubs also believed that a 1910 Virginia statute that defined a black person as having at least one-sixteenth black blood no longer protected the integrity of the white race. Pointing to census figures that showed a decrease in the number of mulattoes in Virginia from 222,910 in 1910 to 164,171 in 1920, they argued that an increasing number of people with some black blood must be passing as white. Consequently, a new, “absolute” color line offered the only “possibility, if not the probability, of achieving a final solution.”

Powell’s analysis of census data, however, points to the absurdity of his campaign to define race in absolute terms. While Powell interpreted the steep drop in mulattoes as proof of increased passing, historian Joel Williamson argues that by the early twentieth century the only significant “mixing” occurred between lighter-skinned blacks and darker-skinned blacks. Even census officials warned in 1920 that “considerable uncertainty necessarily attaches to the classification of Negroes as black and mulatto, since the accuracy of the distinction depends largely upon the judgment and care employed by the enumerators.” Mulattoes in Virginia did not become white between 1910 and 1920 but rather became black. In fact, the census bureau did away with mulatto as a category for the 1930 enumeration…

…Although Powell was the Anglo-Saxon Clubs’ leading spokesman, Walter Plecker, as director of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, was without a doubt the group’s primary enforcer. From 1924 until his retirement twenty-two years later, Plecker waged a campaign of threats and intimidation aimed at classifying all Virginians by race and identifying even the smallest traces of black blood in the state’s citizens. In short, the statistician operated on the belief that a person was guilty of being black until he or she could prove otherwise.

Plecker considered it his mission to encourage as many Virginians as possible to register with the state. Between ten and twenty thousand near-white Virginians, he noted, “possess an intermixture of colored blood, in some cases to a slight extent, it is true, but still enough to prevent them from being white.” Such people previously had been considered white, which had allowed them to demand “admittance of their children to white schools” and “in not a few cases” to marry whites. Although such people were “scarcely distinguished as colored,” they “are not white in reality.” Registration, he argued, would enable the Bureau of Vital Statistics to head off such trouble…

…Linking racial integrity and segregated schools assumed a level of critical importance as the General Assembly prepared to meet in January 1930. Revelations that a number of mixed-race children attended white schools in Essex County provided advocates of a stricter racial-definition law the means of persuasion that they had lacked in 1926 and 1928 when they were seen as unnecessarily harassing the state’s Indians. The situation in Essex County first developed in 1928 as local school officials took steps to remove from the white schools children considered mixed. One family resisted, hired a lawyer, and filed suit. In the Circuit Court of Essex County, school officials acknowledged that the children in question had less than one-sixteenth black blood. Consequently, Judge Joseph W. Chinn ruled that the children could not be kept out of white schools.

Chinn based his ruling on what racial integrity advocates had long understood as a loophole in the original legislation. The 1924 Racial Integrity Act defined a white person as an individual with “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian,” making an exception only for certain Indians, and failed to define a black person. Furthermore, the act specifically prohibited the intermarriage of a white person with a nonwhite person, but it made no mention of the schools. Powell later testified that he had assumed that all persons not deemed white would be automatically classified black. But since the 1924 statute did not amend the 1910 act which termed blacks as persons with one-sixteenth or more black blood, an individual with less than one-sixteenth black blood could not be considered black, and therefore he or she could not be prevented from attending white schools.

A reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch concluded that under Chinn’s ruling “any child having less than one-sixteenth Negro blood, not only can attend a white school, but must attend it, and is by law prevented from attending a colored school.” The judge’s opinion, moreover, opened the door for persons with less than one-sixteenth black blood to attend any of Virginia’s colleges or universities. In the wake of Chinn’s decision, local officials understood that their only avenue of relief lay with the state legislature passing a stricter law; consequently, sponsors introduced a measure that defined as black “any person in whom there is ascertainable any Negro Blood”—the so-called one-drop rule…

Mixed race vote key to Cape Town in S. Africa polls

The Citizen
2011-05-16

Justine Gerardy

Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.

