Race, racism, and science: social impact and interaction

420 Pages·2004·1.75 MB·English

by  John P. Jackson

Race, Racism,
and Science
Forthcoming titles in
ABC-CLIO’s
Science and Society
Series
The Environment and Science,Christian C. Young
Exploration and Science,Michael S. Reidy, Gary Kroll, and Erik M. Conway
Imperialism and Science,George N. Vlahakis, Isabel Maria Malaquias,
Nathan M. Brooks, François Regourd, Feza Gunergun, and David Wright
Literature and Science,John H. Cartwright and Brian Baker
Women and Science, Suzanne Le-May Sheffield
Advisory Editors
Paul Lawrence Farber and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt
Race, Racism,
and Science
Social Impact
and Interaction
John P. Jackson, Jr.,
and Nadine M. Weidman
ABC-CLIO
Santa Barbara, California • Denver, Colorado • Oxford, England
Copyright 2004 by John P. Jackson, Jr., and Nadine M. Weidman
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in
a review, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jackson, John P., 1961–
Race, racism, and science : social impact and interaction /
John P. Jackson and Nadine M. Weidman.
p. cm. — (Science and society)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-85109-448-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 1-85109-453-9 (e-book)
1. Race. 2. Race awareness—History. 3. Racism—History. 4. Social evolution. 5.
Human evolution. 6. Race discrimination—History. I. Weidman, Nadine M., 1966– II.
Title. III. Series: Science and society (Santa Barbara, Calif.)
HT1521.J33 2004
305.8—dc22 2004006531
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an e-book.
Visit abc-clio.com for details.
ABC-CLIO, Inc.
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Series Editor’s Preface, ix
Prologue, xi
1 The Origins of Racial Science, Antiquity–1800, 1
Was There Race in Antiquity?, 1
The Curse of Ham and Medieval Racial Thought, 4
The Age of Exploration, 7
Natural Philosophy and the Colonial Experience:
The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 8
The Science of Anthropology, 12
The Atlantic Slave System, 20
Enlightenment Values and Racial Thought, 22
Conclusion, 24
Bibliographic Essay, 24
2 The Establishment of Racial Typology, 1800–1859, 29
The Reign of Monogenism: Prichard and Lawrence, 35
Steps toward Polygenesis, 39
American Polygenism: Morton, Nott, and Gliddon, 45
Polygenism in the Land of Prichard, 52
Conclusion, 55
Bibliographic Essay, 57
3 Race and Evolution, 1859–1900, 61
Darwin’s Argument in On the Origin of Species, 63
Darwin and Wallace on Natural Selection and Human Origins, 67
Darwin on Human Evolution, 69
Physical Anthropology and the Persistence of Polygenism, 72
v
vi
Contents
Spencer and Evolution, 76
Spencer on the Savage Mind, 80
Social Darwinism and Its Variants, 84
Social Darwinism in Germany, 85
Sociocultural Evolutionism in Britain, 88
Bibliographic Essay, 93
4 The Hardening of Scientific Racism, 1900–1945, 97
The Problem of Heredity, 97
Francis Galton, 99
Hard Heredity, 102
The Rise of Nordicism, 105
Nordicism and Civilization, 105
The Supremacy of Nordics, 107
The Rise of Eugenics, 109
Eugenics and Race in the United States, 109
German Rassenhygiene, 120
Bibliographic Essay, 125
5 The Retreat of Scientific Racism, 1890–1940, 129
Boas and the Culture Concept, 130
Boasian Anthropology and Black Folklore, 137
Psychologists and the Critique of IQ Testing, 144
From Race Psychology to Studies in Prejudice, 146
Genetics and the Critique of Eugenics, 153
Bibliographic Essay, 159
6 The Liberal Orthodoxy, 1940–1960, 163
The Geneticists’ Manifesto, 165
Wartime Antiracism: Benedict, Montagu, and Dunn and Dobzhansky, 168
Experts in Prejudice, 173
An American Dilemma, 177
The Post-Myrdal Liberal Orthodoxy, 181
The Damage Argument,188
The Breakdown of the Liberal Orthodoxy, 193
The UNESCO Statements on Race, 197
Bibliographic Essay, 201
vii
Contents
7 A Multicultural Science of Race, 1965 to the Present, 205
Movement Scholarship, 205
The Rejection of the Pathology of Black Culture, 207
Institutional Racism and Colonialism, 209
Genetics, New Physical Anthropology, and the Abandonment of Race, 213
Forward to the Past: The Psychometrician Case for Race Differences, 219
Psychometrics, Intelligence, and Heritability, 222
Geneticists versus the Psychometricians, 224
The Psychometricians versus Scholars of Institutional Racism, 226
Psychometric Case for Policy, 230
Bibliographic Essay, 233
Chronology, 237
Glossary, 243
Documents, 255
Bibliography, 371
Index, 387
About the Authors, 403

Series Editor’s Preface
T
he discipline of the history of science emerged from the natural sci-
ences with the founding of the journal Isis by George Sarton in 1912.
Two and a half decades later in a lecture at Harvard Sarton explained,
“We shall not be able to understand our own science of to-day (I do not say to
use it, but to understand it) if we do not succeed in penetrating its genesis and
evolution.” Historians of science, many of the first trained by Sarton and then
by his students, study how science developed during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries and how the evolution of the physical, biological, and social
sciences over the past 350 years has been powerfully influenced by various
social and intellectual contexts. Throughout the twentieth century the new field
of the history of science grew with the establishment of dozens of new journals,
graduate programs, and eventually the emergence of undergraduate majors in
the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, technology, and medicine. Sar-
ton’s call to understand the origins and development of modern science has
been answered by the development of not simply one discipline, but several.
Despite their successes in training scholars and professionalizing the field,
historians of science have not been particularly successful in getting their work,
especially their depictions of the interactions between science and society, into
history textbooks. Pick up any U.S. history textbook and examine some of the
topics that have been well explored by historians of science, such as scientific
racism, the Scopes trial, nuclear weapons, eugenics, industrialization, or the rela-
tionship between science and technology. The depictions of these topics offered
by the average history textbook have remained unchanged over the last fifty
years, while the professional literature related to them that historians of science
produce has made considerable revision to basic assumptions about each of
these subjects.
The large and growing gap between what historians of science say about
certain scientific and technological subjects and the portrayal of these subjects
in most survey courses led us to organize the Science and Society series. Obvi-
ously, the rich body of literature that historians of science have amassed is not
ix