Mixed Race Studies

The Mixing of Races and Social Decay

Eugenics Review
Volume 41, Number 1 (April 1949)
pages 11–16

The Right Rev. E. W. Barnes, Sc.D., F.R.S. (1874-1953)
Biship of Birmingham, England

I have chosen to address you on a subject of great importance. With regard to it strong differences of opinion exist. As we consider various aspects of the subject we grope our way uncertainly.

Let us begin with statements that all will accept.

Some Facts of Inheritance

First, the various races of mankind interbreed freely with one another. International enmity, racial prejudice, cultural differences all seem, speaking generally, impotent to prevent interbreeding.

Secondly, the extension of world trade and of transport facilities is steadily increasing the mixture of races and in consequence the likelihood of interbreeding.

I add a further statement that is steadily winning acceptance; physical and psychical qualities are inherited by the same laws of inheritance. As an illustration of this statement we may say that from a tuberculosis parent a tendency to tuberculosis can be inherited; likewise from a drunken parent a tendency to drunkenness can be inherited. In either case, in mating, the dangerous gene or genes may be rejected, or they may be handed on as recessives; but, if rejection or subordination does not take place, the evil tendency will show itself when the environment gives it a chance.

What we have to insist upon in addition to the above fundamental facts is that the complex of desirable qualities, or modes of behaviour and of appreciation, which we call civilization, is a recent acquisition of humanity: it may easily be destroyed or, at least, injured. Our civilization is a fragile thing, which can only be preserved by the education of each successive generation.

And the most careful education, painstaking and thorough though it be, at times fails. Such failure is, it seems, especially likely to occur when the type of civilization which the education aims at producing differs markedly from that which may be called ancestral.

Unsatisfactory “Pockets” in our Society

It is much to be regretted that we lack authoritative knowledge which will enable us to forecast such failure. There is general agreement that in our industrial areas, and in some of our villages, “pockets” of feeblemindedness exist: the children from families in these pockets are expected by elementary teachers to be-and in fact often are backward at school. It seems certain that mental dullness is inherited more often than not. But though “pockets” are formed by half-breeds, if we may for convenience so describe children who are the offspring of different racial stocks, and though children from these “pockets” fairly often prove unsatisfactory to their teachers, it is difficult to know how far their defects are due in innate limitations rather than to harmful home influences. As we put the inquiry we sometimes receive over-confident opinions: colour prejudice, which in Britain is instinctive and strong, tends to distort judgment.

There is no doubt that grave social decay often appears in places like seaports where races mix. But we must remember that, when there is no race mixture, if war leads to conditions under which children run wild, or defective housing creates circumstances leading to immorality, even good stocks will tend to decay. The best we can say is that, when conditions improve, recovery can be rapid. But, I repeat, civilization is fragile: it is a pattern of lving more easily broken than repaired…

…Mixture of Races in South Africa and West Indies

I have left until the end of my survey the most important and difficult of all aspects of the mixing of races, the problem of the Negro in South Africa and in the U.S.A. In each country the ” colour problem ” is a domestic political issue of the first magnitude. Dislike of intermarriage and fear of Negro domination show themselves in white attempts at restrictive legislation. Anxiety is greater in South Africa because there the white man is an intruder; and developments in the West Indian islands suggest that ultimately a partially coloured population will be universal. Descendants of Dutch settlers naturally wish to retain a racial heritage of which they are rightly proud. Their civilization is far higher than that of the Negroes among whom they live and distinctly higher than that of the Indians who seek admission as traders. Without Negro labour in the gold mines the industry could not be carried on as at present; and, in fact, climatic conditions make it natural that manual labour should be supplied by the Negro. We have, in fact, a situation which has recurred throughout history. Two races live side by side: the one of higher culture is dominant but increases slowly in numbers: the other becomes increasingly necessary because it supplies manual labour; it has also the higher birthrate. Inter-breeding takes place and in the end a mixed race with a lower civilization is evolved.

The Negro Problem in the U.S.A.

