Mixed Race Studies

Race-crossing and glands: Some human hybrids and their parent stocks

Eugenics Review
Volume 23, Number 1 (April 1931)
pages 31-40

Jon Alfred Mjöen, Director
Vindern Biological Laboratory (Oslo, Norway)

(Paper read at the ninth meeting, 1930, at he the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations.)

The earlier displacements of population, the migrations of which history relates, usually took place during long epochs of time.  Amongst the greatest were the migrations of the Arabs, the Semites, and the Mongols.  These wholesale movements of population were of quite a different character from the Viking raids from the Mediterranean lands and Northern France, the Gothic invasion of Italy and Spain, the Norman’s conquering expeditions to England, the expulsion of the Huguenots, or the emigration of Puritans to the United States, and the Walloons to Sweden.

But even the most stupendous invasions that history records, hardly assumed such dimensions as the movements of population we have witnessed in our own days.  The system of control that is called inspection of passports shows, for example, that the racial elements of alien origin which in a three-year period after the War have crossed into Central Europe from East, number no less that 600,000.  The emigrants from the East settled in Berlin, Paris, and other large cities (according as the rate of exchange varied), and to-day they form a constantly increasing contingent of Asiatics, Russians, Poles, Galicians, Greeks, and various others.  New York alone was invaded, in the course of a three-year period, by a similar contingent of foreign racial elements amounting to about on and half million.

Nobody who with open eyes has observed the masses in the great modern cities, Paris, Berlin, New York, Chicago, will have failed to be struck by the manner in which the racial physiognomy of the population is in process of changing.  Clean, open racial features are becoming more and more rare in these masses in the slums, which in the real sense of the word are amorphous.  All unity of form is dissolved, and a hideous confusion of all possible coulours and shapes from all the races of the earth has taken place.

The picture which we see before our eyes everyday, so to speak, on journeys in Europe, North Africa, and America, raises a question of importance: What will be the effect, the final result of this gigantic blood-mixing?  The picture gives an impression of lack of guiding-instinct, lack of stability and balance.  But is this lack of balance a result of social or biological causes; and have we any reason to believe that crossing with foreign races will have a deleterious effect upon the native stock?…

…Hybrids’ Tempermental Instability

In full agreement with this suggestion of glandular disturbance is the general opinion of biologists that the human hybrid shows a typical instability in mental and moral respects—a want of balance.  His motives and actions are incalculable, his impulses stronger that his self-control. I feel more and more convinced that the inmates of our prisons and asylums are to a large extent recruited from these types of mixed race, who numbers are constantly rising on account of increasing intercourse between populations from all parts of the world.

A special group of individuals which is causing a great deal of trouble in our northern countries, Norway and Sweden, is the Gipsy (tater) group. We know very litte about their origin, except that they are badly race-mixed and have all the characteristics of unbalanced hybrids.  They are vagabonds, beggars, loafers, and criminals.  Whole families of this hybrid population are filling up our prisons and asylums.

One hears, of course, of prominent hybrids—Booker Washington, the American teacher and reformer, was a Mulatto, and Porfirio Díaz, President of Mexico, was a Mestizo. But they are exceptions to the rule, and they are few compared with the enormous number of human hybrids all over the world.  We find it very often stated that the famous Swedish writer August Strindberg, was of very “mixed ascendency.”  I do not know how far this is assertion is to be relied upon.  But what would be likely to be the result if we advocated race-crossing on such premisses?  If by deliberate experimental breeding of men we could produce 10,000 ‘Stindberg blends,’ we should obtain no small contigent with Strindberg’s brutality, his melancholy, his capriciousness, his violent temper, his pessimism, his cynicism towards women (though he married four times), and all his lack of self-control—and yet we might be cheated of the expected types with Strindberg’s creative genius…

Read the entire article here.

