Mixed Race Studies

The Mulatto Problem

The Journal of Heredity
Volume 16, Number 8 (August 1925)
pages 281-286

Ernest Dodge
Washington, D. C.

The numerous races and subraces of mankind could hardly have maintained their distinct existence to so late a date in history save for the geographical barrier generally found between different stocks. The only other bulwarks against amalgamation are artificial caste distinctions and such degree of mutual repulsion or lessened attraction as may exist when racial characteristics differ in the extreme.

Whenever and wherever the one dependable barrier of geographic separation between two radically different types is swept away, it should be the business of Eugenics to investigate the biological results of crossing. If these prove to be beneficial or even neutral, then artificial walls of caste should be discouraged, as these are always inconvenient and may become intolerable. But if the results of amalgamation are found to be markedly injurious, then eugenic research will not only strengthen the force of social inhibition but lift it from the plane of mere prejudice or pride to the level of an ethical mandate. In the United States a problem exists which demands extensive and impartial eugenic research,’ but which unfortunately has never received it on any adequate scale. Nine-tenths of our population are a heterogeneous mixture of many European races which collectively we call by the misnomer of “Caucasian.” The other one-tenth belong to a type so different and so prepotent for perpetuating their differences in mixed offspring, that present-day sentiment is strongly crystalized against amalgamation of the two populations.

We should err, however, if we assumed that caste barriers now existent keeping black and white America distinct throughout all centuries to come. Past history would point to a different expectation. Probably one in five of the Afro-American people has enough of the Caucasian in his makeup to be noticed by an observer, while doubtless many considered to be full blacks have one-eighth or one-sixteenth part of white ancestry. True it is that the major part of this influx of white blood occurred a considerable time ago, having been tolerated by a- sort of patriarchal moral code under slavery and in the earlier years after emancipation. Improvement in education, economic condition, and racial self respect has doubtless reduced the number of colored mothers willing to consent to extra-legal unions; and the sentiment also of the majority race is probably less tolerant than formerly toward such alliances. As for legal intermarriage, it has always been too infrequent to be the leading factor in the problem.

But the saying is a true one that “you can’t un-scramble eggs.” Unless it should be a fact that the children and grandchildren of mulattoes are inferior to pure negroes in fertility and viability, the composite complexion of the Afro-American community must inevitably grow lighter as the centuries succeed one another. For it cannot be expected that the interbreeding of two contiguous populations will ever be reduced to zero. And every child that shall ever be born of a mixed union increases permanently the percentage of European blood in the colored population. The process might indeed be slow, but it could work in only one direction.

It becomes, therefore, a matter of real importance to learn what the ultimate results of past or future intermingling will be. The present article is meant in part as a plea for the endowment of scientific research in ways that will be indicated before we close…

…(IV.) There is one final possibility that must be reckoned with, though it is contrary to all prevailing ideals. That is that race and caste barriers may sometime in the long centuries be quite swept away and the entire American people become a race of quintroons. Such a thing will not come about by any cataclismic break in existing customs. But the foregoing discussion points the way to its final possibility—unless eugenic researches should prove such a result to be so radically undesirable that society would erect against miscegenation a bulwark of caste thrice stronger even than now…

…And then as for the white race: if impartial research should conceivably prove that’even the smallest admixture of colored blood is a pronounced racial handicap, lessening the mental processes, the moral fiber, fecundity and the resistance to disease, then it would become a duty to the future to maintain and further strengthen at any cost all barriers against amalgamation. But if, on the other hand, the most careful research should indicate that the results of an ultimate “quintroonifying” of America would be at the utmost no worse – than neutral, then would our people be justified in ceasing to worry about the future and in letting each coming generation handle its own caste problem with whatever degree of laxity or vigor shall best suit its own predilections, immediate conditions, or conscience…

Read the entire article here.

