Mixed Race Studies

“The Horrid Alternative”: Miscegenation and Madness in the Frontier Romance

Journal of American & Comparative Cultures
Volume 24, Issue 3 (Fall/Winter 2001)
Pages: 137-151
DOI: 10.1111/j.1537-4726.2001.2403_137.x

Harry J. Brown, Assistant Professor of English
DePauw University

In a speech delivered to a gathering of Delaware and Mohican Indians, Thomas Jefferson foresaw the destiny of the United States as a “marriage” of its various races, declaring that, in ”the natural progress of things,” Indians and whites “would meet and blend together… intermix, and become one people” (Wald 25). He invites (the Indians to “mix with us by marriage” and grandly prophesies, “your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great island” (Wald 26). But even as Jefferson imagined the new nation as a “marriage” of whites and Indians, the subsequent generation of writers who assumed the responsibility of telling the story of th nation found it difficult to imagine what such a marriage would yield.

In her survey of American frontier writing in The Land Before Her (1984), Annette Kolodny observes a “studied literary silence on the subject of white-red intermarriage” (70). Scholars have since suggested that the uneasiness of the frontier romance with miscegenation stems from the sacred myths of  racial, national, and patriarchal accendance. Racial mixing represents a fundamental contradiction to the national ideology of racial separatism; therefore, the frontier romance, intent upon the creation of a “national” literature, registers this contradiction as a tense “silence.”

I will examine this “silence” more closely in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok: A Tale of Early-Times (1824), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of The Mohicans (1826), and Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, or A Tale of Early Times in ihe Massachusetts (1827).  As these romances are confronted and confounded by the specter of miscegenation, they drift from the daylight world of the “historical,” the native realm of a solid “national” literature, into the nightmare world of me “gothic,” where racial hybridity is manifested not exactly as “silence” but more sharply as madness, degeneracy, and horror. Within these novels we find an intersection of science and sensationalism as the widely-held racial theory of “diminishing fertility” manifest itself in the romance as insanity or living death, the ineveitable “curse” invoked by the “unnatural” mingling of white and Indian blood. The presence of miscegenated women and “half-breed” figures confounds the foundational categories of the national identity imagined by these romances—white and red, civilization and nature, future and past—and, consequently, these figures are represented as irrational, perverse, or doomed, the recurring “nightmare” invading America’s dream of itself.

At the same time, a tradition of “hybrid texts” resists this widely disseminated myth of degeneration and present alternative visions of racial mixing to those provided by the critically sanctioned historical romances. James E. Seaver’s A Narrative of the the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), for example, published in the same years as Hobomok and equal to The Last of the Mohicans in popularity, offers a way to “read against” the The popularily of the narrative further suggests that, contrary to critical assumptions, audiences were perhaps more receptive to Jefferson’s idea of a racially mixed American future than were romance writers and reviewers.  Jemison’s over-looked success tells us that while reviewers strongly objected to considering miscegenation as part of the formula for a national literature, common readers were apparently less troubled by the prospect of a heterogeneous nation and less insistent on the separation of races as a necessary component of national identity. This apparent gap between the critical and popular responses suggests that…

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Some Refelctions on Eugenics and Religion

Eugenics Review
Volume 18, Number 1 (April 1926)
pages 7-14

The Right Rev. E. W. Barnes, ScD., Hon. D.D., F.R.S. (1874-1953)
Bishop of Birmingham, England

The Galton Lecture delivered before the Eugenics Education Society at their Meeting in London on Tuesday, February 16th, 1926.

Eugenics is the science of human betterment. Its object is to discover how we may breed better human beings. The eugenist seeks to improve human racial stocks in the belief that he can thereby quicken the process of civilisation. He fixes attention primarily on the individual and not on his surroundings. He is concerned with nature rather than nurture, with the innate qualities which the individual inherits rather than with the environment in which those qualities have an opportunity of growth and expression. Eugenics and Sociology are thus complementary to one another. The extravagant eugenist says that the swine makes the stye. The extravagant sociologist says that the stye makes the swine. Neither statement expresses the full truth and even expert biologists differ widely as to the extent to which the balance of truth inclines one way or the other.

