Race Unmasked, by Michael Yudell. Foreword by J. Craig Venter (preface)

Biology and Race i n t h e 2 0 t h C e n t u ry

Michael Yudell F o r e wo r d b y J. Cr a i g V e n t e r

Introduction

R

ace, while drawn from the visual cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, identifiable present, and uncertain future.

The concept of race has been at the center of both triumphs and tragedies in American history and has had an unmistakable impact on the human experience. It is a term used both casually and scientifically; a way people and groups choose to describe themselves and their ancestors; a way scientists and societies have chosen to describe and interpret the complexity that is human diversity and difference; and a way that doctors and public health officials make decisions about our health, both individually and collectively. It can be a source of pride, self-understanding, and resistance. Also of oppression and carnage. It is indeed an idea that has shaped the dreams and lives of generations.

This book tells the history of the formulation and preservation of the race concept and explores the role that science, particularly genetics and related biological disciplines, played in the making of America’s racial calculus over the course of the twentieth century. In so doing, it shows where commonly held beliefs about the scientific nature of racial differences come from and examines the origins of the modern idea of race.

The book also examines how ideas about race developed into a biological concept during the twentieth century, and how that concept has persisted in various incarnations as accepted scientific fact into the twenty-first.

This is not, however, a story of the triumph of rational science over ignorance and racism. Instead, this book considers how this history shaped a contemporary paradox in thinking about the biological race concept; that is, that race can be understood to be both a critical methodological

2 Introduction

tool for biologists to make sense of human genetic diversity and, at the same time, widely believed not to be a particularly accurate marker for measuring that diversity.

The race concept in biology can be traced to eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury debates about slavery, colonialism, and the nature of citizenship, which were driven by the sciences of polygeny, phrenology, and craniometry. But its early twentieth-century manifestation, in the work of those considered the finest scientists of the time—primarily eugenicists and geneticists—marked an important change. Whereas nineteenth-century race concepts were rooted in theories of racial distinctiveness based on measurable and observable physical traits such as cranial capacity and skin color, in the early decades of the twentieth century the biological sciences conceived of race as a reflection of unseen differences attributed to the then recently discovered factors of heredity, also known as genes. If polygeny, social Darwinism, and craniometry were the scientific backbones of a nineteenth-century understanding of race, then in the twentieth century eugenics and genetics played that same role, providing the formative language of modern racism. Hence, beliefs about racial differences became rooted primarily in biology rather than in social or economic ideologies.

Over the twentieth century, the race concept had various incarnations in biology. It was modified and abandoned, embraced and repudiated by scientists. Yet it survives into the twenty-first century, persisting largely as a biological concept in both science and society. This book shows how scientists, even with the best intentions of modernizing or modifying the concept to keep with the scientific practices of the time, wound up reinforcing it and helping to ensure its survival.

Race has been called man’s most dangerous myth, a superstition, and, more recently, a social construction.1 Race concepts are rooted in the belief that the people of the world can be organized into biologically distinct groups, each with their own discrete physical, social, and intellectual characteristics. Changes to and variations in race concepts are themselves products of a range of variables, including time, place, geography, politics, science, and economics. As much as scientists once thought that race was a reflection of physical or biological differences, today social scientists, with help from colleagues in the natural sciences, have shown that the once seemingly objective race concept is in fact historically contingent

Introduction 3

and has had an unmistakable impact on the American story. Two interwoven histories—the introduction of and consequent use of the term “race” in the study and explication of human difference and the general use of the race concept—inform the evolution of the race concept in twentiethcentury biological thought.

