Mixed Race Studies

‘The offspring of infidelity’: Polygenesis and the defense of slavery

Emory University
2008
506 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3332327
ISBN: 9780549849544

Christopher Luse, Instructional Assistant Professor of History
University of Mississippi

This dissertation examines an internal debate within the antebellum South over the nature of slavery and race. Focusing on the printed materials of the public sphere, this work explores the impact of a newly popular doctrine within ethnology, polygenesis, on the southern defense of slavery. Supporters of polygenesis claimed that non-white races were not merely inferior, but separately created species with fundamentally different physiological, intellectual and moral natures. For centuries polygenesis had been over shadowed by the orthodox doctrine in ethnology, monogenesis, which claimed that all races descended from a common ancestor (Adam and Eve). Under attack from antislavery forces, white southerners turned to polygenesis. They asserted that only the permanent inferiority of blacks justified bondage. Southern physicians were at the forefront of popularizing this defense, using their knowledge of medicine and physiology to claim that blacks resembled apes more than Caucasians. Southern newspaper editors took up the cause to refute abolitionist attacks. Supporters developed the theory of “hybridity,” claiming that people of mixed racial ancestry were “hybrids” doomed to disease, infertility and an early death. Southern supporters used this theory to assert only slavery prevented “amalgamation.” In response, southern Christians heatedly attacked this new “infidelity” as undermining the Bible, the chief defense of slavery. Southern ministers defended their vision of “Christian Slavery.” They claimed that southern slavery was based on a beneficial paternalistic master-slave relationship. Polygenesis undermined the common bonds of humanity necessary for paternalism. Southern Christians used the latest scientific research to argue for a common physical and moral nature among all the races. With the coming of the Civil War, southern Christians attempted to reform slavery up to “Bible Standards” by legalizing slave marriages and access to the Bible. They failed. In the aftermath of defeat, many white Christians adopted polygenesis to attack Reconstruction and racial equality.

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of History

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Proslavery Ethnology
• Chapter 2: Hybridity and Other Threats
• Chapter 3: Christian Slavery
• Chapter 4: The Moral and Theological Critique
• Chapter 5: The Scientific Critique of Polygenesis
• Chapter 6: I he Crisis of Christian Slavery
• Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

On the eve of the secession of South Carolina, Reverend James Henley Thornwell held southern slaveholders to Scriptural standards and found them wanting. Thornwell, a reluctant secessionist, delivered a jeremiad to call on southerners to repent as they faced the fiery trial of preserving their embattled slaveholding community. The Presbyterian Thornwell, a prestigious clergyman often called “the Calhoun of the Church,” denounced a grave threat to slavery. The target of his wrath was not only the ravings of abolitionists, but the “science, falsely so-called” which defended slavery by making “the slave a different being from his master.” Thornwell maintained “those who defend slavery upon the plea that the African is not of the same stock with ourselves, are aiming a fatal blow at the institution by bringing it into conflict with the dearest doctrines of the Gospel.” Thornwell viewed with consternation the increasing popularity of polygenesis, a previously marginal theory within ethnology. This emerging school not only asserted the inferiority of “lower races,” but claimed their separate creation as species with fundamentally different natures. Within the antebellum South a paradoxical debate raged. Southern white Christians, staunch defenders of slavery, attacked this new form of scientific racism by defending the humanity of black slaves. The southern critics of polygenesis even employed many of the same arguments and sources as abolitionists. Thornwell aimed his harshest anathemas at southerners who adopted this “infidel” theory to defend slavery. Thornwell admitted that “our offense has been, that in some instances we have accepted and converted into a plea, the conclusions of this vain conceit.”

In his brilliant sermon Thornwell managed to address the most important themes of the controversy. He argued “such speculations have not sprung from slavery. They were not invented to justify it. They are the offspring of infidelity, a part of the process by which science has been endeavoring to convict Christianity of falsehood.” Thornwell was only partially correct. Polygenesis, and scientific racism as a whole, had multiple roots. The debate involved not only slavery, but the long process of accommodation and conflict between science and religion within Western culture. It did not pit enlightened scientists against obscurantist religious bigots, although the polygenists loved to claim as much. Foes of polygenesis like Thornwell defended an established vision of the relation of science to religion that proclaimed the unity between the Word and Works of the Creator. The troubled but vital partnership between Christianity and science underwent profound strain due to the use of ethnology to defend slavery and racial subordination. Because, with apologies to Thornwell, it is clear that the necessity to defend slavery and racial subordination drove the development of polygenesis, which also became very popular in the North and Europe. The Northern Democratic Party, especially, used polygenesis to denounced calls for racial equality.

