Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • The mulatto may, in some respects, be an improvement on the negro, but he is certainly no improvement on the white man, and in the long run the mulatto, like all the other hybrids, becomes extinct.

    I have never seen the results of amalgamation on so large a scale as the Doctor proposes with his great caldron; but I have seen the white, black and Indian, all mixed up in one person, but that person was nothing like Dr. Talmage’s beauty nor was he 95 per cent. beyond anything I had ever seen. The white and yellow were very much marred in the mixture, and the black not much improved, if improved at all. The mulatto may, in some respects, be an improvement on the negro, but he is certainly no improvement on the white man, and in the long run the mulatto, like all the other hybrids, becomes extinct. My long observation goes to prove that in mixing the races all are weakened and none are benefitted.

    Rev. S. P. Richardson, D.D., “Amalgamation,” Weekly Banner-Watchman [Athens, Georgia], (March 26, 1889). Source: Digital Library of Georgia.

  • Nothing so accelerates the human race as the mingling of races… It is the intermingling of the races in America that is going to destroy the last vestige of race prejudice…

    “Nothing so accelerates the human race as the mingling of races. And in this country we are going to have all the opposite nationalities intermingled. It is the intermingling of the races in America that is going to destroy the last vestige of race prejudice. How heaven feels about it you may conclude from the fact that Christ, a Jew and born of a Jewess, promulgated a religion for all races, and that Paul, a Jew, became the chief apostle to the Gentiles..” —Reverend Thomas De Witt Talmage

    “Room for All,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, (Monday, March 3, 1889, page 2, column 4). Source: Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection.

  • Diverse Millennial Students in College: Implications for Faculty and Student Affairs

    Diverse Millennial Students in College: Implications for Faculty and Student Affairs

    Stylus Publishing, LLC.
    October 2011
    320 pages
    6″ x 9″
    Cloth ISBN: 978 1 57922 446 2
    Paper ISBN: 978 1 57922 447 9
    Ebook ISBN: 978 1 57922 712 8
    Library Ebook ISBN: 978 1 57922 711 1

    Edited by:

    Fred A. Bonner II

    Aretha F. Marbley

    Mary F. Howard-Hamilton

    While many institutions have developed policies to address the myriad needs of Millennial college students and their parents, inherent in many of these initiatives is the underlying assumption that this student population is a homogeneous group. This book is significant because it addresses and explores the characteristics and experiences of Millennials from an array of perspectives, taking into account not only racial and ethnic identity but also cultural background, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status differences—all factors contributing to how these students interface with academe.

    In providing a “voice” to “voiceless” populations of African American, Asian American, Bi/Multi-Racial, Latino, Native American, and LGBT millennial college students, this book engages with such questions as: Does the term “Millennial” apply to these under-represented students? What role does technology, pop culture, sexual orientation, and race politics play in the identity development for these populations? Do our current minority development theories apply to these groups? And, ultimately, are higher education institutions prepared to meet both the cultural and developmental needs of diverse minority groups of Millennial college students?”

    This book is addressed primarily to college and university administrators and faculty members who seek greater depth and understanding of the issues associated with diverse Millennial college student populations. This book informs readers about the ways in which this cohort differs from their majority counterparts to open a dialogue about how faculty members and administrators can meet their needs effectively both inside and outside the classroom. It will also be of value to student affairs personnel, students enrolled in graduate level courses in higher education and other social science courses that explore issues of college student development and diversity, particularly students planning to work with diverse Millennial college students in both clinical or practical work settings.

    Contributors: Rosie Maria Banda; Fred Bonner, II; Lonnie Booker, Jr.; Brian Brayboy; Mitchell Chang; Andrea Domingue; Tonya Driver; Alonzo M. Flowers; Gwen Dungy; Jami Grosser; Kandace Hinton; Mary Howard-Hamilton; Tom Jackson, Jr.; Aretha F. Marbley; Samuel Museus; Anna Ortiz; Tammie Preston-Cunningham; Nana Osei-Kofi; Kristen Renn; Petra Robinson; Genyne Royal; Victor Saenz; Rose Anna Santos; Mattyna Stephens; Terrell Strayhorn; Theresa Survillion; Nancy Jean Tubbs; Malia Villegas; Stephanie J. Waterman; Nick Zuniga.