It cannot he disputed that the innate good qualities which a man inherits fail to develop in bad surroundings. Ignorance, dirt, vicious example and abject poverty degrade personality. They prevent the growth of that which is best in a child and stimulate its baser instincts. So strong in the life of a child are the influences of what the psychologists call association and suggestion that many think that environment is of more importance than heredity. It must be admitted that our knowledge as to what constitutes ‘heredity’ lacks precision. We are ignorant as to how far a child receives from its parents at conception a set of physical and psychical fundamentals which no environment will change. But statistical enquiries in general confirm the common saying that ‘like begets like.’ We have, moreover, to remember that civilisation is a racial product. The forces of association and suggestion which act on any individual within it, no less than most of his physical surroundings, are the creation of the race. If the racial stock be good such forces and physical conditions will gradually become more beneficial. If the stock be poor, both its physical environment and mental atmosphere will gradually degenerate. The ultimate creative power of a civilisation resides in the innate racial qualities of the people which make it, whatever be the process by which those qualities were initially produced.

No nation is homogeneous. Probably all races result from a blend of peoples of different types. A so-called pure race is one which has lived so long free from alien intrusion that a uniform type has been gradually evolved. In such a race the fundamentals due to heredity have been thoroughly mixed. Among its members there is therefore a naturally strong social cohesion. Individuals think, feel, and act in much the same way. In particular there will be uniformity of religious outlook. For a pure race what Disraeli called ‘the religion of all sensible men’ is a definite entity.

When a nation is mixed and, in particular, when one race imposes itself upon another there can be no such unity. At first the apparent civilisation will be that of the dominant race. Culture will be created by the ruling aristocracy: and the populace will accept organisation by which it benefits, though this be based on principles and ideas with which it has little sympathy or understanding. This situation probably existed when Greek civilisation reached its zenith. Ultimately the ruling stocks, died out, dissipated by war or luxury. Such of their descendants as survived were the offspring of mixed marriages, racially impure. Now when two races are thus mixed the individual seems to lack stability of organisation. The characteristics derived from his parents are associated rather than blended. Probably it is only after a fairly large number of generations that a new type of harmony is created. In the early generations the physical characters of one or other of the parental types may be dominant: but the recessive strain cannot be ignored; and I believe that in the fundamentals of the mind there is disharmony. The distrust of half-castes is not the outcome of mere prejudice. They are often unstable in character. In popular phrase ‘you never know what they will do next.’ It is impossible to foretell which side of their mental inheritance will be uppermost on any particular occasion.

After a sufficient number of generations a mixed race evolves a unity, a unity in diversity, of its own. Which of the two strands which go to make it is dominant? The answer seems to be that which is indigeneous to the soil. Black and white in England mate and white survives. Black and white in Jamaica mate and black survives. There seems little doubt that in ancient Greece the original population gradually asserted itself. Most certainly the great intellectual achievements of the Golden Age were gradually ignored; they were submerged by primitive folk-beliefs thrust up from the populace. Moreover where the physical characters of one of two mixed races prove the stronger, the mental qualities of that race are usually dominant; and vice versa. The half-caste in Jamaica not only becomes darker in successive generations but he also becomes more negroid in his habit of mind. Language, as we know, is no criterion of racial origin. But ideas and especially religious ideas are a very good criterion as to which strain in a mixed race has proved the stronger. The religious practices and beliefs of the black Republic of Hayti are not, according to good observers, vastly different from those of the African jungle…

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Hope, Fear, Shame, Frustration: Continuity and Change in the Expression of  Coloured Identity in White Supremacist South Africa, 1910-1994

Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume 32, Number 3 (September, 2006)
pages 467-487

Mohamed Adhikari, Associate Professor of Historical Studies,
University of Cape Town

This article seeks to explain the basic impulses behind coloured exclusivity in white supremacist South Africa and to elaborate on continuity and change in the processes of coloured self-definition by identifying the core attributes of coloured identity and outlining the ways in which they operated to reinforce and reproduce that identity. The central argument is that coloured identity is better understood not as having evolved through a series of transformations, as conventional historical thinking would have it and as the existing literature assumes, but as having remained remarkably stable throughout the era of white rule. It is argued that this stability derived from a core of enduring characteristics that informed the manner in which colouredness functioned as an identity during this period. This is not to contend that coloured identity was static or that it lacked fluidity, but that there were both important constraints on the ways in which it was able to find expression and sufficiently strong continuities in its day-to-day functioning for coloured identity to have remained recognisably uniform despite radical changes in the social and political landscape during this time. The principal constituents of this stable core are the assimilationism of the coloured people, which spurred hopes of future acceptance into the dominant society; their intermediate status in the racial hierarchy, which generated fears that they might lose their position of relative privilege and be relegated to the status of Africans; the negative connotations, especially the shame attached to racial hybridity, with which colouredness was imbued; and finally, the marginality of the coloured community, which severely limited their options for social and political action, giving rise to a great deal of frustration.

