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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VIII. Social Stratification - 32. The Negro Class Structure - 3. Color and Class
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696 An American Dilemma
factors determining status within the Negro community. This ha» a history
as old as class stratification itself among Negroes. Mixed bloods have
always been preferred by the whites in practically all respects. They made
a better appearance to the whites and were assumed to be mentally more
capable. They had a higher sales value on the slave market.^^ The select
classes of trained mechanics and house servants who early came In closer
contact with the dominant culture of the whites seem largely to have been
drawn from the group of mixed bloods, and their superior training further
raised their status.
A sexual selection added its influence to this occupational differentiation.
The fair-skinned house girls were more frequently used as mistresses by
men of the planter class than were the plantation hands. They became the
mothers of successive generations of even whiter children. Many white
fathers freed their illegitimate mulatto offspring and often also the chil-
dren’s mothers, or gave them the opportunity to work out their freedom
on easy terms. Some were helped to education and sent to the free states
in the North. Some were given a start in business or helped to acquire land.
For this reason the free Negro population everywhere contained a
greater proportion of mixed bloods than did the slave population.^^ The
mulattoes followed the white people’s valuation and associated their
privileges with their lighter color. They considered themselves superior
to the black slave people and attributed their superiority to the fact of their
mixed blood. The black slaves, too, came to hold this same valuation. The
white people, however, excluded even the fairest of the mulatto group
from their own caste—in so far as they did not succeed in passing—and the
mulattoes, in their turn, held themselves more and more aloof from the
black slaves and the humbler blacks among the free Negroes; thus the
mulattoes tended early to form a separate intermediary caste of their own.
Although they were constantly augmented by mulatto ex-slaves, they sel-
dom married down into the slave group. In such cities as New Orleans,
Charleston, Mobile, Natchez, and later Washington, highly exclusive
mulatto societies were formed which still exist, to a certain extent, today.
Color thus became a badge of status and social distinction among the Negro
people.
Emancipation destroyed any possibility there might have been for the
mulatto group to form an intermediary caste of their own in America as a
substitute for their not being able to get into the white group.® Even their
upper class position lost in relative exclusiveness as their monopoly of free-
dom was extinguished and white philanthropy began to aid the recently
emancipated slave masses. The new definition of the Negro problem in the
•In South Africa, the mulatto group holds itself as a separate caste, even though the
blacks are not slaves. A similar situation exists in many other countries. Our statement refers
to conditions in the United States only.
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