I propose to resurrect and analyze a half-forgotten debate which illustrates major issues in antebellum intellectual and cultural life. I contend that the controversy was much more prominent in the sectional turmoil than has been generally appreciated. The issue was fiercely contested in the pulpit, the lecture platform, in newspaper editorials and on the political stage. The debate was not the mere hobby-horse of a small group of researchers confined to erudite scientific journals. Its prominence is reflected in both secular and denominational newspapers. I have sought the most popular sources available. In part, this explosion of material was due to significant innovations in print technology and transportation during the era. The late antebellum era witnessed a massive increase in the circulation of newspapers and reading material. I have assembled this weight of material to demonstrate that the controversy was pervasive in the public realm. Newspaper editorials often assumed the basic points of the issue to be public knowledge. The conflict affected a host of pressing issues, from slavery to the rise of new scientific disciplines to the nature of republican government. The debate pervaded the public sphere.

The debate illuminates southern slavery and southern culture as a whole. Historians continue to debate heatedly the nature of slavery. The controversy over polygenesis uncovers a uniquely conservative, patriarchal and religious worldview as well as a serious indigenous challenge to this Christian, paternalistic ideology. The antebellum South increasingly denounced the powerful currents of egalitarianism, religious liberalism, and “infidelity” sweeping the western world, but they could not separate themselves from them. Southerners saw themselves as modern men participating in the larger developments of Western civilization. They used the latest innovations in sociology, political science and natural history to defend an institution denounced as immoral and archaic by the rest of the Western world…

…Along with abolitionism and socialism, proslavery Christians wrestled with another “ism,” racism. At the heart of the ethnological debates was the nature of race. In order to understand the antebellum controversy it is necessary to deal with some of the theoretical issues of race. Nineteenth century ethnologists celebrated their increased understanding of human differences as a major advance in understanding the natural world. They believed that they discovered the nature of human variations in the same fashion that Isaac Newton discovered the laws of physics. They believed they had gained insight into the plans of the Creator. “Race” was an expression of natural law, not an artificial human category. In contrast, for the past eighty years, biologists, anthropologists and geneticists have been dismantling the idea of race as a valid scientific concept. In a fascinating instance of foreshadowing, antebellum critics of polygenesis anticipated a number of the modern assaults on race. Opponents repeatedly pointed out the impossibility of clearly defining racial boundaries. They presented the imperceptible gradations of complexion, hair and physiognomy among the races. Proslavery Christians even denied that there existed a uniform, degraded “Negro Type.” Modern geneticists have mapped the extraordinary amount of genetic overlap between the various “races,” concluding that on the most basic level of chromosomes and genes, the races are the same. As Audrey Smedley puts it, the “Biogenetic variations in the human species are not the same phenomenon as the social clusters we call ‘races.'” Modern scientists have largely abandoned race in favor of geographically based “breeding populations” with varying gene frequencies.

Modern anthropologists have traveled a similar path. Beginning in the early twentieth century with the pioneering work of Franz Boas, anthropologists have stressed the plastic nature of human behavior and capacities. Anthropologists view human behavior as mostly culturally determined and transmitted. For the purposes of this study, the most crucial insight is that race is socially and culturally constructed. Race is an ideology, not a science. Barbara J. Fields writes “Race is not an element of biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually), nor even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of pie) that can be imagined to live an eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology.” Racial thought is inseparable from the purposes it serves within a specific society, the conflicts it attempts to resolve (or disguise), the hierarchies it justifies and the meanings it explains. The ideology of race is the descriptive vocabulary of the everyday reality of power relations, more specifically, of the historic ability of European peoples to dominate other peoples. Ideologies of race are always historic despite their focus on the natural world. Most scholars insist that “race” did not exist in anything like its modern form until the era of European discovery and expansion. Race was the product of unique historical developments despite the efforts of ethnologists to give permanency to racial categories. Like all ideologies, although not “real” in a scientific sense, race is the cultural expression of very real social relations. Race is a human invention in much the same sense as political systems, art or literature. And like all human creations, it changes according to the needs of its society.

