Mixed Race Studies

The Measure of America: How a rebel anthropologist waged war on racism

The New Yorker
2004-03-08
18 pages

Claudia Roth Peierpont

Along with the Ferris wheel, the hamburger, Cracker Jack, Aunt Jemima, the zipper, Juicy Fruit, and the vertical file, the word “anthropology” was introduced to a vast number of Americans at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Marking the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America-and opening just a little late, in May, 1893, owing to the amount of construction required to turn a marshy wasteland on Lake Michigan into a neoclassical “White City,” as the fair was called-the six-month celebration put on display all that the nation had achieved and still hoped to become. Here proud Americans could view the table on which the Declaration of Independence had been signed, the manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address, and two full-scale replicas of the Liberty Bell-one executed entirely in grain, the other in oranges. As for the future, the fair was ablaze with work-reducing inventions, from the electric kitchen to the electric chair. But the most important promise of an American utopia was the extraordinary assembly of peoples. American Indians and native Africans, Germans, Egyptians, and Labrador Eskimos were just a few of those invited to take part in nearly a hundred “living exhibits”-whole villages were imported and exactingly rebuilt-with the purpose of expanding American minds: “broadening, opening, lighting up dark corners,” a contemporary magazine expounded, “bringing them in sympathy with their fellow men.”

No one was more devoted to this goal than a young anthropologist named Franz Boas, who had emigrated from Germany ten years before, staunch in the belief that America was “politically an ideal country.” Enthralled by the collections of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, he had made his field of study the Indians of the Northwest Coast-the artistically accomplished Haida, Kwakiutl, and Bella Coola tribes-and, in the days leading up to the fair’s triumphal opening, he was busy supplying the final timbers for a pair of houses in which a Kwakiutl group would live, on the bank of a pond outside a small pavilion marked “Anthropology.” Inside was a spectacular array of masks and decorated tools, which Boas had spent two years assembling. His expectations for impressing visitors derived less from the works’ richly painted surfaces, however, than from their intellectual and imaginative content-what he described as the “wealth of thought” that was clearly visible if only people learned to look. The Indians had been asked to perform the rituals that would enable viewers to perceive this wealth, and had been assured that at the fair they would receive the respect that was their due, even if it had been no part of their experience in the old, demonstrably un-utopian New World.

In fact, the wretched history of Indian life in nineteenth-century America had long been justified by the claims of anthropology, a field that originated during debates over slavery and the right of settlers to seize the natives’ lands, and patriotically embraced such practices as part of the natural racial order. The chief means of establishing the racial order was to measure skulls-both the conveniently empty craniums acquired through a thriving graveyard market and the more resistant living models. Anthropologists presented their findings as objective science: elaborate measuring techniques yielded columns of figures that inevitably placed white intelligence at the top of the scale, red and yellow capacities farther down, and blacks at the wholly uncivilizable bottom. It was no coincidence that this science faithfully mirrored popular opinion: published studies were so open in their manipulation of evidence-a higher proportion of male skulls, for example, were employed when larger dimensions were desired-that they appear to have been not conscious attempts at deception but unwitting examples of delusion.

The effects of such studies, however, were painfully real. At mid-century, the anthropologist Samuel Morton asserted that whites and Negroes belonged to different species, while another anthropologist, Josiah Nott, popularized the view that slavery saved Negroes from reverting to their original barbaric state: these authoritative voices resounded in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, of 1857, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney resolved that “the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” After Emancipation, theories of separate racial evolutions fuelled the case for black disenfranchisement, right up to the passing of the first Jim Crow laws, around the time of the Chicago fair…

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Passing For Horror: Race, Fear, and Elia Kazan’s “Pinky”

Genders: Presenting Innovative Work in the Arts, Humanities and Social Theories
Issue 40 (2004)

Miriam J. Petty, Assistant Professor of Visual and Performing Arts
Rutgers University, Newark

Film genres routinely mix and evolve over time in ways that change our expectations of them, and change the way that we as audiences read and receive them. At times, however, the mixing of genres can function to focus our attention on certain film texts, and certain critical moments within these texts. While work on genre by scholars such as Thomas Schatz, Charles Maland, and Steve Neale suggests that social problem films are “too various in their narratives and thematic characteristics to warrant the label ‘genre’” (Maland 307), John Hill, Peter Roffman, and Jim Purdy observe the way that social problem films typically employ “general conventions, especially those of narrative and realism” (Roffman, Purdy 222). In this essay, I use the 1949 Hollywood film Pinky to suggest the ways in which social problem films dealing with the phenomenon of racial “passing” (instances in which light-skinned black characters “pretend” to be whites) use themes and motifs commonly found in horror films.