In the U.S.A., as is well known, the outcome of the Civil War was freedom for the slaves coupled, theoretically, with full civil rights. The actual denial of the franchise in the Southern States has been notorious. Of recent years Negroes have been migrating to the north, where their political influence is being felt. Such migration is leading to further racial admixture. In thirty American States legislation to prevent marriage between whites and Negroes exists—in one instance a Negro has been defined as one in whom there is more than three sixteenths of Negro blood. The California Supreme Court has recently declared such legislation unconstitutional. Americans, whether they like the prospect or not, must accept the fact that a Negro strain in the population is spreading. How should this outcome be regarded?

The earlier stages of disreputable intercourse between white and black belong to the past. Coloured people in all but remote areas of the United States of America have acquired a mixture of white blood. Whenever a so-called Negro makes his mark in public life, inquiry almost always shows a mixed ancestry. In fact, the American “Negro” is already of a different race from the African from whom he is partially descended. This fact is probably the cause of the wide divergence of American opinion as to the right attitude towards “black” citizens. Those who live in Southern States where the Negro strain in the coloured population is strong are prejudiced against any form of political or social equality. Those who know the qualities and potentialities of what we may call the “new” Negro have no such prejudice. The “new” Negro is already developing a characteristic culture. His religion is a form of Christianity which, though intellectually primitive, is emotionally strong. For “Negro spirituals” a musician of the quality of Walford Davies had great admiration. Some plays and stories due to “new” Negroes show the beginning of new forms of art…

Read the entire article here.

Sterility Among Hybrids

The Canadian Medical Association Journal
Volume 16, Number 6 (June 1926)
page 661-665

Frank N. Walker, M.B.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

In choosing sterility to demonstrate some of the metabolic aberrations of hybrids, I do so because in this condition a certain number of difficult variables can be easily eliminated. We are taught that all physiological variations are congenital or acquired. Since sterility cannot be laid at the door of heredity it must be acquired. We are likewise taught that all complaints of the human body are either functional or organic. In this discourse I do not propose to discuss any form of sterility that has an anatomical cause from the pathological viewpoint. It has been estimated that in the United States there are to-day nearly two million sterile couples who are still at the age of childbearing, and it is needless to say that in miiany cases it is the disappointment of a lifetime, especially to those who take their citizenship seriously. Since I intend to discuss here only functional sterility, allow me to review briefly some of the outstanding cases of this condition found in animal breeding.

The common mule has been recognized as sterile since the days of Homer, though Columnella quotes from Mago, a Carthaginian agriculturist, that in his country the fecundity of the mule was a frequent event, although it was regarded as a prodigy in Greece and Italy. He adds that these mixed mules do not cross again with *one another, but only with the primitive species that gave them birth. Others have discussed the fact of sterility among mules in the northern climates. I am inclined to put some credence in this statement with regard to geographic latitude, as I will mention later that calcium metabolism is an important factor of infertility.

…Turning now to human beings I would begin by stating that the mulatto is not so fertile as the pure black or pure white types. Statistics show that where the coloured population of the United States has the largest number of mulattoes, the birth rate is much lower than where the coloured population is pure black. Physically the mulatto is inferior to either of the races that gave him cause. Physical deterioration may have its exceptions in racial crosses. Sulivan states that “the part Hawaiian is an inmprovement on the HIawaiian stock although the birth rate is lower”. It has been mentioned that sterility is rather common in Jewish-Gentile marriages. The cross between the European and the Australian aborigines is almost sterile…

…The harm done by racial mixtures I believe is much wider than the scope of this paper. Its importance as a factor in asthma, eczema and spasmophilia are beyond question to me. So wrapped up it seems are racial mixtures with the ailments of mankind, that I have almost reached the stage that I would dogmatically assert that “If you show me a family where the doctor is metaphorically always on the doorstep, I will show you a family of profound racial mixture.”

Let us, as the trained interpreters of the ills of mankind delve more deeply into the reasons. that bring sorrow to so many households. Whether it be the disappointment of a sterile marriage, the disheartening result of child after child being born dead, or the financial embarrassment because it is too often sterile individuals who set a community’s social pace, it matters not. The world and civilization did not reach its present status by sterility either relative or absolute. There is a cause, and thecause can be found, providing we jointly put forth our efforts to interpret our experiences, and at all times bear a virtuous tolerance toward those who attempt to assist, us, even though we differ from them in minor details…

Read the entire article here.

