Age of reason

Rally in Sydney (Wikicommons). Antiracists see themselves as open-minded individuals at war with hardline ideologues.

 

The interwar years gave antiracism a new lease on life, thus reversing a long decline that had begun in the late 19th century. This reversal was driven largely by two events: the acrimonious debate over U.S. immigration in the mid-1920s and Hitler's rise to power in the early 1930s. Many people, especially academics, were convinced of the need for an uncompromising war on "racism"—a word just entering use as a synonym for Nazism.

The war on racism began in the social sciences, especially through the efforts of John B. Watson in psychology and the Boasian triad in anthropology (Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead). After initially holding a more balanced view, these social scientists began to argue that genes contribute little to differences in behavior and mental makeup, especially between human populations.

In addition to the political context, there was also the broader cultural setting. The 1920s brought a flowering of African and African-American influences on popular culture, as seen in the Harlem Renaissance, the emergence of jazz, and the infatuation with art nègre. African Americans were viewed no longer as an embarrassment but as a source of excitement and novelty. In this role, black singers, musicians, and artists would lead the way in mobilizing mainstream support for the war on racism, such as Marian Anderson in her concert at the Lincoln Memorial and Paul Robeson through his political activism.

Would things have turned out differently if the immigration debate of the 1920s had been less acrimonious or if Hitler had not come to power? The most widespread answer seems to be "no"—sooner or later, men and women of reason would have broken free of the ideological straightjacket imposed by racism, social Darwinism, and hereditarianism. Franz Boas said as much in an interview he gave in 1936: "I will try to clean up some of the nonsense that is being spread about race those days. I think the question is particularly important for this country, too; as here also people are going crazy" (JTA, 1942).

How true is this view? Was the war on racism a healthy reaction to a mad ideology?

First, the word "racism" scarcely existed in its current sense back then. Continuous use dates from the 1920s and initially referred to the integral "blood and soil" nationalism that was becoming popular, especially in Germany, the word "racist" itself being perhaps a translation of the German Völkisch. Its use in a broader sense is largely postwar and has rarely been positive or even neutral. It's an insult. The racist must be re-educated and, if necessary, eliminated.

If the racist is no longer an ignorant person but rather a villain, and if he is defined by his impulses or negative passions (hate, aggressive intolerance, etc.), then the evil is in him, and his case seems hopeless. The antiracist's task is no longer to lead the "racist" towards goodness, but rather to isolate him as a carrier of evil. The "racist" must be singled out and stigmatized. (Taguieff, 2013)

The term "social Darwinism" likewise came into use well after the period when it was supposedly dominant:

Bannister (1988) and Bellomy (1984) established that "social Darwinism" was all but unknown to English-speaking readers before the Progressive Era. Hodgson's (2004) bibliometric analysis identified a mere eleven instances of "social Darwinism" in the Anglophone literature (as represented by the JSTOR database) before 1916. Before 1916 "social Darwinism" had almost no currency whatsoever [...].

"Social Darwinism" did not acquire much greater currency between 1916 and 1943; a mere 49 articles and reviews employ the term. (Leonard, 2009)

The term did not become commonplace until 1944 with the publication of Social Darwinism in American Thought by Richard Hofstadter. Since then it has appeared 4,258 times in the academic literature. Like "racism" it has seldom been used positively or neutrally:

"Social Darwinism" had always been an epithet. From its very beginnings, reminds Bellomy (1984, p. 2), "social Darwinism" has been "heavily polemical, reserved for ideas with which a writer disagreed." (Leonard, 2009).

The term "hereditarianism" likewise entered common use long after its supposed golden age. According to Google Scholar, "hereditarian" and "hereditarianism" appear 0 times in the literature between 1890 and 1900, 6 times between 1900 and 1910, 8 times between 1910 and 1920, 18 times between 1920 and 1930, and 52 times between 1930 and 1940. In most cases, these terms seem to have been used pejoratively.

Thus, all three words entered common use when the beliefs they described were no longer dominant. More to the point, these words were more often used by opponents than by proponents, sometimes exclusively so.

Of course, an ideology doesn't need a name to exist. Many people engaged in racial thinking without bothering to label it. As Barkan (1992, p. xi) observes: “Prior to that time [the interwar years] social differentiation based upon real or assumed racial distinctions was thought to be part of the natural order.” It is difficult, however, to describe such thinking as an ideology, in the sense of a belief-system that seeks obedience to certain views and to a vision of what-must-be-done. William McDougall (1871-1938) was a prominent figure in psychology and is now described as a "scientific racist," yet his views showed little of the stridency we normally associate with ideology:

Racial qualities both physical and mental are extremely stable and persistent, and if the experience of each generation is in any manner or degree transmitted as modifications of the racial qualities, it is only in very slight degree, so as to produce any moulding effect only very slowly and in the course of generations.

I would submit the principle that, although differences of racial mental qualities are relatively small, so small as to be indistinguishable with certainty in individuals, they are yet of great importance for the life of nations, because they exert throughout many generations a constant bias upon the development of their culture and their institutions. (Mathews, 1925, p. 151)

Similarly, the anthropologist William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) is described today as a "social Darwinist," even though the term was never applied to him during his lifetime or long after. He did believe in the struggle for existence: "Before the tribunal of nature a man has no more right to life than a rattlesnake; he has no more right to liberty than any wild beast; his right to pursuit of happiness is nothing but a license to maintain the struggle for existence..." (Sumner, 1913, p. 234). He saw such struggle, however, as an unfortunate constraint and not as a normative value. Efforts to abolish it would simply transfer it to other people:

The real misery of mankind is the struggle for existence; why not "declare" that there ought not to be any struggle for existence, and that there shall not be any more? Let it be decreed that existence is a natural right, and let it be secured in that way. If we attempt to execute this plan, it is plain that we shall not abolish the struggle for existence; we shall only bring it about that some men must fight that struggle for others. (Sumner, 1913, p. 222).