The seductive power of race as an ideology rests in its explanatory power and its simplicity. Racial ideologies empower all members of the superior social caste to make immediate judgments on the worthiness and intelligence of the “lower races” which determine the allotting of power and privileges. Almost as important is its ability to comprehensively explain the world. This power underscores a contention of this project: that polygenesis represented the first comprehensive racial ideology. This new doctrine explained all of human history and culture in terms of permanent, inherent racial traits. Earlier theories on the origin and nature of races focused narrowly on how physiological distinctions originated. They attempted to explain how peoples seemed to differ. Early ethnologists sought explanations for human variations that preserved the idea of a common human origin. In contrast, polygenists placed race at the center of human history. They focused on why humans differed.

The late emergence of polygenesis as a prominent theory underscores one aspect of racism. Race as a concept did not emerge through scientific research or historical investigation, but through the experience of domination and exploitation. For centuries prior to the emergence of sophisticated racial theories, “folk racist” beliefs of the inferiority of other races were prevalent in America. Most of the scientific findings of polygenists justified long standing beliefs concerning Indians and Africans. In Colonial America, whites contended that only Africans could labor in the semi-tropical South and that mulattoes were weaker and more diseased than the pure races. Nineteenth-century ethnologists gave a veneer of  authority to these beliefs by expounding theories of “hybridity” and “acclimation.” Racial ideologies are nothing if not purposeful. They almost always address a pressing need, whether it is the need to justify the necessity of enslaved labor to grow staple crops, or the necessity to control a dangerous “middle caste” between black slaves and white freemen.

By the late antebellum era, “folk racist” beliefs solidified into a set of core contentions concerning “lower races.” This increasing sophistication underscores the dynamic and fluid nature of racist beliefs. As slavery came under increasing attack, basic assumptions concerning blacks could no longer be taken for granted. They required increasing support and evidence. Among the most important “principles” of scientific racism were that races represented permanent distinctions which could be measured and evaluated. These distinctions organized themselves in a hierarchy of racial “types.” “Types” were idealized representations which disguised all the innumerable complexities among actual peoples. In antebellum racial types, all Caucasians possessed the profile of a Grecian god, while all blacks were ape-like and prognathous. These types expressed the true nature of the distinct races. These types represented not merely physiological differences, but basic moral, spiritual and intellectual distinctions. Racists emphasized that surface somatic variations were merely signs indicating the more fundamental racial “essences.” White seeming quardoons were in a deep physiological and psychological sense still black or an unnatural mixture. Ethnologists contended that these fundamental distinctions reflected God’s will embodied in natural law…

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Negro History, Part X: Miscegenation in America

Ebony Magazine
October 1962
pages 94-104
(Digitized by Google)

Lerone Bennett, Jr., Executive Editor

The material in this chapter on miscegenation during the slavery period is based largely on James Hugo Johnston’s doctorial dissertation at the University of Chicago, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860; Carter Woodson’s article. “The Beginnings of The Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks” in The Journal of Negro History; and A. W. Calhoun’s study, A Social History of the American Family.

Sin. Sex. Race.

The three words took deep roots, intertwined and became one in the Puritan psyche. In the famous sermon preached at Whitechapel in 1609 for Virginia-bound planters and adventurers, the minister fused the words in a stern admonition against miscegenation. From Genesis he summoned the figure of Abram who left his country and his father’s house and migrated to a land God had prepared for his seed.

“Abram’s posteritie,” the preacher said, “(must) keepe to themselves. They may not marry nor give in marriage to the heathen, that are uncircumcised…  …The breaking of this rule, may breake the necke of all good successe of this voyage, whereas by keeping the feare of God, the planters in shorte time, by the blessing of God, may grow into a nation formidable to all the enemies of Christ.”

It was easier said than done.

From the beginning, English colonists, following Abram’s example, married and mated with Hagars—red and black. Even more distressing to the Puritan mind was the broad tolerance of the English women who married and mated with Hagars brothers. Proscription began early. In 1630, a bare 21 years after the Whitechapel sermon, one Hugh Davis was “soundly whipped before an assemblage of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christians by defiling his body in lying with a Negro…” Forty years later, white women were being whipped and sold into slavery and extended servitude for showing open preferences for Negro men. Alarmed by widespread miscegenation, colonists from South Carolina to Massachusetts began a systematic campaign which ultimately made the Whitechapel sermon the racial policy of the land. Every instrument of persuasion was used to teach white people that they should “not marry nor give in marriage” to Negroes. No amount of persuasion, however, could “keepe” whites to themselves.

