Mixed Race Studies

Can Science Explain the Concept of Race?

PsycCRITIQUES
Volume 57, Release 16 (2012-04-18)
Article 4
5 pages

Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies
Brown University

Amed Logrono, Senior Human Biology Major
Brown University

A review of Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan (Eds.) New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011. 296 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-15697-4 (paperback).

As many have written, genomics has ushered in a new era of disease- and behavior-related research. At the same time, biomedical researchers have become increasingly focused on health disparities. Consequently, when, how, and whether race should be used in medicine has been the topic of an intense, sometime contentious, and very public debate.

Less widely appreciated, though of perhaps even greater consequence, is that during this same period, there has been a radical expansion of DNA technologies for identifying individuals purported to be involved in criminal activities. The stakes in the use of DNA technologies in forensics are, if anything, higher than in the sphere of biomedicine. Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture is a collection of essays, edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan, that address the intersection of race and genomics in several distinct but overlapping and mutually reinforcing spheres. It joins a growing number of books and edited volumes dedicated to exploring the origins and impact of the revitalization of the concept of race among scientists (see, e.g., Epstein, 2007; Roberts, 2011).

Race and the Genetic Revolution provides important insights into some of the most critical and highly charged applications of genomics. An important strength of this timely, engaging, and readable book—and what distinguishes it from some others—is the clarity with which it demonstrates how genomics findings in one discipline such as biomedicine are applied to other disciplines such as psychology, with the assumptions made about race unexamined…

…Although their perspectives vary, the majority of authors in this collection subscribe to the view that race is a social, not a biological, construction. They agree that historical classification systems based on physical and behavioral traits have established a hierarchy of human worth. Though it is not genetically defined, most authors argue that race is socially and politically real, with real social and biological consequences…

…That race is a social, not a genetic, construct is widely acknowledged, though not always well understood. To demonstrate the social nature of race, several authors point to changing classification systems over time and place and to the empirically demonstrated fact that the genetic variation within groups is greater than that between groups. None of the contributors denies the rich genetic variation that characterizes humans; what is at issue for the authors is whether this variation can be categorized scientifically and the uses made of the scientifically constrained data…

Read the entire review here.

More male and mixed-race health visitors wanted

Nursing Times
Harborough, Leicestershire, United Kingdom
2012-08-16

Steve Ford, Deputy News Editor

The Department of Health says it is seeking to attract more men and people from mixed ethnic backgrounds into health visiting, as part of the national recruitment drive.

The overwhelming majority of health visitors are white, female and approaching retirement, according to a DH equality analysis of the health visiting workforce in England. 

The research, published this week, is intended to inform the government’s ongoing Health Visitor Implementation Plan. The national strategy was published in February 2011 and set the aim of boosting the health visitor workforce by an extra 4,200 by 2015.

As of September 2010, there were 9,995 female health visitors and only 101 males, meaning “approximately 99% of health visitors” were women, the DH analysis said…

…“We are working with marketing colleagues to encourage nurses from mixed ethnic backgrounds to join the health visitor workforce,” the report said…

Read the entire article here.

Biological Distance and the African American Dentition

Ohio State University
2002
229 pages

Heather Joy Hecht Edgar

A DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Gene flow occurs whenever two human populations come in contact. African Americans are the result of gene flow between two biologically disparate groups: West Africans and Americans of European descent. This project utilized characteristics of dental morphology to trace genetic relationships among these three groups. Dental morphological traits are useful for this purpose because they are heritable, do not remodel during life (although they can be lost to wear or pathology), and can be compared equally among samples from past and present populations. The results of this research provide new knowledge about human microevolution in a biocultural setting. By analyzing observations from a variety of samples from African Americans, European Americans, West Africans, and western Europeans, conclusions were made on patterns of genetic change through time and space.

The specific hypothesis addressed is that since gene flow has been continuous among West Africans, African Americans, and European Americans in the American colonies and subsequently in the United States, the more recent a sample of African Americans observed, the more they tend toward the average, genetically, of West Africans and Europeans. Dental characteristics reflect this heritage and the pattern of temporally limited genetic similarities. In addition to testing this hypothesis, several predictions were made and tested regarding the historical patterns of admixture in African Americans. These predictions involved whether gene flow has occurred at a constant rate, whether African Americans with greater admixture were more likely to take part in the Great Migration, and whether the dental morphology of the Gullah of South Carolina is especially like their West African ancestors.

