Mixed Race Studies

The Species Problem: Nineteenth-Century Concepts of Racial Inferiority in the Origin of Man Controversy

American Anthropologist
Volume 72, Issue 6 (December 1970)
pages 1319–1329
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1970.72.6.02a00060

John S. Haller, Jr., Emeritus Professor of History
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

The species problem and its implications in the origin of man controversy had grown in importance in prewar America owing largely to the question of slavery. Implicit in the problem was the position of the so-called inferior races in society. The monogenists, despite their emphasis on environmentalism, were no more favorable to the Negro, except in their remote theoretical stance. The Civil War—not Darwin—brought the controversy to an end in America, but it continued to rage in Europe. The apparent synthesis of the schools during the 1870s did not disturb the stereotyped ideas of racial inferiority. The “inferior races” remained the basis of evolutionary discussion, leaving them as remote outcasts of the evolutionary struggle.

Though most nineteenth-century anthropologists were busily engaged in the technical aspects of somatometry, a good number of them were also concerned with the more problematic question of man’s origin. Like somatometry, the speculation into origin grew out of the awareness of differences in the broad spectrum of genus Homo. The taxonomic system of Linnaeus not only precipitated an intensive study of comparative structures, but led also to the question of whether the various “races” of man originated in one primitive stock. Were the Negroes, Hottentots, Eskimos, and Australians really men in the full sense of the term, sharing in the intellectual endowments of the European, or were they half-brutes, not belonging to what the French scientist Bory de Saint-Vincent called the “race adamique”? Defined in other terms, the problem concerned whether humanity descended from a monogenetic type, or whether humanity had distinct polygenetic ancestors. If it were true that these peoples were really subspecies, or subraces, then, some argued, they should become subject to the superior races. The subsequent controversy between the monogenists and polygenists became the longest of the internecine battles among the physical scientists of man. Though ostensibly concerned only with origin, the controversy highlighted a major confrontation between science and religion. It also illuminated the peculiar role played by the “inferior races” to the higher categories of man, a role that was fundamentally the same in both schools and remained unchanged during the decades before and after Darwin. The apparent synthesis of the two opposing schools during the 1870s seemed not to disturb the continuity of race stereotypes and the ideas of racial inferiority…

…The early polygenists favored the term “species” in their belief in the diversity of man. In the context of their definition, species were “fixed” and did not naturally cross with other species, except under artificial conditions. Although there was occasional fertility between the separate species, the product of the union was sterile or tending toward sterility, proving the “unnaturalness” of the original union. The concept of species was important to those nineteenth-century scientists who drew their schematization of the universe from the logical and spatial arrangement of the chain of being. For if one hybrid were capable of increase, the divine arrangement of the creator would have been distorted and a destructive imbalance set into the order of the world. All living things formed one chain of universal being from the lowest to the highest. None of the species originally formed were extinct. Nature proceeded according to divine plan and admitted of no improvement. The continuation of this belief into the nineteenth century precipitated an enormous amount of speculation as to whether the mulatto was more or less fertile than either of the two original stocks. The general consensus was that the mulatto was less fertile, and hence, an artificial hybrid tending toward extinction.As the nineteenth-century polygenists turned to the term “race” rather than “species” to define human types, so they borrowed the word “mongrel” in exchange for “hybrid” to identify the offspring of mixing (Vogt 1864: 441; Huxley 1876:412). In doing so, however, they created a confusion in terminology because the monogenist’s criteria for “species,” “race,” “mongrel,” and “hybrid” remained unchanged…

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Reconstructing Molly Welsh: Race, Memory and the Story of Benjamin Banneker’s Grandmother

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
September 2008
194 pages

Sandra W. Perot

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of History

Molly Welsh, oral tradition captured in the nineteenth century tells us, was a white Englishwoman who worked as an indentured servant. The same tradition has it that she owned slaves, although she is said to have married (or formed a union with) one of them. I aim not only to recover the life of Molly Welsh Banneker, but also to consider its various tellings—probing in particular at Molly’s shifting racial status. By examining a multiplicity of social and cultural aspects of life for seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Maryland women, I test whether these various narratives are even possible or plausible reconstructions of the Molly Welsh story. My project thus sheds light on the woman Molly Welsh was, how her story was constructed, what factors contributed to the retelling of her story, and why and at what point various narratives deviate from each other. By comparing the various Molly Welsh/Benjamin Banneker narratives it is possible to uncover or at least posit the most reliable narrative, while at the same time coming to a greater understanding of how such historically undocumented stories are constructed and what part memory plays in their reconstruction. An extensive bias informs many of these narratives, shaped by the various “memories” generated by family loyalty, by the growing tensions between the North and the South over slavery, by Reconstruction, and by new standards in historical accuracy that appeared with the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884.
 
