Mixed Race Studies

Race: I’m Just Who I am

Time Magazine
1997-05-05

Jack E. White, Washington

Tamala M. Edwards, Washington

Elaine Lafferty, Los Angeles

Sylvester Monoroe, Los Angeles

Victoria Rainert, New York

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

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 The old black-white stereotypes are out of date, and Zoeller is just the latest casualty of America’s failure to come to grips with the perplexing and rapidly evolving significance of racial identity in what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

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

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

Read the entire article here.

In the Eye of the Beholder: Observed Race and Observer Characteristics

PSC Research Report
Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michgan
Report No. 02-522
August 2002
36 pages

David R. Harris, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Services Policy
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Deputy Provost and Vice Provost for Social Sciences
Cornell University

Over the past decade there has been intense debate about racial categories, but surprisingly little discussion of racial categorization. Specifically, there has been little attention devoted to if, and how, characteristics of observers affect observed race. This is troubling because racial classification data are the foundation upon which scholarly studies of race, and policy initiatives to fight discrimination. In this paper I present findings from a web-based survey that was designed to address gaps in our understanding of racial categorization. As part of the Study of Observed Race, 1,672 college freshmen were presented with photographs of individuals, and asked to identify each person’s race. Results indicate that observers’ race, sex, and familiarity with racial groups each influence how they classify by race, and that there are important interactions between observers’ characteristics. I close by discussing the implications of my findings for the 2000 census.

On April 1, 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau did something that was both revolutionary and controversial. Rather than ask individuals to identify with a single racial group, the 2000 Census allowed people to identify with as many as six racial groups. Even casual observers of American racial classification realized that this was revolutionary, as it directly challenged the precedent that individuals identify with one, and only one, racial group. What was less obvious was just how controversial this change in racial classification procedures would be. When the race counts were released in early 2001, few were sure how to interpret these new data. Many wondered what it meant that people had identified with multiple racial groups? For others, there were very real concerns about how to use the data. Should those who identified with more than one racial group be reassigned to a single-race group? If so, how?

In order to make sense of the new census race data, it is imperative that one first understand that these data implicitly assume that the race people select for themselves, or that is selected for them by someone in their household, is the same race that would have been selected by any other observer in any other context. Previous work has challenged this assumption by arguing that self-identified race can vary by context (Harris and Sim 2002), and that self-identified and observer-identified race need not agree (Hahn, Mulinare, and Teutsch 1992; Harris and Sim 2000). In this paper I pursue a further challenge to the assumption of fixed racial classifications by examining if, and how, observed race varies by observer characteristics. If it is true that an individual’s race can be adequately described through self-reports, then observed race should not vary by observer. If observed race does vary by observer, and especially if it does so systematically, then there may be further reasons to question the census race counts.

This work is important for at least three reasons. First, it provides basic information about processes of racial classification. Second, the new census race question is part of a major change in how the federal government measures race. By 2003, all federal race data will be collected using the “one or more races” approach (Office of Management and Budget 1997). Furthermore, because organizations outside the federal government are also likely to adopt this new racial classification scheme, work that affects our understanding of the new census race data will have a broad impact. Third, because a central impetus for collecting race data is to enforce civil rights laws (Office of Management and Budget 1997), and much discrimination is based on observed race (e.g., racial profiling), it is imperative that we understand if, and how, race varies by observer. Failing to do so will limit our ability to effectively enforce civil rights laws…

Read the entire report here.

Ties on the fringes of identity

Social Science Research
Volume 33, Issue 4 (December 2004)
Pages 702-723
DOI: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2003.10.002

Carolyn A. Liebler, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Minnesota

I use data on part-American Indian children in the 1990 Census 5% PUMS to assess my hypotheses that thick racial ties within the family constrain racial identification, and that structural aspects of the community (group size, inequality, and racial heterogeneity) affect racial identification when racial ties are thin within the family. American Indians present an interesting case study because their high levels of intermarriage and complex patterns of assimilation/identity retention for generations provide a varied group of people who could potentially identify their race as American Indian. Several hypotheses are supported by the data, signifying that racial identification among people with mixed-heritage is affected by the social world beyond individual psychology and racial ties within the family.

Article Outline

1. Introduction
2. Identity and thickness of ties
3. Hypotheses
4. Data and sample selection
5. Dependent variables
6. Focal independent variables
7. Control variables
8. Drawbacks to using census data to study identity
9. Results
10. Discussion
11. Conclusion
Appendix A. Descriptive statistics for entire sample
References

Read or purchase the article here.

