What do you think?
Rate this book
The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea
Biological races do not exist—and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today.The Myth of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theories of racial degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified certain races, especially fair-skinned “Aryans,” as superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human sterilization—policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide. Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas’s new, scientifically supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking.Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains why—when it comes to race—too many people still mistake bigotry for science.
385 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 6, 2014
410 people are currently reading
4220 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
April 16, 2017
The problem with reading a book like this is that this is really a long series of biographies of people that I would rather not have to think about at all. That said, this is an important read, not least because it shows that there are remarkable similarities in the lives of these people – for instance, I couldn’t get over how many of them liked to hunt. There is a line Lou Reed’s ‘Beginning of a Great Adventure’ where he is talking about how he would like to bring up his children to be progressive and he says,
I'd teach 'em how to plant a bomb, start a fire, play guitar
and if they catch a hunter, shoot him in the nuts
And I’ve always seen the last of these as a completely reasonable response to hunting and hunters – naturally, there is a kind of irony here, as shooting a hunter in the nuts is a good way of taking them out of the gene pool – but you do understand that this is meant as a joke? It is the racists who are obsessed with the hygiene tasks associated with removing humans that they are not too fond of from the gene pool and thereby perfecting the human stock. This idea reached its full and absurd heights with the Nazis in the 1930-40s and the hideous consequences of that remain beyond the powers of human imagination to conceive up to today.
Eugenics is a repulsive idea, but some form of it seems almost inevitable given how capitalism is increasingly becoming grossly unfair, but still remains a system that wants to justify itself on some notion of meritocracy. To be grossly unfair and supposedly a system based on merit requires that ever growing groups in society need to be deemed unfit – since this unfitness is what determines their location within society. Genes provide the perfect explanation – you are poor because you have crap genes, you are poor because you are black and black skin makes you inferior because (insert list of nonsense here).
At first it looked like races had the support of the best and brightest of Western thought – there is a rather long discussion here on Hume and Kant’s racist ideas – ideas I was completely unfamiliar with – and Darwin’s son appears to have given some support to Eugenics at one time and the whole movement was started off by his half-cousin, Francis Galton. Once you notice that all these people tend to be rich white guys the reason for their preferences for certain genetic ‘types’ becomes pretty clear.
And I hadn’t realised how many of these bastards disliked the Irish – as an inferior Irish person myself, it is nice to get to take this all personally…
This book starts and ends with the author mentioning someone sitting in a classroom and wondering how they had gotten all the way through school before finding out that the concept ‘race’ simply has no scientific validity at all. That genetics has shown that there is more genetic variation within populations of humans than there is between populations of humans, that the genetic variation between populations produce differences that are, quite literally, skin deep. That even if you could define intelligence and race, science has never found anything approximating a link between one and the other.
Not that this will stop racists from being racists – science always struggles to overcome ideas that people have ‘always known to be true’ – but what this book shows remarkably well is that these ideas are wish-fulfilment, not ‘science’.
Unfortunately, facts like this make very little difference to the lived experience of whole groups of people in society – being black is made no less problematic in the US by knowing ‘race’ is a discredited idea – when you are defined every day by ‘your race’.
One of my favourite bits in this was a guy saying he wanted to research how mixing raced parents might produce buggered up humans as offspring. For instance, if you mixed a tall person from one race with a short person from another race would this result in a child with really big organs in the tiny body – or a tall person with tiny organs? As if tall and short people only occur between races, not within races – you know, we’ve run this experiment forever and it seems to have worked out fine.
There are a number of things I would have liked this book to have covered that it didn’t. Look, that is a function of the ground the book was trying to cover and the ideas it is trying to overcome. And this is an ongoing task in the US in particular – the election of Trump makes the few sentences of hope expressed in this book about the meaning of the election of Obama ring decidedly hollow.
A lot of the issues of race raised here may soon become academic too of course – I’m not entirely convinced humanity will survive the Trump presidency, so I guess that is one way to end racism. Still, this book focuses on the extreme end of racists, but I would have been interested to also hear what might be said in refutation of say Pinker or Dawkins and their views of genetics – the more genteel end of this story. This is, admittedly, somewhat outside of the scope of the book, but I think these ideas are of more moment in many ways than are the extremist documented here. I would like to see these ideas placed under the same sort of criticism as is done to the genetic gender nonsense that Cordelia Fine presents in her wonderful ‘Delusions of Gender’.
The other aspect I would have liked to have seen discussed here is a fuller discussion of the nature of the social construction of races – not just in how the dominant race seeks to define the other, but also how that impacts upon the dominated races and tragically upon their own self-concept. The books to read on this subject include Du Bois’s ‘The Souls of Black Folk’, Claude Steel’s ‘Whistling Vivaldi’, bell hook’s ‘Black Looks’ and Goffman’s ‘Stigma’.
That said, this book provides an endlessly fascinating journey through the sad and self-congratulatory world of white supremacists. It would be nice to think such people are on the way out – but unfortunately, they serve a role in our society in justifying inequality in all senses – and so, those who benefit most in our society from how it is structured will see these racist ideas as fruitful and worthy of their support. The number of rich people who have given so generously to the ongoing support of these ideas is, in itself, a key lesson from this book.
This book provides a very useful reference to a long list of seminal racists – not the sort of scab I generally like to pick at, the pus being quickly overwhelming, but important nonetheless.
I'd teach 'em how to plant a bomb, start a fire, play guitar
and if they catch a hunter, shoot him in the nuts
And I’ve always seen the last of these as a completely reasonable response to hunting and hunters – naturally, there is a kind of irony here, as shooting a hunter in the nuts is a good way of taking them out of the gene pool – but you do understand that this is meant as a joke? It is the racists who are obsessed with the hygiene tasks associated with removing humans that they are not too fond of from the gene pool and thereby perfecting the human stock. This idea reached its full and absurd heights with the Nazis in the 1930-40s and the hideous consequences of that remain beyond the powers of human imagination to conceive up to today.
Eugenics is a repulsive idea, but some form of it seems almost inevitable given how capitalism is increasingly becoming grossly unfair, but still remains a system that wants to justify itself on some notion of meritocracy. To be grossly unfair and supposedly a system based on merit requires that ever growing groups in society need to be deemed unfit – since this unfitness is what determines their location within society. Genes provide the perfect explanation – you are poor because you have crap genes, you are poor because you are black and black skin makes you inferior because (insert list of nonsense here).
At first it looked like races had the support of the best and brightest of Western thought – there is a rather long discussion here on Hume and Kant’s racist ideas – ideas I was completely unfamiliar with – and Darwin’s son appears to have given some support to Eugenics at one time and the whole movement was started off by his half-cousin, Francis Galton. Once you notice that all these people tend to be rich white guys the reason for their preferences for certain genetic ‘types’ becomes pretty clear.
And I hadn’t realised how many of these bastards disliked the Irish – as an inferior Irish person myself, it is nice to get to take this all personally…
This book starts and ends with the author mentioning someone sitting in a classroom and wondering how they had gotten all the way through school before finding out that the concept ‘race’ simply has no scientific validity at all. That genetics has shown that there is more genetic variation within populations of humans than there is between populations of humans, that the genetic variation between populations produce differences that are, quite literally, skin deep. That even if you could define intelligence and race, science has never found anything approximating a link between one and the other.
Not that this will stop racists from being racists – science always struggles to overcome ideas that people have ‘always known to be true’ – but what this book shows remarkably well is that these ideas are wish-fulfilment, not ‘science’.
Unfortunately, facts like this make very little difference to the lived experience of whole groups of people in society – being black is made no less problematic in the US by knowing ‘race’ is a discredited idea – when you are defined every day by ‘your race’.
One of my favourite bits in this was a guy saying he wanted to research how mixing raced parents might produce buggered up humans as offspring. For instance, if you mixed a tall person from one race with a short person from another race would this result in a child with really big organs in the tiny body – or a tall person with tiny organs? As if tall and short people only occur between races, not within races – you know, we’ve run this experiment forever and it seems to have worked out fine.
There are a number of things I would have liked this book to have covered that it didn’t. Look, that is a function of the ground the book was trying to cover and the ideas it is trying to overcome. And this is an ongoing task in the US in particular – the election of Trump makes the few sentences of hope expressed in this book about the meaning of the election of Obama ring decidedly hollow.
A lot of the issues of race raised here may soon become academic too of course – I’m not entirely convinced humanity will survive the Trump presidency, so I guess that is one way to end racism. Still, this book focuses on the extreme end of racists, but I would have been interested to also hear what might be said in refutation of say Pinker or Dawkins and their views of genetics – the more genteel end of this story. This is, admittedly, somewhat outside of the scope of the book, but I think these ideas are of more moment in many ways than are the extremist documented here. I would like to see these ideas placed under the same sort of criticism as is done to the genetic gender nonsense that Cordelia Fine presents in her wonderful ‘Delusions of Gender’.
The other aspect I would have liked to have seen discussed here is a fuller discussion of the nature of the social construction of races – not just in how the dominant race seeks to define the other, but also how that impacts upon the dominated races and tragically upon their own self-concept. The books to read on this subject include Du Bois’s ‘The Souls of Black Folk’, Claude Steel’s ‘Whistling Vivaldi’, bell hook’s ‘Black Looks’ and Goffman’s ‘Stigma’.
That said, this book provides an endlessly fascinating journey through the sad and self-congratulatory world of white supremacists. It would be nice to think such people are on the way out – but unfortunately, they serve a role in our society in justifying inequality in all senses – and so, those who benefit most in our society from how it is structured will see these racist ideas as fruitful and worthy of their support. The number of rich people who have given so generously to the ongoing support of these ideas is, in itself, a key lesson from this book.
