Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas

Johns Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science

by Paul Lawrence Farber

This book explores changing American views of race mixing in the twentieth century, showing how new scientific ideas transformed accepted notions of race and how those ideas played out on college campuses in the 1960s. In the 1930s it was not unusual for medical experts to caution against miscegenation, or race mixing, espousing the common opinion that it would produce biologically dysfunctional offspring. By the 1960s the scientific community roundly refuted this theory. Paul Lawrence Farber traces this revolutionary shift in scientific thought, explaining how developments in modern population biology, genetics, and anthropology proved that opposition to race mixing was a social prejudice with no justification in scientific knowledge. In the 1960s, this new knowledge helped to change attitudes toward race and discrimination, especially among college students. Their embrace of social integration caused tension on campuses across the country. Students rebelled against administrative interference in their private lives, and university regulations against interracial dating became a flashpoint in the campus revolts that revolutionized American educational institutions. Farber’s provocative study is a personal one, featuring interviews with mixed-race couples and stories from the author’s student years at the University of Pittsburgh. As such, Mixing Races offers a unique perspective on how contentious debates taking place on college campuses reflected radical shifts in race relations in the larger society.

Genres: Science

136 pages, Paperback

First published December 28, 2010

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Lawrence Farber tackles an important historical question in Mixing Races: how did the changing scientific landscape in the US after the Second World War, especially in the fields of genetics and anthropology, influence public and legal opinion on so-called “race mixing” or miscegenation? He addresses this question against the backdrop of the 1960s college scene, leveraging his own experiences at the University of Pittsburgh to describe the unfolding of a couple cases of mixed-race student relationships. Larger ideological changes in society were focused on college campuses, pitting the more progressive students and faculty members against college administrators, parents and deans of women. (Deans of men were, Farber notes, usually not as strict.) This backdrop establishes miscegenation as an important part of the history of the Sixties Revolution, one that has attracted considerable scholarly attention. (See, for instance, Farber’s short “Further Reading” section at the end of the book.) Farber adds an important dimension to the discussion in the role played by two schools of thought in post-war science: in anthropology, the Boas school at Columbia University (Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, Otto Klineberg, and Ashley Montagu) and, in genetics, Theodosius Dobzhanksy and his students.

Scientific theories of race and racial interbreeding were, for the most part, confined to natural history, anthropology and genetics—fields that were dominated by discussions of morphology in the first half of the twentieth century. In the traditional view, an individual’s physical traits (skin color, height, arm length), which also were thought to line up well with his continent of origin, placed him in a particular race. The influential theory of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach held that there were five such races: Caucasian, Ethiopian (later, “Negro”), Mongolian, American Indian, and Malayan. (Blumenbach himself did not propose a hierarchy of races.) Farber notes how the fact that variations within a race are larger than those between races was frequently overlooked by early twentieth century theorists; for example, someone classified as “Caucasian” could have darker skin than someone classified as “Negro.” Farber also emphasizes that even eighteenth century theorists such as Buffon and Blumenbach were aware of the artificiality of racial classifications. So there was always an underlying tension that something was not quite right about the scientific concept of race. The general scientific opinion before the Second World War was that although these races can technically interbreed, they should not, for a variety of (allegedly) purely scientific reasons. Jon Mjøen, from his study of interbreeding between Norwegians and Lapps, developed the concept of “disharmonious crosses,” as indicated by purported diseases and malformations in the offspring. The textbook Human Heredity by Baur, Fischer and Lenz, widely influential throughout the 1930s, was used by the Nazi party to justify the Nuremberg Laws and their concept of Rassenschande (“racial defilement”).

In part due to the horrors of Nazi Germany, and in part due to changes in scientific opinion around the same time, the anti-miscegenation position was made untenable. Montagu, for instance, stressed that the concept of “race” was a social construct, and Dobzhanksy emphasized the importance of focusing on populations rather than individuals (showing, as mentioned earlier, that variations between races pale in comparison to those within a race). The influence of their theories on the fields of anthropology and genetics slowly changed scientific opinion, which in turn influenced public opinion to the extent that, by 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional by a vote of 9-0, citing the Fourteenth Amendment.

The book was reviewed by several historians of life science, many of whom make valid points of criticism. Mike Fulton criticizes the overly introductory and cursory nature of the book, the “stilted” third-person narrative, and the all-too-brief “Further Reading” section that does not, Fulton claims, do justice to the expansive literature on race. I disagree with Fulton’s claim that this cursory approach fails to genuinely introduce and entice the reader to explore further. Staffan Müller-Wille was also disappointed, rightly criticizing Farber for concentrating too much on both the special case of the US and the fields of physical anthropology and genetics. (What about the work of social scientists and cultural anthropologists?) Müller-Wille does credit Farber for his personal account, and for helping us “see that the Sputnik shock, the popularization of neo-Darwinian evolution, and the dismissal of scientific racism belonged to the same cultural transformation that eventually opened out into the student rebellion of 1968.”

[Daniel Watkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book felt more like an extended intro article than a book. Good stuff, and I appreciate the application to OSU, but I think it could have gone further.