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(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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Chapter 5. Race and Ancestry 131
certainly be preferred as a sexual partner. Such girls tended, at least after
the first generation in America, to be mulattoes rather than pure-blooded
Negroes. The fact that a similar preference probably occurred in the choice
of Negro girls for household work, where they became more exposed to
sexual advances, would strengthen its importance. Within the Negro
marriage market the mulattoes’ lighter skin has had, and continues to have,
a strong competitive value. This can again be assumed to work as a factor
of positive selection favoring the mulatto group: Dark males who have
distinguished themselves in any way tend to take light mulatto women
as wives.
As a result of this marriage selection, whatever talent there is among the mulattoes
remains among the mulattoes; whatever talent there is among the black group marries
into the mulatto caste. In either event the talent of the Negro race finds its way into
the mulatto groups. The descendants of these talented men are mulattoes, and what-
ever of the father’s superior mentality and energy they may show or carry becomes
an asset to the mulatto group, and the full-blood group is correspondingly impover-
ished. ’I’he mulatto caste loses none of its native worth and is constantly reinforced
by the addition to it of the best of the variant types which appear among the
numerically larger group.^^
We cannot accept this line of reasoning, however, without qualifications,
since it is not certain that whites have predominantly selected innately
superior Negro girls to have sex relations with, or that socially successful
dark Negroes who marry light girls are also biologically superior, or that
the inferiority of the white parents of mulattoes has not balanced the
superiority of their Negro parents. The proof that mulattoes are biolog-
ically superior to full-blooded Negroes must go beyond the finding that
mulattoes have made greater achievements than pure-blooded Negroes,
since the latter have had more social handicaps than the former.®^
Differences in fertility and mortality between groups with a varying
degree of white ancestry must, through the generations, have affected the
results of miscegenation upon the genetic composition of the present-day
American Negro people. While opportunistic opinions have been expressed
both to the effect that mulattoes were sterile, or more sterile, than full-
blooded Negroes, on the one hand, and that they were unusually prolific,
on the other hand, there is not the slightest shred of scientific evidence for
either of these opposing popular beliefs.*^
It is certain, however, that mulattoes are concentrated in cities in the
higher economic brackets, where—^because of greater use of effective birth
control—they have a lower fertility than the Negro pdpulation as a whole.
Nor does the probable lower death rate of mulattoes entirely counter-
balance their lower birth rate. This differential reproductivity has been
tending to reduce the proportion of white genes in the total Negro popula-
tion. While other effects on genetic composition by differential reproduc-

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