Mixed Race Studies

The study of racial mixture in the British Commonwealth: Some anthropological preliminaries

Eugenics Review
Volume 32, Number 4 (January 1941)
pages 114-120

K. L. Little
The Duckworth Laboratory
University Museum of Ethnology, Cambridge

In a recently published and noteworthy symposium entitled “Race Relations and the Race Problem,” eleven prominent American writers reviewed the sociological implications of racial contacts on the American continent, with special reference to problems arising out of the very large racial minority in the U.S.A. of some 13 million American Negroes. One of these authors, Professor S. J. Holmes, has pointed out elsewhere that there are three racial possibilities in view for the United States. The entire population may become “white”; it may become “black”; or “whites” and “blacks” may fuse together into a hybrid stock. This last possibility seems to be fairly well substantiated by the anthropometric material collected by Professor Melville J. Herskovits, who in his turn attributes the rise and growth of this new hybrid “race” to the effect of social selection.

Although the interest shown in North America to problems of racial relations in particular, and to human genetics in general, as proved by the articles in such journals as the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, is readily understandable, it stands out in very sharp relief to the lukewarm attention afforded to such matters in the countries which compose the British Commonwealth. The latter empire comprises practically speaking members of every major and minor race group in the world, and so contains the elements of most possible forms of human miscegenation, yet official information regarding the actual racial compositions of these populations is often very incomplete, and particularly so in the colonial areas where it would be most interesting. Nor, anthropologically speaking, can much of the semi-official data, as displayed, for example, in such books of reference as the Encyclopaedia Britannica by the use of phrases as “the higher-type races,” “black low type,” etc., be considered more satisfactory. The fact, however, that nothing like a complete anthropometric survey has yet been instituted even in this country, may help to explain, though not to condone, the lack of more exact information elsewhere…

…How Will Racial Relations be Affected in the Future?

In sociological science it is no more than a truism to state that the structure of no society is static. This would be clear even if the disruptions achieved by such forces as war did not make the presence of the dynamic factors which are continuously changing and modifying institutions and traditions even more obvious. It may, therefore, be thought unquestionable that present forms of racial or social segregations will undergo corresponding alteration, becoming either more elastic or more rigid in the process. In the former event then not only will the racial composition of populations change considerably, but many new “racial” populations will emerge. In this light, then, eugenic considerations involve not only the forms of racial hybridization at present in force, but the far wider possibilities of the future; since it is but reasonable to suppose that in human genetics no less than elsewhere, the biological results become more diverse as new and additional factors are added. Moreover, specific as well as general consideration seems all the more necessary, when it is remembered that answers stlll to be provided for certain ambiguously interpretable phenomena are in a sense but the preface to wider fields…

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Racial mixture in Great Britain: some anthropological characteristics of the Anglo-negroid cross (A Preliminary Report)

Eugenics Review
Volume 33, Number 4 (January 1942)
pages 112-120

K. L. Little
The Duckworth Laboratory
University Museum of Ethnology, Cambridge

With the exception of a large number of family studies secured by Miss R. M. Fleming, little anthropological attention has so far been given to the question of racial crossing in this country, although the presence of some fairly extensive hybrid communities in most of our sea-port cities affords an excellent opportunity for anthropometric investigation, particularly in respect to the Anglo-Negroid cross. The present paper, comprising a brief statistical analysis of the measurements of some ninety Anglo-Negroid or “Coloured” children, together with a smaller “White ” sample of forty drawn from the same environment, represents what it is hoped may be merely a prelude to a wider and statistically more adequate survey of the subject, especially as far as the adult element is concerned. The present data, including those of a small number of adults with one F1 adult exception, were gained entirely from a community in Cardiff, where all the subjects were born. In the course of the enquiry the opportunity was taken of examining a further sample of some eighty subjects mainly of Anglo-Arab and Anglo-Mediterranean parentage. These, however, have been omitted from the present discussion for considerations of space. The Anglo-Negroid adult sample is as yet too small for statistical treatment, and has similarly been omitted, although a few particulars as to its characters are given below.

