Mixed Race Studies

Cultural encounters and hyphenated people

The Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia
Volume 1, 2009
pages 97-107
ISSN 1988-5946

Anne Holden Rønning, Professor Emerita
University of Bergen, Norway

Cultural encounters are a dominant feature of contemporary society. Identities are ever-changing ‘routes’ as Hall and others have stated, so we become insiders and outsiders to our own lives. The manifaceted expression of cultural belonging and its formation is illustrated by examples from Australasian writers who express not only the conflict of belonging to more than one culture, but also its inherent value. Such writers provide the reader with alternative ways of reading culture and illustrate the increasing trend to see ourselves as hyphenated people belonging nowhere specific in a globalised world.

In the move from a colonial to a post-colonial, multicultural, and transnational society critics have spoken of identity, identities, pluralism and hyphenated peoples. Globalization and extensive migration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have increased encounters between cultures and raised further questions of integration and assimilation. Matthews has defined culture as “the information and identities available from the global supermarket” (27). He sees culture as hyphenating in our materialistic society since the cultural supermarket, dominated by the mass media, leaves the ability to appropriate culture in an adequate manner socially to the individual rather than the group.

If we consider the manifaceted expression of cultural belonging and its formation, two of the most common encounters are linguistic and cultural, expressed in texts of different kinds in art, music, literature, or drama. The themes of many recent EASA conferences have underlined this aspect of Australian studies, from pluralism at the first conference, to maintaining the national, re-visioning, remembering, re-invention of itself, and translating cultures, to mention just some. In art, for example, this has been demonstrated by papers on the use of palimpsest in Japanese-Australian pottery, a fascinating picture of sculptures and vases with half Chinese and half Australian motifs. On another occasion it was shown how older colonial Australian landscape paintings were painted over, or had new features imposed on them by indigenous painters—for example, barbed wire, different indigenous signs—thus subverting and reclaiming the land. And, of course, literature has provided a plethora of examples of cultural encounters at all conferences. Brydon and Tiffin think of this kind of “cross-cultural interaction” in terms of flora, comparing it to a rhizome which spreads its roots out and shoots up in other places, yet retains its contact with the centre (1993, 12), symptomatic of the diversification of cultures and identities…

…Hyphenated people

Though the word ‘hyphenated’ has often been thought of in negative terms, in today’s society it is increasingly thought of as positive, indicating multiculturality—since the days of homogeneity of race are long gone. However, recently when speaking of this I have been met with a sense of derision—another attempt to make oneself different, another labelling. But are we not all hyphenated in some way, the two parts intertwined? An understanding of this could lead to a world less full of conflicts. Bhahba has discussed what happens when cultures meet, historically from the point of view of colonization, and today with immigration as the site for such exchange. He describes “[h]ybridity [as] a fraught, anxious and ambivalent condition. It is about how you survive, how you try to produce a sense of agency or identity in situations in which you are continually having to deal with the symbols of power or authority” (THES 1999). But he also acknowledges the mix of cultures he himself represents in this ironic description of himself as Mr. Hybrid: “The very process of colonization shifts certainties and sureties. It exposes the fictionality of certain ideas that are seen to be universal. (…) Hybridity is like the way I’m dressed – Indian jacket, silk scarf, corduroys and a collarless shirt from Italy. There you are, Mr. Hybrid” (THES 1999)

The hyphenated person retains parallel cultures, both influencing the other but yet remaining separate. This is most clearly seen in migrant and settler communities, but is equally relevant for all who no longer live in their so-called ‘country of origin’. Trinh-Minh-Ha, the American Vietnamese film critic, has written much on these issues as she sees film as a particular example of cross-cultural encounters both in viewer and maker as well as in text and performance. She envisages such encounters as often resulting in a bricolage, a pastiche, quoting Scott Momaday: “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves (…) The greater tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined” (‘Out There’ cited in Minh-Ha 8). For those migrating or of mixed racial and ethnic parentage literature has always had a vital role to play in disseminating and problematizing issues of hyphenation, from the time of Shakespeare’s Caliban onwards. In When the Moon Waxes Red Trinh Minh-Ha uses the moon as a symbol of the constant and yet the changing, and therefore I would suggest symbolic of how cultural encounters function. The title of the book refers to a belief in Chinese mythology that a red moon is a portent of coming calamity—the eclipse as dangerous. Just as the moon waxes and wanes, yet retains its form, so do our identities vary according to time and place, and the cultural encounters we meet…

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AAS 310: Mixed Race And The Media

University of Texas, Austin
Center for Asian American Studies
Spring 2012

Alexander Cho, Assistant Instructor

What is “race,” and what does it mean to be “mixed”? How is mass media responsible for channeling fears, desires, and anxieties about “mixed” bodies? Why are “mixed race” bodies suddenly desirable and chic? Can one exist in two or more categories at the same time? How do people think of “mixedness” in the U.S., and how is it different in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Brazil? Why do people care so much? Why do categories matter? Isn’t everyone “mixed” somehow? Where do you fit in?
 