CAPE TOWN – Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.

“No other option: DA,” said the mixed race supporter of the Democratic Alliance over the ruling African National Congress (ANC) that led South Africa into democracy.

“I’ll never vote any ANC, never. I’ll never vote for a black man, never,” said Cox, 72. “They don’t worry for us.”

Politicians have scrambled to woo mixed race voters, known locally as coloureds, who are the majority in Cape Town, South Africa’s only major city not in ruling party hands.

The battle is a two-party race between President Jacob Zuma’s ANC, which lost the city five years ago, and the DA led by Helen Zille, who is the first female leader of the party.

The coloured group is tipped to back the DA—years after many cast their first votes in 1994 for apartheid’s white minority nationalists that oppressed them but ranked them higher than blacks…

…Coloureds who have African, European, East Asian and South Indian roots had more privileges than the darker-skinned black majority in apartheid’s strict hierarchy designed to keep South Africa’s people apart and protect white power.

The divisions cut across separate housing, education and even language with Dutch settler-derived Afrikaans spoken instead of local African languages.

And while power has shifted, many still feel sidelined…

Read the entire article here.

Mildred Loving

The Economist
2008-05-15

Mildred Loving, law-changer, died on May 2nd, aged 68

The loved each other. That must have been why they decided to get their marriage certificate framed and to hang it up in the bedroom of their house. There was little else in the bedroom, save the bed. Certainly nothing worth locking the front door for on a warm July night in 1958 in Central Point, Virginia. No one came this way, ten miles off the Richmond Turnpike into the dipping hills and the small, poor, scattered farmhouses, unless they had to. But Mildred Loving was suddenly woken to the crash of a door and a torch levelled in her eyes.

All the law enforcement of Caroline county stood round the bed: Sheriff Garnett Brooks, his deputy and the jailer, with guns at their belts. They might have caught them in the act. But as it was, the Lovings were asleep. All the men saw was her black head on the pillow, next to his.

She didn’t even think of it as a Negro head, especially. Her hair could easily set straight or wavy. That was because she had Indian blood, Cherokee from her father and Rappahannock from her mother, as well as black. All colours of people lived in Central Point, blacks with milky skin and whites with tight brown curls, who all passed the same days feeding chickens or smelling tobacco leaves drying, and who all had to use different counters from pure whites when they ate lunch in Bowling Green. They got along. If there was any race Mrs Loving considered herself, it was Indian, like Princess Pocahontas. And Pocahontas had married a white man…

Read the entire article here.

Loving Indian Style: Maintaining Racial Caste and Tribal Sovereignty Through Sexual Assimilation

Wisconsin Law Review
Volume 2007, Number 2 (2007-01-12)
pages 410-461

Carla D. Pratt, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Educational Equity; Nancy J. LaMont Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law
Pennsylvania State University

I. Introduction

When the United States Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s miscegenation statute forty years ago, everyone understood that the Court was eroding the formal barrier between blacks and whites. Although there has been healthy disagreement about Loving v. Virginia, including whether it provides the precedent for legal endorsement of same-sex marriage, scholars generally agree that the Virginia statute which Loving struck down was not a law proscribing miscegenation generally, but merely prohibiting miscegenation with a white person. Commentators have generally recognized the Virginia legislators’ choice to structure the law in this way as being aimed at preserving white racial purity and ensuring that white women were reserved exclusively for white men. Ostensibly the law was insouciant regarding the intimate relations of people of color, but a closer look betrays its impact on interracial relations between people of color.

Further, state miscegenation laws that ultimately permitted whites to marry Indians aided the assimilation of Indians into mainstream white America by operating as a form of racial rehabilitation. Indian assimilation, however, required more than Indians intermarrying with whites; it required the total indoctrination of Indians into the system of white supremacy. This meant that Indians needed to adopt white sexual mores, including the aversion to race-mixing with blacks.