While Molly Welsh may appear to be a near-silent character in her grandson Benjamin Banneker’s story, it is possible that new discoveries will be made that further verify (or refute) the long-standing tradition that Molly Welsh was a white English dairymaid transported to Maryland and that she married one of her own slaves by whom she had four daughters. Recent interest in new ways of approaching history, a greater acceptance of oral traditions as an important historical source, and a renewed appreciation for exploring stories of the untold masses, including women and minorities, may someday locate Molly’s voice and allow her to speak for herself. The chances of uncovering Molly Welsh’s story through documentary sources has improved with the recent emergence of powerful databases and electronic search tools have made many things possible that once were not (ancestry.com, the Old Bailey records for example). And then, perhaps Molly might come to represent other seventeenth-century women who married or had children with African men, like Eleanor Atkins who had a “Molattoe” child and who subsequently received twenty-four lashes for her crime, Elizabeth Day who admitted before the court that she had an illegitimate “Malatto” child by a “Negro man named Quasey belonging to her master,” or Eleanor Price who pleaded guilty to “Fornication with a Negro Man named Peter Belonging to Mr. John Walker,” received twenty-one lashes, and whose child, Jeremiah, was bound out until the age of twenty-one. Through their stories we might come to accept that one of the few choices these women had may have been with whom they had a child, though even this is subject to question. Regardless, Molly Welsh’s story is one that does not appear to stand alone. Through her we might see how women survived their indentures and prospered, or managed at the very least to endure life in Maryland, women whose lives until now never managed to become a footnote in anyone’s biography.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: LOCATING MOLLY WELSH: MEMORY AND MYTH IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MARYLAND
• I THE DAIRYMAID AND THE PRINCE
• II “OF THE DEEPEST DYE”: EARLY NARRATIVES
• III “A REMARKABLY FAIR COMPLEXION”: THE EMERGENCE OF MOLLY WELSH
• IV “ACT WELL YOUR PART, THERE ALL THE HONOR LIES”: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF MOLLY WELSH’S CHARACTER
• V “THE TALE AS IT WAS TOLD FOR A HUNDRED YEARS ON THE RIDGE”: EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN SCHOLARS REVITALIZE MOLLY’S STORY
• VI “TRUE NOBILITY’S CONFINED TO NONE”: MOLLY IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
• VII “BUT WHAT ARE COLOURS? DO COMPLEXIONS CHANGE?” TWENTYFIRST CENTURY PERSPECTIVES ON MOLLY WELSH.114
• VIII EPILOGUE
• APPENDICES
  • I CHRONOLOGY OF PRINT CONCERNING ANCESTRY OF BENJAMIN BANNEKER
  • II BANNEKER FAMILY TREE
  • III INTERNET RESPONSES TO MOLLY WELSH
  • IV MARYLAND LAWS DIRECTLY PERTAINING TO SLAVERY, RACE, INDENTURED SERVITUDE, WOMEN, AND MARRIAGE IN SEVENTEENTH- AND EARLY-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY MARYLAND
  • V 1685 INDENTURE
  • VI A BRIEF EXAMINATION OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TRANSPORTATION RECORDS
  • BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Racial classifications in the US census: 1890–1990

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 16, Issue 1 (1993)
pages 75-94
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.1993.9993773

Sharon M. Lee, Adjunct Professor of Sociology
University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

