Mixed Race Studies

Love with a Proper Stranger: What Anti-Miscegenation Laws Can Tell Us About the Meaning of Race, Sex, and Marriage

Hofstra Law Review
Volume 32, Issue 4 (2004)
pages 1663-1679

Rachel F. Moran, Michael J. Connell Distinguished Professor of Law
University of California, Los Angeles

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

–Wislawa Szymborska

If true love is for the lucky few, then for the rest of us there is the far more mundane institution of marriage. Traditionally, love has sat in an uneasy relationship to marriage, and only in the last century has romantic love emerged as the primary, if not exclusive, justification for a wedding in the United States. In part, the triumph of love reflects a society increasingly committed to an ethic of individualism, including individualism of the romantic variety, so that marriage is no longer presumptively a tool for the State to advance the general welfare. In the quest for individual liberation, women have gained access to education and employment that increasingly emancipates them from dependency on a husband to achieve economic security.

Because marriage has grown to be a matter of personal choice, the number of restrictions on permissible partners has steadily declined. Even so, some official regulation persists, and we can learn as much about the meaning of matrimony by looking at who is excluded as by looking at who is eligible. To that end, I want to explore the lessons of anti-miscegenation laws, state statutes that once prohibited interracial marriage. At one time, these statutes were widespread, but they were not identical in their coverage. The laws universally targeted relationships between Blacks and Whites, and a number of the provisions, particularly those in Western states, banned unions between Asians and Whites. A few restricted intermarriage with Native Americans, but none mentioned Latinos. The laws had a remarkable longevity. Even though individuals enjoyed increasing freedom to choose a mate free of state and community interference, these statutes remained valid until 1967 when the United States Supreme Court struck them down as unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia.

Although anti-miscegenation laws generally have been analyzed as racial legislation, they also can tell us a great deal about intimacy. These provisions have certainly been used to define and entrench racial difference, but they are also a means to set the boundaries of sexual decency and marital propriety. Here, I will use the comparative experience of Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos to illustrate some of the laws’ implications for race and identity. I will then place the statutes in the context of larger developments regarding the regulation of sex and marriage to show how they reflected anxieties about wayward lust and forbidden desire.

I. THE ROLE OF ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAWS IN RACIAL SEPARATION AND STRATIFICATION

In the American mythology of racial segregation, there is an assumption that racial groups have always lived separately and that there is an almost natural inevitability about this arrangement. In fact, in the earliest years of settling the American colonies, Black slaves often worked side by side with White indentured servants. In these close, cooperative arrangements, interracial attraction was by no means a rarity. Relationships across the color line complicated social boundaries between Black and White, slave and free. Whites who, at least as a formal matter, had freely chosen a temporary contract of hard labor did not seem so very different from Blacks who had been sold into prevented race-mixing that undermined both the sanctity of free White labor and the legitimacy of Blacks’ status as property.

As the institution of slavery was consolidated, anti-miscegenation laws assumed another valuable purpose. They defined a racial hierarchy in which Whites were free and Blacks were not. Although many statutes banned both interracial marriage and fornication, White male slaveholders regularly flouted the laws. They could demand sex from their Black female slaves and inflict terrible punishment, including rape and sale on the auction block, if the women resisted. A former Virginia slave remembers the fate of another slave woman named Sukie:

“Ole Marsa was always tryin’ to make Sukie his gal.” One day when she was making lye soap and he approached her, “she gave him a shove an’ push his hindparts down in de hot pot o’ Soap. Soap was near to bilin’, an’ it burn him near to death. . . Marsa never did bother slave gals no mo’.” But a few days later Sukie was sent to the auction block.

