Mixed Race Studies

The Anglo-Indian Community

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 40, Number 2 (September, 1934)
pages 165-179

Elmer L. Hedin
Halcyon, California

Of the several half-caste croups in Asia, the largest and most self-conscious is the Anglo-Indian Community. It numbers perhaps two hundred thousand persons who maintain themselves precariously on the outskirts of British-Indian officialdom, employed for the most part in clerical and other minor positions under the government. The life of the Anglo-Indian is one protracted struggle for status, occupational and social, and in that struggle he seems to be losing ground. Despised by both British and Indians, he may well be submerged in the turmoil of the present, trampled under by the march of India’s millions toward nationalism.

With the discovery of a sea route to eastern Asia in the last decade of the fifteenth century there began a new era of intimate and exten sive trade relationships between the nations of Europe and those of the Far East. The first European traders belonged to a world in many respects more tolerant than the present one, a world in which race prejudice was almost unknown. Consequently, more often than not they entered into more or less permanent marriage relationships with native women, a custom which resulted, after a few generations of trade and political expansion, in the presence of considerable numbers of half-castes. Such half-castes were in a special position and tended to form self-conscious communities, the largest, the best organized, and the most interesting of which is that community in India variously known as East Indian, Eurasian, or Anglo-Indian.

Some fifteen hundred years before Christ, India was conquered by a people speaking an Aryan language and allied to the present Europeans in blood. Later there were invasions of Greeks, Parthians, and Arabs. As a consequence, there was a not inconsiderable intermixture of invaders’ blood with that of the already hybrid population they found, fought with, and often ruled. But these mixtures took place so long ago that it is not easy to tell what proportion of white and what proportion of dark blood there is in any native of India. Furthermore, it has been and is customary for Europeans to think of all Indians as “colored” without regard to their possible…

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The Measurement of Negro “Passing”

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 52, Number 1 (July, 1946)
pages 18-22

John H. Burma

Older and popular methods of estimating the number of Negroes who pass over into the white group are no longer to be credited. Considerable misconception exists concerning passing itself, which is more frequently temporary and opportunistic than permanent and complete. In the absence of scientifically accurate counts, the lower estimates of passing are probably more reliable.

Whenever a minority group is oppressed or is the subject of discrimination, some individual members attempt to escape by losing their identity with the minority and becoming absorbed into the majority. In the United States the Negro is such a minority group. In many cases a foreigner may become indistinguishable in a country by adopting the language, customs, and dress of that country. This technique, of

TABLE 1: native whites of native parentage, by Age Groups, for 1900 and 1910

Ages		Populations		Increase or Descrease
1900	1910	1900	1910
0-4…	10-14	5,464,881	5,324,283	-140,589
5-9…	15-19	5,174,220	5,089,055	-85,165
10-14…	20-24	4,660,390	4,682,922	+22,532
15-19…	25-29	4,234,953	4,049,074	-185,879
20-24…	30-34	3,805,609	3,401,601	-404,008

course, avails the Negro little because of his high visibility.

Being a Negro in America is not just a biological matter, it is a legal and social matter as well. It has been declared, by law, how much Negro heredity makes one a Negro; and because of the determination to prevent the infusion of Negro blood into the white group, the law frequently decreed that a person of one thirty-second, one sixty-fourth, or “any discernible amount” of Negro blood was a Negro. This meant that many persons who were legally Negro had so much white blood that they were, biologically, indistinguishable from whites. This, in turn, led to a considerable number of “white Negroes” being mistaken for legal whites and being treated as such. Some of this group, we have long been aware, simply went where they were not personally known and became a permanent part of the white group.

This passing of the legal Negro for white has been well known for over one hundred and fifty years. What we have not been able to ascertain accurately was the number of these legal Negroes who passed as white. This lack of concrete knowledge did not, of course, prevent considerable speculation and opinionated estimates. By the very secrecy which must involve passing, its investigation is almost insuperably hindered, and seldom, if ever, have estimates agreed.