Briefly stated, the aspects of racial crossing it is intended to cover comprise such questions as the segregation of both quantitative and qualitative physical characters in the hybrid population, the comparative variability of the respective groups, and comparative differences in growth and sex differences. In the light of these considerations it was decided to. employ as wide an assortment of characters as was practicable, and having regard to the specific racial stocks involved, i.e. Negroid and Caucasoid (White), to give special attention to those features which show clear differentiation between the parent stocks. In terms of the present facilities these may be listed as skin, hair and eye colour, lip thickness, nasal width and height and the corresponding nasal index, and the ratio of nasal depth to width. In addition, a fairly large number of characters possessing genetical rather than racial significance were chosen, and these included such features as head length, head breadth, facial length, etc., etc., from which the relevant cephalic, facial, fronto-jugal and other indices were obtained. Finally, two modifiable characters in the shape of stature and sitting height were included….

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Africa’s Latin Quarter

The Walrus
July 2008 (Escape: Summer 2008)

Stephen Henighan

Despite bleak poverty, Mozambique’s multi-ethnic literary culture thrives

In downtown Maputo, the monument to the origins of apartheid is just off Karl Marx Street. Maputo, with its manageable proportions, dreamy views over Delagoa Bay, and cosmopolitan restaurant scene, is one of Africa’s most pleasant capital cities. I walked to the apartheid monument through windblown red dust and young people lugging buckets of water into high-rise buildings. Most modern conveniences—such as traffic lights, credit cards, and cellphones—work in Maputo, but a few, such as the water supply in apartments, are unreliable.

Mozambican literary culture, which I’d come to Maputo to explore, is rooted in the country’s history as a Portuguese colony that gained its independence through a Marxist-Leninist revolution in 1975, and in its proximity to neighbouring South Africa. Nowhere are this history’s contradictions more evident than in the Louis Trichardt Memorial Garden. On the back wall of a patio sunk below the street, a plaster frieze depicts Trichardt, a stout Afrikaner, leading oxen through the wilderness in the late 1830s. A trilingual inscription in Afrikaans, Portuguese, and English, under the heading “They Harnessed the Wilds,” lauds the Portuguese colonialists for their hospitality to the South African Voortrekkers, and their solidarity in fighting off “native tribesmen.” Most self-respecting Marxist revolutions would have demolished this racist kitsch, but Mozambique, a coastal nation with a tolerance for strangers, prefers to allow all the dissonant chords of its past to resonate at once.

“Mozambique is a crossroads,” Mia Couto, the country’s best-known writer, tells me. “Things happened here that are unique in the history of Africa. There’s an acceptance of others, a way of receiving others, that I haven’t found in other African countries. This doesn’t mean that we’re better than others, but rather that there’s a very long history of relating to outsiders.”…

…Mozambique’s racial mixing dates back to between AD 300 and 800, when a vast wave of people of Indonesian descent invaded the East African coastline. Travelling in coastal Mozambique, I passed through areas inhabited by tiny, fine-boned people with remotely Asian physiques. The African languages spoken by these people contain vestiges of Malay vocabulary. There was even significant trade with China, and the spread of Islam brought a tradition of marriage alliances with the Arab traders who dominated Mozambique’s economy in the early Middle Ages. The residue of this period is evident not only in the high-cheekboned racial inheritance of people in northern Mozambique, but in the country’s many mosques, ranging from the Aga Khan’s shimmering Ismaili mosque in downtown Maputo to the tiny, green-painted huts used for worship in villages. Too poor to build minarets, the villages designate their mosques with crescents raised on poles.

Portuguese colonialism, which began with the arrival of Vasco da Gama in 1498, intensified Mozambique’s racial mixing. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, unable to manage the sprawling, distant colony, Lisbon assigned Mozambique’s governance to the Viceroyalty of Goa, the Indian jewel in the crown of the Portuguese empire. In defiance of every stereotype of colonialism, Africans in Mozambique had a European language imposed on them by administrators who were ethnically Indian. Many of these Portuguese-speaking Indian civil servants or adventurers intermarried with local leaders. In the Zambezi Valley, in central Mozambique, mixed Indo-Portuguese-African elites broke away from government structures to form autonomous settlements known as prazos.

In the nineteenth century, these palisaded outposts fought a sixty-year war of resistance against Portuguese colonial authority, only succumbing to the central government in 1902. Miscegenation between Europeans and Africans was less common in Mozambique than in other Portuguese colonies, such as Angola or the Cape Verde islands, but the roots of Mozambican identity spring from a tradition that assumes everyone descends in part from an outsider.