Yet his belief in the struggle for existence was not associated with imperialism and “might makes right.” Indeed, he considered imperialism a betrayal of America's traditions and opposed the Spanish-American War and America’s subsequent annexation of the Philippines. A class of plutocrats would, he felt, come into being and foment imperialist wars in the hope of securing government subsidies and contracts (Wikipedia, 2015).

Herbert John Fleure (1877-1969), a geographer and anthropologist, is similarly described today as a "scientific racist" who saw racial differentiation taking place even at the micro level of small communities:

[...] Fleure accepted the reality of racial differentiation even in Europe, where all the populations exhibit types of diverse origins living and maintaining those type characters side by side in spite of intermarriage and of absence of any consciousness of diversity. These various types, each with mental aptitudes and limitations that are in some degree correlated with their physique, make diverse contributions to the life of each people. (Barkan, 1992, p. 60)

Nonetheless, he condemned the "folly" of confusing such differentiation with language and nation states (Barkan, 1992, pp. 60-64). He also became a strong opponent of Nazism and attacked anti-Semitism in his lectures and articles (Kushner, 2008).

I could give other examples, but why bother? There was a spectrum of racial thinking that encompassed a wide range of scholars, many of whom were sympathetic to the plight of minorities. This variability is hardly surprising, given that racial thinking of one sort or another was typical of most educated people who came of age before the 1930s. Indeed, we are regularly treated to the discovery that some respected person, like Winston Churchill or Albert Schweitzer, was, in fact, a racist. This historical reality is embarrassing not just because the people in question are still role models, but also because it undermines the notion that antiracism freed us from an ideological straitjacket.

Conclusion

Words like "racism," "social Darwinism," and "hereditarianism" create the impression that a single monolithic ideology prevailed before the triumph of antiracism. Actually, the truth was almost the reverse. There was initially a wide spectrum of beliefs, as is normally the case before one belief pushes out its rivals and imposes its vision of reality. Antiracism triumphed because it was more ideological than its rivals; it possessed a unity of purpose that enabled it to neutralize one potential opponent after another. Often, the latter were unaware of this adversarial relationship and assumed they were dealing with a friendly ally.

History could have played out differently. Initially a tool in the struggle against Nazi Germany, antiracism became critically dependent on a postwar context of decolonization and Cold War rivalry. Without this favorable context, it would have had much more trouble seizing the moral high ground and locking down normal discourse. Its revival would have likely stalled at some point.

A world without antiracism could have still brought in laws against discrimination, particularly for the basics of life like housing and employment. But such efforts would have been driven not by ideology but by a pragmatic wish to create a livable society, like modern-day Singapore. In this alternate world, rational people would act rationally. They would not, for instance, be blindly sticking to antiracist principles—and insisting that everyone else do likewise—in the face of the demographic tsunami now sweeping out of Africa.

Social scientists in particular would be acting more rationally. They would not have to assume human sameness and arrange the facts accordingly. They would not face the same pressure to ignore embarrassing data, to choose the less likely explanation, and to keep quiet until ... until when? They would be free to work within the earlier, and more fruitful, paradigm that viewed human differences as a product of genes, culture, and gene-culture interaction. 

Such a paradigm could have absorbed findings on learning and conditioned reflexes, perhaps even better than the one we have now. Indeed, the current paradigm has trouble explaining why the effects of conditioning disappear at different rates, depending on what one has been conditioned to do. For instance, people lose a conditioned fear of snakes and spiders much more slowly than a conditioned fear of electrical outlets, even though the latter are more dangerous in current environments (Cook et al., 1986; Ohman et al., 1986). Conditioning, like learning in general, seems to interact not with a blank slate, but rather with pre-existing mental algorithms that have modifiable and non-modifiable sections.

 

Of course, this is not how history played out. We are living under an ideology that claims to be an anti-ideology while demanding the sort of conformity normally found in totalitarian societies. In the past, this contradiction largely went unnoticed, perhaps because the full extent of the antiracist project remained poorly known. Or perhaps people chose not to know. Increasingly, however, even the pretence of not knowing is becoming difficult. As French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut wrote, "the lofty idea of the 'war on racism' is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century" (Caldwell, 2009).

References 

Barkan, E. (1992). The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars, Cambridge University Press.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=-c8aSO-gnwMC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Caldwell, C. (2009). Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, Penguin.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=637_SgdPfnsC&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

JTA (1942). Dr. Franz Boas, Debunker of Nazi Racial Theories, Dies in New York, December 23  http://www.jta.org/1942/12/23/archive/dr-franz-boas-debunker-of-nazi-racial-theories-dies-in-new-york 

Kushner, T. (2008). H. J. Fleure: a paradigm for inter-war race thinking in Britain, Patterns of Prejudice, 42

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00313220801996006 

Leonard, T.C. (2009). Origins of the myth of social Darwinism: The ambiguous legacy of Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 71, 37-51

https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/myth.pdf

Mathews, B. (1925). The Clash of Colour. A Study in the Problem of Race. London: Edinburgh House Press.

Ohman et al. (1986). Face the Beast and Fear the Face: Animal and Social Fears as Prototypes for Evolutionary Analyses of Emotion, Psychophysiology, 23, 123-145.

Sumner, W.G. (1913). Earth-hunger and other essays, ed. Albert Galloway Keller, New Haven: Yale University Press. 

Taguieff, P-A. (2013). Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme, Paris: PUF.

Wikipedia (2015). William Graham Sumner

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Graham_Sumner

Behaviorism and the revival of antiracism

John B. Watson conditioning a child to fear Santa Claus. With a properly controlled environment, he felt that children can be conditioned to think and behave in any way desired

 

After peaking in the mid-19th century, antiracism fell into decline in the U.S., remaining dominant only in the Northeast. By the 1930s, however, it was clearly reviving, largely through the efforts of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students.

