Mixed Race Studies

The American Negro: A Study in Racial Crossing

Praeger (Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf (New York) in 1928)
July 1985
112 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-313-24795-8

Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

An anthropomorphic study of the black population in the United States, based on a study conducted in 1920.

The word “Negro” is, biologically, a misnomer, for the African Negroes, brought to the United States as slaves, have crossed in breeding with the dominant White population, as well as with the aboriginal American Indian types with whom they came into contact, so that there is today only a small percentage of the American Negroes who may be considered Negro in the ordinary sense of the term.

Melville J. Herskovits, “The Physical Form and Growth of the American Negro,” Anthropologischer Anzeiger, Volume 4, Number 4 (1927): 293-316.

A Further Discussion of the Variability of Family Strains in the Negro-White Population of New York City

Journal of the American Statistical Association
Volume 20, Issue 151 (1925)
pages 380-389
DOI: 10.1080/01621459.1925.10503502

Melville J. Herskovits

A paper read at the meeting of Section H., American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Washington , D.C., January 2, 1925.

In an investigation of the variability of a population, there are a number of sub-variabilities which can be studied, all of which must be taken into consideration when a study of the general variability of a population in a given trait is to be made. Thus, there is, besides the individual variability, that of the individuals themselves from day to day. In the case of growing children, this is an important factor, and is generally recognized where child-data are being worked with. But even with adults, there is the change which occurs with the day’s activity, particularly in such matters as height, or weight. Again, a population is not made up of isolated individuals, but is composed of family lines, and the variability of these is important, as well as the variation within the families. Although great attention is usually paid to the differing variabilities of populations taken as a whole, these others have usually been overlooked.

The present paper is concerned with variations within the family strains, and between these strains, in the Negro-White population of New York City. The measurements were taken at Public School 89, Manhattan, a school the pupils of which are about 98 per cent Negro. The amount of mixture which has gone into the racial composition of this population, is, of course, an unknown quantity, but there is strong reason to believe that an estimate of 15 to 20 per cent pure Negro would be high. In other words, the population is almost entirely mixed. By measuring the variability of family strains an indication may be had of the amount of mixture, and, at the same time, a measure of the variability within these family lines. The statistical procedure needed for such analysis was given by Boas in a paper published some time ago. The writer also has prepared a paper dealing with the…

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A Critical Discussion of the “Mulatto Hypothesis”

The Journal of Negro Education
Volume 3, Number 3, The Physical and Mental Abilities of the American Negro (July, 1934)
pages 389-402

Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963)

The Two “Mulatto Hypotheses”

What is the “mulatto hypothesis?” The phrase may be used to indicate a point of view concerning the desirability or undesirability  of racial crossing, wherever this has occurred, and between whatever peoples it has taken place. The question as to the character of the hypothesis itself, however,  is somewhat difficult to answer, for there is not one position but two taken on the matter. Since each of these two positions, which are diametrically opposed, claim support from the findings of studies made on human and animal populations, it is important that they be differentiated at the outset of our discussion. The first of them holds that racial crossing is pernicious in its effects; the second maintains that inbreeding is inadvisable, since new strains must be introduced into a population if fertile, virile offspring are to be assured. Any consideration of these two “mulatto hypotheses,” then, must range beyond the confines which would be set if The Two “Mulatto Hypotheses” What is the “mulatto hypothesis?” The phrase may be used to indicate a point of view concerning the desirability or  undesirability  of racial crossing, wherever this has occurred, and between whatever peoples it has taken place. The question as to the character of the hypothesis itself, however,  is somewhat difficult to answer, for there is not one position but two taken on the matter. Since each of these two positions, which are diametrically opposed, claim support from the findings of studies made on human and animal populations, it is important that they be differentiated at the outset of our discussion. The first of them holds that racial crossing is pernicious in its effects; the second maintains that inbreeding is inadvisable, since new strains must be introduced into a population if fertile, virile offspring are to be assured. Any consideration of these two “mulatto hypotheses,” then, must range beyond the confines which would be set if only Negro-white crossing were studied, while such a consideration must similarly include not only a discussion of the results of crossing on the intellectual capabilities of mixed-bloods, but also on their physical potency and social efficiency.