    Table of Contents

    • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    • INTRODUCTION / Fred A. Bonner, II
    • PART ONE: DIVERSE MILLENNIALS IN COLLEGE: A National Perspective
      • 1. A NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: Testing Our Assumptions About Generational Cohorts / Gwendolyn Jordan Dungy
    • PART TWO: AFRICAN AMERICAN MILLENNIALS IN COLLEGE
      • 2. AFRICAN AMERICAN MILLENNIALS IN COLLEGE / Terrell L. Strayhorn
      • 3. THE PERSON, ENVIRONMENT, AND GENERATIONAL INTERACTION: An African American Rural Millennial Story / Corey Guyton and Mary F. Howard-Hamilton
    • PART THREE: ASIAN AMERICAN MILLENNIALS IN COLLEGE
      • 4. ASIAN AMERICAN AND PACIFIC ISLANDER MILLENNIAL STUDENTS AT A TIPPING POINT / Mitchell James Chang
      • 5. ASIAN AMERICAN MILLENNIAL COLLEGE STUDENTS IN CONTEXT : Living at the Intersection of Diversification, Digitization, and Globalization / Samuel D. Museus
    • PART FOUR: LATINA/O MILLENNIALS IN COLLEGE
      • 6. LA NUEVA GENERACIÓN: Latina/o Millennial College Students at Four-Year Institutions / Victor B. Saenz, Manuel Gonzalez, and Sylvia Hurtado
      • 7. MILLENNIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND LATINO/A STUDENTS / Anna M. Ortiz and Dorali Pichardo-Diaz
    • PART FIVE: NATIVE AMERICAN MILLENNIALS IN COLLEGE
      • 8. INDIGENOUS MILLENNIAL STUDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION / Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy and Angelina E. Castagno
      • 9. NATIVE AMERICAN MILLENNIAL COLLEGE STUDENTS / Stephanie J. Waterman
    • PART SIX: LGBTQ MILLENNIALS IN COLLEGE
      • 10. LGBTQ MILLENNIALS IN COLLEGE / Lori D. Patton, Carrie Kortegast, and Gabriel Javier
      • 11. IDENTITY MAKEOVER MILLENNIAL EDITION / Using Contemporary Theoretical Frameworks to Explore Identity Intersections Among LGBTQ Millennial Populations / Lori D. Patton and Stephanie Chang
    • PART SEVEN: BI- AND MULTIRACIAL MILLENNIALS IN COLLEGE
      • 12. MULTIRACIALIZATION, ‘‘MIXING,’’ AND MEDIA PEDAGOGY / Nana Osei-Kofi
      • 13. MIXED RACE MILLENNIALS IN COLLEGE: Multiracial Students in the Age of Obama / Kristen A. Renn
    • PART EIGHT: VOICES OF MILLENNIALS IN COLLEGE: A Diversity of Perspectives
      • 14. MOVING UP AND OUT: Students of Color Transitioning From College to the Workforce / Lonnie Booker, Jr., Tonya Turner-Driver, Tammie Preston- Cunningham, Theresa Survillion, and Mattyna L. Stephens
      • 15. CURRICULUM DESIGN FOR MILLENNIAL STUDENTS OF COLOR / Rosa Maria Banda, Alonzo M. Flowers, III, Petra Robinson, Genyne Royal, Rose Anna Santos, and Nicholas Zuniga
    • CONCLUSION: FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER GENERATION: New Realities, New Possibilities, and a Reason for Hope / Aretha F. Marbley
    • ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
    • INDEX

  • Clearly Invisible Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity by Marcia Alesan Dawkins, and: The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium by Michele Elam (review)

    Clearly Invisible Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity by Marcia Alesan Dawkins, and: The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium by Michele Elam (review)

    Philip Roth Studies
    Volume 9, Number 2, Fall 2013
    pages 99-103
    DOI: 10.1353/prs.2013.0024

    Donavan L. Ramon
    Rutgers University

    Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012, vxi + 229 pp.