This book provides a very useful reference to a long list of seminal racists – not the sort of scab I generally like to pick at, the pus being quickly overwhelming, but important nonetheless.
January 5, 2017
Used this as a textbook last year in Race and Ethnic Relations. Highly recommended. Well-written and documented, and covers all the important issues of why the world would care so much to make race "real" (important) in biology. Extensive sections on eugenics, Nazism, "scientific racism", both in the out of the universities. On the former, he includes the most infamous Phillippe Rushton, a biologist in Canada (dead a couple years now - Allah Rest His Soul) who regularly claimed that Whites had the biggest brains and the smallest penises, Blacks the biggest penises and smallest brains, and Asians somewhere in the middle. (I saw a letter in a Science for the People study group in Boston meeting where E.O. Wilson - the famous entomologist-sociobiologist, whom many don't know had racist tendencies - in support of Rushton's tenure in the late 80s saying that most all biologists believed similarly to Rushton but were afraid to say so publically.) Silly political correctness not to support racial superiority theories, I guess.
February 23, 2021
Indoctrination garbage. There are many biological racial differences. Diseases are one difference. Different races have different prevalences of diseases. Different races also have different bone structures. Yes, anthropologists can tell one's race from their bones. Skin colour is a very superficial difference and only the tip of the iceberg. Wake up. I'm not saying that other races are superior or inferior but to say that there are no races is a huge lie.
June 10, 2020
...In 1950, UNESCO issued a statement asserting that all humans belong to the same species and that “race” is not a biological reality but a myth. This was a summary of the findings of an international panel of anthropologists, geneticists, sociologists, and psychologists.
I had high expectations of this book but it was a huge disappointment. I wil say that the intro was very captivating in terms of historical context and relavancy. It dimisses the the perceptions about race and it says that we are all the human race, there is no black, white but we are all apart of the same human race.I was recommended to read this by Jane Elliot, a civil rights educator on race who I deeply admire.
While this was heavily researched and very well written, the language was too technical so it was not really that appealing to me. I wanted this book to be more persuasive than informative, it was a lot of terms that I was not familiar with. This could had something to do with my ignorance but I also have read about Eugenincs as a undergradate student thus a lot of these things were rehearsed.
Despite my average rating of this book, I wll recommend if you want to be more "informed' about race but not if you want to be convinced. It was a broad collection of facts that will better suit a textbook than a novel.
I had high expectations of this book but it was a huge disappointment. I wil say that the intro was very captivating in terms of historical context and relavancy. It dimisses the the perceptions about race and it says that we are all the human race, there is no black, white but we are all apart of the same human race.I was recommended to read this by Jane Elliot, a civil rights educator on race who I deeply admire.
While this was heavily researched and very well written, the language was too technical so it was not really that appealing to me. I wanted this book to be more persuasive than informative, it was a lot of terms that I was not familiar with. This could had something to do with my ignorance but I also have read about Eugenincs as a undergradate student thus a lot of these things were rehearsed.
Despite my average rating of this book, I wll recommend if you want to be more "informed' about race but not if you want to be convinced. It was a broad collection of facts that will better suit a textbook than a novel.
May 9, 2021
This book should be required reading for all citizens and taught in high schools, perhaps using an edited simplified text, the Cliff Notes version.
Basically the facts are:
1. humans are all one race, a fact that has been established scientifically through genetics and other biological sciences;
2. the first evil of racism is that it promotes the false concept of races;
3. the differences within humanity are cultural not racial;
4. there is a long history of radical right-wing conservatives using the concept of races to divide humanity so they can advance their agenda for political power.
Basically the facts are:
1. humans are all one race, a fact that has been established scientifically through genetics and other biological sciences;
2. the first evil of racism is that it promotes the false concept of races;
3. the differences within humanity are cultural not racial;
4. there is a long history of radical right-wing conservatives using the concept of races to divide humanity so they can advance their agenda for political power.
December 26, 2018
Absolutely garbage.
October 17, 2014
Rubbish.
December 4, 2014
Anyone who understands evolutionary biology and genetics knows that the notion of human races is not a biological or scientific one. The author does a good job of presenting the history of race and racism from the time of the Spanish Inquisitions to the 21st century. Read it and see how the racists of today are really no different than those of the past - although some are more subtle - sharing the same language, bigoted hatred and same myth based notions found in polygenism, monogenism, eugenics and 'scientific racism'.
March 29, 2018
The belief in race as an objective, biological reality has been very strong, pervasive, and significant in much of public policy. Yet scientists say it is simply not real. There is neither very much genetic variability in humans compared to other species, even our closest relatives, nor is it distributed in humans in anything like the consistent patterns that, in other species, define the biological concept of races.
Humans are all one species, with no subspecies, no biological races.
Yet the idea is powerful and persistent. Robert Wald Sussman lays out the history of the idea of races, and early explanations for differences. He works through the ideas of pre-Adamites (separate, earlier creations of non-white humans, also called polygenesis), and degeration (the idea that humans are all descendants of Adam, but non-whites are degenerated forms, also called monogenesis.)
Monogenesis at least left open the possibility that differences might be environmental, and perhaps be overcome, but that was often an inconvenient, and thus unpopular, idea.
He also lays out the completely unscientific nature of these ideas. Humans are all descended from the same source, and as noted above, there's very little genetic variation in humans compared to other species. (A friend involved with English shepherds and responsible breeding commented that, by dog breeding standards, humans have a terrifying COI, i.e., coefficient of inbreeding.)
Sussman describes the intertwined effects of the pseudo-scientific theories of racial origins and racial inferiority, and the political theories and policies that grew from them--including the rise of the eugenics movement in the US and Germany. Influences flowed back and forth between Germany and the US, getting worse and worse.
At the same time, the rise of real genetic science, and the development of cultural anthropology, also began to undermine those theories.
It's a fascinating and alarming account, and the racial theories are still with us today, affecting today's policies on immigration, education, health care, and the social safety net. It's well written, read well by the narrator, and tremendously informative.
Recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
Humans are all one species, with no subspecies, no biological races.
Yet the idea is powerful and persistent. Robert Wald Sussman lays out the history of the idea of races, and early explanations for differences. He works through the ideas of pre-Adamites (separate, earlier creations of non-white humans, also called polygenesis), and degeration (the idea that humans are all descendants of Adam, but non-whites are degenerated forms, also called monogenesis.)
Monogenesis at least left open the possibility that differences might be environmental, and perhaps be overcome, but that was often an inconvenient, and thus unpopular, idea.
He also lays out the completely unscientific nature of these ideas. Humans are all descended from the same source, and as noted above, there's very little genetic variation in humans compared to other species. (A friend involved with English shepherds and responsible breeding commented that, by dog breeding standards, humans have a terrifying COI, i.e., coefficient of inbreeding.)
Sussman describes the intertwined effects of the pseudo-scientific theories of racial origins and racial inferiority, and the political theories and policies that grew from them--including the rise of the eugenics movement in the US and Germany. Influences flowed back and forth between Germany and the US, getting worse and worse.
At the same time, the rise of real genetic science, and the development of cultural anthropology, also began to undermine those theories.
It's a fascinating and alarming account, and the racial theories are still with us today, affecting today's policies on immigration, education, health care, and the social safety net. It's well written, read well by the narrator, and tremendously informative.
Recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
January 23, 2015
Meh...basically just a history of scientific racism, with remarkably little analysis and no new scholarship. Stephen Jay Gould did it better, more succinctly, and with better-structured sentences.
January 20, 2024
The vast majority of anthropologists, geneticists, biologists, and psychologists who have researched the subject have agreed for decades: the concept of biological races holds as much weight as the theory that the Earth is flat. Defining biological race (or just race) starts with understanding the evolutionary process of speciation. This process occurs when various members of the same species become separated and confined to certain areas. Over time (tens of thousands of years), as breeding occurs and genes are exchanged only between members in the same geographical region, these separated populations of what were once the same species begin evolving discernible differences. These differences usually are produced by ecological constraints inherent to the different regions these populations have made their homes. Eventually, the differences will become so great that (as long as little to no genetic exchange occurs between the separated populations) these distant groups will no longer be able to breed and reproduce with one another, and have in effect become a whole new species; this is the essence of speciation. The pseudoscience of biological race theory contends that different ‘races’ are the result of ongoing speciation, and that humanity’s various races are in an intermediary stage of the process where, although there are genetic differences between races, the various races can still exchange genes and breed together. Therefore, biological race posits that races are subspecies of humans which are genetically, biologically, and morphologically different, and this difference is due to the vast amounts of time (10,000 plus years) that these races were separated and therefore unable to breed and swap genes with each other. A problem quickly arises when one realizes that this theory rests on the assumption that there are distinct and discernible differences in genetics between so-called races; an assumption that proves to be untrue once one realizes that there is just as much, if not more, genetic variation within ‘races’ than between ‘different’ races. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of human history such as myself also realizes that it is simply impossible to argue that large populations of humans have remained isolated from others for tens of thousands of years. From the beginning, humans have been a migratory species that has continuously migrated back and forth, to and from regions. Migration between regions and populations is one of the most consistent aspects of human history, and there is no evidence on record of any long term geographic isolation for any large population of humans. Thanks to our advances in science, scientists have long been able to measure the genetic diversity within and among both human and animal populations. We can readily determine the degree to which different populations of a species differ from one another, and how these differences came about. By examining molecular data, scientists have come up with a “genetic threshold” to determine the bare minimum genetic difference there needs to be between two populations for them to be considered subspecies. Compared to other large animals with wide geographic distributions, humans don’t even come close to reaching the subspecies genetic threshold despite having the widest geographical distribution of any animal on the planet. All this is to say that there is no evidence for a biological basis for race, and that there race and racism are a sociological phenomenon rather than a biological one.
