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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 5. Race and Ancestry - 9. Present and Future Genetic Composition Trends
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134 An American Dilemma
from Eastern Europe and from around the Mediterranean Sea and also
from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the rising social respect-
ability of the American Indian, have made passing easier for the Negro.
Warmer relations with the republics of South America will perhaps be an
influence in the same direction. The increasing segregation, on the other
hand, which tends to create economic and social monopolies for the Negro
upper class (to which most of the light-colored mulattoes belong) will
tend to decrease the desire to pass. So also will the rising race pride.*
America is unique among all countries having a mixed population—not
excluding countries like Brazil where discrimination is so much milder
—
in having a significant number of white or almost white Negroes, who
could easily pass but prefer not to do so.
As the individuals who pass must be near-white, the extent of passing
is a function of the number of such individuals. Continued miscegenation
between whites and Negroes will tend to increase that number 5
miscegena-
tion between mulattoes and darker Negroes—as well as low reproduction
rates for mulattoes—will tend to decrease it. What the trend of passing is,
and will be, resulting from the interplay of these various factors, is impos-
sible to ascertain on the basis of present evidence.
The effect of passing, whatever its extent, is to neutralize the effect of
miscegenation on the genetic composition of the Negro people.’* It is even
possible to conceive of a temporary condition in which the rate of passing
would exceed the rate of addition of new white blood into the Negro group
so that there would be a tendency for the American Negro group to
become more negroidized.
Differential reproductivity is a factor which can be expected to have
a continuing importance within the next decades.®® Our knowledge of social
and economic conditions among the Negro people and of the development
of differential reproductivity in other countries which are more advanced
in birth control rather favors the forecast that present fertility differences
between the various Negro groups are not going to decrease much for a
long time.** Infant mortality and, generally, mortality in the lower age
groups may be expected, on the other hand, to become gradually more
equalized.** There are, further, no sure signs that light-colored people will
not remain in the upper class. Since, with increasing segregation, the Negro
• See Chapter 30, Section 2.
*The effect of passing on the American population can never become important
because those who pass usually have more Caucasoid genes than Negroid, and because the
numbers who pass are insignificant compared to the huge American white population.
• Fertility differentials may decrease, however, if Southern states extend the policy, which
a few of them now have, of setting up birth control clinics in rural areas. (See Chapter 7,
Section 7.)
• See Chapter 7, Section 1.
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