Mixed Race Studies

British Eugenics and ‘Race Crossing’: a Study of an Interwar Investigation

New Formations
Number 60 (2007)
pages 66-78

Lucy Bland, Professor of Social and Cultural History
Anglia Ruskin University, United Kingdom

In 1937 a polemic entitled Half-Caste was published, heralding ‘the richness of hybrid potentiality’. Written by a self-defined Eurasian called Cedric Dover its opening pages indicated the extent of prejudice facing those of mixed race:

The ‘half-caste’ appears in a prodigal literature. It presents him … mostly as an undersized, scheming and entirely degenerate bastard. His father is a blackguard, his mother a whore … But more than all this, he is a potential menace to Western Civilisation, to everything that is White and Sacred…

This ‘prodigal literature’ included novels and ‘a vast mass of pseudo-science’ developed by ‘eugenists, anthropologists, sociologists and politicians’.  In the book’s Preface, written by British scientist Lancelot Hogben, it was eugenics that was singled out for condemnation: ‘An influential current of superstition (called National Socialism in Hitler’s Germany and Eugenics in England) claims the authority of science for sentiments which are the negation of civilised society’. Yet despite the negative tone of the Preface, and the reference to ‘pseudo-science’, Dover was clearly not uninfluenced by eugenics.  He cited a number of British eugenists in his ‘Acknowledgements’, and he dedicated his book to Ursula Lubbock (Mrs Grant Duff) an active member of Britain’s Eugenics Society. He also admitted: ‘I subscribe without qualification to the prevention of undeniably dysgenic matings … but not to the conceit that colour and economic success are indices of desirability’. His invocation of a different index of ‘desirability’ other than economic success was reminiscent of other socialists who espoused eugenics on their own terms.  Eugenics was sufficiently protean to be harnessed to different ideological beliefs, ranging from the ultra conservative to the social-reformist and socialist. What was new and unique about Dover’s particular take on eugenics was the centrality of the ‘half-caste’, who ‘must be regarded … as a portent of a new humanity—a portent to be encouraged by the stimulation of eugenical mixture …’

In contrast to his own positive eugenical reading, Dover recognised that most other exponents of eugenics in interwar Britain took a very different view of the ‘half-caste’, namely, as ‘potential menace to Western Civilisation’. Why did these eugenists (and indeed many of the British establishment) hold such a view? What did they think were the implications of the presence of the ‘half-caste’? What or who was unsettled by the presence of mixed race people? One way of exploring these concerns is through an analysis of a project set up by the British Eugenics Society to investigate what they called ‘race crossing’. An examination of this project not only throws light on the prevailing discourses on race differences and their measurement, whiteness, and Englishness, but it also enables us to test historian Barbara Bush’s claim that eugenics was ‘a strong element of inter-war racism’, and to get a clearer sense of the role played by British eugenics in the discussion and regulation of race…

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The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics

MIT Press
January 2009
368 pages
7 x 9, 35 illus.
Paper ISBN-10: 0-262-58275-9; ISBN-13: 978-0-262-58275-9

Evelynn M. Hammonds, Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies (and Dean of Harvard College)
Harvard University

Rebecca M. Herzig, Professor of Women and Gender Studies
Bates College, Lewiston, Maine

The Nature of Difference documents how distinctions between people have been generated in and by the life sciences. Through a wide-ranging selection of primary documents and insightful commentaries by the editors, it charts the shifting boundaries of science and race through more than two centuries of American history. The documents, primarily writings by authoritative, eminent scientists intended for their professional peers, show how various sciences of race have changed their object of study over time: from racial groups to types to populations to genomes and beyond. The book’s thematic and synthetic approach reveals the profoundly diverse array of practices—countless acts of observation, quantification, and experimentation—that enabled the consequential categorizations we inherit.
 
