Race Relations in World Perspective: Papers Read at the Conference on Race Relations in World Perspective, Honolulu, 1954 9780824884772

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Race Relations

IN WORLD PERSPECTIVE

Race Relations in World Perspective PAPERS READ AT THE CONFERENCE ON RACE RELATIONS IN WORLD PERSPECTIVE • HONOLULU • 1954

EDITED and with an Introduction by

ANDREW V i . UND

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII PRESS •

Honolulu, Hawaii

•

1955

COPYRIGHT

Library

W S

BY THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII

of Congress Catalog Number

Manufactured

PRESS

}6-51 S3

in U.S.A. by TONGG PUBLISHING COMPANY, LTD.

Dedicated to

Robert Ezra Park

Contents Introduction

ix

I. Frame of Reference 1. Reflections on Theory of Race Relations

3

HERBERT G . B L U M E R

II. Demographic and Economic Factors Affecting Race Relations 2. Rigidity and Fluidity in Race Relations

25

BERNHARD L . HORMANN

3. Occupation and Race on Certain Frontiers

49

ANDREW W . LIND

4. Colonialism and Dualism

71

J . H. BOEKE

III. Political and Ideological Considerations 5. New Peoples

95

EVERETT C . HUGHES

6. Race and Related Ideas in the Near East

116

ALBERT HOURANI

7. Race Relations in West and Central Africa

145

GEORGES BALANDIER

8. Race Relations in the Development of Southern Africa

167

J O H N A . BARNES

9. Race Relations in the Soviet Union

187

W A L T E R J . KOLARZ

10. Administrative Aspect of Racial Relations in the Tropical Far East J . S. FURNIVALL

217

IV.

Race Relations as Affecting Personality

11. Social Roles and Types in Race Relations CLARENCE E. G U C K

12. The African Elite in British West Africa K E N N E T H LITTLE

13. Adjustment Problems of Negro and Immigrant Elites T . S. SIMEY

V. A Regional Orientation 14. Race Relations in South Africa ABSOLOM VILAKAZI

15. The Negro in the United States E . FRANKLIN FRAZIER

16. Race Relations in Formosa under the Japanese Y U Z U R U OKADA

17. The Chinese in Southeast Asia MAURICE FREEDMAN

18. Indian-Mestizo-White Relations in Spanish America R A L P H L . BEALS

19- Race Relations in Portuguese America DONALD PIERSON

Introduction The recent gathering in Bandung, Indonesia, of the political leaders from twenty-nine different countries of Africa and Asia highlights the urgency of tested knowledge on the theme of this book. The mere fact of calling a conclave predominantly of colored people, from which the former colonizing powers of the West were excluded, is itself of great moment to the future peace of the entire world. Perhaps equally portentous, however, was the difficulty of the conferees to unite even on a note of common protest against "colonialism in any form," reflecting both the fatuousness of political pronouncements in the absence of adequate social knowledge and the seriousness of our present lack of knowledge with regard to the relations between the races of man. Another conference, completely devoid of political powers and far less pretentious in its claims to the attention of the world, was convened in another part of the Pacific just ten months earlier. This conference sought to lay the groundwork of social knowledge such as the Bandung conference probably lacked. The gathering in Honolulu, Hawaii, in June, 1954, was composed of some forty social scientists and administrators, selected for their first-hand knowledge and understanding of, and their scholarly insights into, what happens when people of different racial backgrounds meet. There was no expectation on the part of this modest company that they would succeed in filling the obvious gaps in the existing knowledge, much less provide the solution to the enigma as to "what should be done about race relations." They would insist, however, that sound social planning—of the type contemplated at Bandung or in any other political gathering—is obviously impossible without the kind of knowledge and understanding which they were seeking to assemble. The nineteen chapters of this book are data papers which were prepared for the Conference on Race Relations in World Perspective ix

X

Introduction

held in Honolulu from June 28 to July 23, 1954. An account of what transpired in the conference itself appears in a companion volume, Race Issues on the World Scene, written by Melvin Conant, one of the active participants in the conference. The contributors to the present volume, with one exception, were members of the conference who had been invited to abstract from their own spheres of knowledge and experience whatever insights might be relevant to the theme of the conference. Specialists each on one or more aspects of the emerging discipline of race relations, the writers were given maximum freedom in the selection of titles for their papers and in the method of treatment, the only limitation being one of length. A minimum of editorial revision has been done to provide uniformity in spelling and clarity of expression. A major concern of the participants in the Honolulu conference, apparent in the chapters of this book, was the funding of knowledge in an area where parochialism had so largely prevailed. The recognition that "with strikingly few exceptions, students of race relations have been preoccupied with problems of minority groups within their own areas of experience" was a central consideration in the calling of the conference. The American "race problem" has been largely conceived in terms of the Negro; in Latin America it is the relations between Indians and whites; while in other parts of the world it concerns the "native" and the difficulties of keeping him "in place." Such exclusive concern with the problems of the region, while understandable and sometimes required of local administrators, militates against the emergence of scientific knowledge. The careful examination and analysis of specific cases and situations, their comparison, and the generalizations based upon them—these constitute the essence of science, which has as yet only slightly penetrated into the studies of race relations. It is also becoming increasingly recognized that sound policy with respect to race relations, even on the local level, demands much wider acquaintance with what is happening elsewhere in the world than most administrators have thus far possessed. Any attempt, however, to bring order into an area of such breadth and complexity as that suggested by the title of "Race Relations in World Perspective" must be recognized as a bold and somewhat precarious venture. Robert E. Park, whose contribution to the emerging discipline of race relations is unrivaled among modern

Introduction

xi

social scientists, conceived of the interaction of peoples and races in the modern world as so vast and irresistible as to assume the character of a "cosmic process"—as coextensive, in fart, with social interaction itself. The scholars who contribute to this volume, many of whom are greatly indebted intellectually to Park, share in most cases his catholic conception of race relations and, by their participation in a conference so broadly defined, signalize their endorsement of a world perspective upon the problem. Chief among the obstacles in the way of achieving effective understanding in this area is the lack of a common language—of terms and concepts which possess a common meaning for the various observers. Even within the company of scholars participating in the writing of this book, selected as they were in part for the breadth of their intellectual vision, the peculiar definitions and assumptions of the various disciplines represented intrude themselves to some degree. Considering, however, the wide range of the social sciences represented—sociology, anthropology, history, economics, and political science, not to mention numerous national and cultural traditions—it is rather remarkable that their basic assumptions do not vary more widely. The definition of race itself is one about which scientists have disagreed most vigorously, and the efforts of international bodies, such as Unesco, to obtain consensus upon a specific formulation have apparently served rather to emphasize the points of difference. While recognizing the generic meaning of race as a biological subdivision of the human family, the great majority of writers in this book find it impossible to accept such a working definition of the term. They tend rather toward a social interpretation in which race is conceived simply as "a group of people who are regarded and treated in actual life as a distinctive biological group with a common ancestry." There is, however, great variation in the emphasis which the authors give to different environmental factors—demographic, economic, political, ideological, or psychological—and little would probably be gained at this stage by seeking to secure agreement as to the precise definition of the term. By way of providing a necessary framework of basic concepts and hypotheses for such studies, Herbert Blumer outlines in the first chapter the broad range of social and historical factors which interact in the dynamics of modern race relations. After disposing of the

xii

Introduction

logical ambiguities in the common use by both scholars and laymen of the terms "race" and "relations," Blumer proposes a set of workable definitions. Especially provocative for further research is Blumer's representation of the lines along which he considers that a new order of race relations is emerging in the present world, supplanting the hierarchical racial order of the past. The prospects, however, of evolving a body of universal principles of race relations are relatively poor, owing to the complexity of the factors operating within the present world order. The most that can be hoped for in the way of a theory of race relations, according to the author, is a set of "policy" principles for guiding action in given situations. The other writers are equally modest in their claims for the scientific validity of their findings, emphasizing at most the applicability of their generalizations within relatively restricted geographic or conceptual areas. Sixteen of the nineteen writers recognized some fairly definite geographic limitation upon their conclusions, as the titles of the papers themselves clearly imply. In most cases the geographic reference is to a rather large area of race-relations experience, such as the United States, Brazil, Spanish America, South Africa, the Near East, the Soviet Union, and Southeast Asia, but the analysis quite inevitably tends to be based upon "the intimate knowledge of the given concrete situation" leading to "policy" theory rather than "scientific" theory. It is equally apparent, however, that many, if not all, of the writers entertain the hope that their findings will have more than local significance, that they may shed light upon the experience of other areas, and that they may afford some test of the validity of the theories evolved in other comparable areas. Modern industrialized society, in setting the peoples of the world in motion as never before in human history, creates the problem of race. This has been noted quite universally by students of race relations and is one of the relatively few propositions upon which they do agree. This is a recurring theme in many of the chapters in this book, but in three of the papers the operation of the demographic and economic factors in race relations has been selected for special scrutiny. In areas where Western industrialized people have come into contact with "native folk," the practical problems associated with the biology of race relations—population maintenance, reproduction,

Introduction

xiii

disease, and mortality—have been most perplexing to administrators. In seeking to explain why some native peoples appear to survive and even expand, while others decline in numbers even to the point of extinction, Bernhard Hormann has developed a situational rather than a biological theory of race relations. He points out that, in general, the isolated folk societies, by virtue of their lack of exposure and consequent lack of immunity fall easy prey to Western diseases, and decline in numbers. Peasant societies, however, such as the Chinese and other peoples of eastern and southern Asia, have already had some experience with Western diseases and tend to expand under the beneficent influence of Western preventive medicine. Another situational approach is suggested in Andrew Lind's discussion of certain "frontiers" as race-making and race-differentiating environments. On the highly stratified occupational structure of the plantation frontier, races are "created" from among the imported and native labor groups, and rigid social distances are maintained between these groups as a control device. The farm settlement frontier is represented as another type of economic situation in which racial distinctions are also sharply drawn, but owing to the conflict over land rather than occupation. In contrast to both plantation and farm settlement frontiers, the commercial frontier is represented as bringing together detribalized and socially atomized peoples in a relationship of equality and of freedom of movement from one occupation to another. Two specific regions of racial contact— British Malaya and Hawaii—are used to illustrate the shifting racial definitions and the contrasted opportunities for occupational advancement. J. H. Boeke's discussion of colonialism and dualism provides a third situational approach to the problems of racial and cultural contact. As an economist, Boeke tends to shy away from direct reference to race or race relations. However, his central interest in these two competing systems relates to the struggle occurring within each system between the indigenous and the foreign values—a struggle essentially between racial groups. Colonialism implies, according to Boeke, a type of economic exploitation of a region by a dominating foreign political power, whereas dualism defines a sort of economic coexistence of an imported "high capitalism" and an indigenous "precapitalism" within a similar region. Boeke contends that a new, indigenous, but equally exploitative, colonialism may

xiv

Introduction

emerge in areas where the older colonialism has been forced out, and he cites Indonesia as a prize example. The emergence of what Everett Hughes describes as "new peoples," in which the unifying conception is one of race, provides another important theme for several chapters of the book. In the first chapter of this section, Hughes outlines in broad strokes the part played in the modern nationalistic ferment of such unifying or divisive symbols as racial ideologies and myths, distinctive languages, historic territories and boundaries, and localized literature and art. Among the numerous provocative ideas suggested in this essay, the conception of the time perspective which different peoples bring to bear upon race relations—of a sense of urgency or of restraint in seeking to realize their objectives as a distinct people—clearly offers greater research possibilities than it has thus far received. The next chapter of this section, although focused upon the particular experience of the peoples of the Near East, affords both illustration and test of the theory as to the emergence of "new peoples." While pointing out that the continual mingling and fusion of peoples in the Middle East makes wholly inapplicable the conception of race as a biological unity, Albert Hourani marshals extensive historical evidence of the critical part played in that area by the group affiliations associated with race. Religion, in particular, has played a prominent integrating and insulating role, and, of course, the numerous ethnic identifications play a part roughly parallel to that of race. Special attention is directed, in Georges Balandier's paper on race relations in West and Central Africa, to certain psychological conditions which are conducive to the emergence of new peoples. Although by no means confined to this phenomenon, the chapter delineates the widely observed practice of counter-racism and the circumstances under which this develops. What is known in this part of the world as "negritude" is represented as a psychological reaction to colonialism and is expressed in such forms as the protest literature of Negro intellectuals, the drawing of sharp lines of distinction with respect to half-castes, a fear of "whitening," and the rise of labor movements and exotic religious cults. A number of other writers call attention to the same types of racial manifestation in widely scattered settings.

Introduction

xv

The official governmental policies with respect to race relations quite naturally command the attention of a number of the writers, and it is the central concern in three of the papers. John Barnes first presents a schematic treatment of the administrative policies adopted by European governments vis-à-vis the native peoples and governments of Southern Africa. Granting variations and possible omissions of certain stages, Barnes submits a basic framework of evolutionary stages: (1) foreign policy, (2) frontier phase, (3) paternalism, and (4) integration. Special attention is given to the phase of integration which Barnes describes as occurring when distinct racial groups "become inextricably dependent on one another in a unitary political and economic system." Much of the present governmental policy in this area, according to Barnes, is designed to block integration, which nevertheless continues irresistibly as a consequence of industrialization and urbanization. Walter Kolarz' analysis of race relations in the Soviet Union takes the form of a discussion of the official policies with regard to racial quality and the treatment of existing racial groups. He finds that the announced constitutional pledge of racial equality and nondiscrimination runs counter to, and has been officially nullified in many areas by, the working policy of centralization and Russification. Thus, the Russian "elder-brother" ideology, like its earlier parallels among Western European and American powers, expresses itself in a chauvinistic and paternalistic colonialism. Perhaps the closest approximation to the type of practical knowledge which might have been put into immediate use at Bandung or at a similar conference of administrators is contained in J. S. Furnivall's chapter on the administrative aspects of racial relations in the tropical Far East. Himself an administrator of long experience under British colonial rule and retained as an adviser by the independent Burmese government, Furnivall concludes that many of the basic assumptions inherent in the programs of Western powers for dealing with this vast area, such as the Colombo Plan and the Foreign Operations Administration of the United States, should be thoroughly re-examined, if not abandoned. Although race relations are commonly conceived as group relations, and most of the writers in this volume focus attention primarily upon collectivities, it does not mean that they are unaware

xvi

Introduction

of the part which the individual plays in such relations. Three of the writers have chosen to deal primarily with race relations as they affect persons and with the part which such individuals in turn may play in the course of race relations. T h e first of this series, by Clarence Glick, was designed to provide a set of basic definitions and of general hypotheses with respect to the effect of race relations on personality—a frame of reference, tentative and exploratory in nature, to be tested by experience in various situations. H e conceives of race relations as characteristically going through four typical phases—precontact, contact and predomination, domination, and post-domination—in the course of which identifiable personality types emerge. In the post-domination phase of the process, to which most of the discussion is directed, Glick identifies on the one hand a series of personality types associated with nationalistic movements, and another series associated with movements which serve to integrate racial minorities. Although recognÍ2Íng the special functions of the race leader, Glide's scheme obviously includes all sorts and varieties of personality types. The individuals who have achieved positions of prestige and leadership among the subordinated peoples on racial frontiers are of special interest to Kenneth Little and T . S. Simey. The British W e s t African frontier, as described by Little, offers a peculiarly interesting setting for the study of a Westernized leadership among native peoples, owing to the relative lack of permanent settlement of Europeans— a situation roughly comparable to that described by Balandier. Of the three types of persons emerging from the "Westernization" process—"educated," "semiliterate," and "nonliterate"—it is the native intelligentsia, educated abroad, whose role, according to Little, is most critical and whose social position is most equivocal. Utilizing, as a point of departure, Park's familiar thesis that race relations are as inclusive as the social process, Simey devotes much of his paper to an elaboration of the problems of leadership in areas of cultural complexity, such as Israel and the British West Indies. Major attention, however, is directed to the varying patterns of adjustment to life in Great Britain on the part of immigrants from West Africa and the West Indies. The seven papers with a predominantly regional orientation yield readily to arrangement along a continuum from a situation of pro-