In fact, interracial sex was so common that a new dilemma arose: How should the mixed-race offspring be identified? Traditionally, a child’s status was based on the father’s heritage, but a patrilineal rule would mean that most children of Black and White origin would be White and free. Such a result would once again complicate the line between Black and White, slave and free, as masters who enjoyed their license with female slaves produced emancipated mulattoes, not subject to the control of White owners and potentially loyal to Black mothers still in bondage. The solution was to change the rule of descendible privilege. Instead of determining a child’s status based on the father’s identity, a matrilineal principle of identity would be applied. Moreover, a one-drop rule evolved to ensure that even remote African ancestry identified a child as Black, not White. The children of sex across the color line would be Black and nearly always slaves. They could be emancipated only if their White father and master chose to do so, and they could never escape their Blackness…

…While anti-miscegenation laws were used to define racial difference and create racial hierarchy between Blacks and Whites in colonial America and later the antebellum South, the statutes served a distinct function when applied to Asian immigrants who arrived on the West Coast, particularly California, in the mid- to late 1800s. The Chinese were the first to arrive in substantial numbers in the middle of the nineteenth century when gold was discovered. Under the immigration laws, the Chinese were treated as sojourners, laborers who came temporarily to work and then returned to their home country. This migrant labor force was overwhelmingly male. In 1852, only seven of 11,794 Chinese were female. By 1870, Chinese men outnumbered Chinese women by a margin of 14 to 1.8 Because the men were here to sweat but not to stay, the United States government made clear that as unassimilable, non-White foreigners, they were ineligible for citizenship. Federal officials discouraged immigration of Chinese women because they did not want the sojourners to put down roots, form families, and produce children who would be Americans by birth….

…In contrast to Blacks and Asians, anti-miscegenation laws were seldom applied to Native Americans and never mentioned Latinos. The reasons for the lenient treatment of Latinos and Native Americans are quite similar. In both cases, these groups first came into contact with Whites when frontiers were being settled. At the outset, Whites had much to gain by forming friendly alliances with Indian tribes or Mexican natives. On occasion, these alliances could be cemented through intermarriage. Consider, for example, the Anglo settlers who arrived in northern Mexico to make their fortunes in the early to mid-1800s. Mexico, newly freed from Spanish rule, hoped to capitalize on the sparsely populated furthermost reaches of its territory by attracting foreign investors. However, Mexican officials did not want Anglos simply to come to their country, exploit the land, and leave with their fortunes. Instead, the government wanted to encourage permanent settlement, and an excellent way to do this was to reward those who put down roots there. As a result, Mexico offered naturalization opportunities and corresponding trade advantages to Anglos who married Mexican women. Indeed, the expectation was that Anglo settlers would be loyal to Mexican wives, not manipulate or abandon them after using them to personal advantage. In a diary of his Western travels, Matt Field, a journalist for the New Orleans Picayune, made these expectations clear to his readers when he described the sad tale of Maria Romero, who fell in love with a charming but dissolute Anglo adventurer who deserted her and her child by him. As Field wrote, “when subsequently she heard that [her lover] had designedly abandoned her, and had gone forever back to the United States, her reason failed, and poor Maria, the beauty of Taos, became a lunatic.” Maria had clearly expected marriage, not betrayal. In keeping with the commitment to permanent settlement in Mexico, the children of mixed marriages often spoke Spanish, observed Mexican cultural traditions, and Hispanicized their non-Spanish surnames…

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Sex, Blood, and Hybridity: The Discourse of Racial Anxiety in Antebellum Writing

Northeast Modern Language Association
NeMLA 2012 Convention
Rochester, New York
2012-03-15 through 2012-03-18

This panel seeks to investigate how antebellum literary texts worked dialectically with the new racial science of ethnology to respond to the dominant racial ideologies of the day. Topics and/or critical paradigms can include, but are certainly not limited to: miscegenation, disease, politics, erotics, gender, feminism, science, politics, class, trauma, critical race/queer theory, reception theory, and reader-response.

