Mixed Race Studies

Race-crossing and glands: Some human hybrids and their parent stocks

Eugenics Review
Volume 23, Number 1 (April 1931)
pages 31-40

Jon Alfred Mjöen, Director
Vindern Biological Laboratory (Oslo, Norway)

(Paper read at the ninth meeting, 1930, at he the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations.)

The earlier displacements of population, the migrations of which history relates, usually took place during long epochs of time.  Amongst the greatest were the migrations of the Arabs, the Semites, and the Mongols.  These wholesale movements of population were of quite a different character from the Viking raids from the Mediterranean lands and Northern France, the Gothic invasion of Italy and Spain, the Norman’s conquering expeditions to England, the expulsion of the Huguenots, or the emigration of Puritans to the United States, and the Walloons to Sweden.

But even the most stupendous invasions that history records, hardly assumed such dimensions as the movements of population we have witnessed in our own days.  The system of control that is called inspection of passports shows, for example, that the racial elements of alien origin which in a three-year period after the War have crossed into Central Europe from East, number no less that 600,000.  The emigrants from the East settled in Berlin, Paris, and other large cities (according as the rate of exchange varied), and to-day they form a constantly increasing contingent of Asiatics, Russians, Poles, Galicians, Greeks, and various others.  New York alone was invaded, in the course of a three-year period, by a similar contingent of foreign racial elements amounting to about on and half million.

Nobody who with open eyes has observed the masses in the great modern cities, Paris, Berlin, New York, Chicago, will have failed to be struck by the manner in which the racial physiognomy of the population is in process of changing.  Clean, open racial features are becoming more and more rare in these masses in the slums, which in the real sense of the word are amorphous.  All unity of form is dissolved, and a hideous confusion of all possible coulours and shapes from all the races of the earth has taken place.

The picture which we see before our eyes everyday, so to speak, on journeys in Europe, North Africa, and America, raises a question of importance: What will be the effect, the final result of this gigantic blood-mixing?  The picture gives an impression of lack of guiding-instinct, lack of stability and balance.  But is this lack of balance a result of social or biological causes; and have we any reason to believe that crossing with foreign races will have a deleterious effect upon the native stock?…

…Hybrids’ Tempermental Instability

In full agreement with this suggestion of glandular disturbance is the general opinion of biologists that the human hybrid shows a typical instability in mental and moral respects—a want of balance.  His motives and actions are incalculable, his impulses stronger that his self-control. I feel more and more convinced that the inmates of our prisons and asylums are to a large extent recruited from these types of mixed race, who numbers are constantly rising on account of increasing intercourse between populations from all parts of the world.

A special group of individuals which is causing a great deal of trouble in our northern countries, Norway and Sweden, is the Gipsy (tater) group. We know very litte about their origin, except that they are badly race-mixed and have all the characteristics of unbalanced hybrids.  They are vagabonds, beggars, loafers, and criminals.  Whole families of this hybrid population are filling up our prisons and asylums.

One hears, of course, of prominent hybrids—Booker Washington, the American teacher and reformer, was a Mulatto, and Porfirio Díaz, President of Mexico, was a Mestizo. But they are exceptions to the rule, and they are few compared with the enormous number of human hybrids all over the world.  We find it very often stated that the famous Swedish writer August Strindberg, was of very “mixed ascendency.”  I do not know how far this is assertion is to be relied upon.  But what would be likely to be the result if we advocated race-crossing on such premisses?  If by deliberate experimental breeding of men we could produce 10,000 ‘Stindberg blends,’ we should obtain no small contigent with Strindberg’s brutality, his melancholy, his capriciousness, his violent temper, his pessimism, his cynicism towards women (though he married four times), and all his lack of self-control—and yet we might be cheated of the expected types with Strindberg’s creative genius…

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Hierarchies of whiteness in the geographies of empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barrets of Jamaica

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
Volume 80, Numbers 1&2 (2006)
pages 5-43
DOI: 10.1163/13822373-90002486

Cecilla A. Green, Associate Professor, Sociology
Maxwell School of Syracuse University

Shows how a racial solidarity between whites in colonial Jamaica during slavery developed, but covered class differences between whites. Author examines the differences between the lesser-white, socially mobile settlers, and the upper plantocracy. She looks especially at social-structural factors, in particular genealogy and reproduction, that separated upper plantocratic families and dynasties, with connections with Britain, e.g. through absentee plantation owners, from less wealthy white settlers, that obtained intermediate positions as overseers, and generally were single males. She relates this further to the context with a white minority and a majority of slaves, and with relatively less women than men among the whites, that influenced differing reproductive patterns. The upper-class tended to achieve white marrying partners from Britain, alongside having children with slaves or people of colour, while lower-class whites mostly reproduced only in this last way. Author exemplifies this difference by juxtaposing the family histories and relationships, and relative social positions of Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer who came alone, and had an intermediate position, and the upper-class wealthy Barrett family, who were large land and slave owners, and established a powerful white dynasty in Jamaica, with British connections, over centuries, and that also included, sidelined, coloured offspring.

…Even here there are important qualifications. Thistlewood is not a candidate for the dual marriage system who decides to forego the benefits of a White wife in part because of the assurance of other conditions of reproduction that guarantee full maintenance of class status. This is true, for example, of George Goodin Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s great-uncle, discussed below, who mates exclusively (at least, in self-acknowledged terms) with a mulatto slave, Elissa Peters. Their children suffer a fate not untypical of the offspring of such couplings: they are not given the Barrett name, but they are sent to England to be schooled and domiciled according to the terms of their father’s will, and they receive secondary (and inevitably contestable) bequests. Thistlewood, in contrast, gives his son John his name. He does not have the economic wherewithal or the genealogical amplitude and latitude to school him in England, and evinces no aspirations or plans to that effect. John is schooled locally and is later apprenticed to a master carpenter, William Hornby.

It should be pointed out here that not all large planter names were so closely guarded (outside of the widespread process of giving estate slaves the surnames of their owners). Another strategy, pursued by Martin or Martyn Williams, the dually married husband of George’s properly pedigreed first cousin (who later becomes the widowed mistress of George’s brother), was to both pass on the name and petition the courts to declare his illegitimate mixed-race children, whose mother was a free Black woman, legally White. To complicate matters, there is a third option that both Williams’s “dual marriage” obligations and the changed inheritance laws of his and George’s time preclude him from pursuing (whatever his personal inclinations): bequeathing his main properties to Colored heirs. His properties are passed on to his legitimate White heirs. The case of Molly or Mary Cope (née Dorill), the fully endowed illegitimate quadroon daughter of Thistlewood’s late employer (now his employer, under coverture of her White husband) is different, but in part only because of the absence of competing claims from a “legitimate” White family. She appears to us, through the admittedly limited medium of Thistlewood’s cryptic daily log, as the tragic dupe of a strategy to re-inscribe and recover a proper plantocratic and racial destiny for the at-risk property and lineage of her paternal ancestry. Once she has fulfilled all the right conditions she becomes practically dispensable. She confides to Thistlewood that her husband “wants her to cut the entail off and settle upon him for life” (Hall 1999:70). She is being pressed to transfer title to the estate to her abusive and incompetent White husband…

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