This book traces racism to the Iberian Peninsula, much like Gerald Horne; except where Horne traces the origins of racism towards anti-black sentiments emanating from the Catholic’s conflicts with Muslims on the Peninsula, this book believes the embryos of biological racism grew out of conflicts between Catholics and Jews. As some Jews gained wealth (and therefore power) on the Peninsula, they were able to use this to convert to Catholicism and socially integrate themselves into the population. As this conversion process took place it became necessary for Spanish Catholics to distinguish Jewish converts from long-time Catholics. Tracing someone’s bloodline became the way to do this. Anyone who had a Jewish ancestors in the previous 5 generations was considered a “new Christian” and subject to restrictions that “old Christians” were not, like restricting new Christians from attending college or holding certain government positions (it should be noted that Horne also pointed out that anti-semitism played a crucial role in the origins of race and racism, especially during the Protestant Reformation). Racism became concretely traced to blood when certificates of “purity of blood” were issued to non-Jews so that they could prove they were not a member of the “inferior” group. The Spanish Inquisition of the 1400s used systematic violence to enforce this new-found ideology of blood purity. This book doesn’t delve into why the Inquisition occurred, but reading Horne fills in the gap. As he explained it, the Inquisition was a response by Catholic Spain feeling tightening pressure from both Muslims and Protestants, which therefore elicited a violent and draconian response of forced Catholic conversion and brutalization of non-Catholics/those who refused conversion. Either way, this violence soon made its way to the Americas as Columbus’ voyage to the New World ushered in the “apocalypse of settler colonialism”.
Interaction with indigenous Americans naturally brought up questions by Catholics as to who these people were. Since the overall goal of Spanish colonialism was conquest, the answer to this question fell into two camps, both of which functioned as a way to dehumanize Native Americans and thus justify their genocide and enslavement. Theory 1 (degeneracy theory) posited that these men had once been biblical peoples who had migrated to the New World and then “degenerated” into something subhuman. Theory 2 (pre-Adamite theory) said that American Indians did not descend from Adam and Eve, and instead had an origin which came before the two, making them a completely different species from those who had descended from the ‘first man and woman’. Either way, each theory boiled down to the belief that American Indians were sub-human, incapable of being Christians or governing themselves, and therefore could be mistreated horrendously without moral consequences.
These two theories had remarkable staying power and their threads still remain when it comes to racial theory. The degeneration theory was originally the more popular of the two, as it didn’t challenge Christian orthodoxy as to the origins of all of humanity. Instead, it argued that climate and isolation from Christian civilization had corrupted Americans from their Adam and Eve origins. This turned out to be the more liberal theory, as its proponents argued that their degeneration could be reversed by providing them the benefits of European civilization, even against their own will (AKA white man’s burden). Elements of this can be seen in the OG imperialist philosopher John Locke, who justified taking Native American land on the basis of the “fact” that they had failed to adequately improve their land (read Ellen Meiksins Wood’s “The Origins of Capitalism” for a more thorough critique of Locke). He accepted that all men had been created equal under God, and yet the degeneracy of Natives, as evidenced by their failure to properly improve the land, meant they had devolved into lesser beings than the Europeans, and therefore lost their previously inalienable God-given rights. Other signs of this degeneracy were their change of skin color which, according to Montesquieu, was caused by climate. Montesquieu then set out to create a climate-based theory of race, which obviously assumed the climates of Europe produced the best and “most beautiful” races. Various Enlightenment thinkers then added a pseudoscientific gloss over the climate-based degenerate theory (for deeper critiques of the Enlightenment and liberalism, read Domenico Losurdo’s “Liberalism: A Counter History”). The most influential of these was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who both coined the race of ‘Caucasian’ to mean white people, and hierarchically ranked races based on various subjective measures (for example beauty, which Blumenbach considered white people to be the most beautiful, was based on nothing more scientific than his personal preferences), with Caucasian being at the top of the hierarchy and all others having degenerated from the original and superior Caucasian race.
Early believers of the pre-adamite theory believed that Native Americans were akin to giants, fairies , and other creatures that today would be called mythical (for more on this read the excellent book “American Holocaust”). The theory was given a new lease on life during The Enlightenment, as its heterodox view of Christian origins became less taboo due to the general anti-religious zeitgeist of the movement. As slavery proliferated and the Enlightenment’s fetishization of science grew, it became popular for academics to view Black people as a sort of intermediate species between ape and human, adding a scientific veneer to what was essentially still the pre-adamite theory. Studies of skull sizes also began to be used as ammunition for the pre-adamite theory. Arguments for this pseudoscientific theory, which would eventually morph into phrenology, argued that human skull sizes have always been different across different regions from the beginning of time, using ancient Egyptian skull sizes to ‘prove’ the validity of this theory. The differences in skull sizes shows that human races have therefore always been different and some (i.e. the non-white races) have always been inferior, withthis inferiority being directly traced to their skulls. A feature of the pre-adamite theory that still lingers today was the idea that, as distinct species, each race has its own strength and weaknesses; obviously, it followed that the white race has the best strengths compared to the other races. Following this belief, pre-Adamite racists, who were often also staunch imperialists, believed that non-white races such as the black race were incapable of forming civilizations. They bolstered this belief through deliberate misreadings of history and general historical ignorance, and argued that any mixing of races would ‘de-civilized’ the white race, and was therefore bad.
In the 1900s the discovery of Mendelian genetics posited that traits are genetically passed down from parent to offspring, and these “genes” are neither unaffected by overuse/underuse nor are they influenced of the environment (as opposed to the previous popular Lamarckian genetics, which believed traits that are used more are more likely to be passed down). Racists took this to mean that the differences between races were biologically determined and unaffected by environmental conditions. This idea fit in with the framework of Social Darwinism, or a conservative theory used to promote the status quo which, through vulgarizing Darwin’s works on evolution, argued that the world’s hierarchies were a result of natural selection; the “most fit” (the strong) should dominate, since they are “naturally adapted” to do so, while the “least fit” (the weak) naturally belong at the bottom rungs of society. Social Darwinism fit in nicely with the centuries old “might makes right” justifications of European imperialism, and combining this with biological determinism created fertile intellectual grounds for the eugenics movement. If you accept (as Social Darwinists did) that it is “morally wrong” to support the “weak”, since that would promote the “reproduction and survival of the less fit”, and if you believe that whether you are strong or weak is determined solely by biological means that are unchangeable, this leads you to the nasty conclusion that some people are naturally less fit, this cannot be changed, and they therefore should be extricated from society. The eugenics movement (“eugenics” was coined in 1883 from the Greek words “well born”) formed as a proactive form of Social Darwinism, and it sought to ensure that the state would prevent those with supposedly undesirable traits, especially races with these traits, from passing them down and allowing them to fester in future generations. This could be done through either “positive eugenics”, which called for controlling breeding so that only the best traits would be produced, or “negative eugenics” (as the Nazis would eventually try), which called eliminating “biologically inferior people” and excluding them from the population altogether through means such as segregation, castration, deportation, and outright genocide. These were very mainstream ideas espoused throughout some of the most powerful institutions and by some of the most well respected minds in the West and especially in America.
America’s eugenics movement was more vicious than Europe’s in the 1900s, likely as a reaction to the presence of Native Americans, African Americans, and vast influxes of migrants. More college courses were taught on Eugenics in America than in Europe, and theories of biologically determined mental traits became popular, including the idea that the majority of the poor and criminals were mentally deficient (the word ‘moron’ was coined at this time); many of these theories would lay some of the groundwork in fields such as evolutionary psychology and anthropological criminology. These ideas were so popular that, in 1907, U.S. president and eugenicist Woodrow Wilson passed legislation in Indiana that made sterilization of certain “undesirable individuals” compulsory; eventually over 30 states adopted similar laws. By 1930 there were over 300 college courses on eugenics, while almost every high school textbook had a section on eugenics in the United States. The stage was now set for scientific racism to intellectually come into its own.
Scientific racism was based on three beliefs: 1: that humanity is divided into many subspecies, all with distinct traits, with the Nordic race being the top subspecies
2: that moral and intellectual traits correlate with physical traits, which are all due to genetics, and these traits are unchangeable
3: that the mixture of races always results in degradation of the better race, which leads to eugenics becoming a necessity.
Scientific racism maintained a veneer of being an actual science through the creation of IQ (intellectual quotient) tests. These tests, which were originally created and written by eugenicists, attempted to quantify intelligence and boil it down to a single number (eugenicists believed that intelligence was a singular inheritable trait determined solely by genetics). Questions of early IQ tests included things such as: “which one of these plays does Becky Sharp play in?”; “the Ford arrow is produced where?”; ”which Sport has pitchers?”; “how many legs does a copier have?”; and “who wrote Robinson Crusoe?”. When white Americans (specifically rich white Americans) scored better in these tests than anyone else, IQ strengthened ideas of ‘Nordic superiority’ as well as general conservative viewpoints that the superior man naturally rises to the top. It should be no surprise that eugenics therefore became common sense and “popular wisdom” that was financed by powerful oligarchs, espoused by politicians, believed by the most leading academics of the 1800-1900s, and used as the backbone for countless laws.