Introduction

xvii

nounced, to one of relatively slight, racial stratification and distance. The emotional tensions involved and the obstacles to objective description and analysis presumably also diminish as one moves along this continuum. There is some evidence, however, that as racial stratification diminishes the tensions involved, although less obvious, are more subtle in character and hence more difficult to describe objectively. In general, each of the discussions in this section is directed to the specific problems of a given region with only incidental concern for the testing or formulation of principles of universal applicability. The Union of South Africa is now and is likely to remain for some time in the future one of the "hot spots" of the world with respect to race relations, and it consequently imposes upon the scholar seeking an objective analysis more than ordinary difficulties. Absolom Vilakazi writes as a "participant observer," but confines his paper to a review of the major conceptions of race relations which prevail in South Africa and of the accompanying practices. The so-called "American race problem"—involving Negro-white relations—although involving a relatively high degree of social distance and of stratification, clearly falls below South Africa on such a continuum. Moreover, the evidence presented by E. Franklin Frazier in the second chapter in this series indicates that the situation in the United States is fluid and is moving in the direction of greater integration of the Negroes within the American community, and toward less pronounced differentials between Negroes and whites with respect to economic, political, and social position. While recognizing the many unique aspects of Negro-white relations in the United States, Frazier places special emphasis upon the common characteristics which it shares with other situations where Europeans and non-Europeans meet. One of the common misconceptions resulting from the parochialism of most race relations literature is that Europeans and Americans have exercised a monopoly upon colonialism and the racial exploitation which has so commonly accompanied it. This illusion should be partially corrected by Yuzuru Okada's description of race relations in Formosa under the Japanese. The practices followed by the Japanese in their associations with the Chinese and the natives of Formosa do not differ significantly from those of the British, French, or Americans on other plantation frontiers. The Japanese

xviii

Introduction

state was unquestionably somewhat more closely identified with the economic processes, especially on the plantations, and a policy of assimilation was followed more aggressively than by most of the other colonial powers. The differentiation in social status on the basis of racial criteria was certainly no less pronounced than in the United States at the same period of time. Maurice Freedman's analysis of the problems of the Chinese in Southeast Asia further underscores the social nature of race by revealing how varied and shifting the conceptions and definitions of the Chinese are in this part of the world, this despite a very pronounced disposition of the Chinese to maintain their separate identity. A frontier situation affording opportunity to compete on relatively equal terms has enabled the Chinese throughout Southeast Asia to acquire considerable economic strength, but this has not been paralleled by any comparable participation in the political or cultural life of the country of residence. The experience of the Chinese in this region illustrates the singularly interesting possibility of assimilation, acculturation, and even amalgamation occurring independently of each other. Spanish America and Portuguese America, as described by Ralph Beals and Donald Pierson, are two regions with relatively little identification of race with social position. Beals divides the whole of Spanish America (except the Caribbean) into three large regions, depending upon the relative social position occupied by the Europeans, mestizos, and Indians in each. From Argentina, where a myth of European racial homogeneity is consonant with, and supported by, strong out-group prejudices, to Mexico in which some degree of Indian ancestry is a decided political asset, the range of interracial situations is obviously very wide. But throughout this area, miscegenation has been extensive and has occurred over a long period of time. As a consequence, race as a biological phenomenon and race as a social and cultural phenomenon have become hopelessly confused, and the major trend in the region is "to seek ways of eliminating both biological and cultural differences" between peoples. The range in patterns of race relations in Portuguese America is not so broad as in Spanish America, but Pierson clearly recognized the dangers in oversimplification and studiously avoided them. On the basis of research initiated twenty years ago, Pierson developed a score of fundamental hypotheses regarding race relations in Brazil,

Introduction

xix

which have in general been confirmed by the work of other scholars. Extensive miscegenation throughout Portuguese America has created no permanent mixed racial stocks but rather a situation of considerable status fluidity, in which blacks, browns, and whites all participate under conditions of considerable freedom and equality. European physical traits, however, possess disproportionate prestige and aesthetic value among all ranks of society. Pierson's further observation that in Brazil class distinctions are gradually displacing race distinctions, such that rising in class can also change one's race, may well be a portent of what may occur with increasing frequency in many other parts of the world where miscegenation is far advanced. A series of new intrusive forces, including industrialization and urbanization, increase the likelihood of further change in an already dynamic situation. An excellent analysis of race relations in the South Pacific and Australia, prepared and presented to the conference by Professor A. P. Elkin, was, at the suggestion of the author, reluctantly omitted, owing to the difficulty of sufficiently reducing its length to be consonant with the other papers in the volume. This valuable paper will be published elsewhere in full. The editor takes this opportunity to gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support of the Ford Foundation and the Mclnerny Foundation toward the attempt to extend the boundaries of knowledge represented in this book. He is especially indebted to President Gregg M. Sinclair of the University of Hawaii, who early recognized the possible implications of such a venture and whose enthusiasm and resourcefulness assisted so greatly in bringing the conference into being, to Herbert Blumer of the University of California, and to Everett Hughes and Robert Redfield of the University of Chicago for their wise counsel and generous assistance in planning the conference of which this book is one tangible outgrowth. ANDREW W . LIND

Honolulu, Hawaii September, 1955

I. Frame of Reference

Chapter 1 REFLECTIONS O N THEORY OF RACE RELATIONS HERBERT

G.

BLUMER

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA (BERKELEY)

A theory of race relations must be clear as to what is meant by "race" and by "relations." These two terms are ambiguous in ordinary discourse and in the usual scholarly writing. Without a clear understanding of what they refer to in the empirical world, any theory which is organized around them will be automatically deficient.

The Meaning of Race The term "race" is fundamentally a biological concept. A s usually conceived, it presumes that the human species consists of branches or divisions biologically distinct from each other. Each branch has a stable and common hereditary make-up which is maintained intact providing that the members mate with each other. This stable and distinctive heredity shows itself in bodily features— such as skeletal structure, physiognomy, coloration, and hair texture — a n d possibly in psychological traits. The physical features, in particular, are the means of distinguishing races and of placing individual human beings in them. The hereditary stability of the separate races is disturbed and their distinctiveness is blurred by interbreeding. This hybridization results in considerable variability inside a race and in considerable overlapping between them. The scholar confronted with this condition has the difficult task of reconstructing the original races. Finally, a racially hybrid people may form a new stable racial stock through a lengthy process of interbreeding. T w o major difficulties are encountered in applying this biological 3

4

Reflections on Theory of Race Relations

conception of race to human beings in actual life. First, there is disagreement as to what are the human races, viewed either in terms of original races or in terms of new stable biological stocks. Biologists and physical anthropologists who undertake the scientific task of isolating and identifying human races have not agreed and do not agree on the criteria of race. Quite clearly, if the concept of race as a biological grouping varies and is inconsistent in its criteria, the concept itself is deficient for both empirical reference and for theorizing. The second difficulty in working with a biological concept of race is more telling. It is the now familiar point that in actual life people view and act toward each other on the basis of social conceptions of race that are likely to diverge markedly from "scientific" biological conceptions, whatever these latter may be. Peoples may classify one another as races on the basis of geographical residence, language, mode of living, and other conditions which do not coincide with classifications made by scientists on the basis of biological traits. It is contended that these working conceptions of race used by people in their association are "real," since they provide the basis for conduct; correspondingly, the "scientific" biological conceptions are "spurious," since they are irrelevant to how peoples face and treat each other as races. Largely as a result of the two difficulties mentioned, the trend in current social science thought is to shift from the biological to a social conception of race. A race has come to mean simply a group of people who are regarded and treated in actual life as a race. The membership of the race simply consists of those individuals who are identified and classified as belonging to it. As a tool of analysis of people in actual life situations, such a social conception of race is clearly superior to, and more useful than, a scientific biological conception. It offers lines of analysis that cling close to real experience. It can be said that the study of human races as developed by biologists and physical anthropologists has essentially no meaningful connection with race relations in real human life and offers no contribution to understanding or analyzing such relations.1 1 It may be argued that there is a considerable identity between the major races as recognized by biologists and physical anthropologists, and as recognized by people in actual life—such as whites, Negroes, and Mongolians—and that as a consequence the studies made by the former may contribute knowledge valuable to the understanding of race relations

HERBERT G. BLUMER

5

Further probing of the social conception of race is needed in order to have a reasonably clear working definition. To conceive a group of people as a race is obviously only one of many ways in which that group might be conceived. It might be regarded as a set of dwellers, a social class, a territorial group, a nation, or one of countless other groups. Thus, we are compelled to ask what is involved in conceiving a group as being a race; what sets off this kind of conception from other kinds of conceptions. The answer, it seems to me, is that the group that is conceived as being a race is believed to be a biological grouping, with its members having hereditary affinity or sharing a common biological nature. Thus we are led back to a recognition of race as a biological grouping. But it is a biological grouping only in the sense that it is conceived as such by those who regard it as a race—and not on the basis of established biological evidence in the scientific sense. Thus it would seem that a reasonably accurate, realistic, and workable concept of race is that it is a class or group of human beings who are regarded and treated in social life as a distinctive biological group with a common ancestry. This definition of the term "race" serves realistically, I believe, to identify races when studying or analyzing race relations. As a concept it requires us to go to people themselves to see how they categorize each other, and to note that when they are led to select a class of individuals as being a distinct biological group with a common ancestry, they have established a race. Such classifying or grouping of individuals may be made without the people actually having in their vocabulary any word that corresponds to the English word "race." Also, the group that is set up as a race may be so utterly lacking in a common biological heritage from the standpoint of science as to make its designation as a race seem ridiculous. Nevertheless, if it is regarded as a distinct biological group with a common biological heredity, the stage is set for the existence of race relations.

among the latter. Against such a contention two things should be said: First, none of these so-called major races is homogeneous—each differs widely in biological composition, culture, mode of living, etc.—and thus should not be treated as an entity. Second, each exists as a very different kind of object to many groups and thus is approached differently and acted toward differently. The major race is in no sense the "constant" that is presupposed by the biological conception.

6

Reflections on Theory of Race Relations

The Meaning of Relations Now let us consider the term "relations." This is a catchall term in the social sciences which is taken for granted and rarely subjected to any analysis. Relations in human group life are multitudinous in number and diverse in kind. Embracing everything that might be thought to connect individual with individual and group with group, relations stem in all directions, take all sorts of forms, and show a wide range of characters. As far as I can see, there is no evidence whatsoever for assuming that race relations are a special class or kind of social relations with a distinct generic character that sets them apart—as when we speak of economic relations or intimate relations or impersonal relations or conflict relations. Aside from the single unique feature that comes from races regarding each other as biologically distinct, all of the relations found between races are also found between groups that are not races. Similarly, the range of relations found generally in human group life may be covered in the relations between racial groups. Because of the all-inclusiveness and high diversity of social relations, it is necessary, in order not to get lost in analysis, to introduce some scheme of the major lines of social relations in group life. The following kinds of axes of relations are proposed as those which aid the observation and understanding of the position of racial groups with regard to one another. 1. Formal economic relations. Represented by division of labor; division of occupation; differences in wealth, income, and ownership; differences in economic control; differences in standards of living; and differences in economic opportunities. 2. Formal status relations. Represented by social status positions; class or caste positions; positions of prestige, authority, and deference; differences in rights, privileges, and obligations. 3. Preferential relations. Represented by the selection of associates in the different situations in life; the differential acceptance and differential rejection that occur in having to act together or toward one another. 4. Ideological relations. Represented by the various views and conceptions which groups have of one another. Includes stereotyped ideas and images, and supporting beliefs, myths, and justifications. 5. Attitudinal or feeling relations. Represented by the variety of sentiments and organized emotions which people may have toward one another —affection, hatred, antipathy, fear, contempt, respect, reverence, like, dislike, etc.

HERBERT G. BLUMER

7

6. Orderly or discordant overt relations. Represented by overt relations which are smooth, orderly, and harmonious, or which are marked by friction, discord, and conflict. This is the kind of relations which we usually have in mind when we ask how well people are getting along together. 7. Organized manipulative relations. Represented by relations in which groups seek through deliberate effort to change or retain a given position toward one another, to control one another along given lines or to undermine such control, or to adjust to such control. These relations are between acting, scheming, and planning groups. The relations are marked by conflict and struggle, but they are not mere conflict relations since they also involve accommodation, point-to-point acceptance of each other, and occasional co-operation. This area of relationship is occupied by organized groups with conscious objectives who develop guiding policies, devise plans, mobilize power, and resort to strategy. This line of social relationship is becoming more and more pronounced in modern life.

Complex Character of Race Relations Since the separate terms "race" and "relations" have been defined or specified, we may now turn to a theoretical consideration of the nature of race relations. We are confronted by two fundamental questions: (1) How do race relations arise? (2) What is the effect of race on relations? The first of these two questions can and should be restated: How do a given people come to be regarded as a race? This question has not been studied, as far as I know, chiefly because it has not been posed as a scholarly problem. What I suggest as an answer is in part conjecture. One condition which would lead to the identification of a group as a race would be the biological appearance of the members of that group. Because of evident visibility, physiognomy, color, stature, body form, and hair texture would seemingly provide a basis or an occasion for thinking of a given set of people as a race. But such biological marks by themselves need not lead the people possessing these marks to be identified as a race. There are in many human groups various constant differentia in biological appearance, such as blond or brunette hair, light or swarthy color, narrow or broad faces, short or long stature, which do not give rise to a conception of race on the basis of such fixed biological marks. A second contributory condition to an initial identification of a people as a race is their possession of a distinctive language, conduct, or culture. If these cultural differentia are accompanied by

8

Reflections on Theory of Race Relations

differentia in biological appearance, there is greater likelihood of conceptions of race arising. But I suspect that there appear to be still other contributing conditions which are required, such as an ecological separateness or living apart, and particularly a sense that the group is alien and not party to the historical heritage of one's own group. These few remarks point to the danger in thinking that race relations emerge automatically with the association of people having different biological make-ups. Much more likely, the explanation of the identification of peoples as races has to be sought in the historical conditions under which such people meet and in the experiences which lead them to single each other out as distinctive groups believed to be biologically different. The more important question is, what effect does the identification of a people as being a racial group have on relations with that people? As far as I can interpret the evidence, a recognition of a group as being biologically different, or the imputation to it of such a difference, does not determine either the direction, the form, or the nature of relations with that group. Race relations in terms of direction, form, and nature result, as will be considered later, from a complex interaction of many factors inside a given historical setting. To regard the character of race relations to be the sheer result of a recognized or imputed biological difference is pure fantasy. Care must be taken not to be misunderstood on this point. A group may have an already organized racial conception which it applies to a people it is meeting for the first time; this conception would likely have a significant influence on the relations that are developed with that people. However, such an organized racial conception is itself a historical product and represents a way in which an original sense of biological difference has been defined through complex experience over time. The mere recognition or imputation of biological difference does not determine the subsequent conception that is formed of the group regarded as biologically different. If the sheer imputation of group biological distinctiveness— which is the basic condition and premise of race relations—does not account for the direction, the form, or the nature of race relations, one may ask whether it has any significance whatever. An affirmative answer is required. First, as already suggested, it sets the stage for the formation of conceptions, feelings, acts, and patterns of association, although it does not determine that formation.