In antebellum America, the notion of ‘blood’ as ‘race’ maintained a strong hold over the 19th century literary imagination. This panel will examine how antebellum literary texts worked dialectically with the new racial science of ethnology to respond to the dominant racial ideologies of the day. Mid-century works by authors as varied as Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Lydia Maria Child, and Frances E. W. Harper illustrated very clearly the instability of racial classification and its resultant sexual anxieties. Rather than phenotype, references to ‘white’ blood and ‘black’ blood came to be regarded as the primary signifiers of racial traits. The enduring fascination of white Americans with the mathematical fractionalization of blood was evident in the creation and use of words such as octoroon, quadroon, and mulatto in the titles of magazine articles, books, and pamphlets while, at the same time, actual skin color would become an increasingly invisible signifier of race. Among the anthropologists, anatomists, ethnologists, and naturalists who led the drive for racial classification in the mid-19th century were polygenists such as Josiah C. Nott, Samuel Cartwright, George Glidden, and others. Alabama physician Nott’s 1844 Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races and 1854 Types of Mankind cut to the heart of race-based ‘scientific’ writing during the19th century. Nott’s hypothesis that mulattoes, as the offspring of interracial sexual couplings—termed ‘faulty stock’—could not be self-sustaining was never scientifically tested. In addition, the continued emphasis on the supposed degeneracy and diseased blood caused by race-mixing betrayed a degree of hysteria disproportionate to the actual numbers of the unions. This panel is significant in that it seeks a fresh investigation of paradigms through which antebellum literary texts can be read as directly responding to the new science and ideology of ethnology. Topics and/or critical paradigms can include, but are certainly not limited to: miscegenation, disease, politics, erotics, gender, feminism, science, politics, class, trauma, critical race/queer theory, reception theory, and reader-response. Send 1-page abstract and brief bio as Word attachment to Rebecca Williams, rebelwill7@gmail.com, with ‘NEMLA’ in subject line.

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School Hygiene and Eugenics: The Role of Physical Education in Regeneration “The Brazilian Race”

Revista HISTEDBR On-Line
Number 35 (September 2009)
pages 19-28
ISSN: 1676-2584

Karl M. Lorenz, Associate Professor, Director Teacher Certification Programs
Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut

From 1870 to 1930, physicians, writers, anthropologists and educators discussed the relationship between education and the less-privileged segments of the Brazilian population. Among ideas circulating in the late nineteenth century were precepts of School Hygiene, such as physical exercise could promote personal health and, in a broader sense, the total development of the child. In discussions of eugenic themes in the early decades of the twentieth century, Physical Education was further promoted as a corrective measure for the negative effects of miscegenation; that is, the physical, intellectual and moral debilities of the poor and non-white segments of the Brazilian population. This paper examines the nature and effects of the school discipline Physical Education on the less-favored children of Brazil by first introducing its role in School Hygiene and then by focusing on its extended role from the eugenic perspective. In this latter discussion, the racial ideas of Fernando de Azevedo regarding the regenerating effect of Physical Education on the “Brazilian Race” are explored.

During the period known as the First Republic (1889-1930), different segments of Brazilian society sought to define the “Brazilian race.” Their efforts originated from a larger concern about the most efficacious ways to politically and socially modernize the country and create a new model of society. Increasing urbanization, industrialization, abolition, and an expanding school-going populace were important factors that shaped discussions on economic and social issues in the waning years of the Empire (1822-1889) and the first years of the Republic.

The question that perplexed those struggling with these issues was how could a country endowed with vast national resources like Brazil experience such a slow pace of economic and social development? As expected of such a broad question, numerous explanations were offered. Among these, and one that was prominent in influential intellectual circles, was the racial constitution of the Brazilian people. Race, it was argued, was the key determinant of social progress and national development (VECHIA & LORENZ, 2009, p. 58).

The identification of race as a factor in social progress and national development is not surprising given that since the mid 1800s the Brazilians were familiar with racial theories circulating in Europe. The theories first gained prominence with the studies of the British scientist Francis Galton (1822-1911) and the publication of his 1865 article Hereditary Talent and Character and his 1869 book Hereditary Genius. Galton meticulously recorded the physical characteristics of humans and concluded that a large number of physical, mental and moral traits were inherited and that progress could be achieved by the conscious selection and transmission of a population’s hereditary endowments to future generations. Galton coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development to denote the science of the biological improvement of humankind. The eugenics doctrine encouraged the reproduction of superior individuals and races while discouraging the reproduction of those that were inferior…

…Eugenic Discourse in Brazil

In the second half of the nineteenth century racial ideas circulated in Brazil and fixed the notion for many Brazilian intellectuals that the great challenge of nationhood resided in its people. Count Gobineau’s influential text promoting the racial theory of the superiority of the “Aryan race,” Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1854), was one of the first works known to the Brazilian elite. His ideas supported the thesis that the Brazilian race was primarily comprised of the poor and non-white segments of the population and that these were responsible for the social misery of the country and the slow pace of national progress. Other social and scientific texts by Buckle, Kidd, le Bon, Lapouge, and social Darwinists held up Brazil as a prime example of the “degenerative” effects produced by “promiscuous racial miscegenation.” Brazilians found themselves receptive to these writings, especially those that espoused the apparent inequality of races in terms of a hierarchy constituted of “evolved” and “primitive” typologies. Theories of Negro inferiority, mulatto degeneration, tropical decay and their effects at inhibiting progress were accepted by many of the political and social elite (STEPAN, 1990, p. 114).