The first, and by far the most widely known, effort to arrive at an unbiased estimate of the number of legal Negroes who have more or less permanently passed into the white group was made by Hornell Hart rather incidentally to a study of migration. His method of analysis was a breakdown of the census returns for native whites of native parentage, by age groups. The reasoning involved hinges on the fact that this group cannot increase. Emigration might logically decrease it, as would deaths, but there should be no increases. Yet, as is seen by Table 1, Hart found a marked increase. In fact, the group who had been between…

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The Hybrid in Hawaii as a Marginal Man

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 39, Number 4 (January 1934)
pages 459-468

William C. Smith
William Jewell College

Several factors conspire to make the hybrid in Hawaii occupy a position markedly different from that of the mixed-blood in other areas. The relative absence of race prejudice on the part of the Hawaiians has created an atmosphere which is favorable both to intermarriage and to persons of mixed blood. There are certain differences between the several groups. The Chinese-Hawaiian is, by consensus, a superior product and is accorded a high status. The Caucasian-Hawaiian is given a lower rating and consequently is more sensitive and self-conscious. There is a considerable group of multiple hybrids, the results of several crosses. These tend to form a group of their own since they cannot readily attach themselves to any of the pure-blood groups as do the dual hybrids. The mixed-bloods of all sorts are drawn together, and within this group there is little hesitancy with reference to intermarriage. This entire group mingles rather freely with the Hawaiians, but there is considerable social distance between them and the Nordics. The hybrid plays an important role in the life of Hawaii. As a participant in two or more cultures he acts as an intermediary and interpreter. The presence of a considerable number of hybrids has been responsible for the relative absence of race prejudice. The hybrids are increasing in numbers and in importance, and it is in the minds of these persons that the conflicts and fusions of culture are taking place. To understand fully the life of Hawaii, attention must be directed to this marginal group.

A study of the hybrids, or racial crosses, in the Hawaiian Islands is interesting because of the contact of so many racial and cultural groups. They constitute one of the major population groups of the Territory. According to the Census of 1930 there are 12,592 Asiatic-Hawaiians and 15,632 Caucasian-Hawaiians out of a total population of 368,336. In addition there are a number of Asiatic-Caucasians and other crosses distributed among the various ancestral groups.

The situation of the hybrids in Hawaii differs markedly from that of the Eurasian in India or the mulatto in continental United States. They are not all in the same situation, however, for there are certain differences in the treatment accorded the various crosses. In the main they are not sensitive as to their mixed ancestry. It is not at all unusual to hear someone say, “I am of mixed blood, and I am proud of it.”

Several factors determine their status in Hawaii. For several centuries the Hawaiians had lived in isolation, which precluded the cultivation of prejudices. When Europeans began to make frequent…

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Mentality of Racial Hybrids

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 36, Number 4 (January 1931)
pages 534-551
DOI: 10.1086/215474

Robert E. Park (1864-1944), Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago

Racial hybrids are one of the natural and inevitable results of migration and the consequent mingling of divergent racial stocks.  The motives bringing peoples of divergent races and cultures together are, in the first instance, economic.  In the long run, economic intercourse enforces more intimate personal and cultural relations, and eventually amalgamation takes place.  When the peoples involved are widely different in culture and in racial characteristics, and particularly when they are distinguished by physical marks, assimilation and amalgamation take place very slowly.  When the resulting hybrid peoples exhibit physical traits that mark them off and distinguish them from both parent-stocks, the mixed bloods are likely to constitute a distinct caste or class occupying a position and status midway between the two races of which they are composed.  The mixed bloods tend everywhere to be, as compared with the full bloods with whom they are identified, an intellectual and professional class.  The most obvious and generally accepted explanation of the superiority of the mixed bloods is that the former are products of two races, one of which is biologically inferior and the other biologically superior.  In the case of the Negro-white hybrids in the United States, other and less obvious explanations have been offered.  It has been pointed out, for example, that the mulatto is the result of a social selection which began during the period of slavery, when the dominant whites selected for their concubines the most comely, and presumably the superior, women among the Negroes.  There is, however, the fact to be considered that in a society where racial distinctions are rigidly maintained, the mixed blood tends to be be keenly conscious of his position.  He feels, as he frequently says, the conflict of warring ancestry in his veins.  The conflict of color is embodied, so to speak, in his person.  His mind is the melting pot in which the lower and higher cultures meet and fuse…