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Second, and of much greater importance, it tends to sustain and rivet whatever conceptions, feelings, acts, and patterns are formed. It is likely to have this effect in part because some of the biological features like color or physiognomy, which are the mark of the imputed biological difference, are ineradicable; they enable, as some students have pointed out, an easy and repetitive "pegging" of feelings, views, and definitions. The sense of biological difference sustains and rivets given race relations in another and more important way, namely, in that whatever is ascribed to the group as part of its racial being is automatically regarded as constant and as transmissible intact from generation to generation. Thus, a fixity is imparted to the complex of views and feelings that grow up around a belief in biological difference, that is not found in the same degree in the case of other kinds of group difference. Third, it is probable that the sense of group distinctiveness in biological make-up facilitates, even though it does not cause, feelings of opposition. Thus, where conditions of experience incline toward mild conflict relations, the sense of biological difference may enhance feelings of opposition and promote such conflict relations. Aside from these few limited ways, the factor of race per se seems to have no influence on race relations. The implication of my remarks is that the explanation of race relations must be sought in social conditions and historic experience and not in any analysis of race. Any careful scrutiny of the relations between racial groups compels a recognition of the following points: (1) such relations are the product of a complex number of factors; (2) they are markedly dependent on the peculiar character of happenings and of situations; and (3) they are subject to much change, occasionally approaching pronounced transformation. This is true irrespective of what may be selected as a relation. I should like to discuss the point by considering briefly the seven lines of relation mentioned previously. 1. Formal economic relations. Obviously, economic relations between given racial groups depend on a complex variety of conditions: the type of economy; the play of forces that sustain or transform that economy; the possession of initial economic advantages or handicaps by the racial groups, such as type of wealth, capital, skill, and kinds of interests and preoccupations; the conditions under which the racial groups meet; differential possession of power; and the structuring of opportunities and of impediments. These are only a few of the many factors which an economist would rec-

10

Reflections on Theory of Race Relations

ognize as determining the complex differentiation of an economy and the allocation of people within it. The play of these many variable factors, embodied in complex and variable interdependency gives rise to a serial run of historical happenings and situations which in turn affect and set lines for the development of new relations. Thus any given concrete instance of economic relationship between racial groups has a history and has to be understood through that history. Finally, as one would suspect and as historical evidence bears out, economic relations between racial groups readily undergo change, sometimes to the extent of profound transformations. 2. Formal status relations. It is obvious that status relations between racial groups also are marked by the three mentioned features. They are a product of many varied factors, such as the original conditions of contact; the differential possession of the skills, knowledge, and the wherewithal needed for the different positions in the status structure; the differential possession of insignia and symbols of prestige; the differential possession of the instruments of power; the opportunities to mobilize and utilize power; the presence and absence of opportunities to acquire power or to retain power; and the development of bodies of ideas which sanction and idealize the status structure. The status structure must be recognized also as a product of a given stream of historical development. Third, status relations between racial groups are subject to change, sometimes to marked change. 3. Preferential relations. The taste, canons of judgment, and conceptions of propriety that lie behind and determine preferential selection and rejection of associates in the relations between racial groups come from a complex interplay of varied factors, such as how members of the racial groups initially regarded each other; the values, beliefs, and codes originally held by them; the age and sex composition of the two groups; the kinds of institutional philosophies, definitions, and controls brought to bear in the situation; the extent to which contacts of intimacy and remoteness are set by conditions of living; and the structuring of economic and status relations. The interplay of such factors lies in a course of historical development with its own peculiarity. Again, patterns of selection and rejection of associates may undergo marked change. 4. Ideological relations. The views and images which racial groups form of one another and the beliefs and myths supporting such views and images are numerous and diverse. They are the products of varied historical experience, into which there may enter many kinds of happenings and many kinds of factors. The pattern of the views and images may be set by the original historic conceptions which a group has of its importance and role. The views and images may reflect and justify the structure of formal economic and status relations of the past or of the present, or they may be a reaction against such formal relations. They may carry the imprint of past traumatic experiences. They may acquire a cast in reaction to the criticism of outsiders and the effort of outsiders to change the structure of formal relations. They may be shaped to sanction and allow for the execution of coveted acts against a racial group. They may represent efforts at emulation of some

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people having prestige. They may gain form from special kinds of fear or resentment. These few remarks suggest that ideological relations may be complex, that they may be the result of many kinds of factors, and that they have a historical setting and a historical career. These observations also imply clearly that racial views and images may be subject to diverse growth and to marked change. 5. Attitudinal or feeling relations. The feelings and attitudes between racial groups are usually very complex and again are formed through the interplay of many varied factors. It is well to stress these points, since practically all theories in this area presuppose a single feeling (like prejudice) or at best a few, and further seek to account for the feeling or feelings through a single or a few factors (like innate aversion or protection of status). Feelings between members of different racial groups run a wide gamut— hate, distrust, contempt, depreciation, dislike, indifference, curiosity, tenderness, respect, reverence, envy, compassion, love, awe, fear, uncertainty, lust, disgust, and approbation—to mention a few. The conditions of group experience which give rise to and crystallize such feelings, again, may be, and usually are, very diverse. To avoid repetition, I wish merely to say that such factors as those mentioned in the case of preferential relations, and many others besides, operate to form feelings and attitudes between racial groups. They also have histories and are subject to profound reshaping. 6. Orderly or discordant overt relations. A little reflection should make one realize that the presence of orderly or discordant relations between racial groups may result from many different kinds of happenings in the run of historical experience. Changes in economic position, the play of new conceptions of rights and hopes, changes in status opportunities, the play of an educational system, ethical reawakenings or regressions, outside agitation on behalf of new doctrines, new legislation, strengthening or relaxing of police powers—these are only a few of what could easily be an impressively lengthy list of factors and occurrences that introduce harmony or friction and conflict into overt relations between races. It should be selfevident that these happenings fall into or constitute a run of historical events. One needs merely to mention that obviously orderly and discordant relations between racial groups are subject to change and transformation. 7. Organized manipulative relations. It is easiest to recognize in the organized manipulative relations between racial groups the three points I have been making: that such relations result from the interplay of many different factors, that they lie as formed and forming points in a historical sequence, and that they are susceptible to significant change. The fact that race relations are products of complex factors, that they have varying careers, and that they are subject to the possibilities of marked change sets difficulties to the development of theory suitable to an adequate analysis of race relations. I believe that these difficulties have not been recognized or appreciated sufficiently. As

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Reflections on Theory of Race Relations

a result, many ideas based on untenable premises have got into theory of race relations. The better body of theory, which is justly recognized as superior, seems in its turn to have been derived from a recent and special kind of historical setting. I suspect that this better theory is not too applicable to the different kind of setting into which the world seems to be moving. Following are a few of the naive and unfounded ideas that have crept into a fair amount of current theory of race relations. One is that unsatisfactory race relations are to be explained as a result of feelings of prejudice; this idea ignores the many different axes of relations and the many different conditions which give rise to these relations. Another questionable idea is that racial prejudice arises from some factor or factors of individual make-up, such as an "authoritarian" personality structure, or an unconscious sense of guilt, or a set of traits reached through some personality test; ideas of this sort are obtuse to the complicated lines of historical experience and the complicated processes of definition that have led to the formation of feelings of prejudice in a racial group. Another example is the notion that members of one race act toward members of another race on the basis of the attitudes that they have toward them; this notion disregards the many kinds of relations that are prescribed or governed by conditions that are unrelated to the attitudes or feelings of the participants. A similar questionable notion is the view that "tension" in race relations results from a blocking of motives and feelings by the overt patterns of race relations, and that such "tensions" are the prelude to outbreaks of violence; this view ignores the fact that overtly orderly relations may exist despite illfeeling of one racial group toward the other, and also that tensions do not necessarily lead to outward violence and, indeed, need not be required on occasion for outward violence. A final example is the view that lodges racial opposition in the different cultures of racial groups; this view disregards the many conditions of experience that may define the way in which racial groups are led to conceive one another and to relate to one another. While many other instances might be mentioned, the above examples suffice to indicate how easy it is for ideas to creep into theories of race relations that would never be entertained if it were recognized that race relations are formed by complicated and varying factors in complex processes of historical experience.

HERBERT G. BLUMER

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Race Relations as a Hierarchical Order

Let us now consider the better and more solid theory of race relations. This better body of theory has been built up, it seems, with reference to a special setting of race relations—a setting which has flourished primarily during the last two centuries but which is disappearing today. It is an arrangement of races such as we associate with European colonialism, European industrial expansion, and migrations of peoples in pursuit of economic livelihood. The arrangement is in the form of a racial order within a society. It presupposes a vertical relation of racial groups, with one racial group occupying a dominant social position and one or more racial groups occupying subordinate positions. This hierarchical relationship comes about in three ways: (1) a peaceful or warlike invasion of some native land by a dominant group which sets up an economic, political, and cultural order of life which is alien to the natives but into which the natives have to fit in a subordinate role, if they fit in at all; (2) the bringing of large numbers of an outside group into an order of life which has already been set up by the dominant group, and into which the imported racial people enter as subordinates; (3) the more or less voluntary migration of people to an occupied area which they enter on a subordinate level and in which they compete economically with members of a dominant racial group. In all cases the dominant group occupies the higher levels of the economy, has control of political power, enjoys a superior social status, and, on the basis of these privileged positions, draws a line between it and the subordinate racial group or groups. If this line is respected by the subordinate racial people, the racial groups may live together in orderly accommodated relations. However, members of the subordinate racial group may seek to cross the line, primarily by entrance into the occupations and economic positions reserved by the dominant racial group to itself, or by political efforts to lessen or overthrow the political control of the dominant group. The dominant racial group construes the crossing of the line or preparations to cross the line as threats to its status, its power, and its livelihood. It thus develops fears, apprehensions, resentments, angers, and bitternesses which become fused into a general feeling of prejudice against the subordinate racial people or peoples, and which gain outward expression in forms of discrimination, segregation, and re-

14

Reflections on Theory of Race Relations

pression. In turn, the subordinate racial people form a counterprejudice and engage in subtle acts of reprisal. The relations between the racial groups thus become marked by tension, with occasional outbreaks of violence. This statement is very sketchy. It leaves out many interesting aspects which have engaged the attention of the student and the theorist—such as the role of the so-called marginal man, or of buffer groups, or of divergent policies of political control, or of alleged cycles of race relations. But it indicates the central character of the setting which has been the major subject of modern theory in race relations. It is obvious that this theory is concerned with the establishment and maintenance of a hierarchical racial order within a given society. The neat fitting of this theory to the instances which it is presumed to cover is not always successful—embarrassing exceptions seem to arise from point to point. Yet on the whole the theory has been illuminating. It has been able to catch realistically racial situations in many areas of the world and to give them a reasonable rationale. N e w Character of Race Relations

However, my impression is that the setting of race relations in our modern world is taking on a form which is significantly different from that which has just been briefly described. The difference is not contained in the mere fact that today race relations are changing—they have always tended to do that—but rather that the change is in fundamental sets of patterns, suggested in the expression that "races are today on the move." The past setting has been one of the formation and maintenance of a racial order inside of a given society. The new settings which I believe to be taking shape are of two types: (1) a fluid, blurred, and variegated process of racial thrusts and accommodations; and (2) a positioning of racial groups as sovereign or quasi-sovereign peoples. Fluidity of Race Relations. The first of these new settings seems to be emerging with the breakdown of hierarchical racial orders. Some light on its character is given by a consideration of the major forces that are at work to undermine or tear down the traditional racial orders that have taken form and flourished during the last two centuries. These forces may be identified and grouped in the

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following way: the breakdown of insularity; the strengthening of the position and power of subordinate racial groups; the weakening of unity of view and intention in the dominant racial group; and the increase of organized manipulative efforts to change relations or to preserve them. It seems clear that the insularity which has marked the racial orders of recent times is dissolving within the framework of our modern world. With increased communication across geographical boundaries, subordinate racial groups are becoming more aware of what is happening elsewhere in the world and are disposed to reassess their position in a more sophisticated manner. The insularity is also giving way in the face of increasing interest of the outside world in local racial orders. This interest is manifest in serious journalistic reporting, in a literature of romance, in "scientific" studies in the world of scholarship, in critical discussion by official and semiofficial international bodies—indeed, in a conference such as this. This outside interest usually carries a theme of ethical condemnation of the racial order and the voicing of some conviction that the racial order is basically untenable. We need to note also the increased opportunities in our modern world for the play of propaganda and of manipulative efforts on behalf of an outside ideology which challenges the premise of the racial order. Although it is conceivable that rigid controls over a communication may arrest the breaking down of the insularity of traditional racial orders, this is the more unlikely probability. The loss of insularity exposes the racial order to new perspectives which initiate and reinforce interpretations and views unfavorable to its maintenance. Another line of happening undermining traditional racial orders is the improvement in the position and power of subordinate racial groups. Some members improve their economic position by moving upward in the occupational structure or by accumulating wealth. Some begin to gain the skills, the knowledge, the experience, and the "know-how" that is required by the economy, and thus are better prepared to improve their economic position. Similarly, some members improve their social status—by getting better economic positions, by achieving professional positions, by advanced education, by intellectual superiority, and by effective use of power. Initially this improvement may be reflected only inside the social structure of the subordinate group, but, even so confined, the social advance-

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Reflections on Theory of Race Relations

ment has the effect, as others have pointed out, of tilting the line of separation from the dominant group from a horizontal to a diagonal plane. With improvements in economic and social position, with increased sophistication, with more conscious organization, and a more sophisticated leadership, the subordinate group moves toward increased political power. The third line along which the traditional racial order disintegrates is the weakening of unity in the views and action of the dominant racial group. This comes usually in the form of disagreement over the policies to be used in regard to the subordinate group. The break may be on ideological lines or on lines of interest of subgroups who believe they have something to gain from a different set of relations. With such disagreements and breaks, the premises as well as the lines of policy are thrown into question and thus are lifted out of the realm of the mores. This undermining of what has been unified conviction naturally leaves openings to fundamental changes. Another line of development which undercuts the traditional racial order is constituted by increased organized efforts to change it in part or in whole, or to offset such efforts, or to reinforce the premises of the order. As one looks at what is happening in societies having traditional racial orders, one sees the steady growth of organizations which operate to bring pressure to bear on the racial order or on the situation affecting the racial order. The basis for such organized manipulative efforts in subordinate racial groups is laid by greater sophistication, the development of a press, the rise of a new leadership skilled in the ways of the system, and the emergence of intellectuals who debunk the myths of the racial order, who advance new definitions, and who agitate on their behalf. Specific organizations come to be formed with objectives, programs, and policies. They operate inside the existing institutional structure» seeking to mobilize power and to apply it at strategic points. Such organizations become effective means of changing the racial order at its weak links and, in doing so, they weaken it at other links. The formation of "counterorganizations" among the dominant racial group to preserve the racial system has the effect, interestingly, of increasing stress and fluidity and of furthering a series of new crises, each one of which requires further manipulative effort. The maintenance of the traditional order is severely weakened by the play

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back and forth of organizations whose acts are continually setting new situations which have to be met. Impressive change of established racial orders is taking place along the four lines which I have mentioned. Barring a thorough severing of communication of a society with the outside world and the setting up of rigid and effective controls within it, there is every reason to believe that change will steadily mount along these four lines. Of more interest than the disintegration of racial orders that this change implies is the question of what arrangement of race relations may be expected to follow in its wake. It would seem natural to look at the change as essentially a transition to either a new accommodative order in which racial groups would have new stable places or to a society in which races would lose their identity and disappear. I see nothing to suggest that the process of change is a transitional stage or that it will terminate in either of these two forms. It appears, instead, to have every prospect of being a long enduring process which will constitute a historical epoch in its own right. My reasons for believing this are two. First, race relations cannot avoid being incorporated to the full in the unsettling and dynamic changes that are part and parcel of the industrialized and urbanized mass society that is emerging in the world today. Let us bear in mind some of the central features that are intrinsic to such a society: increased diversification of groups and organization; increased technological and occupational change; increased territorial movements of individuals; quickened vertical mobility; increased exposure to new definitions of objects and situations; rapid turnover in the objects of attention and interest; increased alignment and realignment of groups on the basis of interests; and intensification of the play of pressure groups and interest groups. It is fantastic to assume that race relations will be segregated and insulated from the operation of these shifting and continuing forces that are integral to modern life. Since our technological mass society is organized intrinsically on the premise of change, and since, by virtue of this organization, it places a premium on innovation, pressure and counterpressure, the opening of new opportunities and the disappearing of old ones, and the realignment of groups in almost all spheres, there is nothing to suggest that within it or as a result of its operation there may emerge a new structure of races, with fixed and stable positions and a crystallized governing code.