Questions about the origin and nature of the Brazilian Race were explored in the national literature, often in publications that voiced eugenic themes and employed eugenic terminology. Sílvio Romero, in his 1888 masterpiece Historia da literatura brasileira, discussed the mixing of the white, Indian and Negro peoples in Brazil, estimated a timeframe for the general whitening of the Brazilian people, and even advocated European immigration to hasten the “whitenening” and “homogenizing” process (ROMERO, 1906, p.123). Euclides da Cunha, in his novel Os Sertões, tells of the 1896 rebellion in Canudos, in the backlands of the northeastern tropical state of Bahia. He reflects on its causes and identifies the prejudicial effects of racial mixing on the behavior of the rebellious mestiço sertenejos (mestizos of the backlands) as one of a constellation of causes. The Bahian physician and ethnographer Nina Rodrigues, in Mestiçagem, Degenerescência e Crime (1899), defended the idea of the inferiority of the mestizo and the Negro and suggested they be subjected to their own penal codes. Towards the end of nineteenth century the historian Joaquim Maria de Lacerda decried the “black race” as “much less civilized and intelligent than other races”, and prior to 1930, the novelist Afrânio Peixoto asserted that mestizos were the problematic offspring of the mixing of superior and inferior races.

Most revealing was the racial view of the Brazilian writer Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948) who describes his disagreement with four inhabitants of the sertão (backlands of Brazil) in a letter to his friend Godofredo Rangel. The letter, which was published in the Journal of São Paulo in 1914, collectively referred to these “four lice” as a fictional and symbolic figure named Jeca Tatu—or “Jeca the backwoods hog” (the armadillo)—thus creating one of the best known literary characters of Brazilian culture. Jeca represents the typical country hick—a poor, ignorant, unpleasant and disease-ridden caboclo (an individual of mixed European and native Indian blood). Monteiro writes of his indignation with the apathy and indolence of the sertenejos, who because of miscegenation were a “veritable plague on the earth.” Even though later Lobato revised his thinking and attributed the decadence of the hybrid Jeca Tatu to his poor economic conditions, the image of the degenerate mestizo became deeply etched in the minds of Brazilians (VECHIA; LORENZ, 2009, p. 61-62)…

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Individuals and groups today in 2011 that insist and demand we all tell our whole “racial truth,” are no less misguided and insidious than the Virginians who insisted and demanded “racial integrity” in 1924.

Steven F. Riley, “Don’t Pass on Context: The Importance of Academic Discourses in Contemporary Discussions on the Multiracial Experience,” (paper presented at the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, Los Angeles, California, June 11, 2011).

Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (State legislature of Virginia)

The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 of Virginia, United States, was a law that had required the racial makeup of persons to be recorded at birth, and prevented marriage between “white persons” and non-white persons. The law was the most famous ban on miscegenation in the United States, and was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in 1967, in Loving v. Virginia.

• 1. Be it enacted by the general assembly of Virginia, That the State registrar of vital statistics may, as soon as practicable after the taking effect of this act, prepare a form whereon the racial composition of any individual, as Caucasian, Negro, Mongolian, American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof, or any other non-Caucasic strains, and if there be any mixture, then, the racial composition of the parents and other ancestors, in so far as ascertainable, so as to show in what generation such mixture occurred, may be certified by such individual, which form shall be known as a registration certificate…
• …4. No marriage license shall be granted until the clerk or deputy clerk has reasonable assurance that the statements as to color of both man and woman are correct. If there is reasonable cause to disbelieve that applicants are of pure white race, when that fact is stated, the clerk or deputy clerk shall withhold the granting of the license until satisfactory proof is produced that both applicants are “white persons” as provided for in this act.
  
