Mixed Race Studies

The Hybrid and the Social Process

Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 6, Number 4 (4th Quarter, 1945)
pages 327-336

Jitsuichi Masuoka

An intermixture of blood is an invariable outcome of human migration, contact, and association. To this statement there seems to be no historical exception. Races and peoples, however much they may be physically and culturally dissimilar, if they come together at all, associate to produce individuals of nondescript physical type. In its essence, the hybridization of peoples and races is a biological process, but as it has a wider social implication, it may be studied as a part and parcel of social processes.

A study of changes in genetic factors, as a consequence of racial intermixing, belongs properly to the science of human genetics. Race mixture in its wider ramification is a sociological problem for reasons generally recognized but not always fully understood. Man’s sex appetite, as of all other human impulses, is everywhere culturally channeled, and in this broad sense, one may well speak of race mixture as falling within the orbit of sociology. Moreover, as the intermixture of races runs counter to the existing sex mores of the societies in contact and, as it undermines, in the long run, the pre-existing social order, the problem of race mixture comes to have a sociological rather than biological import. In this way it comes about that the problems of “race mixture” and “race problem” are inseparable in the minds of many; thus, making an objective study of racial hybridization difficult. Race mixing is freighted with heightened emotions and sentiments and intellectual stupidities rampage in this area of discourse. It seems important, therefore, that this problem be examined as a phase of general social process. By viewing it within this wider frame of reference, one may attain a reasonable degree of objectivity toward race mixture.

Much has been written about racial miscegenation by students of biology, psychology, and social sciences. But, the hybrid as a personality type received its first clear definitive statement from Reuter and Park. “The hybrids,” Reuter writes, “tend to be distinct in social position, cultural status, and personality organization: sociologically as well as racially, they are hybrid.” Resulting chiefly from their accessibility to wider cultural opportunities, the mixed-blood individuals occupy the status superior to that of the natives but inferior to that of the whites. However, this superior social position of the hybrid is not to be taken as an evidence of innate intellectual superiority. It should, as Reuter points…