But a timid revival had already begun during the previous two decades. In the political arena, the NAACP had been founded in 1910 under the aegis of WASP and, later, Jewish benefactors. In academia, the 1920s saw a growing belief in the plasticity of human nature, largely through the behaviorist school of psychology.

The founder of behaviorism was an unlikely antiracist. A white southerner who had been twice arrested in high school for fighting with African American boys, John B. Watson (1878-1958) initially held a balanced view on the relative importance of nature vs. nature. His book Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919) contained two chapters on "unlearned behavior". The first chapter is summarized as follows:

In this chapter, we examine man as a reacting organism, and specifically some of the reactions which belong to his hereditary equipment. Human action as a whole can be divided into hereditary modes of response (emotional and instinctive), and acquired modes of response (habit). Each of these two broad divisions is capable of many subdivisions. It is obvious both from the standpoint of common-sense and of laboratory experimentation that the hereditary and acquired forms of activity begin to overlap early in life. Emotional reactions become wholly separated from the stimuli that originally called them out (transfer), and the instinctive positive reaction tendencies displayed by the child soon become overlaid with the organized habits of the adult.

By the mid-1920s, however, he had largely abandoned this balanced view and embraced a much more radical environmentalism, as seen in Behaviorism (1924):

Our conclusion, then, is that we have no real evidence of the inheritance of traits. I would feel perfectly confident in the ultimately favorable outcome of a healthy, well-formed baby born of a long line of crooks, murderers and thieves, and prostitutes (Watson, 1924, p. 82)

[...] Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years. (Watson, 1924, p. 82)

Everything we have been in the habit of calling "instinct" today is a result largely of training—belongs to man's learned behavior. As a corollary from this I wish to draw the conclusion that there is no such thing as an inheritance of capacity, talent, temperament, mental constitution, and characteristics. These things again depend on training that goes on mainly in the cradle. (Watson,1924, p. 74).

Why the shift to extreme environmentalism? It was not a product of ongoing academic research. In fact, Watson was no longer in academia, having lost his position in 1920 at Johns Hopkins University after an affair with a graduate student. At the age of 42, he had to start a new career as an executive at a New York advertising agency. Some writers attribute this ideological shift to his move from academia to advertising:

Todd (1994) noted that after Watson lost his academic post at Johns Hopkins, he abandoned scientific restraint in favor of significantly increased stridency and extremism, such that there were "two Watsons—a pre-1920, academic Watson and a post-1920, postacademic Watson" (p. 167). Logue (1994) argued that Watson's shift from an even-handed consideration of heredity and environment to a position of bombast and extreme environmentalism was motivated by the need to make money and the desire to stay in the limelight after he left academia. (Rakos, 2013)

There was another reason: the acrimonious debate in the mid-1920s over immigration, particularly over whether the United States was receiving immigrants of dubious quality. Rakos (2013) points to Watson's increasingly harsh words on eugenics and the political background: "It is probably no coincidence that only in the 1924 edition of the book—published in the same year that Congress passed the restrictive Johnson-Lodge Immigration Act—did Watson express his belief that behaviorism can promote social harmony in a world being transformed by industrialization and the movement of peoples across the globe."  

Eugenics is mentioned, negatively, in his 1924 book:

But you say: "Is there nothing in heredity-is there nothing in eugenics-[...] has there been no progress in human evolution?" Let us examine a few of the questions you are now bursting to utter.

Certainly black parents will bear black children [...]. Certainly the yellow-skinned Chinese parents will bear a yellow skinned offspring. Certainly Caucasian parents will bear white children. But these differences are relatively slight. They are due among other things to differences in the amount and kind of pigments in the skin. I defy anyone to take these infants at birth, study their behavior, and mark off differences in behavior that will characterize white from black and white or black from yellow. There will be differences in behavior but the burden of proof is upon the individual be he biologist or eugenicist who claims that these racial differences are greater than the individual differences. (Watson, 1924, p. 76)

You will probably say that I am flying in the face of the known facts of eugenics and experimental evolution—that the geneticists have proven that many of the behavior characteristics of the parents are handed down to the offspring—they will cite mathematical ability, musical ability, and many, many other types. My reply is that the geneticists are working under the banner of the old "faculty" psychology. One need not give very much weight to any of their present conclusions. (Watson, 1924, p. 79) 

Conclusion

Antiracism did not revive during the interwar years because of new data. Watson's shift to radical environmentalism took place a half-decade after his departure from academia. It was as an advertising executive, and as a crusader against the 1924 Immigration Act, that he entered the "environmentalist" phase of his life. This phase, though poor in actual research, was rich in countless newspaper and magazine articles that would spread his behaviorist gospel to a mass audience.

The same could be said for Franz Boas. He, too, made his shift to radical antiracism when he was already semi-retired and well into his 70s. Although this phase of his life produced very little research, it saw the publication of many books and articles for the general public. As with Watson, the influence of external political events was decisive, specifically the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s.

In both cases, biographers have tried to explain this ideological shift by projecting it backward in time to earlier research. Boas' antiracism is often ascribed to an early study that purported to show differences in cranial form between European immigrants and their children (Boas, 1912). Yet Boas himself was reluctant to draw any conclusions at the time, merely saying we should "await further evidence before committing ourselves to theories that cannot be proven." Later reanalysis found no change in skull shape once age had been taken into account (Fergus, 2003). More to the point, Boas continued over the next two decades to cite differences in skull size as evidence for black-white differences in mental makeup (Frost, 2015).