Hierarchies of whiteness in the geographies of empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barrets of Jamaica

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
Volume 80, Numbers 1&2 (2006)
pages 5-43
DOI: 10.1163/13822373-90002486

Cecilla A. Green, Associate Professor, Sociology
Maxwell School of Syracuse University

Shows how a racial solidarity between whites in colonial Jamaica during slavery developed, but covered class differences between whites. Author examines the differences between the lesser-white, socially mobile settlers, and the upper plantocracy. She looks especially at social-structural factors, in particular genealogy and reproduction, that separated upper plantocratic families and dynasties, with connections with Britain, e.g. through absentee plantation owners, from less wealthy white settlers, that obtained intermediate positions as overseers, and generally were single males. She relates this further to the context with a white minority and a majority of slaves, and with relatively less women than men among the whites, that influenced differing reproductive patterns. The upper-class tended to achieve white marrying partners from Britain, alongside having children with slaves or people of colour, while lower-class whites mostly reproduced only in this last way. Author exemplifies this difference by juxtaposing the family histories and relationships, and relative social positions of Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer who came alone, and had an intermediate position, and the upper-class wealthy Barrett family, who were large land and slave owners, and established a powerful white dynasty in Jamaica, with British connections, over centuries, and that also included, sidelined, coloured offspring.

…Even here there are important qualifications. Thistlewood is not a candidate for the dual marriage system who decides to forego the benefits of a White wife in part because of the assurance of other conditions of reproduction that guarantee full maintenance of class status. This is true, for example, of George Goodin Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s great-uncle, discussed below, who mates exclusively (at least, in self-acknowledged terms) with a mulatto slave, Elissa Peters. Their children suffer a fate not untypical of the offspring of such couplings: they are not given the Barrett name, but they are sent to England to be schooled and domiciled according to the terms of their father’s will, and they receive secondary (and inevitably contestable) bequests. Thistlewood, in contrast, gives his son John his name. He does not have the economic wherewithal or the genealogical amplitude and latitude to school him in England, and evinces no aspirations or plans to that effect. John is schooled locally and is later apprenticed to a master carpenter, William Hornby.

It should be pointed out here that not all large planter names were so closely guarded (outside of the widespread process of giving estate slaves the surnames of their owners). Another strategy, pursued by Martin or Martyn Williams, the dually married husband of George’s properly pedigreed first cousin (who later becomes the widowed mistress of George’s brother), was to both pass on the name and petition the courts to declare his illegitimate mixed-race children, whose mother was a free Black woman, legally White. To complicate matters, there is a third option that both Williams’s “dual marriage” obligations and the changed inheritance laws of his and George’s time preclude him from pursuing (whatever his personal inclinations): bequeathing his main properties to Colored heirs. His properties are passed on to his legitimate White heirs. The case of Molly or Mary Cope (née Dorill), the fully endowed illegitimate quadroon daughter of Thistlewood’s late employer (now his employer, under coverture of her White husband) is different, but in part only because of the absence of competing claims from a “legitimate” White family. She appears to us, through the admittedly limited medium of Thistlewood’s cryptic daily log, as the tragic dupe of a strategy to re-inscribe and recover a proper plantocratic and racial destiny for the at-risk property and lineage of her paternal ancestry. Once she has fulfilled all the right conditions she becomes practically dispensable. She confides to Thistlewood that her husband “wants her to cut the entail off and settle upon him for life” (Hall 1999:70). She is being pressed to transfer title to the estate to her abusive and incompetent White husband…

Read the entire article here.

Social Status, Race, and the Timing of Marriage in Cuba’s First Constitutional Era, 1902-1940

Journal of Family History
Volume 36, Number 1 (December 2010)
pages 52-71
DOI: 10.1177/0363199010389546

Enid Lynette Logan, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

This article examines the practice of marriage among whites, mestizos, blacks, Cubans, and Spaniards during the first constitutional era, focusing upon the reported ages of brides and grooms. The study consists of a quantitative examination of trends found in the records of 900 Catholic marriages celebrated in Havana during the opening decades of independence. The first major finding of the research is that according to most major indicators of status, age was negatively correlated with rank. Thus, contrary to the conclusions of studies conducted in many other contexts, those in the highest strata of society married younger. Furthermore, very significant differences were detected in the marital patterns of those identified as mixed-race and those labeled as black. This finding offers empirical weight to the notion that the early-mid twentieth-century Cuban racial structure would best be characterized as tripartite, rather than binary in nature.

Read or purchase the article here.

Half-Caste [Book Review]

The Eugenics Review
Volume 29, Number 2 (July 1937)
pages 141-142

Reviewed by Michael Fielding

Dover, Cedric. Half-Caste. London, 1937. Secker & Warburg. Pp. 324. Price 1os. 6d.