From the Curse of Ham to the Curse of Nature

The British Journal for the History of Science
Volume 40, Issue 3 (2007)
pages 367-388
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087407009788

Robert Kenny, ARC Research Fellow
The Australian Centre, School of Historical Studies
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

This paper examines the debate engendered in ethnological and anthropological circles by Darwin’s Origin of Species and its effects. The debate was more about the nature of human diversity than about transmutation. By 1859 many polygenists thought monogenism had been clearly shown to be an antiquated and essentially religious concept. Yet the doctrine of natural selection gave rise to a ‘new monogenism‘. Proponents of polygenism such as James Hunt claimed natural selection had finally excluded monogenism, but Thomas Huxley, the most prominent exponent of the new monogenism, claimed it amalgamated the ‘best’ of both polygenism and monogenism. What it did provide was an explanation for the irreversible inequality of races, while it maintained that all humans were of one species. This bolstered belief in the innate superiority of the Caucasians over other peoples. The effect was finally to sever British ethnology from its evangelical monogenist roots. More subtly and surprisingly, it provided support in Church circles for a move away from the ideal of the ‘Native Church’.

It is well known that Darwin’s Origin of Species avoided applying the mechanism of natural selection to the development of the human species. Darwin waited twelve years before publishing his Descent of Man in 1871. Others were not so reticent. Natural selection provoked debate in British ethnological and anthropological circles through the 1860s, debates enacted in the shadow of the American war over slavery and British colonial expansion. Just as much as they were prompted by the transmutation theory, the debates had their antecedents in competing views of human diversity: did the variety of human races represent a single species descended from a common ancestor, or did the variety indicate separate species of humans descended from uncommon ancestors? Before 1859 the monogenist camp was seen, particularly by its opponents, as having based its arguments on religious conviction as much as on science, while many polygenists also saw their position as at least as much in harmony with Christian Scripture. But, to the surprise of many polygenists, after 1859 many of the most famous Darwinians, who had little truck with religion as a source of scientific knowledge, proclaimed themselves monogenists.

In the standard historiography, particularly in the writings of George Stocking, these debates are characterized as involving a conflict between a ‘Darwinian’ camp, ensconced in the Ethnological Society of London, and the ‘Anti-Darwinians’ of the Anthropological Society of London.1 Such histories, aiming to elucidate the progress of the ‘Darwinian revolution’ within anthropology, have underplayed the fundamental shift that occurred in the predominant attitude of the Ethnological Society under the influence of the Darwinians. This shift turned a monogenism of practical equality of races into a monogenism that accepted an irrevocable inequality of races and was politically little different from the polygenism advocated by the leaders of the Anthropological Society. Such histories have also overplayed polygenists’ antagonism to Darwin’s theory—for many polygenists transmutation was a means to understand the plurality of races as a plurality of species. The aim here is to examine the mechanics of the shift in monogenism and to show that natural selection, at least as then perceived by many, challenged and fatally undermined both polygenism and orthodox monogenism at their foundations. In so doing it established a new ‘scientific’ argument for human inequality that was to have far-reaching and surprising effects…

…Polygenisms

Despite his monogenism, Hodgkin was a long-time friend of the most vocal polygenists of the time, Robert Knox and the American Samuel Morton. They were all Edinburgh students together. Notoriously implicated in the Edinburgh scandals of Burke and Hare, Knox enthusiastically argued that the mulatto offspring of a European-native coupling were non-productive in the same way as a mule. He held that even in Ireland there had been ‘no amalgamation of the Celtic and Saxon blood’. This was not a novel position, as the term implies—’mulatto’ is from the Spanish for young mule. It was commonly held by settlers in Australia that Aboriginal women who had once borne a child to a European were thenceforward unable to conceive with an Aboriginal man. This supposed fact was used by Samuel Morton to support his polygenist doctrines in America, where polygenism had a greater following because it could so easily be used to support slavery. It had enough currency that Darwin felt the need to mention its disproof as late as 1871 in his Descent of Man.