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Reflections on Theory of Race Relations

Undoubtedly, the dynamic forces of modern industrialized mass society will lead to marked changes in race relations and certainly over time to a diminution of their importance. I do not think, however, that race relations will disappear. There will still be occasion inside of the complex, diversified, and moving society for peoples to identify each other as racial groups. This will be due in part to the perpetuation of memories stemming from the racial order undergoing disintegration; such memories tend to have a self-perpetuating character and are easily revocable. Also the fact that members of the subordinate racial groups will be moving upward and outward in the changes taking place in the mass society will provide continuing occasion for the affirmation of racial identification. They will encounter obstacles at different points and find themselves confronted by areas of exclusiveness from which they will be barred. In turn, members of the dominant race, faced with these efforts of others to enter areas of exclusiveness, will similarly have occasion to reinstate awareness of racial difference. Finally, it is reasonable to expect the operation of "clannish" tendencies which will perpetuate some separateness of racial groups—particularly in intimate circles such as that of marriage, home life, social circles, and networks of personal relationships. Such likely experiences point to a continuation of racial identifications. This general picture may be sharpened in detail by considering what is likely to happen in an industrialized mass society along the seven axes of race relations that I have previously mentioned. 1. Formal economic relations. It is reasonable to believe that there will be a significantly greater spreading of members of subordinate racial groups throughout the occupational structure and that they will acquire greater wealth and economic control. The increasing diversification and shifts in occupations in the economy plus the varied acquisition of skill, experience, capital, and "connections" by individual racial members will make this movement spotty but continuous. Resistance and exclusion may be expected at many points but these points will not be arranged along a fixed line as in a racial order. Such resistance and exclusion will tend to give way. The likely picture of race relations in the economic sphere will be one of great fluidity. 2. Formal status relations. These relations will reflect the developments in economic relations. Members of subordinate racial groups can be expected to spread throughout the status structure, moving into positions of prestige, authority, and power. Because of the nature of the fluid society this status movement will take place in essentially all realms—business,

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political life, education, administrative management, the professions, recreation, sports, and the arts. This status movement will occasion, obviously, realignments in relations between members of different racial groups. This realignment is certain to be continuous and shifting. 3. Preferential relations. As races shift in their formal economic and status relations, as they alter their conceptions of each other, as they revalue each other along the lines of respect, fear, admiration, etc., changes will take place in the norms and feelings that govern acceptance and rejection of associates. It is unlikely that the changes in preferential relations will be uniform; the probability is that they will be varying and spotty, resting less and less on a decisive code and depending more and more on the definitions given separately by multitudinous social sets and circles. 4. Ideological relations. The play of the divergent, dynamic forces of modern industrialized society can be expected not only to change the conceptions and images held by racial groups of each other but to diversify the conceptions and make them more tenuous. The conceptions and images will reflect the changes in formal relations between the races, shifts in power, increased sophistication, and rational evaluation. 5. Attitudinal or feeling relations. These relations have every prospect, also, of being diverse and fluid. This is likely because of the many new and varied situations in which the members of the different racial groups will meet and act. The differential experience set by these situations plus the varying definitions and evaluations made by racial groups of one another bespeak the great likelihood of fluidity in attitudes and feelings. 6. Orderly or discordant overt relations. In the light of the setting of an industrialized mass society the overt relations between racial groups are likely to be orderly, although not necessarily characterized by good will. People can be expected to align themselves in so many ways other than racial that race relations are likely to lose much of their importance. Being removed from a place of separate distinctiveness and coming to constitute just one among many alignments, race relations are likely to be subject to the control of the general policy of restraint, rational appraisal, and orderly adjustment that is required for the running of a complex society. 7. Organized manipulative relations. By nature, an industrialized mass society fosters and depends on the manipulative efforts of organized groups. These are called for by virtue of the shifting diversification of interests which are being pursued and because of the absence of established channels for the realization of such interests. W e may expect two developments in this area of relations between racial groups. First, there will be great reliance on organized manipulative efforts by the subordinate racial group in its quest for access to the privileges and rights in the society. Second, however, there will be an increasing tendency for members of different racial groups to unite across race lines in the pursuit of newly developing common interests. Consequently, we may expect in this area, as in others, fluid, changing, and variable relations between racial groups.

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Reflections on Theory of Race Relations

I recognize the conjectural character of these sketchy views on what is likely to be the nature of race relations in modern, industrialized mass society. The views are based in large measure on the moving pattern that is emerging in the United States. To regard this pattern as the necessary prototype of an industrialized and urbanized world society may be an ethnocentric error. Whether or not my remarks be true in detail, I believe, nevertheless, that traditional racial orders are doomed to disintegration, as the trend of recent happenings seems indeed to be showing. Considering the forces which are at work, it seems more reasonable to anticipate a shifting, reshuffling, and transformation of race relations than their disappearance or their restructuring in a fixed and stable arrangement. A long time may be required before traditional racial organization breaks down completely as a result of the dynamic forces inherent in modern technological and urban society. The trend, however, seems to be in this direction. It is a trend toward fluidity in social relations, including race relations. Relations between Sovereign Racial Peoples. The second type of racial setting which seems to be emerging today is in the form of a relationship between racial peoples who enjoy sovereignty or quasi sovereignty. This setting is following in the wake of the breakdown of modern colonialism. The political control associated with modern colonialism is changing markedly, being overthrown in some instances, withdrawn in others, and in other cases being greatly relaxed through new administrative policies. The result is to bring previously subordinate native groups into full or partial political control of sovereign states. This new arrangement, which marks the breakdown of older racial arrangements, sets an intriguing question as to the kind of race relations, if any, which may develop between different racial peoples, each of whom comprises a sovereign state. Will such groups continue to conceive each other in racial terms? If so, what form are these conceptions likely to take? Further, how will these conceptions affect the policy and actions of the sovereign groups toward each other? The time has been too brief and the evidence too paltry to supply any definite answers to these questions. One conjectures that the memories of past racial relations would carry over into and affect the views and policies of the new sovereign people. More likely, these memories and their correlative

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feelings might constitute a reservoir, to be exploited on behalf of nascent nationalism, in an effort to develop allegiance, mobilize support, and ensure strong, united action. Whatever may be one's conjectures on these matters, the question remains as to the nature of race relations between sovereign groups, particularly between those that have emerged out of a traditional racial order. Conclusions Let me note in closing the implications of the foregoing discussion for the development of a body of theory of race relations. Since the sheer fact of race has no determinative bearing on race relations and since the relations are a result of a process of historical development involving complicated and varying factors, the possibilities of forming a body of "scientific" theory would depend seemingly on some stability and constancy in a given process of historical formation. While such stability and constancy were marks of the racial orders built up in recent centuries, they do not seem to be marks of the arrangement of races in the newly emerging world society. Hence the likelihood of forming a body of theory of race relations suited to this emerging world is not too promising, if one seeks theory in the form of "universals." Very likely, instead, the formation of theory in this area will be in the form of "policy" theory—theory which is designed to analyze given concrete situations as a basis for the devising of policy and the guidance of action. Policy theory requires an intimate knowledge of the given concrete situation, its people, their traditional views, their present run of attention, and the forces at work among them. It seeks through analysis of such matters in a concrete setting to assess the possible consequences of alternative schemes of action. I suspect that racial experts are more likely to make contributions to policy theory than to "scientific" theory in the realm of race relations.

Chapter 2 RIGIDITY AND FLUIDITY IN RACE RELATIONS BERNHARD

L.

HORMANN

UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII

Introduction "The varieties of man," wrote Darwin in the journal which he kept as the naturalist on the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, "seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals— the stronger always extirpating the weaker." He had been concerned with the widespread decline of aboriginal populations in America, the South Seas, and Australia, and after giving due weight to such obvious factors as the introduction of diseases and alcoholic spirits and the disturbance of the native food supply, he referred to a "more mysterious agency," the spontaneous appearance of ailments among natives when Europeans appear on the scene, so that "it would almost appear as if the effluvium of one set of men shut up for some time together was poisonous when inhaled by others; and possibly more so, if the men be of different races."1 Thus, the great naturalist emphasized race relations as primarily a biological phenomenon. While his later Origin of Species revolutionized the science of biology and made it possible to conceive of the races of man as at least distantly related rather than as separate, even distinctly created, entities, nevertheless, his general influence on the study of race and race relations has been to accentuate the biological character of race and race relations. Consequently his influence has tended to blind the student, at the sacrifice of the study 1 Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897; 2nd ed., 1 9 4 ! ) . P- 436.

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Rigidity and Fluidity in Race Relations

of the role of culture in group behavior and of social definitions and processes in the relations which develop between races when they come into contact with each other. It is significant that this biological conception of race and race relations became the prevailing scientific notion in exactly the most literate and scientifically advanced countries of the world and in the very century when the exploration of the world was being completed and large defenseless areas staked out into several new colonial empires, when the largest mass migration in history tore close to fifty million individuals from their ancestral roots, and when the institution of human slavery, the slave trade, and black-birding, and contract labor had their last heyday. Thus, this now scientifically supported notion came at a most opportune time for explaining these unprecedented demographic developments. Further, here was a concept remarkably useful to those nations and organized interests that gained ascendancy in the inevitable competition and conflict that the vast movements of people occasioned. The older ethnocentric notions of the in-group and the out-group, the Chosen People and the Gentiles, Greeks and Barbarians, "men" and "non-men," which had characterized prehistoric and preliterate peoples, as well as the peoples of antiquity, were too simple for the welter of nineteenth-century movements. It made sense to say that in the contact of races of different capacities the ensuing struggle for existence would allow some to decline and even to disappear, while others, being more fit, survived with increased vigor and in greater numbers. To be sure, the decline and extinction of groups of American Indians and Oceanic peoples aroused the concern of humanitarian, moralist, and missionary, the lament of the poet, and the interest of an occasional scientist. Not everyone looked at the process as an inevitable biological consequence of "the clash of culture and the contact of races," to use George H. Pitt-Rivers' phrase. Some emphasized the ruthlessness of European colonists or the degeneracy of native customs before contact. Today, in the middle of the twentieth century, we see the curious phenomenon of a gradual revision by all scientists, including biologists, of the concept of race. The attempt to classify mankind on the basis of measurable traits has led only to abstract classes having little relationship to the real population groups found in the world

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at large. The attempts to correlate visible traits and anatomical measures with physiological functioning and psychological and cultural characteristics have been essentially fruitless. Furthermore, Hitler's excrescent racialism and the ordeals growing out of it have tended to discredit, perhaps unduly, the biological concept of race. Social scientists dealing with racial problems have, of course, been strongly influenced by the prevailing biological orientation. Their attention being directed not so much to the delimitation of the racial boundaries but rather to what happens when races meet, it was inevitable that they should come to see ever more clearly that race as a force in the world of affairs was not the phenomenon studied by biologists but a concept emerging in the contact between peoples. In contact, peoples form conceptions of one another which, when attached to highly visible external traits, such as color, in a biologically oriented age, they come to believe point to biologically determined groups rather than to culturally and socially molded groups. The interest of social scientists in race "relations" rather than in race per se became most characteristic of the sociologists, as indicated, for instance, by Robert E. Park's framework for the study of racial problems, in which he introduced such concepts as the "race relations cycle" of competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation, and the "marginal man"; or by Maunier's framework for the study of colonial sociology, involving the cycle: domination, partnership, and emancipation; or by Bogardus' social distance scale; or by Warner's "caste and class" conceptualization. This sociological study of the relations between races and the decline of the scientific acceptability of the biological concept of race leaves, nevertheless, an important biological area, namely, that of the actual role of biological factors in the meeting of population groups, the area which Park called the ecological, or "competition." Was Darwin right in suggesting that races engage in a biological struggle for existence, and is race, therefore, after all, a biologically valid concept? Although stable race-adhering genetic traits seem consistently to elude scientific analysis, must we not, nevertheless, ask ourselves certain questions regarding the biology of race relations? For instance, how do populations in isolation maintain themselves numerically? What kinds of immunities and resistances to disease do they have? What are their fertility and mortality rates?

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How, if at all, do they attempt to control fertility, disease, and mortality? Do they have a conception of their own population problem? Are there, in these various demographic respects, differences among populations, and how can we account for such differences as we may find? What happens when such groups are brought into contact with other populations demographically different from them? What happens when two or more populations live together in one area? These are the questions with which this paper is concerned. Demographic Responses to Culture Contact

Our picture of populations before contact cannot, unfortunately, be obtained by observation in the field. It must to some extent be deduced from observations made upon such populations after contact has occurred. Such observations have been made and we will, therefore, turn to them first. The extinction of native peoples after contact with European civilization is a phenomenon widely noted, although a careful survey, continent by continent, indicates that the phenomenon is not quite as universal as is frequently assumed. An entirely opposite effect on population has been emphasized by demographers with a Malthusian orientation, namely, that in contact some peoples have shown tremendous growth. A reversal of initial downward trends has also been noted. In the 1930s, Felix Keesing noted that in the Pacific it was no longer correct to speak of the continuing decline of the island populations, and predicted the imminent emergence on some islands of a problem of overpopulation. Another possible reversal, an initial upward trend followed by a downward one, is seldom noted, and was probably rare. This does, however, seem to characterize the history of the Plains Indians, who multiplied after adopting the horse and experiencing a great economic development, but later declined. Unfortunately it is true that frequently such trends indicate only the changes in total numbers of a population in a large area. If the population is that of a broad classification of people, such as "native American Indian population," or of the population of a continent, it will obviously be an average of many curves, some of which may differ from it. It is thus desirable, whenever possible, to

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break up the large population into its functioning parts and to study these more local curves. Another word of caution is called for. Population curves do not tell us of the relative importance of changes in fertility and mortality, of emigration and immigration, and of changes in the classification of peoples. The last difficulty is almost always involved when miscegenation has taken place, for then the problem of how to classify persons of mixed blood arises and is solved in a variety of ways. Any attempt to theorize about population trends of peoples undergoing culture contact must take account of these obvious basic difficulties. It must further be recognized that the basic data for explaining these curves, i.e., birth data, death data, information about migration, and information about age and sex structure and about miscegenation and classification are for most parts of the world inadequate, incomplete, or entirely missing. Indeed, the basic crude data for drawing the curves—total population figures—are themselves still highly inaccurate, in many cases, being based on the crudest of estimates. The areas having regular and dependable modern censuses cover less than half the population of the world. About the situations represented by these four curves, there have been developed various theories. The Problem of Extinction The theories about extinction run a wide gamut and are often mutually contradictory. When Europeans came into first contact with preliterate populations they were often shocked by their customs, particularly those relating to food, sex, marriage, clothing, care of the young, and shelter, which to them seemed barbaric and even degenerate. This outlook led to the assumption that the populations were already on the decline before contact with the white man, an assumption which the best evidence today indicates to be false. Other Europeans, perfectly aware of European exploitation and abuse of the natives, or of ill-advised programs for natives, such as an insistence upon wearing clothes, generalized to the point of attributing the major declines of these populations to European malpractices. Today, we know that while atrocities are not to be denied and while interferences with specific customs at times had unforeseen negative consequences, the relentless march to extinction

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which several native groups experienced cannot be attributed to these deliberate interferences. Many writers found the decline was due in general to diseases introduced to nonimmune populations. In this, they overlooked some peoples, like the Tasmanians, with no record of having suffered from epidemics, and others, exemplified by the Plains Indians, who did suffer from serious epidemics, but easily recouped their losses. The assumption about genetically carried or racial immunities and nonimmunities was in conformity with the Darwinian orientation. T o the newer theories about resistance to disease we will return later. Pitt-Rivers, writing as late as the 1920s, followed a strictly Darwinian approach to the problem of the decline of native peoples in culture contact. He argued that the native population was biologically adapted to its precontact conditions, which, when disturbed by European penetration, changed their situation to one of maladaptation. Only as the natives mixed with the whites could a new strain be developed which was adapted to the new conditions and which was therefore capable of survival. The more strictly anthropological, sociological, and psychological theories about the decline of populations revolve around such concepts as the "psychological factor," the loss of the useful arts, social disorganization, as aspects inherent in the contact situation. As early as 1868 a German anthropologist, Georg Gerland, presented his judgment of the relative influence of several causes of depopulation, listing them in the order of their importance.2 His first and most important group was: ( 1 ) Hostile treatment by Europeans, found in all parts of the world. a. Psychological, which may be more harmful to population than the physical is. b. Physical. But complete extermination due to this factor took place in only a few places of very narrow geographical extent.