This article examines racial classifications on United States population census schedules between 1890 and 1990 to provide insights on the changing meanings of race in US society. The analysis uses a sociology of knowledge perspective which assumes that race is an ideological concept that can be interpreted most productively by relating its definition and measurement to the larger social and political context. Four themes are identified and discussed: (i) the historical and continuing importance of skin colour, usually dichotomized into white and non‐white, in defining race and counting racial groups; (ii) a belief in ‘pure’ races that is reflected in a preoccupation with categorizing people into a single or ‘pure’ race; (iii) the role of census categories in creating pan‐ethnic racial groups; and, (iv) the confusing of race and ethnicity in census racial classifications. Each theme demonstrates the potential or actual role of official statistics, exemplified by census racial data, in reflecting and guiding changes to the meaning and social perceptions of race. A detailed examination of racial classifications from the 1980 and 1990 Censuses shows that the influence of political interests on racial statistics is particularly important. The article concludes with a discussion of whether official statistical recorders such as population censuses should categorize and measure race, given the political motivations and non‐scientific character of the classifications used.

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Hannah Gómez
2012-08-29

I am an MA and MS candidate at Simmons College in Boston preparing to present a paper on the formation and assertion of biracial identity in Young Adult literature. While I’ve amassed quite the list of novels, I’m sure I am missing some from smaller presses and urban and hi/lo imprints from major publishers. I am also looking for relevant critical and historical sources on mixed race identity, terminology used to describe various mixes, and biracial literature. I’m seeking suggestions and pointers from the Mixed Race Studies community (no self-published books, please)! If you have a title or resource to suggest, please e-mail Hannah Gómez. Thanks!

Hidden Hapa

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
2012-04-06

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

“Hey, what are you doing over there with the Hapa?”

Kathy and I looked over and there were three of our Japanese American friends at another table smiling at us, one with a mischievous grin. Sandy had jokingly pointed out that I was a mixed blood amidst a group of full bloods. Kathy and I smiled back at them and returned to our conversation.
 
But Kathy suddenly surprised me by saying, “Actually, I’m kind of mixed too; my mother is from Okinawa; like an interracial marriage to Japanese.” I looked over at my friends and remembered that one of them had told me his father was Chinese. Hey, that makes three of us and only two of them!
 
I recalled this incident when I read yesterday in the New York Times that while Asian Americans still have one of the highest interracial marriage rates in the country, Asian Americans are marrying other Asian Americans more often than in recent years. The article reported that many of these couples are of different ethnicities, such as Chinese-Indian and Filipino-Vietnamese. This means that mixed Asian Americans will continue to increase, and that many of them will not be apparently ethnically mixed. Of course, these individuals exist now and the diversity among any ethnically defined subgroup of Asian Americans is far greater than assumed. Little is know about their experience, and I think they are generally not regarded as Hapa and may not consider themselves to be Hapa. But as for others, such as black Asians, who now feel excluded from Hapa circles, a space to express mixed ancestries may be appreciated. Developing these welcome spaces is a challenge facing Asian American communities…

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More male and mixed-race health visitors wanted

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

Steve Ford, Deputy News Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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When Half Is Whole: Multiethnic Asian American Identities

Stanford University Press
September 2012
248 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780804775175
Paper ISBN: 9780804775182

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu
Stanford University

“I listen and gather people’s stories. Then I write with the hope to communicate something to people, that they gain something of value by reading these stories. I tell myself that this is something that isn’t going to be done unless I do it, just because of who I am. It’s a way of making my mark, to leave something behind—not that I’m planning on going anywhere, right now.”

So begins Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu in this touching, introspective, and insightful exploration of mixed race Asian American experiences. The son of an Irish American father and Japanese mother, Murphy-Shigematsu has devoted his life to understanding himself as a product of his diverse roots. Across twelve chapters, his reflections are interspersed among profiles of others of biracial and mixed ethnicity and accounts of their journeys to answer a seemingly simple question: Who am I?

Here we meet Margo, the daughter of a Japanese woman and a black American serviceman, who found how others viewed and treated her, both in Japan and the United States, in conflict with her evolving understanding of herself. Born in Australia and raised in San Francisco, Wei Ming struggled with making sense of her Chinese and American heritage, which was further complicated when she began to realize she was bisexual. Rudy, the son of Mexican and Filipino parents, is a former gang member and hip hop artist who redirected his passion for performance into his current career as a professor of Asian Pacific American Studies. Other chapters address issues such as mixed race invisibility, being a transracial adoptee, hapa identity, beauty culture and authenticity testing, and more.