“A Whole New Race”: Chinese Cubans and Hybrid Identities in Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 7, Issues 1 & 2 (Fall 2009)
14 paragraphs
ISSN 1547-7150

Ann Marie Alfonso-Forero, Dissertation Editor
Graduate School, University of Miami

More so than its predecessors Dreaming in Cuban and The Agüero Sisters, Cristina García’s 2003 novel Monkey Hunting establishes her sense of Cubanness within the broader context of the Caribbean experience. More importantly, it seeks to create an inclusive and diverse sense of what it means to be Cuban that destabilizes the very notion of racial identification, which fails to account for the dynamic nature of identity and the importance of adopted cultural and religious traditions. What Monkey Hunting offers as an alternative is a process of identification through self-chosen cultural and religious hybridities that provides a source of agency in a time and place fraught with various forms of brutal and racialized socio-political oppression.
 
García, a Cuban-born novelist who has spent all but her first two years of life in the United States, addresses issues of race and identity in her previous novels, but does so in a way that makes use of themes and historical events closer to her own experience. These narratives take on Castro’s revolution, the condition of exile, and family politics and division, and are equally concerned with Cuba as they are with Cuban-American culture in the United States. Monkey Hunting surprised critics with its broader concerns and unusual subject matter. When asked during an interview in L.A. Weekly what made her choose to write about the legacy of a Chinese man in Cuba, García answered:

Monkey Hunting probably came from my first visit to a Chinese-Cuban restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, circa 1965. “You mean I get to order the black beans and the pork fried rice?” That blew my mind. Later, I got to thinking more seriously about compounded identities. My own daughter, for example, is part Cuban, Japanese and Russian Jew, with a little Guatemalan thrown in on my paternal grandmother’s side. Traditional notions of identity don’t work for her. I don’t think they work for a lot of people anymore. I wanted to explore this. (Huneven 38)

This response calls attention to García’s preoccupation with hybridity, which is evident throughout the text’s various narrative threads. Spanning over 150 years, four generations, and at least three continents, the novel concerns itself with issues of slavery, indentured servitude, colonization, the sugar plantation, and Cuba’s complex racial and political history, and presents readers with a Cuban identity that is inclusive of the Asian and African presences on the island. This paper argues that through the narrative of Chen Pan and his family, García explores the ways in which self-chosen hybridities allow for the inclusion of both Chinese and African cultures in Cuban identity and function against patriarchal Spanish colonial paradigms that tend to restrict identification along the lines of race and gender. Privileging cultural and religious hybridities over fixed racial identifications, García celebrates her characters’ ability to create fluid and dynamic identities, even if she is at moments ambiguous about the role of racial politics in their choices. Moreover, this preoccupation allows the novel to participate in Caribbean discourses surrounding race since, as Antonio Benítez-Rojo points out, “the Caribbean area… [is the] most extensive and intensive racial confluence registered by human histories” (199), and Cuba is no exception. Reading the novel as distinctly Caribbean, while also acknowledging it as a product of the Cuban-American exile community, requires that due attention be paid to issues of race and hybridity…

Read the entire article here.

Skin Color of Mulattoes

Journal of Heridity
Volume 5, Number 12 (December 1914)
pages 556-558

Charles B. Davenport, Director
Department of Experimental Evolution
(Carnegie Institution of Washington)
Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York

Apparently Four Factors Involved—Segregation in Second Generation—Skin Pigment Developed After Birth—No Correlation Between Color of Skin and Curliness of Hair in Offspring of Mulatto Marriages.

The method of heredity in negro-white crosses has long been cited as a demonstration of the failure of modern principles of heredity in their application to some specific cases. Skin color is said to show a typical blending, as in the mulatto, and it is generally assumed that all of the offspring of two mulattoes resemble their parents in skin color; and if a mulatto be crossed with a white that all of the offspring will be of a shade still lighter than the mulatto parent, namely, of a quadroon color. The current theory also has a great social importance because according to it, “once a negro, always a negro;” since the negro characteristics can not be wholly eliminated even by successive matings with white. However, as a concession, certain States even in our South permit the offspring of a person containing one-eighth negro blood and a pure white to pass as a white citizen and to marry, legally, a white person. That is, after matings of a mulatto and her offspring for two further generations with white persons the final generation may pass for white…

VARIATION IN MULATTO PROGENY The family of a white man of colored ancestry, and a mulatto woman. All seven sons and daughters are shown in the photograph. The infant is the lightest, with 8% black in the skin; this will doubtless darken with age. The son at the extreme right of the picture has 22% black in his skin; the boy at the extreme left has 26% black. (Fig. 17.)

