Mixed Race Studies

A Health Survey of the Seminole Indians

Yale Journal Biology and Medicine
Volume 6, Number 2 (December 1933)
pages 155–177

H. Hamlin

Among the numerous tribes of Indians living in Oklahoma the Seminoles offer some interesting phenomena for study which may contribute information on the subject of race mixture and its relationship to environment and health. The early history of the tribe in its original habitat of the Florida Everglades is not without romantic color, embodying as it does the Spanish occupation of the Southeastern United States and the stormy times before and after the War of 1812 that culminated in the Florida purchase. Many other tribes besides the Seminoles were occupying rich lands that European settlers coveted for plantations so that agitation for removal of the Indians by coercion gained increasing favor. Slavery augmented the conflict since negro deserters were continually seeking refuge among the Indians, especially in parts that now constitute Georgia and Florida.

It is recorded that as early as 1785 bands of Cherokees, Choctaws, Delawares and Shawnees began migrating west to settle because of pressure from whites along the borders of their old domain and the scarcity of game. The transfer of Indians comprising the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole tribes from their indigenous habitat to lands in what is now the state of Oklahoma was carried on with continuous difficulty until after 1840. The government was forced to conduct two expensive military campaigns against the Seminoles, and over a thousand recalcitrants refused to be caught and expatriated. These survivors remained in Florida. By 1906 around 100,000 individuals, of whom only about 26.4 per cent were full-bloods, had been officially enrolled as the Five Civilized Tribes and had been given individual land grants.

From the foregoing historical outline the possibilities of comparative study on the present-day Seminoles in both Oklahoma and Florida can be understood. Such a project was sponsored by the Laboratory of Anthropology at Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the summer of 1932 and placed under the direction of Dr. W. M. Krogman of the Anatomy Department of Western Reserve University. The greater part of the work resolved itself into the compilation of detailed anthropometric measurements of selected individuals. The tribal rolls, upon which the government based the land allotments, made feasible the deduction of rather accurate genealogical tables for four or five generations. The statements of every subject concerning his or her family were checked and protracted further by comparison with Campbell’s Abstract of Seminole Indian Census Cards, which proved an invaluable source of information. It is hoped that opportunity may avail to correlate the findings on physical measurements and other criteria of the Oklahoma Seminoles with the results of a similar procedure among the Seminoles still living in Florida, the latter serving as a control group…

…After the Creek war of 1813-14 a great many Creeks from the upper Creek country moved into Florida. They increased the population considerably and began mixing with the predominant Hitchiti (Oconee) racial element. This new strain was definitely Creek and later came to be identified with the Seminole. Such an interpretation is substantiated further by Wissler’, who classifies the languages of the Upper Creeks, Lower Creeks, and Seminoles together under the northern division of Muskogee proper. It seems clear that the Florida Seminoles were originally derived from the non-Muskogean Hitchiti of Georgia admixed with the earlier Floridian Yamasee and Yuchi, and this combination later admixed with Muskogee, mostly Creek. Before his departure for the west therefore, the Florida Seminole undoubtedly had a high percentage of Creek blood; and the two by impact of association had become linked enough in language and culture to obscure their separate origin.

Before the advent of Seminole stock in the west there was unquestionably an appreciable amount of negro blood present. This was a result of slavery, which reached its greatest development as a social practice in the Southeast during the latter part of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Large numbers of slaves apparently succeeded in escaping from their masters to gain sanctuary among the Florida Indians. It would seem that negroes were usually anxious to make their way into Florida where they were often able to acquire a kind of group independence among the Indians. A large number of negroes accompanied the Five Tribes on their westward migration, including slaves of the Indians as well as those who had intermarried and their offspring. To the Creek fraction represented in Florida Seminole blood, therefore, must be added an unknown but quite definite component representing negro admixture acquired prior to removal. There probably had been some infusion of white blood with the Seminoles through Spanish intermixture before they took up residence in the west. Nash”, Giddings and Bartram’ predicate its occurrence in their writings, but the emphasis on the negro element is much greater. According to Nash”, the amount of white blood in the modern Florida Seminoles has increased to some extent, and this view is confirmed by others, notably Hrdlikcka. On the other hand negro intermixture among the present-day descendants of the original Florida Seminoles has declined. The population has been reported to be around 500 for a number of decades so that investigators have been able to tabulate race crossing with some certainty’0. White half-castes are granted full status by the Indians and an increase in their number is predicted for the future. Presumably, the propagation of white blood in the Florida Indians since the Seminole wars may be attributed to the offspring of unsanctioned Indian-White matings…

Pure Seminole—Age 44.

