Mixed Race Studies

Trends in Mate Selection in a Tri-Racial Isolate

Social Forces
Volume 37, Number 3 (March 1959)
pages 215-221

Thomas J. Harte
Catholic University of America

Read before the twenty-first annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Asheville, North Carolina, April 11, 1958.

The “Brandywine” population of Southern Maryland is a tri-racial hybrid group which manifests many of the physical and social characteristics common to other known isolates located through the eastern part of the United States.  It is reputedly descended from mixed white, Indian, and Negro stock, although its most group-conscious members tend to reject the theory of Negro intermixture in their family background.  The skin color and hair texture of members seem to substantiate the theory of some white ancestry, and although a relatively high proportion possess some physical characteristics usually associated with Negro types, in general this population is marked by a high degree of “visibility.”  The Brandywine group is predominately rural. It has a total population of approximately 5,000.  Roman Catholicism is today, and has been traditionally, the religion of almost all of its members. Sixteen surnames are common in the population; four of these are unique to the group, the remaining twelve being more or less common among Negro and/or white families in the area.

The group has succeeeded in maintaining a considerable measure of isolation from the larger Negro and white populations through endogamous marriages as well as by residential and, to some extent, occupational segregation…

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The Variability of Hybrid Populations

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 16, Issue 3 (January/March 1932)
pages 283–307
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330160312

K. Wagner
Department of Anatomy
University of Oslo

On the assumption of mendelian inheritance it should be expected that hybrid populations, apart from the first generation of crossing, must show an increased variability as compared with the original ‘races’ that entered into the mixture. Assuming that the characters investigated are genetically very complex, i.e., that there is pronounced polymeria, the difference in variability between hybrid populations and the relatively ‘pure’ races would no doubt be diminished, but not entirely eliminated. The chances for segregation of a polymeric character are, it is true, very small and diminish greatly with an increasing number of fundamental factors, so that a very large body of hybrid material would be required in order to be able to count upon a variation effect, but polymeric characters in this absolute sense are certainly exceptional. If the complete emergence of a character is due to combinations of the factors abc, then ab, ac, or be will in many, perhaps in most, cases have some, effect. Neither does dominance play any decisive role for the variability rule here laid down, as the segregation of recessive types must bring about a considerable increase in the variability of hybrid populations, and, quite apart from this, it may be said that absolute dominance hardly comes into consideration as regards most of the anthropological characters.

Here, as so often elsewhere, changes of environment may have a disturbing influence, but these must necessarily be disregarded in a theoretical consideration of the matter. In case the racial crossing took place far back in time, it might be imagined that the high degree of heterozygosis occasioned…

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Factors in the Microevolution of a Triracial Isolate

American Journal of Human Genetics
Volume 18, Number 1 (January 1966)
pages 26-38

W. S. Pollitzer
Department of Anatomy
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

R. M. Menegaz-Bock
Genetics Training Committe
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

J. C. Herion
Department of Medicine
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Triracial Isolates today attract the attention of the anthropologist, the geneticist, and the medical scientist as questions arise concerning the origin of such isolates, their history, social status, breeding structure, and inherited pathological conditions. This paper describes the physical, serological, and clinical characteristics of a hybrid population in northeastern North Carolina (Witkop et al., 1960; Menegaz-Bock, 1962), its racial composition, and the cultural and biological factors in its evolution.

History

The population can be traced at least as far back as the American Revolution. The most common surname in this region today is the same as that of two brothers, said to be descended from Cherokee Indians and whites, who fought in that war. The census of 1790 for the county in which the majority of this population now live lists this name only under the designation “all other free persons;” four of seven other surnames frequent in this population are listed as “free white,” while three are listed under both of these headings. Many of these names, well-known in the isolate today, can be traced through the census reports of the nineteenth century. In 1800, ten are listed, mostly under “free persons of color,” and the census of 1810 lists six of these as “other free persons except Indians not taxed.” By 1820, most of these names appear in the column “free Negro.” Eleven surnames common in the current population are listed in the census of 1830 as “free colored persons,” and most of these are listed under the same heading again in 1840. The census of 1850, designating free inhabitants as “white,” “black,” and “mulatto,” registers a dozen of these family names as “mulattoes” and half of these also as “white.” In 1860, the census for the western district of the county listed 13 of the common names as free inhabitants, either white, black, or mulatto. In the 1870 census for the township where most of the population now lives, five of seven last names common in the group include mulattoes. The census of 1880 contains ten names common in the township now, and all but two of these are to be found under “mulatto.” The census of 1890 was destroyed, and names are not released for the censuses from 1900 on…