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Race and Marriage

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 15, Number 4 (January 1910)
pages 433-453
DOI: 10.1086/211800

Ulysses G. Weatherly (1865-1940), Associate Professor of History, Economics and Sociology
Indiana University

The aversion exhibited by most animals to pairing with individuals of another species has been attributed by Westermarck to the selective power of hereditary instinct.  those which prefer pairing with their own kind transmit their characteristics to their offspring and become the progenitors of numerous individuals marked by this particular trait.  Hybrid kinds on the other hand have a smaller chance of survival, both because the are either sterile or relatively infertile, and because departure from type is not conductive to the favor of their fellows.  Among plants, where conscious choice is impossible, hybrid individuals are more numerous.  So clearly developed is this instinctive aversion among the higher vertebrates that certain varieties refuse to interbreed with closely related varieties of the same species.  Examples of this occur among some kinds of deer, sheep, and horses.  It is impossible to determine at what point in evolution the non-paring instinct merges into a definite consciousness of kind, or when physical inability to cross is transformed into actual aversion to crossing, but it is certain that species aversion exists far down the scale of animal intelligence.

With the lowest orders of humans there enters another factor based on a highly developed self-sense which is found in animals only in a rudimentary form.  Aversion to cross-breeding may spring from a sense of strangeness due to geographical isolation and non-contact with other human varieties.  Some remote peoples have conceived of themselves as the only ones of their kind, and this idea has been reflected in the group name.  Experience requires only that the name distinguish members of the group from animal kinds with which its member come in contact, and they call themselves merely “men” or “human beings.”  Strangers, especially those of a markedly different physique, are looked upon as beings of another order with whom it is dangerous or wicked to interbreed.  Hybrids resulting from the earliest crossing with strangers are regarded as monstrosities…

…But, as Ripley points out, intermarriage does not really bring about acclimatization at all.  It results in the formation of an entirely new type.  Undoubtedly crossing with the dark races furnishes, for some regions, the sole means by which the European peoples can survive in the tropics in any form.  Furthermore, when aggressive races undertake to govern backward people of alien stock it may be theoretically advantageous to have a mixed class to break the shock between the two types.  Mr. Sydney Olivier is convinced that this is the case in the British West Indies:

I consider that this class of mixed race is a valuable and indispensable part of any West Indian community, and that a colony of blacks, colored and whites has far more organic efficiency and far more promise in it than a colony of black and white alone.  A community of white and black alone will remain, so-far as official classes are concerned, a community of employers and serfs, concessionaires and tributaries, with, at best, at bureaucracy to keep the peace between them and attend to the nice adjustment of this burden.  The graded mixed class in Jamaica helps to make an organic whole and saves it from this distinctive cleavage.

But conditions in Jamaica are peculiar because in that island the hybrids are not, as is usually true, in antagonism with either of the parent stocks, and because there are almost none of the class of “poor whites” who constitute so large an element of the problem in the southern states of America.  The position of the half-caste is usually an unfortunate one.  The consciousness of his superiority to the more primitive stock raises a barrier against sympathetic co-operation on that side, while on the side of the dominant race he finds no willingness to grant social equality.  If he is not more depraved in morals that either of the parent races he at least has acquired the reputation of being so.  Unless the two extremes continue to cross, the mixed breeds tends to disappear, either by marrying back into the darker race or by approaching the whites through conscious sexual selection, lighter mates always being preferred in successive generations.  Hoffman’s investigations show that in Jamaica itself mixed marriages are on the decline and that there is a well-marked tendency among the population to revert to the African type.  In some districts in the southern states likewise the growing race antipathy of whites manifests itself in a decrease of intercourse with negroes.  Bruce believes that this is already resulting not only in a rapid decline in the number of mulattoes, but in a perceptible return of the colored population to the original African type. “As his skin darkens,” continued Bruce, “in its return to the tint which distinguishes that of his remote ancestors, the prospect of the whites and blacks lawfully mixing their blood fades into the thinnest shadow of probability.”…