Seminole-Negro—Age 25.

Seminole-White—Age 34.

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Mixed Race: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2011-06-19

Velina Hasu Houston

Recently I was honored with a Loving Award from the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival (held June 11-12 at the Japanese American National Museum). The award and the meaning behind it has caused me to reflect on multiracial identity.

My parents married in 1954 after a nine-year courtship in Japan. When they left Japan, they arrived in the U.S., a country in which their marriage was illegal in 17 states and would remain so until 1967, two years before my father’s death.

In the landmark civil rights case Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down laws against interracial marriage, honoring the marriage of Afro-Indian Mildred Loving and her white husband Richard (who also were second cousins).

I grew up in a community where being mixed race was a natural thing, at least for those of us who had foreign mothers and American fathers. We were multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural — and often, like me, transnational. The idea of having a foot in at least two countries and being a blend of three or four ethnicities was par for the course…

Read the entire article here.

Other Communions: Maya, Mulatto, Woman and God in Miguel Ángel Asturias 1923-1974

University of Michigan
2010
218 pages

Andrea Leigh Dewees

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Romance Languages and Literatures: Spanish) in the University of Michigan

“Other Communions: Maya, Mulatto, Woman and God in Miguel Ángel Asturias 1923-1974” engages the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate’s literary production over five decades, beginning with his portrayals of the Maya and expanding to include his representations of the mulatto, female and God. I am primarily concerned with close readings of Los ojos de los enterrados (1960), Mulata de Tal (1963) and El árbol de la cruz (1997) but I draw also from others of Asturias’s novels, as well as historiography, postcolonial and feminist theory, to show how Asturias narrates the nation through literary figures of the Other.

Chapter 2 begins with an intellectual history of Asturias as a “Maya” author, tracing the roots and permutations of this myth through biography, autobiography, and literary criticism. I then show how his appropriative creation of a Maya indigenismo is central to his political and aesthetic conception of Latin American literature. However, Asturias’s novels extend beyond this fictive Maya center. Chapter 3 analyzes a non-Maya, untranslated phrase associated with a mulatto character in Asturias’s Banana Trilogy. I analyze an emerging negrista aesthetic and argue that the interruptive repetition of the phrase structures the novel’s account of the recent history of revolution, land reform and democratic rupture in Guatemala, as well as the more distant legacies of the conquest, colonialism and slavery.

Mulata de tal also features a mulatta character and in Chapter 4 I explain how Asturias connects land to the female body through a complex series of fragmentations, profanations and redemptions. In contrast to the more historical concerns of the Banana Trilogy, this novel is encased within an apocalyptic framework, marking a shift in Asturias’s attention from a Maya origin to the end of days.

Finally, I examine a sketch published after Asturias’s death, El árbol de la cruz, calling attention to Asturias’s connection between the female Other and the cross in what amounts to a brief treatise on communion. I show how this text, read accumulatively through popular religiosity in others of Asturias’s novels, balances between definitive origin and conclusive end.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• Chapter 1 Introduction Mimesis and Guatemalan National Literature
• Chapter 2 Asturias and lo maya
• Appendices
• Chapter 3 Irrupted History: 1944, 1954 and Los ojos de los enterrados
• Chapter 4 Fragments between hell and heaven: land, the female body and the text in Mulata de tal
• Chapter 5 Crosses, Origins, Communions
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

What Is The Real Issue With Obama Choosing Black?

The Atlanta Post
2010-05-04

Yvette Carnell

During candidate Obama’s run for Presidency, he said “I self-identify as an African-American. That’s how I am treated and that’s how I am viewed. And I’m proud of it.” Case closed right?  One would think so, but now that President Obama has checked “black” on his Census form, some of his detractors are criticizing him for running away from his heritage. So please allow me to set the record straight….

President Obama checked “black” on his Census form because, well, he is black.