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Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Art

American Art
Volume 5, Number 3 (Summer, 1991)
pages 88-107

Judith Wilson, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
University of California, Irvine

miscegenationn. [Latin miscere to mix + genus race…]: a mixture of races; esp: marriage or cohabitation between a white person an a member of another race.
—Webster’s Seventh  New Collegiate Dictionary

Today, most physical anthropologist do not believe that pure races ever existed.
—Bruce G. Trigger

What the matter came down to, of course, was visibility.  Anyone whose appearance discernibly connected him with the Negro was held to be such.
—Winthrop Jordon

“Race” is a peculiarly optical system of classification as Hugh Honour and Albert Boimehave observed. In the English-speaking world, it is a concept that characteristically stresses a single feature or color—value—and is structured by polarities “white” and “black,” “white” and “non-white,” “the white race” and “the darker races,” 0r “white people” and “people of color.” Miscegenation, the sexual union of individuals assigned to different racial categories, blurs such distinctions, thereby threatening race-based systems of social order and privilege. Indeed, as both anthropologist Bruce Trigger and philosopher Anthony Appiah have suggested, the age-old historical fact of miscegenation undermines the validity of race as either a scientific or a philosophical construct.

North American attitudes toward race are notoriously rigid and denial oriented in their insistence upon what anthropologist Virginia R. Dominguez has labeled “the binary system”:

Whereas descendants of Africans and Europeans in the United States, regardless of miscegenation, are typically allowed membership in only two racial categories—white and black—the Afro-Latin world… has long used miscegenation as a mechanism for the construction of a new category of people epistemologically separate from both whites and blacks.

North American practice is unique, not only in its tendency to view miscegenation primarily in African- versus European-American terms—a tendency that both excludes additional levels of genealogical complexity (e.g., the possibility of African, European, and Native American ancestry) and erases other histories (e.g., the record of anti-Asian sentiment and legislation, with its accompanying prohibitions of interracial sex). Thus reduced to a black-white issue, the sex-race conjunction has given rise to forms of literary and cinematic representation that are well known: American authors ranging from James Fenimore Cooper to William Faulkner have shared a preoccupation with the supposed tragedy of mixed ancestry, and filmmakers ranging from D. W. Griffith to Spike Lee have lamented the alleged horrors of interracial sex…

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The Measure of America: How a rebel anthropologist waged war on racism

The New Yorker
2004-03-08
18 pages

Claudia Roth Peierpont

Along with the Ferris wheel, the hamburger, Cracker Jack, Aunt Jemima, the zipper, Juicy Fruit, and the vertical file, the word “anthropology” was introduced to a vast number of Americans at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America-and opening just a little late, in May, 1893, owing to the amount of construction required to turn a marshy wasteland on Lake Michigan into a neoclassical “White City,” as the fair was called-the six-month celebration put on display all that the nation had achieved and still hoped to become. Here proud Americans could view the table on which the Declaration of Independence had been signed, the manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address, and two full-scale replicas of the Liberty Bell-one executed entirely in grain, the other in oranges. As for the future, the fair was ablaze with work-reducing inventions, from the electric kitchen to the electric chair. But the most important promise of an American utopia was the extraordinary assembly of peoples. American Indians and native Africans, Germans, Egyptians, and Labrador Eskimos were just a few of those invited to take part in nearly a hundred “living exhibits”-whole villages were imported and exactingly rebuilt-with the purpose of expanding American minds: “broadening, opening, lighting up dark corners,” a contemporary magazine expounded, “bringing them in sympathy with their fellow men.”

No one was more devoted to this goal than a young anthropologist named Franz Boas, who had emigrated from Germany ten years before, staunch in the belief that America was “politically an ideal country.” Enthralled by the collections of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, he had made his field of study the Indians of the Northwest Coast-the artistically accomplished Haida, Kwakiutl, and Bella Coola tribes-and, in the days leading up to the fair’s triumphal opening, he was busy supplying the final timbers for a pair of houses in which a Kwakiutl group would live, on the bank of a pond outside a small pavilion marked “Anthropology.” Inside was a spectacular array of masks and decorated tools, which Boas had spent two years assembling. His expectations for impressing visitors derived less from the works’ richly painted surfaces, however, than from their intellectual and imaginative content-what he described as the “wealth of thought” that was clearly visible if only people learned to look. The Indians had been asked to perform the rituals that would enable viewers to perceive this wealth, and had been assured that at the fair they would receive the respect that was their due, even if it had been no part of their experience in the old, demonstrably un-utopian New World.