It was not until W . H. R. Rivers published his brilliant essay on the psychological factor in 1922 s that much attention was devoted to the notion that depopulation might be related to and involve a

'Georg Gerland, Aussterben der Naturvolker (Leipzig: Verlag von Fr. Fleischer, 1868). 'William H. R. Rivers, ed., Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), chap, viii, Rivers, "The Psychological Factor."

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social process which occurred to a people when it came under the sway of a more powerful civilization. But about the time that "loss of interest in life" was being more widely accepted as a centrally important causative factor, some students of the problem became aware of widespread reversal of depopulation trends, so sudden and yet so marked and persistent that Rivers' hypothesis was thrown into question, as was the notion of Pitt-Rivers that a population could be saved only by acquiring new biological adaptations to changed conditions through widespread miscegenation. Growth and Overpopulation The great increase in population of such areas as Java, Japan, India, Egypt, and Mexico in recent decades has been the preoccupation of persons with an orientation entirely different from those we have just mentioned. Almost no anthropologists have been concerned with these increases. From the world of affairs it has been governmental and military leaders who have expressed themselves in such terms as the "yellow peril." Careful evaluation of available data has indicated that it is not the innate breeding propensities of these growing populations, by which they were assumed to be showing their outstanding biological fitness to survive, that accounts for their steady increase, but rather the saving of lives through various public health measures and through greater political peace and order. About this there seems to be general agreement among reputable scholars. To a large extent, the reversal upward of earlier downward trends is also being explained by improved public health. Recently, public health measures seem, through effective treatment of gonorrhea, also to have improved fertility. We now come to a very interesting observation which those who have been exclusively concerned with either upward or downward trends have overlooked. If we compare the populations which experienced downward trends after initial contact with the white man with those populations which experienced upward trends, we note that the former were, as a rule, peoples with a subsistent, selfsufficient, nontrading kind of economy, the food gatherers and shifting agriculturalists. Those showing upward trends, on the other hand, are characteristically the so-called peasant peoples.

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While this contrast suggests a twofold scheme into which preindustrial populations may be divided, our lack of detailed demographic data about pastoral peoples and the fact that between shifting agriculture and peasant agriculture there are transition stages indicate a demographic continuum rather than this twofold mutually exclusive division. In this paper, however, the emphasis is on the fundamental contrast between the isolated folk societies and peasant peoples.4 The difference between the way the "peuplades," or "little peoples," react to the coming of the white man and the way peasant peoples react suggests that there is something about the precontact situation of both groups that might help us understand their demographic reaction in contact, and that, in view of the fact that the reaction seems to occur regardless of race or clime, the difference in what happens after contact may be connected with the way of life and the demographic equilibrium attained before contact. Are peasants demographically different from the collectors and shifting agriculturalists? Isolated Folk Populations One difference can be very easily established. The isolated peoples have few or no endemic contagious diseases; among peasant populations the major contagious diseases are endemic and periodically become epidemic. This difference is accounted for by the fact that the populations of the organisms causing disease need large human populations in order to remain viable. In small isolated human groups, they either die out or lose their virulence, whereas in a widespread and relatively dense population, characterized by at least some trade, the disease-inducing organisms remain virulent by virtue of the fact that they can keep moving through all parts of the dense population, i.e., they are endemic. * We seem to have so few accurate population data about the pastoral peoples that it is not easy to place them according to this twofold scheme. The writer, however, is inclined to believe that their record indicates population characteristics more like the collectors and primitive agriculturalists. Toynbee and Carl Sauer note that these pastoral tribes are gradually but relentlessly being replaced by peasants and farmers who are invading and occupying the grasslands formerly occupied by them. They appear, according to Ekvall, who studied both nomads and peasants on the Sino-Tibetan frontier, to have less resistance to disease than the peasants.

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Thus, as Romanzo Adams noted, the Hawaiians did not suffer from serious epidemics of smallpox, measles, influenza, and whooping cough until 1849 to 1853. In that period of the California Gold Rush, the ships that came to Hawaii from eastern United States stopped in California, and their crews and passengers then brought the organisms of these diseases to Hawaii. In the seventy-year period from Cook's discovery to 1849, there is a record of only one devastating epidemic, in 1804, the mai okuu (the vomiting sickness), possibly cholera, which may have been introduced from the Orient. During this period the ships that came to Hawaii had such a long voyage that whatever diseases were found on shipboard at the beginning of the voyage had time to run their course completely and die out or lose their power. It is probably true that the reason the Tasmanian aborigines never suffered from epidemic diseases, according to the record, is their great distance from dense populations where such diseases were endemic. The lack of resistance can today be understood and explained, not on the basis of racial immunities acquired over many generations by a process of natural selection, but rather by the building of tolerances in individuals to various disease organisms by one of several mechanisms: the resistance acquired through repeated exposure, immunity acquired in childhood through a mild infection, or the development in the individual of a chronic form of a disease. We now have a way of explaining the high incidence of epidemic diseases and their high mortality when formerly isolated or sparse populations are brought into closer contact with civilization. In two or three generations an adult population is raised which is no longer virgin to the contagious diseases and possesses the same kind of relative immunities as peasant and town peoples do. The fact that the isolated peoples have no customs of care for the sick no doubt accentuates the course of the early epidemics. One may speculate further that acclimatization is, for many individuals in a population being exposed to new climatic conditions, a similar process; and while these individuals react violently at first, they gradually build up a physiological tolerance for the new conditions by virtue of a period of exposure to them. Possibly also the inability of populations to tolerate alcohol may not be, as was so frequently assumed in the case of the American Indians, a matter of the lack of "racial" tolerance, but rather the lack of a lifetime

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of exposure, culturally recognized, to alcoholic beverage. The maladaption of unmixed populations to their changed situation growing out of contact with European civilization, of which Pitt-Rivers made so much, is thus seen to be a matter of the physiological lack of tolerance of individuals and the society's lack of cultural definitions for coping with the changed conditions, as well as the social disorganization experienced by the society in contact. Returning to the nature of the population equilibrium of the isolated peoples before the disturbance through contact with Europeans and their civilization, we have in the case of the Eskimos and the Tikopia, for instance, small populations living under such clearly delimited environmental conditions that they could "see" their population problem and so had various practices which acted like modern contraception. Through crude methods of contraception, induced abortion, infanticide, etc., they kept down their proportion of infants. It would be almost legitimate to speak of their having low birth rates, although technically it was a moderately high birth rate supplemented by a high infant mortality rate. From their point of view, a high infant mortality rate would, because it kept down the number of "social" births, i.e., the number of individuals achieving recognized social status, act like a low birth rate.5 We might call this the "social birth rate." N o doubt, the adult death rate, as well as the natural, noninduced infant mortality rate, fluctuated somewhat with good and bad times. Thus there were cycles among these peoples, but within narrow limits. Regarding the Eskimos, Weyer came to the conclusion that some Eskimo communities have a very narrow population range, from three or four families at the least to several hundred individuals at the most, within which the chances for survival in the Arctic environment are most favorable. While one family is the theoretical minimum for survival, Weyer argued that a larger number was actually necessary: May it not be due to the fact that the minimum size of the unit capable of surviving and perpetuating itself is larger than the family in the narrow sense? Children and women who are bearing children or caring for the S A . M. Carr-Saunders, The Population Problem ( O x f o r d : O x f o r d University 1 9 2 2 ) , among others, confirms this p i c t u r e in his discussion of " t h e regulation of bers a m o n g primitive races."

Press, num-

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very young cannot paddle their own weight, so to speak, in the selfmaintenance organization. Quite possibly, therefore, in the family in its smallest sense the combined efforts of the food-securing members, of whom there would be only one or at most a very few, would not produce sufficient subsistence continuously for all, including the non-productive members. 6

The necessity of staying within upper population limits is well brought out by Birket-Smith, who tells of the annual return of a hunger period. For the Caribou Eskimos the worst hunger period in recent years was in 1919, when one hundred or more people died of starvation.7 Firth is certain that in the pre-European period of Tikopia's complete isolation, its population maintained a fairly constant stability, in equilibrium with the known food supply. An occasional drought or hurricane caused famine and a small temporary drop in population. Overpopulation was recognized and prevented by a variety of devices: celibacy of younger male members of a family; prevention of conception; abortion; infanticide; the practice of men setting out on sea voyages, often never to return; and war, by which one portion of the population was driven out by another.8 One can thus make out a case for at least the smallest, most isolated of the primitive societies having a more sophisticated and a more realistic approach to their population problems than the vastly larger populations of peasant societies, or than any politically controlled group of societies. Economically, these folk societies sometimes experience brief but ephemeral prosperity when European traders and industrialists seek to use the natives as labor in some exploitative trade (e.g., fur trade, sandalwood trade), or in mines and on plantations, or in military installations, and in order to get them to work at all pay them inflated wages. In the process, the native economy, and with it the native way of life, is disrupted. In these situations occurs the social disorganization which so many observers have noted for these folk societies.

"Edward M. Weyer, The Eskimos: Their Environment and Folkways (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 9 3 2 ) , p. 142. 7 K a j Birket-Smith, The Caribou Eskimos (Copenhagen: Gyldeddalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), Vol. I., p. 101. 8 R a y m o n d Firth, We, the Tikopia ( N e w Y o r k : American Book Company, 1936), pp. 408—41 J.

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Peasant Populations W e may now try to delineate the contrasting kind of population adjustment achieved by peasant peoples. They show the equilibrium which R. D. McKenzie called biological equilibrium, distinguished from the mobile equilibrium of industrial peoples.9 Representative of biological equilibrium is the population of China throughout most of its history and down to the contemporary period. In Ta Chen's judgment, China's population moved historically in cycles, which in some cases endured over several centuries. The climax of a cycle came toward the end of a dynastic era. The climax ushered in a period of epidemics and famines, which led to rebellions and eventually to the overthrow of the dynasty. This point marked the end of the population cycle. The new era of order and peace again encouraged production and the growth of population.10 Jaffe adds a long-term trend and describes the whole process as follows: Given a fixed geographical area, say the land within the present boundaries of China, then, over the centuries, population has increased slowly in an approximately straight-line way, the population increase being closely related to the increase of the cultivated land. Super-imposed on this longterm trend are the cycles which Ta Chen noted; as the developed resources increased, population momentarily increased more rapidly, after which catastrophe struck and it began to decrease. Finally, super-imposed upon these cycles are the yearly fluctuations due to flood, drought, famine, etc. 11

Seen at the local or village level and as reflecting the total way of life of the peasants, the Chinese picture seems to be somewhat as follows: Hunger and famine are clearly within the experience of the vast majority of the Chinese population. Severe famines have repeatedly swept large sections of China and many peasants subsist on a very meager diet. The problem of sufficient food looms large in the thinking of peasants. But, whereas the noncultivators "see" their problem as one of keeping their numbers within those absolute numerical limits which their experience tells them will mean the dif° R . D. McKenzie, The Evolving World Economy, Albert Kahn Foundation for the Foreign Travel of American Teachers, Report V (New York: Trustees of the Foundation, 1926), pp. 4 7 - 6 0 . 1 0 T a Chen, Population in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946). U A . J . Jaffe, " A Review of Censuses and Demographic Statistics of China," Population Studies, I (December, 1947), p. 337.

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ference between extinction and survival of their whole group, the food supply being "given" by nature, the peasants see their problem not so much as that of maintaining their numbers within the clearly known limits, but as one of increasing, or at least guaranteeing, the food supply available to them. The former seek to control population; the latter, food supply. Peasants derive their food supply from land. A typical peasant concern, therefore, is to have as much land as possible, the "land hunger" that we associate with peasants. After the change from shifting agriculture to settled agriculture, this concern over land becomes identified with household families and extended families rather than with villages, for the very change raises the value of land and, therefore, its desirability. The writer once heard Ralph Linton describe such a change in the Tanala people of Madagascar, who changed from dry-land rice cultivation to wet-land cultivation. Perhaps the change also means that the population is leaving a situation of what Nieboer called open resources and entering one of closed resources.12 At any rate, families compete with one another for land. Some become wealthy by virtue of owning more land than is needed for their survival. Others are barely able to survive. Among many peasant populations, meat is a very rare item of the diet, and the diet consists of a monotonous repetition of a staple and a few vegetables.13 The poorer peasant families eke out their existence by work at handicrafts or by intermittent work in town or city, or, as in Java for instance, on plantations. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of this century, younger sons in peasant families even went as contract laborers to such distant plantation areas as Hawaii in the hope of saving sufficient funds to improve and enlarge the land holdings at home. Whereas town life is absent from isolated folk society, it is a clear correlate of peasant 12 H . J. Nieboer, Slavery as An Industrial System (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1910). "See, for instance, Martin C. Yang, A Chinese Village (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), p. 32: " T h e population of Taitou can be divided roughly into four classes on the basis of food consumption. A t the lowest level is the group for whom sweet potatoes are the main item of diet; next are those who have a combination of sweet potatoes and millet; third, those who eat millet and wheat; and at the top, those who eat mainly wheat. All classes eat garden vegetables in large quantities when these are available. The first two groups rarely have animal products of any kind; the last two have them occasionally." John Embree, Suyemura (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 41, says: "The diet is largely vegetarian, though fish and occasionally chicken accompany a banquet."

