Mixed Race Studies

The general inferiority of the mixed stock has passed into a proverb even in Africa, where it is said: “A god created the whites; I know not who created the blacks; certainly a devil created the mongrels.” So reports Livingstone (quoted by Lombroso), and adds that he had seen but one Portuguese Mestizo of robust health. In Brazil it is held that the mingling of Indian with Latin blood has not produced evil results, but everywhere else such remote crossings have been more or less disastrous. Strikingly is this the case with the Zambos—the mixture of Indian and Negro; they are mainly degenerates and degraded. Thus E. G. Squier, writing of Honduras in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. XII., says: “A small part of the coast, above Cape Gracias, is occupied by the Sambos, a mixed race of Indians and Negroes, which, however, is fast disappearing.” In Mexico, Central and South America, the half-breeds are everywhere stationary or declining. In India the Eurasians (20,000 in Calcutta) “touch a level of degradation which is far lower than any reached by the pure heathen about them. They inherit defects more conspicuously than virtues from both races from which they spring” (Pop. Sci. Mon., Nov., 1892). In Japan the inferior Ainos are passing away before the superior Japanese. The hybrids are never healthy or vigorous, and vanish with the third or fourth generation. Here, in the United States, the testimony is all against the Mulatto. In a report of the Provost-Marshal General, the opinions of physicians stand eleven to one against the Mulatto as “scrofulous and consumptive,” “degenerated physically,” and the one favourable judgement reposes on only two instances. The anthropometry of the Mulatto is decidedly against him. His average lung capacity, the most significant of measurements, was found by Gould to be only 158.9 cubic inches against 163.5 for the pure Black, and 184.7 for the White. His respiration rate was equally unfavourable, being 19 per minute against 17.7 for the pure Black, and 16.4 for the White. We refer, also, to the testimony of Dr. Shaler (p. 52), that he had never known a Mulatto to pass threescore. The writer remembers the first use he ever heard of the word “cachectic;” his father spoke of it as a term generally applicable to Mulattoes.

From the convergence of all such testimony, which may be multiplied indefinitely, there seems no escape whatever. We must concede, with Lombroso: “It is impossible to contemplate these facts without admitting that marriages between some human races are much less fertile and happy than between others;” and especially unfortunate are those between such extremes as Whites and Negroes. When such anthropologists as Waitz, Serres, Deschamps, Bodichon, anticipate a millennium from universal miscegenation, it is only sentimentalism or else forgetfulness of the distinction drawn so properly by Topinard (Éléments d’Anthropologie générale, 1885) between the intermingling of nearly related and of distantly related races. In the first case the result is, in general, certainly good; in the latter, it is quite as certainly bad.

But let us now, merely for the moment and for the sake of argument, admit that both our premises are in doubt; that, perhaps, after all the Negro is not inferior organically—mentally, morally, or physically—to the Caucasian, and that interfertility might, perhaps, work no deterioration; would the case be essentially altered? Assuredly not. For even then the most extreme negrophilist must still admit that there is, at least, a reasonable doubt; even if the Negro be not proved inferior, yet he is certainly not proved equal, and there is a large body of at least apparent evidence against him; even if it be not certain that miscegenation would work deterioration, it is at least very possible and seemingly probable. Who, then, would have the foolhardihood to make this experiment of race amalgamation—an experiment which, once made, is made forever; whose consequences could never be undone—when there is at least and at the very lowest an undeniable possibility, not to say certainty, that those consequences would be disastrous in the extreme? Can we imagine a more wanton folly? Would such an experiment beseem any other place so well as the madhouse?

William Benjamin Smith, The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn, (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1905). 67-70.