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The Problem of the Marginal Man

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 41, Number 1 (July 1935)
Pages 1-12
DOI: 10.1086/217001

Everett V. Stonequist (1901-1979), Professor of Sociology
Skidmore College

The marginal man arises in a bi-cultural or multi-cultural situation.  The natural desire of the mixed-blood is to advance toward the group occupying the higher status.  He may be forced to accept the status of the lower group, possibly becoming their leader.  He may be rejected by both groups.  Where accommodation, rather than conflict, prevails, the mixed blood may constitute a middle class.  With intermarriage the mixed-blood approximates more nearly the status of the dominate race.  The marginal individual experiences what [W. E. B.] Du Bois has analyzed as “double consciousness.”  It is as if he regarded himself through two looking-glasses presenting clashing images.  The marginal individual passes through a life-cycle:  introduction to the two cultures, crisis, and adjustment.  The natural history involves an initial phase with a small group of marginal individuals who are ahead of the minority.  This group increases, and a movement develops having as a goal some kind of equality and independence.  The final outcome may be a new social framework; if assimilation is facilitated, the minority may be incorporated into the dominant group, or become the dominant group, and the cycle ends…

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At the federal university in Brazil’s capital city, Brasília, a special committee was constituted in 2004 to evaluate the application file photographs of self-classified negros (read “blacks” or “Afro-Brazilians”) applying to the university via a new racial quota system. An anthropologist, a sociologist, a student representative, and three negro movement actors make up that committee, and their identities are kept sub secreto (Maio and Santos 2005). If the committee does not consider a candidate to be a negro or negra, then he or she is disqualified. The applicant can, however, appeal the decision and appear in person before the committee to contest his or her racial classification (Universidade de Brasília 2004). The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul has also adopted the use of photographs and a verification committee for a racial quota system (UEMS 2004). At that institution, the committee is made up of two university representatives and three negro movement actors (Corrêa 2003).

This unusual modus operandi highlights a period of instability in racial categories, associated with a novel phase in the political struggle for identity and inclusion by the Brazilian negro movement. Through a multifaceted process, but without disruptive protest or mass mobilizations, the movement has successfully pressured state actors to mandate negro inclusion in higher education and to encode that legislation with language emic to the movement. The label negro is not an official census term; the Brazilian state has for well over a century used a ternary, or three-category, format to represent the black-white color continuum that includes an intermediate or mixed-race category. In contrast, negro is part of a dichotomous racial scheme, counterposed to white, whose novelty in official contexts leads to the thorny issue of defining its boundaries. Nonetheless, some 30 Brazilian public universities have already adopted race-targeted policies (Ribeiro 2007).  Moreover, legislation is now before the national congress mandating that all federal universities adopt racial quotas…

Stanley R. Bailey, “Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil,” American Journal of Sociology. (Volume 114, Number 3, 2008): 577–614.

