The Study of Racialism

mixedmom · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 772 }

Apparently, the mulatto category was only put on the US Census to attempt to collect data that showed the inferiority of the mulatto to the black and white "races". Josiah Nott had hoped to prove that Mulattos were a hybrid of two separate species by showing that Mulattos had shorter lifespans and more health problems than their white and black parent groups. If he had been successful in collecting this data, he would have used this information to try to convince the scientific community that blacks and whites were absolutely separate species with different evolutionary points of origin. The authors speculate that the mulatto category would probably still be on the census today if the data showed what Nott had hypothesized.
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Categories and Contexts: Anthropological and Historical Studies in Critical Demography (International Studies in Demography)
by Simon Szreter (Editor), Hania Sholkamy (Editor), A. Dharmalingam (Editor)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0199270570/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Throughout its history as a social science, demography has been associated with an exclusively quantitative orientation for studying social problems. As a result, demographers tend to analyze population issues scientifically through sets of fixed social categories that are divorced from dynamic relationships and local contexts and processes. This volume questions these fixed categories in two ways. First, it examines the historical and political circumstances in which such categories had their provenance, and, second, it reassesses their uncritical applications over space and time in a diverse range of empirical case studies, encouraging throughout a constructive interdisciplinary dialogue involving anthropologists, demographers, historians, and sociologists.

About the Author

Simon Szreter has been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge since 1992, and is Reader in History and Public Policy in the Faculty of History at Cambridge. He took History Tripos at Cambridge, completed his PhD with the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in 1983, and was Research Assistant to Lord (Michael) Young of Dartington at the Institute of Community Studies from 1983 to 1984. In 1984 he was appointed Lecturer in Demographic History at Cambridge University. He is the founding editor of Historyandpolicy.org. Hania Sholkamy is Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Gender and Women's Studies at the American University in Cairo. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences in 1997. She was Ioma Evans-Pritchard JRF at St Anne's College from 1996 to 1998, and Research Associate at The International Population Council in Cairo. She joined the American University as Assistant Professor of Anthropology in 2000. A. Dharmalingam received a PhD from the Australian National University, was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania from 1991 to 1994, and joined the Population Studies Centre of the University of Waikato in 1995.

Product Details

Hardcover: 424 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (May 20, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0199270570
ISBN-13: 978-0199270576
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
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Here are the pages that I found to be VERY informative concerning the mulatto category on the US census:

pg 109:

pg 111:

pg 112:

pg 113:

pg 114: