Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

The consequences of such blendings may be studied with reference to the viability of the offspring, their mental faculties, and their fecundity.

At the outset it is important to premise that the question cannot be treated as simple and single. It is complex. The results of race-crossings differ with races and with evironment. The law that applies to one case in one place is not certainly good in other cases and elsewhere.

It seems, for instance, tolerably certain that the cross between the white and black races produces offspring (mulattoes) who are deficient in physical vigor. It is well ascertained in the United States that they are peculiarly prone to scrofula and consumption, unable to bear hard work, and shorter lived than either the full black or the white. This is not owing to our climate, as the same results are recognized by the negroes of the Gold Coast, who for four hundred years have been in constant contact with the whites.[200] In the West India Islands, the mulattoes must be constantly reinforced by new crossings, or they disappear.

The fertility of such unions, though generally equal if the number of births alone is considered, is really less on account of the greater mortality of the infants. As a rule, the third generation of descendants of a marriage between the white and the Polynesian, Australian or Dravidian, become extinct through short lives, feeble constitutions or sterility. According to one writer, except a few small islands in the Pacific, there is not an instance of a modern population of mixed white blood, living by itself, which is not on the road to extinction.[201]

It is not certain that this applies either to the crossing of the Eurafrican or the African with the American race. The half-breed between the negro and the Indian, of which we have examples in the Cafusos of Brazil, the Zambos of Paraguay, the Chinos of Peru, and the “Black Caribs” of St. Vincent, are said to be finely formed and vigorous. Throughout Mexico, Central and South America, there has been a blending of the white and red races on an enormous scale, and the result has been that both physically and mentally this mixed race has repeatedly taken precedence in political and social life over the pure descendants of the European colonists. It is well-known that the half-breeds of our frontiers, of British America and of Greenland, are singularly hardy, intelligent and vigorous scouts, guides, hunters and soldiers. Not a few of them have distinguished themselves in our colleges, and later in clerical and political life.

It would appear also that in the earlier conditions of social life, no such debility attended the crossing of the Eurafrican and African race as seems at present to be the case. The only physiological explanation which can be offered of the numerous negroid tribes of eastern and southern Africa, is that they are the descendants of prolonged and intimate unions between the pure negroes and members of the Hamitic and Semitic divisions of the white race (see above, p. 185). This permits the suggestion that there are special causes now at work which alter the influences of race-mixture from what they once were.

Some of them are patent. In modern times it is an almost universal law that all mixed-white populations derive their white blood exclusively from the father, their dark blood exclusively from the mother. I do not know that I can tell you precisely what effect this would have,[202] but it is certain that such a divergence from what is customary within the race limits would exert a decided influence both physically and socially. It is generally believed among students of heredity that the psychical qualities are inherited more from the mother, the physical more from the father; and if this holds good in most cases, we should expect the children of such unions to be intellectually inferior to the average of their parents. This I think is true. Advocates of miscegenation, such as de Quatrefages, Serres and others, are apt to draw a different conclusion, because they compare the average intellectual ability of the products of such unions with the average of the lower race, and this is certainly in favor of the mixed stock, but is an unscientific procedure.

It is also true that in perhaps ninety per cent. of the cases, these mixed unions are illegal, and the children suffer under the stigma of illegitimacy. This means more or less deficiency in home training, education, legal protection, and social recognition. In primitive conditions this was not the case, and hence race minglings at that time were under far more favorable auspices.

In most modern communities the prejudice against members or partial members of the dark races forces them to rest content with unequal advantages, if not educational, at least social, and the recognition of these invisible barriers must necessarily have a deteriorating influence on ambition. This of course was not the case in primitive society, where no other power was recognized than that of the strong right arm.

The possibility of a vigorous and fertile cross-race under certain conditions seems therefore to have been demonstrated by the past history of the species. Is it a desirable result in itself? May we look forward to the commingling of races as worth the fostering care of states and societies? The question bristles with difficulties—moral, not physical difficulties.