Pseudoscience of Race

In the reading "Defining Race", I explained that racial categories are part of the power structure of a society. They help to justify and perpetuate the inequalities within a culture.

Science is part of that power structure too. Until recently, in Europe and the United States, almost all scientists were members of the most powerful racial group in their societies. It's not surprising, then, that early scientific studies (or really, pseudo-scientific studies) of human diversity reflected the biases of the scientists themselves, and perpetuated the structural inequalities that already existed (systemic racism, in the anthropological sense).

Just as racial systems first developed in the context of European colonial expansion and the need of Euro-American colonists for cheap labor, so too did the scientific study of race and diversity. Prior to that period, people had noticed physical differences between communities in different parts of the world. The ancient world was far more globalized than we usually recognize. The Roman empire encompassed parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia, and traded with powerful kingdoms well into sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia; they recognized physical differences, but these weren't considered important in determining to which class or category a person belong. In the medieval period, caravans from Europe traded in China, and merchants like Marco Polo commented on the physical traits of people he met along the route, but he didn't place much social importance on them.

In a rough sense, European colonization and the development of modern scientific methods coincided during the Enlightenment. Colonization allowed European scientists access to the diversity of human physical traits, but it also gave European scientists a powerful incentive to characterize the traits of Native American, African, and Asian peoples as inferior to those of Europeans.

In the 18th century, European scientists were classifying people around the world into different subcategories. Carolus Linnaeus, famous for his system of biological classification published in 1735, divided humans into four groups: Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europeanus. Some white American scientists argued that the different "races" of humans were actually different species. In the American colonies, where racial hierarchies were rapidly developing, this was a popular theory. But even with the biases that were prevalent at the time, many scientists, particularly in Europe, had to admit that the data did not fit this explanation of human diversity. George Louis de Buffon, a French naturalist, published his Histoire Naturelle in 1749, pointing out that all populations of people were interfertile (could have viable and fertile children together), and therefore must be all one species.

de Buffon also argued that the physical differences between people around the globe were superficial. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German naturalist, made similar arguments in the late 1700's. Blumenbach divided human diversity into five races: Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American. Blumenbach is why we use the term "Caucasian" to refer to white Americans and Europeans, although, ironically, for much of American history the people from the Caucasus would not have been considered white. The term was re-defined in the 19th century as focused on northern and western Europe. Like de Buffon, Blumenbach argued that human differences were the result of the environments in which populations were found, and that there was no evidence that people from any one race were substantially inferior to any other.

Unfortunately, Blumenbach also showed his Euro-centrism by assuming that the "Caucasian" race (which, in his view, included most of northern Indian, the Middle East, and eastern Europe) was the "original" race, and that all others had degenerated from that "ideal" due to environmental influences. This degenerative hypothesis was far more influential than his contention that the peoples of the world were roughly equal in ability. Equality did not fit the political aims of the society in which he lived.

Although de Buffon has shown quite early that all humans must be one species, an idea called monogenism -- and despite the evidence of interfertility of all races in the United States -- American naturalists and early scientists in the late 18th and early 19th centuries increasingly argued for a polygenic (multiple species) theory of human diversity. The field of anthropology first developed in this context, as scientists began examining people from many backgrounds in an attempt to prove the polygenic theory. Both anthropology and polygenism were strongest in the United States, where justifying the different treatment of people based on race was fundamental for maintaining the economic system of the nation, which relied heavily on enslaved labor.

[Breaking out of the authorial voice quickly to make sure something is very clear: even back in the 18th century, it was obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain that all humans had to be one species. The ability to have children together is, in fact, the very definition of a species, and the United States was full of people with mixed racial backgrounds. The scientists who were arguing against it were arguing for what they wanted to believe, not what the data was telling them. OK, back to the Voice of Authority.]

Polygenists used incomplete and incorrectly-interpreted data to "prove" that people came from multiple species, and also that some "species" of humans were inferior to others. In the early 1800's, American physician, and the founder of American biological anthropology, Samuel G. Morton, attempted to show the inferiority of non-European racial groups through the use of craniometry (the measurement of skulls). Morton assumed that skull size was an accurate measure of intelligence.

[News flash: this is not true. Your skull size is a reasonable reflection of your height, though, with taller people having larger bodies overall and therefore larger heads. If you would all like to believe that I must be unusually smart because I'm unusually tall, go ahead. I can take it.]

Morton measured the size of the brain in skulls from a variety of populations and "proved" that Europeans had the largest brains, then Native Americans, than Africans. In his book The Mismeasure of Man, Steven Jay Gould, the prominent paleontologist, showed that Morton's analyses were flawed and, in fact, his measurements showed no such differences between the races. Although others have argued that Gould's reanalysis was itself flawed, the general consensus is that Gould's critique is, by and large, accurate. Morton's work was misleading at best, and certainly did not prove any intellectual differences between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans.