OFFSPRING OF WHITE X MULATTO MATING Part of the “W” family, including a medium colored mother and six of her seven children by a white man; also a little first cousin of the other children, who is directly in front of the mother. Note the great variation in the facial coloration of full brothers and sisters. The skin color of the youngest child is the same as that of a typical white infant, namely, 5% black, whereas the oldest boy of the group has a skin color of 32%black, considerably darker than his mother. (Fig. 18.)

Read the entire article here.

The Chinese in the Caribbean [Book Reveiw]

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal
Volume 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2005)
8 paragraphs
ISSN 1547-7150

Kathryn Morris

Andrew R. Wilson, Editor. The Chinese in the Caribbean. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2004, xxiii+230 pp.

The Hakka are a migratory people. We move outwards on the tides of history. Most of us have relatives in Surinam, Panama, the British West Indies, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and other parts of South-east Asia. After several more generations in Canada, will it still be significant that we sojourned for a few generations in Jamaica? For now and as far we can see, that is how we identify ourselves and that is also how we are perceived by the wider Canadian community . . . In this generation we became part of a North American community, with significant concentration in Miami, New York, Toronto and other U.S. and Canadian cities and even London, England, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan.

—Patrick A. Lee, Canadian Jamaican Chinese 2000.

Culturally, the signifier “Chinese” in the Caribbean context has evolved into a broad term that encompasses the latest group of emigrants to the region; the hyphenated (Trinidadian, Jamaican, etc.), third- or fourth-generation, mixed-ancestry Chinese; and the countless members of the Chinese Caribbean Diaspora who are still “on the move.” Toronto, home to a large population of people who define themselves as Chinese—insert Caribbean country here—Canadian, has become a major center for Chinese Caribbean diasporan activity aimed at maintaining connections to the Caribbean and to China. For example, Patrick Lee’s work, excerpted above, presents pictorial and narrative histories of Jamaican Chinese families spanning five generations; Lee’s work pays tributes to his father, Lee Tom Yin’s earlier work, Chinese in Jamaica (1957), which commemorated the 100-year anniversary of the Chinese arrival in Jamaica. Reaching further out into the world, the celebrity of Jamaican reggae artist Sean Paul, who claims Chinese among his ancestors, has put the Chinese-Caribbean connection in the international spotlight. This substantial community is now a dragon with a foot on every continent and is growing in size and visibility. Andrew R. Wilson’s The Chinese in the Caribbean, which begins with the statement, “The macro-historical significance of Chinese emigration [since the 1830s] is undeniable,” is the latest publication to bring critical attention to this Caribbean and global phenomenon (vii).
 
The Chinese in the Caribbean is a collection of eight essays that together provide a fairly detailed overview about the Chinese presence in the Caribbean. Divided into three parts—The British West Indies, Cuba, and Re-Migration and Re-Imagining Identity—this book manages to be accessible to those seeking introductory information on the topic, and yet detailed enough for scholars to engage in topical research.
 
Read the entire reveiw here.

Hybrid Types of the Human Race: Racial Mixture as a Cause of Conspicuous Morphological Changes of the Facial-type

The Journal of Heredity
Volume 12, Number 6 (June 1921)
pages 274-280

Herman Lundborg (1868-1943)
Race-Biological Institution, Uppsala, Sweden

It has been possible for recent hereditary research to show that some racial qualities are inherited according to Mendel’s law. In 1913, Eugen Fischer, the anthropologist, made a close study of questions of this kind and laid a scientific foundation for hybrid research in the human world.

The morphological race-characters, which are formed through an early and complete ossification—for instance the form, the length, the breadth of the skull etc.—seem to be depending upon heredity in a higher degree than, for instance, the length of the body, which is more easily modified by environmental factors, which depend upon an ossification completed at a later period. I have treated this latter question in a recent communication.