    Michele Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011, xxiii + 277 pp.

    According to W.E.B. DuBois’s prophetic theory articulated in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (221). Myriad critical and popular pieces over the past several years suggest that this theory has run its course: the celebration of mixed race people putatively implies the “end” of race. Certainly the election of the first biracial president has been touted as the epitome of post-race life in America. Yet as recent critical interventions by Michele Elam and Marcia Alesan Dawkins remind us, race remains prevalent because of biracial people, not in spite of it.

    The continuities between DuBois’s theory and Elam’s are underscored by the title of the latter’s monograph. In The Souls of Mixed Folk, the Stanford University English Professor asserts that the notion of post-Black art being apolitical is a complete fiction, much like the idea that post-Civil Rights politics are in decline. By examining the images of mixed race subjects in a wide range of artistic forms, Elam argues that these venues are the newer locations that “engage issues of civil rights and social change” (16). To accept this belief, she begins her book by convincing readers that the increased interest in mixed race deludes many people into believing that race no longer exists. If this is truly the case, then why do fictional representations of biracial people continue to represent anxiety across a multitude of genres? More specifically, why has the last several years seen a resurgence in narratives of racial passing—such as Philip Roth’s The Human Stain?

    Elam explores these questions across five thoroughly researched and well-written chapters. The first traces the history of mixed race studies in curricula across the nation while raising related yet ignored issues. For instance she problematizes the focus of heteronormative depictions of mixed race families at the expense of homosexual ones, while also reminding us that mixed Americans have historically been the result of sexual violation. She believes we must be mindful of considering the product of these unions as representatives of racial progress without understanding the nuances of slavery and violence inflicted on black bodies by whites.

    Chapter two changes the focus from history to contemporary comic strips by Aaron McGruder and Nate Creekmore. In their works, Elam rightly sees racial identity as “a matter of public negotiation, social location, cultural affirmation, political commitment, and historical homage” (58). In chapter four, Elam situates the traditional European bildungsroman against the “mixed race bildungsroman”. The former focuses on the “social incorporation of the individual” (125) whereas protagonists in the latter are not “incorporated into the society or the social progress that they are supposed to represent . . . [and they] challenge the popular image of the ‘modern minority’” (126). She applies her theory of the “mixed race bildungsroman” to Emily Raboteau’s The Professor’s Daughter (1997) and Danzy Senna’s Symptomatic (2004). Elam’s last chapter examines performances of mixed race in Carl Hancock Rux’s play Talk and “The Racial Draft” skit from Dave Chappelle’s defunct late-night comedy show. Her argument here is that in both performances, there is a “re-visioning and a re-membering of the national order” (161).

    The middle chapter is the one that is most germane to this journal, as it examines racial passing in Danzy Senna’s Causcasia (1999), Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (2000). Despite research to the contrary, Elam begins this chapter by arguing that racial passing literature is far from being an obsolete genre, as these novels attest. Despite living in a post-race era, these narratives collectively argue for the rebirth of racial passing as a “social inquiry” (98). Explaining further, the novels addressed here force readers to reconsider “the performative, iterative nature of racial identity as a rich social heuristic” (98).

    This is nowhere more evident than in The Human Stain , where racial passing acts as a “reactionary vehicle to critique political correctness”—particularly because it is set during President Clinton’s sex scandal (98). In this regard, “performance,” can have multiple meanings in the novel: one referring…

  • Garcetti, New Los Angeles Mayor, Reflects Changing City

    Garcetti, New Los Angeles Mayor, Reflects Changing City

    The New York Times
    2013-10-07

    Jennifer Medina

    LOS ANGELES — He is Jewish. He is Latino. He can break dance and play jazz piano. He speaks nearly impeccable Spanish. He has talked longingly about growing his own vegetables and maybe even raising his own chickens. He lives on this city’s hip east side.

