Red blooded Americans: Mulattoes and the melting pot in United States racialist and nationalist discourse, 1890--1930.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes American conceptions of Black-White racial mixing between 1890 and 1930. It tracks the conflicting influences of cultural and physical definitions of race on American categorizations of people of mixed ancestry. Drawing on Black and White perspectives, on scientific, governmental, literary, and popular sources, this project examines the complex relationship between these discursive locations and their roles in shifting definitions of interracial categories. The first chapter re-examines the formation of nineteenth-century scientific and popular conceptions of race, arguing that this development centered in large part on debates over the viability of mulattoes and ramifications of racial mixing. This debate resulted in conflicting depictions of people with mixed ancestry as both inferior to and superior to pure Blacks. The next three chapters examine discussions of racial hybridity and the role of mulattoes in American racialism, focusing on popular and fictional images, federal census and state racial categories, and anthropological, eugenic and sociological studies. The establishment of a biracial legal and social system of segregation rendered the mulatto category unnecessary and untenable. By the end of the 1930s, the term mulatto had largely disappeared as a legal and social category and the one-drop rule dominated official definitions. During this period of transition, however, racialist discourse continued to treat mulattoes as distinct from other African Americans, with legal and anthropological categories offering no concensus on how exactly to define and understand the position of mulattoes. African Americans and some White Americans were able to use the contested position of the mulatto as a point from which to challenge both the dominant definitions of American racialism and the racist social structure they upheld. The final chapter focuses on conceptions of the future racial composition of the United States and the relationship between discussions of Black-White amalgamation, immigrant--particularly Southern European--assimilation, and definitions of race and national identity. This dissertation concludes that the intensified attention and multiple perspectives on mulattoes and racial mixing between 1890 and 1930 demonstrated a high level of uncertainty over and resistance to the shift to a binary system of racial classification.