The documents—most reproduced in their entirety—range from definitions of race in dictionaries published between 1886 and 2005 to an exchange of letters between Benjamin Baneker and Thomas Jefferson; from Samuel Cartwright’s 1851 “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” to a 1950 UNESCO declaration that race is a social myth; from a 1928 paper detailing the importance of the glands in shaping human nature to a 2005 report of the discovery of a genetic basis for skin color. Such documents, given context by the editors’ introductions to each thematic chapter, provide scholars, journalists, and general readers with the rich historical background necessary for understanding contemporary developments in racial science.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS OF “RACE”
• 2. ANATOMICAL OBSERVATIONS
• 3. IMMUNITY AND CONTAGION
• 4. EVOLUTION AND DEGENERATION
• 5. TECHNIQUES OF MEASUREMENT
• 6. GLANDULAR DIFFERENCES
• 7. HYBRIDITY AND ADMIXTURE
• 8. TOWARD GENETICS
• 9. THE END OF RACE?
• Index

Genetic Counseling: For children of mixed racial ancestry

Biodemography and Social Biology
Volume 8, Issue 3, 1961
pages 157-163
DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1961.9987478

Sheldon C. Reed, Director
Dight Institute for Human Genetics
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Esther B. Nordlie
Dight Institute for Human Genetics
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

INTRODUCTION

The editors of this journal have been interested in genetic counseling because it is a major practical application of the results of research in human genetics. It is reasonable to assume that genetic counseling may also have some relationship to eugenics, though there is nothing known as to exactly what this relationship may be.

Genetic counseling should be helpful to those who ask for it. The understanding of any problem is the first step toward its solution. Understanding of the problem removes some of the attendant anxiety, even if the solution is unpleasant. There should be less anxiety after genetic counseling than before it has occurred, and the clients indicate in many ways that it is useful to them. The relationship between genetic counseling and eugenics is certainly ambiguous. It is my impression that the relief of anxiety concerning the likelihood of a repetition of an abnormality results in increased reproduction of the parents of the affected children. If this is true, the frequency of any genes responsible for the abnormality would be increased, though slightly, in the population, which would be a dysgenic process. The increased reproduction of the parents of the anomalous children should also increase the frequency of any genes related to the attributes of responsible parenthood which should have positive eugenic benefits. It is not clear to me whether the net result of these opposing tendencies is eugenic or dysgenic. The dysgenic effect is to increase slightly the pool of rare genes for abnormalities which are infrequent, while the slight increase in the supply of genes related to responsible parenthood would be less significant percentage-wise because such genes arc presumed to be more frequent in the population. If genes related to responsible parenthood do not exist, one can only conclude that genetic counseling may well be dysgenic Genetic counseling at present would seem to be liable to the suspicion that it is dysgenic. This effect may be too trivial to warrant consideration. Hopefully, the obvious benefits to the parents who come for counseling outweigh the possible dysgenic costs to society as a whole. The only alternative to genetic counseling is the refusal to impart whatever information research in human genetics has discovered; such a philosophy would be deplorable. Genetic counseling has a function and is here to stay. It is the intention of the editors to present articles by other genetic counselors from time to time. Presumably these articles will cover particular areas of counseling with which they have had extensive experience.

BACKGROUND OF STUDY

Wc have had considerable experience at the Dight Institute in working with adoption agencies in the placement of children of mixed racial ancestry. Mrs. Esther Nordlie (1961) and I have just completed a follow-up of the results of the placement of such children and will summarize the results here, as this is the first study of its kind. It is probable that genetic counselors will be increasingly occupied with this topic as interracial unions are likely to continue in the United States. The casual unions often result in children who become available for adoption. . . .

The problem of placing “pure” Negro, Indian or Mexican children is difficult only because few families of these minority groups request children for adoption. Ordinarily, no attempt would be made to place these babies in Caucasian families as the child or the adoptive parents would probably find social adjustment too difficult. However, children of mixed racial origin may “pass for white” or resemble the Caucasian adoptive parents sufficiently so that placement in a white family is feasible. Such placement is desirable for the child as the socioeconomic environment is assumed to be more favorable there. This would be true only if the racial appearance of the child would permit acceptance in the white community. Many white couples are desperately anxious to adopt children. Some are sufficiently free from racial prejudices to be able to adopt children of mixed racial ancestry, if a reasonable “match” between child and adoptive parents can be made. The critical prediction rests with the geneticist (or anthropologist) who must project the appearance of a small baby ahead to the child of five or six when entering school…

One would suppose that predicting the chances for a child to “pass for white” would be quite simple. Such, however, is not the case. The main difficulty is that these traits, when present in the racial hybrid, may not be apparent in an infant but develop over the years. Hair texture and skin color are the most important traits and at the same time the most difficult to predict. The baby may have no hair; it is well known that babies with considerable Negro ancestry may look quite light at birth and darken considerably during childhood. The geneticist is thus vulnerable to mistakes in his predictions as to the future appearance of the baby. One could take the attitude that unless the geneticist can make his prediction with certainty he should not enter the picture at all. Such reasoning is absurd. The baby is in the custody of the adoption agency and the agency must make some provision for this child.

