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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 5. Race and Ancestry - 3. Changes in Physical Appearance
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122 An American Dilemma
It is also possible to speculate about the eugenic effects of such selective
factors of reproduction as the bad health conditions and the high mortality
rates in the freed Negro population up to the present time and of the looser
sex mores in the Negro population. But in these respects, as in regard to
all the other sources of selectiveness mentioned above, the prudent con-
clusion must be that our factual knowledge of each source is next to nothing,
and that there is no possibility of weighing them together into a conclusion
concerning their resultant effect upon the genetic composition of the Negro
people. It is probable that we shall never come to know, in a scientific way,
what these various selective factors have meant for the genetic composition
of the American Negro people.
Mutations, as well as selection^ may have made the American Negro
different in some respects and in some degree from the corresponding
population groups of the African continent. There is no knowledge as to
the number or character of the genetic mutations that have occurred in the
Negro population since coming to the Western Hemisphere, but there
have undoubtedly been some. Since the cessation of the slave trade, the
Africans, too, must have had mutations that did not get transmitted to the
American Negro people because of isolation. About this we know nothing.
Such mutations must be distinguished from changes which appear to be
“biological” but yet are not, or may not be, inherited by transmission of
genes. In recent decades there have been many studies, usually not with
specific reference to the Negro, indicating how such things as glandular
activity, diet, and physical handling of infants may affect physical traits.
Since Negroes experienced changes in climate, diet, and customary practices
in care of infants, and perhaps even in glandular activity, when they made
the drastic transition from Africa to America, their physical traits may be
expected to have changed. The studies of physical changes of immigrants
inaugurated by Boas open the possibility that changes may occur even in
such standard traits as head form. Since no anthropometric studies were
made of Negroes before they were shipped to America, knowledge is lack-
ing as to the specific character of the changes in physical form. But that
there were some of this type, there is good reason to expect.** Changes in
cultural conditions since the period of slave importation, and the more
recent migration from the rural South to the urban North, may also have
modified the Negro’s physical appearance since he landed on American
shores.*
The influences affecting the Negro’s physical appearance are sometimes
of an intentional type which do not need gross changes in environment to
exert their effects. The Negro woman can, and does, lighten her face
* In this paragraph we are considering only the physical changes due to direct environ-
mental influences. The psychic changes—which are probably more important—will be
treated in Chapter
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