The first of the two positions has perhaps been best phrased by Gates, who is one of its strongest proponents:

Crossing in mankind may be regarded as of three types: (1) Between individuals of the same race. (2) Between different, but nearly related, races; e.g., between the Nordic, Mediterranean and Alpine or East Baltic races, or between different African tribes, or Chinese and Japanese stocks. Such intercrossing goes on continually without causing comment or raising serious problems. (3) Between more distantly related races. Here we might again distinguish (a) crosses between two primitive or two advanced races from (b) crosses between an advanced and a primitive stock. It is only the last type which raises serious difficulties, and is probably undesirable from every point of view. Of course there is no sharp line between the most advanced and the most primitive races, but all intergrades occur. Nevertheless, the distinction I have drawn is certainly an important one.

This author there upon devotes some pages to a discussion of the studies that have been made on human crossed groups. Thus a study made by MacCaughey is quoted concerning the results of mixture in the “microcosmic melting-pot” of Hawaii, with the conclusion

…that such racial intermingling is usually undesirable in its results. Most of the Hawaiian-white hybrids seem to combine the least desirable traits of both parents, and intermarriages of North European and American stocks with dark-skinned races are considered biologically wasteful.

Lundborn is similarly quoted as concluding, on the basis of studies made in Sweden, “that the crossing of races degenerates the constitution and increases degradation.” After considering such studies, Gates summarizes….

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“African and Cherokee by Choice”: Race and Resistance under Legalized Segregation

American Indian Quarterly
Volume 22, Numbers 1/2 (Winter – Spring, 1998)
pages 203-229

Laura L. Lovett, Associate Professor of History
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Zora Neale Hurston once boasted that she was “the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.”‘ In the same breath, Hurston confessed that she was of mixed blood, but differed “from the party line in that I neither consider it an honor or a shame.” This difference from “the party line,” as she referred to African American perspectives on Native American ancestry, must have been especially striking to Hurston because she had helped to document race mixture during her brief stint as a research assistant to anthropologist Melville Herskovits. Hurston participated in a 1928 study of the ancestry and physical traits of African Americans, which surveyed 1,551 Howard University students and found that 27.2 percent claimed to have some Native American ancestry. Herskovits reports that he went to great lengths to adjust for the “distinct prestige value” of having Native American ancestry within African American communities, but neither he nor Hurston explained why Native American ancestry would have bestowed prestige.

Herskovits’s study was aimed at a long tradition of scientific research on the nature of racial difference. Strongly influenced by the work of anthropologist Franz Boas, Herskovits wanted to explain the achievement of those African Americans with lighter skin and European features in terms of the dominant system of values in American culture. Since the 1860s, Social Darwinists and later hereditarian eugenicists had sought to explain racial differences in terms of the value of innate biological traits possessed by what were considered to be separate and distinct races. Indeed, the perception that all characteristics were biologically determined and maintained in bloodlines, which were then regulated by “blood quantum” standards, formed an important part of how family identity was constructed. Herskovits questioned the biological framework of “racial integrity” by appealing to cultural and social differences to explain differences ascribed to races. However, this scientific attack did not work its way into American racial ideology for quite some time. In the interim, people renegotiated what were understood to be scientific racial categories in various ways, pointing to places where biological classificatory schema denied the historical realities of interracial relations…

The Multiracial Identity Movement: Countless Ways to Misunderstand Race

MixedRaceStudies.org
2011-11-04

Steven F. Riley

In Jen Chau’s essay, “Multiracial Families: Counted But Still Misunderstood,” in the October 31, 2011 issue of Racialiscious, reveals just how much race is misunderstood by some activists within the multiracial identity movement and exemplifies why the movement—in its current form—is incapable of leading us into a post-racial future.

Part of the “quiet” that Ms. Chau is experiencing is due to the realization that President Barack Obama is not the multiracial messiah some had thought he would be. He is neither a messiah, nor is he—as he has stated on multiple occasions—multiracial.  Unfortunately, in many ways, the policies of our first black President differ little from our previous white President (George W. Bush). Is this the “black-white mix” we were hoping for? Perhaps the quiet is the palatable disappointment in President Obama’s first three years office. What part of “race is a social construction” does she not understand?  As succinctly stated by Professor Richard Thompson Ford,

“Because race is a social category and not a biological or genetic one, Obama’s mixed parentage does not determine his race. Mixed parentage may influence one’s appearance, and a person whose appearance is racially ambiguous can influence how she is perceived. In such instances, race may be a question of personal affiliation to some extent. And mixed parentage may influence how one chooses to identify. But for the most part, society assigns us our races. At any rate, Obama’s appearance is not ambiguous, and he unquestionably identifies as black.” (Emphasis is mine.)

A good first step would be to for activists respect Obama’s identity as they would like us to respect theirs.