Miscegenation in America started not in the thirteen original colonies but in Africa. English, French, Dutch and American slavetraders took black concubines on the Guinea coast and mated with females on the slave ships. It should be noted that many Africans and Europeans were themselves the products of thousands of years of mixing between various African, Asian and Caucasian peoples.

In and around Jamestown and the Massachusetts of Cotton Mather, there was an extensive trade in genes. Socio-economic conditions in the early colonies encouraged racial mingling. White men and women from England, Ireland and Scotland were bought and sold in the same markets with Negroes and bequeathed in the same wills. As indentured servants bound out for five or seven years, these whites worked in the fields with Negro servants and lived in the same rude tenant huts. A deep bond of sympathy developed between the Negro and white indentured servants who formed the bulk of the early population. They fraternized during off-duty hours and consoled themselves with the same strong rum. And in and out of wedlock, they sired a numerous mulatto brood.

When Negro servants were reduced to slavery, the colonial governing classes redoubled their efforts to stamp out racial mixing. Miscegenation in this era was not only a breach of Puritan morality, but it was also a threat to slavery and the stability of the servile labor force. As early as 1664, Maryland enacted the first anti-amalgamation statute. It was an astonishing document. The statute was aimed at white women who had resisted every effort to inoculate them with the virus of racial pride; and the preamble stated very clearly the reasons which drove white men to the extremity of enslaving white women.

And forasmuch as divers freeborn English women, forgetful of their free condition, and to the disgrace of our nation, do intermarry with negro slaves, by which also divers suits may arise, touching the issue of such women, and a great damage doth befall the master of such negroes, for preservation whereof for deterring such freehom women from such shameful matches, be it enacted: That whatsoever free-born woman shall intermarry with any slave, from and after the last day of the present assembly, shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband; and that all the issues of such free-born women, so married, shall be slaves as their fathers were.

This law failed to stay intermarriage. Some women chose love and slavery; others were reduced to slavery by scheming planters who forced them to marry Negro men in order to reap the additional economic benefits accruing from the extended service of the mothers and the perpetual slavery of their children. A celebrated case revolved around Irish Nell, an indentured servant who came over with Lord Baltimore. When Baltimore returned to England, he sold Irish Nell to a planter who forced or encouraged her to marry a Negro. Shocked by the practice of prostituting white women for economic purposes. Lord Baltimore used his influence to get the law changed. The new law was about as effective as the old one—which is to say, it was not effective at all. E. I. McConnac, the authority on white servitude in Maryland, said: “Mingling of the races in Maryland continued during the eighteenth century, in spite of all laws against it.”

Negro-white marriages, especially Negro male-white female marriages, were a problem in Virginia and other colonies. In 1691, Virginia restricted intermarriage. Similar laws were put on the books in Massachusetts in 1705, North Carolina in 1715. South Carolina in 1717. Shortly after the enactment of Virginia’s ban on intermarriage, Ann Wall was convicted of “keeping company with a Negro under pretense of marriage.” The Elizabeth County court sold Ann Wall for five years and bound out her two mulatto children for 31 years, and “it is further ordered,” the court said, “that ye said Ann Wall after she is free from her said master doe at any time presume to come into this county she shall be banished to ye Island of Barbadoes.”

In an unsuccessful attempt to halt intermingling, Pennsylvania banned intermarriage in 1725. Forty-five years later, during the glow of the Revolution, Pennsylvania repealed the ban on intermarriage. Thereafter, mixed marriages became common in Pennsylvania. Thomas Branagan visited Philadelphia in 1805 and averred that he had never seen so much intermingling. “There are,” he wrote, “many, very many blacks who… begin to feel themselves consequential… …will not be satisfied unless they get white women for wives, and are likewise exceedingly impertinent to white people in low circumstances… I solemnly swear, I have seen more white women married to, and deluded through the arts of seduction by negroes in one year in Philadelphia, than for eight years I was visiting (West Indies and the southern states)… …There are perhaps hundreds of white women thus fascinated by black men in this city and there are thousands of black children by them at present.”