It is a mark of evolution that Americans are allowed to identify themselves as “some other race” on their Census forms, but aren’t most of us multi-racial?  If Obama’s critics have decided that he should adhere to the strictest of rules where his race classification is concerned, then shouldn’t all Americans be held to that same standard?  And if we’re all held to that standard, won’t that make the task of completing the Census form an act in futility for many, if not most, Americans? We are a melting pot, and as such, a significant number of us are an amalgamation of a wide variety of races and are therefore, by definition, multiracial.  The only distinction is that race isn’t as much about definition as it is about identification…

…Some observers have even made the case that Obama’s choosing “black” on his Census form was a marginalization of his white mother and grandparents.  It was not. It was, however, an acknowledgment of the visual queues associated with race, and to a larger extent-racism.

What’s more, isn’t it a bit hypocritical for those who’ve fought for the right of multiracial and biracial people to choose a race category which more suitably fits the way in which they self identify, i.e. a choice more ethnically encompassing than purely Black, White, or Asian to now force President Obama into their preferred “multiracial” box?…

Read the entire essay here.

“Redemption for Our Anguished Racial History”: Race and the National Narrative in Commemorative Journalism About Barack Obama

Journal of Communication Inquiry
Volume 35, Number 2 (April 2011)
pages 115-133
DOI: 10.1177/0196859911404604

Siobahn Stiles
Temple University

Carolyn Kitch, Professor of Journalism
Temple University, Philadelphia

This article considers how race was discussed in commemorative journalism produced after Barack Obama’s election and inauguration by major American newspapers, magazines, and television news. A discourse analysis of these commemorative media texts reveals competing—though often overlapping—narratives. Some celebrated Obama’s victory as a racial milestone, claiming it for African Americans past and present, yet another hurdle crossed in the continuing struggle for equality. Other commemorative texts either elided or marginalized racial issues, instead emphasizing diversity and democracy in a narrative of generalized American “freedom” and unity. The narrative in each text, however, was ultimately a tale imbued with nationalist ideology, emphasizing unity and progress at the expense of discussing issues related to contemporary racial inequality in America. Overall, although the coverage of this election demonstrated some change in racial representation, the overall discourse on race in America—and journalists’ thematic avoidance of racial issues—did not.

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Obama Deception?: Empire, ‘Postracism’ and Hegemonic White Supremacy in the Campaign and Election of Barack Obama

Critical Race Inquiry
Volume 1, Number 2 (May 2011)
ISSN: 1925-3850

Tamari Kitossa, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

The essay provides a socio-historical account of the role that hegemonic white supremacy played in the Presidential ascendancy of Barack Obama. I suggest that Obama crafted his political ontology to articulate a discourse of post-racism. Deploying a postmodern amorphous blackness he assuaged White anxiety about whether a Black president will seek to call in the lien African Americans have on the state and White US society for a more just society. By trading on the racial ambiguity of his biography in a country that demands certainty of racial lineage, his personage was made to affirm both the end of racism and the redundancy of anti-racist action. The result was a presidential campaign that traded on the hopes of African Americans and assuaged the anxieties of European Americans and others while propagating the interests of the ruling class and the military industrial complex.

Introduction

Written a month and a half into Barack Obama’s first term, the core elements of this paper were delivered as a lecture for African Heritage Month to a third year class on racism and anti-racism. My giving the lecture itself was unintended. It was a replacement for an invited colleague who had to cancel his appearance. In the months leading up to the election my colleague and I discussed, quite frequently, the policy implications of an Obama Presidency on US foreign policy and domestic relations. I expressed my concern and fascination during these conversations about the cult-like charisma driven preoccupation with Obama as the “new Black”. I was fascinated by many of my family and friends who seemed to bestow mystical significance to Obama’s biography/blackness as signs for/of change. Relatives, especially those in the US were caught up in the post-civil rights-ism euphoria. But I did not share this cheery view of Obama as a political actor. Not because I didn’t like him as a person, but rather because politics from the citizen’s perspective is not an appropriate forum for sentiments such as “like” and “dislike”.

Indeed, for the months leading up to the election I had numerous conversations with my colleague about the near unanimous suspension of critical judgment about Obama’s locus in the machinery of the US’s political and economic elite. With rare exception, I noticed Left blogs and news sites consistently took a wait and see attitude about whether Obama would rule differently than his predecessors. Whatever the case, race was explicit in ways it was not in previous presidential elections. African Heritage Month, too often given to romanticism, struck me as the most opportune moment to disrupt this uncritical celebration of how Obama’s blackness was being articulated.