My theory—which differs considerably from Ms. Chau’s—is that the “quiet” is due to fact that multiracial-identity movement is simply not the progressive force she and others think it is; and we—including activists themselves—are beginning to recognize that.  In many ways, the multiracial-identity movement mimics the tactics, ideologies and demagogueries of the right-wing conservative adherents that it claims to fight.

The problems with the movement are numerous, but they can be narrowed to three major issues: 1) Race as biology, 2) Ahistoricity, and 3) the refusal to discuss the role of white supremacy within the discourses of multiraciality.

After nearly a century of scientific acknowledgment that there is no such thing as “race” as a biological concept, why do some in the movement still pursue issues dealing with so-called “multiracial medicine?”  A truly progressive movement would preface all of its statements with the fact that “race” in short, was a concept used to justify the extermination and enslavement of non-Europeans.

Another deficiency in the multiracial movement is its unwillingness to acknowledge that so-called “racial mixing” in the Americas is a five-century—not four decade—aspect of our history.  Thus even if “race” were a biological concept, we are all most certainly “mixed” by now.  Rather than making hypocritical (demanding the freedom to self-identify for some but not for others) pronouncements on President Obama’s heterogeneous background, multiracial activists should also consider the heterogeneity of the First Lady Michelle Obama, the overwhelming vast majority of black and Latino Americans, and yes, a significant segment of white Americans. In 1927, 40 years before the mythological baby-boom that was allegedly brought about by Loving v. Virginia and just seven years after the last 20th-century census that would enumerate “mixed-race” people (Ms. Chau seems to have forgotten the seven past censuses starting in 1850 that counted mixed-race individuals), anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, revealed that,

“The word “Negro” is, biologically, a misnomer, for the African Negroes, brought to the United States as slaves, have crossed in breeding with the dominant White population, as well as with the aboriginal American Indian types with whom they came into contact, so that there is today only a small percentage of the American Negroes who may be considered Negro in the ordinary sense of the term.” (The emphasis is mine.)

When an early 20th-century anthropologist—in the midst of an overtly racist era—can show more insight that 21st century activists—in the midst of the so-called “Age of Obama” era—we have a serious problem.

Lastly, the most deafening “quiet” within the multiracial movement, is its silence on the role of white supremacy in the continuing oppression and shaping of identities here in United States and around the world.  It is the ideology of white supremacy that created the notion of race as biology, then racialized and dehumanized, enlslaved, and exterminated people around the world for centuries—and continue to do—to preserve the current Eurocentric hegemonic paradigm.  As Professor G. Reginald Daniel has warned,

“We should be especially concerned about any half-hearted attack on the Eurocentric paradigm in the manner of interracial colorism that merely weakens rather than eradicates the dichotomization of blackness and whiteness, while leaving intact the racial hierarchy that maintains white privilege.”

The type of incidents that agitate the multiracial identity movement today are not the growing wealth disparities among racialized groups, or current vigorous attempts to curtail voting rights of minorities ahead of the 2012 General Election, but rather the freely chosen racial identity by the President or the chosen racial identity of the child of a Hollywood celebrity.  As Ms. Chau has stated, there are many ways that we have to fight racism and ignorance, yet the movement—particularly on the internet—is more interested in exploiting the bodies of young people by hosting “mixed-race” fashion shows that conjure-up images of Quadroon Balls from the early 19th-century or posting photographs of the allegedly “multiracial person of-the-day” in a self-aggrandizing exercise that Professor Rainier Spencer has coined as “miscentrism.”  At this rate, the multiracial-identity movement will be no more effective in combating racism and ignorance than a lukewarm decaffeinated soy-triple-shot no-fat latte at Starbucks.

The Physical Form and Growth of the American Negro

Anthropologischer Anzeiger
Volume 4, Number 4 (1927)
pages 293-316

Melville J. Herskovits

(With 17 Tables and 17 Figures)

The series which is represented in this paper is made up of 5,539 American Negroes, comprising individuals of both sexes and all ages from one year to adult-hood, (this latter class including all persons who are twenty-years of age and above). The measurements, the averages and variabilities of which are given below in the tables, were taken, with the exception of one group, during the past three years in New York City; in Washington, D.C.; among the rural population of eastern West Virginia; at Nashville, Tenn.; and at Tuskegee, Ala. The exception which may be noted is a series of 351 individuals, measured by the late Professor [Felix] von Luschan in eight cities of the south of the United States, during the year 1915. This series is also composed of persons of both sexes and all ages, and, for the purpose in hand, is incorporated with the other series mentioned above.

