Mixed Race Studies

Skin Tone Stratification among Black Americans, 2001–2003

Social Forces
Volume 92, Number 4, June 2014
pages 1313-1337

Ellis P. Monk Jr., Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in Sociology
University of Chicago

In the past few decades, a dedicated collection of scholars have examined the matter of skin tone stratification within the black American population and found that complexion has significant net effects on a variety of stratification outcomes. These analyses relied heavily on data collected between 1950 and 1980. In particular, many scholars have utilized the National Survey of Black Americans (1979–1980). This leaves the question of whether or not the effect of skin tone on stratification outcomes remains decades later. Newly available data from the National Survey of American Life (2001–2003) are used to examine this question. I find that skin tone is significantly associated with black Americans’ educational attainment, household income, occupational status, and even the skin tone and educational attainment of their spouses. Consequently, this study demonstrates that skin tone stratification among black Americans persists into the 21st century. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of ethnoracial inequality in the United States and beyond.

Contact of Races in Brazil

Social Forces
Volume 19, Number 4 (May, 1941)
pages 533-538
DOI: 10.2307/2571211

Arthur Ramos
University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro

BRAZIL, as well as other American countries, was originally a land of conquests; the growth of its population has developed by the contact or confluence of European settlers with the Indians. In this vast laboratory of races, the New World, Brazil affords a splendid field for investigation of how heterogeneous peoples from many sources have mingled and formed one homogeneous people, one language, and one culture.

When the Portuguese settlers came to Brazil in 1500 with the caravel guided by Pedro Álvatres Cabral, they met an Indian population occupying the Brazilian coast in an extension of about 5,000 miles. With the Portuguese settlers in the six-teenth century came an enormous number of Africans, at first from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries as slaves for agricultural work, and afterwards for work in mining and other tasks. After the abolition of slavery in 1888, other European contingents immigrated to Brazil. In addition to the Portuguese there were Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and other European peoples, and also some oriental peoples such as the Japanese.

Because of the heterogeneous sources of its population, Brazil is a splendid field for investigation of human hybridism. Unfortunately the field researches are few and without any definite conclusion. But we have at our disposal several centuries of a vast experience of contact of races, this contact being moulded according to a very old Portuguese tradition, that is, the contact between the Portuguese and the peoples they discovered in their exploration and colonization. In the contact between Portuguese and Negroes, for instance, Brazil never had anything similar to the Black Code and other legal prohibitions of contacts of races by miscegenation and intermarriage such as were very frequent elsewhere in the New World, especially in the English America.

The religious feeling has also favored interbreeding, and it was very common among the colonists. Many have emphasized the action of Catholicism with its doctrine of essential equality of mankind and its estimation of racial scruples. This position of Catholicism has been adopted by many Protestant countries influenced by modern missionaries. Important also is the legislation and the strength of the public opinion in several South American countries with reference to miscegenation and intermarriage. In…

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Double-Checking the Race Box: Examining Inconsistency between Survey Measures of Observed and Self-Reported Race

Social Forces
Volume 85, Issue 1
pages 57-74
DOI: 10.1353/sof.2006.0141

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

Social constructivist theories of race suggest no two measures of race will capture the same information, but the degree of “error” this creates for quantitative research on inequality is unclear. Using unique data from the General Social Survey, I find observed and self-reported measures of race yield substantively different results when used to explain income inequality in the United States. This occurs because inconsistent racial classification is correlated with other respondent characteristics such as immigrant generation, educational attainment and age.

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Pacific Islander Americans and Multiethnicity: A Vision of America’s Future?