This Article calls this process—which operated as the pathway to Indian acceptance in American society and privileged Indians over blacks—“sexual assimilation.” While sexual assimilation was aimed at cultural genocide from the federal perspective, it paradoxically played a role in preventing Indian cultural extinction by helping to maintain tribal sovereignty.

Scholars have generally characterized Loving as a case about the line separating whites from blacks. Within the subtext of Loving, however, lies a narrative about the line separating Indians from blacks. Virginia’s miscegenation law employed a eugenics-based racial classification to legally construct Mildred Loving as “Negro,” but her true racial identity contained a Cherokee Indian component. Mildred was herself a product of race mixing. Furthermore, while Mildred’s mixed racial identity may lead one to believe that—as some scholars have suggested—Indians intermarried with blacks freely and frequently, the miscegenation laws of several tribes impart a counternarrative that portrays some Indian communities as viewing marriage to blacks as taboo.

Despite all of the discussion about miscegenation laws that Loving has generated, there has been little discussion about the American Indian Nations’s enactment of miscegenation laws. Perhaps this paucity of literature is due to the fact that Loving had no precedential effect in tribal miscegenation law since tribes are sovereigns that are, in many respects, independent of federal regulation. Nonetheless, an examination of Loving is incomplete without an examination of the role that state miscegenation laws played in Indian communities in the scheme to maintain the boundaries of racial categories and the struggle to maintain tribal sovereignty. An examination of tribal miscegenation law yields a better understanding of how state miscegenation laws affected nonblack people of color such as Native Americans, who were often political casualties of state and federal laws designed with a black-white paradigm in mind. In fact, Native Americans found themselves wedged in the middle of the black-white models of racial subordination and ultimately adjusted to the existing racial hierarchy through social and legal assimilation.

The fact that several Indian tribes adopted miscegenation laws similar to the law struck down in Loving raises important questions. Why did these particular tribes adopt miscegenation laws? What role did the adoption of miscegenation laws play in the tribe and its interaction with state and federal governments? What role did tribal miscegenation laws play in the acculturation of Indians, and what legacy have these laws left for the tribes’ contemporary understanding of self?

This Article examines tribal miscegenation laws in an effort to locate some potential answers to these questions. This Article is not proffered as a definitive answer to the questions posed, but as a contribution to the emerging dialogue aimed at developing a collective understanding of the social, historical, and political context in which such laws arose and operated. This Article deviates from the traditional binary paradigm of exploring how miscegenation laws affected blacks and whites and explores how miscegenation laws affected nonblack people of color and their relations with blacks. Thus, it reveals that the statute at issue in Loving and similar race-preserving laws indirectly regulated interracial relations between certain nonwhite groups.

Part II of this Article explores the substance of tribal miscegenation laws—and their legal and political context—in an effort to better understand why tribes adopted such racially isolating laws. Part III examines how state miscegenation laws affected Native Americans as well as the role of tribal miscegenation laws in maintaining individual and communal Indian identity and tribal sovereignty. Part IV questions whether tribal miscegenation laws, despite their repeal, help explain contemporary tribal conflicts between blacks and Indians. Part V concludes that extant legal disputes between the tribes and African Americans who claim membership in those tribes are derivatives of the project of sexual assimilation of Indian people. This suggests that both the tribes and African Americans who claim a Native American identity could benefit from a better understanding of the historical sociolegal context in which contemporary notions of Indian identity are rooted…

Read the entire article here.

Negro History, Part X: Miscegenation in America

Ebony Magazine
October 1962
pages 94-104
(Digitized by Google)

Lerone Bennett, Jr., Executive Editor

The material in this chapter on miscegenation during the slavery period is based largely on James Hugo Johnston’s doctorial dissertation at the University of Chicago, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860; Carter Woodson’s article. “The Beginnings of The Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks” in The Journal of Negro History; and A. W. Calhoun’s study, A Social History of the American Family.

Sin. Sex. Race.

The three words took deep roots, intertwined and became one in the Puritan psyche. In the famous sermon preached at Whitechapel in 1609 for Virginia-bound planters and adventurers, the minister fused the words in a stern admonition against miscegenation. From Genesis he summoned the figure of Abram who left his country and his father’s house and migrated to a land God had prepared for his seed.