In fact, the wretched history of Indian life in nineteenth-century America had long been justified by the claims of anthropology, a field that originated during debates over slavery and the right of settlers to seize the natives’ lands, and patriotically embraced such practices as part of the natural racial order. The chief means of establishing the racial order was to measure skulls-both the conveniently empty craniums acquired through a thriving graveyard market and the more resistant living models. Anthropologists presented their findings as objective science: elaborate measuring techniques yielded columns of figures that inevitably placed white intelligence at the top of the scale, red and yellow capacities farther down, and blacks at the wholly uncivilizable bottom. It was no coincidence that this science faithfully mirrored popular opinion: published studies were so open in their manipulation of evidence-a higher proportion of male skulls, for example, were employed when larger dimensions were desired-that they appear to have been not conscious attempts at deception but unwitting examples of delusion.

The effects of such studies, however, were painfully real. At mid-century, the anthropologist Samuel Morton asserted that whites and Negroes belonged to different species, while another anthropologist, Josiah Nott, popularized the view that slavery saved Negroes from reverting to their original barbaric state: these authoritative voices resounded in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, of 1857, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney resolved that “the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” After Emancipation, theories of separate racial evolutions fuelled the case for black disenfranchisement, right up to the passing of the first Jim Crow laws, around the time of the Chicago fair…

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Science: Environmentalist

Time Magazine
1936-05-11

In Washington last week one of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists told the National Academy of Sciences about an Englishman who was raised in Italy and married a Jewess. In consequence this Englishman’s gestures gradually became half Italian, half Jewish.

Anthropology is neither an old science like mathematics, astronomy and medicine, nor a modern one like genetics or electronics. The ancient Greeks were willing enough to assign man a place in the animal kingdom and some of them, notably Anaximander, had an inkling of evolution. But they were content to speculate and philosophize. In the early 19th Century anthropology as a science had made little headway. Species and varieties of plants and animals were considered changeless, and so were the races of man. The strange manlike bones found here & there in caves and quarries were thought to be the remains of monsters. The beliefs and practices of primitive people were shrugged off as so much sordid playacting. When the origin and fluidity of species, the significance of fossils and the rationale of primitive cultures were better understood, anthropology began to make progress as a serious study of man in all his aspects.

…Franz Boas got into anthropology 53 years ago. He has invaded almost every branch of this science: linguistics, primitive mentality, folklore, ethnology, growth and senility, the physical effects of environment. He reminds his colleagues of the oldtime family doctor who did everything from delivering babies to pulling teeth.

By no means all anthropologists share Dr. Boas’ belief in the tremendous physical influence of environment. But when he has something to say they listen respectfully…

…Magna Charta. Currently in England a group of scientists including Sir Arthur Smith Woodward and Julian Huxley are engaged in knocking the flimsy props from under Nazi ideas of race purity and race superiority. A quarter-century ago Franz Boas was attacking the same sort of ideas. At that time the view was popular that different races had their characteristic mentalities which determined their culture. Boas had piled up enough data to convince him that such was not the case. The Mind of Primitive Man was published in 1911. When he was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931, that book was called “A Magna Charta of self-respect for the ‘lower’ races.”

Boas observed that nowhere on earth was there such a thing as a pure race, and that the term “race” was a vague and approximate one at best. He doubted that there were any “superior” races. To Boas it seemed that if one person was innately superior to another, it was because there was more genetic difference between family lines than between racial types. Anatomists cannot tell the difference between the brains of a Swede and a Negro. They may distinguish the skulls, but it has been shown over & over that neither the size nor shape of the skull, within the range of normality, has anything to do with intelligence. Dr. Boas has no confidence in intelligence tests as measures of race superiority, because such tests cannot be divorced entirely from environment and experience. During the War it was found that Chicago Negroes did better with intelligence tests than Louisiana blacks, although the two groups were anthropologically alike…

…Dr. Boas argues that if common race prejudice had “instinctive” antipathy for its source, it would show itself in the most intimate of all contacts, the sexual relation. But throughout history slave-owners have bedded with female slaves of different race, whites have mated with Indians and Negroes. Southern children show no aversion whatever to black nurses, must be taught by their elders not to accept blacks as equals. The strongest antipathies are those between social castes like those of India and ancient Egypt — between people of the same race…

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Race-mixing and science in the United States

Endeavour
Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2003)
pages 166-170
DOI: 10.1016/j.endeavour.2003.08.007

Paul Farber, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
Oregon State University

Scientific racism was widely used as a justification to oppose race-mixing in the United States. Historians have justly criticized this abuse of science, but have overlooked some of the important ways in which science was used in the 1930s and 1940s to overturn scientific racism and opposition to race-mixing. Of particular importance was the cultural anthropology of Franz Boas and the evolutionary biology of Theodosius Dobzhansky, which supplied arguments against racism and fundamentally altered the scientific understanding of race.