The historian Bruce Dain reminds us, “Race itself was a monster if ever Americans conceived one, but a monster hidden in their minds, not, as many of them came to think in the reality of a nature behind their appearances.” And, as Dain is quick to point out, “that reality was obscure, shifting, and complex.”2 But one constant in that reality is that since the late eighteenth century science has played a critical role in the formulation of racial views in the United States, and racists and racial theorists have often turned to science to both justify their beliefs and to provide a scientific vocabulary for explaining human difference. In the twentieth century, it was primarily the discipline of genetics from which racial scientists freely exploited both language and prestige. This legacy can be explained largely by the history of genetics itself, which at its founding was inseparable from eugenic theories that were mired in examining hereditary traits both within and between human races.3 The fields of genetics and eugenics would begin to diverge as early as the second decade of the twentieth century as geneticists in the United States sought to develop a more rigorous and less politically intent field. But despite this growing split between the two disciplines, the imprint of eugenical thinking on genetics remained strong, as did the field’s reliance upon genetics. Even today, the typological thought characteristic of eugenicists at the turn of the twentieth century—that is, the way eugenicists correlated both skin color and nationality with a wide array of physical, behavioral, and intellectual traits—continues to be present in beliefs about human difference.

Although a genetic approach was novel to racial scientific thought in the early twentieth century, race thinking about human difference in both science and society was definitely not. The roots of race thinking had been growing in Western thought for centuries. To be sure, American ideas about race difference have been constructed in a variety of ways from numerous corners of social and scientific life, including legal, anthropological, cultural, and sociological conceptions of racial difference. There are, in fact, many race concepts. So when this book refers to the race

4 Introduction

concept, as it often does simply for the purpose of literary parsimony, I recognize that there are others and that the concept described in this book has existed on shifting terrain, even within the nomenclature of the biological sciences. Ultimately, as this book argues, in the twenty-first century, understanding the way race was constructed within the biological sciences, particularly within genetics and evolutionary biology, is essential to understanding its broader meanings.

In many ways, this book documents the process of “racecraft,” a term recently coined by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields in their eponymously named book—Racecraft—meant to convey the “mental terrain” and “pervasive belief ” from where racism and our stubborn belief in race emanate.4 In other words, racecraft reflects both how these ideas are sewn into our individual and collective identities and how deeply embedded in those identities are the self-reflexive assumptions that these ideas are true. Racecraft is a way of seeing, understanding, and reflecting upon our world, even when there is no rational basis for a certain worldview. The history of the race concept in American scientific thought reflects just this: the persistence of long-standing social conceptions of the meaning of difference in the thinking, theorizing, and actions of America’s scientific minds. Fields and Fields’s description of racecraft implicitly recognizes its permeation into scientific thought, which they explain by stating, “The term highlights the ability of pre- or non-scientific modes of thought to highjack the minds of the scientifically literate.”5 Both the eugenicists and racists who sought to utilize the race concept to buttress a discriminatory status quo and the liberal scientists who fought to modernize the concept were equally involved in the perpetuation of racecraft.

Histories of the race concept in American scientific thought have generally told the story of two conflicting and competing ideologies seeking to define the meaning of race within the biological sciences. On one side of this morality tale are racists, working both in and outside of scientific fields to formulate ideas about the meanings of human diversity and to propagate them under the scientific guise of racial difference. While not necessarily self-avowed racists, their agenda and actions have supported white supremacy. From Thomas Jefferson’s musings on the subject in the late eighteenth century, in which he theorized that the difference between the races “is fixed in nature” and hypothesized that blacks were “originally

Introduction 5

a distinct race,” to Samuel Morton and the American School of Anthropology’s nineteenth-century theories about a racial hierarchy of intelligence and of separately created races (the theory of polygeny), to eugenics and the racialized theories of IQ over the course of the twentieth century, racists have sought to utilize science to further their causes.6 On the other side of this divide have been liberal-minded scientists and their allies who have battled the forces of racism through their scientific work and popular writings. Theirs is a story of the rise and fall of racial science and of the race concept itself. At the outset of the twentieth century scientific minds like W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas showed that the race concept was a social construction by illustrating how race was a much more fluid and complex phenomenon than had previously been thought, and that culture and economic circumstances played a more significant role in creating the disparities between racial groups that had been attributed to biological differences. At midcentury, anthropologists like Ashley Montagu and sociologists like Gunnar Myrdal fought against the race concept in their work. In 1950, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) issued its first statement on race, proclaiming, “For all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.”7 These scientists battled the racist and eugenic forces in scientific practice to push racial science to the margins and show that it was a social construction. In other words, a biological understanding of race has been constrained by the social context in which racial research has taken place.

