Hybridity

The term "hybridity", where it relates to race relations, is a very shaky one.

As some of you may be aware (but until this week I was not) as recently as 1974 there existed a debate as to the natural history of humanity and the origins of race. Simply put, it was suggested that different races were actually different species. Eighteenth century Europeans, when making a hierarchical scale of the animal kingdom separated different races as different species (and predictably placed themselves at the top). There was even some discussion as to whether Africans should be catogorized as being a species of ape.

Hopefully this is absurd enough to be surprising to most of us. The debate between monogenists and polygenists has, as Darwin predicted "die[d] a silent and unobserved death". Yet it did not do so before the end of this century.

"Hybrid", as a word, has a long and complex history. Originally a latin term for the offspring of a wild boar and a tame sow, for most of its history in English it has meant a mix of two different species. The 1828 Webster definition of hybrid was "an animal or plant produced from the mixing of two species". The use of the term hybrid to refer to humans, then, was originally a support of the idea that different races were in fact different species.

Thomas Huxley argued that instead of "hybrid", mixed-race humans should be called "mongrels", since "'mongrels' ... are crosses between distinct races, and 'hybrids' ... are crosses between distinct species." But "mongrel" to us (and frankly, probably to Huxley) has such a strong association with dogs, and such a connotation of unknown and unreputable breeding—as a word it is so loaded with value judgement—that it is a much too insulting term to apply to human beings.

What gradually became significant was the definition of "species". For many, the definition of a species was a group that produced fertile offspring. A mule is infertile, and thus we know that a horse and a donkey, despite their similarities, are indeed different species. So the question was asked, can the races of humanity produce fertile children?

To my modern eyes, this seems an absolutely absurd question, but it was in fact debated with seriousness. Some, like Edward Long attempted the evidentially indefinsable position that different races could not, in fact, produce fertile offspring. Some, like Charles White, denied that fertile offspring was the best definition of species.

Next, Darwin attempts to shed some light on the subject.