Watson's radical environmentalism has likewise been explained by his Little Albert Experiment in 1920, an attempt to condition a fear response in an 11-month-old child. Aside from the small sample size (one child) and the lack of any replication, it is difficult to see how this finding could justify his later sweeping pronouncements on environmentalism. There were admittedly other experiments, but they came to an abrupt end with his dismissal from Johns Hopkins, and little is known about their long-term effects:

Watson tested his theories on how to condition children to express fear, love, or rage—emotions Watson conjectured were the basic elements of human nature. Among other techniques, he dropped (and caught) infants to generate fear and suggested that stimulation of the genital area would create feelings of love. In another chilling project, Watson boasted to Goodnow in summer 1920 that the National Research Council had approved a children's hospital he proposed that would include rooms for his infant psychology experiments. He planned to spend weekends working at the "Washington infant laboratory." (Simpson,2000) 

Watson did apply behaviorism to the upbringing of his own children. The results were disappointing. His first marriage produced a daughter who made multiple suicide attempts and a son who sponged off his father. His second marriage produced two sons, one of whom committed suicide (Anon, 2005). His granddaughter similarly suffered from her behaviorist upbringing and denounced it in her memoir Breaking the Silence. Towards the end of his life Watson regretted much of his child-rearing advice (Simpson, 2000).

References 

Anon (2005). The long dark night of behaviorism, Psych 101 Revisited, September 6

http://robothink.blogspot.ca/2005/09/long-dark-night-of-behaviorism.html

Boas, F. (1912). Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, American Anthropologist, 14, 530-562. 

Fergus, C. (2003). Boas, Bones, and Race, May 4, Penn State News

http://news.psu.edu/story/140739/2003/05/01/research/boas-bones-and-race 

Frost, P. (2015). More on the younger Franz Boas, Evo and Proud, April 18

http://www.evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2015/04/more-on-younger-franz-boas.html 

Rakos, R.F. (2013). John B. Watson's 1913 "Behaviorist Manifesto: Setting the stage for behaviorism's social action legacy, Revista Mexicana de analisis de la conducta, 39(2)

http://rmac-mx.org/john-b-watsons-1913-behaviorist-manifestosetting-the-stage-for-behaviorisms-social-action-legacy/  

 

Simpson, J.C. (2000). It's All in the Upbringing, John Hopkins Magazine, April

http://pages.jh.edu/~jhumag/0400web/35.html 

Watson, J.B. (1919). Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist,

http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2009-03123-000/  

Watson, J. B. (1924). Behaviorism. New York: People's Institute.

http://books.google.ca/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=PhnCSSy0UWQC&oi=fnd&pg=PR10&dq=behaviorism+watson&ots=tW26oNvzjs&sig=YtDpYTYq3hE80QHJfo1Q4ebsuPI#v=onepage&q=behaviorism%20watson&f=false

More on the younger Franz Boas

As a professor at Columbia, Franz Boas encountered the elite liberal culture of the American Northeast, one example being Mary White Ovington, a founder of the NAACP (Wikicommons)

Antiracism has roots that go back to early Christianity and the assimilationist Roman and Hellenistic empires. In its modern form, however, it is a much more recent development, particularly in its special focus on relations between whites and blacks and its emphasis on discrimination as the cause of any mental or behavioral differences.

Modern antiracism began in the early 1800s as a radical outgrowth of abolitionism, reaching high levels of popular support in the mid-1800s, particularly in the American Northeast, and then falling into decline due to growing interest in Social Darwinism and increasing disillusionment with the aftermath of the Civil War. By the 1920s, it really held sway only in the Northeast, and even there it was losing ground.

This situation changed dramatically in the 1930s. Antiracism revived and entered a period of growth that would eventually go global. The anthropologist Franz Boas played a key role through his own work and indirectly through the work of his two protégés: Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.

Yet this was the old Boas, a man already in his seventies. The younger Boas had thought differently, as seen in an 1894 speech he gave on "Human Faculty as Determined by Race":

We find that the face of the negro as compared to the skull is larger than that of the American [Indian], whose face is in turn larger than that of the white. The lower portion of the face assumes larger dimensions. The alveolar arch is pushed forward and thus gains an appearance which reminds us of the higher apes. There is no denying that this feature is a most constant character of the black races and that it represents a type slightly nearer the animal than the European type. [...] We find here at least a few indications which tend to show that the white race differs more from the higher apes than the negro. But does this anatomical difference prove that their mental capacity is lower than that of the white? The probability that this may be the case is suggested by the anatomical facts, but they by themselves are no proof that such is the case. (Boas, 1974, p. 230)

It does not seem probable that the minds of races which show variations in their anatomical structure should act in exactly the same manner. Differences of structure must be accompanied by differences of function, physiological as well as psychological; and, as we found clear evidence of difference in structure between the races, so we must anticipate that differences in mental characteristics will be found. (Boas, 1974, p. 239)

We have shown that the anatomical evidence is such, that we may expect to find the races not equally gifted. While we have no right to consider one more ape-like than the other, the differences are such that some have probably greater mental vigor than others. The variations are, however, such that we may expect many individuals of all races to be equally gifted, while the number of men and women of higher ability will differ. (Boas, 1974, p. 242)

Boas returned to this topic in a 1908 speech on "Race Problems in America":

I do not believe that the negro is, in his physical and mental make-up, the same as the European. The anatomical differences are so great that corresponding mental differences are plausible. There may exist differences in character and in the direction of specific aptitudes. There is, however, no proof whatever that these differences signify any appreciable degree of inferiority of the negro, notwithstanding the slightly inferior size, and perhaps lesser complexity of structure, of his brain; for these racial differences are much less than the range of variation found in either race considered by itself. (Boas, 1974, pp. 328-329)

How did his views on race evolve over the next twenty years? This evolution is described by Williams (1996), who sees his views beginning to change at the turn of the century. After getting tenure at Columbia University in 1899, he became immersed in the elite liberal culture of the American northeast and began to express his views on race accordingly. The onset of this change is visible in 1905, when he penned an article for the first issue of The Crisis, the organ of the NAACP: “The Negro and the Demands of Modern Life.” While pointing out that the average negro brain was "smaller than that of other races" and that it was "plausible that certain differences of form of brain exist," he cautioned:

We must remember that individually the correlation [...] is often overshadowed by other causes, and that we find a considerable number of great men with slight brain weight. [...] We may, therefore, expect less average ability and also, on account of probable anatomical differences, somewhat different mental tendencies. (Williams, 1996, p. 17)

The same year, he wrote to a colleague, stressing "the desirability of collecting more definite information in relation to certain traits of the Negro race that seem of fundamental importance in determining the policy to be pursued towards that race" (Williams, 1996, p. 18). In 1906, he sought funding for such a project with two specific goals:

(1) Is there an earlier arrest of mental and physical development in the Negro child, as compared with the white child? And, if so, is this arrest due to social causes or to anatomical and physiological conditions?