The history of scientific racism provides a cautionary tale about the abuse of science by scientists and policy makers, and the ease with which cultural assumptions penetrate our picture of nature. It, therefore, serves as a paradigm case of the relationship of scientific ideas to their social context. Historians have generally castigated the scientists who used and abused their science to justify racist social policy. It would be a mistake, however, if in the discussion of scientific racism we lost sight of the role that science itself played in transforming modern notions of race and in combating racism. Although scholars have generated a vast and complex historical literature on racism and the use of science to legitimate it, they have not paid as much attention to the positive role science played. The history of ideas on race-mixing in the US provides a convenient lens through which to focus on some of the central ideas concerning race and racism, and it is a story that can help make clearer the role science had in influencing the discussion.

A young couple in the 1960s most likely would not have consulted a biology book to help decide if their different racial backgrounds posed an obstacle to getting married and raising a mixed-race family. But, this is not to say that what went for scientific opinion would have been irrelevant to their decision. In many subtle, and some not-so subtle, ways, scientific judgements influence individual choice, social acceptance and legal constraints. Before 1967, 17 states had anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited marriages involving individuals of certain different races, and an extensive body of literature justified those laws by reference to science. In the three decades before the 1967 US Supreme Court ruled in Loving versus Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional, a shift in thinking occurred in the US concerning inter-racial marriage. In part, that shift reflected a new social landscape altered by World War II, the Civil Rights Movement and the 1960s cultural upheaval. But science also played an important, if generally unrecognized, role in that transformation. In particular the work done in anthropology by Franz Boas and his students, and by Theodosius Dobzhansky and others in formulating the modern theory of evolution were central to the contributions made by scientists to the understanding of race and race-mixing…

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Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective

University Press of America
April 2010
516 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-7618-5064-3 / 978-0-7618-5064-9
Electronic ISBN: 0-7618-5092-9 / 978-0-7618-5092-2

Edited by

Julius O. Adekunle, Professor of History
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Hettie V. Williams, Lecturer, African American History
Department of History and Anthropology
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Color Struck: Essays of Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective is a compilation of expositions on race and ethnicity, written from multiple disciplinary approaches including history, sociology, women’s studies, and anthropology. This book is organized around a topical, chronological framework and is divided into three sections, beginning with the earliest times to the contemporary world. The term “race” has nearly become synonymous with the word “ethnicity,” given the most recent findings in the study of human genetics that have led to the mapping of human DNA. Color Struck attempts to answer questions and provide scholarly insight into issues related to race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part 1: The First Complex Societies to Modern Times

1. Race, Science, and Human Origins in Africa
Julius O. Adekunle

2. Race and the Rise of the Swahili Culture
Julius O. Adekunle

3. ‘Caste’-[ing] Gender: Caste and Patriarchy in Ancient Hindu Jurisprudence
Indira Jalli

4. Comparative Race and Slavery in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: Texts, Practices, and Current Implications
Magid Shihade

5. The Dark Craven Jew: Race and Religion in Medieval Europe
James M. Thomas

6. Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Racial Slavery in the New World
Kwaku Osei Tutu

7. The Yellow Lady: Mulatto Women in the Suriname Plantocracy
Hilde Neus

Part 2: Race and Mixed Race in the Americas

8. Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Approaches to Resistance and Social Justice
Andrew Jolivétte

9. Militant Multiraciality: Rejecting Race and Rejecting the Conveniences of Complicity
Rainier Spencer

10. Whiteness Reconstructed: Multiracial Identity as a Category of “New White”
Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma

11. Conversations in Black and White: The Limitations of Binary Thinking About Race in America
Johanna E. Foster

12. The Necessity of a Multiracial Category in a Race-Conscious Society
Francis Wardle

13. Mixed Race Terminologies in the Americas: Globalizing the Creole in the Twenty First Century
DeMond S. Miller, Jason D. Rivera, and Joel C. Telin

14. Examining the Regional and Multigenerational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
Andrew Jolivétte

15. Race, Class, and Power: The Politics of Multiraciality in Brazil
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

16. All Mixed Up: A New Racial Commonsense in Global Perspective
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

Part 3: Race, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Contemporary Societies

17. Black No More: African Americans and the ‘New’ Race Science
Hettie V. Williams

18. Contesting Identities of Color: African Female Immigrants in the Americas
Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika

19. Burdened Intersections: Black Women and Race, Gender, and Class
Marsha J. Tyson Darling

20. Ethnic Conflicts in the Middle East: A Comparative Analysis of Communal Violence within the Matrix of the Colonial Legacy, Globalization, and Global Stability
Magid Shihade

21. Ethnic Identity in China: The Politics of Cultural Difference
Dru C. Gladney

22. Shangri-la has Forsaken Us: China’s Ethnic Minorities, Identity, and Government Repression
Reza Hasmath

23. The Russian/Chechen Conflict and It’s Consequences
Mariana Tepfenhart

Contributors
Index

The Population Variance of the Proportion of Genetic Admixture in Human Intergroup Hybrids

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
December 1971
Volume 68, Number 12
pages 3168–3169
PMCID: PMC389614

T. Edward Reed, Professor of Zoology and Anthropology; Associate Professor of Paediatrics
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

For each individual in a human hybrid population there is a proportion μi, whose value is usually unknown, that expresses the fraction of his genes deriving from a specified parental population. The distribution of these individual proportions about the mean proportion μ is not known for any large hybrid population in man. It is of interest to know whether the population variance of individual proportions (μi) can be estimated from the variation between different, independent estimates of the mean proportion (μ).This possibility was tested with data on Negroes of the Oakland, California area, by the use of some of the principles of analysis of variance. Even with a large sample and the useful Duffy blood-group system to indicate admixture, almost no information about the population variance of individual proportions is provided by between-sample variation in estimates of μ. It is concluded that group data on admixture proportions usually do not give useful information about the population variance. It is further concluded that a recent estimate of this variance by Shockley is in error.

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Caucasian Genes in American Negroes

Science (1969-08-22)
Volume 165
pages 762-768
DOI: 10.1126/science.165.3895.762

T. Edward Reed, Professor of Zoology and Anthropology; Associate Professor of Paediatrics
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Measurement of non-African ancestry is difficult, but it is worthwhile for several genetic reasons.

It is very difficult to describe the genetic history of a large, defined human population in a meaningful way. As a result there have been few opportunities, at the population level, to study the consequences of known genetic events in the recent past of modem populations. The Negro population of the United States, however, is one of the exceptions to these generalizations. The American individual to whom the term Negro is applied is almost always a biracial hybrid. Usually between 2 and 50 percent of his genes are derived from Caucasian ancestors, and these genes were very probably received after 1700. While it is obviously of social and cultural importance to understand Negro hybridity, it is less obvious that there are several pertinent genetic reasons for wishing to know about the magnitude and nature of Caucasian ancestry in Negroes. Recent data, both genetic and historical, now make possible a better understanding of American Negro genetic history than has been possible heretofore. Here I review and criticize the published data on this subject, present new data, and interpret the genetic significance of the evidence.

In order to put the genetic data in proper context, I must first give a little of the history of American slavery. The first slaves were brought to what is now the United States in 1619. Importation of slaves before 1700 was negligible, however, but after that date it proceeded at a high rate for most of the 18th century. Importation became illegal after 1808 but in fact continued at a low rate for several more decades (1, 2). The total number of slaves brought into the United States was probably somewhat less than 400,000 (3). Charleston, South Carolina, was the most important port of entry, receiving 30 to 40 percent of the total number (4). More than 98 percent of the slaves came from a very extensive area of West Africa and west-central Africa-from Senegal to Angola-and, in these areas, from both coastal and inland regions. Shipping lists of ships that brought slaves to the United States-and to the West Indies, often to be sent later to the United States provide a fairly detailed picture of the geographic origins of the slaves and a less complete picture of their ethnic origins. Table 1 gives the approximate proportions of American slaves brought from the eight major slaving areas of Africa. The contribution from East Africa is seen to be negligible, whereas the area from Senegal to western Nigeria contributed about half the total and the region from eastern Nigeria to Angola contributed the other half. An earlier tabulation for entry at Charleston alone (5) is quite similar, except that the contribution from the Bight of Biafra is much less (0.021 as compared to 0.233) and that from “Angola” is appreciably greater (0.396 as compared to 0.245).

At some early point in American slavery, matings between slaves and Caucasians began to occur. Quantitative data are lacking, and we can say only that most of these matings occurred after 1700. Our concern here is the genetic consequences of the matings the introduction of Caucasian genes into the genome (or total complement of genetic material) of the American Negro. We could, in theory, estimate the Caucasian contribution to American Negro ancestry in a very simple way if certain strict criteria were met. In practice it is not possible to show that all these criteria are met, but this fact has not stopped geneticists, including myself, from making estimates…

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