Aristocrats did not always obey the rules they made. Benjamin Franklin, it is said, was quite open in his relationships with black women. Carter Woodson, the careful historian, says Franklin “seems to have made no secret of his associations with Negro women,” Well-to-do people usually stopped short of legal marriage, but there is evidence that some threw caution to the wind. The following item appears in the will of John Fenwick, the Lord Proprietor of New Jersey. “Item, I do except against Elizabeth Adams of having any ye leaste part of my estate, unless the Lord open her eyes to see her abominable transgression against him, me her good father, by giving her true repentance, and forsaking ye Black ye hath been ye ruin of her; and becoming penitent of her sins; upon ye condition only I do will and require my executors to settle five hundred acres of land upon her.”…

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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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Eugenic Feminisms in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Genders: Presenting Innovative Work In the Arts, Ahumanities and Social Theories
Number 31 (2000)
98 paragraphs

Stephanie Athey, Associate Professor of English
Lasell College, Newton, Massachusetts

Reading Race in Victoria Woodhull, Frances Willard, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells

 This essay examines the American intersections of eugenic discourse and organized feminism—black and white—in the 1890s. Reading work by Frances Willard, Victoria Woodhull, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, I explore the emergence of female “sovereignty” or self-determination of the body as a racially charged concept at the base of feminist work.

A central tenet of twentieth-century feminisms, the concept of female sovereignty–women’s economic, political, sexual and reproductive autonomy–was first defined, debated and justified through eugenic and imperialist discourse at the turn of the last century. Black and white feminist discourse of the period made the politically enfranchised, legally protected body both the goal and token of full citizenship. However, within the frameworks white women elaborated, the economic, political, sexual, and reproductive autonomy of black and white women were set fundamentally at odds.

… Even when the organized societies of the American eugenics movement came to focus exclusively on “better breeding” as the only lasting means of race improvement, many black and white women’s organizations retained euthenic projects of regenerative reform well into the twentieth century, promoting the eugenic benefits of social hygiene, temperance reform, training in domestic science, and the like. The eugenic interests of both Frances Willard and Victoria Woodhull, for instance, combine race-driven reproductive agendas with other regenerative environmental reforms.

Black men and club women shared these interests as well. African American artists and intellectuals promoted black race purity as a means of conserving “our physical powers, our intellectual endowments, our spiritual ideals.” In the face of white racial theories, these race conservationists promoted the positive value of blackness. Black nationalists like DuBois, T. Thomas Fortune, Alexander Crummell, stressed different dangers related to race mixing, ranging from loss of black culture and consciousness to a biological “loss of vitality” or “vitiation of race characteristics and tendencies.” Other prominent African Americans supported a eugenics of race mixing or “amalgamation” as a means of genetic improvement. Proponents like Charles Chesnutt or Pauline Hopkins imagined a new American line that blended the strengths of a multiracial heritage but ultimately “conform[ed] closely to the white type.” All these groups reinforced color-based distinctions, and like white eugenists, these African Americans also measured racial fitness in terms of bourgeois class and gender conventions.

Kevin Gaines has argued that though the elite male voice of race conservation publicly defended elite black women against accusations of unchastity, they also frequently reinforced white racist slander, presuming lower-class and rural women’s complicity in systemic sexual abuse. Certainly, racist and sexist theories of black female degeneracy were powerfully resisted by black women’s groups. Yet white supremacist hereditarian and nativist premises were absorbed by black women’s organizations as well. For instance, leaders of the African American, Boston-based Women’s Era Club fought against lynching and racial segregation while maintaining elitist and nativist positions on working class culture and “foreigners,” and an attendant interest in “social hygiene.” As black women refashioned the white codes of bourgeois womanhood into black feminist resistance, their “politics of respectability” was fused to a civilizationist uplift ideology; this for some made it compatible with eugenic discourses of degeneracy. For instance, Nannie Burroughs weighs euthenic against eugenic strategies in her discussion of black poverty in Washington. While the “student of euthenics,” she says, “believes that the shortest cut to health is by creating a clean environment… to do a work that will abide we must first “get the alley’ out of the seventeen thousand Negroes.”…

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Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire

Oxford University Press
May 2011
320 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199604159; ISBN10: 0199604150

Damon Ieremia Salesa, Associate Professor of History, American Culture, and Asian/Pacific Islander Studies
University of Michigan

The Victorians were fascinated with intersections between different races. Whether in sexual or domestic partnerships, in interracial children, racially diverse communities or societies, these ‘racial crossings’ were a lasting Victorian concern. But in an era of imperial expansion, when slavery was abolished, colonial wars were fought, and Britain itself was reformed, these concerns were more than academic. In both the British empire and imperial Britain, racial crossings shaped what people thought about race, the future, the past, and the conduct and possibilities of empire. Victorian fears of miscegenation and degeneration are well known; this study turns to apparently opposite ideas where racial crossing was seen as a means of improvement, a way of creating new societies, or a mode for furthering the rule of law and the kingdom of Heaven.