My colleague and I agreed that what was needed was a critical but not cynical analysis of Obama’s platform and ways he deployed race and just equally how race was invested in the meanings imputed to his ostensibly progressive politics. After all, an aspirant for the most powerful political office of the most powerful country should not be regarded through a sentimental lens. Rather, the question of how sentiment played into the aspirations of those who favoured and disfavoured his candidacy and the extent to which Obama himself articulated a platform to suit these opposing forces were crucial for lucid and complex analysis that steered away from the facile. For us then, blackness and the discourse of “hope” were not grounds to grant Obama the benefit of doubt as to the possibility of economic and political reform and racial healing in the US. Maybe as Canadian men of African descent of a radical Left persuasion we felt little compunction that we were conceding to racism by virtue of a relentless critique of the first serious Black presidential contender. Indeed, based on the historical record, we knew both intuitively and concretely that Black people do not rise to positions of power and influence in the White world without conceding the necessity of sustaining hegemonic white supremacy. If Obama became president of an imperially dominant USA, he too would be bound by the inertia of this historical fact. This fact, in the lead-up to the election seemed lost on many commentators and those in civil society who favoured his candidacy. Interestingly, those on the right saw clearly the issue of empire and presumed the essentialism that blackness equaled radicality feared the worst because of an Obama Presidency. Events since his inauguration have shown the fears of the latter unfounded…

…I will argue in this essay that, as in Dave Chappelle’s hilarious skit about a blind Black man who is a white supremacist, the possibility of a Black American sustaining hegemonic white supremacy is a canard that overturns standard definitions of who can support hegemonic white supremacy. Chappelle’s character gives us choices. We can “re-fence” the apparent anomaly, holding it in abeyance because it does not accord with established patterns of thought and practice (Allport, 1954, p. 23). We can reject the apparent anomaly, since it may be presumed blackness disqualifies a person from sustaining hegemonic white supremacy. Or we can develop a critique equal to the conditions it attempts to explain (see Smith citing Lenin, 2003, p. 314); which is to say that given systemic White racism, the “order of things” makes racism an equal opportunity employer, with or without intent.  This critique suggests that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign depended on deploying colour blindness through blind faith in formal (but not substantive) equality. It suggests further that Barack Obama deployed the ambivalent blackness of his body and his personal biography to reorganize the terrain on which race-talk would occur during his campaign. Indeed, a central observation here is that Obama selectively and strategically appropriated the radical enterprise of anti-racism by deploying a postmodern amorphous blackness that undermined the need for anti-racism. On one hand he assuaged White anxiety about whether a Black president will seek to call in the lien African Americans have on the state and White US society. On the other hand, he propagated the belief that where Whites voted for him, this confirmed the triumphal defeat of hegemonic white supremacy.

In either case, by trading on his blackness his personage was made to affirm both the end of racism and the redundancy of anti-racist action (both of which, ironically, are belied by everyday white supremacist invective leveled against him). Through select and strategic claims of Black fraternity, Obama surreptitiously deployed anti-African American tropes that were passed off as pastoral concern for “his” people. In some ways, he extended a similar paternalistic narrative to the reproach of African leaders in his speech given in West African when he became President (Obama, 2009). The arguments are to be taken as a whole, aimed at unpacking Mr. Obama’s white supremacist presidential campaign and to suggest its effects are more than symbolic. Mr. Obama’s discourse on race, and his persistent “colour blindness” even into his presidency, negates the oppression of African Americans while deepening their exploitation. To a significant extent, Obama deceived no one even if he intended. The deceit that blackness equals progressive change is built into the normative structure of how race is understood in the US.

…Mongrel in the White House: The Post-Racial President

In so highly race conscious a society as the US, who would not find it disarming that its first recognized Black President should share publicly, in a jocular manner, that he prefers to adopt a dog for his daughters who, like himself, is a mongrel or a mutt (Gardner, 2008). Of course, for those whose social history is one in which the “one drop” rule prevailed to determine social caste and reflected abject sexual domination of Black women by White men and the lynching of Black men who married or cavorted with White women, the humour may be lost on them. Indeed, to make light of his “mongrelization” and to ignore its differential historical facticity, is, in view of white supremacy in the US, to attribute transcendence and maturity on the part of the White public and, of course, forbearance on the part of African Americans.

