Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T11:03:58.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Scientific Racism in Modern America, 1870s–1990s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Hamilton Cravens
Get access

Extract

In post-Darwinian times, Americans have usually thought of the national population as divided into many distinct races and ethnic groups. The notions and definitions they have used for a race and an ethnic group have varied from one age to another. Although Americans have not needed the resources of science to believe that some races and ethnic groups are superior to others, in these times science has become a powerful symbol of cultural authority. For the racist, the assistance of science has often been useful. In this essay, it is important to distinguish between the scientific discourse on race and ethnicity whose participants do not necessarily assume that groups differ in value, and that of scientific racism, whose participants might or might not be scientists, but who have consistently assumed that science proves the existence of permanent group differences and legitimates the assertion that some groups are inherently superior to others. Here we shall discuss the latter.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 21 , October 1996 , pp. 471 - 490
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. I thank the following persons for their comments and suggestions: Paula Forrest Helmuth, David M. Katzman, Alan I Marcus, George T. McJimsey, Christine Farnham Pope, Jack Salzman, Henry D. Shapiro, and Clarence E. Walker.

2. Vann Woodward, C., Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951)Google Scholar; and Litwack, Leon, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960)Google Scholar. Of course, the antebellum North was not identical to the postbellum South; there were whites who sought to protect blacks in the North from the Fugitive Slave Law, to extend civil rights to persons of color, et cetera. My point is rather that emancipation did not eliminate racism but reinstitutionalize it in both sections of the country in ways appropriate to time and place.

3. See, for example, Dixon, Thomas Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1905)Google Scholar, perhaps the most widely circulated of all these books; and Cripps, Thomas, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. Obviously the literature on race relations is vast, and space prevents extensive citation.

4. Dinnerstein, Leonard, Uneasy at Home: Antisemitism and the American Jewish Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 149–77, 103–32.Google Scholar

5. Sorin, Gerald, A Time for Building: The Third Migration 1880–1920 (The Jewish People in America, 5 vols., ed. Feingold, Henry L. [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992], vol. 3)Google Scholar, covers this period of American Jewish history well. I have found the entire series quite useful. Works on anti-Semitism in America include Dinnerstein, Leonard's Uneasy at Home, Anti-semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, and The Leo Frank Case (1966; rept. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Gerber, David, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Higham, John, “Social Discrimination Against Jews,” in Higham, , Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975)Google Scholar, and of course his classic Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1865–1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955).Google Scholar

6. Gossett, Thomas F., Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 304–5.Google Scholar

7. Saveth, Edward N., American Historians and European Immigrants, 1875–1925 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 128–29.Google Scholar

8. See Wilson, Woodrow, History of the American People, 5 vols. (New York-Harper, 1902), 5: 212–14.Google Scholar

9. Brinton, Daniel G., Races and Peoples (Philadelphia: D. MacKay, 1890) 51–52.Google Scholar

10. Ripley, William Z., The Races of Europe (New York: Macmillan, 1899).Google Scholar

11. Grant, Madison, The Passing of the Great Race; Or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), passim.Google Scholar

12. Stoddard, Lothrop, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922)Google Scholar, passim. See also Stoddard, , The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), passim.Google Scholar

13. Woods, Frederick A., Mental and Moral Heredity in Royalty (New York: 1906)Google Scholar; Woods, , “Heredity and the Hall of Fame,” Popular Science Monthly 82 (1913): 445–452Google Scholar; Woods, , “Separating Heredity from Environment,” American Breeder's Magazine 2 (1911): 194–96Google Scholar; Woods, , “The Mind of the Negro,” Journal of Heredity 8 (1917): 153–54Google Scholar; and Woods, , “The Racial Origins of Successful Americans,” Popular Science Monthly 84 (1914): 397–402Google Scholar. For references to anti-immigration sentiment and its ties to scientific racism, there is now an abundant secondary literature, including Higham, Strangers in the Land; Solomon, Barbara Miller, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cravens, Hamilton, The Triumph of Evolution: The Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900–1941 (1978; rept. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haller, Mark H., Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought, 1870–1930 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Ludmerer, Kenneth, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; and, most recently, Daniel J. Kevles's overly ambitious In The Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).Google Scholar

14. Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971; rept. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 198–332.Google Scholar

15. Hoffman, Frederick L., “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,” Publications of the American Economic Association, 1st serial, 11 (08 1896).Google Scholar

16. Fredrickson, , Black Image, 249, 251–52.Google Scholar

17. Cravens, Hamilton, “The German-American Science of Racial Nutrition, 1870–1920,” in Technical Knowledge in American Culture, ed. Cravens, Hamilton, Marcus, Alan I., and Katzman, David M. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 127–47.Google Scholar

