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Chapter 5. Race and Ancestry 115
definition came to fasten itself on America. These speculations run all the
way from an often asserted, particularly strong “racial instinct” in the
“Anglo-Saxon race” to Embree’s remark that “this custom grew up during
slavery in order to increase the number of slaves, who constituted valuable
property.”® When attempting to account for the historical origin of the
social definition of the Negro, the fact should be taken into account that
mixed offspring were almost always the result of illegitimate sex relations
in which, according to common law, the ordinary paternal lineage becomes
broken. This question of how the very inclusive definition of the Negro
race arose in American cultural history is not solved.
The definition of the “Negro race” is thus a social and conventional, not
a biological concept. The social definition and not the biological facts
actually determines the status of an individual and his place in interracial
relations.*^ This also relieves us of the otherwise cumbersome duty of
explaining exhaustively what we, in a scientific sense, could understand by
“race” as an ethnological and biological entity.*^ In modern biological or
ethnological research “race” as a scientific concept has lost sharpness of
meaning, and the term is disappearing in sober writings. In something even
remotely approaching its strict sense, it applies only to exceptionally isolated
population groups, usually with a backward culture, which thus seems to
be the concomitant of “racial purity.”
Thus the scientific concept of race is totally inapplicable at the very spots
where we recognize ^^race problems.^^ It is being replaced by quantitative
notions of the relative frequency of common ancestry and differentiating
traits. “Racial purity” is thus relativized, and the hybridity of all peoples
on earth is no longer minimized. Only the ignorant talk about the “Swed-
ish” or “Scandinavian race,” not to speak of the “Anglo-Saxon” or “German
race.” The “white American race” is gradually beginning to be merely a
joke even among the populace, except in the South. The great variability
of traits among individuals in every population group is becoming stressed,
and the considerable amount of overlapping between all existing groups
increasingly recognized. Besides the recognized differences among individ-
uals in any one group, the differences among averages of groups tend to
pale into insignificance.
The fundamental unity and similarity of mankind—^above minor
individual and group differentials—^is becoming scientifically established.
While formerly attention was fixed on the few obvious distinguishing
characteristics, and while the assumption was always that there existed
* In recognition of this, we regularly substitute in this book the terms the **Negro
people,” the “Negro group” or the “Negro population” for the term, the “Negro race.”
When we sometimes, for the sake of convenience, talk about “race,” “racial” characteristics,
or “racial” relations, we should be understood to refer to the popular conception of the
word, not the scientific one.
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