With its attention on people who have been regarded as “half” this or “half” that throughout their lives, these stories make vivid the process of becoming whole.

Contents

• Prologue
• 1. Flowers Amidst the Ashes
• 2. We Must Go On
• 3. For the Community
• 4. English, I Dont Know!
• 5. Bi Bi Girl
• 6. I Am Your Illusion, Your Reality Your Future
• 7. Grits and Sushi
• 8. I Cut across Borders as If They Have No Meaning
• 9. Victims No More
• 10. American Girl in Asia
• 11. Found in Translation
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Recommended Readings
• About the Author

Eurasians: Celebrating Survival

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 28, Issue 1 (2007)
DOI: 10.1080/07256860601082988
pages 129-141

Christine Choo
University of Western Australia

The search for my Asian ancestors and my discoveries in archives, the crumbling pages, the eroding ink, the disappearance of the word, are a metaphor for the simultaneous emergence of the will to recover memories and the slow fading away of the material traces of memory. Eurasians of Malaysia and Singapore once epitomised the blurring of boundaries between cultures and societies in colonial and immediate post-colonial periods. In exploring their cultural and social heritage in the archives and by networking with the Eurasian diaspora on the internet, individuals shape and reaffirm their identities on new and old frontiers. This paper presents Eurasians and their experiences as transcultural or in the middle ground – the space where new ways of being are developed and lived in a cross-cultural environment. It explores how the definition of Eurasian is changing in the context of contemporary globalised society.

Who is Eurasian?

This essay is a personal reflection on the position of Eurasians as “in-betweeners” and the changes experienced by the Eurasian communities of Malaysia from historically, geographically and socially grounded minority communities to imagined communities of a diaspora with families linked by the internet. Paradoxically, in the expanded globalised context of our contemporary world where cross-cultural intermarriage or partnering is common, historic Eurasian communities like those in Malaysia are fading away through intermarriage and migration. Many Eurasian extended families connect and discover their common heritage and family links through the internet. In another reality, unrelated individuals across the world with Asian-European heritage rely on the imagined communities created by the internet to help them gain a sense of identity and community…

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A Further Discussion of the Variability of Family Strains in the Negro-White Population of New York City

Journal of the American Statistical Association
Volume 20, Issue 151 (1925)
pages 380-389
DOI: 10.1080/01621459.1925.10503502

Melville J. Herskovits

A paper read at the meeting of Section H., American Association for the Advancement of Science, at Washington , D.C., January 2, 1925.

In an investigation of the variability of a population, there are a number of sub-variabilities which can be studied, all of which must be taken into consideration when a study of the general variability of a population in a given trait is to be made. Thus, there is, besides the individual variability, that of the individuals themselves from day to day. In the case of growing children, this is an important factor, and is generally recognized where child-data are being worked with. But even with adults, there is the change which occurs with the day’s activity, particularly in such matters as height, or weight. Again, a population is not made up of isolated individuals, but is composed of family lines, and the variability of these is important, as well as the variation within the families. Although great attention is usually paid to the differing variabilities of populations taken as a whole, these others have usually been overlooked.

The present paper is concerned with variations within the family strains, and between these strains, in the Negro-White population of New York City. The measurements were taken at Public School 89, Manhattan, a school the pupils of which are about 98 per cent Negro. The amount of mixture which has gone into the racial composition of this population, is, of course, an unknown quantity, but there is strong reason to believe that an estimate of 15 to 20 per cent pure Negro would be high. In other words, the population is almost entirely mixed. By measuring the variability of family strains an indication may be had of the amount of mixture, and, at the same time, a measure of the variability within these family lines. The statistical procedure needed for such analysis was given by Boas in a paper published some time ago. The writer also has prepared a paper dealing with the…

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Barack Obama as the Great Man: Communicative Constructions of Racial Transcendence in White-Male Elite Discourses

Communication Monographs
Volume 78, Issue 4 (2011)
pages 535-556
DOI: 10.1080/03637751.2011.618140

Christopher B. Brown, Assistant Professor of Communications
Minnesota State University, Mankato

This study examined responses on the potential impact of Barack Obama’s presidency from 16 semi-structured interviews with White males in leadership positions in various organizations across the United States. While numerous studies examine the circulating racial discourses on Obama, few studies explore how he is represented in first-hand accounts from those in the public, specifically from White-male elites. This study examined interview discourses from White-male elites to reveal how they imagine race through Obama. In positioning Obama among the pantheon of great-man leaders, this study showed how dominant racial ideologies get legitimatized and reworked when members of the dominant group desire to construct racial meanings onto a popular Black leader.