It is consequentially important, that there is little outcry today about the perpetuation of this eugenics impulse in the contemporary US relative to poor African American, and to a lesser extent Latina, Native American, and even poor White women (Roberts, 1992, p. 1961). So, far from a passing moment of humour, Obama used his own biography, not in a revolutionary way but as an ideological sociology of the self to demonstrate the choice of narrative of the nation he would align himself with. This narrative, a hegemonic narration of the (White) nation, is one in which radical stories are structurally excluded from consciousness and false ethical stances on racism are interpolated. I suggest that in crafting himself as the quintessential post-modern US subject, Barack Obama is able to deflect White criticisms that would otherwise doom an African American politician committed to revolutionary politics. I will now critically elaborate the false ethical complementarity Barack Obama drew between racism and anti-racism with an examination of his Philadelphia speech on race (and class) in the US…

Read the entire article here.

In visit to Ireland, O’Bama seeks to reverse U.S. notions of race

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2011-05-25

John Timpane, Inquirer Staff Writer

President Obama’s one-day visit to Ireland was a masterly orchestration of three visuals – one imaginary, two very real.

Imaginary visual: the apostrophe in O’Bama. “My name is Barack Obama,” he said in Dublin, “of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.” Anglo-Irish apostrophe, Kenyan last name, American tale…

…Obama was doing much more than playing to the folks at home, with a wink to Moneygall. He was doing no less than seeking to reverse American notions of race, origin, and ethnicity.

“Clearly, a political bet is being made here that this will make beautiful political theater for 2012,” says Matt Wray, assistant professor of sociology at Temple University. “But that isn’t where the conversation ends. There’s a performance here of race and ethnicity that does suggest the terms are changing in the U.S. These images of Obama quaffing Guinness as a son of Ireland really do strike even casual observers as historically new.”

Consider the irony of a man so long under fire for his origins, comes to Ireland to celebrate one strand of those origins. He is called black because in the United States, we are messed up about origins. Why not call him “Barack Obama, America’s 44th white president?” Or “America’s third Irish American president” (after Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy)? He is as much those things as its first black president. No? Never happen? Why not?

Charles Gallagher, chairman of the Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice Department at La Salle University, sees the notorious “one-drop rule” of U.S. social attitudes at work: “A single ‘drop of black blood’ negates your ability to reconnect back to Europe. Race trumps all other questions of ethnic origin. Yet we know that 80 percent of all African Americans have European ancestors. Their history, which includes slavery, has cut them off both from Africa and from Europe, from being able to reclaim that great-grandfather in Sicily or Eastern Europe.”…

…Obama’s speech in Dublin told of Fulmouth Kearney, his grandfather’s grandfather, who got out of tiny Moneygall in 1850, ended up in Ohio, bought land, and started a line of middling, obscure, working Americans. How was Kearney to know his line would braid with a Kenyan line, to run within an American (yes) president? An American tale.

Gallagher says, “What Obama did is fantastic. He’s telling the truth: that ethnicity is absolutely fluid, and you can reclaim the full spectrum of your identity. It’s further blurring of the color line, and it gives permission to Americans, many of whom have incredibly diverse origins, to explore them all.”

As Wray puts it: “It speaks to the fastest-growing segment of Americans—those of mixed race—starting to rewrite the script. Obama, in his blackness, is free to explore his whiteness.”

The circle won’t be closed, of course, until millions of white Americans embrace the Africa in their pasts. Forty million claim Irish roots. How many will claim African?…

Read the entire article here.

Who Are We? Producing Group Identity through Everyday Practices of Conflict and Discourse

Sociological Perspectives
Volume 54, Number 2 (Summer 2011)
pages. 139-162
DOI: 10.1525/sop.2011.54.2.139

Jennifer A. Jones, SBS Diversity Post Doctoral Fellow
Ohio State University, Columbus

Multiracials have the flexibility to opt out of multiracial identity, to shift identities depending on context and are characterized by in-group diversity. Given this fluid space, how do multiracials come to see themselves as a collective? This article describes an empirical example of collectivization processes at work. Specifically, the author observed the process of collective identity-building though ethnographic research in a mixed-race student-run organization. This case study indicates that group identity formation is a negotiated process involving strategies to achieve a sense of belonging and cohesion. The author shows that overtime, by using experiences of social conflict to construct shared experiences, the members of this mixed-race organization developed collective identity In so doing, their experience underscores how collective identity development is socially constructed and how micropractices are essential components of group formation.

Read or purchase the article here.

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…

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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…

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