  The clerk or deputy clerk shall use the same care to assure himself that both applicants are colored, when that fact is claimed…

To read the complete text, click here.

Registration of Birth and Color, 1924.
Rockbridge County (Va.) Clerk’s Correspondence [Walter A. Plecker to A. T. Shields], 1912–1943.
Local Government Records Collection, Rockbridge County Court Records. Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

“My Daughter Married a Negro”: Interracial Relationships in the United States as Portrayed in Popular Media, 1950-1975

Journal of Undergraduate Research
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse
Volume VIII (2005)
13 pages

Melissa Magnuson-Cannady

Between 1948 and 1967, thirty states either repealed their anti-miscegenation laws or the states’ laws themselves were struck down as unconstitutional by the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision. Although these laws were slowly being annulled, interracial relationships, especially Black-White relationships, were still considered taboo in much of the country. This research project critically examines how mainstream America thought about interracial relationships during and after those years as portrayed in popular culture media outlets such as popular magazines and periodicals, newspapers, and one major film. The articles and productions reveal both continuity and change over time and that many of those articles and productions were reactions to national events and court cases. After examining various articles it becomes clear that as more states repealed laws banning interracial relationships, more people accepted interracial relationships as long as interracial couples did not move into their neighborhoods, or involve their children. Currently, while there is an ever-increasing population of people involved in interracial relationships, this fact is not widely depicted in advertisements, on television, or in movies, revealing vestiges of an out-dated taboo.

INTRODUCTION

The author of “My Daughter Married a Negro” chose not to reveal his identity when he wrote this story detailing his family’s ordeal with their daughter marrying across the color line.1 But his story reveals that he and the rest of his family and their friends and neighbors did indeed have issues with the marriage. In fact, with the many references to the Second World War and to war in general, it seems as though he feels that he is fighting a war against the interracial union. This article was one of many articles published between 1950 and 1975 that portrayed both a reluctance to allow such relationships and a slow eventual acceptance of interracial relationships. Even the fact that he chose to remain anonymous and hide the fact that his daughter was marrying a black man from his co-workers speaks volumes about the general thoughts and notions about interracial marriages during the early 1950s. In fact, at the time this article was published and for years after, antimiscegenation laws were still widely practiced and enforced in the majority of the states in the South and the West of the United States. These laws were used to prohibit racial mixing, or amalgamation so to ensure the superiority and purity of the white race, to maintain the hierarchy of slave or free during the centuries of slavery, and to regulate property transmission. Such antimiscegenation laws predated the United States of America and continued to regulate relationships, race, and property transmission for a long time—less than forty years ago many states still had laws that banned the marriage of a white person to a person of any other race. Many of these laws were in place for decades, or even centuries, while other states had more recently passed their laws during the twentieth century…

Racial equality leading to mixed marriages and then to children of mixed racial descent was one of the driving forces behind preventing school integration. The September 19, 1958 issue of U.S. News & World Report published as its cover story “What South Really Fears about Mixed Schools: Leading Sociologists Discuss Sex Fears and Integration.” This article, along with the “Mixed Schools and Mixed Blood” article blatantly reveal the South’s real fear about integration. The sociologists’ views varied greatly. One stated, “…about the last person in the world that the average white kid would really seriously get interested in would be a Negro.” Another stated that although school integration may not directly lead to intermarriage, it will definitely lower the barriers to such relationships.51 Another leading sociologist argued that interracial relationships and sex are used to oppose integration, but that it “may not be the real reason but merely one that is easily understood and useful for the opposition. He then argued that the real reasons may have to do with social and political mobility of Negroes—that better educated Negroes would rock the world of politics in the South and that would eventually lead to whites loosing status and privilege in society. Still another sociologist, when answering the question, “Do you think that white parents are afraid their daughters may become interested in Negro boys, or their sons might become involved with Negro girls?” responded with,

Their sons have clandestinely been involved with Negro girls and women for over 200 years, and the evidence can be seen in the form of light mulattoes in almost every Southern and Northern City.