It is at this point that the book completely falls apart and never recovers. It gets completely lost in the weeds of various personalities associated with eugenics. The author seems to be operating under the assumption that all racism after the eugenics movement is the work of a small cabal of neonazis and eugenicists, along with their various media outlets and propaganda programs. He makes a very uninspired claim (that also takes way too many pages to expand on) that the eugenics movement died because it was out-contested by a more accurate school of anthropology. There is no real materialist analysis at play here, and the impact of mass movements by the peoples eugenics was designed to suppress is never discussed. Instead, the entire discussion is framed around various clashes between the founders of eugenics and anti-eugenic anthropologists, and this takes up about half of the total book! What a fucking waste of time!
This book traces racism to the Iberian Peninsula, much like Gerald Horne; except where Horne traces the origins of racism towards anti-black sentiments emanating from the Catholic’s conflicts with Muslims on the Peninsula, this book believes the embryos of biological racism grew out of conflicts between Catholics and Jews. As some Jews gained wealth (and therefore power) on the Peninsula, they were able to use this to convert to Catholicism and socially integrate themselves into the population. As this conversion process took place it became necessary for Spanish Catholics to distinguish Jewish converts from long-time Catholics. Tracing someone’s bloodline became the way to do this. Anyone who had a Jewish ancestors in the previous 5 generations was considered a “new Christian” and subject to restrictions that “old Christians” were not, like restricting new Christians from attending college or holding certain government positions (it should be noted that Horne also pointed out that anti-semitism played a crucial role in the origins of race and racism, especially during the Protestant Reformation). Racism became concretely traced to blood when certificates of “purity of blood” were issued to non-Jews so that they could prove they were not a member of the “inferior” group. The Spanish Inquisition of the 1400s used systematic violence to enforce this new-found ideology of blood purity. This book doesn’t delve into why the Inquisition occurred, but reading Horne fills in the gap. As he explained it, the Inquisition was a response by Catholic Spain feeling tightening pressure from both Muslims and Protestants, which therefore elicited a violent and draconian response of forced Catholic conversion and brutalization of non-Catholics/those who refused conversion. Either way, this violence soon made its way to the Americas as Columbus’ voyage to the New World ushered in the “apocalypse of settler colonialism”.
Interaction with indigenous Americans naturally brought up questions by Catholics as to who these people were. Since the overall goal of Spanish colonialism was conquest, the answer to this question fell into two camps, both of which functioned as a way to dehumanize Native Americans and thus justify their genocide and enslavement. Theory 1 (degeneracy theory) posited that these men had once been biblical peoples who had migrated to the New World and then “degenerated” into something subhuman. Theory 2 (pre-Adamite theory) said that American Indians did not descend from Adam and Eve, and instead had an origin which came before the two, making them a completely different species from those who had descended from the ‘first man and woman’. Either way, each theory boiled down to the belief that American Indians were sub-human, incapable of being Christians or governing themselves, and therefore could be mistreated horrendously without moral consequences.
These two theories had remarkable staying power and their threads still remain when it comes to racial theory. The degeneration theory was originally the more popular of the two, as it didn’t challenge Christian orthodoxy as to the origins of all of humanity. Instead, it argued that climate and isolation from Christian civilization had corrupted Americans from their Adam and Eve origins. This turned out to be the more liberal theory, as its proponents argued that their degeneration could be reversed by providing them the benefits of European civilization, even against their own will (AKA white man’s burden). Elements of this can be seen in the OG imperialist philosopher John Locke, who justified taking Native American land on the basis of the “fact” that they had failed to adequately improve their land (read Ellen Meiksins Wood’s “The Origins of Capitalism” for a more thorough critique of Locke). He accepted that all men had been created equal under God, and yet the degeneracy of Natives, as evidenced by their failure to properly improve the land, meant they had devolved into lesser beings than the Europeans, and therefore lost their previously inalienable God-given rights. Other signs of this degeneracy were their change of skin color which, according to Montesquieu, was caused by climate. Montesquieu then set out to create a climate-based theory of race, which obviously assumed the climates of Europe produced the best and “most beautiful” races. Various Enlightenment thinkers then added a pseudoscientific gloss over the climate-based degenerate theory (for deeper critiques of the Enlightenment and liberalism, read Domenico Losurdo’s “Liberalism: A Counter History”). The most influential of these was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who both coined the race of ‘Caucasian’ to mean white people, and hierarchically ranked races based on various subjective measures (for example beauty, which Blumenbach considered white people to be the most beautiful, was based on nothing more scientific than his personal preferences), with Caucasian being at the top of the hierarchy and all others having degenerated from the original and superior Caucasian race.
Early believers of the pre-adamite theory believed that Native Americans were akin to giants, fairies , and other creatures that today would be called mythical (for more on this read the excellent book “American Holocaust”). The theory was given a new lease on life during The Enlightenment, as its heterodox view of Christian origins became less taboo due to the general anti-religious zeitgeist of the movement. As slavery proliferated and the Enlightenment’s fetishization of science grew, it became popular for academics to view Black people as a sort of intermediate species between ape and human, adding a scientific veneer to what was essentially still the pre-adamite theory. Studies of skull sizes also began to be used as ammunition for the pre-adamite theory. Arguments for this pseudoscientific theory, which would eventually morph into phrenology, argued that human skull sizes have always been different across different regions from the beginning of time, using ancient Egyptian skull sizes to ‘prove’ the validity of this theory. The differences in skull sizes shows that human races have therefore always been different and some (i.e. the non-white races) have always been inferior, withthis inferiority being directly traced to their skulls. A feature of the pre-adamite theory that still lingers today was the idea that, as distinct species, each race has its own strength and weaknesses; obviously, it followed that the white race has the best strengths compared to the other races. Following this belief, pre-Adamite racists, who were often also staunch imperialists, believed that non-white races such as the black race were incapable of forming civilizations. They bolstered this belief through deliberate misreadings of history and general historical ignorance, and argued that any mixing of races would ‘de-civilized’ the white race, and was therefore bad.
In the 1900s the discovery of Mendelian genetics posited that traits are genetically passed down from parent to offspring, and these “genes” are neither unaffected by overuse/underuse nor are they influenced of the environment (as opposed to the previous popular Lamarckian genetics, which believed traits that are used more are more likely to be passed down). Racists took this to mean that the differences between races were biologically determined and unaffected by environmental conditions. This idea fit in with the framework of Social Darwinism, or a conservative theory used to promote the status quo which, through vulgarizing Darwin’s works on evolution, argued that the world’s hierarchies were a result of natural selection; the “most fit” (the strong) should dominate, since they are “naturally adapted” to do so, while the “least fit” (the weak) naturally belong at the bottom rungs of society. Social Darwinism fit in nicely with the centuries old “might makes right” justifications of European imperialism, and combining this with biological determinism created fertile intellectual grounds for the eugenics movement. If you accept (as Social Darwinists did) that it is “morally wrong” to support the “weak”, since that would promote the “reproduction and survival of the less fit”, and if you believe that whether you are strong or weak is determined solely by biological means that are unchangeable, this leads you to the nasty conclusion that some people are naturally less fit, this cannot be changed, and they therefore should be extricated from society. The eugenics movement (“eugenics” was coined in 1883 from the Greek words “well born”) formed as a proactive form of Social Darwinism, and it sought to ensure that the state would prevent those with supposedly undesirable traits, especially races with these traits, from passing them down and allowing them to fester in future generations. This could be done through either “positive eugenics”, which called for controlling breeding so that only the best traits would be produced, or “negative eugenics” (as the Nazis would eventually try), which called eliminating “biologically inferior people” and excluding them from the population altogether through means such as segregation, castration, deportation, and outright genocide. These were very mainstream ideas espoused throughout some of the most powerful institutions and by some of the most well respected minds in the West and especially in America.
America’s eugenics movement was more vicious than Europe’s in the 1900s, likely as a reaction to the presence of Native Americans, African Americans, and vast influxes of migrants. More college courses were taught on Eugenics in America than in Europe, and theories of biologically determined mental traits became popular, including the idea that the majority of the poor and criminals were mentally deficient (the word ‘moron’ was coined at this time); many of these theories would lay some of the groundwork in fields such as evolutionary psychology and anthropological criminology. These ideas were so popular that, in 1907, U.S. president and eugenicist Woodrow Wilson passed legislation in Indiana that made sterilization of certain “undesirable individuals” compulsory; eventually over 30 states adopted similar laws. By 1930 there were over 300 college courses on eugenics, while almost every high school textbook had a section on eugenics in the United States. The stage was now set for scientific racism to intellectually come into its own.
Scientific racism was based on three beliefs: 1: that humanity is divided into many subspecies, all with distinct traits, with the Nordic race being the top subspecies
2: that moral and intellectual traits correlate with physical traits, which are all due to genetics, and these traits are unchangeable
3: that the mixture of races always results in degradation of the better race, which leads to eugenics becoming a necessity.
Scientific racism maintained a veneer of being an actual science through the creation of IQ (intellectual quotient) tests. These tests, which were originally created and written by eugenicists, attempted to quantify intelligence and boil it down to a single number (eugenicists believed that intelligence was a singular inheritable trait determined solely by genetics). Questions of early IQ tests included things such as: “which one of these plays does Becky Sharp play in?”; “the Ford arrow is produced where?”; ”which Sport has pitchers?”; “how many legs does a copier have?”; and “who wrote Robinson Crusoe?”. When white Americans (specifically rich white Americans) scored better in these tests than anyone else, IQ strengthened ideas of ‘Nordic superiority’ as well as general conservative viewpoints that the superior man naturally rises to the top. It should be no surprise that eugenics therefore became common sense and “popular wisdom” that was financed by powerful oligarchs, espoused by politicians, believed by the most leading academics of the 1800-1900s, and used as the backbone for countless laws.