Morton was famous for collecting and measuring skulls to demonstrate the moral and intellectual differences between races. His work was well known on both sides of the Atlantic. As Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated in his Mismeasure of Man, Morton fudged the measurements to ‘prove’ the Caucasian brain was bigger. This proof became a commonplace—in the decades that followed many writers used the term ‘ larger-brained European’. Friendship notwithstanding, Hodgkin was unimpressed by this science of skulls. In 1849 he wrote, ‘Having myself paid some attention to the ethnological grouping of skulls, I must confess that I have found considerable difficulty in adopting points of characteristic difference; and in this difficulty I find an argument in favour of the unity of species. ‘ He found greater variety of cranial capacity, Morton’s measure of cognitive ability, between individuals within a local group than between distant groups…

Read the entire article here.

Reconceptualizing the Measurement of Multiracial Status for Health Research in the United States

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 8, Issue 1 (2011) (Special Issue: Racial Inequality and Health)
pages 25-36
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X11000038

Meghan Woo, Senior Analyst
Abt Associates Inc.

S. Bryn Austina, Director of Fellowship Research Training in the Division of Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine
Children’s Hospital, Boston

David R. Williams, Florence and Laura Norman Professor of Public Health; Professor of African and African American Studies and of Sociology
Harvard University

Gary G. Bennett, Associate Professor of Psychology and Global Health
Duke University

The assessment of multiracial status in U.S. health research is fraught with challenges that limit our ability to enumerate and study this population. This paper reconceptualizes the assessment of multiracial status through the development of a model with three dimensions: mixed ancestry multiracial status, self-identified multiracial status, and socially assigned multiracial status. We present challenges to studying multiracial populations and provide recommendations for improving the assessment of multiracial status in health research.

‘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…

Purchase the dissertation here.

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)…

Read the entire article here.

Editorial: Implications of racial distinctions for body composition and its diagnostic assessment

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
Volume 71, Number 6 (June 2000)
pages 1387-1389
Print ISSN: 0002-9165; Online ISSN: 1938-3207

Noel W. Solomons, Scientific Director and co-Founder
Center for Studies of Sensory Impairment, Aging and Metabolism (CeSSIAM)

Shiriki Kumanyika, Professor of Epidemiology
University of Pennsylvania

In a truly just and equitable society, the welfare of all would be fulfilled. In a “colorblind” society, the health and nutritional needs of few would be satisfied. A conservative trend toward “colorblindness” in the public and political domain (eg, efforts to end affirmative action) emanates from tactics to hide the social stratification barriers that continue to preclude the full achievement of equity. Public health scientists and social epidemiologists entertain colorblindness as a defense against nonsensical ethnic comparisons that might, inadvertently, perpetuate rather than help to redress effects of racism (1). However, colorblindness denies the reality that people do come in different shades and that these shades have been a basis for much social stratification and discrimination—often with a premium on being lighter-skinned or white (2).

In their comprehensive review article in this issue, “Measures of body composition in blacks and whites: a comparative review,” Wagner and Heyward (3) have done a service for the readership by highlighting differences in various measures of body composition between people designated as ‘black’ or ‘white.’ By reviewing, accepting, and publishing the treatise, the Journal has also served its readers well with respect to fostering a continued discourse on this troublesome issue of how ‘race’ influences the science and applications of nutrition. “Race is inconvenient for objectivity-seeking scientists, because it is an ill-defined, misused, and politically-charged concept (2).” Nevertheless, as we noted previously (4–6), being able to entertain—with eyes wide-open and with rigorous methods—scientific hypotheses about differences between people of European and African heritage has important, enduring public health implications. Avoiding the issue of race or approaching racial issues timidly might make for convenient politics, but it may result in bad science and even worse policy.

Wagner and Heyward (3) portray the ambiguities in the interplay among evolving body-composition techniques and different amounts and densities of fat, muscle, and skeleton across ‘races’ in black and white relief. On close reading, their point is not so much that blacks and whites are different, but that the way that body-composition techniques are used requires more attention to human diversity. They acknowledge that the monolithic classifications of whiteness and blackness obscure biological experiences and differentiation, and that the concept of distinct (ie, genetically homogenous) racial subgroups among humans has now been rejected in the field of anthropology. It is worth commenting further on what these observed differences between blacks and whites might actually signify on a strictly biological level. For example, most of the studies reviewed by Wagner and Heyward contrast blacks and whites from North America, yet to generalize the findings from US black and white subpopulations to those of Europeans and Africans is too far a stretch of the scientific imagination. Cross-cultural studies within populations of African descent cited by Wagner and Heyward (3) show clearly that ‘black’ subjects in the United States are not identical to their contemporary Caribbean and West African brethren.