This book is dedicated to a member of the Council of the Eugenics Society. So if we are a bad lot, as bad as the author in his handpicked quotations from very back numbers of the review implies, there is at least one righteous person among us. It would be interesting to know why Mr. Dover, who carefully tells us that he completed this work in October 1936, and who has been in fairly close contact with the work and personalities of this Society, did not think it was anywhere worth mentioning that earlier in that year the Eugenics Society elected a Darwin Research student for the express purpose of studying the problems of race mixture; which is not a very sensible way of spending its money if the subject is one about which it has made up its mind. In the only reference that we can find to the Society’s present views on ethnic-crossing Mr. Dover tempers his disapproval, but so grudgingly and ungenerously as to give further point to his attack. The fact is that against eugenics Mr. Dover has much the same kind of prejudices that many persons have against the products of race-mixture. We believe that both he and they are mistaken. Mr. Dover would correct his errors by reading the Eugenics Review; they by reading his admirably written Half-Caste…

His theme, summarized in a short sentence, is that there is no genuine scientific case against miscegenation. What often masquerades as such, and is presented as a case based upon the objective study of genetical and anthropological data, proves on Mr. Dover’s examination to be no more than a rationalization of colour prejudices, imperialism, and xenophobia. “To-day there are no half-castes because there are no fullcastes.”

“Accepting the validity of the racial view,” he writes, “it becomes clear that the attributes and status of marginal communities are essentially functions of their physical and social environment, and not of Divine displeasure or some mysterious incompatibility of ‘blood,’ a fluid which has nothing to do with informed social discussion. Certainly, there are disharmonic and socially maladjusted individuals in such communities. Perhaps, too, their incidence is higher than it is among more integrated groups, though that remains to be proved, but they are susceptible to the same methods of improvement that are applied to ‘pure’ peoples. I subscribe without qualification to the prevention of undeniably dysgenic matings, whether exogamous or endogamous, but not to the conceit that colour and economic success are indices of desirability.”…

Read the entire review here.

[Note from Steven F. Riley:  For more information about Cedric Dover, read Lucy Bland’s “British Eugenics and ‘Race Crossing’: a Study of an Interwar Investigation.”]

Bob Marley ‘blacked up’ to blend in

The Independent
2010-12-04

Rob Sharp, Arts Correspondent

Reggae superstar Bob Marley suffered due to his mixed-race background

Bob Marley preached inner peace and serenity to the masses, but was so racked by angst over his race that he used shoe polish to blacken his hair, according to a new book.

Such insecurities, during Marley’s teenage years in Kingston, Jamaica, contrast strongly with the reggae superstar’s image around the world.

…Marley’s widow, Rita, is quoted in the book—entitled I and I: The Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh and Wailer—as saying that her husband was so racially sensitised and aware of bullying for having a fairer complexion that he asked her to “rub shoe polish in his hair to make it more black; make it more African.”

The author, Colin Grant, has interviewed members of Marley’s inner circle for the book, released in January [2011]. These include Marley’s late mother Cedella Booker and Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records.

Grant explained: “When Marley moved to Trench Town in Kingston aged 13 he was thought of as a white man and would have got a lot of grief for that.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Mulatto Millennium: Rethinking blackness in a multiracial world

Utne Reader
September/October 1998

Danzy Senna, from the book Half and Half

Strange to wake up and realize you’re in style. That’s what happened to me just the other morning. It was the first day of the new millennium, and I woke to find that mulattos had taken over. They were everywhere. Playing golf, running the airwaves, opening restaurants, modeling clothes, starring in musicals with names like Show Me the Miscegenation! The radio played a steady stream of Lenny Kravitz, Sade, and Mariah Carey. I thought I’d died and gone to Berkeley. But then I realized that, according to the racial zodiac, 2000 is the official Year of the Mulatto. Pure breeds (at least black ones) are out; hybridity is in. America loves us in all of our half-caste glory. The president announced on Friday that beige will be the official color of the millennium.

Before all of this radical ambiguity, I considered myself a black girl. Not your ordinary black girl, if such a thing exists. But rather, a black girl with a WASP mother and black-Mexican father, and a face that harks back to Andalusia, not Africa. I was born in 1970, when black described a people bonded not by shared complexion or hair texture but by shared history.