    Three months into office, Mayor Eric Garcetti seems to embody a host of ethnic, ideological and cultural strains that are transforming Los Angeles. At the same time, he is avoiding any temptation of red carpet glamour here, a striking change from his predecessor, Antonio Villaraigosa, who came in as mayor riding a powerful wave of popularity but left with decidedly less regard.

    “In some ways everything I have done has prepared me for this job,” Mr. Garcetti said recently in his still mostly barren City Hall office, which he plans to decorate with local historical memorabilia. “Governing Los Angeles is all about cultural literacy — nobody can be completely literate across the board here, but if you don’t have some understanding of many of those cultures, you will be left behind.”…

    …But while many of the city’s most powerful Latino politicians, including Mr. Villaraigosa, were raised in such immigrant enclaves, Mr. Garcetti grew up in the well-heeled San Fernando Valley. Early in the campaign, he faced pointed comments from other elected officials, including the speaker of the State Assembly, that questioned his Latino credentials. Even now, without the pressure of campaigning, he is not given to wax philosophical about his identity. “There was all this craziness about, ‘What are you?’ ” he said. “I am what I am, as Popeye would say. I think we are all tired of that conversation.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Is race erased? Decoding race from patterns of neural activity when skin color is not diagnostic of group boundaries

    Is race erased? Decoding race from patterns of neural activity when skin color is not diagnostic of group boundaries

    Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
    Volume 8, Issue 7 (October 2013)
    pages 750-755
    DOI: 10.1093/scan/nss063

    Kyle G. Ratner
    Department of Psychology
    New York University

    Christian Kaul
    Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science
    New York University

    Jay J. Van Bavel, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
    New York University

    Several theories suggest that people do not represent race when it does not signify group boundaries. However, race is a visually salient social category associated with skin tone and facial features. In the current study, we investigated whether race could be decoded from distributed patterns of neural activity in the fusiform gyri and early visual cortex when visual features that often co-vary with race were orthogonal to group membership. To this end, we used multivariate pattern analysis to examine an fMRI dataset that was collected while participants assigned to mixed-race groups categorized own-race and other-race faces as belonging to their newly assigned group. Whereas conventional univariate analyses provided no evidence of biased race-based responses in the fusiform gyri or early visual cortex, multivariate pattern analysis suggested that race was represented within these regions. Moreover, race was represented in the fusiform gyri to a greater extent than early visual cortex, suggesting that the fusiform gyri results do not merely reflect low-level perceptual information (e.g., color, contrast) from early visual cortex. The findings indicate that patterns of activation within specific regions of the visual cortex may represent race even when overall activation in these regions is not driven by racial information.

    Read the entire article here.

  • Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History by Kathleen López (review)

    Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History by Kathleen López (review)

    Journal of Latin American Geography
    Volume 12, Number 3, 2013
    pages 234-236
    DOI: 10.1353/lag.2013.0049

    Joseph L. Scarpaci, Professor Emeritus of Geography
    Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

    Kathleen López, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013)

    The new millennium cast into the academic and general public’s dialect the word ‘globalization’ as well as the call that everyone should ‘think globally and act locally.’ That may be all well and good, but this adage often falls flat when scholars aim to connect the local with global (glocal). Like the words ‘impact,’ ‘effect,’ and ‘affect,’ the terms at once say everything but communicate little. As the graduate coordinator of my doctoral program was fond of harping in front of frightened graduate students many decades back, “perfectly general, perfectly true, but absolutely meaningless.” Clichés, alas, often substitute for deep, critical thinking and analysis.

    For these reasons, when one sees a subtitle that includes the ambitiously stated ‘transnational history,’ a little skepticism inevitably comes to mind. Geographers are no doubt even more skeptical because, after all, scale and spatial analysis situate both human and physical geographies in the broader context of social and natural sciences, respectively.