(2) What is the position of the mulatto child and of the adult mulatto in relation to the two races? Is he an intermediate type, or is there a tendency of reversion towards either race? So that particularly gifted mulattoes have to be considered as reversals of the white race. The question of the physical vigor of the mulatto could be taken up at the same time. (Williams, 1996, p. 19)

His tone was less even-handed in a private letter, written the same year:

You may be aware that in my opinion the assumption seems justifiable that on the average the mental capacity of the negro may be a little less than that of the white, but that the capacities of the bulk of both races are on the same level. (Williams, 1996, p. 19)

In 1911, Boas published the first edition of The Mind of Primitive Man. It recycled most of his previous writings on race, while emphasizing that race differences in mental makeup were statistical and showed considerable overlap. In 1915, he continued in this direction when he wrote a preface to Half A Man by Mary White Ovington, one of the founders of the NAACP:

Many students of anthropology recognize that no proof can be given of any material inferiority of the Negro race; that without doubt the bulk of the individuals composing the race are equal in mental aptitude to the bulk of our own people; that, although their hereditary aptitude may lie in slightly different directions, it is very improbable that the majority of individuals composing the white race should possess greater ability than the Negro race. (Williams, 1996, pp. 22-23)

Nonetheless, one finds little change from his earlier writings in his 1928 work Anthropology and Modern Life:

[...] the distribution of individuals and of family lines in the various races differs. When we select among the Europeans a group with large brains, their frequency will be relatively high, while among the Negroes the frequency of occurrence of the corresponding group will be low. If, for instance, there are 50 percent of a European population who have a brain weight of more than, let us say 1,500 grams, there may be only 20 percent of Negroes of the same class. Therefore, 30 percent of the large-brained Europeans cannot be matched by any corresponding group of Negroes. (Williams, 1996, p. 35)

Conclusion

From 1900 to 1930, Boas seemed to become increasingly liberal in his views on race, but this trend was hesitant at best and reflected, at least in part, a change in the audience he was addressing. As a professor at Columbia, he was dealing with a regional WASP culture that still preserved the radical abolitionism of the previous century. A good example was Mary White Ovington, whose Unitarian parents had been involved in the anti-slavery movement and who in 1910 helped found the NAACP. Boas was also dealing with the city's growing African American community and, through Ovington's contacts, wrote articles for the NAACP. Finally, he was also dealing with the growing Jewish community, who identified with antiracism partly out of self-interest and partly out of a desire to assimilate into northeastern WASP culture.

Boas didn't really change his mind on race until the 1930s. The cause is not hard to pinpoint. When he died in 1942, an obituary mentioned his alarm over the threat of Nazism:

Dr. Boas, who had studied and written widely in all fields of anthropology devoted most of his researches during the past few years to the study of the "race question," especially so after the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Discussing his efforts to disprove what he called "this Nordic nonsense," Prof. Boas said upon his retirement from teaching in 1936 that "with the present condition of the world, I consider the race question a most important one. I will try to clean up some of the nonsense that is being spread about race those days. I think the question is particularly important for this country, too; as here also people are going crazy." (JTA, 1942)

Hitler's rise to power created a sense of urgency among many academics, both Jewish and non-Jewish, thereby convincing fence-sitters like Franz Boas to put aside their doubts and take a more aggressive stand on race. Thus began the war on racism, which foreshadowed the coming world conflict.

References

Boas, F. (1974). A Franz Boas Reader. The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911, G.W. Stocking Jr. (ed.), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Frost, P. (2014). The Franz Boas you never knew, Evo and Proud, July 13  http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/07/the-franz-boas-you-never-knew.html

JTA (1942). Dr. Franz Boas, Debunker of Nazi Racial Theories, Dies in New York, December 23  http://www.jta.org/1942/12/23/archive/dr-franz-boas-debunker-of-nazi-racial-theories-dies-in-new-york

Williams Jr., V.J. (1996). Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries, University Press of Kentucky.  https://books.google.ca/books?id=MKnIOfHNxXMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Rethinking+race+franz+boas&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=lTkcVcLqLs-OyATM-IGoCQ&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Rethinking%20race%20franz%20boas&f=false

Sometimes the consensus is phony

Migrants arriving on the island of Lampedusa (Wikicommons). The NATO-led invasion of Libya has opened a huge breach in Europe's defences.

 

A synthesis has been forming in the field of human biodiversity. It may be summarized as follows: 

1. Human evolution did not end in the Pleistocene or even slow down. In fact, it speeded up with the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, when the pace of genetic change rose over a hundred-fold. Humans were no longer adapting to relatively static natural environments but rather to faster-changing cultural environments of their own making. Our ancestors thus directed their own evolution. They created new ways of life, which in turn influenced who would survive and who wouldn't.

2. When life or death depends on your ability to follow a certain way of life, you are necessarily being selected for certain heritable characteristics. Some of these are dietary—an ability to digest milk or certain foods. Others, however, are mental and behavioral, things like aptitudes, personality type, and behavioral predispositions. This is because a way of life involves thinking and behaving in specific ways. Keep in mind, too, that most mental and behavioral traits have moderate to high heritability.