Social Forces
Volume 73, Issue 4 (1995)
pages 1365-1383
DOI: 10.1093/sf/73.4.1365

Paul R. Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Rowena Fong, Ruby Lee Piester Centennial Professor in Services to Children and Families
University of Texas, Austin

Americans are rapidly becoming an ethnically plural people. Not only are there many different peoples in the U.S., but a sharply increasing number of individuals are coming to have and to recognize multiple ethnic strains within themselves. The current literature on ethnicity is inadequate, for it assumes that people have only single ethnic identities when, in fact, many people, like Pacific Islander Americans, have long held multiethnic identities. Drawing on survey data and interviews as well as literary sources, this article analyzes the features of Pacific Islander American multiethnic identity: it is situational; individuals commonly simplify their ethnicity in practical living; and people with multiple ancestries are admitted to group membership on much the same basis as people with single ancestries. The bases of Pacific Islander American ethnicity include ancestry, family, practice, and place.

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The Russian Creoles of Alaska as a Marginal Group

Social Forces
Volume 22, Number 2 (December 1943)
pages 204-208

Margaret Mary Wood
Russell Sage College

The interest in Alaska which has been aroused by its strategic importance in the present world-war conflict is bringing to the fore as worthy of attention many problems of this distant American frontier to which little heed has hitherto been given. Among these problems the marginal position of the Russian Creoles in Alaska is one which is of special sociological interest. The position of this group is not only characterized by the difficulties which are commonly associated with the marginal position of racial hybrids, but it is also further complicated by a number of cultural difficulties which arc in many respects unique. These latter difficulties must be seen in the light of the history of the group to be rightly understood.

The present Russian Creoles in Alaska are the descendants of mixed marriages between the Russians and the Alaskan natives which occurred during the period of Russian rule in Alaska. The term “creole” was legally defined by the Russian authorities to mean the children of Russian fathers and the native women, and it was used in this sense in the Russian colonies. In the southern United States and in the West Indies, however, the term is used differently and only includes children of Spanish or French descent born in America of European parents. Historians in writing about Alaska have, for the most part, adopted the Russian use of the term; but it has not found a ready acceptance with the American settlers in Alaska who tend to designate the Creoles as “natives” or “half-breeds.” Both of these terms are keenly resented by the Creole group as I learned to my regret when I was teaching at Kodiak in 1916. I inadvertently referred to the Creoles as natives in making a distinction between some of their customs and those of the American group in Kodiak.   My tactless remark was repeated in garbled form to the local school board, all of whom were Creoles, and stirred up a furore which cost me my position for the following year, deservedly enough perhaps. The question of their name is one concerning which the Creole group are exceedingly sensitive.

Precise statistics of the Creoles in Alaska are lacking, but their number is not large. Russian records for Alaska in 1860 give the number of Creoles who had been baptized into the Russian Church as 1,676. In the United States census report of 1880, Ivan Petroff, who enumerated the Alaskan population for the government, gives their number as 1,756. In more recent census reports the Russian Creoles are not distinguished from other natives of mixed blood in Alaska. The 1930 census gives 7,825 as the number of natives of mixed blood out of a total native population of 29,983, but does not list the Russian Creoles separately. They probably do not constitute more than a third to a half of the natives of mixed blood, however, for racial diffusion is occurring rapidly in Alaska. This diffusion is to be expected. It is the natural outcome of a situation in which a pioneer breed of white men, isolated from women of their own race, are in contact with a docile and not unattractive native people.   The Russians recognized this situation in Alaska with greater frankness and tolerance than it has since been accorded under American rule.

Under the jurisdiction of the Russian American Company, which was chartered in 1799, order was introduced into the Russian colony and the earlier…

The Anglo-Indians: A Disorganized Marginal Group

Social Forces
Volume 14, Number 2 (December 1935)
pages 263-268

Paul Frederick Cressey, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Wheaton College, Newton, Massachusetts

FOUR centuries of European contact with India have left a biological residue of many thousand people of mixed European and Indian stock. Since 1911 this group has been officially designated by the government of India as the Anglo-Indian Community. Elsewhere in Asia racial hybrids of European and Oriental stock are commonly known as Eurasians. The Anglo-Indians are by far the largest group of such hybrids in Asia.