It is at this point that the book completely falls apart and never recovers. It gets completely lost in the weeds of various personalities associated with eugenics. The author seems to be operating under the assumption that all racism after the eugenics movement is the work of a small cabal of neonazis and eugenicists, along with their various media outlets and propaganda programs. He makes a very uninspired claim (that also takes way too many pages to expand on) that the eugenics movement died because it was out-contested by a more accurate school of anthropology. There is no real materialist analysis at play here, and the impact of mass movements by the peoples eugenics was designed to suppress is never discussed. Instead, the entire discussion is framed around various clashes between the founders of eugenics and anti-eugenic anthropologists, and this takes up about half of the total book! What a fucking waste of time!
June 19, 2024
4 stars; 5 stars for relevance, 3 stars for presentation and style; would've liked to see more scientific underpinnings of the whole misconception of race as a distinct biological category of humans with supposed underlying genetic differences from other races; the narrative is heavily skewed towards a historical approach, which is informative but drowns out what should be hammered home as the core message; the bare truth remains; there is more genetic variation within a 'race' than between 'races', i.e. the concept of race as a distinct category of humans has no basis in biology, full stop.
June 11, 2025
In terms of the information it contains this is an excellent book, in terms of how it is written, well it is more of a textbook, but since so many people who still believe in 'race' and the belief in the superiority of one 'race' over another means that books like this are essential. While not fascinating reading any chapter will provide you with ample references both in support of any information or fact it gives but also lead to you to many other worthwhile books.
But why is it still necessary, at the end of the twentieth century beginning of the twenty first, to have to keep demolishing the house of cards built up by 19th and early twentieth century racists using the bogus science of 'eugenics' to confirm their utterly baseless prejudices? The founding father of anthropology Franz Boas demonstrated that neither physical nor mental capabilities were fixed but dependent on environment before WWI sounding the death knell of the Eugenics movement within academia. As the years rolled by his students and successors piled up more and more research demonstrating the complete lack of scientific basis for eugenics and its prejudices. Despite the millions of dollars various crackpots poured into various racist and eugenic movements no research has been produced at any stage to support the reality of different 'races'. The various organisations in the past and even today (the Pioneer Fund) who pour money into the 'cause' is not for research but propaganda.
I can't go on - if you believe in twaddle like race you probably believe in area 51, that people from galaxies far-far-away come to earth to probe our anuses and butcher cows, I won't convince you otherwise, I won't even try. This book is not a scintillating read but it is full of common sense and accurate information. If you want some basic demolition arguments for use against racists (not that it will do any good) this is an excellent source.
But why is it still necessary, at the end of the twentieth century beginning of the twenty first, to have to keep demolishing the house of cards built up by 19th and early twentieth century racists using the bogus science of 'eugenics' to confirm their utterly baseless prejudices? The founding father of anthropology Franz Boas demonstrated that neither physical nor mental capabilities were fixed but dependent on environment before WWI sounding the death knell of the Eugenics movement within academia. As the years rolled by his students and successors piled up more and more research demonstrating the complete lack of scientific basis for eugenics and its prejudices. Despite the millions of dollars various crackpots poured into various racist and eugenic movements no research has been produced at any stage to support the reality of different 'races'. The various organisations in the past and even today (the Pioneer Fund) who pour money into the 'cause' is not for research but propaganda.
I can't go on - if you believe in twaddle like race you probably believe in area 51, that people from galaxies far-far-away come to earth to probe our anuses and butcher cows, I won't convince you otherwise, I won't even try. This book is not a scintillating read but it is full of common sense and accurate information. If you want some basic demolition arguments for use against racists (not that it will do any good) this is an excellent source.
January 8, 2016
I wanted to like this book because I'm very interested in the topic. It may well have good information in it, but it's poorly written and I just couldn't justify slogging through it when Stephen Jay Gould is out there.
February 23, 2019
Great scholarly book about the history of racism and "scientific" racism. Even as a anti-racist, this book had some new information on scientific findings of human diversity. But the main aim of this book is tracing the history of racist movements and debunking their claims with actual science.
Biggest problem is it centrality to US politics. European modern far-right is not analyzed here. Second is that this book is too detailed. It traced meticulously the lives of eugenicists and "race realists" in lengths that i did not care for.
Still a great recourse against the most dangerous myth of our age.
Biggest problem is it centrality to US politics. European modern far-right is not analyzed here. Second is that this book is too detailed. It traced meticulously the lives of eugenicists and "race realists" in lengths that i did not care for.
Still a great recourse against the most dangerous myth of our age.
July 9, 2025
Information packed and well cited. There is so much information in this book! I will have to reread it to get the full effect. Connections of what I had previously thought of as different forms of prejudices (Naziism, immigration/deportation, forced sterilization/institutionalization for instance) were explained and linked in a very compelling way! The history connects them all! It is infuriating and heartbreaking to know that there are still people who feel this way today and organizations who support this nonsense!
August 26, 2019
This is not an analysis, just a rough history - the history alone takes up more than enough space and there's plenty that isn't covered. But all the same it manages to bring up the points that rebut authors like Steve Pinker and Sam Harris, and just straight up do a better job of rather crap and either gutless or sheer nonsense books like Hitler's American Model.
I see a few complaints about the writing - It's just very straight-forward and simple sentences, sufficiently devoid of personality and emotion as to be rather dull. I'm pretty much immune to boredom so long as the topic itself is interesting tho, I don't take issue with it even if I do prefer authors with charisma, or even cheesy humour.
I see a few complaints about the writing - It's just very straight-forward and simple sentences, sufficiently devoid of personality and emotion as to be rather dull. I'm pretty much immune to boredom so long as the topic itself is interesting tho, I don't take issue with it even if I do prefer authors with charisma, or even cheesy humour.
May 28, 2020
Insightful, and I think in today’s society it is important to know the facts that is presented in this book. However the readability could of been a lot better, I felt like it was very informative and readability of the book let it down slightly, with numerous amount of words ending with “ions” that didn’t need to be.
Apart from that he was able to show that racism has started from the hatred of mankind. Unfortunately racism is still prevalent in our world today. I do believe this book clearly will convince readers that race doesn’t exist. As a Christian myself, the only race is the human race, and melanin is the only reason why some are darker than some others. I would recommend this book for sure and probably read it again.
Apart from that he was able to show that racism has started from the hatred of mankind. Unfortunately racism is still prevalent in our world today. I do believe this book clearly will convince readers that race doesn’t exist. As a Christian myself, the only race is the human race, and melanin is the only reason why some are darker than some others. I would recommend this book for sure and probably read it again.
October 28, 2021
Essential reading.
This is an absolutely fascinating account written by an anthropologist. I have written accounts of scientific racism written by historians and biological scientists- never a social scientist.
Almost every other account of this topic begins with Lamarck and Darwin. Sussman actually sets the roots of the problem of scientific racism back further, to the Spanish inquisition. That is a take I had never heard before and something I will definitely be following up on in further reading. He then takes us on a brief tour of the eugenics movement. I recently finished "War Against the Weak" so it was a nice review of a topic I was already fairly familiar with.
Sussman brings us to the career of Franz Boas. Once again, this is a person I had never heard of before and while the little bit I read of him in this book was interesting it left me eager to learn more about him. Finally, the book is rounded out with a look at the Pioneer Foundation and how all these myths about race still persist and affect us today- from immigration policies, policing policies, and voting policies.
This is an excellent book. I learned a lot from it - including some of the things that I thought I knew about intelligence were completely wrong. There is a lot of familiar ground here if you know your history of scientific racism- the perspective is what makes the work unique.
This is an absolutely fascinating account written by an anthropologist. I have written accounts of scientific racism written by historians and biological scientists- never a social scientist.
Almost every other account of this topic begins with Lamarck and Darwin. Sussman actually sets the roots of the problem of scientific racism back further, to the Spanish inquisition. That is a take I had never heard before and something I will definitely be following up on in further reading. He then takes us on a brief tour of the eugenics movement. I recently finished "War Against the Weak" so it was a nice review of a topic I was already fairly familiar with.
Sussman brings us to the career of Franz Boas. Once again, this is a person I had never heard of before and while the little bit I read of him in this book was interesting it left me eager to learn more about him. Finally, the book is rounded out with a look at the Pioneer Foundation and how all these myths about race still persist and affect us today- from immigration policies, policing policies, and voting policies.
This is an excellent book. I learned a lot from it - including some of the things that I thought I knew about intelligence were completely wrong. There is a lot of familiar ground here if you know your history of scientific racism- the perspective is what makes the work unique.
February 2, 2019
An important book that needs to be read by anyone interested in the resurgence of people touting a 'scientific' perspective on the differences in human ability based on 'race' or some other type of broad categorization. Dr. Robert Sussman, a noted biologist, wrote this book in 2014 and it was published a year later, but it's contents are so strikingly relevant to the political climate of today, that it's hard to believe it wasn't written directly as a response to the contemporary news on the resurgence of neo-nazis and ethno-nationalist in the United States. The text is a fairly detailed overview of the idea of "race" starting with "folk racism" of pre-modern times, which existed in many human societies, basically, people noticing differences amongst each other and attributing behavioural patterns to each identifiable group. Sussman then outlines how these notions were mixed in Europe with the rise of revolutionary Christendom to build a kind of proto-prejudice (which melded perfectly with the concept of being one of the 'flock' vs 'of the world'), though, at this time, groups were still open to others coming in (or going out) of their group, so long as they abided by their practices (religion in this case). Then he shows this base served as a foundation to the human and social anthropology perspective, intersecting with ideas from physical anthropology (I think this might be called evolutionary anthropology in modern textbooks) of the 1800s, with the birth of eugenics.