The frelimo guerrilla movement, which led Mozambique to independence from Portugal in 1975, promoted interracialism and the Portuguese language—at the time spoken by just a sliver of the country’s population—as the keys to building a nation from the more than twenty distinct ethnic and linguistic groups inhabiting the country’s long Indian Ocean coastline. Photographs of early meetings of the new government, in the Museum of the Revolution in downtown Maputo, reveal a sprinkling of white, mixed-race, and South Asian faces among the black majority…

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For the first time, blacks outnumber whites in Brazil

Miami Herald
2011-05-24

Taylor Barnes, Special to the Miami Herald

Brazilians are no longer reluctant to admit being black or ‘pardo,’ experts said.

RIO DE JANEIRO—In the past decade, famously mixed-race Brazilians either became prouder of their African roots, savvier with public policies benefiting people of color or are simply more often darker skinned , depending on how you read the much-debated new analysis of the census here.

A recently released 2010 survey showed that Brazil became for the first time a “majority minority” nation, meaning less than half the population now identifies as white.
 
Every minority racial group—officially, “black,” “pardo” (mixed), “yellow” and “indigenous”—grew in absolute numbers since 2000. “White” was the only group that shrank in both absolute numbers and percentage, becoming 48 percent of the population from 53 percent 10 years ago.

Experts say the shift reflects a growing comfort in not calling oneself white in order to prosper in Brazil and underscores the growing influence of popular culture. Paula Miranda-Ribeiro, a demographer at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, said another factor was the increase in bi-racial unions with mixed-race kids.

While Americans look at race as a question of origin, Brazilians largely go by appearance, so much so that the children of the same parents could mark different census categories, she said…

…Activists and artists here say they’ve seen a greater mobilization for mixed-race Brazilians to call themselves black or pardo in recent years.

“The phenomenon I perceive are people getting out of that pressure to whiten themselves, and assuming their blackness,” says visual artist Rosana Paulino, whose doctoral work at the University of São Paulo focused on the representation of blacks in the arts.
 
She sees a rising self-esteem on the part of mixed-race Brazilians who stop using middle-ground terms like “moreninho” (“a little tan”) or “marrom-bombom” (“brown chocolate”) and simply call themselves black…

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Walking in Two Worlds: Mixed-Blood Indian Women Seeking Their Path

Caxton Press
2006
264 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 0-87004-450-8

Nancy M. Peterson

Nancy M. Peterson tells the stories of mixed-blood women who, steeped in the tradition of their Indian mothers but forced into the world of their white fathers, fought to find their identities in a rapidly changing world.

In an era when most white women had limited opportunities outside the home, these mix-blood women often became nationally recognized leaders in the fight for Native American rights. They took the tools and training whites provided and used them to help their people. They found differing paths—medicine, music, crafts, the classroom, the lecture hall, the stage, the written word—and walked strong and tall.

These women did far more than survive; they extended a hand to help their people find a place in a hard new future.

Profit, Power, & Privilege: The Racial Politics of Ancestry
 
American Anthropological Association Meetings
November 18, 2000
San Francisco, California

Lee D. Baker, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies
Duke University

In March of this year each of you received your decennial census, and you were confronted, once again, by those ominous racial boxes. This time, however, you could go ahead and check more than one box. Your ability to check more than one box was a compromise worked out by the Commerce Department and two opposing efforts to lobby the Administration. One effort was launched by people that identify as bi-racial, or of mixed race descent, and who wanted their own box. The other effort was led by the NAACP and the National Council of La Razza who argued that the boxes should remain the same. Although virtually every Latino, Black, or Native American person should go ahead and check “all of the above,” the powerful bi-racial lobby did not want to force their constituents to “choose” between identifying with one ancestor or another. The NAACP and others argued that the census was about identification—not identity—and pressed the Administration to make an accurate count of people who are identified as racial minorities, to gain a better understanding of inter-city demographics, and to maintain the ability to demonstrate disparate impact. These organizations wanted to be able to account for all people identified as black, Hispanic, etc. In this case, the bi-racial lobby viewed race as a proxy for ancestry while the NAACP viewed race as a proxy for political status.

Several months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that indigenous Hawaiians could not vote in a state-wide election for the commissioners of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, an agency that allocates resources set aside when Hawaii became a state in 1959. Since these resources were for the explicit purpose of bettering ” the conditions of Native Hawaiians,” only indigenous Hawaiians could vote for commissioners. The Court deemed the election unconstitutional and invoked the rarely used 15th Amendment, which provides that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude.” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy explained in his majority opinion that “ancestry can be a proxy for race” and therefore ruled the elections unconstitutional. However, elections held by Indian tribes remained Constitutional, Kennedy argued, because of their “unique political status.”