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society.14 Peasants are in great need of extra labor at special times in the agricultural year, such as harvest time and rice-transplanting time. The cheapest labor is that of sons, who, therefore, are highly desired. They are also desired to keep the land within the family, if society provides for inheritance through them, since land is the one protection against starvation. Because peasants belong to dense populations they are burdened with many endemic diseases, which periodically become epidemic. This and the general poverty mean that the infant death rate is unusually high, as is the death rate at other ages. The more children a wife bears to her husband, the greater the assurance of the required labor and the required heir. The emphasis is thus on fertility and on male offspring as a security measure against starvation. All this becomes woven into the religious fabric of the people. The ancestral cult of the Chinese, for instance, makes the having of male heirs a sacred obligation to one's ancestors, whose spirits would "go hungry" if not attended by living male descendants. In China, too, there was the interesting phenomenon of the rise and fall of families, so well illustrated in Pearl Buck's Good Earth. Families are essentially in perpetual competition with one another for the goods of life, land, and sons. Some families experience prosperity. The sons or grandsons begin to dissipate, lose their peasant frugality, and sell their land to up-and-coming families, whose members have been practicing the peasant virtues which make it possible for them to buy land and thus add to the security of themselves, their ancestors, and their descendants. Martin Yang calls this remorseless process the "cycle of families," reminiscent of the population cycle of the whole country, which, as was mentioned above, was associated with the rise and fall of dynasties. The isolated folk peoples, we saw, practiced crude contraception, abortion, and infanticide, all operating to reduce the number of children who would enter the society as recognized persons. Some peasant peoples are also known to practice crude forms of contracep14 See Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1953), p. 31. He says, "The word [peasant] points to a human type. Rather than use it, as some have, for any community of small-scale producer» for market, let us reserve it for this new type. It required the city to bring it into existence. There were no peasants before the first cities. And those surviving primitive peoples who do not live in terms of the city are not peasants. The Siriono Indians are not peasants; nor are the Navajo."

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tion, abortion, and infanticide. A t the same time, they also stress fertility and have cults directed at increasing fertility. T h e restrictive practices probably occur in families when they have attained a size which will guarantee the necessary amount of free labor at times of heavy work. Perhaps it is most likely to occur toward the end of a cycle of prosperity when families have not suffered epidemics and famine and they have an assured number of children for the m a x i m u m labor needs, and the concern of the growing number of nonworking consumers crowds out the concern over having a large enough number of working producers. This kind of "social contraception" would of course occur only when male descendants were assured. It is significant that in respect to infanticide, only female infants are removed. A l l this means that among such peasant peoples as the Chinese the death rate fluctuates greatly, as does the effective or social birth rate. T h e crude death rate, in times of greatest crisis, probably is over 100 per 1,000 population. The crude biological birth rate has been known to g o as high as 5 0 per 1,000, and it remains consistently high except, perhaps, in the time of most severe epidemic or famine. But when the restrictive practices are considered, the high social birth rate is at times greatly reduced. Another contrast between the peasantry and at least some of the smaller isolated folk societies may now be mentioned. T h e isolated folk are reported generally to have practices of adolescent and, at times, adult promiscuity. But all children are equally accepted by the whole primitive group. Infanticide, when it occurs, has apparently no relation to legitimacy. T h e small household family is not strongly differentiated from the whole group, and the child belongs hardly more to one family than to all. The Hawaiian eagerness, still found today, to adopt children, as well as the willingness of Hawaiian mothers to relinquish responsibility for one or more children to a grandmother, an aunt, or some other relative, as well as the high rates of illegitimacy among the Hawaiians today, all bespeak the survival of this loosely structured family complex of the isolated folk society. It is probably significant that these peoples under their isolated condition seem not to have suffered f r o m the ill effects of inbreeding, f r o m venereal diseases, from prostitution. Peasant peoples, on the other hand, develop a double standard of sexual morality, placing great emphasis on the chastity of women

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and the fidelity of wives. Some premarital sexual unions may occur in some peasant societies as a sort of testing of the fertility of the girl desired as wife. A few illegitimate births occur, but the children usually are adopted by the man whom the mother eventually marries. Legitimacy and fertility are emphasized. Overtly a virgin is highly prized, and, as a consequence, parents watch carefully over their growing daughters. Since within a village there is continuous competition among families for land and for large families, the child is much more closely identified with the household family than the child in isolated folk society. The household family is more highly structuralized. In the towns and cities associated with peasant society, prostitution develops. Here the young male can get the sex experience generally denied him in his village. In the economic relationships that have developed between peasant societies and European commercial and industrial civilization in the form of trade and industrial plantation agriculture, both for the European and world market, the significant fact that such relationships have meant almost no change in the way of life of the native societies has become increasingly apparent. The increase of Javanese population from about 4 million in 1800 to 150 million today is to be explained, not by industrialization and urbanization within native society, but by the Pax Neerlandica and Dutch public health measures which, with continued peasant fertility patterns, allowed for this tremendous mushrooming of population. Peasants who went as contract laborers to industrial areas and later returned to their own peasant society have been notoriously uninfluential in the transformation of their home societies. In thus sketching two contrasting "ideal types" of population, it must be emphasized again that some known non-Western peoples fall between these types, and that a continuum might be a better way of representing demographic types. The pastoral peoples are, at least as far as experience with epidemic diseases is concerned, closer to the folk than to the peasant peoples. The pre-European Africans also seem to be marginal to the two types, although possibly closer to the isolated folk. But the two contrasting types thus suggested do help us to understand the great contrast in the reactions of non-Western populations to European contacts: the rapid decline of the isolated folk and the increase of the peasants. We can see clearly that neither demographic

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reaction had anything to do with race, conceived of in genetic terms. The decline of isolated folk peoples was not due to their inherent, i.e., genetic, inability to withstand the biological shock of an invasion by population elements from other races. The great increase of various Far Eastern peoples was not to be attributed to the "Yellow Peril." The reactions at this biological level are to be understood, not as manifestations of racial traits but as the natural responses of a population, regardless of race, to new conditions inherent in the contact with Western society. What we are suggesting is that in the meeting of the European white race with other races there are demographic consequences which involve not the question of racial biology but, primarily, the question as to whether the non-European race was an absolutely or relatively isolated folk society, on the one hand, or a peasant society, on the other. The course that disease, fertility, and mortality ran after contact depended largely on this difference. Economically, the folk peoples could be brought into the world economy only by the disruption of their own economy and society. Here came the loss of interest in life that Rivers spoke of. The peasants could be incorporated into a dual or plural economy, involving a continuation of the native way of life while at the same time contributing to the world market. In both situations, sooner in the case of the peasants, later in the case of the simpler native societies, overpopulation threatened to set in without industrialization having occurred for either kind of people. Japan and Hawaii are great exceptions and for that reason warrant close study by persons interested in the ecology of race relations in world perspective. Industrial Urban Populations Before turning to Hawaii, the writer wishes to suggest a still emerging third "ideal type" of population, namely, that of industrial urban society, into which the others must change if they become industrialized. It has involved continued decline in death rates, attributable to the great reduction in infant mortality rates, the virtual elimination of certain epidemic diseases, and the reduction in mortality in other important diseases, such as tuberculosis. It is believed that this process has reached a point where little further progress is to be expected. But instead of having populations

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with greatly fluctuating death rates, we have, under conditions of industrialization and urbanization, death rates which tend to be stable once they have reached a rate close to, say, 10 per thousand. In the United States registration area the highest death rate since 1915 has been 13.2, the lowest 9.6, the former in 1915, the latter in 1952. What increases in the crude rate that may occur in the future will be due largely to changes in the age structure of the population. On the other hand, the birth rates tend to fluctuate, not very widely and suddenly, but more than the death rates. In the United States registration area, the highest birth rates were 25.0 in 1915 and 24.6 in 1952; the lowest ones were 16.9 in 1935 and 16.7 in 1936. The rise in the American rate since 1936 has baffled many demographers and certainly was counter to their predictions. They had assumed that the small family system minus children or with only one or two would become the prevailing system. What seems actually to have occurred is that the very class of people who in the 1920s and 1930s deliberately planned such small families are now deliberately planning families with three, four, and five children. All this suggests that in advanced industrialized societies, birth rates will reflect changes in fashion. It was in the fashion of the twenties and thirties to regard children as so serious a responsibility and so costly a burden that one's sense of social responsibility was questioned according to the size of his family. Today, the attitude seems to be: the having of children is an experience one cannot afford to miss, and to raise three or four is easier than to have but one, and better for the children. Many individual families are making choices based on similar considerations which are in the air, and their many similar acts make the rates and changes in rates which we note in our urbanized society. The individuals thus affected by the spirit of the times and by changes in the spirit of the times are individuals somewhat emancipated from their ancestral mores. In an industrial mass society such as America, an increasing number of individuals make an increasing number of selections and decisions in terms of fashion and the prevailing Zeitgeist, and thus lose not only their characteristic cultural and "racial" behavior but also their class-based characteristics. They become increasingly what is called middle-class, but what might be called "classless." Perhaps we can also speak of a lower-class demographic reaction

BERNHARD L. HORMANN

43

in modern industrial society, the reaction of the so-called urban proletariat. In many respects these are the still only partially emancipated peasants, come but recently to live in the city. They still are influenced by the high value which villagers place on fertility. They are not yet very sensitive to the spirit of the times, but are still somewhat guided by inherited folkways applicable to courtship, marriage, birth, child rearing, education, work, illness, and death. These ways, never completely syncretized or harmonized even in the peasant village, 15 lurk on in the urban ghettos, where they are interchanged among the ethnic groups and acquire ever more, in this nonvillage context, the characteristics of superstitions. W e notice even a sort of shopping about, across "race" lines, for remedies during this transitional "proletarian" stage between peasantry and urban mass society. What differences one may note in these urbanizing people when derived from nonpeasant folk instead of from peasant societies, such as, for instance, the American Negroes and the Hawaiians, may be traced to the different demographic type from which they are becoming emancipated. These lower-class urbanites seem to be in the process of acquiring the demographic forms of behavior of a middle-class society. At least this is what is apparently occurring in America. Hawaii: A Case History In Hawaii, we see a demonstration of almost all of these demographic aspects of race relations here discussed, and fortunately Hawaii's census data are among the best and oldest in the world. Compassed within one and three-quarters century we have the disappearance of one of the most isolated folk societies in the world and the development of an almost fully industrialized, commercialized, urbanized mass society, with the extremely low death rates (including the second lowest infant mortality rate in the world in 1 9 5 3 ) and the relatively low but recently rising birth rates characteristic of the whole United States. W e see the folk population, which at " S e e , for instance, Francis L. K. Hsu, " T h e Problem of Introducing Scientific Medicine into a Rustic Community" (Kunming: the Yenching-Yunnan Station of Sociological R e search, 1943, typed), in which he describes collective and individual behavior during a cholera epidemic. He indicates that a number of views and practices, somewhat inconsistent one with the other, exist side by side. This coexistence of incompatible elements was also observed by the writer when he studied a Chinese village in the early thirties.

44

Rigidity and Fluidity in Race Relations

first declined so rapidly that its ultimate extinction was feared, now retrieved, and as a mixed population gaining at a rate which promises their passing the 100,000 mark before I960, from a nadir of less than 40,000 in 1910. Studies of the decline and reversal have been made by such sociologists as Romanzo Adams, Andrew W . Lind, and the writer. These studies, based on good historical and statistical materials, indicate that in addition to the factor of epidemic disease, mentioned above, several other factors account for the decline of the Hawaiian population, including the eighteenth-century war for the establishment of the Kamehameha kingdom, venereal diseases, and the disorganization of the native way of life. The greatest social disorganization existed immediately after the death of Kamehameha I in 1819, when the ancient kapu system, or religion, was abolished, and after the death of his powerful consort, Queen Kaahumanu, in the 1830s. During these periods, female infanticide, probably a rarely used ancient custom, was widely practiced, leaving effects demographically noticeable until the end of the century, and in the disorganization the use of sorcery probably increased. The primary effect of the intrusion of Western civilization was thus on the death rate, although the birth rate also declined, perhaps due to venereal disease and the fact that the births of infants who were done away with were not counted. Persistent public health measures have in this century brought about the reversal now so clearly noticeable. That the pure Hawaiians will eventually disappear is inevitable, but their disappearance is due, not to a continuation of the high death rate and low birth rate, but to the fact that a majority of pure Hawaiian brides and grooms are marrying Part-Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians, and their children and descendants are therefore forever lost to the pure Hawaiian groups. In 1951, for instance, 469 children were born to pure Hawaiian mothers, but of this number, only 112, or 24 per cent, were by pure Hawaiian fathers and were thus pure Hawaiian themselves, while 146 or 31 per cent were by PartHawaiian fathers, 36 or 8 per cent by unknown fathers, and 175 or 37 per cent by non-Hawaiian fathers. Of the 351 children by pure Hawaiian fathers, 32 per cent were by pure Hawaiian mothers, 54 per cent by Part-Hawaiian mothers, and 14 per cent by nonHawaiian mothers. Sixteen per cent of all children born to pure Hawaiian fathers or mothers were themselves unmixed.

BERNHARD L. HORMANN

45

In Hawaii, we note further the introduction over a period of a century, from 1 8 5 0 to 1950, of over 4 0 0 , 0 0 0 people, primarily contract laborers, but also wives and children, for Hawaii's sugar plantations. These people came from all over the world: China, Portugal, Norway, Germany, Spain, the South Seas, Japan, Puerto Rico, Korea, India, Russia, the Philippines, and the United States mainland. Almost all were peasants. While many returned to their homes or moved on to the United States mainland, many others remained, and have woven themselves into the fabric of the newly developing society in Hawaii. Thus, we have about two-thirds of Hawaii's people today but one, two, or three generations removed from at least one peasant ancestor. In "multiracial" Hawaii, we have the opportunity to test under conditions where systematic observation is possible, the operation of, and the assumed tenacity of, biological factors. What do we

1.

Hawaiian } Part Hawaiian^ Portuguese . O t h e r Caucasian Chinese — . Japanese . Filipino Puerto Rican Korean — All races

-

.

FERTILITY RATES

.

. — .

HAWAII* 1932

1940

1950

187

193

205

140)

—

.

IN

-

79 f 139 170 312 218 180 178

76

103

69 89 228

105 95 213

108

125

* Number o f births per 1,000 women 1 5—44 years of age

find? Tables 1 and l a give refined fertility rates. Table 2 gives the infant mortality rates of the statistically identified groups of Hawaii. Table 3 gives the tuberculosis death rates for these same groups. In each table there are, for comparative purposes, rates for the whole United States and for peasant and changing folk populations. In general, we see in these tables the startling fact that all the ancestral groups of Hawaii are becoming in their population characteristics increasingly alike; that they have all undergone a great change;

46

Rigidity and Fluidity in Race Relations 1A. FERTILITY RATES*

Territory of Hawaii Portugal England and Wales United States Puerto Rico India Japan New Zealand (Europeans) New Zealand (Maoris) Yap Formosa

1936

1940

1950

53

79 79 47 56

97 78 56 80 160

54

91 91 70

_

_

1951

82 89 157

....

not 91

....

* Number of births per 1,000 women 10-49 years of age

....

tl947

2. I N F A N T MORTALITY RATES I N HAWAII AND ELSEWHERE* 1924

1930

1940

1950

1951

1952

Hawaii Hawaiian Caucasian Hawaiian Asiatic Hawaiian Portuguese Other Caucasian .. — .. Chinese .. .. — -— Japanese — Filipino — Puerto Rican Korean Other All races .

291

83 123 87 33 71 88 262 124 89 40 116

206 102) 13l} 69 36 51 52 190 83 42

164

87

48

27 15 23 24 26 15 24

126 57 47 114 160 90 30 87 136

94 30 29 68 127 60 23 70 35

O 1 her Portugal United Kingdom United States — Puerto Rico — —. . India Japan New Zealand (Europeans).. New Zealand (Maoris) Formosa .. . ..

153t 771 77t 184tt 165«: 45*$

60 I 25

26 jr 52* 37i 51 32 62 87 40

....