3. This gene-culture co-evolution began when humans had already spread over the whole world, from the equator to the arctic. So it followed trajectories that differed from one geographic population to another. Even when these populations had to adapt to similar ways of life, they may have done so differently, thus opening up (or closing off) different possibilities for further gene-culture co-evolution. Therefore, on theoretical grounds alone, human populations should differ in the genetic adaptations they have acquired. The differences should generally be small and statistical, being noticeable only when one compares large numbers of individuals. Nonetheless, even small differences, when added up over many individuals and many generations, can greatly influence the way a society grows and develops.

4. Humans have thus altered their environment via culture, and this man-made environment has altered humans via natural selection. This is probably the farthest we can go in formulating a unified theory of human biodiversity. For Gregory Clark, the key factor was the rise of settled, pacified societies, where people could get ahead through work and trade, rather than through violence and plunder. For Henry Harpending and Greg Cochrane, it was the advent of agriculture and, later, civilization. For J. Philippe Rushton and Ed Miller, it was the entry of humans into cold northern environments, which increased selection for more parental investment, slower life history, and higher cognitive performance. Each of these authors has identified part of the big picture, but the picture itself is too big to reduce to a single factor.

5. Antiracist scholars have argued against the significance of human biodiversity, but their arguments typically reflect a lack of evolutionary thinking. Yes, human populations are open to gene flow and are thus not sharply defined (if they were, they would be species). It doesn't follow, however, that the only legitimate objects of study are sharply defined ones. Few things in this world would pass that test.

Yes, genes vary much more within human populations than between them, but these two kinds of genetic variation are not comparable. A population boundary typically coincides with a geographic or ecological barrier, such as a change from one vegetation zone to another or, in humans, a change from one way of life to another. It thus separates not only different populations but also differing pressures of natural selection. This is why genetic variation within a population differs qualitatively from genetic variation between populations. The first kind cannot be ironed out by similar selection pressures and thus tends to involve genes of little or no selective value. The second kind occurs across population boundaries, which tend to separate different ecosystems, different vegetation zones, different ways of life ... and different selection pressures. So the genes matter a lot more.

This isn't just theory. We see the same genetic overlap between many sibling species that are nonetheless distinct anatomically and behaviorally. Because such species have arisen over a relatively short span of time, like human populations, they have been made different primarily by natural selection, so the genetic differences between them are more likely to have adaptive, functional consequences ... as opposed to "junk variability" that slowly accumulates over time.

Why is the above so controversial?

The above synthesis should not be controversial. Yet it is. In fact, it scarcely resembles acceptable thinking within academia and even less so within society at large. There are two main reasons.

The war on racism 

In the debate over nature versus nurture, the weight of opinion shifted toward the latter during the 20th century. This shift began during the mid-1910s and was initially a reaction against the extreme claims being made for genetic determinism. In reading the literature of the time, one is struck by the restraint of early proponents of environmental determinism, especially when they argue against race differences in mental makeup. An example appears in The Clash of Colour (1925), whose author condemned America's Jim Crow laws and the hypocrisy of proclaiming the rights of Europeans to self-determination while ignoring those of Africans and Asians. Nonetheless, like the young Franz Boas, he was reluctant to deny the existence of mental differences:

I would submit the principle that, although differences of racial mental qualities are relatively small, so small as to be indistinguishable with certainty in individuals, they are yet of great importance for the life of nations, because they exert throughout many generations a constant bias upon the development of their culture and their institutions. (Mathews, 1925, p. 151)

That was enlightened thinking in the 1920s. The early 1930s brought a radical turn with Hitler's arrival to power and a growing sense of urgency that led many Jewish and non-Jewish scholars to declare war on "racism." The word itself was initially a synonym for Nazism, and even today Nazi Germany still holds a central place in antiracist discourse.

Why didn't the war on racism end when the Second World War ended? For one thing, many people, feared a third global conflict in which anti-Semitism would play a dominant role. For another, antiracism took on a life of its own during the Cold War, when the two superpowers were vying for influence over the emerging countries of Asia and Africa.

Globalism

The end of the Cold War might have brought an end to the war on racism, or at least a winding down, had it not replaced socialism with an even more radical project: globalism. This is the hallmark of "late capitalism," a stage of historical development when the elites no longer feel restrained by national identity and are thus freer to enrich themselves at their host society's expense, mainly by outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries and by insourcing low-wage labor for jobs that cannot be relocated, such as those in construction and services. That's globalism in a nutshell.

This two-way movement redistributes wealth from owners of labor to owners of capital. Businesses get not only a cheaper workforce but also weaker labor and environmental standards. To stay competitive, workers in high-wage countries have to accept lower pay and a return to working conditions of another age. The top 10% are thus pulling farther and farther ahead of everyone else throughout the developed world. They're getting richer ... not by making a better product but by making the same product with cheaper and less troublesome inputs of labor. This is not a win-win situation, and the potential for revolutionary unrest is high.

To stave off unrest, economic systems require legitimacy, and legitimacy is made possible by ideology: a vision of a better future; how we can get there from here; and why we're not getting there despite the best efforts. Economic systems don't create ideology, but they do create conditions that favor some ideologies over others. With the collapse of the old left in the late 1980s, and the rise of market globalization, antiracism found a new purpose ... as a source of legitimacy for the globalist project.

I saw this up close in an antiracist organization during the mid to late 1980s. Truth be told, we mostly did things like marching in the May Day parade, agitating for a higher minimum wage, denouncing the U.S. intervention in Panama, organizing talks about Salvador Allende and what went wrong in Chile ... you get the drift. Antiracism was subservient to the political left. This was not a natural state of affairs, since the antiracist movement—like the Left in general—is a coalition of ethnic/religious factions that prefer to pursue their own narrow interests. This weakness was known to the political right, many of whom tried to exploit it by supporting Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan and elsewhere and black nationalists in Africa, Haiti, and the U.S. Yes, politics makes strange bedfellows.