A few years ago, the Lumbee Tribe of Pembroke, North Carolina petitioned the U.S. Congress for federally designated tribal status. At stake was over 70 million federal dollars targeted for health and education. Although members of the Lumbee Tribe have made treaties with the federal government, number 40,000, are recognized as a tribe by the state of North Carolina, and enjoy a very salient “political status,” the federal government in 1994 refused to recognize their tribal status because they did not meet the stringent requirements imposed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Part of the BIA requirements includes tracing descent from a “historic tribe.” The Lumbees, however, have a mixed ancestry that includes decedents from earlier Hatteras and Cheraw groups. Unlike Western tribes, the Lumbees have participated in the crosscurrents of culture since 1585 when Sir Walter Raleigh embarked upon his ill-fated colony. For centuries, the Lumbees have absorbed the culture and people from neighboring black, white, and Indian populations and today are hard-pressed to meet the requirements set by the BIA that simply ignore processes of culture change. In this case, the Lumbees viewed political status as a proxy for ancestry, but Congress did not.

Race and racism in the U.S. today is the historical end product of a gamy mix of social, political, and economic pressures grinding against each other. Like the tectonics of the earth’s plates, it’s usually slow and predictable, but one never knows when these forces will erupt or quake- forever changing the social landscape. (Here in California, tectonics of all kinds are particularly volatile). Although the outcomes of the cases I briefly described seemed more like a game of “rock-scissors-paper,” they fall within the slow and predictable racial tectonics. From the centuries old “one-drop” rule to the complex fractions used to claim tribal membership; race, culture, and heritage, have always been used inconsistently in a struggle to define social, political, and economic relationships. W.E.B. Du Bois once penned that the concept of race was “a group of contradictory forces, facts and tendencies” (Du Bois 1986b:651).

I have long thought that this was one of the best definitions of race, but it does not get us very far. Anthropologists are supposed to identify patterns in process, but it is often difficult when such salient modalities in American culture are used willy-nilly by even our most esteemed institutions. Although it appears in the above cases that race, ancestry, and political status are applied in a sort of catch-as-catch-can manner, there is a simple and usually predictable logic that shapes these “contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies”—Profit, Power, and Privilege. Like the investigative reporter who “follows the money,” a scholar is well served if he or she looks for the way people use race to acquire or protect any one of these three “Ps.”…

…Individuals who yoke their identity to categories of race often miss the fact that most people stitch together an ethnic identity from various cultural heritages, and that cultural identity has nothing to do with racial categories. This distinction between race and ethnicity is thrown into vivid relief when I used to walk out my back door and stroll down 125th Street—affectionately know as the “Heart of Harlem.” The everyday lives of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitian, Nigerians, and African Americans commingle and converge in this community in a way that has transposed historic segregation into a form of congregation that exhibits the rich tapestry of the African diaspora.

The question remains, why does the mixed-race lobby insist on using ancestry as a proxy for race? I think the answers lies in the one argument I have not seen made by members of this lobbying effort. People advocating for a mixed race category should also advocate that every racial minority check that box too. Barring recent immigrants, virtually no person today considered Black, Indian, or Hawaiian can trace an uninterrupted genealogy back to Africa, Hawaii, or ancestral tribe. Moreover, everyone with a mythical “Cherokee grandmother,” should be encouraged to check that box.

In lieu of this argument, it appears that these advocates are trying to institutionalize a mixed race category, which in other countries at least, turns on a claim to white privilege. We can learn from South Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, and even in Louisiana and South Carolina that efforts to institutionalize, not a hybrid heritage, but a mixed race category, actually advances racial injustice and allocates white privilege into the haves, have nots, and have some….

Read the entire paper here.

