Mixed Race Studies

Brown Bag: Mixed-race tension in early America

The Daily Campus: The Independent Voice of Southern Methodist University Since 1915
Dallas, Texas
2011-09-21

Logan May

The struggle of mixed race families in Southwest America was a daunting issue in the early 19th century.

As part of the Brown Bag Lecture Series of the Southwest, SMU Director of Southwest Studies Andrew Graybill shared a detailed account of a mixed White-Native American family from Montana who faced an exponential amount of racial discrimination.

In the Texana Room of DeGolyer Library Wednesday afternoon, listeners gathered and silently snacked on their lunches as Graybill spoke of the Clarke family.

“To walk in two worlds was impossible,” Graybill said, “whites looked at mixed blood with repulsion.”

His book, entitled A Mixture of So Many Bloods, recalled the life of Helen Clarke and the backlash she received for being the daughter of a white man and a Native American woman. At this time in the early 1800s, marriage within the two races was common, and children served as brokers between the two groups. Helen’s father had a prominent role as a fur trader; therefore, the family was often the talk of the town…

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Genetic Counseling: For children of mixed racial ancestry

Biodemography and Social Biology
Volume 8, Issue 3, 1961
pages 157-163
DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1961.9987478

Sheldon C. Reed, Director
Dight Institute for Human Genetics
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Esther B. Nordlie
Dight Institute for Human Genetics
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

INTRODUCTION

The editors of this journal have been interested in genetic counseling because it is a major practical application of the results of research in human genetics. It is reasonable to assume that genetic counseling may also have some relationship to eugenics, though there is nothing known as to exactly what this relationship may be.

Genetic counseling should be helpful to those who ask for it. The understanding of any problem is the first step toward its solution. Understanding of the problem removes some of the attendant anxiety, even if the solution is unpleasant. There should be less anxiety after genetic counseling than before it has occurred, and the clients indicate in many ways that it is useful to them. The relationship between genetic counseling and eugenics is certainly ambiguous. It is my impression that the relief of anxiety concerning the likelihood of a repetition of an abnormality results in increased reproduction of the parents of the affected children. If this is true, the frequency of any genes responsible for the abnormality would be increased, though slightly, in the population, which would be a dysgenic process. The increased reproduction of the parents of the anomalous children should also increase the frequency of any genes related to the attributes of responsible parenthood which should have positive eugenic benefits. It is not clear to me whether the net result of these opposing tendencies is eugenic or dysgenic. The dysgenic effect is to increase slightly the pool of rare genes for abnormalities which are infrequent, while the slight increase in the supply of genes related to responsible parenthood would be less significant percentage-wise because such genes arc presumed to be more frequent in the population. If genes related to responsible parenthood do not exist, one can only conclude that genetic counseling may well be dysgenic Genetic counseling at present would seem to be liable to the suspicion that it is dysgenic. This effect may be too trivial to warrant consideration. Hopefully, the obvious benefits to the parents who come for counseling outweigh the possible dysgenic costs to society as a whole. The only alternative to genetic counseling is the refusal to impart whatever information research in human genetics has discovered; such a philosophy would be deplorable. Genetic counseling has a function and is here to stay. It is the intention of the editors to present articles by other genetic counselors from time to time. Presumably these articles will cover particular areas of counseling with which they have had extensive experience.

BACKGROUND OF STUDY

Wc have had considerable experience at the Dight Institute in working with adoption agencies in the placement of children of mixed racial ancestry. Mrs. Esther Nordlie (1961) and I have just completed a follow-up of the results of the placement of such children and will summarize the results here, as this is the first study of its kind. It is probable that genetic counselors will be increasingly occupied with this topic as interracial unions are likely to continue in the United States. The casual unions often result in children who become available for adoption. . . .

The problem of placing “pure” Negro, Indian or Mexican children is difficult only because few families of these minority groups request children for adoption. Ordinarily, no attempt would be made to place these babies in Caucasian families as the child or the adoptive parents would probably find social adjustment too difficult. However, children of mixed racial origin may “pass for white” or resemble the Caucasian adoptive parents sufficiently so that placement in a white family is feasible. Such placement is desirable for the child as the socioeconomic environment is assumed to be more favorable there. This would be true only if the racial appearance of the child would permit acceptance in the white community. Many white couples are desperately anxious to adopt children. Some are sufficiently free from racial prejudices to be able to adopt children of mixed racial ancestry, if a reasonable “match” between child and adoptive parents can be made. The critical prediction rests with the geneticist (or anthropologist) who must project the appearance of a small baby ahead to the child of five or six when entering school…

One would suppose that predicting the chances for a child to “pass for white” would be quite simple. Such, however, is not the case. The main difficulty is that these traits, when present in the racial hybrid, may not be apparent in an infant but develop over the years. Hair texture and skin color are the most important traits and at the same time the most difficult to predict. The baby may have no hair; it is well known that babies with considerable Negro ancestry may look quite light at birth and darken considerably during childhood. The geneticist is thus vulnerable to mistakes in his predictions as to the future appearance of the baby. One could take the attitude that unless the geneticist can make his prediction with certainty he should not enter the picture at all. Such reasoning is absurd. The baby is in the custody of the adoption agency and the agency must make some provision for this child.