During my travels and investigations in the far north of Sweden, among the population there, which has originated through strong race-mingling among Lapps, Finns and Swedes principally, I could not help noticing that the types vary in a very high degree, and that not unfrequently certain obvious changes of the facial type appear, which do not appear among individuals of a purer race. The numerous recombinations of the genetic structure are probably important causes for this circumstance. There will spring up, it seems to me, in these racial hybrids, besides qualities depending solely on the germ-plasm, in many respects stronger modifications, which probably are to be considered as a partial atrophy. Similar phenomena are often observed in crossings in the vegetable and the animal world…

List of Figures

• RACIAL MIXTURE IN ROYAL FAMILIES
• TYPES OF RACIAL MIXTURE IN SWEDEN
• RACIAL MIXTURES IN SWEDEN
• MIXED TYPES OF UNCIVILIZED PEOPLES

Read the entire article here.

Why Barack Obama Is Black: A Cognitive Account of Hypodescent

Psychological Science
Volume 22, Number 1 (January 2011)
pages 29-33
DOI: 10.1177/0956797610390383

Jamin Halberstadt, Associate Professor of Psychology
University of Otago

Steven J. Sherman, Chancellor’s Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Indiana University, Bloomington

Jeffrey W. Sherman, Professor of Psychology
University of California, Davis

We propose that hypodescent—the assignment of mixed-race individuals to a minority group—is an emergent feature of basic cognitive processes of learning and categorization. According to attention theory, minority groups are learned by attending to the features that distinguish them from previously learned majority groups. Selective attention creates a strong association between minority groups and their distinctive features, producing a tendency to see individuals who possess a mixture of majority- and minority-group traits as minority-group members. Two experiments on face categorization, using both naturally occurring and manipulated minority groups, support this view, suggesting that hypodescent need not be the product of racist or political motivations, but can be sufficiently explained by an individual’s learning history.

Read or purchase the article here.

Another Woolly-Hair Mutation in Man

The Journal of Heredity
Volume 25, Number 9 (September 1934)
pages 337-340

C. Ph. Schokking
Rotterdam, Holland

A Dutch peasant family living near Leiden carries a dominant gene for a type of woolly hair characteristic of the Negro races. This is not to be explained as due to race crossing for two reasons.  In the first place there is no tradition in the family of an infusion of Negro blood and no other evidence of anything but pure Dutch ancestry. Furthermore, hair form behaves in racial crosses not as a simple dominant character but as a “blending” character (in which to or more genes are involved).  Thus simple mendelian inheritance of hair form is not found in Negro-white crosses. Among such hybrids various degrees of curly and wavy hair are observed, and in later generations wooly hare may appear but only where both parents are partly Negro. Thus the occurrence of woolly hair in this family is clear due to mutation rather than race hybridization.

While studying twins in Leiden in 1929 and 1930, I encountered a pair of non-identical twin sisters, one of whom had remarkably curly hair. Since little is known of the inheritance of such genuine woolly hair among Europeans, I followed up the history of this pair. It soon transpired that in the village of Rijnsburg, near Leiden, whence the girls came, many woolly-haired persons were to be found, and that all of these belonged to the same family. After a deal of effort I was able to put together a pedigree chart covering five generations (Figure 3). The founder of the family had already died and no photograph of him was to be had, but an old Rijnsburger, who knew both this man and his father, was able to give me definite information that both of them had woolly hair…

Read the entire article here.

The Skin Color of Children from White By Near-White Marriages

The Journal of Heredity
Volume 38, Number 8 (August 1947)
pages 233-234

Curt Stern (1902-1981), Professor of Zoology and Genetics [Read a biographical memoir by James V. Neel here.]
University of California, Berkeley

It is well known that the inheritance of color differences in negro-white crosses is based on multiple genes, as first postulated by Gertrude C. and Charles B. Davenport in 1910. Most textbooks present the specific hypothesis first proposed by Davenport  that two pairs of genes are involved which act cumulatively and with intermediate effects in heterozygotes, so that negro pigmentation may be symbolized by AABB, white by aabb and various shades of diverse hybrid pigmentation by AABb, and AaBB (dark mulatto) AAbb, aaBB, and AaBb (mulatto), and aaBb and Aabb (light mulatto). In a general way this hypothesis fits the data on negro-white hybrids collected by Davenport. Undoubtedly, however, it is at best only a first approximation. Pigmentation is greatly variable in either whites or negroes. While it is known that much of this variability is inherited, little information is available as to the specific genetic conditions underlying the degrees and types of pigmentation found in either group. Correspondingly limited is our knowledge of the interaction of the “minor” genes for pigment variability with each other and with the “major” ones in negro-white crosses.