Review of Spencer, Jon Michael, The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America

H-Net Reviews
January 1998

Richard L. Hughes

The Census, Race, and…

Amid a racial climate which includes a presidential advisory board on race and a discussion of slavery within the popular media, there lies an increasingly prominent dialogue on race in American culture. As the United States nears its next federal census in the year 2000, many Americans have expressed dissatisfaction with the accuracy of the current four categories of white, black, Asian and Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaskan Native. Some observers have supported the addition of a “multiracial” category where others, such as historian Orlando Patterson, have criticized the continued existence of racial categories on the census as a “scientifically meaningless” and “politically dangerous” “Race Trap.”[1]

One of the reasons why this debate resonates with so many Americans is that the discussion of race and public policy includes both the persistent belief that race is a fixed biological factor and the emerging notion of many scholars and policymakers that race is a fluid historical and sociopolitical construct. Acknowledging both perspectives, Jon Michael Spencer’s The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America is the latest scholarly contribution to this ongoing debate concerning the census and the possible use of the category “multiracial.” Borrowing both the title and analytical framework from Joel Williamson’s New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (1980), which focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Spencer offers a cautionary tale about a “multiracial” category in the contemporary United States.[2] He contends that without a “frank assessment of race” and the end of racism, such a category would be “politically naive” and even “suicidal” to black Americans (pp. 148,155).

While Spencer shares Williamson’s astute perspective that the status of “mulattoes” or, to use Spencer’s term, “multiracial” Americans, is an instructive index for race relations, his argument about the dangers of a new government-sanctioned racial category centers on a “cross-cultural analysis” of multiracial Americans and the coloured people of South Africa (p. 11). Building on the comparative work of historian George Fredrickson, the writings of coloured intellectuals such as Richard Van der Ross and Allan Boesak, and interviews with other “coloured nationalists,” Spencer concludes that the creation of a coloured “middle status” under apartheid served to divide and oppress nonwhites by creating a buffer zone between white elites and the black masses (pp. xiii, 91).[3] The result was the continued oppression of South African blacks and a marginal status for coloured South Africans. Cognizant of the centrality of issues of personal identity in the current American debate, Spencer adds that the middle status robbed coloureds of the identity, esteem, and culture only possible through a unified black consciousness movement in more recent South Africa. Spencer’s valuable contribution lies in his comparative analysis in which the tragedy of South African apartheid underscores the possible dangers in careless additions to America’s racial landscape…

Read the entire review here.

Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Published online: 2010-11-22
DOI: 10.1037/a0021562

Arnold K. Ho
Department of Psychology
Harvard University

Jim Sidanius, Professor of Psychology and African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Daniel T. Levin, Professor of Psychology and Director of Graduate Studies
Vanderbilt University

Mahzarin R. Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics
Harvard University

Individuals who qualify equally for membership in two racial groups provide a rare window into social categorization and perception. In 5 experiments, we tested the extent to which a rule of hypodescent, whereby biracial individuals are assigned the status of their socially subordinate parent group, would govern perceptions of Asian–White and Black–White targets. In Experiment 1, in spite of posing explicit questions concerning Asian–White and Black–White targets, hypodescent was observed in both cases and more strongly in Black–White social categorization. Experiments 2A and 2B used a speeded response task and again revealed evidence of hypodescent in both cases, as well as a stronger effect in the Black–White target condition. In Experiments 3A and 3B, social perception was studied with a face-morphing task. Participants required a face to be lower in proportion minority to be perceived as minority than in proportion White to be perceived as White. Again, the threshold for being perceived as White was higher for Black–White than for Asian–White targets. An independent categorization task in Experiment 3B further confirmed the rule of hypodescent and variation in it that reflected the current racial hierarchy in the United States. These results documenting biases in the social categorization and perception of biracials have implications for resistance to change in the American racial hierarchy.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Historical Treatment of Biracial Individuals
• Empirical Studies of Biracial Individuals: Identification, Categorization, and Perception
• Overview of the Experiments
• Experiment 1: A Blatant Test of Hypodescent
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 2A: A Test of the Automaticity of Hypodescent
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 2B: A Replication
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 3A: Evidence of Hypodescent in Visual Face Perception
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• Experiment 3B: A Replication and Extension
  • Method
  • Results and Discussion
• General Discussion
• Conclusions
• References

The “mixing of races” in America provides a natural laboratory for measuring perceptions of new racial identities that diverge from older and simpler notions of race purity (Shih & Sanchez, 2009). Although social psychologists have studied how humans think about ingroups and outgroups for decades, relatively little is known about the perception of individuals who, by the fact that they embody mixtures of social identities within a single individual, blur traditional group boundaries. Such individuals provide intriguing test cases for social categorization and social perception. We focus on one aspect of such mixtures by studying how humans who meld two seemingly distinct racial groups are categorized and perceived, and thereby test how socially meaningful lines that determine inclusion into desired group memberships are drawn. Fundamentally, the categorization and perception of biracial and multiracial individuals more broadly can reveal how culturally entrenched social categories and norms guide, and even limit, social perception.