With the onset of the 1990s, no one seemed to believe in socialism anymore and we wanted to tap into corporate sources of funding. So we reoriented. Leftist rhetoric was out and slick marketing in. Our educational materials looked glossier but now featured crude "Archie Bunker" caricatures of working people, and the language seemed increasingly anti-white. I remember feeling upset, even angry. So I left.

Looking back, I realize things had to happen that way. With the disintegration of the old socialist left, antiracists were freer to follow their natural inclinations, first by replacing class politics with identity politics, and second by making common cause with the political right, especially for the project of creating a globalized economy. Antiracism became a means to a new end.

This is the context that now frames the war on racism. For people in a position to influence public policy, antiracism is not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. It makes the difference between a sluggish return on investment of only 2 to 3% (which is typical in a mature economy) and a much higher one.

What to do?

Normally, I would advise caution. People need time to change their minds, especially on a topic as emotional as this one. When tempers flare, it's usually better to let the matter drop and return later. That's not cowardice; it's just a recognition of human limitations. Also, the other side may prove to be right. So, in a normal world, debate should run its course, and the policy implications discussed only when almost everyone has been convinced one way or the other.

Unfortunately, our world is far from normal. A lot of money is being spent to push a phony political consensus against any controls on immigration. This isn't being done in the dark by a few conspirators. It's being done in the full light of day by all kinds of people: agribusiness, Tyson Foods, Mark Zuckerberg, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and small-time operations ranging from landscapers to fast-food joints. They all want cheaper labor because they're competing against others who likewise want cheaper labor. It's that simple ... and stupid.

This phony consensus is also being pushed at a time when the demographic cauldron of the Third World is boiling over. This is particularly so in sub-Saharan Africa, where the decline in fertility has stalled and actually reversed in some countries. The resulting population overflow is now following the path of least resistance—northward, especially with the chaos due to the NATO-led invasion of Libya. In the current context, immigration controls should be strengthened, and yet there is lobbying to make them even weaker. The idiocy is beyond belief.

For these reasons, we cannot wait until even the most hardboiled skeptics are convinced. We must act now to bring anti-globalist parties to power: the UKIP in Britain, the Front national in France, the Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and the Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden. How, you may ask? It's not too complicated. Just go into the voting booth and vote. You don't even have to talk about your dirty deed afterwards. 

It looks like such parties will emerge in Canada and the United States only when people have seen what can be done in Europe. Until then, the tail must wag the dog. We in North America can nonetheless prepare the way by learning to speak up and stand up, and by recognizing that the "Right" is just as problematic as the "Left."

 

References

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford. 

Clark, G. (2009a). The indicted and the wealthy: surnames, reproductive success, genetic selection and social class in pre-industrial England,

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Farewell%20to%20Alms/Clark%20-Surnames.pdf 

Clark, G. (2009b). The domestication of Man: The social implications of Darwin, ArtefaCTos, 2(1), 64-80.

http://campus.usal.es/~revistas_trabajo/index.php/artefactos/article/viewFile/5427/5465 

Clark, G. (2010). Regression to mediocrity? Surnames and social mobility in England, 1200-2009

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Ruling%20Class%20-%20EJS%20version.pdf

Cochran, G. and H. Harpending. (2010). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, New York: Basic Books. 

Frost, P. (2011a). Human nature or human natures? Futures, 43, 740-748.

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/251725125_Human_nature_or_human_natures/file/504635223eaf8196f0.pdf  

Frost, P. (2011b). Rethinking intelligence and human geographic variation, Evo and Proud, February 11

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2011/02/rethinking-intelligence-and-human.html 

Harpending, H., and G. Cochran. (2002). In our genes, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., 99, 10-12.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC117504/  

Hawks, J., E.T. Wang, G.M. Cochran, H.C. Harpending, and R.K. Moyzis. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., 104, 20753-20758.

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/5761823_Recent_acceleration_of_human_adaptive_evolution/file/9c9605240c4bb57b55.pdf

Mathews, B. (1925). The Clash of Colour. A Study in the Problem of Race, London: Edinburgh House Press. 

Miller, E. (1994). Paternal provisioning versus mate seeking in human populations, Personality and Individual Differences, 17, 227-255.

http://www.prometheism.net/paternal/  

Rushton, J. P. (2000). Race, Evolution, and Behavior, 3rd ed., Charles Darwin Research Institute.

http://lazypawn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Race_Evolution_Behavior.pdf

The evolution of antiracism

Collection box for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, circa 1850 (Wikicommons).

 

Throughout the world, kinship used to define the limits of morality. The less related you were to someone, the less moral you had to be with him or her. We see this in the Ten Commandments. The phrase "against thy neighbor" qualifies the commandment against bearing false witness and, implicitly, the preceding ones against killing, adultery, and stealing. For the modern reader, "thy neighbor" is helpfully explained as meaning "the children of thy people" (Leviticus 19:18).

In some cases, this kin-based morality gradually ceased to apply the farther away one went from home and from immediate kith and kin. Usually, however, the limits of one's moral community coincided with some kind of boundary: a geographic barrier, a political border, and/or an ethnic frontier. Beyond lay the world of "strangers."