14 17 30 24

—

21

Areas

145$ 63* 60$ 128** 176$ 124$ 32$ 153**

* Number of deaths below one year of age per 1,000 infants born $1920-1924 $1930—1934 **1932-1934 tt1921-1924

89 31 29 67 116 57 23 68 35

#1920-1921

95 29 29 64 48 22 83 35

BERNHARD L. HORMANN

47

3. TUBERCULOSIS MORTALITY RATES I N H A W A I I A N D OTHER A R E A S * 1910

1920

1930

1940

1950

1952

322 103 511 20j 195 86 146 75 201 102

162 60

155 18

48 11

59 55 119 50 162 63

20 20 30 39 124 24

16 12 29 0

Hawaii Hawaiian - . Part Hawaiian Portuguese Other Caucasian C.hinMr Japanese Filipino . . Puerto Rican Korean All races

.. - -

550+ 220 SO 60 230 120 230 140 300 180 Other

Portugal _ . __ United Kingdom United States Puerto Rico Japan New Zealand (Europeans)

157$ 154

....

"•Number of deaths per 100,000 population +1916-1920 $1906-1910 **1921

21

Area s

113** 113

....

69

71 332ft ....

46

—

97 36 23 129 147 23

....

16 ....

-ft1"'

that they are showing, not the characteristics of peasant societies, but the characteristics of urbanized populations. It is apparent that the Japanese of Hawaii are now showing the low fertility rates which bespeak their acceptance of the American urban way of life. In this same respect, the Filipinos are lagging behind the Japanese, having come to Hawaii one and two generations behind the Japanese. They are as yet not so far removed from the peasant way of life. In their infant mortality rate and death rate from tuberculosis, they are also behind the Japanese, and closer to the peasant world. In the case of the peasant-derived groups that have been in Hawaii over a period of several generations, one can see the rise in the recent birth rate which has been found in the nation as a whole and which, it was claimed above, was a response to a change in the spirit of the times regarding the desirability of children.

Rigidity and Fluidity in Race Relations

48

Demographic Problems of Race Relations in the Modern World In summary, we thus see race relations on the ecological level as a matter involving the contacts between not races but poplation types, including those we have sought to identify, the isolated folk and the peasant, each with characteristic modes of population behavior, both before and after contact with industrialized urban or mass society, which in its turn, has forms of population behavior which can be described. Today, there are no longer any societies outside the orbit of Western industrial civilization. The few surviving folk societies are a relatively minor problem. The main problem concerns the still increasing peasant populations, perhaps half the total population of the world, who have not as yet been industrialized. On the ecological level, the problem of race relations in the world of today is thus one aspect and a transitory one of the broader problem of the spread of civilization and the resulting "transformation," as Redfield calls it, of the folk and peasant world. 16 As peasant peoples become integrated into the dynamic world of today, they find a world of many groups vying for power and for the loyalty of people. Groupings which take the indelible marks of color as their primary basis will increasingly suffer at the hands of more functionally organized interest groupings, particularly as various differentials among the racial groups, including finally demographic differentials, disappear. Only color will remain. In the dynamic world of constantly shifting power groupings and of the mass responding to changes in the spirit of the times, there is little likelihood that as rigid a principle as race will continue to determine the major lines along which great intergroup conflicts shape up.

16

Robert Redfield, op.

cit.

Chapter 3 OCCUPATION A N D RACE ON CERTAIN FRONTIERS

ANDREW W. LIND UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII

Most studies of race relations which claim the serious attention of either scholars or administrators include some reference to the occupational distinctions between the groups involved. In many of the studies, occupation is the major criterion of status, on the basis of which racial groups are differentiated; and yet relatively little attention has been focused directly upon occupation. In strictly economic terms, of course, there is no place for race as biologically defined in the calculations of the occupational market place. Men presumably compete for an occupation on the same utilitarian basis as commodities acquire a price in the market, and such extraneous factors as the pigmentation of one's skin, the texture of one's hair, or the angle of one's eyes ordinarily play no part in the ability to perform a particular occupation. This is not to overlook the fact that some of the hallmarks of race, including stature, "body-build," and possibly even skin color, may contribute to occupational efficiency and may therefore have a price placed upon them. So also the prevailing social myths and stereotypes as to the innate skills and capacities of different ethnic groups for certain occupations may possess economic significance, but it is commonly assumed that such prejudices must ultimately yield to the overpowering pressure of economic necessity. Economic interpretations of race and of race relations, on the other hand, are common, and in most of the economic considerations of race there is the implicit assumption that the social position accorded ethnic groups is determined by their success or failure in the struggle 49

50

Occupation and Race on Certain Frontiers

for a livelihood. Nor is it only the avowed Marxians who hold to a rigid economic determinism in matters of race relations. The dominance of one ethnic group over another, whether the relations are those of "technically advanced and backward groups" or those of two or more groups already within the orbit of Western technology, are commonly attributed to the economic and occupational strength which each has acquired in a competitive world economy. A somewhat extreme formulation of this point of view is to be found in the writing of some of the human ecologists previous to World War II. E. B. Reuter provided one of the clearest and most unequivocal expressions of this hypothesis some fifteen years ago in an essay on the suggestive title, "Competition and the Racial Division of Labor." Human groups domiciled in new areas develop the types of behavior, the ways of life, and the habit structures that adapt them to the particular areas. . . . The occupational distribution is determined by necessity and not by choice. Except for a small fraction of pampered individuals, men do the work that they must do in order to live. What that work is is determined by the economic structure which, in turn, is determined by the climatic and other natural resources and by the stage of culture development. As in the animal world, individuals and groups conform their behavior to the demands of the area.1

The determinism implied in this article assumes a biological as well as an economic character, especially in his account of racial division of labor as a form of adaptation. To understand the status of the Negroes in the Southern area, we must understand it as a competitive adjustment to the conditions of life. Their position, like that of every group, is determined by their relative strength and adaptability in a ruthless competition for the means of life, a competition that in the long run destroys the weak regardless of the cause of their weakness.2

Reuter's extensive research in other areas of social science compelled him to recognize the operation of intrusive factors, such as political power, the traditional social expectations, and "a body of social philosophy explaining or justifying the arrangements," but he concludes that "the competitive order progressively favors" a 1 Quoted in E. T . Thompson, ed., Race Relations and the Race Problem University Press, 1939), p. 50. 'Ibid.

(Durham: Duke

ANDREW W. LIND

51

division of labor approaching "the fixity of the biological specialization found among the social insects." In somewhat the same tradition, but much less extreme in its expression, is an earlier statement by R. D. McKenzie.3 Taking as his point of departure the thesis that the world is moving gradually toward an integrated trading economy in which each region or group comes to play its part on a competitive basis with every other, McKenzie concludes that the critical element underlying the meeting of different racial stocks in the modern world is the symbiotic relationship between them. Each region of the world, in adjusting itself to the competitive demands of the world market, "develops an occupational pyramid of greater or less complexity, according to the nature of its resources and the stage of settlement," and "each region selects or ejects population in accordance with the requirements of its occupational pyramid." Thus, ethnic groups "tend to segregate in certain occupations far beyond their numerical proportions." McKenzie is careful to point out at the very beginning of his essay, however, that the division of labor encountered among men has but little relation to the inherent biological differences between them and that the selection of racial groups for certain occupations therefore tends to be on the basis of skills and predispositions acquired in the competitive struggle rather than on biologically inherited traits. Insofar as racial groups do become "segregated" in certain occupations out of proportion to their numbers it is, according to McKenzie, only a temporary accommodation. In mobile societies, such as ours . . . occupational segregation tends in time to disappear unless there is some racial trait sufficient to differentiate the immigrant group from the general population. In this event occupational segregation seems to be lasting. . . . This is exemplified by the occupational distribution of the Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Negroes, and Mexicans in the United States. In more static societies, such as India, it becomes the basis of a caste system of social organization. 4

McKenzie was especially impressed by the changing character of the ethnic and occupational symbiosis which he encountered in the Pacific area and with the regularity with which these changes were taking place. 3 R . D . McKenzie, " C u l t u r a l and Racial Differences as Bases of H u m a n Symbiosis," in Kimball Young, ed., Social Attitudes ( N e w Y o r k : H e n r y H o l t , 1 9 3 1 ) , pp. 1 3 6 - 1 6 5 . 4 Ibid.

52

Occupation and Race on Certain Frontiers

Robert E. Park, the American sociologist who played such a vital role in the early scientific studies of both human ecology and race relations, conceived of competition for a livelihood as the starting point of the race relations cycle "which tends everywhere to repeat itself," and which "is apparently progressive and irreversible." Exploration invariably opens new regions for commercial exploitation: the missionary, as has frequently been said, becomes the advance agent of the trader. The exchange of commodities involves in the long run the competition of goods and of persons. The result is a new distribution of population and a new and wider division of labor. 5

It seems fairly clear, as Park contends, that the search for better economic opportunities on the part of the mobilized masses from the overcrowded areas of the world provides the matrix for most of what we call race relations in the modern world. This unprecedented traffic in both population and goods during the past century appeared to Park as "a general tendency to redress the economic balance and to restore the equilibrium between population and food supply, labor and capital." Its volume is not likely to decline significantly in the near future despite ideological curtains or political barriers, and, thus, continued agitation of the race relations cycles which have been set in motion around the world is to be expected. Equally impressive to Park, however, was the fact that the relations between ethnic groups, although established first on a symbiotic and utilitarian basis, never remain so indefinitely. W e have imported labor as if it were mere commodity, and sometimes we have been disappointed to find, as we invariably do, that the laborers were human like ourselves. In this way it comes about that race relations which were economic become later political and cultural. The struggle for existence terminates in a struggle for status, for recognition, for position and prestige, within an existing political and moral order. 6

In brief, Park thought of race relations as existing on different levels, which included, in addition to the ecological and economic, the political and the personal and cultural, and he was disposed to think of race relations in as broad and inclusive terms as he did of society itself. In the final analysis, however, Park found the heart 5 Robert E. Park, "Our Racial Frontier in the Pacific," Survey Graphic, 19$. 'Ibid., p. 196.

IX (May, 1926),

ANDREW W. LIND

53

of the race problem to consist in the struggle for status, which in modern society is directly identified with the struggle for a desirable place in the occupational hierarchy. This struggle for status . . . is the very source and origin of the race problem as we know it. The man of lower caste, who is usually a man of a different racial stock, is invariably "all right in his place." It is when he seeks to rise that his presence, his occupation, and his position in society—if it is one in which his superiors are not accustomed to seeing him—is resented.7

Variations of the viewpoint thus far presented with respect to the role of economic considerations and, more specifically, of occupation in racial status, are to be found in almost every comprehensive study of race and of race relations. At the one extreme, we encounter the conception of Oliver Cox, with his unabashed assertion that race relations is a "phenomenon of the capitalist exploitation of peoples and its complementary attitudes." Cox contends that although superficially comparable to the caste situation in the occupational limitations involved, the races are not identified with any particular occupations, nor do the relations between races provide any accepted plan for the sharing or for the division of occupations. The most we can say is that Negroes, because of their subordination, will be found mainly on the lower rungs of the occupational ladder; as workers they are ordinarily exploited, but striving to enhance their economic participation is characteristic.8

Despite his bitterly critical attack upon Park's theory of race relations, presumably because it does not give exclusive support to the doctrine that racial prejudice is the "matrix supporting a calculated and determined effort of a white ruling class to keep some people or peoples of color and their resources exploitable," it is very clear that Cox gives support to very much the same point of view as Park, particularly with reference to the striving for occupational position. The monumental study of the Negro in America by Gunnar Myrdal, although primarily focused upon the gap which exists between the idealism of the American Creed with reference to racial equality and its actual practice, draws heavily for its empirical evidence upon the data relating to income and occupation. Consonant ' R o b e r t E. Park, "The Nature of Race Relations," in E. T . Thompson, ed., Race Relations and the Race Problem, p. 23. ' O l i v e r Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1938), p. 440.

54

Occupation and Race on Certain Frontiers

with his definition of the Negro problem as a moral issue, Myrdal decries the tendency among "most of the modern writings on the Negro problem far outside the Marxist school" to indulge in the illusion of scientific objectivity by accepting a "vague conception of economic determinism." Myrdal himself, however, devotes more space to "economics" than to any other section of his book, much of it to substantiate the fact of occupational segregation. Central to this portion is the thesis of a cultural and institutional tradition that white people exploit Negroes. In the beginning the Negroes were owned as property. When slavery disappeared, caste remained. Within this framework of adverse tradition the average Negro in every generation has had a most disadvantageous start. Discrimination against Negroes is thus rooted in this tradition of economic exploitation. . . . This depreciation of the Negro's potentialities is given a semblance of proof by the low standards of efficiency, reliability, ambition, and morals actually displayed by the average Negro. This is what the white man "sees," and he opportunistically exaggerates what he sees. He "knows" that the Negro is not "capable" of handling a machine, running a business, or learning a profession.9

Despite a strong emphasis upon the cumulative influence of cultural and institutional factors, Myrdal obviously cannot escape the recognition that the economic wastes involved in the occupational segregation of the Negro are too great to be borne permanently in either the American South or North. Quite naturally, it is in conjunction with the recent social science studies of the frontier that the close functional relationship between race and occupation have become most apparent. The collection of essays by Everett and Helen Hughes, Where Peoples Meet™ elaborates and effectively illustrates the ecological approach to race relations, first clearly suggested in Park's paper, "Our Racial Frontier in the Pacific." The Hugheses have directed attention to the numerous spots around the world where people meet, the common characteristic of most of them being the magnetism of a chance for a better livelihood. Even the so-called missionary frontiers of Africa are recognized as being "incidental to modern political and economic conquest of the continent." 9 G u n n a r M y r d a l . An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy ( N e w Y o r k : H a r p e r and Brothers, 1 9 4 4 ) , pp. 2 0 7 - 2 0 8 . 10 J u s t ten years earlier a widely publicized collection of readings on race and c u l t u r e contacts utilized t h e significantly different title of When Peoples Meet, w i t h only a m i n i m u m emphasis u p o n t h e f r o n t i e r .

ANDREW W. LIND

55

Here it is that native labor is used on a mammoth scale by European conquering entrepreneurs in extractive industries and in commercial agriculture. . . . European exploitation has put these people on the move. Sometimes it is their land which is wanted and they must move on. Sometimes it is their labor which is wanted and various means are used to get it.11

In the more intensive studies of race relations in industrialized frontiers, the Hugheses find evidence of industry, not only as the "grand mixer of people," but also as the "colossal agent of racial, ethnic, and religious segregation" and of racial and ethnic discrimination. We might properly utilize this dual hypothesis as the basis for our subsequent examination of the role of occupation and race on certain frontiers. The Racial Variable on the Frontier Before proceeding with the analysis of the specific problem of this paper, we should examine somewhat more closely the nature and meaning of race, particularly as it relates to the frontier. The frontier, by definition, is an area of contact—whether it be of ideas, goods, institutions, or peoples; and as such, it would be expected to provide the special focus for racial and ethnic relations. As a consequence of the forces released in the world by the Industrial Revolution, peoples of sharply contrasted appearance and customs have been brought together on an unprecedented scale, and the stage has thus been set for the appearance of the phenomenon of race and the consequent relations between the races. One of the most obvious and yet most commonly disregarded aspects of race is its functional character in relation to the frontier. Granted that race, as applied to human beings, is a classificatory device based originally upon genetically acquired physical characteristics, it should also be clear that race is a recent human discovery, or "invention," to use Redfield's appropriate term.12 Not only is it true, as Redfield further emphasizes, that "the biological differences which enable us to classify the human species into races are superficial differences," but our awareness of the phenomenon is largely restricted to the periods following the extensive interconu Everett Cherrington Hughes and Helen MacGill Hughes, Where Peoples Meet: Racial and Ethnic Frontiers (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1952), p. 46. 12 Robert Redfield, " W h a t We Do Know About Race," Scientific Monthly, September, 1943, pp. 193-201.