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Black and white twins

The Guardian
2011-09-23

Joanna Moorhead

James and Daniel are twins. What sets them apart is that one is white and one is black—and the differences don’t end there, as Joanna Moorhead discovers

The two teenage boys sitting on the sofa opposite are different in almost every way. On the left is James: he’s black, he’s gay, he’s gregarious, and he’s academic. He’s taking three A-levels next summer, and wants to go to university. Daniel, sitting beside him, is white. He’s straight, he’s shy, and he didn’t enjoy school at all. He left after taking GCSEs, and hopes that his next move will be an apprenticeship in engineering.

So, given that they are diametrically opposed, there is one truly surprising thing about James and Daniel. They are twins. They were born on 27 March 1993, the sons of Alyson and Errol Kelly, who live in south-east London. And from the start, it was obvious to everyone that they were the complete flipside of identical. “They were chalk and cheese, right from the word go,” says Alyson. “It was hard to believe they were even brothers, let alone twins.”…

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Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Fourth Edition)

Westview Press
July 2011
400 pages
Trade paperback ISBN: 9780813345543

Audrey Smedley, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and African American Studies
Virginia Commonwealth University

Brian D. Smedley, Vice President and Director
Health Policy Institute
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies

In a sweeping work that traces the idea of race for more than three centuries, Audrey Smedley shows that “race” is a cultural invention that has been used variously and opportunistically since the eighteenth century. Race, in its origin, was not a product of science but of a folk ideology reflecting a new form of social stratification and a rationalization for inequality among the peoples of North America.

New coauthor Brian Smedley joins Audrey Smedley in updating this renowned and groundbreaking text. The fourth edition includes a compelling new chapter on the health impacts of the racial worldview, as well as a thoroughly rewritten chapter that explores the election of Barack Obama and the evolving role of race in American political history. This edition also incorporates recent findings on the human genome and the implications of genomics. Drawing on new understandings of DNA expression, the authors scrutinize the positions of contemporary race scientists who maintain that race is a valid biological concept.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Some Theoretical Considerations
• 2. Etymology of the Term “Race”
• 3. Antecedents of the Racial Worldview
• 4. The Growth of the English Ideology about Human Differences in America
• 5. The Arrival of Africans and Descent into Slavery
• 6. Comparing Slave Systems: The Significance of “Racial” Servitude
• 7. Eighteenth-Century Thought and Crystallization of the Ideology of Race
• 8. Antislavery and the Entrenchment of a Racial Worldview
• 9. The Rise of Science and Scientific Racism
• 10. Growth of The Racial Worldview in 19th Century Science
• 11. Science and the Expansion of Race Ideology Beyond the US
• 12. Twentieth-Century Developments in Race Ideology
• 13. Changing Perspectives on Human Variation in Science
• 14. Dismantling the Folk Idea of Race: The Election of Barack Obama and the Transformations of an Ideology
• 15. The Health Consequences of the Racial Worldview
• References
• Index

Race Mixture in Hawaii

Journal of Heredity
Volume 10, Issue 1 (1919)
pages 41-47

Vaughan MacCaughey
College of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii

THE CHINESE

The   Hawaiian Islands   arc remarkable for the diversity of  races represented and for the varied conjugal race-mingling which has taken place in this tiny island world during the past hundred and fifty years. Excellent general accounts of the nature of Hawaii’s population can be found in W. F. Blackman’s “The Making of Hawaii” (Macmillan, 1906, 266 pp.) and in “Race Mingling in Hawaii” by Ernest J. Reece (American Journal of Sociology, 20:104-16, July. 1914). The present paper is the first of a series of eugenic studies of Hawaii’s polyglot and polychrome population, a series which embodies data not heretofore assembled and made available for students of eugenics.