18. Efron, John M., Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-De-Siecle Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 1–32, 58–180.Google Scholar

19. Fishberg, Maurice, The Jews: A Study in Race and Environment (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911).Google Scholar

20. Boas, Franz, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1911)Google Scholar; and Stocking, George W. Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, (New York: Free Press, 1968), 161–94.Google Scholar

21. Du Bois, William E. B., The Philadelphia Negro (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1899)Google Scholar; and Bois, Du, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. G. McClurg, 1903)Google Scholar. See also Miller, Zane L., “Race-ism and the City: The Young Du Bois and the Role of Place in Social Theory, 1893–1901,”Google Scholar in Cravens, et al. Technical Knowledge, 112–24.Google Scholar

22. See Cravens, , Triumph of Evolution, 3–53.Google Scholar

23. Cravens, , Triumph of Evolution, 56–86Google Scholar; and Cravens, Hamilton, Before Head Start: The Iowa Station and America's Children (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 5, 22–24, 95–105, 106, 130–31, 170, 199–200.Google Scholar

24. See, for example: Mayo, M. J., The Mental Capacity of the American Negro, Archives of Psychology 28 (New York: Science, 1913, vol. 28)Google Scholar; Jordan, H. E., “The Biological Status and Social Worth of the Mulatto,” Popular Science Monthly 82 (1913): 573–82Google Scholar; Ferguson, George Oscar Jr., The Psychology of the Negro: An Experimental Study, Archives of Psychology, (New York: Science, 1916), vol. 36Google Scholar; and Partlow, W. D. and Haines, Thomas H., “Mental Rating of Juvenile Delinquents and Dependents in Alabama,” Journal of Applied Psychology 3 (1919): 291–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W Norton, 1981), 146–233.Google Scholar

26. Yerkes, Robert M., ed., Psychological Examining in the United States Army, Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1921), 15: 202–11, 235–58, 421–22, 551–657, 699, 704–42, 779, 820–37, 853–861Google Scholar, passim. See also Brigham, Carl C., A Study of American Intelligence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1923)Google Scholar, passim. In our own time, some social scientists claim that fifteen IQ points - which is about one standard deviation for an IQ test such as the Stanford-Binet - is the difference between the average IQ of the majority and minority in any culture in the world, regardless of race or color; in other words, fifteen IQ points, or one standard deviation difference, might as well be an index of majority-minority oppression. See Fordham, Signithia and Ogbu, John U., “Black Students and the Burden of ‘Acting White,’” Urban Review 18 (1986): 176–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ogbu, John G., Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1978)Google Scholar, passim; and Flynn, James R., “Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations: What IQ Tests Really Measure,” Psychological Bulletin 101 (1987): 171–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Cravens, , Triumph of Evolution, 89–155.Google Scholar

28. Dixon, Roland B., The Racial History of Man (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), 475–523.Google Scholar

29. Hrdlicka, Ales, The Old Americans (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1925).Google Scholar

30. Cravens, , Before Head Start.Google Scholar

31. Cravens, , Triumph of Evolution, esp. 224–41.Google Scholar

32. Persons, Stow, Ethnic Studies at Chicago 1905–1945 (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 28–45, passim.Google Scholar

33. Cravens, , Before Head Start, 72–105Google Scholar; see also Cravens, , Triumph of EvolutionGoogle Scholar (241–65), on the field of individual differences.

34. On this point, see Persons, , Ethnic Studies, passim.Google Scholar

35. Herskovits, Melville J., The American Negro: A Study in Race Crossing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928)Google Scholar. See also Mead, Margaret, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (New York: Morrow, 1942)Google Scholar; Benedict, Ruth, Race: Science and Politics (New York: Modern Age, 1940)Google Scholar; and Benedict, , Race and Racism (London: Routledge and Sons, 1942).Google Scholar

36. Cravens, , Triumph of Evolution, 157–90.Google Scholar

37. Dinnerstein, , Uneasy at HomeGoogle Scholar, and see the other citations in notes 4 and 5 as well. See also Forster, Arnold and Epstein, Benjamin, The New Anti-Semitism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).Google Scholar

38. See Cravens, , Before Head Start, passim.Google Scholar

39. Jensen, Arthur, “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review 39 (1969): 1–123CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The literature on Jensen and his work is considerable; one might start with Jensen, Arthur R., Genetics and Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).Google Scholar

40. Herrnstein, Richard and Murray, Charles, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).Google Scholar

41. Wiggins, David K., “‘Great Speed But Little Stamina’: The Historical Debate Over Black Athletic Superiority,” Journal of Sport History 16 (Summer 1989): 158–85.Google Scholar