This course will give students the tools to critically respond to these questions via a comparative, historically situated study of the representation of “mixed-race” people in popular media. Major attention will be paid to special concerns for Asian American populations; it includes substantial attention to African American and Latino populations. Chiefly U.S.-centered, but with a large transnational comparative component analyzing “mixed” racial formation in: North America, Latin America, Caribbean, Brazil.

Families on the color-line: patrolling borders and crossing boundaries

Race and Society
Volume 5, Issue 2, 2002
Pages 139-161
DOI: 10.1016/j.racsoc.2004.01.001

Erica Chito-Childs, Associate Professor of Sociology
Hunter College, City University of New York

Multiracial couples and families are becoming increasingly more common, yet opposition to these relationships still exists even if it is often hidden in color-blind language. In this lingering societal opposition to black-white unions, the strongest opposition often comes from the couples’ families. The social institution of the family plays an integral role in reproducing the dominant ideologies of race that exist in society, and more specifically a racialized discourse that actively discourages interracial unions. Families reproduce racial boundaries, by patrolling who their members can and cannot become involved with. In our society where group membership is all-important and identity is based primarily on one’s racial group, families object to individuals from different “racial” groups redefining themselves apart from their racial identities. Drawing from in-depth interviews with black-white couples, the responses of their white and black families will be explored to illustrate how families express opposition to black-white interracial relationships. In both white and black families, certain discourses are used when discussing black-white relationships that reproduce the image of these unions as different, deviant, even dangerous. Interracial relationships and marriage often bring forth certain racialized attitudes and beliefs about family and identity which otherwise are not expressed.

Article Outline

• 1. The role of family in societal opposition
• 2. Theorizing black–white couples and their families
• 3. Racialized discourses and color-blindness
• 4. Methods
• 5. Findings
• 6. Color-blind or blinded by color?
• 7. Family responses: from ambivalence to opposition
• 8. “But what about the children?”
• 9. Black–white differences in familial opposition
• 10. Black, white, and shades of grey
• References

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The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa

Princeton University Press
2011
368 pages
6 x 9; 7 halftones. 1 line illus. 4 maps
Paper ISBN: 9780691123172
Cloth ISBN: 9780691123165
eBook ISBN: 9781400840410

Duana Fullwiley, Associate Professor of African and African American studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

In the 1980s, a research team led by Parisian scientists identified several unique DNA sequences, or haplotypes, linked to sickle cell anemia in African populations. After casual observations of how patients managed this painful blood disorder, the researchers in question postulated that the Senegalese type was less severe. The Enculturated Gene traces how this genetic discourse has blotted from view the roles that Senegalese patients and doctors have played in making sickle cell “mild” in a social setting where public health priorities and economic austerity programs have forced people to improvise informal strategies of care.

Duana Fullwiley shows how geneticists, who were fixated on population differences, never investigated the various modalities of self-care that people developed in this context of biomedical scarcity, and how local doctors, confronted with dire cuts in Senegal’s health sector, wittingly accepted the genetic prognosis of better-than-expected health outcomes. Unlike most genetic determinisms that highlight the absoluteness of disease, DNA haplotypes for sickle cell in Senegal did the opposite. As Fullwiley demonstrates, they allowed the condition to remain officially invisible, never to materialize as a health priority. At the same time, scientists’ attribution of a less severe form of Senegalese sickle cell to isolated DNA sequences closed off other explanations of this population’s measured biological success.