This idea that there was a struggle between two fairly well-defined groups of scientists, that racial science rose pre–World War I and waned post–World War II, and that in this same time line race shifted from a concept rooted in typology to one rooted in population genetics does not hold up upon closer examination. This history, it turns out, is not so simple and not so hopeful. The notion that the race concept and racial science have somehow withered, or that the concept is being resurrected by genomics and the work of the Human Genome Project, is rooted in the post–World War II era liberal hope that by showing race to be a social construction, the seemingly intractable problem of racism could be overcome. The premise of a rise and fall is central to what the sociologist of science Jenny Reardon calls “the canonical narrative of the history

6 Introduction

of race and science.” It is a “dominant narrative,” as she calls it, one that “truncates history.”8 In his book reimagining the John F. Kennedy assassination, 11/22/63, Stephen King describes history as “obdurate”—a nearly immovable force that itself fights change. The same could be said of historiography, which is also obdurate. It changes, in many ways, more slowly than the history from which it seeks to extract truths and meanings. By truncating our understanding of the evolution of the race concept, the “canonical narrative” hides a richer and much more disturbing past—one that roots a modern race concept in eugenical thought, one that examines how the race concept in biology survived many challenges (from both within science and without) and was an animating force in science throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and one that considers how even those thought to be antiracist scientists helped preserve a concept they thought they were contesting.

Scholars have begun to contest this canonical narrative. Works by Jenny Reardon on the history of the Human Genome Diversity Project, Gregory Dorr on the relationship between eugenics and segregation in Virginia, and Lee Baker on the role that anthropologists have played in the reformulation of concepts of race all reframe how we think about this history.9 In this book I build on these works and others, arguing that the biological race concept, as we understand it today, originated with eugenic theories of difference and was re-created and integrated into modern biological thought by population geneticists and evolutionary biologists in the 1930s and 1940s during the evolutionary synthesis in biology (the union of population genetics, experimental genetics, and natural history that reshaped modern biology).

While important changes in the biological approach to race did occur as early as the 1930s, particularly as an increasing number of geneticists, anthropologists, and social scientists began moving away from typological and eugenic descriptions of human difference to view races through the lens of population genetics and evolutionary biology, the shift away from typology was not as complete and was much more complicated than the canonical narrative suggests. Contrary to so much of the literature on the race concept, the field’s shift on race was not simply the liberal triumph of science over ignorance. Instead, it was first a struggle to find

Introduction 7

meaning for the concept within taxonomic nomenclature and the evolutionary synthesis, and, second, a struggle to find alternative ways to explain human genetic diversity. And it was in this contradictory space that a growing group of scientists found themselves as they struggled to both find meaning for a race concept in science and fight against racial science and racism more generally.

Many, in fact, came to reject a eugenic and typological notion of fixed genetic differences between so-called racial groups and instead understood human races as dynamic populations distinguished by variations of the frequency of genes between them. By rooting the meaning of race in genetic variation it became more difficult (though still possible) to root race in eugenic conceptions of difference and to argue that one race or another had particular traits specifically associated with it, or that one individual was typical of a race. Furthermore, the four or five racial groups identified by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientists now varied depending upon the genes and traits examined by geneticists.

Theodosius Dobzhansky, the evolutionary biologist whose work between the 1930s and 1970s had a tremendous influence on the way that scientists thought about race, concluded that the number of human races was variable depending upon what traits were being examined. In fact, Dobzhansky believed the race concept in the context of population genetics and evolutionary biology was simply a tool for making genetic “diversity intelligible and manageable” in scientific study.10 In other words, while human differences are real, the way we choose to organize those differences is a methodological decision and not one that reflects an underlying evolutionary hierarchy.