From a sociostructural perspective, miscegenation and biracial identity have profound implications for understanding the stability and permeability of extant racial group boundaries. In the United States, there is a clear and consensually agreed upon racial status hierarchy—members of dominant and subordinate groups alike agree that Whites have the highest social status, followed by Asians, Latinos, and Blacks (see Fang, Sidanius, & Pratto, 1998; Kahn, Ho, Sidanius, & Pratto, 2009; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999, pp. 52–53). However, many have argued that the increasing rate of interracial dating and marriage between racial minorities and Whites, and resulting patterns of biracial identification of their offspring, will lead to a fundamental change in the American racial hierarchy (e.g., Alba & Nee, 2003; J. Lee & Bean, 2004, 2007a, 2007b; Sears & Savalei, 2006; Thornton, 2009). For example, J. Lee and Bean (2004) suggested that “based on patterns of immigration, intermarriage, and racial/multiracial identification…, Latinos and Asians may enjoy the option to view themselves as almost white or even white, and consequently, participate in a new color line that is still somewhat exclusionary of blacks” (p. 237). Others, like Thornton (2009), have documented how the mainstream media perceives the significance of multiracial identification: “For mainstream [news] papers, we are in a new era, sans racial determinants, and in this context multiracial people embody a color-blind America…” (p. 121). These sentiments assume that biracials will be accepted as part of their dominant parent group and not limited by their minority parent group status. However, are biracial targets perceived accurately as equal members of both parent groups or more in terms of their dominant or subordinate group lineage? The five experiments reported here are aimed at addressing this question…

Read or purchase the publication here.

Changing Family Structures in America [Project Description]

US 2010: Discover America in a New Century
2010

Zhenchao Qian, Professor of Sociology
Ohio State University

The US 2010 research project examines changes in American societ in the recent past.  Directed by sociologist John Logan, US 2010 is funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and Brown University.

Qian will create a descriptive portrait of changes in family structure, with a special emphasis on gender and racial/ethnic differences and geographic variations. Using the 2010 and earlier censuses and the 2005-2010 American Community Surveys (ACS), his research will highlight several trends.

Marriage rates have declined over the years. The weakened connection between marriage and childbearing, the growing popularity of nonmarital cohabitation, the stable high divorce rates, and the declining remarriage rates have all contributed to the decline in marriage rates…

Interracial marriage reflects racial and cultural diversity in American families. Recent increases in interracial marriage have narrowed the “social distance” between racial groups; Qian will demonstrate trends in intermarriage with whites for blacks, Asian Americans, American Indians and Hispanics. ..

“With increasing shares of minority populations, Americans can no longer be viewed in simple black and white or even single-race terms,” Qian said. “Intermarriage connects married couples, families, friends, and social networks of different racial/ethnic groups; the growing population of mixed-race individuals from intermarriage further blurs racial boundaries and adds another dimension of diversity in American families.”

Read the entire project description here.

Racial and Ethnic Intermarriage in the United States [Interview with Daniel T. Lichter]

Population Reference Bureau
2010-05-20

Questions and Answers with:

Daniel T. Lichter, Professor of Policy Analysis and Management and Sociology
Cornell University

Donghui Yu:
Could you please tell us some features of Asian American(partucularly Chinese American)’s intermarriage with other race? Thanks.

Daniel T. Lichter:
Asian women have among the highest rates of interracial marriage in the United States. My colleague, Yujun Wang, has shown with the 2007 American Coummunity Survey that roughly 55 percent of U.S. born Asian women (aged 18-34) married non-Asians, mostly white men. That’s a lot of out-marriage.

Compared with Asian women, Asian men have much lower rates of marriage to whites or other races. My Asian male students sometimes complain that white guys are dating Asian women, but that white women seem uninterested in them. There is lots of debate about why this is the case, and the empirical evidence is too weak to draw strong conclusions. Antecdotal explanations sometimes emphasize cultural definitions of masculinity (e.g., shorter height of Asian men) or gender roles (e.g., perceptions that Asian men may hold patriarchal gender role attitudes). We just don’t have enough hard data on these sorts of questions, which deal with highly sensitive issues that often strike a nerve.