The results of this research indicate that while admixture of European American genes into the African American gene pool has been continuous over the last 350 years, it has not occurred at a constant rate. Cultural trends and historical events such as the Civil War and the Jim Crow era affected the rate of admixture. A final product of the current research is a series of probability tables that can be used to determine the likely racial affiliation of an unknown individual. These tables are useful in historic archaeological and forensic settings.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century

The New Press
Spring 2011
512 pages
6.125  x 9.25 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-59558-495-3

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

A powerful new argument from a leading intellectual that explores how today’s cutting-edge genetic science helps perpetuate inequality in a “post-racial” America

While embracing a racial ideology rooted in genetics, Americans are accepting a genetic ideology rooted in race that makes everyone responsible for managing their own lives at the genetic level instead of eliminating the social inequalities that damage our entire society.
—From Fatal Invention

A decade after the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes.

In this provocative analysis, leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race. By searching for differences at the molecular level, a new race-based science is obscuring racism in our society and legitimizing state brutality against communities of color at a time when America claims to be post-racial.

Moving from an account of the evolution of race—proving that it has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science—Roberts delves deep into the current debates, interrogating the newest science and biotechnology, interviewing its researchers, and exposing the political consequences obscured by the focus on genetic difference. Fatal Invention is a provocative call for us to affirm our common humanity.

The Biological Status and Social Worth of the Mulatto

The Popular Science Monthly
June 1913
pages 573-582
Source: University of California via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

Harvey Ernest Jordan, Professor of Anatomy and Director of the Anatomical Laboratories
University of Virginia

The United States has something more than a “negro problem”; it has a mulatto problem. Our 10,000,000 coloredd fellow-citizens comprise somewhat less than 8,000,000 full-blooded negroes; approximately 2,000,000 contain varying percentages of “white” blood.  This “white man’s burden” has several cardinal aspects, notably, social, economic and political. The fundamental aspect, however, is the biologic. Does the presence of this vast company of “half-breeds” complicate or facilitate the “problem”? Certain it is that they must be reckoned with. Are they an aid or a hindrance to a permanent satisfactory adjustment of full relationship between the white race and the colored? To one man their presence is a source of black despair, to another of radiant hope. Which is the more rational attitude? It depends upon the scientific facts in the case. The first point concerns the biological status of this mulatto hybrid.

It may help the subsequent discussion to note at this point the fact that Jamaica does not have a “negro problem” as we know it in the United States. And on the face of things it would appear that it might well be present there in even more aggravated form. For in Jamaica there are only about 15,000 whites among a colored population of about 700,000, including about 50,000 mulattoes. It should be noted that in this “Queen of the Greater Antilles” the mulattoes, as a class, are more nearly at the level of the whites, than at that of the pure negroes. The mulattoes contribute the artisans, the teachers, the business and professional men. They are the very backbone of wonderful Jamaica. To be sure, Jamaica has had 30 years more than the United States during which to “solve” her “negro problem.” But perhaps the perfect adjustment between the races in Jamaica and the elimination of any “problem” of this kind finds its explanation in a more rational and more consistent political treatment made possible by the absence of any constitutional prescription. We may well suspect that the inconsistency of according to the negro legal (constitutional) equality and withholding it practically (politically and socially) has had a morally harmful effect upon both black and white. To stultify oneself as between one’s theory and practise is always subversive of high moral tone.   We shall return to this point below. Suffice it to note here that the Honorable Mr. Olivier, governor of Jamaica, recognizes in the presence of the mulatto only a past blessing, a present advantage, and a future promise of great good.

In the beginning we shall need to raise the question once more as to whether the Negro and Caucasian are actually different man-species, as was held by the eminent zoologist, Louis Agassiz, and as is still held by many, as, for example, the noted French psychologist, Le Bon; or whether they simply represent different “races” or varieties of the same species homo, as is more commonly believed. Le Bon quotes with
approval:

If the Negro and the Caucasian were snails, all zoologists would affirm unanimously that they constitute excellent species, which could never have descended from the same couple from which they had gradually come to differ.