This new approach was brought about by novel findings in genetics that demonstrated that genetic variation was much more common within species than once thought, and by the development of the evolutionary synthesis, which rejected eugenic notions of difference between and among species. Changes in the race concept were also influenced by a growing cadre of scientists who were generally more liberal on matters of race than their predecessors had been, as well as by a gradual liberalization on matters of race in post–World War II America. Indeed, as this book documents, this was a two-way street—the scientists involved in conceptualizing a race concept in biology were as much a product

8 Introduction

of the scientific culture in which they were trained as they were a part of the social milieu in which they lived their lives. Unfortunately, what was believed to be the methodological utility to evolutionary biologists and population geneticists of this new race concept would help reinforce confusion about the term, even within the field, and it would quickly be exploited and manipulated by racists from both within and outside the field. By the 1960s, Dobzhansky, whose work helped re-create race in the framework of population genetics and evolutionary biology, came to the conclusion that despite race’s utility as a tool for classification and systematization—“devices used to make diversity intelligible and manageable”— that investigation into human diversity had “floundered in confusion and misunderstanding.” He also came to believe that the scientific and social meanings of race were inseparable, and that “the problem that now faces the science of man is how to devise better methods for further observations that will give more meaningful results.”11 Racial science did not simply end with the decline of the eugenics movement in the 1930s and 1940s, which was brought down by advances in scientific thinking that recognized the fallacy of the eugenic proposition and by a worldwide reaction to Nazi eugenical horrors. Nor did it recede in the wake of statements on race and racism by UNESCO in the early 1950s—statements that were critical of the race concept and helped to shape thinking in this area among both natural and social scientists.

Nor did the psychologist Kenneth Clark’s studies illustrating the effects of segregation and white supremacy on African Americans, studies that figured prominently in the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, bring an end to racial science.12 Instead, racial science and the race concept have survived many intellectual and political challenges. The historian William Stanton once said of the race concept that “man was being fitted into a system of immutable law.”13 When biologists at midcentury reaffirmed the race concept in the context of modern genetics, they were, intentionally or not, preserving racist ideas in science for both scientific and extrascientific purposes.

A history of the race concept in biology would be incomplete without understanding the role that eugenics played in its development. To a reader well versed in the eugenic literature, many of the characters and issues raised in chapters 1 and 2 of this book will seem quite familiar.

Introduction 9

While it is true that a major objective of the eugenics movement was to keep the “unfit” from reproducing, it is also true that the movement and its architects helped develop a new language of difference and, therefore, of race in the twentieth century. This facet of eugenics has been largely overlooked in the historical literature. It would not be accurate, however, to suggest that eugenicists simply reflected the deeper racial anxieties and animosities of the nation in the early decades of the Jim Crow era. This book shows how, instead, eugenicists actually helped shape the way in which those animosities were incorporated into the scientific lexicon of the times.

A rereading of eugenic-era primary source materials reveals that incorporation and revises that history by showing how beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries eugenics focused intently on the black-white divide in American society and sought to explain that divide in eugenic terms. It also shows how the attention of eugenicists to what they believed to be fundamental differences between whites and blacks provided a foundation for rethinking the race concept during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Eugenicists, as this book shows, devoted considerable resources to the study of black-white differences from the beginning of the movement in the late nineteenth century. Yet historians have painted eugenics as largely incidental to the formulation of ideas of race in science, focusing instead on the history of eugenic institutions, on the relationship between eugenics and emerging conceptions of ethnicity among immigrant white groups, and on the impact of eugenic policies (in particular sterilization programs and immigration restrictions). These approaches overlook the links between eugenic thought and ideologies of race and racism and their impact on African American history.

Attention to the impact of racial science on African Americans during the twentieth century has focused heavily on two histories: the Tuskegee Experiments (Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male) and IQ studies. By telling these stories separately, historians have often missed a bigger picture—a narrative exploring how, beginning with eugenics, biology has been used to buttress and rationalize American’s changing view of African Americans, and that thinking in the natural sciences has influenced the continued evolution of racist ideology in the United States.