Public opinion accepts this fact, however, as not endangering the purity of the white race so long as the mixing does not involve the incorporation of the mixed-blood children in the father’s group. Of course, legal marriage with colored women would violate this principle, and this is why it is forbidden by law in every Southern State and in many non-Southern States.

With the daughters of white parents, it is a very different matter. Motherhood is concealed only with great difficulty. An old saying of the frontier has it that motherhood is a matter of fact but fatherhood is a matter of opinion. Hence it is through the woman that the white group lays down its rules of race membership.

This statement, very similar in many ways to Peggy Pascoe’s explanation of interracial relationships, shows why interracial marriage, but not interracial sex, is banned by law in many states, and how race and sex compound to further subjugate black women of the South. This statement reveals the sick truth that while white male slave owners had supreme control over his slaves, and later sharecroppers, and women in general in the South, black men had almost no power—not even to protect their female family and friends from the possible horrors of the white man. And, while not all of the relationships resulting in mixed children were based on this imbalance of power that resulted in rape, many surely were purely by the definition of rape itself. This statement reveals the ugly, horrible truth about one aspect of race relations in the South…

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Nation, miscegenation, and the myth of the mulatta/o monster 1859-1886

Universite de Montreal (Canada)
2009
261 pages
Publication Number: AAT NR60321
ISBN: 9780494603215

Jessica Alexandra Maeve Murphy

These presentee a la Faculte des etudes superieures En vue de l’obtention du grade de Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.) en etudes anglaises

“Nation, Miscegenation, and The Myth of the Mulatta/o Monster, 1859-1886” examines how Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Robert Louis Stevenson use the trope of the mulatta/o monster only to subvert it by showing readers that the real monster is white, hegemonic culture. More specifically, it deals with how Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Octoroon, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde depict the interracial body as a gothic house, one which is a microcosm for an increasingly hybrid and un-homely nation. The four texts under consideration in my thesis all explore what it means to be black and female (or dark and feminized) in the United States and Britain where to be white, male, and affluent is to have virtually limitless power over the bodies of women, particularly black ones.

Drawing upon Nancy Stepan’s notion of “proper places,” this dissertation looks at how interracial individuals challenged existing hierarchies in the mid-to-late nineteenth century by defying racial, gender, and class norms nationally and transatlantically. While many scientists of the period believed that mixed-race people were infertile and headed for extinction, the proliferation of such individuals attests to the fact that the number of racially hybrid people was increasing, not decreasing. For many Victorians and their American counterparts, the rise in this population as well as the shifting roles of black and white women, black men, and the working class compelled them to label these groups. It also heightened their concern with degeneration and their need to polarize black/white, female/male, and rich/poor. Yet, as this project shows, while such binaries are necessarily porous, England and the United States both made use of them to establish and define their national identities vis-à-vis one another. Whereas American writers like Jacobs and Wilson relied on such constructs to shame their country and to shape its future, British ones like Braddon used them to allege national superiority or, like Robert Louis Stevenson, later on in the nineteenth century, to reveal the changing face of the nation.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Making and Unmaking Monsters in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig
• Chapter 2: Sexual Propriety and Racial Transgression in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Chapter 3: The Transatlantic Gaze in M. E. Braddon’s The Octoroon
• Chapter 4: Mr. Hyde as Hybrid in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekvll and Mr. Hyde
• Notes
• Works Cited

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Intermarriage and racial amalgamation in the United States

Biodemography and Social Biology
Volume 14, Issue 2 (1967)
pages 112-120
DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1967.9987710

David M. Heer, Professor Emeritus of Sociology
University of Southern California

Within the last few years tremendous popular interest has been aroused in the subject of Negro-white intermarriage. Fifteen years ago Negro protest leaders claimed they were interested only in jobs and votes and consequently downplayed talk of intermarriage. Moreover, conservative whites were comforted by Gunnar Myrdal’s report that although the ban on intermarriage was for them the most important aspect of the caste system, Negroes considered it the least important of the various discriminations they were forced to suffer. Very recently, however, the attitude on the part of many Negro leaders toward intermarriage has changed. Increasingly, such leaders, particularly the younger ones, are saying, “Why not?”