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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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Chinese Interracial Families

Undergraduate Research Journal
Indiana University, South Bend
1998

Lin Liu, Honors Freshman Research Seminar Participant

In an increasingly multi-cultural America, the Chinese population as well as the number of Chinese interracial families has risen significantly among all other nationalities. Since the 1940’s, the Chinese population has soared. There have been many contributing factors. These factors include World War II, the Immigration Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ruling of anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional. But despite this continual increase over the years, many Chinese and Chinese interracial families still face barriers such as subtle and blatant racism. From history and current statistics we see these families have overcome many obstacles to become what they are today. But there is no reason for these barriers to remain in place because these families are special in their own way.

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The Eurasian in Shanghai

The American Journal of Sociology
Volume 41, Number 5 (March, 1936)
pages 642-648

Herbert Day Lamson

Although hybrid offspring tend to form an intermediary group of cultural contact between the native and the alien in societies where they are found, the Eurasian in Shanghai finds himself discriminated against by both parent-stocks. Since his father is often a poorly paid transient and his mother frequently is from the servant class, his biological inheritance is low grade and his opportunities for educational and social advantages few. The cultural blending of the white and the yellow races that has gone forward has not come through the Eurasian, but through the large number of the upper strata of natives who have visited and studied in foreign lands and have brought back varying degrees of that culture.

The Eurasian in Shanghai occupies an intermediate position biologically, and somewhat socially in so far as he is the subject of social discrimination at the hands of both alien and native groups. Over the mixed blood hovers the traditional stigma of illegitimacy. The ostracism is not absolute, there are no lynchings and no laws against mixture, but, granted this prejudice on the part of the two parent-groups, the hybrid offspring differ outstandingly. Not that they are biologic freaks, but the fact of being “half-caste” gives thejn a position in the social structure which interferes with their mobility and social contacts even in a so-called cosmopolitan society. For this reason this intermixture has important sociological consequences.

Each of the ethnic groups, the native and the alien in Shanghai, has tended to remain socially somewhat isolated from the other, though individuals have, through legal or illegal mating, produced a group of hybrid offspring of varying nationalities. This has come about chiefly through the taking of native women by alien men. The resulting mixed bloods have been subjected to estrangement and isolation. The British brought with them from India their prejudice against the half-caste, and the alien population has been strongly influenced by this point of view. On the whole, the Chinese disapprove of miscegenation and discriminate against the hybrid, especially if the latter has hybrid-racial visibility and follows the alien in belittling the native. This is one reason why the Eurasian…

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But Think of the Kids: Catholic Interracialists and the Great American Taboo of Race Mixing

U.S. Catholic Historian
Volume 16, Number 3
Sources of Social Reform, Part One (Summer, 1998)
pages 67-93

David W. Southern, Cotton Professor of History
Westminster College, Fulton Missouri

After requesting church funds for the Catholic Interracial Council of New York (CICNY) in the late 1930s, Father John LaFarge, the foremost Catholic integrationist in the first half of the twentieth century, found he had to justify his plea before James Francis Mclntyre, the much-feared chancellor of the archdiocese of New York, A mean-spirited and authoritarian bishop, Mclntyre had earlier warned the CICNY that church work among African Americans should stress religious conversion rather than social and economic reform. Even though Mclntyre’s conservative attitude was known, LaFarge was startled when the bishop unexpectedly punctuated their meeting by accusing him of advocating interracial marriage.

