Here’s another gem from my highbeamresearch.com excursion. An excerpt from a Time Magazine article published in 1931. My favorite parts of this one are: “practically from the beginning acquired white blood”- like it just magically happened, “conditions imposed by their maternity”- now it would most frequently be imposed by their paternity, and the 80% thing. People often say (or throw in my face) that “we’re all mixed, we’re all biracial- get over it.” I completely understand that we’re all mixed, but before reading this article I imagined that all blacks are mixed because of the aforementioned “acquiring” of white blood. And when I imagined that I thought of it coming directly from a white person. But this old article points out that the white blood often comes from “Negroes and mulattoes…marrying mainly among their own color and so distributing the primary blood mixtures more and more evenly throughout the new race.” It seems obvious (it is obvious), I just never thought of it in that way.
Browns
Monday, Oct. 12, 1931
That the dark tenth of the U. S. population should no longer be called Negroes, but Browns, is the thesis of a study published last week by President Edwin Rogers Embree of the Julius Rosenwald Fund.* From 1619 when John Smith bought “twenty Negars” and thus introduced slavery to Anglo-Saxon America, until 1808 when the U. S. formally forbade slave importations, the Negroes came from diverse African stocks. From the beginning, the African races in America married among themselves and with Indians, and practically from the beginning acquired white blood. Comments Mr. Embree: “No special odium was attached to the begetting of mulatto children in slave days. It was regarded almost as a matter of course. Thomas Jefferson was reported, when President, to have regretted that certain of his own children were estopped from voting because of the conditions imposed by their maternity. When a yellow girl, reputed to be the daughter of President Tyler and living in his entourage in the White House, eloped with a white man and in punishment was sold ‘down the river,’ the matter was so ordinary as to cause only a piquant wave of gossip in Washington society. What was customary, in this regard, of those in high places was true to a greater degree of the generality of slave owners.” Result is a melange of black and white, dashed with red. The U. S. Census counts 20% of Negroes as mulattoes. Private sociological estimates put the mulatto per centage at 80%. Mr. Embree believes that “well above half of the Negroes in America have some white or Indian blood.” For a half century Negroes and mulattoes have been marrying mainly among their own color “and so distributing the primary blood mixtures more and more evenly throughout the new race.” Hence, “even if there is no more infusion of white blood, a few more generations of mingling among the Negroes themselves will bring about so general a distribution of inheritance strains that it is likely that every Negro in America will have some white blood and most of them some Indian ancestry.” Already they show traits “as uniform as any typical race of mixed ancestry, such for instance as the Japanese or the Anglo-Saxons.”
Mr. Embree’s Browns are still mostly peasants and servants on Southern farms or laborers in Northern factories. But sufficient have risen into the arts, professions and commerce for him to predict their pervasion of the U. S. scene and despite much turmoil, which he considers not altogether valueless for U. S. culture, their passive acceptance by the general population.
* BROWN AMERICA—Edwin R. Embree—
mulatto diaries 