The population of Hawaii, 1918, in round numbers is as follows:

Asiatics............................153,500
   Japanses..................105,000
   Chinese....................23,000
   Koreans.....................5,000
   Filipinos..................20,000

Polynesians..........................40,000
   Hawaiian...................23,000
   Caucasian-Hawaiians........11,000
   Chinese-Hawaiians...........6,000

Latins...............................31,000
   Portuguese.................23,000
   Spanish.....................2,000
   Porto Rican.................6,000

Americans. Scotch. British, Germans,
Russians, etc........................22,000

The Hawaiians are remnants of the splendid Polynesian stock that formerly solely possessed this lovely mid-Pacific archipelago. The Americans, North Europeans and other “white men” represent the traders, missionaries, beach-combers, sailors, fugitives from justice, merchants, sugar planters, professional, military and capitalistic classes that have completely dominated and exploited the life and resources of the islands. All of the other races—Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Spanish, Portuguese, Porto Rican, Russian, Negro, South Sea Islanders, etc.—have been imported wholesale by the agricultural corporations to work in the sugar-cane fields. At present the population of Hawaii is predominantly Asiatic, alien, male, illiterate, non-English-speaking, non-Christian, landless, and homeless.

The Chinese have been associated with Hawaii since very early times The first epoch in Hawaii’s industrial exploitation was the “Sandalwood Period,” during which an active trade was carried on with China. Chinese coolie? began to he imported in small numbers about 1870. The flood of coolie labor swelled rapidly and reached a maximum about 1870. The exclusion law, which went into effect with annexation in 1898, has decreased the number of Chinese immigrants. The immigration of foreign-born Chinese into Hawaii to 1910 has been as follows:

Previous to 1890..............6,580
1891-1895.....................3,340
1898-1900.................... 3,830
1900-1905 ......................445
1905-1910.......................205

The Chinese now number 23,000; the increase during the past decade has been slight. There are now 800 registered Chinese voters in Hawaii. In 1900 there were almost as many Chinese children (1,300) in the public and private…

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German science and black racism—roots of the Nazi Holocaust

The FASEB Journal (The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology)
Volume 22, Number 2 (2008)
pages 332-337
DOI: 10.1096/fj.08-0202ufm

François Haas, Associate Professor
Department of Rehabilitation Medicine
New York University

The Nazi’s cornerstone precept of “racial hygiene” gave birth to their policy of “racial cleansing” that led to the murders of millions. It was developed by German physicians and scientists in the late 19th century and is rooted in the period’s Social Darwinism that placed blacks at the bottom of the racial ladder. This program was first manifested in the near-extermination of the African Herero people during the German colonial period. After WWI, the fear among the German populace that occupying African troops and their Afro-German children would lead to “bastardization” of the German people formed a unifying racial principle that the Nazis exploited. They extended this mind-set to a variety of “unworthy” groups, leading to the physician-administered racial Nuremberg laws, the Sterilization laws, the secret sterilization of Afro-Germans, and the German euthanasia program. This culminated in the extermination camps.

If the physician presumes to take into consideration in his work whether a life has value or not, the consequences are boundless and the physician becomes the most dangerous man in the state.

Christopher Willhelm Hufeland (1762–1836)

ALTHOUGH THE SLAUGHTER OF INNOCENTS has been a repeating theme throughout human history, only the Nazi-led extermination of millions of people deemed undesirable was framed in the scientific context of “racial hygiene.” At the core of Nazi philosophy was the view of the nation as a living organism. Using Herder’s concept of Volk, Hitler viewed German society as an organism with its own health. “Our people is also a biological entity… German people forms one great relationship, a blood society… This biological unity of people will be known as the people-body.” Because individual human beings were regarded as functional or dysfunctional parts of this larger whole and thus affecting the health of the people-body, racial hygiene became seminal to Hitler’s thinking. As Bavarian Cabinet Minister Hans Schemm declared in 1934, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”

The rise of science-based medicine combined with physicians’ roles in national health reform during the late 19th century to give physicians first-time political leverage and continuous and unprecedented levels of public recognition. Hitler and the Nazis reached out early to physicians:

I could, if need be, do without lawyers, engineers, and builders, but… you, you National Socialist doctors, I cannot do without you for a single day, not a single hour. If…you fail me, then all is lost. For what good are our struggles, if the health of our people is in danger?