“Abram’s posteritie,” the preacher said, “(must) keepe to themselves. They may not marry nor give in marriage to the heathen, that are uncircumcised…  …The breaking of this rule, may breake the necke of all good successe of this voyage, whereas by keeping the feare of God, the planters in shorte time, by the blessing of God, may grow into a nation formidable to all the enemies of Christ.”

It was easier said than done.

From the beginning, English colonists, following Abram’s example, married and mated with Hagars—red and black. Even more distressing to the Puritan mind was the broad tolerance of the English women who married and mated with Hagars brothers. Proscription began early. In 1630, a bare 21 years after the Whitechapel sermon, one Hugh Davis was “soundly whipped before an assemblage of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christians by defiling his body in lying with a Negro…” Forty years later, white women were being whipped and sold into slavery and extended servitude for showing open preferences for Negro men. Alarmed by widespread miscegenation, colonists from South Carolina to Massachusetts began a systematic campaign which ultimately made the Whitechapel sermon the racial policy of the land. Every instrument of persuasion was used to teach white people that they should “not marry nor give in marriage” to Negroes. No amount of persuasion, however, could “keepe” whites to themselves.

Miscegenation in America started not in the thirteen original colonies but in Africa. English, French, Dutch and American slavetraders took black concubines on the Guinea coast and mated with females on the slave ships. It should be noted that many Africans and Europeans were themselves the products of thousands of years of mixing between various African, Asian and Caucasian peoples.

In and around Jamestown and the Massachusetts of Cotton Mather, there was an extensive trade in genes. Socio-economic conditions in the early colonies encouraged racial mingling. White men and women from England, Ireland and Scotland were bought and sold in the same markets with Negroes and bequeathed in the same wills. As indentured servants bound out for five or seven years, these whites worked in the fields with Negro servants and lived in the same rude tenant huts. A deep bond of sympathy developed between the Negro and white indentured servants who formed the bulk of the early population. They fraternized during off-duty hours and consoled themselves with the same strong rum. And in and out of wedlock, they sired a numerous mulatto brood.

When Negro servants were reduced to slavery, the colonial governing classes redoubled their efforts to stamp out racial mixing. Miscegenation in this era was not only a breach of Puritan morality, but it was also a threat to slavery and the stability of the servile labor force. As early as 1664, Maryland enacted the first anti-amalgamation statute. It was an astonishing document. The statute was aimed at white women who had resisted every effort to inoculate them with the virus of racial pride; and the preamble stated very clearly the reasons which drove white men to the extremity of enslaving white women.

And forasmuch as divers freeborn English women, forgetful of their free condition, and to the disgrace of our nation, do intermarry with negro slaves, by which also divers suits may arise, touching the issue of such women, and a great damage doth befall the master of such negroes, for preservation whereof for deterring such freehom women from such shameful matches, be it enacted: That whatsoever free-born woman shall intermarry with any slave, from and after the last day of the present assembly, shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband; and that all the issues of such free-born women, so married, shall be slaves as their fathers were.

This law failed to stay intermarriage. Some women chose love and slavery; others were reduced to slavery by scheming planters who forced them to marry Negro men in order to reap the additional economic benefits accruing from the extended service of the mothers and the perpetual slavery of their children. A celebrated case revolved around Irish Nell, an indentured servant who came over with Lord Baltimore. When Baltimore returned to England, he sold Irish Nell to a planter who forced or encouraged her to marry a Negro. Shocked by the practice of prostituting white women for economic purposes. Lord Baltimore used his influence to get the law changed. The new law was about as effective as the old one—which is to say, it was not effective at all. E. I. McConnac, the authority on white servitude in Maryland, said: “Mingling of the races in Maryland continued during the eighteenth century, in spite of all laws against it.”