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I am a third-year doctoral student in counseling psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University and I am currently working on a study exploring the experiences of biracial and multiracial women. I am looking for women who are 18 years old or older and of mixed racial heritage to participate in a one hour confidential interview. Please contact me if you interested in participating in my study.

For more information, contact Susan Mao at susanemao@gmail.com.

Supremacy by Law: The One Man One Woman Marriage Requirement and Antimiscegenation Law

Journal of Bisexuality
Volume 7, Issue 3-4, 2008
pages 145-169
DOI: 10.1080/15299710802170771

Jacqueline Battalora, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
Saint Xavier University, Orland Park, Illinois

This article is concerned with epistemology and the assertion of supremacy. Focusing on the resources deployed to make marriage restrictions logical, this article investigates their descriptive and structural underpinnings. I juxtapose support for the Defense of Marriage Act and Federal Marriage Amendment with antimiscegenation case law and examine descriptions of fact, the patterns they shape, and the underlying structure that holds them together. These laws are an arena of contestation not only over policy choices but over God and nature, and ultimately difference. I pay attention to the ways in which constructions of difference work to exclude and erase and I argue that these laws share a common structure of supremacy. Dualistic constructions of difference work to erase those whose bodies threaten the clear lines that justify exclusion by law. Those who are multiracial, where whiteness is a contributor, and those who are bisexual represent such a threat to racial marriage bans on the one hand and same sex marriage bans on the other. The formula of difference-making, erasure, and supremacy in law has important implications not only for challenging marriage restrictions today but to measure future law and policy.

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Training for assimilation: Cecil cook and the ‘half‐caste’ apprentice regulations

Melbourne Studies in Education (Currently known as Critical Studies in Education)
Volume 29, Issue 1 (1987)
pages 128-141
DOI: 10.1080/17508488709556226

Tony Austin
Darwin Institute of Technology

One of the most significant consequences of the colonisation of Aboriginal Australia was a fast growing population of people of mixed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descent, known as ‘Half-castes’. As the increase in numbers became pronounced. Half-castes were vilified more vehemently even than other Aborigines. However, popular contempt was tinged with shame that children, fathered by Europeans and so with a mix of White blood, were left to be brought up as ‘savages’ in the bush or on the fringes of settlement. Hence legislation for the protection and control of Aborigines included special provision for Half-castes: they were to be given an improved chance to assimilate to White Australia.

This paper describes one attempt in the Northern Territory during the 1930s to prepare young people for assimilation—an apprenticeship scheme for Half-caste pastoral workers. The scheme is viewed in the context of Commonwealth Government policy for Half-castes and prevailing views about the intellectual capacity of Aborigines and Half-castes.

Social Darwinism and Aboriginal Intelligence

From the earliest days of Commonwealth control of the Northern Territory progressive officials with anthropological interests, like Chief Protectors Herbert Basedow and Baldwin Spencer had included in their policy proposals education and training for Aborigines and especially for Half-castes who were considered to be intellectually superior to other Aborigines. But these proposals were barely acted upon. In addition to general Commonwealth neglect of Aborigines and intermittent military and financial crises, the reason is to be found in Australian views about Aborigines’ intelligence.

Basedow and Spencer, in ascribing intellectual prowess (however limited) to Aborigines, were out of step with anthropological opinion. Late nineteenth century British, American and Australian anthropologists disseminated the belief that the Scale of Nature had become rigid, making progress for certain peoples impossible and so consigning them to a permanent place of inferiority in the struggle for survival. Such theories of evolutionary arrest, coupled with A.R. Wallace’s contention that moral and mental evolution had largely replaced physical evolution made the link between ‘savages’ and the apes, or at best with Neanderthal and Engis humans, conventional anthropological wisdom.

In Australia, ethnocentric Europeans reasoned that cessation of cultural evolution was demonstrated by Aborigines’ lack of recognisable institutions, rulers, morality, religion, parental pride, sense of humour or responsible treatment of the ‘fair sex’. Cultural discontinuity, it was argued, was a clear indication of intellectual inferiority. As [Charles] C. Staniland Wake put it, Aborigines ‘represent the childhood of humanity itself, revealing to us the condition of mankind, if not in primeval times, yet when the original potentialities of man’s being had been slightly developed by the struggle for existence’ Scientific substance for this view was provided by craniologists who alleged that Aboriginal brains were primitive and incapable of matching the power of those of the ‘higher races’. Features of Aboriginal brains were said to show an ‘infantile character… a type of anomaly which is referable to persistence of an immature (even a foetal) condition’.

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