Mclntyre’s charge was preposterous. Before the post-civil rights era, few American liberals, including African Americans, advocated interracial marriage. While the militant black leader W. E. B. Du Bois preached that no one of his race could sanction antimiscegenation laws that were based on the innate inferiority of African Americans, he did not make the repeal of such laws a high priority. As editor of the Crisis in the 1910s and 1920s, he mostly reported successes in defeating newly proposed antimiscegenation laws in Washington, D.C., and in northern states; and like most white liberals, he insisted that 999 out of each thousand black men had no desire to many white women…

‘Mixed Race’ Children in British Society: Some Theoretical Considerations

The British Journal of Sociology
Volume 35, Number 1 (March, 1984)
pages 42-61

Anne Wilson

A study of the racial identity of British ‘mixed race’ children raises a number of theoretical issues about the racial categorization system of Britain; in particular, the validity of the assumption that British racial thought is strictly dichotomous (perceived in terms of the two mutually exclusive categories of ‘black’ and ‘white’) is called into question.

In British and American sociological literature, mixed race people have often been described as occupying a ‘marginal’ or an in-between position, from which they can only escape by adopting full membership of either the black or the white group. None the less, some sociologists have suggested that it is possible for mixed race people to steer a successful course between the two groups or to alter their racial self-image according to circumstance: more generally, it has been argued that the process of ethnic identity is more fluid and dynamic than it is frequently depicted.

The dichotomous ‘black-or-white’ model of racial identity stems from analysis of the American racial structure: the investigation of British racial identity would appear to require a more flexible view of the racial categorization system.

When sociologists attempt to formulate a sociological problem about a particular group of people, their first concern is to locate the boundaries of the group in question and then to place discussion of it in the context of sociological theory. Where the object of enquiry is defined in racial terms this research step merits special consideration; for the question of what constitutes racial difference is still a matter of contention.

In this paper, I shall explore some of the theoretical issues involved in studying the racial identity of the children of British interracial…

“White Negroes” in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 64, Number 2 (May, 1998)
pages 247-276

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Not until David L. Cohn returned to his native Mississippi after an absence of two decades did he understand the complexities of the racial system in which he, a white man, had been reared during the first decades of the twentieth century. “I began to discover that this apparently simple society was highly complex,” he wrote in the 1948 foreword to his memoir of Delta life. “It was marked by strange paradoxes and hopelessly irreconcilable contradictions. It possessed elaborate behavior codes written, unwritten, and unwritable.”

In the same year that Cohn’s words were published, Davis Knight, a twenty-three-year-old Mississippi man, collided with this system of paradoxes, contradictions, and codes. On June 21, 1948, the Jones County Circuit Court in Ellisville indicted Knight, who claimed to be—and certainly looked—white, for the crime of miscegenation. Two years earlier, on April 18, 1946, he had married Junie Lee Spradley, a white woman. The state claimed that, even though Knight appeared to be white, he was in fact black…

The Octoroon: Early History of the Drama of Miscegenation

The Journal of Negro Education
Volume 20, Number 4 (Autumn, 1951)
pages 547-557

Sidney Kaplan, Instructor In English
University of Massachusetts

From the moment of its birth the American democracy has appeared to some of its best champions as the perfect subject for Aristotelian tragedy. Could the democracy with an overwhelming reservation be anything other than the hero with a fatal flaw? The essence of slavery, complained Jefferson at the close of the Revolution, was the “perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other”; he trembled for his country when he reflected that God was just and that his justice could not sleep forever. One ramification of this peculiarly American tragedy—the “problem” of passion between black and white—has been a staple of our stage for almost a century. From Boucicault’s The Octoroon in the decade before Gettysburg, through O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun in the era of the first World War, to Hughes’s The Barrier of the current guilty hour, the drama of miscegenation has packed box and balcony throughout the land.

Putting aside the question of its dramatic merit, it is easy to see why Boucicault’s play, from the historian’s point of view, is the most interesting of the genre; for not only did The Octoroon for the first time, effectively and sympathetically, place a Negro in the center of an American stage, but also, in the troubled time of its premiere, despite all its meagerness as play or tract, it became a small portent of impending crisis and irrepressible conflict. As Joseph Jefferson wrote, thirty years after its first night, The Octoroon “was produced at a dangerous time”; for the slightest allusion to the peculiar institution served then only “to inflame the country, which was already at a white heat.”

Three days after John Brown had been hanged in Virginia, the curtain arose on The Octoroon in New York. On the evening of December 6, 1859, just as Brown’s coffin began the last lap on the journey North to the quiet Adirondack farms, the Winter Garden…

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