Read the entire article here.

Immigration, Intermarriage, and the Challenges of Measuring Racial/Ethnic Identities

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1735-1737
DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.90.11.1735

Mary C. Waters, M. E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology
Harvard University

This commentary reviews recent demographic trends in immigration and intermarriage that contribute to the complexity of measuring race and ethnicity. The census question on ancestry is proposed as a possible model for what we might expect with the race question in the 2000 census and beyond. Through the use of ancestry data, changes in ethnic identification by individuals over the course of their lives, by generation, and according to census question directions are documented. It is pointed out that the once-rigid lines that divided European-origin groups from one another have increasingly blurred. All of these changes are posited as becoming more likely for groups we now define as “racial.” While it is acknowledged that race and ethnicity will become increasingly difficult to measure as multiple racial identities become more common and more likely to be reported, it is argued that monitoring discrimination is crucial for the continued collection of such data.

Read the entire article here.

Race: I’m Just Who I am

Time Magazine
1997-05-05

Jack E. White, Washington

Tamala M. Edwards, Washington

Elaine Lafferty, Los Angeles

Sylvester Monoroe, Los Angeles

Victoria Rainert, New York

His nickname notwithstanding, professional golfer Frank (“Fuzzy”) Zoeller saw Tiger Woods quite clearly. He gazed upon the new king of professional golf, through whose veins runs the blood of four continents, and beheld neither a one-man melting pot nor even a golfing prodigy but a fried-chicken-and-collard- greens-eating Sambo. Zoeller saw Woods, in short, as just another stereotype, condemned by his blackness to the perpetual status of “little boy.”

Zoeller soon paid a price for saying openly what many others were thinking secretly. K Mart, the discount chain with a big African-American clientele, unceremoniously dumped him as the sponsor of a line of golf clothing and equipment, and he abjectly withdrew from the Greater Greensboro Open tournament. “People who know me know I’m a jokester. I just didn’t deliver the line well,” Zoeller tearfully explained. But his real crime was not, as he and his defenders seem to think, merely a distasteful breach of racial etiquette or an inept attempt at humor. The real crime was falling behind the times. The old black-white stereotypes are out of date, and Zoeller is just the latest casualty of America’s failure to come to grips with the perplexing and rapidly evolving significance of racial identity in what is fast becoming the most polyglot society in history.

If current demographic trends persist, midway through the 21st century whites will no longer make up a majority of the U.S. population. Blacks will have been overtaken as the largest minority group by Hispanics. Asians and Pacific Islanders will more than double their number of 9.3 million in 1995 to 19.6 million by 2020. An explosion of interracial, interethnic and interreligious marriages will swell the ranks of children whose mere existence makes a mockery of age-old racial categories and attitudes. Since 1970, the number of multiracial children has quadrupled to more than 2 million, according to the Bureau of the Census. The color line once drawn between blacks and whites—or more precisely between whites and nonwhites—is breaking into a polygon of dueling ethnicities, each fighting for its place in the sun.

For many citizens the “browning of America” means a disorienting plunge into an uncharted sea of identity. Zoeller is far from alone in being confused about the complex tangle of genotypes and phenotypes and cultures that now undercut centuries-old verities about race and race relations in the U.S. Like many others, he hasn’t got a clue about what to call the growing ranks of people like Woods who inconveniently refuse to be pigeonholed into one of the neat, oversimplified racial classifications used by government agencies–and, let’s face it, most people. Are they people of color? Mixed race? Biracial? Whatever they like?…

Read the entire article here.