Toward a universal morality

The first efforts to universalize morality—to create a single moral system that could apply to everyone—"arose simultaneously around 500 BCE in various parts of the world, from China in the Far East to Southern Italy in the West" (Assmann and Conrad, 2010, p. 121). These efforts were initially driven by the need to form alliances between different peoples:

Alliance - the formation of treaties - proved the most important instrument of internationalism. Forming an alliance required mutual recognition of the deities which served as patrons. The treaties which these empires formed with each other and with their vassals had to be sealed by solemn oaths invoking the gods of both parties. The list of these gods conventionally closes the treaty [...]. They had to be equal in their function and rank. Intercultural theology became a concern of international law. (Assmann and Conrad, 2010, p. 125) 

As ancient empires expanded and absorbed different peoples, this intercultural theology became useful for internal peace, notably with the Hellenistic empires that arose in the wake of Alexander the Great's conquests. By affirming that different religions are interchangeable, it became possible to create a common civic culture for diverse peoples:

Hellenization had two faces. On the one hand, it referred to the diffusion of Greek language, ideas and customs all over the Ancient World; on the other hand, it appeared to be more of a construction of a 'common culture', suggesting a similar change in Greece as in the other cultures. Flavius Josephus did not speak of 'Greek' but of 'common culture', ho koinos bios, as the goal of Jewish assimilation or reform in the Hellenistic age. (Assmann and Conrad, 2010, p.  127) 

One result would be the emergence of a universal religion. We like to associate this development with the teachings of Jesus, but a kind of proto-Christianity was already emerging near the end of the pre-Christian era.  At that time, many Jews were adapting their belief in one God to the universal worldview of Hellenistic culture:

Thus, while biblical universalism was founded on a notion of the mission of Israel to save all of humanity and bring them to the true worship of the only God, Hellenistic notions of universalism involved the assumption that all the gods were really different names for one God. (Boyarin, 1994, chap. 3). 

The two belief-systems merged among the increasingly Hellenized Jews of the eastern Mediterranean, thus setting the stage for Jesus and making it easier for his movement to succeed.

The Christian impulse

This new religion became a vehicle not only for moral universalism but also for belief in human equality. For if morality is universal, all humans must have the same capacity to follow its rules. In Christ, asserted Paul, there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female (Galatians 3:28).

While Christianity would steer people in the direction of universalism, there were limits to how far it could go. Theologians sometimes spoke of the need to set lower aims for average people and higher aims for saintly men and women. We see this realism in Augustine's position on prostitution: "If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust" (De Ordine ii, 4). The same could be said for the Church's position on war, slavery, prejudice, and other manifestations of human inequality. These were the realities of an imperfect world. 

Such imperfections nonetheless became harder to accept over the following centuries. First, there was "mission creep." Once the Church had established certain ideals, there was continual pressure to bring human behavior into line with them. Second, the geocenter of the Church was shifting away from the eastern Mediterranean, where the absolute morality of Christianity had been constrained by the relative morality of kinship. Farther north and west, beyond the Hajnal Line, kinship ties were weaker and people more receptive to universal principles. There was thus a "fruitful encounter" between the Christian faith and these northwest Europeans who were more willing to internalize such principles and apply them more thoroughly (Frost, 2014a). 

Within this region, Catholicism would radicalize to the point of splitting away and becoming Protestantism. Here, too, Christian ideals would increasingly be taken to their logical conclusion.

The Abolitionist movement

Abolitionism began in the 17th century among English Quakers as a movement to abolish the slave trade. Over time, it grew more radical, seeking not only to free black slaves but also to extirpate racial and ethnic prejudice. Although "antiracism" did not yet exist as a word, its form and substance were already recognizable by the early 19th century. This was particularly so in the American northeast, where radical abolitionists denounced not only slavery but also fellow abolitionists who wanted to settle freed slaves in Africa. "In the 1830s, for the first time in American history an articulate and significant minority of Americans embraced racial equality as both a concept and a commitment" (Goodman, 1998, p. 1). This militant minority wanted more than simply an end to slavery: 

Believing that racial prejudice underpinned slavery, abolitionists committed themselves not just to emancipation [...] "Our prejudice against the blacks is founded in sheer pride; and it originates in the circumstance that people of their color, only, are universally allowed to be slaves," Child argued. "We made slavery, and slavery makes the prejudice." Color phobia, abolitionists contended, is irrational, wicked, preposterous, and unmanly. It is contrary to natural rights and Christian teaching, which recognizes no distinctions based on color. Race prejudice, Elizur Wright Jr. exploded, is "a narrow, bitter, selfish, swinish absurdity." (Goodman, 1998, p.58)

Decline ... and resurgence

That first wave of antiracism subsided in the late 19th century, partly because of the rise of Social Darwinism and partly because of disillusionment with the Civil War's aftermath. Radical abolitionists had long set their sights on ending slavery and crushing the American South, yet achievement of both goals failed to bring the final goal of human equality any closer. In the face of growing self-doubt, they lacked the ideological stamina to keep the faith and push forward, come what may. The movement thus fell into decline, remaining dominant only in the American northeast.

This first wave did not die, however. It was resuscitated in the early 1930s and would give rise to a much more dynamic second wave. The rise of Nazism convinced many Jewish intellectuals, notably the anthropologist Franz Boas, of the need to fight "racism" in all its forms, this word being initially a synonym for Nazism (Frost, 2014b). The war on racism would outlive the defeat of Nazi Germany, as a result of continuing fears of anti-Semitism in the postwar era. Moreover, it had now taken on a life of its own, much like its 19th-century predecessor. 

Today, some eighty years later, that war is still being fought. What began as a reaction to Nazism has become a permanent cultural revolution.

References 

Assmann, A., and S. Conrad. (2010). Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, New York

http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/1831/1/Assmann_Globalization_2010.pdf  

Boyarin, D. (1994). A Radical Jew. Paul and the Politics of Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press.

http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft7w10086w;brand=ucpress  

Frost, P. (2014a). A fruitful encounter, Evo and Proud, September 26

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/09/a-fruitful-encounter.html  

Frost, P. (2014b). From Nazi Germany to Middletown: ratcheting up the war on racism, Evo and Proud, July 19

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/07/from-nazi-germany-to-middletown.html  

Goodman, P. (1998). Of One Blood. Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality, Berkeley: University of California Press.

http://books.google.ca/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=Zy47hp0QjFQC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&ots=f0ONCiUl-T&sig=TDfjRtlGuGRd-kxwZ8fXlL8OpCU#v=onepage&q&f=false