Biracial Americans were framed by eugenicists as a peculiar racial middle class

Evidence

Reuter made a name for himself arguing that anything Black people achieved was in fact the achievement of biracial people. He situated biracial people as a sort of racial middle class, below superior Whites, but above inferior “full Blacks,” as they were called. (Biracial people often rejected the racist idea of their inferiority to Whites, but some consumed and reproduced the racist idea of their superiority to Blacks.) Reuter stamped biracial people as a “peculiar people”—despite their success—around the same time that homosexuals were being marked as a “peculiar people.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 811

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘peculiar people’ middle-category framing echoes the reader’s boundary-placing project and connects to how Kendi sorts graded racial hierarchies elsewhere.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the eugenic ‘peculiar people’ framing of biracial Americans relate to the contemporaneous pathologizing of homosexuality — does Kendi develop a fuller parallel?