Science: PassersPosted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Passing, Social Science, United States on 2011-05-27 02:40Z by Steven |
TIME Magazine
1946-08-12
Will U.S. whites eventually absorb the nation’s Negroes—as Italy, Mexico and Portugal have absorbed theirs? So thought James Bryce, and so, for more than a generation, have thought many sociologists. “It is now estimated,” wrote Author Herbert Asbury in Collier’s last week, “that there are at least between 5,000,000 and 8,000,000 persons in the U.S., supposed to be white, who possess Negro blood… Authorities generally agree that between 15,000 and 30,000… Negroes go over to the white side every year.”
Author Asbury’s conclusions are disputed by Sociologist John H. Burma of Grinnell College, who thinks the “authorities” exaggerate. In the American Journal of Sociology he argues that the number of Negroes passing as whites is much smaller.
Facts about Negro “passing” are understandably hard to come by. Guesstimates have depended largely on a pioneering study made in 1921 by Duke University Sociologist Hornell Hart.
Analyzing the U.S. census, he discovered an odd discrepancy in the population of native whites: between 1900 and 1910, the group which was aged 10 to 14 in 1900 somehow grew instead of shrinking. When deaths and emigrations were totaled and deducted, the group mysteriously gained 170,000 in population. Other studies showed that every year some 20,000 Negroes unaccountably disappeared from the census statistics. The obvious explanation: the Negroes had become native “whites.”
Read the entire article here.