This draws a line of the development of the concept of race from folk-mannerisms to classical biology, where it was initially viewed as a legitimate unit of measurement to demarcate humans, to its expulsion in the 1930s and 40s, first in the United States, with the rejection of the eugenicist movement, to then the rest of Europe after the war, to it's resurgence in the American south in the 1950s, with the tacit support of people like Bill Shockley, the father of the transistor, which was used to justify the lack of social welfare programs to help African Americans and other non-European citizens and immigrants to be provided with social welfare opportunities, and finally, to its mutation in the 80s, 90s, 00's to the notion of "culture", to justify blocking of immigration from "culturally incompatible" peoples, captioning with its inflammation into something closer to outright racism in the past 2 years.
Roughly half the book focuses on the science (or lack thereof) of these ideas, including disentangling the notion that traits/ behaviours/race are somehow linked at a 'deep' level, mostly from the perspective of understanding alleles. One of the immediate applications of this disentanglement is disabusing one of the notions that strata of intelligence (or any other behavioural trait that could be observed by humans) measured by some performance test (IQ) can be pinned down as idiosyncratic to any "race" of people. This fallacy is revealed mostly using simple biostatistics to observe variance of traits within group vs between, and showing that the former often is greater than the later, breaking the utility of race as a biological construct. Further, modern works in genetics lend more evidence to this by illustrating how 'intelligence' is a very nebulous (and thus complicated) phenomena, leading at least, to a powerful feasibility argument, that it is unlikely any identifiable "races" could claim exclusive monopoly, to the exclusion of, or even preponderance to the 'upper strata' of intelligence performance, which itself is not even 'true intelligence' whatever that may be.
The other half is probably a far more interesting story for most readers, as it outlines the persona that was involved in the struggle of ideas from the 19th century to modern times. An obscure figure in biology emerges as the hero of this story, Franz Boaz, who was one of the first to challenge the primacy of the eugenicist which had ensconced themselves in both high academia and the top policy/governing circles of much of the Western world in the early 20th century. It was Boaz that started to leverage data and statistical techniques to disprove assertions of Physiognomy, which claimed a correlation between cranial/skull dimensions of various races and observable behavioural traits. Boaz was first to observe that variance within was often higher than between for whatever he was measuring "within" a "race", by measuring dimensions of head/hands/etc of Eskimos. This would later be shown to often be true for non-observables (by eye), at the gene level.
What Sussman does convincingly is linking these early eugenicists with modern practitioners of this ideology, via the investments from organizations like the "Pioneer Fund", which has its origins to the Third Reich, "FAIR", and other far-right organizations which have shaped policy from immigration reform to social welfare from the 80s onwards. These organizations have sought to either prevent legal immigration to the United States or slow it down, using the rationale of 'culture' (hereby shown cleanly by Sussman to be a stand-in for race in the modern use), and to simultaneously remove social programs for 'culturally incompatible' peoples, which have included at one point or another in the last 70 years, African Americans, Latin Americans, Asian American, and recent immigrant families from these regions. They have justified this through a plethora of rationales from the perniciousness of the 'welfare state' to the supposed inability of African Americans to better themselves via education.
Sussmann identifies men like Kris Kobach, and other people, who have now become members of the current administration, as people directly funded by the Pioneer Fund or one of its appendages. This also includes men like Charles Murray, who recently made some splashes w/ his misadventures on college campuses.
Though Sussman died tragically in the summer of 2016, he all but anticipated the rise of what the New York Times comically labelled recently as the "intellectual dark web". Men like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson are basically just touting 100-year-old crackpot notions, but hidden under new labels like evolutionary psychology or evolutionary sociology. The book ends with an uplifting but vigilante message, with his discussion of the 2nd election of Barack Obama, but warning that this does not mean racism has been expunged from our society. The obviousness of his words would be manifest to all just two years later. A good companion to this book, dealing more with the biology, genetics, and data of this topic is from the Coursera course "Introduction to Human Genetics" from the U. Minnesota. Both that course and this book are highly recommended, especially for those who are coming from a non-science, policy background, who wants a clear view of the current ethno-nationalist politics of our era, where they come from, exactly how they are a fallacy, and where these ideas will lead if not stopped. Highly recommended.
This draws a line of the development of the concept of race from folk-mannerisms to classical biology, where it was initially viewed as a legitimate unit of measurement to demarcate humans, to its expulsion in the 1930s and 40s, first in the United States, with the rejection of the eugenicist movement, to then the rest of Europe after the war, to it's resurgence in the American south in the 1950s, with the tacit support of people like Bill Shockley, the father of the transistor, which was used to justify the lack of social welfare programs to help African Americans and other non-European citizens and immigrants to be provided with social welfare opportunities, and finally, to its mutation in the 80s, 90s, 00's to the notion of "culture", to justify blocking of immigration from "culturally incompatible" peoples, captioning with its inflammation into something closer to outright racism in the past 2 years.
Roughly half the book focuses on the science (or lack thereof) of these ideas, including disentangling the notion that traits/ behaviours/race are somehow linked at a 'deep' level, mostly from the perspective of understanding alleles. One of the immediate applications of this disentanglement is disabusing one of the notions that strata of intelligence (or any other behavioural trait that could be observed by humans) measured by some performance test (IQ) can be pinned down as idiosyncratic to any "race" of people. This fallacy is revealed mostly using simple biostatistics to observe variance of traits within group vs between, and showing that the former often is greater than the later, breaking the utility of race as a biological construct. Further, modern works in genetics lend more evidence to this by illustrating how 'intelligence' is a very nebulous (and thus complicated) phenomena, leading at least, to a powerful feasibility argument, that it is unlikely any identifiable "races" could claim exclusive monopoly, to the exclusion of, or even preponderance to the 'upper strata' of intelligence performance, which itself is not even 'true intelligence' whatever that may be.
The other half is probably a far more interesting story for most readers, as it outlines the persona that was involved in the struggle of ideas from the 19th century to modern times. An obscure figure in biology emerges as the hero of this story, Franz Boaz, who was one of the first to challenge the primacy of the eugenicist which had ensconced themselves in both high academia and the top policy/governing circles of much of the Western world in the early 20th century. It was Boaz that started to leverage data and statistical techniques to disprove assertions of Physiognomy, which claimed a correlation between cranial/skull dimensions of various races and observable behavioural traits. Boaz was first to observe that variance within was often higher than between for whatever he was measuring "within" a "race", by measuring dimensions of head/hands/etc of Eskimos. This would later be shown to often be true for non-observables (by eye), at the gene level.
What Sussman does convincingly is linking these early eugenicists with modern practitioners of this ideology, via the investments from organizations like the "Pioneer Fund", which has its origins to the Third Reich, "FAIR", and other far-right organizations which have shaped policy from immigration reform to social welfare from the 80s onwards. These organizations have sought to either prevent legal immigration to the United States or slow it down, using the rationale of 'culture' (hereby shown cleanly by Sussman to be a stand-in for race in the modern use), and to simultaneously remove social programs for 'culturally incompatible' peoples, which have included at one point or another in the last 70 years, African Americans, Latin Americans, Asian American, and recent immigrant families from these regions. They have justified this through a plethora of rationales from the perniciousness of the 'welfare state' to the supposed inability of African Americans to better themselves via education.
Sussmann identifies men like Kris Kobach, and other people, who have now become members of the current administration, as people directly funded by the Pioneer Fund or one of its appendages. This also includes men like Charles Murray, who recently made some splashes w/ his misadventures on college campuses.
Though Sussman died tragically in the summer of 2016, he all but anticipated the rise of what the New York Times comically labelled recently as the "intellectual dark web". Men like Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson are basically just touting 100-year-old crackpot notions, but hidden under new labels like evolutionary psychology or evolutionary sociology. The book ends with an uplifting but vigilante message, with his discussion of the 2nd election of Barack Obama, but warning that this does not mean racism has been expunged from our society. The obviousness of his words would be manifest to all just two years later. A good companion to this book, dealing more with the biology, genetics, and data of this topic is from the Coursera course "Introduction to Human Genetics" from the U. Minnesota. Both that course and this book are highly recommended, especially for those who are coming from a non-science, policy background, who wants a clear view of the current ethno-nationalist politics of our era, where they come from, exactly how they are a fallacy, and where these ideas will lead if not stopped. Highly recommended.
June 20, 2024
Wow. Is the first word I think of when I reflect back on this book. It’s the kind of book you can forever keep going back to for reference. The story takes you on a journey of the history of Scientific racism, anthropology, and Eugenics. It paints a perfect picture of how racist ideas are formed and the efforts of those to carry on the ongoing cycle of misinformation, lies and racist propaganda. It was written in a way that is absolutely impossible to deny that many modern day policies are in direct link to past scientific racism.
It was sad to see how it only takes a few individuals with power to create so much last longing damage to the psyche of the world, I learned so much that I will carry with me for a lifetime.
I found out the author passed away not long after the release of this book, he exposed so many people in this book both dead and alive and I am glad he got the chance to create an undeniable truth. RIP Robert W Sussman.
It was sad to see how it only takes a few individuals with power to create so much last longing damage to the psyche of the world, I learned so much that I will carry with me for a lifetime.