To your last question, Chinese Americans overall have higher rates of outmarriage to whites than some other Asian groups (e.g., Asian Indians or Vietnamese). This probably reflects that fact that they have been in the U.S. for many generations (and a large percentage share common cultural traits of the majority white population, including language). But among recent Chinese immigrants—the first generation—rates of intermarriage are much lower and perhaps lower than in the past. Some of this seems to reflect the recent influx of Chinese with lower education levels from new sending areas(e.g., from Fujian province).

Chinyere Osuji:
Does interracial marriage really demonstrate a blurring of racial boundaries? If so, in what ways can we see this happening? Does this impact the lives of black-white couples? If so, in what ways?

Daniel T. Lichter:
From my perspective, the growth of interracial marriages has definitely blurred racial boundaries in the U.S. In fact, I often think of interracial marriage as the spoon that stirs the “melting pot.” For example, interracial couples bridge the family and social networks of each partner. They span racial boundaries by interacting on both sides of the racial divide and, more importantly, they bring other friends and family members with them. Of course, this assumes that both sides of the racial divide accept the interracial couple, which isn’t always the case.

Also, the mixed race children of interracial couples, by definition, blur the racial line. These children are more likely than single race children to have cross-racial friends and to marry interracially themselves. Most children of black-white couples, however, are still likely to identify themselves as black or African American rather than as mixed-race or some other racial label. President Obama identified himself as black on the 2010 decennial census, even though his mother was white and his father was black…

…Yang Jiang:
Dr Lichter,
How do you think the increase of biracial/multiracial population in the U.S affect the overall interracial marriage rates? Compared to single race counterparts, are they more likely to to inter marry or intra-marry? How should we distinguish inter- vs intra-marriages for biracial/multiracial individuals?

Daniel T. Lichter:
This is a more difficult question to answer than it appears at first blush. On the one hand, mixed-race individuals are more likely to than single-race persons to marry someone other than another mixed-race person. So if mixed-race people are treated as a separate racial category, then this would increase the overall share of interracial marriages in the United States. Zhenchao Qian and I have treated black-white mixed-race persons as black or white or mixed race in separate analyses. In the end, regardless of classification, it doesn’t have much effect on overall rates of racial intermarriage.

This is likely to change in the future. Only 2-3 percent of the population today self-identifies as having more than one race. Of course, many people who self-identify as having only one race (President Obama) may in fact be multi-racial. Is President Obama’s marriage to Michelle Obama interracial? This question makes clear the conceptual challenges of this sort of research and the subjective nature of racial self-identification…

Read the entire interview here….

Racial Identity’s Gray Area

The Wall Street Journal
2008-06-12

June Kronholz

The Definition of Whiteness Continues to Shift

When Barack Obama, whose mother was white, identifies himself as black, and when Bill Richardson, whose father was white, identifies himself as Hispanic, who is white?

The U.S. Census Bureau says the country will be majority-minority in 2050—that is, the combined number of blacks, Asians, American Indians and Hispanics will put whites in the minority. Texas and California are already there.

But the definition of white keeps shifting. Groups have been welcomed in or booted out; people opt out, sue to get in or change their minds and jump back and forth.

The deepest racial divide, between blacks and nonblacks, endures. But there also are identity shifts among African-Americans, as Sen. Obama’s success suggests. Some make it into the middle class, where education and social mobility may help shape their identities as much as race does. Others are left behind in increasingly segregated schools and neighborhoods.

The U.S. has never found it easy to assign race, although it certainly has tried. A century ago, the people who did the counting—demographers, sociologists, policy thinkers—divided whites into three strata. They considered Nordic whites, from England, Scandinavia and Germany, the most ethnically desirable and elite, followed by the Alpine whites, from eastern and central Europe, and finally the Mediterraneans. Everyone else was identified as black, red, yellow or brown, which included South Asians.

Whiteness and the privileges that came with it were so closely guarded that in 1912, a House committee held hearings on whether Italians were really Caucasian, says Thomas Guglielmo, a historian at George Washington University. The idea was picked up from Italy, where northern, lighter-skinned Italians, were asking the same questions about the southern, darker-skinned Italians, he says. No one argued seriously that Jews and Greeks, or Irish and Poles—light-skinned but poor—weren’t white, but whether they were ethnically Caucasian was up for debate, he adds…

…”Who’s white [won’t] mean that much, but when someone is partly black, that will still be noticed by a large part of society,” says Bill Butz of the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington research group. He sees today’s black-white divide becoming a “black/nonblack” gulf…

…Opting Out of Whiteness

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there was “some sentiment” among non-Arabs for counting Arab-Americans as nonwhite, says David Roediger, a University of Illinois race historian. Since then, the Arab-American Institute in Washington has unsuccessfully lobbied the government for a separate “Middle East and North African” category on the census. The institute puts the Arab-American population at three times larger than the Census estimates, which limits its political power and claims on government programs…

…The Melting-Pot Effect

That doesn’t mean race won’t matter, even as it becomes harder to define. Blacks still cannot jump back and forth across those shifting racial lines, which explains why Sen. Obama calls himself black even while he singled out his white grandmother in his speech claiming the Democratic nomination.