10 Introduction

It is also significant that before 1924 explanations of racial difference by eugenicists and geneticists, according to most historians, were focused primarily on differences among what we would now consider white ethnic groups. Eugenics was not just about preserving whiteness from ethnics but was also about the construction of scientifically justified color differences. In the wake of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 (also known as the Immigration Act of 1924), which severely restricted immigration into the United States (legislation urged and supported by eugenicists), the focus of many eugenicists and other racial scientists shifted toward examining black-white racial differences.14 An examination of the discussions and debates taking place at this time among and between eugenicists, geneticists, evolutionary and population biologists, and anthropologists reveals how academic thinking helped to formulate the science behind ideologies of race and racism.15 The race concept has had a marked impact on the practice of science and on the social understandings of human difference from eugenics to genomics. By examining the history of the biological race concept during the twentieth century, historians have borne witness to the ways in which the biological sciences have helped to shape thinking about human difference. The historian Charles Rosenberg reminds us that “science has lent American social thought a vocabulary and supply of images.”16 This book describes the role that scientific thought, particularly genetics, played in developing a language and methods used to measure the meaning of human difference in the form of race. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explains that the diffusion of scientific ideas and concepts into the general population took place by a process he calls “semantic deference”; “that is, with the increasing prestige of science, people became used to using words whose exact meanings they did not need to know, because their exact meanings were left to the relevant experts.”17 Through these processes, during the twentieth century biology and genetics became an arbiter of the meaning of the race concept.

An examination of the history of the biological race concept reveals that race is not what most people think it is. Ultimately, as this book illustrates, race is neither a static biological certainty nor a reflection of our genes. Instead, race is a historical and cultural phenomenon—an analysis of human biological difference mediated by the politics, culture, and

Introduction 11

economics of a given historical moment and by the individual or society in that moment. For America, the corrupting power of racial thought remains embedded in its social structures. We see it in disparities in health, in housing, and in employment and social opportunities.18 This work does not claim to expose the nature of these disparities or how to mitigate them; this work focuses instead on the ideas behind the race concept. But by examining the historical and intellectual bases for the race concept, we can, it is hoped, begin to understand its origin and develop news ways of thinking about the meanings of human diversity.

This book shows how the biological race concept came to be what it is today and why, because of this history, race continues generating controversy as a classificatory tool.

YUDELL

2016 A RT H U R J. V I S E LT E A R P R I Z E , A M E R I C A N P U B L I C H E A LT H A S S O C I AT I O N

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ace Unmasked examines the roots of the modern idea of race to explain commonly held beliefs about the scientific nature of racial differences and to determine why race continues to generate controversy as a tool of classification. Surveying the work of some of the twentieth century’s most notable scientists, Michael Yudell reveals how genetics and related biological disciplines formed and preserved ideas of race and, at times, racism. A gripping history of science and scientists, Race Unmasked throws the contours of our evolving understanding of human diversity into sharp relief.

“A challenging, well-researched work that clearly shows the interconnectedness of scientific and social thought.”

KIRKUS REVIEWS

“This impressive book [challenges] the standard narrative of race science’s postwar decline and fall. . . . Yudell follows in the footsteps of historians such as Richard Hofstadter and Charles E. Rosenberg—scholars who have uncovered the interdependence of biology and American social thought.”

J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N H I S TO RY

“A timely, readable, and engaging contribution to the growing literature on race and science.”

S O C I A L H I S TO RY O F M E D I C I N E

“A fascinating and perceptive study of ‘man’s most dangerous myth.’ This insightful book on race should be read widely by anyone concerned with the multiple uses, misuses, tangled history, and persistent confusions over this vexed and potent concept.”

RACE UNMASKED

L I B R A RY J O U R N A L (starred review)

B I O L O G Y A N D R A C E I N T H E 2 0 T H C E N T U RY

“A detailed history of the concept of race and its evolution throughout the twentieth century.”

K E I T H WA I L O O , Princeton University

BIOLOGY AND RACE I N T H E 2 0 T H C E N T U RY

M I C H A E L Y U D E L L is associate professor and chair of the Department of Community Health and Prevention at the Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University.

Cover design: Mary Ann Smith

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK C U P. C O L U M B I A . E D U

MICHAEL YUDELL

ISBN: 978-0-231-16875-5

9 780231 168755

COLUMBIA

F O R E WO R D B Y J. C R A I G V E N T E R