However, simply external gross appearance is no infallible criterion by which to judge of species. And the more highly developed the organism the wider do the individuals differ within the species. Two human brothers may differ infinitely more than two true snail-species. Zoology can furnish many examples where a larval form, or individuals of opposite sex, or the same form modified by peculiar environmental conditions, have been mistaken for separate species. The real scientific test is that of impossibility of effecting a cross, or of infertility inter se of hybrids of a possible cross. A cross between the horse and the ass produces a mule. But mules are infertile if interbred. Hence horse and ass are separate species. A very valuable cross can also be effected between the cow and the buffalo. But the offspring are barren bred among themselves.  Hence cow and buffalo are at least of different species. The mulatto is the product of a negro-white cross. He is as fecund with his own kind, or when he mates with white or negro, as either pure-breeding negroes or whites are. As a matter of fact, the mulatto is probably more prolific than the normal average of either white or negro. During the past twenty years he has increased at twice the rate of the Negro. The Negro is then simply a black variety of the human species. He is the white man’s brother; and we may both be cousins of the apes.

The second question that presents itself is this: Is the mulatto necessarily degenerate? The idea has been and is very eminently and widely held that the crossing of races is intrinsically bad, biologically harmful; that it inevitably and inexorably works deterioration. Agassiz noted in Brazil a

decadence that results from cross-breeding which goes on in this country to a greater extent than elsewhere. This cross-breeding is fatal to the best qualities whether of the white man, the black, or the Indian, and produces an indescribable type whose physical and mental energy suffers.

Humboldt and Darwin held the same opinion, Hilaire Belloc in “The French Revolution” notes regarding Marat

Some say . . . that a mixture of racial types produced in him a perpetual physical disturbance: his face was certainly distorted and ill-balanced (p. 78).

Schultz claims to have noted an intrinsic deterioration in Gentile-Jew crosses.   Le Bon expresses himself as follows:

To cross two peoples is to change simultaneously both their physical constitution and their mental constitution . . . the first effect of interbreeding between different races is to destroy the soul of the race, and by their soul we mean that congeries of common ideas and sentiments which make the strength of people, and without which there is no such thing as a nation or a fatherland . . . a people may sustain many losses, may be overtaken by many catastrophes, and yet recover from the ordeal, but it has lost everything and is past recovery, when it has lost its soul (pp. 53-55).

Le Bon explains this supposed necessary degeneration in half-breeds as due to the “influence of contrary heredities” which “saps their morality and character.” We shall return to Le Bon’s idea of a loss of “soul” as consequent of inter-racial crosses…

…I admit the general inferiority of black-white offspring. Defective half-breeds are too prevalent and obtruding to permit denying the apparently predetermined result of such crosses. But I emphatically deny that the result is inherent in the simple fact of cross-breeding. There are not a few very striking exceptions among my own acquaintances. Absolutely the best mulatto family I have ever known traces its ancestry back on both the maternal and paternal side to high-grade white grandfathers and pure-type negro grandmothers. The reason for the frequently inferior product of such crosses is that the better elements of both races under ordinary conditions of easy mating with their own type feel an instinctive repugnance to intermarriage. Under these usual circumstances a white man who stoops to mating with a colored woman, or a colored woman who will accept a white man, are already of quite inferior type. One would not expect superior offspring from such parents, if it concerned horses or dogs. Why should we expect the biologically impossible in the case of man? If the parents are of good type, so will be the offspring. And even with the handicap of frequently degraded white ancestry, the mulatto of our country, as in Jamaica, forms the most intelligent and potentially useful element of our colored population.

The fact then is established, beyond all possibility of disproof, it seems to me, that a negro-white cross does not inherently mean degeneracy; and that the mulatto, measured by present-day standards of Caucasian civilization, from economic and civic standpoints, is an advance upon a pure negro. In further support of the potency of even a relatively remote white ancestry may be cited the almost unique instance of the Moses of the colored race, Booker T. Washington. As one mingles day by day with colored people of all grades and shades, one is impressed with the significance of even small admixtures of Caucasian blood. What elements of hope or menace lie hidden in these mulatto millions? How can they help to solve or confuse the “problem”?…

…The mulatto has appeared through the white man’s acts. He will greatly increase in the coming generations, by breeding with both his kind and with pure negroes. A high fertility is increased relative to the negro by a lessening death-rate. It is fortunate that he represents an advance on the negro, and a real national advantage in our efforts to adjust the negro ” problem.”…

…The truth is that the hybrid finds himself alive and human, with all that this signifies in terms of capacity for soul development. The pure-bred has no better initial equipment. In the matter of human fundamentals they come to differ only as a different nurture plays upon a very similar human nature. There surely are no real data for the support of Le Bon’s notion that contrary heredities sap the vitality of hybrids and leave them barren of soul…

Read the entire article here.

The claim that persons identifying as multiracial suffer health risks due to the lack of a federal multiracial category is without foundation. On March 1 and 2, 1993, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry conducted their Workshop on the Use of Race and Ethnicity in Public Health Surveillance. One of the general principles agreed upon by workshop participants was that “the concept of race as assessed in pub­lic health surveillance is a social measure. Biological or genetic reference, or both, should be made with extreme caution.” Clearly, the call for instituting a mul­tiracial category for purposes of disease screening is medically insupportable. According to epidemiologists and workshop participants Robert Hahn and Donna Stroup, medical screening by biological race is not desired since “what is mea­sured as ‘race’ in public health surveillance is not a biological characteristic, but rather a self-perception for which phenotypic characteristics may be one among many criteria… Even were distinctive biological markers of race determined, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to assess such markers in common surveil­lance processes and in the census.”

Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States, (Boulder: Westview Press,1999), 158.

Beyond Black and White: Color and Mortality in Post Reconstruction Era North Carolina

Explorations in Economic History
Published online: 2012-07-13
DOI: 10.1016/j.eeh.2012.06.002

Tiffany L. Green, Postdoctoral Fellow
Health Disparities Research Scholars Training Program
Center for Demography and Ecology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Tod G. Hamilton, Research Fellow
Department of Society, Human Development, and Health
School of Public Health
Harvard University

A growing empirical literature in economics and sociology documents the existence of differences in social and economic outcomes between mixed-race blacks and other blacks. However, few researchers have considered whether the advantages associated with mixed-race status may have also translated into differences in mortality outcomes between subgroups of blacks and how both groups compared to whites. We employ previously untapped 1880 North Carolina Mortality census records in conjunction with data from the 1880 North Carolina Population Census to examine whether mulatto, or mixed-race blacks may have experienced mortality advantages over to their colored, or non-mixed race counterparts. For men between the ages of 20-44, estimates demonstrate that all black males are more likely than whites to die. Although our results indicate that there are no statistically significant differences in mortality between mulatto and colored blacks, there are some indications that mulatto males may have enjoyed a slight mortality advantage compared to their colored counterparts. However, we find a substantial mortality advantage associated with mixed-race status among women. These findings indicate that mixed-race women, rather than men, may have accrued any mortality advantages associated with color and white ancestry.

Highlights

• We use data from the 1880 North Carolina Mortality Census to explore inter- and intra- racial mortality differences.
• Our analyses demonstrate that net of a variety of controls black males have greater probability of dying in 1880 than whites.
• We confirm that mulatto (mixed race) women have more favorable mortality profiles than colored (non-mixed race) women, and that mortality differences between white and mulatto women are statistically insignificant.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia

Melbourne University Publishing
March 2002
364 pages
235 x 154 mm, 25 b/w illustrations & 4 maps
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-522-84989-9

Warwick Anderson, Research Professor of History
University of Sydney

Winner of the Australian Historical Association W.K. Hancock Prize 2004

In this lucid and original book, Warwick Anderson offers the first comprehensive history of Australian medical and scientific ideas about race and place.

In nineteenth-century Australia, the main commentators on race and biological differences were doctors. The medical profession entertained serious anxieties about ‘racial degeneration’ of the white population in the new land. They feared non-white races as reservoirs of disease, and they held firm beliefs on the baneful influence of the tropics on the health of Europeans.

Gradually these matters became the province of public health and biological science. In the 1930s anthropologists claimed ‘race’ as their special interest, until eventually the edifice of racial classification collapsed under its own proliferating contradictions.

The Cultivation of Whiteness examines the notion of ‘whiteness’ as a flexible category in scientific and public debates. This is the first time such an analytic framework has been used anywhere in the history of medicine or of science. Anderson also provides the first full account of experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on Aboriginal people in the central deserts.

This very readable book draws on European and American work on the development of racial thought and on the history of representations of the body. As the first extensive (and entertaining) historical survey of ideas about the peopling of Australia, it will help to reshape debate on race, ethnicity, citizenship and environment.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Temperate South
  • 1. Antipodean Britons
  • 2. A Cultivated Society
• The Northern Tropics
  • 3. No Place for a White Man
  • 4. The Making of the Tropical White Man
  • 5. White Triumph in the Tropics?
  • 6. Whitening the Nation
• Aboriginal Australia
  • 7. From Deserts the Prophets Come
  • 8. The Reproductive Frontier
• Conclusion: Biology and Nation
• Notes
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index

Racial ideology and the production of knowledge about health

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.1] (2012-07-02)

Hamish L. Robertson
University of New South Wales

Joanne F. Travaglia, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Health Services Research
University of New South Wales

Introduction

Racial terminology and its associated assumptions pervade the discourses of health policy, practice and research. The language utilised within and across these discourses emerge from both historical and current ideologies and approaches to the understanding and management of difference. As a result the language used reflects the inconsistencies ‘held’ within and between these ideologies. ‘Traditional’ racial or ethnic categories are juxtaposed with ‘mixed’ and hyphenated categories (such as ‘race/ethnicity’), which in turn have been at least partially deconstruction and problematised by post-colonial and critical race theorists. The concept of ‘race’ is mixed, moulded and blended as clinicians and researchers search for ways to describe human diversity.

In this article, we examine and unpack the conflation of contested and competing concepts of race with arguments from a critical perspective. We begin by briefly considering the origins of the concept of ‘race’. We then consider how ‘race’ is utilised in three areas of practice: research into and commentary on differential patterns of morbidity and mortality across population groups; the examination on the impact of social inequalities on specific groups and populations; and more recently, and most highly debated, explorations of the genomic links to prevalence of diseases.

Health, as well as other social systems (including education, economics and the law) utilise racial language to produce their own particular versions of injustices, at least in part by representing such language as ‘natural’ products of the ‘neutral’ findings of science. Through various examples, we show how these knowledge production processes not only create and legitimise such language, but adapt to utilise emerging science to support the perpetuation of these ideological positions over time. Just as in feminist critiques of gender the link between the presumed bio-genetic specificity and formal rigidity of ‘race’ and racialised inequality can be exposed as a discourse adaptively constructed through a centuries long politics of social categories, and the privileging of unproblematised medical narratives…

…Race is a polysemic concept with a long and contested history. The term ‘race’ is dynamic and adaptable because it is not the core concept of racialised knowledge and thinking, that is to say ‘race’ has no causal properties. The concept and associated taxonomic devices, including categorisations of race, have no dynamic or processual power. The focus on ‘race’ misses both the production of knowledge about racialised things (entities, dynamics) and the locus of power in racial debates and theories. It is the active process of racism and racialisation that produce racist circumstances, situations, knowledge and beliefs. Racial categories are rather, abstract nouns that act as part of the linguistic architecture of racist knowledge by creating a set of artificial boundaries for knowledge and beliefs that are both fluid and contentious. The ‘new’ discourses of population ‘mixing’ are a reflection of these false population categories and their presumed borders, since both consensual and non-consensual assimilation/integration are a permanent feature of human history…

Read the entire article here.

History Counts: A Comparative Analysis of Racial/Color Categorization in US and Brazilian Censuses

American Journal of Public Health
Volume 90, Number 11 (November 2000)
pages 1738-1745

Melissa Nobles, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Categories of race (ethnicity, color, or both) have appeared and continue to appear in the demographic censuses of numerous countries, including the United States and Brazil. Until recently, such categorization had largely escaped critical scrutiny, being viewed and treated as a technical procedure requiring little conceptual clarity or historical explanation. Recent political developments and methodological changes, in US censuses especially, have engendered a critical reexamination of both the comparative and the historical dimensions of categorization. The author presents a comparative analysis of the histories of racial/color categorization in American and Brazilian censuses and shows that racial (and color) categories have appeared in these censuses because of shifting ideas about race and the enduring power of these ideas as organizers of political, economic, and social life in both countries. These categories have not appeared simply as demographic markers. The author demonstrates that censuses are instruments at a state’s disposal and are not simply detached registers of population and performance.