…The US Census Bureau once attempted to capture the reality of admixture between people of African and European descent by including the designation mulatto (a person who was three-eighths to five-eighths black), quadroon (a person who was one-quarter black), and octoroon (a person who was one-eighth black) (7). However, throughout most of American history, the conventional “racial” semantics have favored a binary schema in which people with any identifiable proportion of African ancestry were classified as ‘black’ and in which a rather heterogeneous set of light-skinned people were classified as ‘white’ (7). Thus, what began as the stark polarization of “freeman” or “slave” in colonial America has remained in binary terms throughout postbellum history. This lumping of all people with any African ancestry together as ‘blacks’—although not done universally, eg, in Brazil—has never been challenged successfully in the United States, perhaps because of a fundamental resistance to acknowledging that admixture has occurred between people of African and European descent from slavery onward. As a reminder, we have the recent controversy over whether Thomas Jefferson’s descendants from his slave consort should be admitted to the Jefferson family burial grounds to eternally rest beside descendants of his Anglo, patrician wife. The Howard University sociologist E Franklin Frazier, a prominent dissenter of binary polarization, proposed the 3 classifications black proletariat, brown middle class, and yellow aristocracy (8). This classification system, while capturing a real stratification within the African-American population, was also a not-so-subtle commentary on the direct relation of admixture with European blood to social status. The binary classification may be salient for describing the effective social meaning of ‘race’ in US society—privilege associated with not having and disadvantage associated with having African ancestry…

Read the entire editorial here.

Reliability of race assessment based on the race of the ascendants: a cross-sectional study

BMC Public Health
Volume 2, Number 1 (2002-01-16)
DOI: 10.1186/1471-2458-2-1
5 pages

Sandra C. Fuchs
Department of Social Medicine, School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Sylvia M. Guimarães
Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Cristine Sortica
School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Fernanda Wainberg
School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Karine O. Dias
School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Mariana Ughini
School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

José Augusto S. Castro
Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Flavio D. Fuchs
Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Race is commonly described in epidemiological surveys based on phenotypic characteristics. Training of interviewers to identify race is time-consuming and self identification of race might be difficult to interpret. The aim of this study was to determine the agreement between race definition based on the number of ascendants with black skin colour, with the self-assessment and observer’s assessment of the skin colour.

…Methods

A cross-sectional study was conducted on a sample of 50 women aged 14 years or older, which were systematically selected from an outpatient clinics of a University affiliated hospital in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil. Participants included in the study answered to a pre-tested and structured questionnaire, which collected information on the number of black ascendants (parents and grandparents), school attendance, and included a self-assignment of the colour of skin as well as the observer assessment of skin colour.
 
In a preliminary phase, a training was provided to the observers to standardise the identification of the skin colour and in the details of several phenotypic characteristics employed in Brazil before [10] such as the colour of hair, lines and hands’ palm surface. Following the training, the principal investigator and the research assistants observed 28 women and compared their findings of the physical features. The research team reached full agreement for skin colour (white, mixture or black), hair colour (blonde, light brown, medium brown, dark brown or black), lines and hands’ palm surface (pink palm and colourless lines, pink palm and red lines or white palm and dark lines) for the last 15 women observed. We also investigated the race of ascendants, through the question: “Which are the race of your ascendants: parents and grandparents?”. A total of six research assistants were certified for the study.
 