To those who were reading Morton's work, however, accuracy was significantly less important than fitting the socially-accepted narrative about race. In the 1840s, Morton worked with U.S. Secretary of State John Calhoun to develop "scientific" arguments for the spread of slavery. They were successful in persuading the government to annex Texas as a slave state. The 1840s and 1850s saw the development of the American School of Anthropology, a group of wealthy, white scholars dedicated to the (pseudo)scientific study of race, which, coincidentally, [really, not coincidentally] they used to justify slavery and the racial hierarchy in the U.S.

The American School of Anthropology included, in addition to Morton, two of his followers, Josiah Nott and George Gliddon. In 1854, Nott and Gliddon published Types of Mankind, a polygenist book that was widely read by scholars and non-scholars alike. In the book, they used mis-translations of the Bible to argue against the idea of monogenism, relied heavily on Morton's (flawed) cranial studies, and argued that evolutionary explanations of human differences could not be true because ancient Egyptian paintings showed people and animals in their current state.

[Another quick interjection: this is nonsense. Egyptian paintings are too recent and too narrow in their geographic range to show major phenotypical differences in people and animals.]

Types of Mankind was an explicit argument for the enslavement of African people on the basis of their "inferiority" and became the basis for Confederate propaganda leading into the Civil War. Gliddon died before the war broke out, but Nott, a slave-owner himself [naturally], served as an officer in the Confederate army and as director of the Confederate General Army Hospital in Mobile. Both of his sons served -- and died -- in the Confederate army.

There was one positive outcome of the publication of Types of Mankind: its popularity galvanized opposition to polygenism. Abolitionists spoke out against the American School of Anthropology. Frederick Douglass, once an enslaved man and by 1854 one of the leading intellectuals of his time, gave an address entitled "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered", in which he pointed out the political goals of the so-called scientific work: "by making the enslaved a character fit only for slavery, [slave owners] excuse themselves for refusing to make the slave a freeman...." Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, was also moved to speak out against this view of humankind. His masterpiece, The Descent of Man, was an answer to Nott and Gliddon.

Slavery wasn't the only institution that was supported by these pseudo-scientific studies of race. Another member of the American School of Anthropology, Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born Harvard naturalist, argued for the theory of recapitulation, the idea that the races were rungs on an evolutionary ladder, with the "superior" races more fully developed than the "inferior" races. Recapitulation is based on the (true) observation that more complex animals (like mammals) have some early developmental forms that look like less complex animals (like fish). Embryo humans, for example, go through a stage when they develop gills.

So far, the theory was on solid scientific ground. But Agassiz, and others, argued that recapitulation was not just a reflection of a shared ancestry between humans and fish, but rather that humans were a more highly evolved fish that continued to develop after the gill stage, while fish were, essentially, a less developed human, one that stopped growing and changing after that early fetal stage. By this logic, then, all species could be ranked based on how "adult" or "juvenile" they were, with inferior species having traits that were less developed or more child-like than those of superior species. Since Agassiz believe that different groups of humans were different species, he believed that "inferior" races would have more juvenile traits, while "superior" races would have more adult traits. This argument was used to support slavery (by showing people with African ancestry were more "childlike"), but also to justify European colonialism, by claiming that the "childlike" people of Asia, Africa, and Native America needed more mature and "adult" Europeans to run their countries.

[Here again! It shouldn't need saying, but all of this is so much bull. First, generalizing from embryonic development to the creation of a hierarchy between populations within a single species has no scientific basis. Yes, human embryos briefly have gills. What does that have to do with whether there are differences in the degree of development between human populations? Second, even if we accepted the theory, what kind of traits make a person "more adult" or "more childlike"? Facial hair? Well, that is found in people of European descent more often than in people of African, Asian, or Native American descent, because facial hair is an adaptation to cold climates. But, what about height? Height tends to reflect childhood nutrition, so citizens of wealthier Western nations are taller now, but this doesn't pattern by race; African-Americans are taller on average than citizens of many African nations. There are also communities in Africa, Asia, and Native America that are tall, on average, such as the Maasai. How about secondary sexual characteristics, like breast and penis size? A recent meta-analysis of 15,000 penises worldwide showed no size difference by race. Average bra size, like height, reflects nutrition more than ancestry. In other words, although Agassiz and other supports of recapitulation were trained scientists, their data was a hot mess.]

In the late 1880s, then, when the founder of modern American anthropology, Franz Boas, first arrived in the United States, the field was a disaster. American anthropologists were a group of crackpot reactionaries using their faulty science to prop up a vicious system of racial inequality. What happened next will shock you!