The Afro-Mexican presence in Guadalajara at the dawn of independence

Purdue University
December 2010
85 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1490649
ISBN: 9781124557854

Beau D. J. Gaitors

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University by Beau D. J. Gaitors In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

Scholars often characterize the Afro-Mexican experience through depictions of a large presence during the colonial period and a rapid decline after Mexican independence. Prior studies emphasized miscegenation and racism as causes of the disappearance of Afro-Mexicans from Mexican society. This thesis addresses the presence and subsequent disappearance of Afro-Mexicans from Guadalajara. Census records show that the Afro-Mexican population in Guadalajara was significant, one-fourth of the population, at the end of the colonial period. However, records also show that the Afro-Mexican population experienced a substantial decline to only two percent of Guadalajara’s population at the dawn of independence. This thesis asserts that the “disappearance” of Afro-Mexicans was a result of integration, especially in the residential and occupational spheres of Guadalajara. The two percent of Afro-Mexicans recorded in the census illustrates that Afro-Mexicans continued to integrate into society and did not simply disappear. Afro-Mexicans became Mexicans through social incorporation into the city through residential, occupational, and marital integration.

Table of Contents

• LIST OF TABLES
• ABSTRACT
• CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 2. THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN NEW SPAIN
• CHAPTER 3. THE GROWTH OF GUADALAJARA TO 1791
• CHAPTER 4. RESIDENTS OF GUADALAJARA 1791-1822
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

List of Tables

• Table 1. Afro-Mexicans in Guadalajara, 1821-1822, by Cuartel
• Table 2. Marriage within Race (Major Groups)
• Table 3. Afro-Mexican Marriage Across Race
• Table 4. Race in the System of Education
• Table 5. Distribution of Afro-Mexican Occupational Positions

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

On December 6, 1810, standing on the balcony of the Palacio Real in the city of 

Guadalajara, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla proclaimed the independence of the Mexican nation. In this proclamation he also declared that the independence of Mexico, known as New Spain in the colonial period, would be accompanied by the emancipation of all slaves in the nation.1 More specifically, Hidalgo stated that all slaveholders should emancipate their slaves within ten days of the decree. These enslaved individuals constituted several different racial and ethnic groups, including Native American and African. Native Americans were taken captive during wars and employed as slaves by the Spanish especially in Northern New Spain. In contrast, the vast majority of Africans arrived in New Spain alongside Europeans either as enslaved laborers or free conquistadors, creating a sizeable population of Africans within New Spain. African descendants remained in many regions of New Spain throughout the colonial period; however, centuries of assimilation and integration rendered the African presence in Mexico miniscule at the dawn of independence.

Today when people are asked, “What is a Mexican?” individuals rarely visualize a person of African descent. Despite a considerable presence in the history of Mexico, Mexicans of African descent, or Afro-Mexicans, have been essentially invisible in the history of Mexico. Afro-Mexicans, like many other marginalized groups in other nations, have been constantly neglected in contemporary national narratives or given brief references in national histories despite the prominent historic role they played. Afro-Mexicans have experienced varying degrees of invisibility in the contemporary portrayal of Mexican history and national identity. The neglect of the Afro- Mexican in the national history directly impacts the present-day position of people of African descent in Mexico. The inability of individuals to immediately and quickly point to the significant contributions and the presence of Africans in the history of Mexico makes it easy to assume that African descendants do not have a space in present-day Mexico. More specifically, the neglect of the African presence in the narrative of Mexico makes it easy for people to imagine Mexico as a nation without strong ties to African heritage and blood. Yet, in the last fifteen to twenty years, Afro-Mexicans have struggled to gain a representative space in the Mexican self-portrait, causing many scholars to reevaluate and reconsider the presence of people of African descent in Mexico. Although individuals have reconsidered the varying degrees of invisibility of the African heritage in Mexico, there is still a lack of momentum in recovering the African links to Mexico in the present day.

The process resulting in the invisibility of Afro-Mexicans is not simply a contemporary issue; it is steeped in the historic construction of the Mexican identity. Centuries of miscegenation and assimilation of different racial and ethnic groups led to the creation of a multi-racial society in Mexico. Theories emerged to account for the image of the Mexican nation and its interracial heritage. Individuals in power constructed the Mexican identity with great influence on the perceptions of citizens. In the 1920s Mexican intellectuals, most notably José Vasconcelos, began to promote the idea of a cosmic race, “la raza cósmica,” in Mexico. This theory sought to promote a collective group identity that went beyond race and ethnicity in Mexico. Individuals of Spanish descent, Native American descent, and African descent populated the vast region that made up Mexico. However, these three groups had many variations within themselves. There were numerous indigenous groups that populated the region that would later become Mexico. People of African descent had a significant role in populating Mexico in the colonial period. Some were born in different regions in Africa and brought to the New World, while others were born in the Americas. Furthermore, the African position in the colonial system varied, as some Africans were enslaved while others were free. Just as with the African case, there were Spaniards who were born in the New World, known as criollos, and Spaniards born in Spain, known as peninsulares. Throughout the colonial and post-independence periods the indigenous, African, and Spanish groups constituted a multiracial and multiethnic society. Contributing to this mixed landscape were the sexual relations between these individuals, resulting in the birth of mixed-race individuals who inhabited colonial Mexico.