A post-World War II offering from the Fox studio, Pinky represents part of what Christopher Jones calls the “culmination of the trend toward black realism in the American cinema of the forties” (110) in 1949. As Jones observes, this year saw the release of films like Lost Boundaries (also a cinematic account of a “black-as-white” passing story), Stanley Kramer’s post-war drama Home of the Brave, and the film adaptation of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. Pinky’s place as the most popular and critically acclaimed of these films dealing substantially with “blacks at home in the United States, enduring the problems of civilian life” (Jones 110-111) suggests the significance of examining the currents of fear and repression underlying its presentation of racial realities.

In his noted essay “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” Robin Wood posits that “in the classical Hollywood cinema motifs cross repeatedly from genre to genre,” and continues by asserting that genres “represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions” (671). As one of Hollywood’s social problem films on the theme of race, Pinky indeed addresses the profound and lasting ideological tension created by the social construct of race, the taboo of interracial relationships and the children of such relations. Pinky also casts a white actress as a “mulatto” character light-skinned enough to “pass for white,” further complicating the film’s ideological function by making “white as black” passing acceptable, while simultaneously problematizing “black as white passing,” a paradox I will discuss more fully later.

Throughout this essay, I use the word “mulatto” or the phrase “mulatto figure” to reflect the function that such characters perform—one which disrupts the boundaries of traditional racial stratifications between blacks and whites. In fact, my analysis of Pinky frequently conflates the terms “black” and “mulatto” or “mixed-race,” identities and experiences that are not necessarily one in the same. Pinky itself conflates these terms in its storyline. What is more, historically, Hollywood films that feature the mulatto figure do not attend to such differences, but at once exploit the sensationalism in the issue of passing and use the mulatto as a generic cipher for “the race problem.” Pinky pays more attention to questions of intraracial color difference than most, but still limits Pinky’s experience to a series of problems of race that subside when she accedes to the status quo of segregation. The specificity of her ancestry only serves to give her story an unusual “angle.”…

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Picturizing Race: Hollywood’s Censorship of Miscegenation and Production of Racial Visibility through “Imitation of Life”

Genders: Presenting Innovative Work in the Arts, Humanities and Social Theories
Issue 27 (1998)

Susan Courtney, Associate Professor of English and Film Studies
University of South Carolina

“A Case Very Near the Borderline”

Hollywood’s Production Code explicitly banned “miscegenation” from the American screen for nearly thirty years. The files of the Production Code Administration (PCA) which document the interpretation of that ban, however, demonstrate the PCA censors’ utter confusion as to the meaning of the miscegenation clause they were charged to enforce. That confusion is nowhere more apparent than in the PCA’s file on Imitation of Life (1934), a project the PCA originally rejected on the grounds that it “violate[d] the Code clause covering miscegenation, in spirit, if not in fact.” What is strikingly odd about the PCA’s original ruling in this case, however, is that while the clause of the Code that forbade miscegenation defined it as a “sex relationship between the white and black races,” no such “sex relationship” was “in fact” at issue in Imitation of Life. Indeed, like Fannie Hurst’s best-selling novel on which the script was based, the melodrama was far more concerned with relationships among black and white women than with any heterosexual relationships. Specifically, the film’s plot follows the rise to fortune of a white widow on the profits of her black maid’s pancake recipe, and is primarily centered around the relationships among these two single mothers, Bea Pullman and Delilah, and their respective daughters, Jessie and Peola. While the film shows us no heterosexual “sex relationship” between whites and blacks, the considerable extent to which Bea and Delilah function as a couple might invite us to read the relationship between these women as a “sex relationship” of its own. Delilah cooks, cleans and rears Bea’s child during the day and rubs her feet at night—the latter prompting Bea to sigh with pleasure while Delilah lectures her about the joys of passion Bea has yet to find with a man: “You need some loving honey child!” Yet as significant as Bea and Delilah’s relationship is to an understanding of the film, a reading of it as “miscegenation” seems to have been well beyond the sensibilities of the PCA censors who, in my experience, never considered “sex relationship” in anything but the most decidedly heterosexual of terms. Nevertheless, in a letter to Universal that supported (without clarifying) PCA Director Joe Breen’s nebulous interpretation of miscegenation, Will Hays, Breen’s boss, expressed the PCA’s “considerable worry” on the subject and urged the studio to drop the project, lest it “develop into a case very near the borderline.”…

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Science: Environmentalist

Time Magazine
1936-05-11

In Washington last week one of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists told the National Academy of Sciences about an Englishman who was raised in Italy and married a Jewess. In consequence this Englishman’s gestures gradually became half Italian, half Jewish.