The Enculturated Gene reveals how the notion of an advantageous form of sickle cell in this part of West Africa has defined–and obscured–the nature of this illness in Senegal today.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction: The Powers of Association
• Chapter Two: Healthy Sicklers with “Mild” Disease: Local Illness Affects and Population-Level Effects
• Chapter Three: The Biosocial Politics of Plants and People
• Chapter Four: Attitudes of Care
• Chapter Five: Localized Biologies: Mapping Race and Sickle Cell Difference in French West Africa
• Chapter Six: Ordering Illness: Heterozygous “Trait” Suff ering in the Land of the Mild Disease
• Chapter Seven: The Work of Patient Advocacy
• Conclusion: Economic and Health Futures amid Hope and Despair
• Notes
• References
• Index

Racial identity and the spatial assimilation of Mexicans in the United States

Social Science Research
Volume 21, Issue 3 (September 1992)
pages 235-260
DOI: 10.1016/0049-089X(92)90007-4

Douglas S. Massey, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs
Princeton University

Nancy A. Denton, Professor of Sociology
Center for Social and Demographic Analysis
State University of New York, Albany

Mexico’s national ideology holds that Mexicans are mestizos, a racially mixed group created by the union of Europeans and Indians. When Mexicans migrate to the United States, this mixed racial identity comes into conflict with Anglo-American norms that view race dichotomously, as Indian or white but not both. In this paper we examine the process of ideological assimilation by which Mexicans in the United States shift their identities from mestizo to white, and then measure the effect that race has on the level of residential segregation from non-Hispanic whites. Although residential barriers are not as severe for mestizos as for Hispanics of African heritage, we find that mestizos are significantly less likely than white Mexicans to achieve suburban residence and that this fact, in turn, lowers their probability of contact with non-Hispanic whites.

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I wouldn’t, But You Can: Attitudes toward Interracial Relationships

Social Science Research
Published online: 2011-11-18
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2011.11.007

Melissa R. Herman, Visiting Researcher of the Research Unit
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
also Assistant Professor, Sociology, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Mary E. Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Iowa

Using the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we study Whites’ attitudes towards dating, cohabiting with, marrying, and having children with African Americans and Asian Americans. We find that 29% of White respondents reject all types of relationships with both groups whereas 31% endorse all types. Second, Whites are somewhat less willing to marry and bear children interracially than to date interracially. These attitudes and behaviors are related to warmth toward racial outgroups, political conservatism, age, gender, education, and region. Third, White women are likely to approve of interracial relationships for others but not themselves, while White men express more willingness to engage in such relationships personally, particularly with Asians. However, neither White men nor White women are very likely to actually engage in interracial relationships. Thus, positive global attitudes toward interracial relationships do not translate into high rates of actual interracial cohabitation or marriage.

Highlights

• Whites are more willing date interracially than to intermarry or bear multiracial children.
• These attitudes are related to outgroup warmth, conservatism, age, gender, education & region.
• White women generally approve of interracial relationships for others but not themselves.
• White men generally approve of interracial relationships both personally and globally.
• Neither White men nor White women are very likely to actually engage in one.

An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York before 1930

Temple University Press
December 2011
256 pages
5.5 x 8.25
1 map, 6 halftones
Paper ISBN: 978-1-59213-128-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-59213-127-3
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-59213-129-7

Shirley Yee, Associate Professor of Women Studies; Adjunct Associate Professor of History; Adjunct Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies
University of Washington

How the crowded neighborhoods of New York’s Lower East Side gave rise to cross-racial and cross ethnic bonds before 1930

Examining race and ethnic relations through an intersectional lens, Shirley J. Yee’s An Immigrant Neighborhood investigates the ways that race, class, and gender together shaped concepts of integration and assimilation as well as concepts of whiteness and citizenship in lower Manhattan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In contrast to accounts of insulated neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves, Yee’s study unearths the story of working-class urban dwellers of various ethnic groups—Chinese, Jews, Italians, and Irish—routinely interacting in social and economic settings.

Recounting the lived experiences in these neighborhoods, Yee’s numerous, fascinating anecdotes—such as the story of an Irishman who served for many years as the only funeral director for Chinese residents—detail friendships, business relationships, and sexual relationships that vividly counter the prevailing idea that ethnic groups mixed only in ways that were marked by violence and hostility.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Forming Households, Families, and Communities
• 2. Building Commercial Relations
• 3. Sustaining Life and Caring for the Dead
• 4. Mixing with the Sinners: The Anti-vice Movement
• 5. On (Un)Common Ground: Religious Politics in Settlements and Missions
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

From the Introduction:

In the winter of 1877, a group of mourners gathered in a dimly lit funeral parlor on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan to pay their last respects to Ah Fung (sometimes referred to as Ah Lung), a Chinese man who had been brutally murdered in his Lower East Side apartment. He had died of “ghastly wounds” at Bellevue Hospital after living for eighty hours with his brain exposed. Both Irish and Chinese people attended the funeral, including Mrs. Ah Fung, a woman of Irish ancestry. The New York World described the mixed gathering as “something unprecedented . . . [that gave] a good idea of the cosmopolitan character of the city” Given the well-publicized history of anti-Chinese hostility among the Irish working class, it is not surprising that the editors viewed the Ah Fung funeral as an anomaly.