I found out the author passed away not long after the release of this book, he exposed so many people in this book both dead and alive and I am glad he got the chance to create an undeniable truth. RIP Robert W Sussman.
November 10, 2019
This is a very well written account of the history of racism. Its roots are in the Spanish Inquisition, it has persisted until the present time, its fruit is human misery. Present day science finds no justification to classify humans into races. This book is well documented and can get a little academically heavy, but I believe they call it evidence. The fields of genetics & anthropology have been abused by bigots and their organizations for many years to support their hateful, fear mongering positions. They hate dark skinned people, of course, but also Jews, Muslims & sometimes Catholics. The author covers the NAZIs & other western European racist movements, including the Eugenics Laws in NAZI Germany. The Holocaust represents these racists' most successful attempt to racially cleanse by murdering large numbers of people using the government.
If you want to learn where this all came from and what is going on currently, take a look at this book. I recommend it to all who'd rather build bridges than walls.
If you want to learn where this all came from and what is going on currently, take a look at this book. I recommend it to all who'd rather build bridges than walls.
January 3, 2019
This book is amazing. It really helps recreate the story of the critical importance of race and redraw the lines of cultural and intellectual influence that created racist theories. Too many times, the history of race is presented as episodic, as if only those moments and incidents are related to race or affected by it. This restores a fuller picture that puts those moments into context to really see the core importance of race in societies over centuries, showing how the same ideas that emerged hundreds of years ago are recycled time and time again as we've moved from biblical to biological to evolutionary and genetic frameworks for understanding humans and their diversity. Just the type of intelligent, big picture book I was looking for. I end up reading slowly because it requires me to stop, think, and absorb. I am excited to keep reading.
March 21, 2017
The chapters on the Pioneer Fund and scientific racism from the 60s forward is stellar and peerless. The earlier sections also superb, yet somewhat less groundbreaking. Specifically good at the history of the Pioneer Fund and its influence on immigration policy.
May 13, 2023
when I saw the title I thought the whole book would be solely debunking the notion of distinct races and reiterating the concept that race is socially constructed, but it went into much more detail than I expected, developing the argument into its logical conclusion (not to say the matter of race is shelved of course). It's so wild to me that for so long, there's been concrete evidence that there are no biological races in humans but rather different ethnic groups, yet that fact isn't close to common knowledge. Then again, I think (or at least I hope) that most people know that the differences between races are only physical rather than in qualities like intelligence, so that's not too bad I guess. For the vast majority, the distinction between the concept of different races and different ethnic groups is almost nothing.
One thought that kept running through my brain as I read this book was that while historical mathematicians were absolute geniuses (how on earth can you find out the earth is round by math, or invent the concept of cotangent?), historical social scientists (and even some modern social scientists) were just absolutely deranged (imagine believing that black people were inferior because they supposedly existed before adam, that is the pinnacle of a baseless theory). The book itself was like a compilation of biographies: it introduced an idea, then listed like five laughably racist people who believed in and built off that idea, then showed how those ideas were used by other, later, racists to further the goals of bigotry. It kinda started to drag during the eugenics section (here's a racist, here's the racist policies he introduced, here's a nazi who was directly inspired by him!) but I really do appreciate that section in particular for explaining how exactly Nazis were influenced by American eugenicists, because that's something I've always heard but never knew the details of.
Another thing that surprised me was how recent the concept of culture as we know it is. I thought it would be self-evident that every society has their own unique culture, but apparently culture used to just be "high culture" and nothing else. I also never thought of culture as the counter to eugenics, but who knew. The amount of beef the racists had with Boaz was unreal, even though his observations were empirically right; I guess it just proves the saying that you can't logic someone out of a position that they didn't logic themselves into. The fact that these blatantly unscientific ideals prevail into the late 20th and even the 21st century shouldn't be shocking to me, but it is. Some of the things these people said are so racist that it's laughable, but not funny (to quote the book directly), and they literally have the information at their hands telling them that it is not true.
In conclusion, though this book was a bit more biographical than I would expect, it ultimately succeeded in its goal of explaining the origins of modern racism, and how completely and utterly illogical it is.
One thought that kept running through my brain as I read this book was that while historical mathematicians were absolute geniuses (how on earth can you find out the earth is round by math, or invent the concept of cotangent?), historical social scientists (and even some modern social scientists) were just absolutely deranged (imagine believing that black people were inferior because they supposedly existed before adam, that is the pinnacle of a baseless theory). The book itself was like a compilation of biographies: it introduced an idea, then listed like five laughably racist people who believed in and built off that idea, then showed how those ideas were used by other, later, racists to further the goals of bigotry. It kinda started to drag during the eugenics section (here's a racist, here's the racist policies he introduced, here's a nazi who was directly inspired by him!) but I really do appreciate that section in particular for explaining how exactly Nazis were influenced by American eugenicists, because that's something I've always heard but never knew the details of.
Another thing that surprised me was how recent the concept of culture as we know it is. I thought it would be self-evident that every society has their own unique culture, but apparently culture used to just be "high culture" and nothing else. I also never thought of culture as the counter to eugenics, but who knew. The amount of beef the racists had with Boaz was unreal, even though his observations were empirically right; I guess it just proves the saying that you can't logic someone out of a position that they didn't logic themselves into. The fact that these blatantly unscientific ideals prevail into the late 20th and even the 21st century shouldn't be shocking to me, but it is. Some of the things these people said are so racist that it's laughable, but not funny (to quote the book directly), and they literally have the information at their hands telling them that it is not true.
In conclusion, though this book was a bit more biographical than I would expect, it ultimately succeeded in its goal of explaining the origins of modern racism, and how completely and utterly illogical it is.
September 29, 2022
The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea was published in 2014, and it's author, American anthropologist Robert Sussman, died shortly afterwards in July of 2016. Perhaps it was a mercy for Sussman to die before the ascendancy of Donald Trump and Jordan Peterson, and the return (or did it really go anywhere) of scientific racism into public discourse. Sussman makes a valiant effort to trace the evolution of scientific racism in both Europe and the United States to its present status (as of 2014), from the perspective of an anthropologist deeply concerned with the inability of this discredited idea to die a dignified death.
Perhaps that brings me to my initial discomfort with this text. It is neither a work of history (almost no primary sources are cited) nor is it a scientific rebuttal of the ideas surrounding eugenics and scientific racism. I realized, towards the end of Myth of Race, that this book was more a work of, lets call it, anthropological disgust. It became clear that Sussman was writing this book as a way to understand (from a cultural-historical perspective) why the concepts of eugenics and scientific racism still persist until today. As an individual personally and professionally dedicated to the science of anthropology it is clear that the fact that scientific racism even remotely remains relevant, after decades of research discrediting it, greatly unsettled Sussman (as it should us all). The tenacity of racist ideas to survive, he argues, is due to the idea of culture itself (a concept which in itself negates biological determinism).
In the end I found Myth of Race to be an enlightening (and disturbing) overview of the major players who pushed (and continue to push) scientific racism into the 21st century. At first I found the author's castigatory tone disconcerting, but by the end I found it quite amusing to read the author impugn the character of those of his 'peers' who continued to promote scientific racism. And I get it, it is infuriating to see how racists continue to mobilized long discredited ideas of genetic racial differences to garner fear and power in today's society. To, in Sussman's words, "present a scientific veneer for those who don't read or understand legitimate science" (264). And this is the really dangerous part, how easily an (uneducated) public can be influence by what seems to be scientific knowledge.
Perhaps that brings me to my initial discomfort with this text. It is neither a work of history (almost no primary sources are cited) nor is it a scientific rebuttal of the ideas surrounding eugenics and scientific racism. I realized, towards the end of Myth of Race, that this book was more a work of, lets call it, anthropological disgust. It became clear that Sussman was writing this book as a way to understand (from a cultural-historical perspective) why the concepts of eugenics and scientific racism still persist until today. As an individual personally and professionally dedicated to the science of anthropology it is clear that the fact that scientific racism even remotely remains relevant, after decades of research discrediting it, greatly unsettled Sussman (as it should us all). The tenacity of racist ideas to survive, he argues, is due to the idea of culture itself (a concept which in itself negates biological determinism).
"Being anti-racist is not simply political correctness, it is proven science. Human races cannot be unequal when biological races do not exist among humans. It is impossible, scientifically and otherwise! It is the concept of culture that enables us to disprove the biologically deterministic anti-environmental view of racial inequality, and yet it is the reality of culture that continues to keep this same racist view of humanity alive." (227-8)
In the end I found Myth of Race to be an enlightening (and disturbing) overview of the major players who pushed (and continue to push) scientific racism into the 21st century. At first I found the author's castigatory tone disconcerting, but by the end I found it quite amusing to read the author impugn the character of those of his 'peers' who continued to promote scientific racism. And I get it, it is infuriating to see how racists continue to mobilized long discredited ideas of genetic racial differences to garner fear and power in today's society. To, in Sussman's words, "present a scientific veneer for those who don't read or understand legitimate science" (264). And this is the really dangerous part, how easily an (uneducated) public can be influence by what seems to be scientific knowledge.
January 28, 2018
Bitvis trögläst genomgång av rasismens, eller kanske snarare den rasistiska mytens, historia de senaste 500 åren. Det är många namn och inriktningar att hålla i huvudet och Sussman väjer inte för detaljerna, samtidigt som han inte gör anspråk på att stå för en komplett skildring av samtliga individer, grupper och teorier som passerat revy under dessa århundraden, inte minst under andra halvan av 1800-talet och fram till nazismens maktövertagande i Tyskland under tidigt 30-tal. Det är alltså avgränsat, samtidigt som det är både brett och svåröverskådligt.
