Mixed Race Studies

Psychologically, the mulatto is an unstable type.

In the thinking of the white race, the mulattoes generally are grouped with the backward race and share with them the contempt and dislike of the dominant group. Nowhere are they accepted as social equals. The discrimination varies all the way from the more or less successfully concealed contempt of the Brazilian white for the socially ambitious metis, to the open and bitter hatred of the South African for the “coloured man” and the Native boy, but it seems to be present everywhere. The origin of the half-castes was everywhere an irregular one; this is a point about which prejudice can always center. Their nearer approach in physical appearance to the white type is simply taken as evidence of additional irregularities in ancestry. The two things—the lower ancestry and the presumption of a dubious origin—are the focal points about which the white man’s contempt for the mixed-blood group centers.

By the native race, the mixed-blood group is generally accepted as superior. The possession of white blood is an evidence of superiority. The ancestral blot excites no prejudice. The mulattoes are envied because of their color and enjoy a prestige among the darker group because of it.

Between these two groups, one admiring and the other despising, stand the mixed-bloods. In their own estimation, they are neither the one nor the other. They despise the lower race with a bitterness born of their degrading association with it, and which is all the more galling because it needs must be concealed. They everywhere endeavor to escape it and to conceal and forget their relationship to it. They are uncertain of their own worth; conscious of their superiority to the native they are nowhere sure of their equality with the superior group. They envy the white, aspire to equality with them, and are embittered when the realization of such ambition is denied them. They are a dissatisfied and an unhappy group.

It is this discontented and psychologically unstable group which gives rise to the acute phases of the so-called race problem. The members of the primitive group, recognizing the hopelessness of measuring up to the standards of the white race, are generally content and satisfied with their lower status and happy among their own race. It is the mixed-blood man who is dissatisfied and ambitious. The real race problem before each country whose population is divided into an advanced and a backward group, is to determine the policy to be pursued toward the backward group. The acute phase of this is to determine the policy to be adopted toward the mixed-bloods. To reject the claims and to deny the ambition of the mulattos may cause them to turn back upon the lower race. In this case, they may become the intellectual leaven to raise the race to a higher cultural level, or they may become the agitators who create discord and strife between the pure-blood races. To form them into a separate caste between the races, is to lessen the clash between the extreme types and, at the same time, to deprive the members of the lower race of their chance to advance in culture by depriving them of their natural, intellectual leaders. To admit the ambition of the mulattoes to be white and to accept them into the white race on terms of individual merit, means ultimately a mongrelization of the population and a cultural level somewhere between that represented by the standards of the two groups.

Edward Byron Reuter, The Mulatto In The United States: Including A Study Of The Role Of Mixed-Blood Races Throughout The World, (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1918). 102-104. http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7040137M/The_mulatto_in_the_United_States