…1850–1920 Censuses

The 1850 census marked a watershed in census-taking in several ways. For our purposes, a large part of its significance rests in the introduction of the “mulatto” category and the reasons for its introduction. This category was added not because of demographic shifts, but because of the lobbying efforts of race scientists and the willingness of certain senators to do their bidding. More generally, the mulatto category signaled the ascendance of scientific authority within racial discourse. By the 1850s, polygenist thought was winning a battle that it had lost in Europe. The “American school of ethnology” distinguished itself from prevailing European racial thought through its insistence that human races were distinct and unequal species. That polygenism endured at all was a victory, since the European theorists to abandon it. Moreover, there was considerable resistance to it in the United States. Although most American monogenists were not racial egalitarians, they were initially unwilling to accept claims of separate origins, permanent racial differences, and the infertility of racial mixture. Polygenists deliberately sought hard statistical data to prove that mulattoes, as hybrids of different racial species, were less fertile than their pure-race parents and lived shorter lives.

Racial theorist, medical doctor, scientist, and slaveholder Josiah Nott lobbied certain senators for the inclusion in the census of several inquiries designed to prove his theory of mulatto hybridity and separate origins. In the end, the senators voted to include only the category “mulatto,” although they hotly debated the inclusion of another inquiry—“[d]egree of removal from pure white and black races”—as well. Instructions to enumerators for the slave population read, “Under heading 5 entitled ‘Color,’ insert in all cases, when the slave is black, the letter B; when he or she is a mulatto, insert M. The color of all slaves should be noted.” For the free population, enumerators were instructed as follows: “in all cases where the person is black, insert the letter B; if mulatto, insert M. It is very desirable that these particulars be carefully regarded.”

The 1850 census introduced a pattern, especially in regard to the mulatto category, that lasted until 1930: the census was deliberately used to advance race science. Such science was fundamental to, though not the only basis of, racial discourse—that is, the discourse that explained what race was. Far from merely counting race, the census was helping to create race by assisting scientists in their endeavors. Although scientific ideas about race changed over those 80 years, the role of the census in advancing such thought did not.

The abolition of slavery and the reconstitution of White racial domination in the South were accompanied by an enduring interest in race. Predictably, the ideas that race scientists and proslaveryadvocates had marshaled to defend slavery were used to oppose the recognition of Black political rights. Blacks were naturally inferior to Whites, whether as slaves or as free people, and should therefore be disqualified from full participation in American economic, political, and social life. Although scientists, along with nearly all Whites, were convinced of the inequality of races, they continued in their basic task of investigating racial origins. Darwinism presented a challenge to the still dominant polygenism, but the mulatto category retained its significance within polygenist theories. Data were needed to prove that mulattoes lived shorter lives, thus proving that Blacks and Whites were different racial species…

…The mulatto category remained on the 1910 and 1920 censuses for the same reason that it had been introduced in 1850: to build racial theories. (Census officials removed the category from the 1900 census because they were dissatisfied with the quality of 1890 mulatto, octoroon, and quadroon data.) The basic idea that distinct races existed and were enduringly unequal remained firmly in place. What happens when superior and inferior races mate? Social and natural scientists still wanted to know. But the advisory committee to the Census Bureau decided in 1928 to terminate use of the mulatto category on censuses.

The stated reasons for removal rested on accuracy. Had the advisory committee possessed confidence in the data’s accuracy or the Census Bureau’s ability to secure accuracy, “mulatto” might well have remained on the census. The committee did not refer to the evident inability of the mulatto category to settle the central, if shifting, questions of race science: first,whether “mulatto-ness” proved that Whites and Blacks were different species of humans, and then, whether mulattoes were weaker than members of the so-called pure races. The exit of the mulatto category from the census was markedly understated, especially whencompared with its entrance in 1850 and its enduring significance on 19th-century censuses.

Beginning with the 1890 census, all Native Americans,whether taxed or not,were counted on general population schedules. Much as racial theorists believed that enumerating mulattoes would prove their frailty, they thought that Native Americans were a defeated and vanishing race. Given the weight of these expectations in the late 19th century, it is not surprising that census methods and data reflected them. As the historian Brian Dippieobserved, “the expansion and shrinkage of Indian population estimates correlate with changing attitudes about the Native American’s rights and prospects.” The idea of the vanishing Indian was so pervasive that the censuses of 1910 and 1930 applied a broad definition of “Indian” because officials believed that each of these censuses would be the last chance for an accurate count.

Read the entire article here.