Negro-white marriages, especially Negro male-white female marriages, were a problem in Virginia and other colonies. In 1691, Virginia restricted intermarriage. Similar laws were put on the books in Massachusetts in 1705, North Carolina in 1715. South Carolina in 1717. Shortly after the enactment of Virginia’s ban on intermarriage, Ann Wall was convicted of “keeping company with a Negro under pretense of marriage.” The Elizabeth County court sold Ann Wall for five years and bound out her two mulatto children for 31 years, and “it is further ordered,” the court said, “that ye said Ann Wall after she is free from her said master doe at any time presume to come into this county she shall be banished to ye Island of Barbadoes.”

In an unsuccessful attempt to halt intermingling, Pennsylvania banned intermarriage in 1725. Forty-five years later, during the glow of the Revolution, Pennsylvania repealed the ban on intermarriage. Thereafter, mixed marriages became common in Pennsylvania. Thomas Branagan visited Philadelphia in 1805 and averred that he had never seen so much intermingling. “There are,” he wrote, “many, very many blacks who… begin to feel themselves consequential… …will not be satisfied unless they get white women for wives, and are likewise exceedingly impertinent to white people in low circumstances… I solemnly swear, I have seen more white women married to, and deluded through the arts of seduction by negroes in one year in Philadelphia, than for eight years I was visiting (West Indies and the southern states)… …There are perhaps hundreds of white women thus fascinated by black men in this city and there are thousands of black children by them at present.”

Aristocrats did not always obey the rules they made. Benjamin Franklin, it is said, was quite open in his relationships with black women. Carter Woodson, the careful historian, says Franklin “seems to have made no secret of his associations with Negro women,” Well-to-do people usually stopped short of legal marriage, but there is evidence that some threw caution to the wind. The following item appears in the will of John Fenwick, the Lord Proprietor of New Jersey. “Item, I do except against Elizabeth Adams of having any ye leaste part of my estate, unless the Lord open her eyes to see her abominable transgression against him, me her good father, by giving her true repentance, and forsaking ye Black ye hath been ye ruin of her; and becoming penitent of her sins; upon ye condition only I do will and require my executors to settle five hundred acres of land upon her.”…

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Toward a Racial Abyss: Eugenics, Wickliffe Draper, and the Origins of the Pioneer Fund

Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences
Volume 38, Issue 3, (Summer 2002)
pages 259–283
DOI: 10:1002/jhbs.10063

Michael G. Kenny, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia

The Pioneer Fund was created in 1937 “to conduct or aid in conducting study and research into problems of heredity and eugenics.. and problems of race betterment with special reference to the people of the United States.” The Fund was endowed by Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper, a New England textile heir, and perpetuates his legacy through an active program of grants, some of the more controversial in aid of research on racial group differences. Those presently associated with the Fund maintain that it has made a substantial contribution to the behavioral and social sciences, but insider accounts of Pioneer’s history oversimplify its past and smooth over its more tendentious elements. This article examines the social context and intellectual background to Pioneer’s origins, with a focus on Col. Draper himself, his concerns about racial degeneration, and his relation to the eugenics movement. In conclusion, it evaluates the official history of the fund.

This article traces the historical roots of The Pioneer Fund, a still extant American charitable endowment founded in 1937 by textile heir Col. Wickliffe Preston Draper (1890–1972). The Fund, through its granting program, claims to have had a significant positive influence on the development of the behavioral sciences; but it has also attracted public attention because of its support for research on racial group differences. Pioneer’s beginnings reach back into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when eugenics emerged as a powerful and cosmopolitan social reform impulse; an exploration of the Fund’s origins sheds light both on that time and on the permutations of the eugenics movement that led to its present notoriety.

However, knowledge of Pioneer’s beginnings and social context remains fragmentary and dispersed, and here I use the papers of the American Eugenics Society (in the keeping of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia), and the Harry Laughlin papers (Library of Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri) to gain entrée into the circumstances surrounding the prehistory and early days of the Fund, particularly the attitudes and role of its founder, Wickliffe Draper.