Physicians responded in kind (Table 1 ): “The National Socialist Physicians’ League proved its political reliability to the Nazi cause long before the Nazis seizure of power, and with an enthusiasm, and an energy, unlike that of any other professional group.”

Central to this affinity was the 19th century etiologic notion evolving from Social Darwinism that certain diseases (e.g., mental illness, feeblemindedness, criminality, epilepsy, hysteria, alcoholism) are genetically determined. The physicians who had developed this theory—primarily psychiatrists, neurologists, and anthropologists—became Germany’s eugenicists and authored the country’s racial policy, and it was primarily these physicians and their disciples who eventually led the Nazi government’s policy of ethnic cleansing. This program evolved in a series of discrete steps of ever-increasing barbarism that emerged during the German colonial period in Africa and terminated in the extermination camps of the Holocaust…

The African colonies and concentration camps also served racial scientific inquiry. Post-mortems were performed to study causes of death and bodies of executed prisoners were preserved and shipped to Germany for dissection (Fig. 1 , (14) ). A 1907 chronicle reported that: “A chest of Herero skulls was recently sent to the Pathological Institute in Berlin, where they will be subjected to scientific measurements.”

Probably the most well-known study was the physician Eugen Fisher’s evaluation of Basters, the mixed-blood children of Dutch men and Nama women. He argued that “Negro blood” was of “lesser value” and that mixing it with “white blood” would destroy European culture, and advised that Africans should be exploited by Europeans as long they were useful, after which they could be eliminated…

…In 1920, Doctor F. Rosenberger wrote in the Medical Review, “…Shall we stand in silence and allow it to happen that in the future the banks of the Rhine shall echo not with the songs of beautiful and intelligent white Germans, but with the croaks of stupid, clumsy, half-animal and syphilitic mulattos?” This reiterated the threat first articulated during Germany’s colonial period that racially mixed offspring (called Mischlings) will destroy the purity of the German white race. As Colonial Secretary Solf had incited people in 1912, “You send your sons to the colonies: do you want them to return with wooly-haired grandchildren?…Do you want your girls to return with Hereros, Hottentots and bastards?. …We are Germans, we are white, and we want to stay white…

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Dorothy Roberts – Fatal Invention

The Tavis Smiley Show
PRI: Public Radio International
2011-07-08

Tavis Smiley, Host

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Professor and legal scholar Dorothy Roberts explores the effects of race-based science in her new book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. It’s the first text of its kind to document the development of racial science and biotechnology based on genetics and to map its implications for equality in America.

The Biggest Lie About Race? That It’s Real

The Root
2011-07-26

Jenée Desmond-Harris, Contributing Editor

Dorothy Roberts says race is a social and political construct, and she won’t rest until we know it.

There’s a reason we’ll never come to a consensus on the most accurate racial classifications for Barack Obama or Tiger Woods. There’s a reason questions about ethnicity on the census and college applications feel impossible to an increasing number of Americans. There’s a reason you can be black in the United States, colored in South Africa and something else entirely in Brazil.

According to Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century, it’s because, despite centuries of efforts to treat race as if it’s a biological category, it is no more than social construction—created to oppress people—that changes with place, time and perspective.

The Root talked to Roberts about the profit that’s behind the re-emergence of myths about race, the impact for African Americans and health, and how we can continue to talk about it, minus the long-standing lies.

The Root: Fatal Invention is an attempt to correct major misunderstandings and myths about race. Explain what race is and what it isn’t.

Dorothy Roberts: I can say very definitively that race is an invented political system; it is not a natural biological condition of human beings. The human species is a single race. It is not biologically divided up into distinguishable races…

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Fatal Invention: Race and Science

The Brian Lehrer Show
WNYC
Monday, 2011-08-15

Brian Lehrer, Host

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland & Ellis professor and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, and author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-create Race In the Twenty-First Century, discusses how the findings of the Human Genome Project a decade ago stands in contrast to racial definitions in medicine and technology.

Download the audio here (00:13:04).