Salesa explores how and why the preoccupation with racial crossings came to be so important, so varied, and so widely shared through the writings and experiences of a raft of participants: from Victorian politicians and writers, to philanthropists and scientists, to those at the razor’s edge of empire—from soldiers, missionaries, and settlers, to ‘natives’, ‘half-castes’ and other colonized people. Anchored in the striking history of colonial New Zealand, where the colonial policy of ‘racial amalgamation’ sought to incorporate and intermarry settlers and New Zealand Maori, Racial Crossings examines colonial encounters, working closely with indigenous ideas and experiences, to put Victorian racial practice and thought into sharp, critical, relief.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Crossing Races
• 1. Systematic Colonisation and Racial Amalgamation
• 2. Intimate Encounters in New Zealand Before 1840
• 3. Racial Amalgamation in New Zealand 1840-1850s
• 4. Crossing Races, Encountering Places
• 5. The Tender Way in Race War
• Conclusion: Dwelling in Unity
• Bibliography

Passing Me By: African American Women and ‘Passing’ As a Film Genre

PopMatters
2011-04-08

Matt Mazur, PopMatters Contributing Editor

Caught between two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in the African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, the protagonist of the passing film is confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage.

“Life is but a walking shadow,” wrote William Shakespeare in Macbeth. In film studies, we frequently consider the extreme contrast of light and dark, of noirish chiaroscuro designs that were born from the severe German expressionist lines. These are the “shadows” that highlight the pronounced differences between black and white, between coruscation and silhouette, between good and evil. The complex interplay between these two diametrically-opposing forces is one of the most essential technical elements of a film’s design, illuminating, reflecting and projecting the subconscious and highlighting implicit narrative themes in a visual language that aids the spectator’s understanding of the art as they read it. Nowhere is this essential cinematic contrast more apparent than upon the skins of characters in films about passing—a trope in which (usually female, usually biracial African American/Caucasian) pass for white, abandoning their black heritage and otherness to reap the benefits of whiteness. The light is the positive signifier, while the dark is the negative.

Until recently, this particular leitmotif was refracted bluntly in the way race dynamics were depicted in film in general. There were “black” films and “white” films, but rarely did any movie dare to highlight what life was like for any realistic scope of biracial characters who existed in true Jungian shadow-self, caught between these two worlds, standing on a near-literal precipice with one foot in African American experience, the other firmly in majority white culture, confronted with an impossible choice: live in truth as a person of color, be marginalized and treated like dirt, or risk “passing” for white to gain societal advantage. This concept was, from post-Reconstruction through the ‘60s, a much-discussed, weighty social issue, evidenced in the presence of the passing narrative in black and white art of the time, and it was brought most to social awareness in cinematic depictions, many of which proved to be financial and critical successes.

While racial passing seems outdated by today’s standards, and the very thought of a black person needing to pass for white actually smacks of racism, this essay repositions the importance of passing as a genre by looking at four key Hollywood films from the early-‘30s through the late-‘50s: two versions of Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl in 1934 and Douglas Sirk in 1959), Pinky (Elia Kazan, 1949), and Band of Angels (Raoul Walsh, 1957). We examine how race passing has become supplanted by other more socially acceptable sub-modes of the passing narrative (for example: the quintessential passing model now largely excludes race but focuses instead on gender and sexuality), but also how the distant ancestors of race passing can still somewhat insidiously found lurking unnamed in the world of contemporary film, from the extreme popularity of a biracial actress like Halle Berry (who has been nicknamed a “black Barbie” because of the way she conforms to standards of white female beauty) to the teasing, exoticized, and even sexually-festishized presence of the racially-ambiguous Mariah Carey in films such as Glitter (Vondie Curtis-Hall, 2001) and Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (Lee Daniels, 2009)…

Read the entire article here.