During the study, after the informed consent was obtained, one interviewer applied the questionnaire asking questions to the participants and the research team independently registered the information on physical characteristics, observing the women under sunlight. All interviewers were blinded to each other answers. Skin colour was described by the observers as white, mixed or black, the self-assigned skin colour used white, black, mixed, and local words meaning light mulatto and dark mulatto. The race of the parents and grandparents was investigate using a heredogram, which incorporated two generations to the assess the inheritance. Even though information could be reported for a maximum of six ascendants some women did not know the father or grandparents. Therefore, we collapsed the categories with more than 3 ascendants of black origin in the category of at least three black ascendants. There was investigated a sample of 50 women, which did not include the 28 women at the training phase. This sample size was sufficient to detect an agreement of at least 85%, with an error of 10%, and a confidence interval of 95%. In order to calculate the kappa coefficients, self-reported mixed skin colour was collapsed with light mulatto and dark mulatto. Analysis were carried out through Chi-square for contingency tables and kappa statistics to calculate to what extent the observers agreed beyond what we would expect by chance alone [15]. Kappa coefficients were calculated from observation of six interviewers and the skin colour self-assigned by the participant. The Kappa statistic was calculated for each two categories (white vs. non white; black vs. non black and mixed vs. non mixed) and a global Kappa with 95% confidence interval for all three categories. Kappa greater than 0.75 was taken as an excellent agreement, between 0.75 and 0.40 intermediate to good agreement, and below 0.40, poor agreement. The reliability of self-assigned black, mixed, or white skin colour with the number of black ascendants was obtained by weighted kappa. Weights were giving to the frequencies in each cell of the table according to their distance from the diagonal that indicates agreement [16]. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of our Institution and all participants gave their informed consent to participate…

Read the entire article here.

Y-STR diversity and ethnic admixture in White and Mulatto Brazilian population samples

Genetics and Molecular Biology (Former title: Brazilian Journal of Genetics)
Volume 29, Number 4 (São Paulo  2006)
pages 605-607
DOI: 10.1590/S1415-47572006000400004
ISSN 1415-4757

Luzitano Brandão Ferreira
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Celso Teixeira Mendes-Junior
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Cláudia Emília Vieira Wiezel
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Marcelo Rizzatti Luizon
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

Aguinaldo Luiz Simões
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil

We investigated 50 Mulatto and 120 White Brazilians for the Y-chromosome short tandem repeat (Y-STR) markers (DYS19, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392 and DYS393) and found 79 different haplotypes in the White and 35 in the Mulatto sample. Admixture estimates based on allele frequencies showed that the admixture of the white sample was 89% European, 6% African and 5% Amerindian while the Mulatto sample was 93% European and 7% African. Results were consistent with historical records of the directional mating between European males and Amerindian or African females.

The Brazilian population is a result of interethnic crosses of Europeans, Africans and Amerindians, and is one of the most heterogeneous populations in the world. When the first European colonizers arrived (1500 AD), 1-5 million Amerindians already lived in the region that now is known as Brazil (Salzano and Callegari-Jacques, 1988). Before 1820, European colonization was almost exclusively composed of Portuguese while between 1820 and 1975 the great majority of immigrants were from Portugal and Italy, followed by a small number by people from Spain, Germany, Syria and Japan (Carvalho-Silva et al., 2001). Between the 16th and 19th centuries approximately 3.5 million Africans were brought as slaves to Brazil, coming mainly from West, West-Central and Southeast Africa (Curtin, 1969). The colonization of Brazil involved mostly European men, many of whom produced children with Amerindian and African females.

Although the classification of races is wrong from genetic standpoint (Templeton, 1998), Brazilians are classified for census purposes based on color. According to the last Brazilian government census of the 170 million Brazilians, 84 million were males, of which 52% were White, 39% were Brown, 6% were Black and 3% were classified in other categories (IBGE, 2000). Mulatto is the term commonly used in Brazil to designate the offspring result from the union of White and Black people. We used five Y-chromosome short tandem repeat (Y-STR) markers, recognized as good markers for population studies, to investigate genetic polymorphism and ethnic admixture in White and Mulatto Brazilian population samples.

We investigated 170 healthy, unrelated, individuals seeking paternity investigation at the Ribeirão Preto University Hospital, in the city of Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo state, Southeastern Brazil. The race of the individuals in the sample was determined based on their biomedical records, 120 individuals being White and 50 Mulatto, from Ribeirão Preto and the surrounding towns…

Read the enire article here.