    Enter Kathleen López: Assistant Professor of History and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies (a title that might also give one pause) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Whereas many Latinamericanist geographers struggle to speak any semblance of Spanish and conduct fieldwork with the assistance of Latin American and Caribbean scholars, Dr. López approaches the study of transnational migration to the island of Cuba armed with fluent Spanish and Chinese. Armed with extensive field work in Cuba, China, and the United States, Dr. López assembles a tour d’force that brings archival, ethnographic, and historic analyses to bear on a story that traces the history of Chinese migrants to Cuba in the nineteenth century, through the alliance with Cuban forces to overturn the colonial yoke imposed by Madrid, to the twentieth century events that include strong xenophobia, the Japanese-China war, WW II, and the Cuban Revolution. Copiously referenced and gracefully written, Chinese Cubans tells the tale of a truly global transnational migration pattern that documents how the Chinese in Cuba used investment, remittances, and return visits to bridge these migrants’ search for the best of Cuba and their homeland. The tale begins with the importation of more than 100,000 Chinese workers – indentured servants often treated as slaves because of Great Britain’s objection to the African slave trade—who build rail lines and work in sugar plantations in ways similar to how Chinese ‘coolie’ workers did in the United States. Chinese Cubans were fiercely loyal to the Cuban independence movement of the nineteenth century, and great accolades were given to them by the fiercest and most venerable of revolutionary fighters. Unlike conditions in Peru, Jamaica, and the especially harsh anti-Chinese movement in Mexico in the 1930s, we learn that Cuba was relatively welcoming (overall) in receiving the Chinese diaspora. They added to the miscegenation (mestizaje) stew (ajiaco) that Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortíz highly praised. However, to López’s credit, she calls into question the much-venerated Ortíz’s description of this marginal contribution to Cuban culture (which Ortíz postulated that, numerically at least, was a European and African fusion). The so-called ‘third founder’ of Cuba (after Columbus and Alexander von Humboldt), Ortíz derided Chinese immigrants for their certain tolerance of homosexuality, their (limited) use of opium. That is why he classified them phenotypically (i.e., “yellow mongoloids”….”and essential otherness” (p. 210).

    Readers will find that similar prejudices hurled upon immigrants elsewhere were also cast upon Chinese Cubans. They were often characterized as ‘inassimilable’ just as Jews were in Europe in the twentieth century and much the way Mexicans are portrayed in the current U.S. immigration debacle. When hard economic times fell upon Cuba, anti-nationalism was whipped up against Cubans of Chinese descent, who were often portrayed as perennial strike breakers and ‘scabs.’

    Not surprisingly, there are indirect parallels to be drawn between the relationship of mainland (communist) China and Taiwan, on the one hand, and Cuba and the United States, on the other hand. The 1949 Chinese communist takeover of mainland China and the exodus of Chiang Kai-shek to Formosa (Taiwan) generates yet another out-migration of Chinese to Cuba. And in 1959, many Chinese…

  • In‐and‐out‐of‐race: The story of Noble Johnson

    In‐and‐out‐of‐race: The story of Noble Johnson

    Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
    Volume 15, Issue 1, 2005
    pages 33-52
    DOI: 10.1080/07407700508571487

    Jane Gaines, Professor of Film Studies
    Columbia University School of the Arts

    Noble Johnson’s story is a very American story, a story more typical than we have historically wanted to admit. It is the story of race loyalty and race betrayal, of family belonging and disconnection. It is a mysterious story of disappearance, a chronicle of the way a public person became a “missing person.” His is also the story of someone who was more than one—a sort of man with a thousand faces and a range of identities. We claim him as an important African American while acknowledging that he chose to think of himself and to live in terms of other equally raced categories during different portions of his long life.

    The case for owning his African American heritage was continually made to Johnson by his brother George in correspondence during the later years of his life. George’s history is one of deep affiliation with the African American community. A booster for black enterprise from his years as a real estate agent in the all-black town of Muskogee, Oklahoma, in his later years George started a black entertainment clippings service in Los Angeles, where he moved from Omaha, Nebraska, in 1926. But the glory for George was in the formation, in 1916, of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, a business made possible by Noble Johnson’s Los Angeles connections but also George’s industrious work building a distribution…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Professor discusses covert racism

    Professor discusses covert racism

    The Dartmouth
    Dartmouth College
    Hanover, New Hampshire
    2013-09-27

    Bryn Morgan

    Though racism is more covert today, blacks are subject to the same prejudice as they were in the 1960s, Duke University sociology professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argued in a lecture on Thursday. Bonilla-Silva said a new form of racism has emerged, replacing Jim Crow racism.

    “We are not post-racial,” he said. “This ideology is suave but deadly.”

    Focusing on relations between whites and blacks, Bonilla-Silva said the latter’s current economic status has remained the same in recent decades, even as the forms of subordination and racism have since evolved.

    After describing various ways in which this ideology is prevalent in today’s society, Bonilla-Silva presented three main points about color-blind racism: the forms of interpreting racism, rhetorical strategies for articulating racism and stories contextualizing racism.

    Bonilla-Silva said whites believe that they are not racist and often use the election of President Barack Obama to support the claim that America has moved beyond its racially tense past…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Amalgamation

    Amalgamation

    Weekly Banner-Watchman
    Athens, Georgia
    1889-03-26
    page 1, columns 3-4
    The Athens Historic Newspaper database is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia as part of Georgia HomePLACE.
    Transcribed by Steven F. Riley

    A Reply By Rev. S. P. Richardson D. D. to a Sermon By Dr. Talmage, Preached in Brooklyn, N.Y. March 3rd, on “The United States, Immigration Ethology, and the Amalgamation of All the Races.

    Text Acts XVII and part of the 20th verse, “And hath made of one blood all nations,” (the whole verse) of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The whole verse shows clearly that God, instead of intending to unite by immigration and amalgamation all nationalities, before determined and appointed their bounds of separation. He gave Africa to Ham, Asia to Shem and Europe and the West to Japheth. He also gave form, brain and color to each family suited to develop the countries in which he placed them.

    Dr. Talmadge says: “The advantage of the influx of nations, through mighty additions of foreign population to our above population I think God is giving, to fill this land with a race of people 95 per cent superior to anything the world has ever seen. Marriage outside of one own nationality and with another style of nationality is a mighty gain.”

    The Doctor then speaks of himself and of the very great gain by mixing the Scotch and Irish. Dr. Talmage knows that the European nations are largely made up of the white or Japhethic race, all of the one primordial race. The Doctor is a great man in some respects, but what would he have been if only his Scotch and Irish blood had been supplemented with a little sprinkling of negro, Indian and Hottentot? He proposes to make (not the North) “but the whole United States a great caldron, in which to mix all races and all nationalities, and to formulate in this caldron, out of all races, a new race or manhood “95 par cent, superior to anything this world has ever seen.”

    The Doctor proves, as he thinks, from his garbled text, and from a scientific analysis of one single part of man, “the blood” that all men are the same. Now if the Doctor really wanted to be fair in his presentation of his subject to the world, why did he not subject the hair, skin, bones and odor of all the races to the same analysis? Why just take one thing, “the blood.” All animals have some one thing in common with man, seeing, hearing and tasting belong to the ass as well as the man.

    If all the races are one when put into his big caldron, will they not still be one when he takes them out? If the putting of all the races into the big caldron, with all their different colors and odors, would make them all Scotch-Irish, it might be well to put them in, but so far as the experiment has been made up to date, the facts are that in exact proportion as you put in white, black, or yellow, it comes out white, black or yellow in the very same proportion it was put in. If the white and black mix they will be mulattoes in all coming generations.