It is important, in any consideration of the American Negro, to understand the use of the term. The word “Negro” is, biologically, a misnomer, for the African Negroes, brought to the United States as slaves, have crossed in breeding with the dominant White population, as well as with the aboriginal American Indian types with whom they came into contact, so that there is today only a small percentage of the American Negroes who may be considered Negro in the ordinary sense of the term. I have  discussed the extent to which this crossing has occurred, and the consequent hybrid character of the American Negro people of today, elsewhere, and it is therefore only necessary…

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Melville Jean Herskovits

American Anthropologist
Volume 66, Issue 1 (February 1964)
pages 83-109
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1964.66.1.02a00080

Alan P. Merriam

Melville Jean Herskovits (1895-1963)

Melville Jean Herskovits was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, September 10, 1895, and spent his childhood there and in Texas. In 1920 he took his Ph.B. at the University of Chicago, and later came under the influence of Franz Boas, then at Columbia University, where he took an M.A. in 1921 and his doctorate in 1923. In 1924 he married Frances Shapiro, and their daughter, Jean, was born in 1935. He held the post of lecturer in anthropology at Columbia University from 1924 to 1927, and was at Howard University in 1925. In 1927 he moved to Northwestern University where he remained, as full professor since 1935, until his death February 25, 1963.

Facts of this nature tell us but little about a man who gave his intellectual life to anthropology, of his devotion to his field of study, or of the enormous integrity he brought to it. It is, rather, in looking at the fruits of his devotion that we see the scope and brilliance of his productivity and the constant theme of humanitarianism, based always on the facts of research, that marked his work.

From 1923-1927 Herskovits carried out his first major series of studies as Fellow of the Board of the Biological Sciences of the National Research Council; this was a detailed program of physical anthropology titled “Variability under Radical Crossing.” The project came to be centered about variability, homogeneity and heterogeneity, and the problem of Mendelian inheritance in race crossing; it began with early anthropometric studies of Negro boys in New York City and Riverdale, New York (#28, 37). In 1925, Herskovits pointed out the importance of the range of variability in studying a mixed racial grouping (#31: 70), and suggested that a significant means of understanding heredity in racial crossing could be achieved through the study of genealogies of individuals concerned (#121, 61). This led immediately to the question of homogeneity and heterogeneity (#39) in the American Negro population, and Herskovits concluded:

That the variability of family strains can be utilized as an indication of the homogeneity or heterogeneity of a population; that the Negro-White population of New York is of surprisingly great homogeneity of type; that in this instance, at least, the result may be taken as an indication of the heterogeneity of racial origin; and that there is not in this population great variation between families, but rather within them. (#43 : 12)

The concept of low variability in family lines and high variability within families of New York Negroes was so different from that generally prevailing that Herskovits sought a further explanation which he found in the element of social selection (#35, 63, 100)…

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Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge

University of Nebraska Press
2004
357 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2187-1

Jerry Gershenhorn, Professor of History
North Carolina Central University

Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge is the first full-scale biography of the trailblazing anthropologist of African and African American cultures. Born into a world of racial hierarchy, Melville J. Herskovits (1895–1963) employed physical anthropology and ethnography to undermine racist and hierarchical ways of thinking about humanity and to underscore the value of cultural diversity. His research in West Africa, the West Indies, and South America documented the far-reaching influence of African cultures in the Americas. He founded the first major interdisciplinary American program in African studies in 1948 at Northwestern University, and his controversial classic The Myth of the Negro Past delineated African cultural influences on American blacks and showcased the vibrancy of African American culture. He also helped forge the concept of cultural relativism, particularly in his book Man and His Works. While Herskovits promoted African and African American studies, he criticized some activist black scholars, most notably Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois, whom he considered propagandists because of their social reform orientation.

After World War II, Herskovits became an outspoken public figure, advocating African independence and attacking American policymakers who treated Africa as an object of Cold War strategy. Drawing extensively on Herskovits’s private papers and published works, Jerry Gershenhorn’s biography recognizes Herskovits’s many contributions and discusses the complex consequences of his conclusions, methodologies, and relations with African American scholars.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Making of an Anthropologist
• 2. The Attack on Pseudoscientific Racism
• 3. Transforming the Debate on Black Culture
• 4. Subverting the Myth of the Negro Past
• 5. Objectivity and the Development of Negro Studies
• 6. The Postwar Expansion of African Studies
• 7. Foreign Policy Critic
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

We begin the new century like we began the last, debating the proper approach toward social and political concerns relating to race and culture. Yet the terms and the nature of the debate have changed. At the beginning of the twentieth century, race and culture were generally framed in hierarchical terms, with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants at the top of the developmental scale. In the United States, as in much of the rest of the world, white men held powerful political and social sway; African Americans, in particular, were subjugated politically, economically, and socially. Abroad, Africans and Asians su√ered similarly under Western imperialism. Those who were nonwhite, non-Western, or female had little voice in global politics or in the academy. According to mainstream scholars, African culture was nonexistent, and black American culture was merely a distorted version of Anglo-American culture….

