Passers

Will U.S. whites eventually absorb the nation's Negroes--as Italy, Mexico and Portugal have absorbed theirs? So thought James Bryce, and so, for more than a generation, have thought many sociologists. "It is now estimated," wrote Author Herbert Asbury in Collier's last week, "that there are at least between 5,000,000 and 8,000,000 persons in the U.S., supposed to be white, who possess Negro blood. . . . Authorities generally agree that between 15,000 and 30,000 . . . Negroes go over to the white side every year."

Author Asbury's conclusions are disputed by Sociologist John H. Burma of Grinnell College, who thinks the "authorities" exaggerate. In the American Journal of Sociology he argues that the number of Negroes passing as whites is much smaller.

Facts about Negro "passing" are understandably hard to come by. Guesstimates have depended largely on a pioneering study made in 1921 by Duke University Sociologist Hornell Hart.

Analyzing the U.S. census, he discovered an odd discrepancy in the population of native whites: between 1900 and 1910, the group which was aged 10 to 14 in 1900 somehow grew instead of shrinking. When deaths and emigrations were totaled and deducted, the group mysteriously gained 170,000 in population. Other studies showed that every year some 20,000 Negroes unaccountably disappeared from the census statistics. The obvious explanation: the Negroes had become native "whites."

Recently Grinnell's Burma brought the Hart census analysis up to date (1940). He found that after 1910 there was no such rise in the native white population as Hart observed. His conclusion: the figures of the Census Bureau cannot be used to shed any light on the number of Negroes who pass.

Fathers & Sons. A much more reliable index of Negro passing than Hart's, Burma thinks, is a study of 346 mulatto families made by Sociologist Caroline Day. She found that 10% of these families had members who had passed. Estimating that 40% of the 2,750,000 U.S. Negro families are comparable to Dr. Day's group (in their proportion of white blood), Burma figured that there are some 110,000 passers all told. His estimate of the number passing each year: 2,750.

Negroes who pass are seldom detected; there are no telltale Negroid features that a generous mixture of Caucasian genes will not erase. Anthropologists and geneticists pooh-pooh the bugaboo of an atavistic black baby. If one of the parents is pure white, the baby cannot be darker than the darker parent; if both have Negro blood, the baby may be slightly darker than its parents but the chances are against it.

Today racial intermarriage is legal in 18 states, and Negro passing is becoming easier. But the No. 1 authority on U.S. Negroes, Sweden's Gunnar Myrdal, thinks that amalgamation of U.S. whites and Negroes is highly unlikely, because of: 1) a decline in the number of mulatto bastards, who were the products of much blood-mixing in the 19th Century; 2) Negro inbreeding, which will make white-blooded Negroes darker and level the race at a middling brown.

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