The distribution of the Anglo-Indians accurately reflects their history. They are concentrated in those areas where the maximum European contact has occurred. In the four largest port cities, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Rangoon, live one-third of all the Anglo-Indians, while an additional one-third live in other parts of the provinces in which these cities are located. Anglo-Indians are predominantly city dwellers, and their life and problems have an urban setting. In 1931 the Anglo-Indian population of India and Burma was returned by the official census as 138,395. This represents an increase of 11.4 per cent during the preceding decade, and 12.1.9 per cent for the last fifty years. The increase in the total population of India in these same periods has been 10.1 per cent and 31.3 per cent respectively. There is a tendency for many persons of light complexion to return themselves as British, and some Indian Christians are enumerated as Anglo-Indians. The Census of India recognizes these errors and estimates the corrected total for Anglo-Indians to be approximately 165,000. In 1931 the sex ratio was 1,061 Anglo-Indian males for every 1,000 females.

Many European stocks are represented among these hybrids, including British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. The term Anglo-Indian is thus something of a misnomer, but the largest single stock is British, and the group is predominantly British in its cultural affiliations. On the Indian side the stock is almost entirely of Hindu origin, only a very few persons being of Moslem descent.   There is no…

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Memorandum Concerning the Characteristics of the Larger Mixed-Blood Racial Islands of the Eastern United States

Social Forces
Volume 21, Number 4 (May 1946)
pages 438-477
DOI: 10.2307/2572217

William Harlen Gilbert, Jr.
Library of Congress

Prefactory Statement

In many of the eastern States of this country there are small pockets of peoples who arc scattered here and there in different counties and who are complex mixtures in varying degrees of white, Indian, and Negro blood. These small local groups seem to develop especially where environmental circumstances such as forbidding swamps or inaccessible and barren mountain country favor their growth. Many are located along the tidewater of the Atlantic coast where swamps or islands and peninsulas have protected them and kept alive a portion of the aboriginal blood which greeted the first white settlers on these shores. Others are farther inland in the Piedmont area and are found with their backs up against the wall of the Blue Ridge or the Alleghenies. A few of these groups arc to be found on the very top of the Blue Ridge and on the several ridges of the Appalachian Great Valley just beyond.

No satisfactory name has ever been invented to designate as a whole these mixed outcasts from both the white and Negro castes of America. However, their existence can be traced back practically to the beginning of settlement by whites in the various areas in which they occur. The early white settlers called these racial intermediates “free colored” or “free negroes” and considered them frequently as mere squatters rather than as legitimate settlers on the land. The laws were interpreted to the disadvantage of these folk and they were forbidden to testify in court. Acts were passed to prohibit their immigration from other States and they were considered as undesirables since they bridged the racial gap between free whites and slave Negroes.

After the Civil War these mixed folk were still classified as “colored” or as “mulattoes” but they were frequently encouraged to develop their own institutions and schools separate from the Negroes. In recent years there are some indications that the numbers of these intermediate mixed populations are growing rather rapidly and that they may total well over 50,000 persons at the present time.

There is little evidence for the supposition that they are being absorbed to any great extent into either the white or the Negro groups. Their native breeding grounds furnish a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of population which periodically swarms into cities and industrial areas. The characteristics of illiteracy, poverty, and large families mark them as members of the more backward section of the American nation. Draft boards and the armed forces have found it difficult to classify them racially for military service. As a sizable native minority they certainly deserve more attention than the meager investigations which sociologists and anthropologists have hitherto made of their problems. A recognition of their existence by social scientists can hardly prejudice their social prospects since the vast majority can not possibly hope to pass as “white” under the present social system. In the hope of enlisting the interest of scientific bodies and foundations in research on these mixed groups, then, the following brief memorandum outline of ten of these mixed “racial islands” is presented…

[The list described in the memorandum are:]

