Race Amalgamation
- Hoffman was not a professionally trained social scientist and based most of his statistical analyses on the data produced by social science research
- Written for the American Economic Association
- Most of this research was guided by “scientific racism”
- Within this, different races occupied different levels on an evolutionary scale where whites were the highest tier and all others were compared to them
- If races were so naturally different then it made no sense to pass laws aimed at racial equality
- Race amalgamation: racial interbreeding
- One of the reasons used to justify laws for segregation was that they would reduce “harmful” interracial sexual contact and this text is helpful in understanding the social climate at the time of the Plessy decision
- Hoffman’s main question is whether crossing leads to the improvement or deterioration of races
- Fecundity: fertility
- Hoffman says races of similar culture and physical and psychical development can intermarry to mutual advantage
- Antipathy: aversion
- The underlying cause for white antipathy towards blacks is the “law of similarity” that maintains the separation of different classes because a civilized race does not readily intermingle with less advanced civilizations
- Hoffman mentions an immense amount of concubinage and prostitution among colored women but does not mention that most of these women were held as slaves and forced to have sexual contact with them
- Mulatto: a person of mixed race, mainly a person with 1 white and 1 black parent
- Hoffman believes mulattos are inferior to blacks and those of all races
- Scrofula: inflammation of lymph nodes
- Hoffman argues that any mixture of white blood deteriorates the physique and impairs the power of endurance, and introduces scrofula
- Hoffman believes the mulatto is physically and morally inferior to pure-blooded blacks but intellectually superior
- Hoffman argues that the crossing of blacks and whites has been detrimental to true progress and contributes to increased mortality rates and inferior social efficiency
- Hoffman wants to know whether there is a natural tendency towards amalgamation or isolation
- he says there is a positive tendency among people of color to congregate together in the South
- Hoffman uses observations such as noticing people do not marry out of their religion or race, which is actually still the trend in current society, however, he is assigning these observation a meaning which is not at all factual. It is true that people still tend to marry within their own race and religion but it is not because people of different races and religions are not meant to be together naturally, it just kind of is what it is.
- Hoffman believes that illicit sexual intercourse has gone down since after the war, is this because the slaves have been freed and can no longer be taken advantage of by whites?
- concludes that amalgamation is contrary to the interests of the colored race
Strivings of the Negro People
- double-consciousness: the sense of political identity thrust upon black Americans in a society where they were not considered just Americans, but African-Americans which gives them two unreconciled strivings generated by their African descent and American citizenship
- second sight: the vision of both an insider and a outsider that helps to critique the strengths and weaknesses of American society
- this essay can be read a response to the Plessy decision
- Du Bois’s description of double-consciousness why, given the unequal power relations between blacks and whites in American society, blacks had little choice but to see segregation as viewing the colored race as inferior
- he says he was shut out from white society but had no desire to join
- he explains that the world he longed for, with opportunities , was for whites and not blacks
- says that being black in American society is like having “second sight” because it only lets him see himself through the eyes of whites
- two-ness: being both an American and black which leads to strife
- African Americans just want be both black and American without losing opportunity
- he brings up the “black artist” and says the beauty revealed to this black artist was the beauty of his race, but it was despised by everyone else
TMM
- Morton believed he could identify races from features of the skull
- he simply categorized skulls the way he WANTED them to be
- Morton assumed he could measure intelligence through the size of the brain, but he never considered that brain size was not related to intelligence, it was just related to the size go the body
- Morton failed to separate his skulls by sex or stature because he WANTED to read differences in brain size as differences in intelligence
- Morton’s finagling can be ordered in 4 categories
- favorable inconsistencies and shifting criteria: Morton often chose to include or delete large subsamples in order to match group averages with prior expectations
- subjectivity directed toward prior prejudice: Morton’s measures were sufficiently imprecise to permit a wide range of influence by subjective bias
- procedural omissions that seem obvious to us: Morton never considered alternate hypotheses
- miscalculations and convenient omissions: all miscalculations and omissions in Morton’s work helped his case
- polygenists forced defenders of slavery to consider whether they should accept a strong argument from science at the cost of their religion
- the arguments on polygeny represent the last time that arguments in the science mode did not form a first line of defense in the status quo
English 2089 