Unmixing for Race Making in Brazil

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 114, Number 3 (November 2008)
pages 577–614
DOI: 10.1086/592859

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

This article analyzes race-targeted policy in Brazil as both a political stake and a powerful instrument in an unfolding classificatory struggle over the definition of racial boundaries.  The Brazilian state traditionally embraced mixed-race classification, but is adopting racial quotas employing a black/white scheme.  To explore potential consequences of that turn for beneficiary identification and boundary formation, the author analyzes attitudinal survey data on race-targeted policy and racial classification in multiple formats, including classification in comparison to photographs. The results show that almost half of the mixed-race sample, when constrained to dichotomous classification, opts for whiteness, a majority rejects mixed-race individuals for quotas, and the mention of quotas for blacks in a split-ballot experiment nearly doubles the percentage choosing that racial category.  Theories of how states make race emphasize the use of official categories to legislate exclusion.  In contrast, analysis of the Brazilian case illuminates how states may also make race through policies of official inclusion.

At the federal university in Brazil’s capital city, Brasília, a special committee was constituted in 2004 to evaluate the application file photographs of self-classified negros (read “blacks” or “Afro-Brazilians”) applying to the university via a new racial quota system. An anthropologist, a sociologist, a student representative, and three negro movement actors make up that committee, and their identities are kept sub secreto (Maio and Santos 2005). If the committee does not consider a candidate to be a negro or negra, then he or she is disqualified. The applicant can, however, appeal the decision and appear in person before the committee to contest his or her racial classification (Universidade de Brasília 2004). The State University of Mato Grosso do Sul has also adopted the use of photographs and a verification committee for a racial quota system (UEMS 2004). At that institution, the committee is made up of two university representatives and three negro movement actors (Corrêa 2003).

This unusual modus operandi highlights a period of instability in racial categories, associated with a novel phase in the political struggle for identity and inclusion by the Brazilian negro movement. Through a multifaceted process, but without disruptive protest or mass mobilizations, the movement has successfully pressured state actors to mandate negro inclusion in higher education and to encode that legislation with language emic to the movement. The label negro is not an official census term; the Brazilian state has for well over a century used a ternary, or three-category, format to represent the black-white color continuum that includes an intermediate or mixed-race category. In contrast, negro is part of a dichotomous racial scheme, counterposed to white, whose novelty in official contexts leads to the thorny issue of defining its boundaries. Nonetheless, some 30 Brazilian public universities have already adopted race-targeted policies (Ribeiro 2007).  Moreover, legislation is now before the national congress mandating that all federal universities adopt racial quotas…

…The Brazilian census has used the categories branco (white), pardo (brown or mulatto), preto (black), and amarelo (yellow or Asian descent) since 1940 and added the indígena (indigenous) category in the 1991 census. According to its 2000 census, Brazil’s racial or color composition is 54% white, 39% mulatto, 6% black, 0.5% yellow, and 0.4% indigenous. The correspondence of Brazilian census terms with a color continuum is often contrasted with the U.S. use of ancestry for classifying its population (Nogueira 1985). In the United States, ancestry has been historically understood via the rule of hypodescent (Davis 1991). According to that rule’s logic, for any person of mixed ancestry that includes some ponderable African extraction, all other ancestries are generally obviated.

In Brazil, the mulatto and black census categories are considered by negro movement actors, as well as by many scholars, to comprise persons of some discernible degree of African ancestry, whom they view as members of a negro racial group (Guimara˜es 2001; Ribeiro 2007). Prominent negro politician, movement actor, and scholar Abdias do Nascimento clarifies this specific vision of ancestry, color, and race in Brazil:

Official Brazilian census data use two color categories for African descendants: preto (literally, “black”) for the dark-skinned and pardo (roughly, mulatto and mestizo) for others. It is now accepted convention to identify the black population as the sum of the preto and pardo categories, referred to as negro, afro-brasileira, or afro-descendente. In English, “black,” “African Brazilian,” and “people of African descent” refer to this same sum of the two groups. (Nascimento and Nascimento 2001, p. 108)

In contrast to the traditional color classification scheme, this new system approximates the U.S. understanding of racial group membership (Nobles 2000, p. 172; Guimarães 2001, p. 173). That is, the negro-versus-white dichotomous classification scheme in Brazil similarly joins together individuals with some discernible degree of African ancestry into one racial group for race-targeted policy administration, in essence representing an attempt to clarify ambiguous boundaries by “unmixing” the population.