    I have never seen the results of amalgamation on so large a scale as the Doctor proposes with his great caldron; but I have seen the white, black and Indian, all mixed up in one person, but that person was nothing like Dr. Talmage’s beauty nor was he 95 per cent. beyond anything I had ever seen. The white and yellow were very much marred in the mixture, and the black not much improved, if improved at all. The mulatto may, in some respects, be an improvement on the negro, but he is certainly no improvement on the white man, and in the long run the mulatto, like all the other hybrids, becomes extinct. My long observation goes to prove that in mixing the races all are weakened and none are benefitted. All the different families of the same race may be benefitted by mixing, like the Scotch and the Irish, but never by mixing the races. If God had intended the amalgamation of all the races, why did He, by creation, or miraculous interposition separate the races, and appoint them bounds, and give to each the place of his habitation. The negro is not a human invention, nor is the white or yellow man, but a divine appointment. The three colors are primordial, and are not radically changed by food, or climate. The negro was black four thousand years ago, as he is now. God says he cannot change his skin any more than the leopard can change his spots, and yet the Doctor would change God’s decree.

    Europe and the North brought the negro from his God-given home, and sold him to the South, then becoming dissatisfied with what they had done, destroyed a half million of Southern white people to set the four million of negroes free. In their modes of warfare they showed that they were capable of the deepest depravity, and really acted worse than common Savages. Now they are dissatisfied with the freedom of the negro, and their most popular and sensational preacher sounded the bugle note on the 3d of March in Brooklyn, N.Y., to rig up a big caldron, into which be proposes to cast both negroes and whites, and stew them both down to a common mulatto, and destroy both the white and black races, and substitute them with a race of mulattoes, a type of humanity God never made. There is not a mulatto or mule in the primordial type, in the kingdom of nature. The Bible, experience and God in universal nature, are all pronounced against the amalgamation of the races. I have never known a Scotch-Irishman, Dutchman or Englishman, not even a cold blooded Yankee to improve their posterity by mixing with negroes and Indians. Nor have I ever known the negro or Indian much improved by mixing with them. The real facts are the negro has no more affinities for the white and yellow races, than they have for him.

    Dr. Talmage says: “There was a time when I entertained race prejudices, but thanks to God that prejudice is gone and if I set in a church on one side a black man and on the other side an Indian and before me a Chinaman and behind me a Turk, I would be as happy as I am now standing in the presence of this brilliant auiience. The sooner we get this corpse of race prejudice buried the healthier will be (not our Northern) but American atmosphere.”  This is the most pronounced social equality and amalgamation I have ever heard from any man. I have denied, that the Northern churches held any such views, and that it was only a ghost of Southern imagination. Dr. Talmage is a representative mam, and knows the mind and feelings of the North.

    Dr. Talmage ought to be a good Presbyterian and let God’s divine decrees alone. Did God not ordain the races? The Doctor ought to be tried for heresy and put out of the church for trying to violate the divine decrees by making mulattoes out of people which God has made white and black. I would suggest to the good Doctor and his brilliant congregation, to make the experiment of mixing the races on a smaller scale, and not have so large a funeral all at onca. Let one of the Doctor’s daughters marry a negro, and another a Chinamen, and another a Hottentot, and then let his Elders follow his exaple, and take time and see if, on a small scale, they can produce a race 95 per cent above anything the world has ever seen.  Then show his picture of this new development to his Northern friends, who drive the negro children out of their white public schools.  If the North will fix up large gardens and invite the negroes to come up North among their friends, and then enter into a hearty amalgamation, the negro problem may be solved.

    If the good Doctor will take the time and pains to review the history of nations, their decay and final fall, he will see that in most instances their ruin was the result, both religiously and politically of mixing nations and amalgamation. God forbade the Jews to mix with other nations. Dr. Talmage, in the face of the Bible, proposes to build up a great nation out of the very causes that have destroyed greater nations. I have no doubt but our good Dr. Talmage and brilliant Brooklyn congregations would suffer crucifixion before they would mix their families with negroes, Chinamen and Hottentots. This great country has been built up, not by the Hametic or Shemetic races, but by the children of Japheth–English, Dutch, Scotch and Irish, and the country will never be injured by the immigration, of those nationalities, or our amalgamation with them. I am English and German, but no negro or Chinaman. An Englishman or Scotchman is not a foreigner in this country, but one of the same white family. —S. P. Richardson.