Not only was I black, but I sneered at those by-products of miscegenation who chose to identify as mixed, not black. I thought it wishy-washy, an act of flagrant assimilation, treason-passing, even. I was an enemy of the mulatto people…

…Let it be clear—my parents’ decision to raise us as black wasn’t based on any one-drop-of-blood rule from the days of slavery, and it certainly wasn’t based on our appearance, that crude reasoning many black-identified mixed people use: If the world sees me as black, I must be black. If it had been based on appearance, my sister would have been black and my brother Mexican, and I Jewish. Instead, my parents’ decision arose out of the black power movement, which made identifying as black not a pseudoscientific rule but a conscious choice. Now that we don’t have to anymore, we choose to. Because black is beautiful. Because black is not a burden, but a privilege…

…These days, M.N. folks in Washington have their own census category—multiracial—but the extremist wing of the Mulatto Nation finds it inadequate. They want to take things a step further. I guess they have a point. Why lump us all together? Eskimos have 40 different words for snow. In South Africa, during apartheid, they had 14 different types of coloreds. But we’ve decided on one word, multiracial, to describe a whole nation of diverse people who have absolutely no relation, cultural or otherwise, to one another. In light of this deficiency, I propose the following coinages:

Standard Mulatto: White mother, black father. Half-nappy hair, skin described as “pasty yellow” in winter but turns caramel tan in summer. Germanic-Afro features. Often raised in isolation from others of its kind. Does not discover “black identity” till college, when there is usually some change in hair, clothing, or speech, so that the parents don’t recognize the child who arrives home for Christmas vacation (“Honey, there’s a black kid at the door”).

African American: The most common form of mulatto in North America, this breed, seldom described as mixed, is a combination of African, European, and Native American. May come in any skin tone, from any cultural background. Often believe themselves to be “pure” due to historical distance from the original mixture, which was most often achieved through rape.

Jewlatto: The second most prevalent form, this breed is made in the commingling of Jews and blacks who met when they were registering voters down South during Freedom Summer or at a CORE meeting. Jewlattos often, though not necessarily, have a white father and black mother (as opposed to the more common black father and white mother). They are likely to be raised in a diverse setting (New York City, Berkeley), around others of their kind. Jewlattos are most easily spotted amid the flora and fauna of Brown University. Famous Jewlattos include Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet (and we can’t forget Zoe, their love child)…

Read the entire article (including more about the following terms: Mestizo, Cultural Mulatto, Blulatto, Cablinasian, Tomatto, Fauxlatt0)  here.

Steelers and Ward nominated for Positive Peace Awards

Pittsburgh Steelers News
2010-12-06

Celebrate Positive announced today that the Pittsburgh Steelers and wide receiver Hines Ward have been nominated for the inaugural  2010 United Nations NGO Positive Peace Awards in the Professional Sports Team and Professional Athlete categories. This award, viewed as a 21st century peace prize, honors and recognizes individuals, businesses, athletes, sports teams, entertainers and schools around the world for their positive contributions.

…The nomination of Hines Ward came from Pearl S. Buck International Inc. [for] his critical work in Korea which has changed the perception of the biracial population in the community. His involvement has attracted influential Koreans to join him in his efforts.

“Hines Ward changed the cultural landscape of Korea,” said Janet Mintzer, President/CEO of Pearl S. Buck Intl. “After Japanese invasions, Korea placed high value on being pure-blooded Koreans, creating prejudice of biracial people. As a successful biracial Korean-American, he returned to Korea, creating media attention which sparked a cultural shift.”…

Read the entire article here.

Room For Debate: Does It Matter Where You Go to College? Merit and Race

New York Times
2010-11-30

Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Professor of Law and Harry T. Ice Faculty Fellow
Indiana University

What sensible and ambitious students should keep in mind about where they go to school.

Notwithstanding our commitment to egalitarian norms, where one chooses to go to college continues to matter, greatly. Intuitively, for most people, matriculation at an elite institution is a no brainer: the better the school, the higher the payoff for its graduates. The research supports this intuition. Attendance at elite colleges and universities has a positive effect on the likelihood that a student will graduate; on future earnings; on the likelihood that a student will attend graduate school; and even to lower divorce rates and better health…

…The calculations are relatively the same for many minority applicants with some added considerations. I have two particular issues in mind.

