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It is proposed to discuss two seemingly disparate, but actually closely connected, phenomena: The downward social identification of:
Persons born of marriages between spouses of such disparate social backgrounds that one of the parents can be deemed to have contracted a hypogamous, and the other a hypergamous marriage.
Persons born of marriages between parents of equally high social status who, despite—and perhaps even because of—their exalted ancestry, display a marked tendency toward an identification with their social inferiors.
Downward identification on the part of children born from interracial marriages is apparently less common than is upward identification with the parent belonging to the favored social or “racial” group. Many sociologists list upward identification as a source of familial and social conflict, but fail to mention conflicts resulting from downward identification. Some examples of such downward identification may now be given.
Case 1. A very attractive, somewhat neurotic and rebel-liously bohemian young woman was Jewish on her father's side and Gentile on her mother's side. Although her parents were divorced and her father had rejected her, she systematically identified herself with Jews, refused to date Gentiles and, on one occasion, closely questioned a prospective “date” whose “racial” antecedents were not known to her, to discover whether or not he was Jewish. It is unnecessary to consider here in detail the deeper unconscious mechanisms of her downward identification, one element of which was her desire to succeed in a love relationship with a Jew (-father), which is precisely what both she and her mother had failed to achieve. What matters here is simply the fact that this woman's downward