1. Brass Ankles and Allied Groups of South Carolina
2. Cajans and Creoles of Alabama and Mississippi
3. Croatans of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia
4. Guineas of West Virginia and Maryland
5. Issues of Virginia
6. Jackson Whites of New Jersey and New York
7. Melungeons of the Southern Appalachians
8. Moors and Nanticokes of Delaware and New Jersey
9. Red Bones of Louisiana
10. Wesorts of Southern Maryland

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The “Sabines”: A Study of Racial Hybrids in a Louisiana Coastal Parish

Social Forces
Volume 29, Number 2 (December, 1950)
pages 148-154

Vernon J. Parenton

Roland J. Pellegrin

Read before the thirteenth annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Biloxi, Mississippi, April 15, 1950.

Historically, the position of the racial and  cultural  hybrid in rural American society has received but little attention from sociologists. Beginning with the twentieth century, however, and especially since 1930, a number of social scientists have centered their investigations on such marginal groups. The acculturative processes associated with the formation of hybrid groups are as difficult to analyze as they are sociologically interesting. Nevertheless the complexity of these processes may be viewed as a challenge rather than as a barrier to social investigations.

Among those areas of the United States where hybrid groups arc found, Louisiana constitutes an interesting socio-cultural laboratory for such research. Partly because of the heterogeneous racial and ethnic character of the state’s population, with its concomitant diversity of cultures, and partly because of its geographical position, Louisiana contains a number of racial and cultural “islands,” the inhabitants oi which range in color from brown to near white. This paper is a preliminary report on a tri-racial group, derisively called the “Sabines,” who inhabit the marshy fringe of a Louisiana parish bordering the Gulf of Mexico. These persons, of mixed white, Indian, and Negro ancestry, have a unique history.

Historical Background

The first white men to explore the Gulf Coast found several Indian tribes inhabiting the area. These tribes may be classified into five linguistic groups: the Muskhogean, Natchez, Tunican, Chitimachan, and Atakapan. In Louisiana the most important group was the Muskhogean, which was, composed of a variety of tribes, including the Houma, Washa, Chawasha, Bayogoula, Chakchiuma, and several others.  The Indian element present in the Sabines of today is derived from a variety of these Muskhogean tribes, but principally from the Houmas…

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Trends in Mate Selection in a Tri-Racial Isolate

Social Forces
Volume 37, Number 3 (March 1959)
pages 215-221

Thomas J. Harte
Catholic University of America

Read before the twenty-first annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Asheville, North Carolina, April 11, 1958.

The “Brandywine” population of Southern Maryland is a tri-racial hybrid group which manifests many of the physical and social characteristics common to other known isolates located through the eastern part of the United States.  It is reputedly descended from mixed white, Indian, and Negro stock, although its most group-conscious members tend to reject the theory of Negro intermixture in their family background.  The skin color and hair texture of members seem to substantiate the theory of some white ancestry, and although a relatively high proportion possess some physical characteristics usually associated with Negro types, in general this population is marked by a high degree of “visibility.”  The Brandywine group is predominately rural. It has a total population of approximately 5,000.  Roman Catholicism is today, and has been traditionally, the religion of almost all of its members. Sixteen surnames are common in the population; four of these are unique to the group, the remaining twelve being more or less common among Negro and/or white families in the area.

The group has succeeeded in maintaining a considerable measure of isolation from the larger Negro and white populations through endogamous marriages as well as by residential and, to some extent, occupational segregation…

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More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order by G. Reginald Daniel [Book Review: Bonilla-Silva]

Social Forces
Volume 81, Number 2 (December 2002)
pages 674-676

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Most books on multiracial matters are as fluffy as a goose-down pillow. These books are often edited collections in which personal narratives by multiracial people from middle-class backgrounds are paraded with very little historical analysis to provide context, no theoretical argument on how multiracialism fits in the larger racial system, and no regard for how representative the stories are. Fortunately, this is not the case with G. Reginald Daniel’s book, More than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order. This is a sophisticated, historically complex, and theoretically driven analysis of multiracialism in the U.S…

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