Sussmans perspektiv är det amerikanska, och när han i bokens andra hälft börjar redogöra för efterkrigstidens rasistiska rörelser tappar han lite av sin relevans i min läsning, även om det går att dra paralleller till motsvarande utveckling i Sverige - inte minst vad gäller retoriken hos dessa rörelser. Det är samma frågor/myter som avhandlas i USA; om mångkultur, invandring, kriminalitet och den inhemska kulturens kommande undergång - det som i sverigevänlig terminologi brukar kallas "islamifiering".
En sak som skrämmer mig är hur Sussman på slutet lyckas blottlägga de krafter och grupper som lagt grunden för Donald Trumps presidentskap, utan att veta att detta kommer att ske (boken kom i början av 2016 och skrevs innan Trump klivit ut på scenen som reell kandidat). Kapitlen om "The Pioneer Fund" är i princip obligatoriska för den som vill ha en djupare förklaring till det mångåriga och långtående arbete som som gjorde det möjligt för Trump att kandidera till - och vinna - presidentvalet.
Vi får under bokens gång också en skildring av kulturbegreppets framväxt som ett slags motpol till den rasistiska världsbild som trots allt dominerade kring det förra sekelskiftet. Franz Boas är ett namn jag förvisso redan känner till, då jag läst några poäng socialantropologi, men jag hade inte tillfullo begripit den betydelse såväl han som kulturbegreppet faktiskt hade i kampen mot (den biologiska) rasismen. Att rasismen lyckats klänga sig kvar genom att essentialisera kulturbegreppet och därmed i princip göra det synonymt (åtminstone för deras intressen) med det biologiska rasbegreppet är däremot en annan sak, och avhandlas inte i denna bok (vars huvudsakliga fokus alltså ligger på myten om att det skulle existera biologiska, mänskliga raser).
Sammanfattningsvis alltså en intressant, om än trögläst, bok som på ett överskådligt sätt ritar upp den moderna rasismens släktträd.
Sussmans perspektiv är det amerikanska, och när han i bokens andra hälft börjar redogöra för efterkrigstidens rasistiska rörelser tappar han lite av sin relevans i min läsning, även om det går att dra paralleller till motsvarande utveckling i Sverige - inte minst vad gäller retoriken hos dessa rörelser. Det är samma frågor/myter som avhandlas i USA; om mångkultur, invandring, kriminalitet och den inhemska kulturens kommande undergång - det som i sverigevänlig terminologi brukar kallas "islamifiering".
En sak som skrämmer mig är hur Sussman på slutet lyckas blottlägga de krafter och grupper som lagt grunden för Donald Trumps presidentskap, utan att veta att detta kommer att ske (boken kom i början av 2016 och skrevs innan Trump klivit ut på scenen som reell kandidat). Kapitlen om "The Pioneer Fund" är i princip obligatoriska för den som vill ha en djupare förklaring till det mångåriga och långtående arbete som som gjorde det möjligt för Trump att kandidera till - och vinna - presidentvalet.
Vi får under bokens gång också en skildring av kulturbegreppets framväxt som ett slags motpol till den rasistiska världsbild som trots allt dominerade kring det förra sekelskiftet. Franz Boas är ett namn jag förvisso redan känner till, då jag läst några poäng socialantropologi, men jag hade inte tillfullo begripit den betydelse såväl han som kulturbegreppet faktiskt hade i kampen mot (den biologiska) rasismen. Att rasismen lyckats klänga sig kvar genom att essentialisera kulturbegreppet och därmed i princip göra det synonymt (åtminstone för deras intressen) med det biologiska rasbegreppet är däremot en annan sak, och avhandlas inte i denna bok (vars huvudsakliga fokus alltså ligger på myten om att det skulle existera biologiska, mänskliga raser).
Sammanfattningsvis alltså en intressant, om än trögläst, bok som på ett överskådligt sätt ritar upp den moderna rasismens släktträd.
December 8, 2024
"Biological races do not exist―and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today."
This is one of the most profound books I've read in a long time. When I think about a book like this, it provides insight on why the dehumanizing evils surrounding the myth of race has haunted and destroyed humanity for centuries. Reading a book like this explores the motives behind the all of the ugliness that came from the invention of race, to include the prejudices, the stereotypes, generalities, fear, and outright ignorance spawned from the lies by European "scholars" in particular who made up the concept of race with ZERO scientific evidence to back up their lies. From those lies they claimed and believed that Caucasians are somehow "superior" to other human beings, especially in the so-called "New World" (which wasn't new as those lands were occupied by other humans who didn't look like them and might not have been advanced in the same sense that they were).
This dehumanizing lie about race was carried with explorers who went on to become pirates and plunderers who stole from other humans in those far off lands and even used religion to justify those lies. That explains why the atrocities of human enslavement came about, particularly in the colonies. There is great effort to hide, omit and conceal truth like this from the history books, especially American history.
This sad and tragic book that highlights a long held lie about race is highly recommended for those who wonder why racism still exists centuries after it was first invented. This book educates us on how the myth of race was founded upon a lie that endured for centuries by those who sought to use the lie as a means for conquest, theft and a false belief of "superiority" over other humans who look different from them. It's an eye opener who seek truth and wish to denounce the long held lies about "race".
This is one of the most profound books I've read in a long time. When I think about a book like this, it provides insight on why the dehumanizing evils surrounding the myth of race has haunted and destroyed humanity for centuries. Reading a book like this explores the motives behind the all of the ugliness that came from the invention of race, to include the prejudices, the stereotypes, generalities, fear, and outright ignorance spawned from the lies by European "scholars" in particular who made up the concept of race with ZERO scientific evidence to back up their lies. From those lies they claimed and believed that Caucasians are somehow "superior" to other human beings, especially in the so-called "New World" (which wasn't new as those lands were occupied by other humans who didn't look like them and might not have been advanced in the same sense that they were).
This dehumanizing lie about race was carried with explorers who went on to become pirates and plunderers who stole from other humans in those far off lands and even used religion to justify those lies. That explains why the atrocities of human enslavement came about, particularly in the colonies. There is great effort to hide, omit and conceal truth like this from the history books, especially American history.
This sad and tragic book that highlights a long held lie about race is highly recommended for those who wonder why racism still exists centuries after it was first invented. This book educates us on how the myth of race was founded upon a lie that endured for centuries by those who sought to use the lie as a means for conquest, theft and a false belief of "superiority" over other humans who look different from them. It's an eye opener who seek truth and wish to denounce the long held lies about "race".
March 4, 2024
When it comes to race there are essentially three main streams of thought in Western countries:
1. Races are real biological groups in humanity with important differences making some groups better than others (racism). Believed by white nationalists, the KKK, nazi's and similar people.
2. Races are real biological groups in humanity but there are no relevant differences between them that would make one group better than another (anti-racism & racialism). This is where most people nowadays are, particularly in America.
3. Races are a harmful social construct, essentially a made up division into groups based on arbitrary cultural differences and select biologically irrelevant surface features (anti-racialism). This is the modern scientific view of things, as evidenced by for example the American Anthropological Association's Statement on Race. In this view dividing people into "white" and "black" based on the amount of melanin in their skin is just as silly as thinking people's bloodgroups will determine their fortunes (as happens in Japan).
It is this third stance that this book argues for. Personally I find that most people don't know this third view even exists. It is a great textbook that I cannot recommend enough.
It pairs well with more quantitative work by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (Genes, Peoples and Languages; The History and Geography of Human Genes) which shows that all humans descend from human populations migrating out of Africa as early as 300kyr ago and consequently show remarkable genetic cohesion and uniformity compared to other species.
1. Races are real biological groups in humanity with important differences making some groups better than others (racism). Believed by white nationalists, the KKK, nazi's and similar people.
2. Races are real biological groups in humanity but there are no relevant differences between them that would make one group better than another (anti-racism & racialism). This is where most people nowadays are, particularly in America.
3. Races are a harmful social construct, essentially a made up division into groups based on arbitrary cultural differences and select biologically irrelevant surface features (anti-racialism). This is the modern scientific view of things, as evidenced by for example the American Anthropological Association's Statement on Race. In this view dividing people into "white" and "black" based on the amount of melanin in their skin is just as silly as thinking people's bloodgroups will determine their fortunes (as happens in Japan).
It is this third stance that this book argues for. Personally I find that most people don't know this third view even exists. It is a great textbook that I cannot recommend enough.
It pairs well with more quantitative work by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (Genes, Peoples and Languages; The History and Geography of Human Genes) which shows that all humans descend from human populations migrating out of Africa as early as 300kyr ago and consequently show remarkable genetic cohesion and uniformity compared to other species.
June 17, 2020
First published 6 years ago, the background on The Myth of Race is still relevant and especially so today. For the most part it covers the early 20th century history of Eugenics: one of the major strengths here is documenting the strong ties between ideas originally developed in the US that were applied later in Nazi Germany: I’ve read at least on book with that theme but Sussman did a better job in showing the relationship. He prominently features the ‘work’ of Madison Grant who had undue influence on eugenic beliefs and post 1st world war immigration policy. It also highlights the virtual war of ideas between people like Grant and Frank Boas (the coverage in this book was more interesting than the recent “Gods of the Upper Air”). The section on more recent activity is very good too and we’re actually spared from delving too much into Trump territory as it was published at a time when it was unthinkable that such a clod could be elected leader of the country. The more recent section wasn’t as engaging, but it did touch on some of the cretins in the Trump orbit like Kris Kobach.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews