The American Negro and Race Blending

The American Negro and Race Blending

The Sociological Review
Volume a2, Issue 4 (October 1909)
pages 349–360
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1909.tb01972.x

Frances Hoggan

The problem of the colour population of America is many-sided. Perhaps the most vital question to be considered is that of the amalgamation of the races: how far it has reached or may reach, and what good or bad results it has produced or may be expected to produce.

It may be affirmed unhesitatingly, that no two races of men can live side by side in the same country without more or less race blending. The question therefore narrows itself to one of amount and incidence. In the Southern United States, practically all mixed unions during the period of slavery were irregular unions between white men and Negro women, using the term Negro in its legal sense to include all degrees of intermixture down to one-sixteenth only of coloured blood. Comparatively few mixed marriages took place, although a few of the higher class Mulattoes belonging to Northern families are the offspring of married parents and bear no stigma of bastardy. In the Southern States marriage was hardly ever thought of, and even had it been the enactments against it, passed in different years in the various States, were so uncompromising and drastic as effectually to prevent its occurrence. The race blending of slavery was therefore one-sided, the fathers only being white, and it was outside of legal marriage. When the resulting offspring is studied the inferiority of the mother socially and culturally cannot fail to reveal itself in the child, and in addition to the maternal inferiority, the upbringing and general conditions of slave life were such as to render it next to impossible to emerge from servile habits and modes of thought. When, as was often the case, the master and the father were one and the same man, his paternity was ignored to an extent unparalleled in other countries where slave mothers were common. In contrast with the more humane Mahommedan law and customs, the American slave child was seldom freed, and he could be sold away from the mother, in which case he became a mere waif, with no trace of natural relationships, without recognised kindred, and without even the semblance of a home.  It would be difficult to find elsewhere such loose family ties as prevailed among the slave population of the United States, or a more unnatural conception of the role of the white father. When he was not at the same time the…

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