Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 5. Race and Ancestry - 4. Early Miscegenation
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
124 An American Dilemma
tion, even when they did not consciously follow the opposite policy, must
have had this result. This intermingling between the African tribes also had
its beginnings in Africa, where commerce and wars, slaveholding and slave
trade, for thousands of years, had this effect.^® The extensive slave trading
by Europeans after the discovery of the New World, and the stirring up of
population movements in Africa caused thereby, only intensified a process
already taking place. Its final consummation occurred in America.®
In the United States miscegenation with Indians and whites occurred from
the very beginning. Indians were held as slaves in some of the American
colonies while Negro slaves were being imported. Equality of social status
between Indians and Negroes favored intermingling. The whites had little
interest in hindering it.^® As the number of Negro slaves increased, the In-
dian slaves gradually disappeared into the larger Negro population. Whole
tribes of Indians became untraceably lost in the Negro population of the
South.** Some Indian tribes held Negro slaves with whom they mingled,
and some were active in the internal Negro slave trade. Runaway Negro
slaves and free Negroes often took refuge in the Indian camps, where they
then were kept as slaves or were adopted. They took part in the wars and
insurrections and became completely amalgamated in the Indian tribes with
which they lived. In a few cases the intermixture produced a group that
was recognized neither as Indian nor as Negro. A few isolated groups of
this type remain to the present day.®®
During the nineteenth century, the Indians declined as a significant ele-
ment in the population of the South, and those who remained began to
take on the attitudes of the white man toward the Negro. From this
time on, Indian-Negro mixture was probably no more important than
Indian-white mixture in the South. But the early interbreeding between
Negroes and Indians has been of greater importance for the genetic com-
position of the American Negro population than has until recently been
realized.®* Twenty-seven and three-tenths per cent of the Negro sample of
1,551 individuals examined by Herskovits claimed some Indian ancestry.®"
The relations between Negro and white indentured servants during the
seventeenth century had much the same social basis as the Negro-lndian
intermixture. As already pointed out, some time lapsed before the imported
Negroes were pushed down to the lower status of chattel slavery, and
racial prejudice developed only gradually. All through the colonial period,
the white population showed a marked excess of males and a scarcity of
females—as did also the Negro population—which Sd? is a factor tending
* This intermingling, both in Africa and in America, will be considered again when we
discuss the possible consequence of a new “brown race” in America. (See Section 9 of this
chapter.)
^
Many other Indian tribes, of course, moved West, so that the relative absence of Indians
in the South is by no means due solely to amalgamation with the more numerous Negroes.
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