Racial inequalities and perinatal health in the southeast region of Brazil

Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research
Volume 40, Number 9 (September 2007)
pages 1187-1194
DOI: 10.1590/S0100-879X2006005000144
ISSN 1678-4510

L. M. Silva
Departamento de Saúde Pública
Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

R. A. Silva
Departamento de Saúde Pública
Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

A. A. M. Silva
Departamento de Saúde Pública
Universidade Federal do Maranhão, São Luís, MA, Brasil

H. Bettiol
Departamento de Puericultura e Pediatria, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brasil

M. A. Barbieri
Departamento de Puericultura e Pediatria, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto
Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brasil

Few studies are available about racial inequalities in perinatal health in Brazil and little is known about whether the existing inequality is due to socioeconomic factors or to racial discrimination per se. Data regarding the Ribeirão Preto birth cohort, Brazil, whose mothers were interviewed from June 1, 1978 to May 31, 1979 were used to answer these questions. The perinatal factors were obtained from the birth questionnaire and the ethnic data were obtained from 2063 participants asked about self-reported skin color at early adulthood (23-25 years of age) in 2002/2004. Mothers of mulatto and black children had higher rates of low schooling ( £ 4 years, 27.2 and 38.0%) and lower family income ( £ 1 minimum wage, 28.6 and 30.4%). Mothers aged less than 20 years old predominated among mulattos (17.0%) and blacks (14.0%). Higher rates of low birth weight and smoking during pregnancy were observed among mulatto individuals (9.6 and 28.8%). Preterm birth rate was higher among mulattos (9.5%) and blacks (9.7%) than whites (5.5%). White individuals had higher rates of cesarean delivery (34.9%). Skin color remained as an independent risk factor for low birth weight (P < 0.001), preterm birth (P = 0.01), small for gestational age (P = 0.01), and lack of prenatal care (P = 0.02) after adjustment for family income and maternal schooling, suggesting that the racial inequalities regarding these indicators are explained by the socioeconomic disadvantage experienced by mulattos and blacks but are also influenced by other factors, possibly by racial discrimination and/or genetics.

Introduction

Natives, mulattos, blacks, and whites occupy unequal places in the social networks, with differential aspects related to birth, growth, disease, and dying. Racial inequality is not limited to socioeconomic indicators related to quality of life, income and schooling but also occurs in health indicators. In the United States, which have a tradition of research on racial questions, the rates of preterm birth, low birth weight and infant mortality are higher among blacks than among whites (1,2).

Although Brazil is considered to be a country in which racial discrimination is not so significant and in which “racial democracy” prevails, significant socioeconomic inequalities related to diverse ethnic groups exist in this country (3,4). Even in cities in the south of the country, where there is better access to health services, black women have fewer opportunities to receive ideal prenatal care, with repercussions on perinatal health (5-7). In the town of Pelotas, black children have a higher prevalence of low birth weight, preterm birth and restricted intrauterine growth (8). In a study conducted in Rio de Janeiro, black mothers had lower schooling, a greater proportion of smokers and lower prenatal care attendance, cohabited less, and had a higher prevalence of pregnancy during adolescence (9). In Brazil in general, infant mortality is higher among blacks and native Indians (10).

The race/ethnic group category is not useful as a biological category, but is a social construct (11,12). In Brazil, the term race is normally used to refer to phenotype (physical appearance) rather than to ancestrality (origin), as is the case in the US. While US research is based on categories of “pure” races, in Brazil the “brown” or “mulatto” category is commonly used also to refer to cross-bred individuals (13). The determination of race in health studies is usually done by the interviewer, whereas the more recommended procedure is self-classification (11).

Few studies regarding ethnic inequalities and perinatal health have been conducted in Brazil, mainly due to low availability and/or quality of the data or to inadequate instruments for the measurement of race/ethnic origin. Questions related to the inequalities existing between individuals of mulatto and black skin colors have not been fully clarified, with these groups being usually analyzed as non-white in relation to whites. It has not been clarified whether the inequalities existing between ethnic groups regarding perinatal factors are due to socioeconomic factors or to other cultural or genetic factors. To clarify these questions, a study was conducted to analyze a cohort of individuals born in Ribeirão Preto, SP, in which skin color self-reported in adulthood in 2002/2004 was related to the social, economic, obstetrical, and perinatal characteristics of the subjects at birth in 1978/79.

Read the entire article here.