Those circumstances have been smoothed over by figures central to the Fund’s current operation and, in conclusion, I will evaluate this revisionist history in light of the archival and supplemental material to be reviewed below…

…Davenport and Grant, among others, held that certain racial combinations—say Negro/White—are inherently “disharmonious” because the evolutionary histories of their aboriginal populations had gone down widely divergent paths. As Davenport put it, “miscegenation commonly spells disharmony—disharmony of physical, mental and temperamental qualities and this means also disharmony with environment. A hybridized people are a badly put together people and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffective people” (1917, p. 366). Madison Grant feared that, if the American “Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control,” it will sweep the “nation toward a racial abyss” because miscegenation always leads to a evolutionary reversion toward the lower type in the mix. “The cross between a white man and a negro is a negro… the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (1916, p. 228; for more on racial “disharmony” see Barkan, 1992, p. 165; Baur, Fischer, & Lenz, 1931, p. 692; Glass, 1986, p. 132; Provine, 1973; Stepan, 1985; Tucker, 1994, pp. 64–67).

The investigation of race mixing from a Mendelian point of vieww as pioneered by German anthropologist Eugen Fischer, who—armed with Davenport’s early studies of human heredity—undertook an innovative field study of “die Rehobother Bastards,” a Boer/Hottentot mixed-race population in the then German colony of South-West Africa (Fischer, 1913; see Massin, 1996). Fischer’s general aim was to decouple the effects of heredity and environment through detailed biometric and genealogical studies of a discrete and nowrelatively endogamous population of mixed race origins (Massin, 1996, pp. 122–123). The “Bastards” had the advantage of being an isolated group with well known family ties, unlike the situation in the United States, in which persons of mixed-race ancestry had been “subsumed in a lower, completely undefinable mixed-race proletariat” (1913, p. 21). As late as 1939, Fischer’s monograph was still regarded as the “classic study of race mixture” (Hooton, 1939, p. 156)…

…By definition a “white” person could have no known trace of nonwhite blood (including Asian), whereas a nonwhite person was anyone who did—except when it came to those who were one-sixteenth native Indian or less, and were therefore defined as equivalent to whites in legal terms. This logic was based on a perception of just who most of the contemporary “Indians” of Virginia actually were. Plecker believed that, because of long standing miscegenation between the two communities, most of those who identified themselves as “Indian” were in effect negroes attempting to pass as white (Plecker, 1924).

Though not arising out of any particular love for Indians, the one-sixteenth rule had an interesting motivation: so as to not exclude from the white race the many proud descendants of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. Disputes about racial identity, legitimacy, and validity of marriage generated by such legislation have provided considerable subsequent diversion for legal historians (Avins 1966; Pascoe 1996; Saks 1988; Wallenstein 1998).

Plecker had already corresponded with Charles Davenport about the quality of white/Indian/black mixed-race populations, and was included among those whom Wickliffe Draper should meet. Plecker and Cox accordingly traveled north in June to visit with Draper in New York; they also stopped by to see Madison Grant, and were feted by the Laughlins at Cold Spring Harbor. Cox gave a talk at the Museum of Natural History on the topic of repatriation, and there was further discussion of a possible Virginia-based endowment to advance the cause of eugenics (Plecker to Laughlin, 8 June 1936; see Smith, 1993, pp. 80–81).

What Draper envisioned was nothing less than the establishment of an Institute of National Eugenics (or perhaps “Institute of Applied Eugenics”) at the University of Virginia, aimed at “conservation of the best racial stocks in the country” and “preventing increase of certain of the lower stocks and unassimilable races.” Laughlin observed that the University “has a tradition of American aristocracy which the nation treasures very highly.” It therefore seemed a promising venue, as did the South in general—“because of its historical background and traditional racial attitude”—ready to assume leadership in defense of the American racial stock (Laughlin to Draper, draft letter; 18 March 1936). In his survey of the American racial makeup, Madison Grant found that “with Virginia one reaches the region where the old native American holds his ground” (Grant, 1934, p. 226)…

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