The details of Ah Fung’s life are murky. The World described him as a laundry worker, while the New York Times reported that he had eked out a living making cigars and cigarettes with a Chinese man, Tung Ha, also known as “Peter Johnson,” and his white wife, Theresa. The three lived at 17 Forsyth Street, located in an ethnically mixed neighborhood across from the future site of the Manhattan Bridge. For unknown reasons, the household had not included Ah Fung’s wife; the two apparently had been living apart for several months before the attack.

Like other working-class immigrant communities, the Chinese called on their local mutual aid societies to help cover the funeral costs. Members of the Ene E. Jong, a Chinese burial society, raised $200 for the funeral and burial expenses. But the dead man’s friends and relatives had to look outside the Chinese community for an undertaker, for it would not be until the 1930s that the Chinese could hire a licensed Chinese funeral director. They hired William H. Kennedy, who placed Ah Fung’s coffin in his carriage house “amidst numerous hacks, coffins of several sorts, and a dreary looking hearse.” The forty-five-year-old Irish immigrant was a former carpenter and stable and livery keeper known for having “buried all the Chinese that [had] died in the down-town settlement for a number of years past.” Readers of the World caught a glimpse of Chinese customs from Kennedy, who provided a lengthy description of Chinese funeral and burial rituals, information he had acquired after many years of serving the local Chinese community. He also provided details of the Ah Fung funeral, noting that Mrs. Ah Fung, whom he described as “bright and intelligent,” was apparently unmoved by her husband’s violent death. In the undertaker’s view, the young woman was “not in the least crushed by affliction, for having left a tidy sum to his widow, she [was] not left in poverty by the demise of her husband.” Kennedy’s perception that Mrs. Ah Fung was not aggrieved but satisfied at her newly acquired financial state reinscribed popular racial stereotypes of the time—that she could never have entered the marriage out of love, but only for economic gain.

The newspaper reports of Ah Fung’s murder and the funeral that followed were no different from other tales of interracial love, sex, and violence that had become standard fodder in an increasingly sensationalist press by the late nineteenth century. But once we sift through the lurid details of the crime and the “colorful” descriptions Kennedy provides, a layer of interracial/interethnic social and economic relations that operated beneath the radar of popular depictions of urban life begins to surface. Ah Fung’s community in 1877 consisted of both Chinese and non-Chinese people who in various ways provided friendship, kinship ties, social services, and financial as well as emotional support.

Ah Fung’s situation was not unusual. Interrracial/interethnic relations were a common feature of daily life among working-class New Yorkers even as the ethnic composition of working-class neighborhoods in lower Manhattan changed over time. Nearly fifty years after Ah Fung’s funeral, a few blocks north of Forsyth Street, Johanna Hurley sat with Ching Yeng and her four-year-old daughter, Lung Som Moy, as Ching’s husband, Lung Lin, lay dying. Hurley, a widowed German immigrant, lived in the same apartment building and had summoned the ambulance. The building on Division Street, where Hurley’s and Ching’s families resided, housed an ethnically mixed population of old and new immigrants, the latter being mostly Russian and Polish Jews who worked in the city’s garment factories, ran small shops, or peddled wares in the densely populated neighborhoods of lower Manhattan. Moy’s father worked as a store manager several blocks over on Pell Street in the area popularly known as “Chinatown.”…

…The language and politics of difference have undergone significant changes over the past two centuries, encoded in the categories “nationality,” “race,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “culture,” and “class.” Such terms can denote group identities as well as official designations for enumeration and the development of public policy. Popular, legal and social-science definitions of race and ethnicity have been fluid and often inconsistent. In 1911, the Immigration Commission, headed by William P. Dillingham, departed from the practice of classifying people according to country of origin, opting instead to categorize people according to race. The commission defined race broadly rather than adopting the accepted notion that five distinct races existed—Caucasian, Mongolian, African, Malay, and Indian—which, its report argued, confined itself to only physical characteristics and color. According to the report, widening the definition of race to include what social scientists of the time would have referred to as “culture” was, the commission believed, more statistically accurate and practical in its effort to identify diverse groups coming from particular countries of origin. Thus, the commission retained the desire to classify, coming up with forty categories that it believed more accurately represented the identity of immigrant groups.