INDIGO – Laura Kina & Shelly Jyoti

Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts
2043 North Miami Avenue
Miami, Florida 33127
2011-05-14 through 2011-06-30

Opening Reception
2011-05-14, 14:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Shelly Jyoti, Visual Artist, Fashion Designer, Poet, Researcher and Independent Curator

In the 19th century, Bengal was the world’s biggest producer of indigo but today, the deep blue color of indigo is synthetically created in a lab and is associated in the West with blue jeans more than its torrid colonial past. But indigo holds a sustained presence in the post-colonial identity of India. Employing fair trade embroidery artisans from women’s collectives in India and executing their works in indigo blue, Jyoti and Kina’s works draw upon India’s history, narratives of immigration and transnational economic interchanges. The artists decided to collaborate in 2008-2009, considering their mutual interest in textile history, pattern & decoration. They began by thinking about the intersections of their own ethnic and national positions in relation to fabrics. For this exhibition in particular, Jyoti’s Indigo Narratives utilize traditional embroidery and embellishments along with heritage symbols belonging to traveling ethnic communities who settled in coastal Gujarat while Kina’s Devon Avenue Sampler series focuses on a contemporary Desi/Jewish community in Chicago.  This exhibition includes new works in mediums such as hand-embroidery on khadi, acrylic on fabric, hand-stenciled Sanskrit calligraphy and textile embroidery on canvas.

For more information, click here.

Group provides space for ‘racial Hybrids’

The University News
A Student Voice of Saint Louis University Since 1921
2011-04-14

Sean Worley

Black Student Alliance, Filipino Student Association, Indian Student Association and the list of groups oriented around race goes on. Although these student groups have a noticeable presence on campus, for some students, they just are not enough.
 
“I constantly feel different,” freshman Rebecca Glasgow said. “I relate to things but I always feel different.”
 
Glasgow identifies as an Arab-American with her father being from the United States and her mother from Syria, she often wonders where her chartered student organization is on campus.
 
Hybrid Identities is such a student organization for students who identify with no one particular race. In other words they are mixed race, or hybrid.
 
This CSO is currently in its probationary status but is already starting to gain interest and support…

Read the entire article here.

You Are Free: Stories

Riverhead (and Imprint of Penguin Press)
2011-05-03
240 pages
ISBN 9781594485077

Danzy Senna

Each of these eight remarkable stories by Danzy Senna tightrope-walks tantalizingly, sometimes frighteningly, between defined states: life with and without mates and children, the familiar if constraining reference points provided by race, class, and gender. Tensions arise between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to the private school where they’d applied on a lark. A new mother hosts an old friend, still single, and discovers how each of them pities-and envies- the other. A young woman responds to an adoptee in search of her birth mother, knowing it is not she.

Man with a Cross: Hawkeye Was a “Half-Breed”

Cooper Panel
American Literature Association Conference
San Diego, California
May 1998

James Fenimore Cooper Society

Barbara Mann, Lecturer of English
University of Toledo

Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 10, August 1998

Natty Bumppo—Hawkeye of James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leather-Stocking Tales—is indelibly inscribed in the critical mind as the “man without a cross,” that prototypical “white Indian” of American literature. So accustomed are they to Natty’s “man-without-a-cross” mantra that critics take it at face value, never asking the obvious question: Was Natty really a man without a racial cross? I say, “Not a chance.” Seen against the backdrop of Native history, of which Cooper was intimately aware, Natty could only have been a mixed blood.

Now for a little primer: Modem critics tend to assume that the one-drop rule of racial identity was always in force in America, legally disallowing any wiggle room to people of racially mixed ancestry. Not so. There were in actuality three rules of racial identity, each competing with the others between 1750 and 1850: generational passing; the rule of recognition; and the rule of descent. Generational passing, the British rule under colonialism, allowed third generation cross-bloods to pass as “white,” regardless of how Native or African they might look. By 1825, racist theory was gaining ground in America, positing two new, conflicting “rules” of race, those of recognition and descent. The rule of recognition was the eye-test of identity: whoever could pass, might; while the rule of descent—the infamous “one-drop” rule—forbade passing at all times, regardless of generation or appearance. After 1825, only the rules of recognition and descent remained to vie for social control and, from 1850 on, the one-drop rule alone applied. Note that, in Natty’s lifetime, the generational rule and the rule of recognition were in force. Under either, Natty was legally “white,” even though in modem, more racist America, he would not be so categorized…

Read the entire paper here.