Mulattos and blacks in Brazil, however, may not view themselves as common members of a negro racial group (Agier 1993; Marx 1998). Winant writes of nonwhites’ tendency in Brazil “not only to deny, but to avoid their own [black] racial identity” (Winant 2001, p. 246; emphasis in original). Hanchard, too, calls attention in his work to Brazilian nonwhites’ “negation of their [black] identity” (Hanchard 1994, p. 22). The term negro, then, may be more a classification attributed to nonwhites by movement actors than a real social group embraced by the general nonwhite population (Nobles 2000; Telles 2004)…

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The Race Construct and Public Opinion: Understanding Brazilian Beliefs about Racial Inequality and Their Determinants

The American Journal of Sociology
Volume 108, Number 2 (September 2002)
pages 406–39

Stanley R. Bailey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of California, Irvine

Researchers hold that the racial democracy ideology fosters a rejection of discrimination-based explanations for racial inequality, thereby affecting antiracist mobilization. This study finds that Brazilians understand the discriminatory basis of inequality and that an attitudinal dimension associated with racial democracy strongly increases the likelihood of that understanding. Negative stereotyping produces a smaller opposite effect, and “race” is not a significant predictor. Finally, Brazilian and American racial attitudes differ considerably in explaining black disadvantage. These findings question perceptions of Brazilian racial attitudes and the efficacy of
dominant theories for their analysis, suggesting a context-driven approach to theorizing and for antidiscrimination strategizing.

…BRAZILIAN RACIAL ATTITUDES AND THE MYTH OF RACIAL DEMOCRACY
Historical Background

Gilberto Freyre (1946) is credited with popularizing the notion of racial democracy in Brazil in the 1930s. Confronted with scientific racism beliefs in the superiority of a white race and that “mixed” blood created degeneracy, Freyre proposed instead that “cross-breeding” produced hybrid vigor in humans, thereby enabling a bright future for the otherwise condemned “dark” Brazilian nation. He emphasized an uncommon flexibility on the part of Portuguese colonizers that made possible extensive miscegenation, and he claimed that “mixed” Brazilians (of three races: Africans, Europeans, and Indigenous) gave birth to a new metarace, constituting a new world in the tropics (Freyre 1959).

In this ideological construct, miscegenation became the motor behind Brazilian racial dynamics and racial democracy. Due to the extensive mixing, potential group boundaries blurred, rendering racism in the manner of U.S. segregation and polarization unintelligible. Unlike nations where ethnic and racial identities were stubbornly ascribed or asserted, in Brazil a universal national identity transcended particularist racial identification. What in other societies were considered incompatible social segments, and where group interests were national organizational principles, in Brazil they were united into Brazilianness. In sum, Brazilians viewed their society through “anti-racialism” lenses, as opposed to those of “racialism” in the United States (Guimarães 1999)…

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Under and Beyond Constraints: Resource Allocation to Young Children from Biracial Families

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 112, Number 4 (January 2007)
pages 1044–1094
ISSN: 0002-9602/2007/11204-0003
DOI: 10.1086/508793

Simon Cheng, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Connecticut

Brian Powell, Rudy Professor of Sociology
Indiana University

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99, the authors examine the extent to which biracial families differ from monoracial families in their transmission of resources to young children. In these analyses, the authors demonstrate the utility of distinguishing not only between white—biracial and nonwhite—biracial families and but also between even more refined measures of biracial families (e.g., white father/Asian mother). The authors find that, in most cases, biracial families provide comparable or greater economic and cultural resources to their children than do their monoracial counterparts, but offer fewer advantages in interactional/social resources. This overall pattern remains even after sociodemographic factors are taken into consideration. Exceptions to this pattern also are identified and explored. Implications for our understanding of racial stratification, interracial relations, and the role of both human agency and constraints on intergenerational transmission of resources are discussed.

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