 …Herskovits sought to undermine racial and cultural hierarchy throughout his career. In his earliest work on the physical anthropology of American blacks—in the midst of 1920s modernist attacks on Victorian thought—he challenged the Victorians’ understanding of race as a biological concept. Using anthropometry, the tool that racist scholars had used to support the notion of a racial hierarchy, Herskovits refuted the dogma of race as an unchanging category, fixed in nature. In The American Negro (1928), Herskovits demonstrated that most American blacks had both African and European ancestry, but contrary to expectations, they exhibited very similar physical characteristics. This finding disproved the interpretation of traditional racial theorists, who assumed that the physical traits of individuals in mixed racial groups would be marked by great differences based on the definition of a race as a people with similar physical characteristics and a common racial ancestry. Herskovits’s finding that a mixed-race group was physically homogeneous rendered the biological definition of race untenable. Indeed, Herskovits maintained that American blacks, by virtue of their mixed heritage, were not really a race at all but a mixed population group. Further, he demonstrated the fallacy of the racist view that mulattoes could not reproduce. Consequently, Herskovits challenged the biological definition of race and helped steer scholars toward a more modern conception of race as a sociological category. By doing so, he undercut the notion that race determined behavior. Instead, he substituted environment and culture for race as the explanation for behavioral and intellectual differences between individuals. In this way he attacked racial hierarchy and demonstrated the falsity of intellectual rankings based on race…

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The study of racial mixture in the British Commonwealth: Some anthropological preliminaries

Eugenics Review
Volume 32, Number 4 (January 1941)
pages 114-120

K. L. Little
The Duckworth Laboratory
University Museum of Ethnology, Cambridge

In a recently published and noteworthy symposium entitled “Race Relations and the Race Problem,” eleven prominent American writers reviewed the sociological implications of racial contacts on the American continent, with special reference to problems arising out of the very large racial minority in the U.S.A. of some 13 million American Negroes. One of these authors, Professor S. J. Holmes, has pointed out elsewhere that there are three racial possibilities in view for the United States. The entire population may become “white”; it may become “black”; or “whites” and “blacks” may fuse together into a hybrid stock. This last possibility seems to be fairly well substantiated by the anthropometric material collected by Professor Melville J. Herskovits, who in his turn attributes the rise and growth of this new hybrid “race” to the effect of social selection.

Although the interest shown in North America to problems of racial relations in particular, and to human genetics in general, as proved by the articles in such journals as the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, is readily understandable, it stands out in very sharp relief to the lukewarm attention afforded to such matters in the countries which compose the British Commonwealth. The latter empire comprises practically speaking members of every major and minor race group in the world, and so contains the elements of most possible forms of human miscegenation, yet official information regarding the actual racial compositions of these populations is often very incomplete, and particularly so in the colonial areas where it would be most interesting. Nor, anthropologically speaking, can much of the semi-official data, as displayed, for example, in such books of reference as the Encyclopaedia Britannica by the use of phrases as “the higher-type races,” “black low type,” etc., be considered more satisfactory. The fact, however, that nothing like a complete anthropometric survey has yet been instituted even in this country, may help to explain, though not to condone, the lack of more exact information elsewhere…

…How Will Racial Relations be Affected in the Future?

In sociological science it is no more than a truism to state that the structure of no society is static. This would be clear even if the disruptions achieved by such forces as war did not make the presence of the dynamic factors which are continuously changing and modifying institutions and traditions even more obvious. It may, therefore, be thought unquestionable that present forms of racial or social segregations will undergo corresponding alteration, becoming either more elastic or more rigid in the process. In the former event then not only will the racial composition of populations change considerably, but many new “racial” populations will emerge. In this light, then, eugenic considerations involve not only the forms of racial hybridization at present in force, but the far wider possibilities of the future; since it is but reasonable to suppose that in human genetics no less than elsewhere, the biological results become more diverse as new and additional factors are added. Moreover, specific as well as general consideration seems all the more necessary, when it is remembered that answers stlll to be provided for certain ambiguously interpretable phenomena are in a sense but the preface to wider fields…

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