The terminology of race remained inconsistent in “objective” government documents, as well as in the courts. The social construction of race as an official classification shaped the ways in which government documents, such as the census, have categorized immigrants and their descendants into specific “racial” groups and reported their country of origin, or nationality. Even though federal census reports added more detail in terms of the numbers of categories, race remained an ambiguous category. Once classified as simply “colored” along with African Americans, the Chinese, for example, were classified as “Ch” for Chinese by 1890, but their children could be classified as either “Chinese” or “white,” especially if they had been born of marriages between Chinese and women of European ancestry. People of African descent were categorized alternatively as “colored,” “Negro,” “Black,” or “mulatto.” Such inconsistencies reflected the continued confusion among census takers about what race “really” was. At the root of the race problem were shifting meanings of whiteness.

Between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, popular understandings of “race” had undergone important changes. As the nation moved steadily toward the narrow “one-drop” rule that signified “blackness,” the meaning of “whiteness” expanded to include the Irish and, later, all Europeans of Caucasian ancestry. By 1920, concerns about how to define “white” and, hence, “non-white” made its way into the U.S. Census guidelines. For the first time, the introduction to the census articulated the notion of racial purity as a way to resolve the problem of classifying mixed-race people and provided guidelines for census takers (who, as it turned out, used their own discretion when classifying people anyway). While previous census reports had simply declared “whiteness” to mean people of European ancestry, in the 1920 guidelines, the government added the terms “purity” and “blood” to further specify the meanings of “white,” “non-white,” and mixed-white: “The term ‘white’ as used in the census reports refers to persons understood to be pureblooded whites. A person of mixed blood is classified according to the nonwhite racial strain or, if the nonwhite blood itself is mixed, according to his racial status as adjudged by the community in which he resides.”…

The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-grande & senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization

University of California Press
2nd revised edition (March 1987)
(originally published in 1933)
622 pages
ISBN: 9780520056657

Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987)

Introduction by:

David H. P. Maybury-Lewis

This book is out of print, but available for on-line reading here.

Table of Contents

• Frontmatter
• Preface to the first English-Language Edition
• Preface to the Second English-language Edition
• Translator’s Acknowledgments
• Author’s Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction to the Paperback Edition
• I General Characteristics of the Portuguese Colonization of Brazil: Formation of an Agrarian, Slave-Holding and Hybrid Society
• II The Native in the Formation of the Brazilian Family
• III The Portuguese Colonizer: Antecedents and Predispositions
• IV The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian
• V The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian (continued)
• Plans showing Big House of the Noruega Plantation
• Glossary of the Brazilian Terms Used
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects

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Rejoining the Parts: A Conversation with Jane Lazarre About Race, Fiction, American History and Her New Novel, Inheritance

Tenured Radical
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-11-15

Claire Potter, Professor of History and American Studies
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut

Jane Lazarre is a writer of fiction, memoir and poetry who has published many books, beginning with her memoir, The Mother Knot (1976; reissued in 1997 by Duke University Press) and most recently,Inheritance, A Novel (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2011). She has taught writing and literature at New York’s City College and at Yale University; and for many years directed and taught in the undergraduate writing program at Eugene Lang College at the New School.

Tenured Radical: The title of the book — Inheritance — asks the reader to think about what is passed down, generation to generation.  But in the first chapter we are confronted with Sam’s frustration and anger that, as a young woman with a white and a black parent, she knows so little of her family history. We come to understand that our historical “inheritance” not only can’t be taken for granted and but also sometimes requires active recovery. How did you come to understand that this was the story you wanted to tell about America’s racial past?

Jane Lazarre: From my early experiences in the late 1960s as a new member, by marriage, of an African American family, and throughout the years of raising two Black sons, I became deeply aware of how much I, as an American and as a white American, did not know about African American history — which is a central, defining part of American history. At the same time, of course, I began to understand all I was unaware of about race, despite a deeply anti-racist upbringing. As a mother, a writer and teacher, I began to study the subject. I saw that I was part of a great majority of white Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, in my ignorance of the complex forces of American racism…

…TR: We’ve heard so much since 2008, and the election of Black president with a white mother, about the United States finally being “post-racial,” and a new kind of fantasy about the beneficial effects of race-mixing, or multiracialism, seems to play a big role in this. But several multiracial characters in Inheritance make the point strongly that they are not immune from racism and that not to be recognized as Black is to deprive them of an inheritance of struggle. Can you elaborate on this theme a bit?