The concept of the “cosmic race” necessitated the erasure of specific group contributions in the construction of the Mexican state in order to create a homogenized Mexican national identity. This new identity was intended to go beyond the multiple distinct groups and mixed groups in Mexican society. The new Mexican identity would theoretically represent the diverse groups as equal participants in the construction of the Mexican nation. These diverse groups would be represented as part of a collective that provided the building blocks to construct the Mexican nation. Yet, the emergence of a homogenous identity resulted in a substantial disappearance and neglect of some groups that participated in the construction of Mexican society. Individual groups were subsumed into the collective identity of the Mexican nation as their contributions were bulked into a single framework of progress.

Although specific groups were brought into a collective identity, they found it difficult to ignore their distinct differences. With this in mind, specific groups presented themselves as both Mexican and their unique group identity. When the cultural contributions to Mexico were acknowledged, the focus was on Spanish and indigenous groups as the primary participants in the construction of Mexico, while the contributions of Afro-Mexicans were relegated to the margins.

Although Afro-Mexicans have been relegated to the margins, their presence in Mexico cannot be so easily overlooked. There are locations in Mexico that hold populations of African descendants in large numbers. Coastal regions and port cities such as Costa Chica, Guerrero, and Veracruz, reflect the significant presence of people of African descent in Mexico. Despite the presence in these regions, the potential for the representation of Afro-Mexicans is limited. The concentration of Afro-Mexicans in these regions encourages the social invisibility of African presence within the greater Mexican nation. More specifically, it is readily assumed that people of African descent have resided solely in these areas. However, Afro-Mexicans were also present on a large scale in other areas of Mexico, especially in urban centers such as Mexico City and Guadalajara. Many Afro-Mexican slaves found their way to various locales in colonial Mexico as a result of slavery and the migratory patterns of slaveholders…

Purchase the dissertation 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…

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Splitting the Difference: Exploring the Experiences of Identity and Community Among Biracial and Bisexual People in Nova Scotia

Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia
April 2011
82 pages

Samantha Loppie

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

The term ‘bicultural’ has been gaining acknowledgment in sociological and psycho-social research and literature. It refers to identity construction which internalizes of more than one cultural identity by an individual. This thesis uses qualitative methods and a grounded theory research design to explore how bicultural (biracial and bisexual) people navigate identity and community in Nova Scotia. While similar research has been conducted on racial and sexual identities elsewhere, this study looks to fill some of the gaps in bicultural research by specifically dealing with it in an Atlantic Canadian context. Living in a social environment steeped in historical discrimination and political struggle exerts significant influence on the identities and communities of bicultural people in Nova Scotia. The thesis research findings suggest that while social environment often creates divisions and dichotomy when interpreting bicultural identities, bicultural people manage to maintain an integrated sense of self within this environment.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Literature Review
  • Biculturalism: A Foot in Both Doors
  • Creating Context: Nova Scotia
  • Bicultural Identity: Biracial and Bisexual
  • Black and Queer: Exploring Marginalized Community
  • Discrimination and Privilege
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Three: Methodology
  • Definition of Terms
  • Qualitative Method and Research Design
  • Participant Selection
  • Research Participants
  • Data Collection
  • Ethics
  • Data Management and Analysis
• Chapter Four: A Place to Belong
  • Identity and Social Context: Nova Scotia
  • How People Talk About Identity Labels
  • Conceptualizing Identity
  • Influence and Development of Identity
  • Expressions of Identity
  • Identity Interactions with Community
  • Divergent Communities
  • Discrimination and Advantage
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Five: Conclusion: Finding Middle Ground
  • Foundations of Dichotomy: Nova Scotia
  • Seeing the Self Through Other’ Eyes: Self and Social Identity
  • Rejected and Accepted: Community Interactions
  • More Than Half: Discrimination and Legitimacy for Bicultural People
  • Invisible Advantage: Role of Privilege in Bicultural Identity
  • Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendices
  • Appendix A – Interview Questions and Guide
  • Appendix B – Consent Form
  • Appendix C – Code List

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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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