I will never forget the morning after it was announced that Barack Obama would become the first African-American President of the United States. That morning, I got onto the bus and sat near a few people who were discussing the election results. As usual, I was the only African American on the bus; after all, the city of Albuquerque has a minuscule Black population. As I sat down, a Caucasian man, who was engaged in the conversation with two other passengers, immediately turned to me and congratulated me on the election. I looked at him quizzically, but replied, “I appreciate it.” At that point another man, apparently Latino, turned to me and said, “See brother, you don’t have much to worry about anymore.” I replied ambivalently, “I guess everything is all good now!” He ardently insisted, “Yeah brother, there are going to be a few changes; don’t you think so?” I shrugged and sheepishly replied, “I guess it looks that way.” The night of the announcement, I too felt proud, but I doubted that Obama’s election would extract the systematic and oppressive circumstances of a racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist society. Sensing that I was not sharing their enthusiasm, the passengers turned away from me and continued with their discussion.

During this time, I was conducting interviews with White males in leadership positions in their organizations to understand how they characterize leadership and heroism. In talking about leaders in US history, they all extolled the valor and foresight of the forefathers in creating a vision for what would eventually become the basic virtues of the US democracy. Some even praised the heroic acts of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy for galvanizing movements in circumstances where their viewpoints were considered unpopular in the mainstream. While my initial interest was to understand how these men construct leadership, I was quite surprised to hear how candidly they spoke to the leadership potential of Barack Obama. Like the passengers on the bus, these men embraced Obama as someone with the potential to alter the course of history, because he represented a healthy vision of future race relations in the United States. It is at this point that I began to ponder how the intersection of my racial and gender identity with that of the bus riders and these leaders gave rise to reflections verifying that racism has little to do with the politics of race in the United States.

The present study examines how and why race enters into the discussion of masculinized leadership when discourses of racial transcendence are appropriated by White-male elites in a cross-race interview context. Specifically, I analyze the rhetorical tactics (see Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) that these White-male elites employ when positioning Obama among the pantheon of great men in history. In this essay, I defined White-male elites as those who self-identified as White; who work in high profile positions such as chief executive officer, president, or partner in law firm; and who are US citizens. Unlike most people of color and White women, White-male elites fit the description of people who occupy spaces in which they can reside in various privileged locations: White, male, nominally heterosexual, affluent relative to economic status, and privileged relative to educational status. Scholarship rarely documents White-male elites’ constructions of race (though see Feagin & O’Brien, 2003). In fact, scholarly research on race and communication provides considerably more attention to the views of ordinary White people like college students (Bonilla-Silva & Forman, 2000; Jackson & Crawley, 2003; Jackson & Heckman, 2002; Martin, Krizek, Nakayama, & Bradford, 1996; Moon, 1999). In that regard, I contend that communication scholars must pay close attention to White-male elite expressions on race and ethnicity, given the relative power and privilege that comes with their linguistic and rhetorical styles, and given that institutional spaces are organized around their cultural repertories.

In commenting on studies of race and communication, Allen (2007) asserted that communication theorists often “neglect to delve into race in critical, substantive ways” (p. 259). I heed Allen’s concern and show how ideological discourses of race manifest in White-male elites’ constructions of Obama. This requires considering the implications for valorizing discourses of great-man leadership through discursive constructions of Obama. As Jennings (1960) and Wrightsman (1977) have noted in their critique of the great-man theory, a sudden act by a great man could alter the fate of the nation as great men maintain the appropriate traits for a particular point in history. It is my contention that these White-male elites embrace Obama as a great man leader to suggest haphazardly that it is better to speak of racism in the past tense. As we will see, critical work on race not only examines racial discourse and its manifestations, but also investigates its imaginative (or ideological) dimensions (Leonardo, 2005) how these White-male elites imagine race through Obama to suit their own ideological purposes…

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