56

Occupation and Race on Certain Frontiers

tinental migrations of the last two centuries. Considering the countless generations which have been required for the evolution of the biologically differentiated groupings to which the term race might be applied, it is highly significant that man has taken little account of these distinctions except on the frontiers of the modern world and that only a small fraction of the total number of conceivable groupings of man on this basis has ever been recognized or utilized. One of the curious paradoxes of this entire area of investigation is that the more readily recognizable and most commonly utilized criteria of race, such as skin color, form and texture of hair, stature, bodily proportions, and facial cast, had begun to lose their sharp definition as a result of extensive interbreeding or of environmental influence before the scholars were sufficiently aware of these differences to study them intensively. At any event, race is rarely defined exclusively in terms of biologically inherited physical traits. As a conception which vitally affects the conduct of people, race tends to be defined in both biological and cultural terms. The racial groups which frequently emerge as significant competitors with each other on the frontier (and to which the term race is applied) are characterized by identifiable (physical) marks or traits of which they and others are conscious, but ordinarily these identifying attributes include such cultural traits as language, clothing, food, religion, and other elements of custom. Indeed, the customary hallmarks may be the only significant ones, and since they may be obliterated in a relatively short space of time, the race also may disappear. One may agree with the Unesco experts on race that groups so defined fail to meet the "scientific" requirements of the term and should therefore be called by some other name,13 but whether they are called races or ethnic groups, these are the vital, functioning entities with which social scientists must be concerned. There is, moreover, some justification for retaining contact with "the man on the street" through the use of common terminology, insofar as the scientist can give clear and precise definition to the terms which he uses. As long as the destinies of large masses of the world's population are controlled by their affiliation with and loyalty to the "socially supposed races"—to use Redfield's descriptive term —the social scientist is clearly obligated to take serious account of "The

Race Concept:

Results of an Inquiry,

(Paris: Unesco, 1952), pp. 98-103.

ANDREW W. LIND

57

them. To the extent that "Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, or any other national group, or Catholics, Protestants, Moslems, or Jews, or groups who speak English or any other language, or people who live in Iceland or England or India, or people who are culturally Turkish or Chinese"14 can be readily identified and conceive of themselves and are conceived by others as having a status and position distinct from the rest of the population, they obviously must be recognized by the social scientists. As a purely functional definition, we may be justified in conceiving of race as a group of people who, because of commonly recognized physical and cultural traits, assumed to be genetically acquired, have become self-conscious and are subject to differential social treatment. This sort of definition obviously conforms fairly closely with the conceptions and actual practices of ordinary people and yet does not deviate from the canons of science. It is functional in recognizing that races appear and disappear as people do or do not take account of such characteristics. The circumstances which call forth racial groups differ from one frontier to another. It is possible, however, to discover certain fundamental similarities in the situations which emerge in the various types of frontiers and to these patterns we now direct our attention briefly. Of the numerous types of frontiers which might conceivably be examined, we shall confine ourselves to only three: (1) the plantation or mining frontier, (2) the farm settlement frontier, and (3) the commercial or industrial frontier. Each develops out of economic conditions peculiar to itself, and, in turn, generates its own peculiar occupational and racial specifications. Every economic enterprise, insofar as it involves the employment of workers who are directed by others, assumes a certain political character. The fact that one group directs and the other executes implies control and discipline, which under the conditions prevailing on the plantation frontier commonly assume also a racial configuration. The plantation comes into being in regions of the world which are sparsely populated and economically underdeveloped, and the problem of recruiting and maintaining an effective labor supply leads to a form of "military agriculture."16 Mentioned in the Unesco statement {ibid., p. 99) as illustrating w h a t people c o m m o n l y regard as races b u t which in f a c t are not races. 1B E. T . T h o m p s o n , " T h e N a t u r a l H i s t o r y of A g r i c u l t u r a l Labor in t h e S o u t h , " in David K. Jackson, ed., American Studies in Honor of William Kenneth Boyd ( D u r h a m : D u k e U n i versity Press, 1 9 4 0 ) , p. 114.

58

Occupation and Race on Certain Frontiers

Plantation colonies have regularly been the seats of wholesale enslavement, and planters have championed such theory as was needful to support what was to them an indispensable actuality. . . . The abolition of slavery then led to the development, where the former system did not persist, of various substitutes and subterfuges: contract-labor, debt-slavery, "compulsory labor," and the like, all in greater or less degree disguised forms of coercion.16

Most students of the plantation have been impressed by the existence of a laboring class "kept in economic, if not political servitude,"17 whose contrast in race with the proprietary and managing group makes control and discipline that much easier. Particularly during the early phases of its development, the plantation presents a highly stratified social structure, with a small proprietary class of one racial extraction at the apex of the economic pyramid, separated sharply by residence, race, plane of living, and culture from the great mass of workers. Since the economic success of the venture is so dependent upon the maintenance of a permanent and pliable labor supply, rigid controls upon its movement, either in space or in status, are rather essential, and the barriers of race become a convenient support to the planter in this struggle. The natives, having ready access to less objectionable sources of livelihood outside the plantation, do not ordinarily afford an adequate supply of labor, with the result that the planters are forced to import workers from areas of overpopulation. These immigrants are selected on the basis of their presumed ability and willingness to perform the menial tasks at the meager wages which the frontier planters can afford, and a common device for preserving the labor structure, once established, is to stress the racial pecularities of the immigrant groups as symbolizing and justifying their inherent occupational inferiority. Thus we discover on the plantation frontier, whether it be the old American South, Hawaii, Fiji, Malaya, Indonesia, or Ceylon, that the various population groups—both native and imported— which provide labor for the plantation enterprises are treated as if they were of separate racial stocks. A striking illustration is to be found in Hawaii where Germans, Norwegians, Portuguese, and " A l b e r t Galloway Keller, Colonization: A Study of the Founding of New Societies (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1908), p. 11. " G e o r g e McCutcheon McBride, "Plantation," Encylcopaedia of the Social Sciences. XII, p. 148.

ANDREW W. LIND

59

Spanish, although sharing a common European and Christian heritage with the British and American planters of the Islands, have consistently been treated as distinct racial groups and have so been classified in the official census as long as their place within the Island economy was primarily on the plantation. They have lost their racial distinction only as the industrialized centers have provided them an opportunity to compete with all the other ethnic groups on a more nearly equalitarian basis, and in the plantation areas the Portuguese and the Spanish are still spoken of as a separate racial group. Other imported labor groups, whose identifying physical hallmarks are more difficult to erase, continue to be defined as separate racial groups even within the urban centers. The functional character of race as a device for preserving the appropriate distances between the imported labor groups and their employers is further illustrated in the terminology used in the censuses of most plantation frontiers. The racial categories are frequently those which identify the labor groups which have worked on the plantations, and the very definitions of race reveal their functional character. For example, the statement on race in the 1931 Report on the Census of Malaya, although specifically disclaiming any identification with occupation, is strongly suggestive of economic class. The term "race" is used, for the purposes of a Malayan census, in a peculiar sense. . . . to cover a complex set of ideas of which race, in the strict or scientific sense, is only one small element. It would be of little use to the administrator or the merchant to attempt a classification of the population by race in the ethnographic sense, to say nothing of the fact that any such tentative classification would be highly controversial. . . . It is, in fact, impossible to define the sense in which the term "race" is used for census purposes; it is, in reality, a judicious blend, for practical ends, of the ideas of geographic and ethnographic origin, political allegiance, and racial and social affinities and sympathies. The difficulty of achieving anything like a scientific or logically consistent classification is enhanced by the fact that most Oriental peoples have themselves no clear conception of race, and commonly regard religion as the most important, if not the determinant, element. A t this census, following precedent, the population was first classified under six main racial heads, Europeans (including Americans and all white races), Eurasians, Malaysians, Chinese, Indians, and "Others." 18 " C . A. Vlieland, A Report on the 1931 Census and on Certain Problems of Vital Statistics (London, 1932), pp. 72—73. The 1947 Census, although observing that the use of the term should be abandoned as not corresponding with ethnological usage, accepts the same

60

Occupation and Race on Certain Frontiers

Although the report goes on to indicate that these primary classes were subsequently subdivided into over "seventy races," it is clear that only the six main racial groupings were put to any extensive use. Almost identical language is used in both the 1936 and 1946 censuses of the Crown Colony of Fiji, further underscoring the functional nature of race on another plantation frontier. Labor, as the critical factor affecting race relations on the plantation frontier, gives place to land on the farm settlement frontier. 19 The portions of the world into which land-hungry peasant peoples have characteristically swarmed during the past two centuries have differed from the plantation frontiers chiefly in the opportunity they afford the entire family to re-establish itself in a new land on a free and independent basis. Here the problem of labor scarcely exists, since the immigrant supply is self-propagating. Land, on the other hand, constitutes for both invaders and indigenes the repository of all values, and the struggle over its possession may become both bitter and intense. The racial problem is simplified by the absence of several subordinate groups struggling for power and recognition, but the depth of feeling between the groups is all the more intensified as a consequence. The struggle for the land develops a moral quality, since the foe is personalized, and both natives and invaders become involved in a fight to protect their closest possessions, including family and religion. Again, it does not appear to matter greatly whether the meeting of peoples occurs in the central plateau of Africa, the western plains of the United States, or the volcanic islands of New Zealand; insofar as the economic situation is conducive to a relatively high m a n land ratio for both indigenes and invaders, the stage is set for possible bitter feelings between them. Various factors, such as the numerical size of the respective groups, the integration of the region within the Western trading economy, the political support available to the f u n c t i o n a l definition of the t e r m , "because of its universal e m p l o y m e n t , in precisely t h e census sense, in official Malayan publications and its wide acceptance in t h a t sense by inf o r m e d private citizens." Stress was t h u s placed u p o n " t h e c o m m u n i t y w h i c h accepts t h e individual and t o w h i c h he claims t o belong," such t h a t a Chinese convert to Islam w h o describes himself as " M e l a y u " would be classified as Malay and a child of Chinese blood adopted in i n f a n c y by a T a m i l would be classified as Tamil. M. V. Del T u f o , Malaya, A Report on the 1947 Census of Population ( L o n d o n , 1 9 4 9 ) , p. 71. 19 This source of conflict obviously also exists on t h e plantation f r o n t i e r , b u t it assumes a less virulent f o r m in the areas of "open resources," where the p l a n t a t i o n c o m p a n y takes form.

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invading group, as well as the policies of the dominant political power, influence the resulting relations between the contending groups, whether they take the form of segregation, extermination, or partial assimilation. It seems fairly clear, however, that the situation on the farm-settlement frontier contributes to a high degree of racial self-consciousness between the groups which meet. They live, moreover, in separate economic worlds, except as the invaders are the harbingers of an expanding commercial economy. As this occurs, there is some disposition for the natives to accept positions as servants within the homes of their technologically favored adversaries, but, in general, the occupational structures within the two groups are distinct and roughly parallel to each other. In contrast to both the plantation or mining frontier and the farm settlement frontier in which race consciousness is sharply defined, the commercial frontier brings together peoples whose tribal or kinship identifications have been largely destroyed and who consequently provide suitable material out of which new racial identifications may evolve. The detribalized and socially atomized peoples, attracted to the developing centers of trade and industry in colonial areas, may have forced upon them a new sense of racial unity of which they were previously completely unaware. This is the "racemaking" situation par excellence. Equally important, however, is the circumstance on the trading frontier of conditions of potential economic equality between the participating groups. The atmosphere of the market place, like that of the city which tends to grow up around it, is relatively free of moral and political restraint. "Stadt luft macbt frei." This is not to suggest that racial consciousness fails to develop around the market place or that occupational segregation by race does not exist. As compared with either the plantation or the farm settlement frontiers, however, the urbanized commercial centers clearly afford a greater range of occupational opportunities and of free movement from one occupational area to another. One of the symbols of the greater freedom afforded peoples on the commercial frontier is the opportunity there provided of seeking each other out and of segregating themselves in urban ghettos or colonies; and, of course, this does occur, with the possibility thereby of increasing racial consciousness and racial distances. Obviously, certain cautions must be exercised in applying the

62

Occupation and Race on Certain Frontiers

conception of the three types of frontiers to any specific situation. The scheme is by no means inclusive, nor is it assumed that the types are mutually exclusive, except in theory. All three types of frontiers may be thought of as developing out of the expanding Western economy; and one type may build upon another, as the commercial frontier, for example, extends into an area which was previously plantation or farm settlement. Insofar as this occurs, the latter frontier is colored and affected by what has gone before. Occupational Position and Race on Two Frontiers By way of illustrating some of the principles outlined above, attention will be focused upon the experience of two specific frontiers —British Malaya and Hawaii. Although differing markedly from each other in such respects as size, location, and both natural and human resources, these two regions have much in common by virtue of their experience on the frontier of the expanding Western economy. As suggested by McKenzie, both of these frontiers which "owe their origin to Western enterprise and capital have . . . developed with a rapidity far beyond the rate of natural biological increase."20 Moreover, each has evolved an occupational pyramid, within which its own peculiar racial elements have adjusted themselves in characteristic fashion. Both Malaya and Hawaii came within the orbit of the Western world as trading frontiers at about the same time. Although Malaya had figured in the explorations and the political exploits of the West from the beginning of the sixteenth century, it was not until Sir Stamford RafHes founded Singapore in 1819 that Malaya's role as "the gateway to commerce of the Far East" became apparent. Hawaii's function as a much smaller, yet significant, center along "the Main Street of the World," to use Park's suggestive figure of speech, has emerged somewhat more recently. Honolulu, with a population of less than 250,000 persons in 1950, is dwarfed in size and economic significance when compared with the Colossus of the Malaya Peninsula, with its nearly 700,000 in 1947; but both have been the integrating economic centers of life within their respective regions. As such, they have also afforded a greater range of occupational op20

McKenzie, op. cit., p. 139.

ANDREW W . LIND

63

portunity for the immigrant racial groups than has been true elsewhere in the two areas. In the case of Hawaii, the democratic and equalitarian atmosphere of the early trading centers, of which there was at least one on each of the five major islands of the group, was well established before a conflicting pattern could emerge. A racially diverse population found its way to Hawaii on the whaling and trading vessels during the seventy years immediately following Captain James Cook's discovery of the islands in 1778, and the early censuses, commencing in 1850, reveal less occupational segregation by race than existed a half-century later, when plantation influence was at its height. Throughout the history of Western contacts in Hawaii, however, the democratizing influence of the urban trading centers has continued to prevail, and this has been reflected in a growing trend during the past fifty years toward a more equalized representation of the immigrant groups within the preferred occupations. A significant distinction between the experience of Hawaii and that of British Malaya lies in the greater impact of the commercial centers upon the total life of the region in one case than in the other. Despite its insular character, the economic and social life of Hawaii appears to be more completely dominated by the standards and values of its capital city and of the commercial centers generally than is true in most other combined plantation and commercial frontiers, including Malaya. According to the most recent censuses of the two regions, 49.6 per cent of the population of Hawaii was resident in Honolulu City as compared with 11.6 per cent of Malaya's population in Singapore, and if one compares the ratio of the total population in cities of ten thousand population and over, Hawaii was 51.0 per cent urbanized in 1950 as compared with 27.5 per cent of British Malaya in 1947. A more valid reflection of the pronounced influence of the commercial frontier upon race relations is found in the comparative data of the two regions with respect to occupational segregation by race. McKenzie provides a useful summary of the situation in British Malaya a generation ago, the main points of which are still valid. As a consequence chiefly of its larger size and its diversity and wealth of natural resources, Malaya has a greater number and a far wider range of occupational outlets for its population than does Hawaii. The census summaries (Table 1 ) , however, do not so much reveal

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