That’s not likely to change soon. Some demographers predict that within a century, there will be as many Americans who are mixed-race as there will be those whose parents are both of the same race, further blurring color lines. But that “hybridity,” as demographers call it, will be concentrated among Hispanics and Asians who marry whites and each other, not among blacks…

Read the entire article here.

Positioning American Japanese in the Context of Japanese and Okinawan Nationalism and Ethnicity

Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume II (October 2009)
18 pages

Stephanie Otani
Stanford University

have the right…
Not to justify my existence in this world.
Not to keep the races separate within me.
Not to be responsible for people’s discomfort with my physical ambiguity.
Not to justify my ethnic legitimacy…
To identify myself differently than strangers expect me to identify…
To create a vocabulary to communicate about being multiracial…
To have loyalties and identification with more than one group of people.

~from the Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People, by Maria P.P. Root

They wear war in their faces. They are the symbols of foreign domination. They embody the transgression of sacred boundaries. In Okinawa, people of Japanese and American descent (or Amerasians) are first and foremost foreigners, no matter how Japanese or Okinawan their language, customs, mannerisms, or worldviews may be. Before they even speak, their face and skin signal to people the circumstances of their births. The rights claimed by Root in the “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People” ultimately culminate in the right to first and foremost be understood as a human being as opposed to racial anomaly or mistake. As of now, these rights are insubstantial claims for those who carry signs of American parentage in their appearance throughout Okinawa and the rest of Japan. Instead, they continue to be externally categorized as gaijin or “foreigners” in their own homes.

Japan does not contain the linguistic nor legal infrastructure to accommodate them under the idea of Japaneseness. Within Japan, Okinawa is a particularly interesting and relevant site to explore issues of cultural and political legitimacy and conflicts between internal and external identity. The historical experience of Okinawa and its struggle for political sovereignty in international affairs mirrors the experience of American Japanese and their struggle to find a sense of national belonging. It is because of the contentious physical and political space Okinawa has historically inhabited that Amerasians struggle to fit into a larger Okinawan or Japanese identity.

Amerasians Within the Broader Context of Japan

In this section I will discuss the overall Japanese attitude toward multiracial people by examining the terms used to refer to multiracial people and the legal status of international couples. These two aspects of Japanese society reflect its reluctance to incorporate ethnic difference…

Read the entire article here.

Social Origins of the Brandywine Population

Phylon (1960-)
Vollume 24, Number 4 (4th Qtr., 1963)
pages 369-378

Thomas J. Harte
Catholic University of America

ALL RACIAL ISOLATES present problems of unknown or mysterious origins. [C. A.] Weslager notes the lack of specific information for the Nanticokes of Delaware and for the Moors as well.  There is some historical evidence that when white people first settled in Robeson County, North Carolina, in the 1730’s, they found a mixed blood people inhabiting the swamps there. However, proof that these people constituted the survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Lost Colony” of Roanoke Island is far from conclusive. A similar lack of specific historical data applies to the “Guineas” of West Virginia, although Gilbert believes that the history of this group can be reconstructed in a general way. Authentic historical information is also lacking for the Melungeons of Tennessee and for some Louisiana racial hybrids as well.

The present paper attempts to trace the Brandywine triracial isolate population of southern Maryland back to its earliest beginnings. Conclusive factual evidence cannot be expected for historical developments in the early period of the group’s evolution. There are, however, substantial materials to support some sound hypotheses which can serve as guides for future research on this and similar populations. The data presented below represent the cumulative results of a systematic search of public and parish records, supplemented on some points by data from personal interviews, for leads as to the origin of this deme. The analysis is largely confined to the late seventeenth century, the whole of the eighteenth century, and the early decades of the nineteenth century.

The hypothesis that racial isolates originated in illegal interracial unions between Indians, whites, and Negroes provides a particularly fruitful lead in tracing the history of the Brandywine group. This hypothesis has been proposed explicitly and implicitly by a number of students of…