Anthropology is neither an old science like mathematics, astronomy and medicine, nor a modern one like genetics or electronics. The ancient Greeks were willing enough to assign man a place in the animal kingdom and some of them, notably Anaximander, had an inkling of evolution. But they were content to speculate and philosophize. In the early 19th Century anthropology as a science had made little headway. Species and varieties of plants and animals were considered changeless, and so were the races of man. The strange manlike bones found here & there in caves and quarries were thought to be the remains of monsters. The beliefs and practices of primitive people were shrugged off as so much sordid playacting. When the origin and fluidity of species, the significance of fossils and the rationale of primitive cultures were better understood, anthropology began to make progress as a serious study of man in all his aspects.

…Franz Boas got into anthropology 53 years ago. He has invaded almost every branch of this science: linguistics, primitive mentality, folklore, ethnology, growth and senility, the physical effects of environment. He reminds his colleagues of the oldtime family doctor who did everything from delivering babies to pulling teeth.

By no means all anthropologists share Dr. Boas’ belief in the tremendous physical influence of environment. But when he has something to say they listen respectfully…

…Magna Charta. Currently in England a group of scientists including Sir Arthur Smith Woodward and Julian Huxley are engaged in knocking the flimsy props from under Nazi ideas of race purity and race superiority. A quarter-century ago Franz Boas was attacking the same sort of ideas. At that time the view was popular that different races had their characteristic mentalities which determined their culture. Boas had piled up enough data to convince him that such was not the case. The Mind of Primitive Man was published in 1911. When he was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931, that book was called “A Magna Charta of self-respect for the ‘lower’ races.”

Boas observed that nowhere on earth was there such a thing as a pure race, and that the term “race” was a vague and approximate one at best. He doubted that there were any “superior” races. To Boas it seemed that if one person was innately superior to another, it was because there was more genetic difference between family lines than between racial types. Anatomists cannot tell the difference between the brains of a Swede and a Negro. They may distinguish the skulls, but it has been shown over & over that neither the size nor shape of the skull, within the range of normality, has anything to do with intelligence. Dr. Boas has no confidence in intelligence tests as measures of race superiority, because such tests cannot be divorced entirely from environment and experience. During the War it was found that Chicago Negroes did better with intelligence tests than Louisiana blacks, although the two groups were anthropologically alike…

…Dr. Boas argues that if common race prejudice had “instinctive” antipathy for its source, it would show itself in the most intimate of all contacts, the sexual relation. But throughout history slave-owners have bedded with female slaves of different race, whites have mated with Indians and Negroes. Southern children show no aversion whatever to black nurses, must be taught by their elders not to accept blacks as equals. The strongest antipathies are those between social castes like those of India and ancient Egypt — between people of the same race…

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Race-mixing and science in the United States

Endeavour
Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2003)
pages 166-170
DOI: 10.1016/j.endeavour.2003.08.007

Paul Farber, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
Oregon State University

Scientific racism was widely used as a justification to oppose race-mixing in the United States. Historians have justly criticized this abuse of science, but have overlooked some of the important ways in which science was used in the 1930s and 1940s to overturn scientific racism and opposition to race-mixing. Of particular importance was the cultural anthropology of Franz Boas and the evolutionary biology of Theodosius Dobzhansky, which supplied arguments against racism and fundamentally altered the scientific understanding of race.

The history of scientific racism provides a cautionary tale about the abuse of science by scientists and policy makers, and the ease with which cultural assumptions penetrate our picture of nature. It, therefore, serves as a paradigm case of the relationship of scientific ideas to their social context. Historians have generally castigated the scientists who used and abused their science to justify racist social policy. It would be a mistake, however, if in the discussion of scientific racism we lost sight of the role that science itself played in transforming modern notions of race and in combating racism. Although scholars have generated a vast and complex historical literature on racism and the use of science to legitimate it, they have not paid as much attention to the positive role science played. The history of ideas on race-mixing in the US provides a convenient lens through which to focus on some of the central ideas concerning race and racism, and it is a story that can help make clearer the role science had in influencing the discussion.

A young couple in the 1960s most likely would not have consulted a biology book to help decide if their different racial backgrounds posed an obstacle to getting married and raising a mixed-race family. But, this is not to say that what went for scientific opinion would have been irrelevant to their decision. In many subtle, and some not-so subtle, ways, scientific judgements influence individual choice, social acceptance and legal constraints. Before 1967, 17 states had anti-miscegenation laws that prohibited marriages involving individuals of certain different races, and an extensive body of literature justified those laws by reference to science. In the three decades before the 1967 US Supreme Court ruled in Loving versus Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional, a shift in thinking occurred in the US concerning inter-racial marriage. In part, that shift reflected a new social landscape altered by World War II, the Civil Rights Movement and the 1960s cultural upheaval. But science also played an important, if generally unrecognized, role in that transformation. In particular the work done in anthropology by Franz Boas and his students, and by Theodosius Dobzhansky and others in formulating the modern theory of evolution were central to the contributions made by scientists to the understanding of race and race-mixing…

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