The first is an extension of the debate over affirmative action in higher education, and particularly the notion of “critical mass.” This is the concern, largely unexpressed yet often at the forefront of our consciousness, of being a racial minority at a predominantly white institution. This point raises the question of who is a racial minority worthy of special consideration. For example, fewer and fewer historically disadvantaged African-American students are being admitted to elite colleges. Increasingly, elite colleges are admitting biracial students and first- or second-generation black students from the Caribbean and from Africa. Historically disadvantaged African-American students are being left behind in the elite college lottery. This is a tragedy. This also underscores the remaining importance of our historically black colleges and universities…

Read the entire article here.

A tale of two scholars: The Darwin debate at Harvard

Harvard Gazette
2007-05-19

Louis Agassiz was a scientist with a blind spot—he rejected the theory of evolution

Few people have left a more indelible imprint on Harvard than Louis Agassiz.

An ambitious institution-builder and fundraiser as well as one of the most renowned scientists of his generation, he founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) and trained a generation of naturalists in the precise methods of observation and categorization developed in Europe. His wife Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the other half of this Harvard power couple, was co-founder and first president of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, the precursor of Radcliffe.

Unfortunately, Agassiz chose the wrong side in what turned out to be the 19th century’s greatest scientific controversy, and as a result ended his career as something of an anachronism. The controversy was over Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” which was published in 1859 and soon won over the younger generation of scientists and intellectuals, including most of Agassiz’s students…

…Agassiz’s idea of nature was an essentially static one: God had placed the various species of plants and animals in specific places around the globe, and there they had remained, in the same forms and quantities as when they were first created. There was a hierarchy to organisms, but not an evolutionary one. Some were more complicated and advanced, but he did not believe as Darwin did that more complicated organisms evolved out of simpler ones.

Agassiz had similar ideas about humans. The five races of man were indigenous to specific sections of the earth. Highest in development were white Europeans. Lowest were black Africans. Agassiz took a very dim view of racial mixing.

In 1863, in a letter to Samuel Gridley Howe, appointed by Lincoln to head the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, Agassiz expressed his views on the matter: “Conceive for a moment the difference it would make in future ages for the prospect of republican institutions and our civilization generally, if instead of the manly population descended from cognate nations, the United States should hereafter be inhabited by the effeminate progeny of mixed races, half indian, half negro, sprinkled with white blood. In whatever proportion the amalgamation may take place, I shudder at the consequences.”…

Read the entire article here.

Obamafiction for Children: Imagining the Forty-Fourth U.S. President

Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
Volume 35, Number 4 (Winter 2010)
E-ISSN: 1553-1201 Print ISSN: 0885-0429
pages 334-356

Philip Nel, Professor of English
Kansas State University

In a column published five days after the 2008 election, journalist Jason Whitlock said of the president-elect’s life: “His is a tale that should be read aloud at bedtime in every American neighborhood.” It was already being read aloud in some neighborhoods. Even before Senator Obama had won the election, there were twelve juvenile titles about his life: two picture books, nine chapter books, and one comic book. From the election to the end of his first year in office, another forty-seven books were published: thirty-six more chapter books, seven more picture books, two comic books, one book of poetry, and one board book. And that doesn’t include the Obama Paper Dolls book, coloring and activity books, the titles about Bo the dog, nor the many books about Michelle, Sasha, and Malia.

To have this many children’s books about a candidate—or about a president so soon in his term of office—is unusual. During the campaign, Republican presidential candidate John McCain had seven titles to Obama’s twelve: five chapter books, one comic book, and one picture book (My Dad, John McCain, written by his daughter Meghan McCain). During George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, there were two juvenile titles about him. By the end of the first year of his presidency, add another four. By the end of his eight-year presidency, Bush inspired twenty-nine fewer books than Obama did in his first year—thirty titles in all, and that includes one anti-Bush satire, Dan Piraro’s The Three Little Pigs Buy the White House (2004). The marked difference in tone between the Bush book titles and the Obama book titles suggest that publishers and authors see the forty-fourth president quite differently from the forty-third…

Read or purchase the article here.