Earlier, most Negro thinking tended to isolate political and economic discriminations from the social discriminations symbolized, par excellence, by white attitudes toward racial intermarriage. However, in the writer’s opinion, such thinking represented faulty sociological analysis. A more thorough view of the situation reveals that restrictions on racial intermarriage may well be closely linked to the economic discrimination that Negroes in our society must endure. Davis (1949) has listed the main social functions of the family as the reproduction, maintenance, placement, and socialization of the young. Let us focus our attention on the placement function of the family in the contemporary United Stales, i.e. on the consequences which birth into a given family has for the youngsters future social position. Let us first remember that the transfer of wealth in our society is largely accomplished by bequeathal from one family member to another. The possession of wealth in our society not only entitles one to receive regular monetary interest; it is also a source of power, credit, and prestige. Secondly, it must be recognized that although universalism is the predominant criterion for the matching of job applicants to job vacancies in our society, particularism is quite important for many segments of it. In particular, in the building trades, jobs cannot be obtained without admittance to the union’s apprenticeship program and in many instances it is almost impossible to obtain entree into the apprenticeship program unless one is a son or other close relative of a union member. Third, social science research has established that entree to elite positions in our society is most easily obtained by those who grow up from birth in a family having relatively high status.  Birth in a high status family, of course, provides the financial means for obtaining advanced education. In addition, however, it is invaluable for giving one a sense of familiarity with the activities and functioning of high status society. This familiarity not only reduces the fear of interpersonal contacts in such a society but also increases the motivation to become a full participant…

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CNN DIALOGUES: The 2010 Census and the New America?

The Cecil B. Day Chapel of The Carter Center
 453 Freedom Parkway, Atlanta, GA, 30307
2011-08-31, 19:00-20:30 EDT (Local Time)

Moderator:
Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s Lead Political Anchor and Anchor of “The Situation Room”

Panelists:

Heidi W. Durrow, author of the debut novel The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
Edward James Olmos, actor and activist
Yul Kwon, Host of PBS’ “America Revealed”
Kris Marsh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland at College Park
Dana F. White, Goodrich C. White Professor of Urban Studies at Emory University

If numbers don’t lie, what can the 2010 U.S. Census tell us about who we are and how we live? On August 31st, thought leaders in sociology, urban studies, and popular culture will come together in front of a live audience at The Carter Center in Atlanta to explore the implications of the 2010 census in the premiere session of CNN DIALOGUES.

This event, hosted by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, will feature Heidi Durrow, Edward James Olmos, Yul Kwon, Kris Marsh and Dana F. White.  This is the first in a series of three CNN DIALOGUES planned for 2011.

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Craniometric Study of the Cape Coloured Population

Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa
Volume 33, Issue 1 (1951)
pages 29-51
DOI: 10.1080/00359195109519876

J. A. Keena
Department of Anatomy
University of Cape Town

(With Plate XI and three Text-figures.)
(Read November 16, 1949.)

The Cape Coloured people inhabit Cape Town, the Cape Peninsula and the western corner of the Cape Province. Their emergence aa a distinct ethnic group is a matter of history, covering a time-period of three centuries. The basis of the Cape Coloured group is the original Hottentot population, and an early admixture occurred between the incoming European settlers and the Hottentots. The Hottentot people at that time were already a somewhat mixed racial group, having absorbed a good deal of Bushman blood (Maingard, 1932). The Bushman element in the genetic make-up of the Cape Coloured will be seen to be an important factor.

A further admixture occurred when the Dutch East India Company introduced slaves into the colony. Some of the slaves came from population groups in the far East, such as Java, or the nearer East, such as Ceylon and India, and they brought into the Cape Coloured group elements of the south-eastern races of Asia. Other slaves came from the east coast of Africa along the trade route of the Dutch East India Company, and these brought a negro clement into the racial make-up of the Cape Coloured. It should be noted, however, that this is not the same as the West African negro element which has entered into the formation of the mixed racial groups of the American continent. The East African negro populations contain a considerable admixture of Hamitic stock which differentiates them from the West African negro communities.

In the main, therefore, the Cape Coloured people contain a mixture of Hottentot, Bushman, European, Asiatic and Negro racial elements, the crossings between these major subdivisions of mankind being well established and having occurred within a comparatively short time-period. To such…

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