Mixed Race Studies

Curious Studies of Mixed Bloods in the West Indies

Timaru Herald
Timaru, New Zealand
Volume XXXVI, Issue 2366
1882-04-22
page 3
Source: Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

The following is contributed by the Paris correspondent of the New Orleans Picayune—There has been an interesting diicussion on the negro question m the French West Indies, carried on in two of our newspapers. An argument in one of them presents views which are so new to me that I have thought they may be novel to you, and so I translate the rejoinder. It was made to an article written to break down the prejudice of color, which keeps wide apart in Martinique white men and negroes. It ways “Unfortunately, the separation of whites and blacks is not caused by a mere prejudice. It is not a vain, stupid pride which leads whites to exclude negroes from their society. Our opponent imagines that ’emancipation, taking their privilege from whites, led the latter to make more of point of pride than ever to keep from confounding with people whom the law had as their equals.’ We must tell our opponent that pride had nothing to do with the separation of color. If the whites kept aloof from the negroes it was because equality made marriages possible socially, alliances which, unfortunately, considered anthropologically, would lead to the most disastrous consequences. There is a physiological law which must be deplored, for negros often deserve great sympathy; but this law must be brought to the knowledge of France, because Frenchmen are ignorant of it, and because this law explains the greater part of these differences which are wrongly attributed to politics. A great many observations have demonstrated that it is, so to say, impossible for a negro family, even after an infinite series of marriages with whites, to change completely the nature of their blood, while if a white family do but once marry with a negro, they lose for ever the purity of their race. In France we call mulatto all persons who are neither black nor white. In the colonies mulatto is applied only to tho offspring of a white man and a negress. After the first cross the children are classed by a scale whose degrees are very numerous, and depends whether the mulattress allies herself to blacks or whites. The first, second, third, or fourth degrees especially have distinct names; two mark the preponderance of white blood, two of negro. If the mulattress ally herself to a negro, the child is called a cafres; if the cafresse ally herself also to a negro, the child is called a griffe. On the contrary, if the mulattress ally herself to a white, the child is called mestif: if the mestive, too, ally herself to a white the child is called quadroon. The terrible consequences of the physiological law mentioned is this:—If the woman be of a more swarthy color than the man to whom she allies herself, the child’s color is like the mother’s color. If the father’s color be the blackest, the child’s color is like the father’s color. When two portons of tho same color are allied, their children are blacker than their parents, and curiously enough the second child is blacker than the first, the third blacker than the second, and so on. In fine, it is beyond doubt that a mixed population, left to themselves, are fatally destined to become negroes in a very few generations. We must add another and still more deplorable fact. It will explain the causes which have compelled the separation between whites and negroes, which cannot possibly be removed. On a plantation in one of the Lesser Antilles une mestive was born of a mulattress mother and a white father. This mestive became the mother of a quadroon. All the daughters of the successive alliances were for six generations allied to white men. Only boys issued from the seventh alliance. At the same time similar phenomena were observed on a neighboring plantation, but here only girls issued from the seventh alliance. The two last children of these seven alliances were married to whites. They were of remarkable beauty; their hair was of the lighter blond nothing about them retained anything of the African race; their skin was so white that they would easily hive been taken, not only for children of northern climes, but even for Albinos, had they not been so graceful and vigorous, so intellectual, nay, so brilliant. Well, their children were more than swarthy, and their grandchildren very dark mulattos. After these indisputable facts, we may well ask how many successive alliances with whites would be necessary to make all trace of black blood disappear? Could the result ever be attained? It may. From these facts, easily be seen why Creole females of pure while blood are averse to ever allying themselves with persons whose veins contain the least drop of negro blood. After a first marriage with this tainted blood, a second fault of that same sort would transform that white family that is to say, this European family, able at any time to return to Europe, to France, and reassume the social position it had before immigration—a second fault would transform it into a family of mulattos, and from mulatto to negro the road is short. We would be of the opinion of our opponent, and would hold with him, that we should lift up completely negroes to the level of whites, to make of them real Frenchmen, to subject them to the military draft, and make them serve in the garrisons of France as well aa of the colonies. Alas! a serious objection to this scheme exists—an objection whose importance Napoleon I saw, eager as he was to aeek soldiers everywhere. He said: “French blood would be soon tainted, and France would be menaced with possessing in a few years a great many persons of mixed blood.”

Heredity in Color

Hawke’s Bay Herald
New Zealand
Volume XXIII, Issue 7956
1888-01-21
Page 2
Source: Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

If a white man marries a negro, their children, boys and girls alike, are all mulattos. Lot us make to ourselves no allusions or mistakes upon this score—each one is simply and solely a pure mulatto, exactly half-way in color, feature, hair, and statue, between his father’s face and his mother’s. People who have not lived in a mixed community of blacks and whites often ignore or misunderstand this fundamental fact of hereditary philosophy; they imagine that one of the children of such a marriage may be light brown, and another dark brown; one almost white, and one almost black; that the resulting strains may to a great extent be mingled indefinitely and in varying proportions. Not a bit of it. A mulatto is a mulatto, and a quadroon is a quadroon, with just one-half and one-fourth of negro blood respectively; and anyone who has once lived in an ox-slave-owning country can pick out the proportion of black or white elements in any particular brown person he meets with as much accuracy as the stud-book shows in recording the pedigree of famous racehorses. Black and white produce mulattos — all mulattos alike to a shade of identity; mulatto and white produce quadroon, and no mistake about it; mulatto and black produce sambo; quadroon and white octoroon—and so forth ad infinitum. After the third cross persistently in either direction, the strain of which less than one-eighth persists becomes at last practically indistinguishable, and the child is ” white by law ” or ” black by law,” as the case may be, without the faintest mark of its slight opposite intermixture. I speak hero of facts which I have carefully examined at firsthand; all the nonsensical talk about finger-nails and knuckles, and persistence of the negro type for ever, is pure unmitigated slave-owning prejudice. The child of an octoroon by a white man is simply white; and no acuteness on earth, no scrutiny conceivable would ever discover the one-sixteenth share of black blood by any possible test save documentary evidence. Here, then, we have a clear, physical, and almost mathematically demonstrable case, showing that, so far as regards bodily peculiarities at least, the child is on the average just equally compounded of traits derived from both its parents. Among hundreds and hundreds of mulatto and quadroon children whom I have observed, I have never known a single genuine instance to the contrary. Heredity comes out exactly true; you get just as much of each color in every case as you would naturally expect to do from a mixture of given proportions. In other words, all mulattos are recognisably different from all quadroons, and all quadroons from all octoroons or all sambos.—From “The Cause of Character,” in the Cornhill Magazine.

The “Brown Tinge”

Evening Post, Wellington, New Zealand
Volume CVI, Issue 46
1928-08-31
page 11
Source: Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa

Future New Zealanders

“Science and history will both some day demand an explanation of the brown tinge in the future New Zealander,” said Sir Apirana Ngata in his address to the Wellington branch of the New Zealand Historical Association last evening. The present offered a unique opportunity for the study of miscegenation by means of genealogical data. The extent to which the mixture of blood had proceeded during the past four or five generations might be gauged with almost mathematical accuracy, if the genealogical method were applied to the problem. For the present and the last generation or two, other interesting problems might be elucidated by the study of the charts where the mixture of breeds was shown.

Thus the effect of miscegenation on virility, constitution, longevity, intellectuality, and morality might be gauged at first hand. Some loose generalisations, as, for instance, that the half-caste partook of the vices of the two races without the virtues of either, might be checked with the facts. Light might even be cast on aspects of Mendelism. The Scotch-Māori, the Irish-Māori, the English-Māori, the German-Māori, the Danish-Māori, the Dalmatian-Māori, the Negro-Māori, the Portuguese-Māori, and, in the present generation, the Hindu-Māori and the Chinese-Māori marriages might all be found on record. In the generation following the first crossing of pure-bloods (it that term could be used) bewildering inter-mixtures of half-breeds with half-breeds of any ot these stocks, of half-breeds with purebloods on either side, of half with quarter, or other fractional breeds might still be patiently pursued by the research student. Dr. Condliffe had expressed the hope that through the mixture of blood the Māori would add another element of romance and daring and poetry that would make the people of New Zealand different even from their kindred peoples in other parts of the Empire. If history should come to register such a result it should not miss the opportunity now offered or tracing the steps towards its attainment.