JL: I wrote extensively about this subject in my memoir, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness, a title that is a take on Ralph Ellison’s famous exploration, in Invisible Man (1952) of “the blackness of blackness.” I disagree strongly with the idea that the election of President Obama is the signal and sign of our “post-racialism.” I know that people of color, including people with one white parent, experience racism every day, even if there have been significant changes in our legal, and even social, attitudes. I believe that all of us, as Americans, are inheritors of the struggle of African Americans to both liberate and recreate themselves, and we deny this connection at our peril and to our great loss. Samantha Reed, the daughter of a (half) black father and a (Jewish) white mother, knows at a very early age that her identity, her history, her future, and even her unconscious (shown in the “white dream” she inherits in the Prologue of the novel,) are profoundly affected by, laced with, absorbed in, her heritage and her life as a Black woman in America. That does not mean she rejects or dismisses her other ethnic histories, nor that she does not love “the three white women whose histories flow into [her] own,” as she says in the early pages of the book. But I am saying, in this novel, as in other works, the lessons I have learned from my life as a mother, now a grandmother, as a teacher of African American literature and a writer about race: that so-called mixedness means little in American history. As I said above, many enslaved Americans, including the great Frederick Douglass, were “mixed” due to rape or forced sexual unions, and nevertheless remained enslaved. Racism in this country is not unchanged from previous centuries, or even previous decades, but as many cultural theorists have written, our educational and prison systems are evidence to the ongoing racism still permeating much of our lives…

Read the entire interview here.

The myth of the melting pot

Biodemography and Social Biology
Volume 1, Issue 4 (1954)
pages 248-251
DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1954.9987204

David C. Rife
Institute of Genetics
The Ohio State University

Elton F. Paddock
Institute of Genetics
The Ohio State University

Myths are fictional legends, but more often than not they carry elements of truth. Popular beliefs concerning the results of racial mixture may be classed as the myth of the melting pot According to this myth, the mixture of races is analogous to the process of manufacturing alloys. There is actually a great deal of truth in this analogy, although the true nature of alloys is frequently misunderstood.

When molten copper and zinc are thoroughly mixed in the proper proportions, brass will be produced. Brass, bronze, and other alloys are intimate mixtures of two or more pure metals. The ideal alloy is one which combines the desired qualities of two or more metals in what appears to be a homogeneous blend.

The appearance of homogeneity is superficial, however, as the alloy is essentially a physical mixture, not a chemical compound. Brass, for example, is a mixture of particles of pure copper and pure zinc, the size of the particles varying from atoms to tiny crystals. The result of a mixing of two races is analogous to the metallurgical melting pot in that the mixing does not result in the elimination of variability. It differs in that the end product in the human melting pot is a grosser mixture, the variation within mixed populations being more readily visible than in the metallic alloy. Concepts to the effect that either type of melting pot produces a new homogeneous product are purely fictitious.

The myth of the human melting pot is founded on the assumption that the hybridization of different human populations will eventually result in the elimination of biological differences. According to this way of thinking mankind will eventually be characterized by a uniform shade of skin color, hair form, and various other physical characteristics, which now vary from one ethnic group to another. There can be no question but that barriers between human races are rapidly being eliminated, owing to modern transportation, education, and communication. Today it is difficult to find “pure” racial groups. In most parts of the world many cultural barriers to understanding and cooperation are on the way out. But what about genetic variability? Is it tending to become less?

The answer is “no.” Genes, the particles of heredity, do not lose their identities but maintain them over an indefinite number of generations, regardless of what other genes they may be associated with. This principle is the essence of the classical discoveries made by Mendel almost a century ago. Mixture of races neither increases nor decreases the total genetic variability in mankind. It brings about an increase of  individual variability.

Mixtures of Negroes and Whites provide an excellent example of this principle. The first generation offspring are intermediate or mulatto. But if these mulattoes marry other mulattoes of similar origin, their offspring will exhibit subtly varying degrees of pigmentation, ranging from the dark brown of Negroes to the light pigmentation of Whites. The genes have maintained their individuality from one generation to another. The mixed population will have much greater variability with respect to…

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