The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea

by Robert Wald Sussman

The Pioneer Fund provided substantial grants to the physicist. He also became a close colleague and confidant of the neo-Nazi Carleton Putnam, who even recommended that some of his own Pioneer Fund money go to Shockley in his war against both blacks and Jews. Funds were given to Shockley personally and to Stanford University to further his research. Shockley organized a nonprofit publicity foundation, the Foundation for Research and Education on Eugenics and Dysgenics, to launder these funds “to further public understanding” (Tucker 2002, 145).

From 1968 to 1976, the Pioneer Fund gave the equivalent of approximately $1.4 million (in 2014 dollar...

Shockley used Pioneer Funds that had been granted to his Stanford University lab to hire neo-Nazi colleague Robert E. Kuttner (see last chapter) and to distribute decade-old articles from neo-Nazi publications (Tucker 2002). He basically used Pioneer Fund money, with the fund’s complete support and blessing, to attempt to sway public opinion.

Jensen, on the other hand, began receiving Pioneer Fund money in 1973, and the fund continued to support him until 1999.

This support financed a special institute, the Institute for the Study of Educational Differences, which was set up to escape the University of California, Berkeley’s oversight. Jensen was president and his wife was vice-president. It received over $2 million in today’s currency. Jensen was never very outspoken about his racist views but he did participate in a few activities that illustrated his racism.

For example, he contributed to and served on the scientific board of Neue Anthropologie, a German journal dedicated to restoring Rassenhygiene and preserving the rac...

This journal was a clone of MQ; it featured similar contributors and even on occasions the same articles. Throughout his career, racial differences in intelligence remained an obsession, and recently he teamed up with the recently deceased president of the Pioneer Fund, J. Philippe Rushton (...

Although his statements and publications had no real scientific validity, Jensen gave “scientific” validity to the claims of current racists and, of course, thus, did exactly what the Pioneer Fund wanted. When a person with some scientific legitimacy repeats this cant, it is easier to convince an uneducated public of the old racist myths. Jensen’s myth (coined as “Jensenism”) was basically that...

He failed to understand the devastating criticisms of the IQ argument Otto Klineberg provided in the 1920s and 1930s and those that other scientists have provided ever since (see articles in Fish 2002, 2013; and Cravens 2009 for examples). He failed to understand the devastating criticisms of the concept of race put forward by anthropologists ever since Boas,...

There can be no genetic association of IQ with race if IQ is not a simple unitary genetic characteristic and if biological races do not exist among humans. However, again, real science is not at question here. The Pioneer Fund is simply interested in continuing the Western European myth of racism, regardless of science. They believe in their cultural myth just as many literal Christians believe that the Earth was created in 4004 B.C. Science cannot tr...

However, even though there is much scientific proof that IQ is not a simple hereditary trait, that it is not easily measured, that all measures of what we assume to be intelligence have some cultural bias, and that biological races do not exist within our species, these modern racists still insist that a simple measured score for IQ is inherited and that there is some relationship between something called race and that measure.

Even Jensen admitted that “race” is a social and not a biological construct (Jensen 1995, 42).

The most notorious of the Foundation for Human Understanding publications was Stanley Burnham’s, America’s Bimodal Crisis: Black Intelligence in White Society (1985). This racist diatribe claimed that African Americans were an expense to their employers because they stole, they were incompetent, and having them as employees generated legal fees. Burnham (a pseudonym) also claimed that he knew a number of African American PhD candidates who had such a poor grasp of language that their theses had to be rewritten by trained secretaries and editors.

In addition, he doubted that “they has [sic] researched and written their own papers.” Harking back to the Mortonites, Burnham argued that black people have smaller brains than Europeans and that Africa’s problems are the result of the “ignorance and irresponsibility of the African mind.” Black people’s problems in other parts of the world were the result of “genetic deficiencies that they cannot remedy.”

Burnham finally claimed that because of the bimodal distribution of intelligence between blacks and whites, “black students whose intelligence and academic performance persistently fall below acceptable standards should be steered as quickly and effectively as possible into job situations in which performance standards are less stringent ...

Burnham believed that his “monogram” [sic] was so important that it “will be read and appreciated a century from now” (Tucker 2002, 158). The Pioneer Fund, through the Foundation for Human Understanding, published three editions of this “monogram” between 1985 and 1994. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Pioneer Fund continued to fund the Foundation for Human Understanding and a few other distributors until it began to shif...

To Pearson and his followers, Christian universalists and biological egalitarians were creating disastrous consequences because they were going against the sociobiological goal of perpetuating white, Nordic superior genes by being unnaturally altruistic with inferior races (they weren’t following the guidelines of their “selfish” genes). Racial prejudice was an evolutionary necessity—it was a natural human tendency, and it perpetuated and maintained the integrity of the gene pool.

They saw mating of different races (species?) in zoos as unnatural and a perversion of natural instincts. Thus, over the years, the main purpose of ISM publications and MQ, the journal of the Pioneer Fund, was to encourage racial conflict (often reprinting Pearson’s earlier Nazi Northern League pamphlets).

The Pioneer Fund basically has been publishing and dispersing the same, unscientific propaganda for five decades and continues to do so. As Tucker (2002, 179) states: “What Pioneer received for its almost $2 million investment, not in Pearson the anthropologist but in Pearson the activist, was largely a campaign for the United States to emulate the Nuremberg Laws, denying to nonwhites the benefits of citizenship.” P...

In the early 1980s, Pearson served as an advisor to Senator Jesse Helms, and, in 1982, he received a letter of praise from President Ronald Reagan for his “substantial contributions to promoting and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad” (quoted in Kühl 1994, 4). In 1986, Pearson was discovered to be closely associated with a number of former leaders of U.S. intelligence agencies and American ...

Currently he serves as director of the Council for Social and Economic Studies, which owns Scott-Townsend Publishers, the publisher of most of his recent books, and he continues to publish several journals in Washington, DC, including MQ, The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, and The Journal of Indo-European Studies. He remains on the board of trustees of the American Foreign Policy Institute. Chip Berlet (2003), a senior analyst at Political Res...

Besides financing Pearson, during the past thirty years, the Pioneer Fund has continued to fund a major twin study, seven new scientific racists, and those who oppose immigration into the United States (Tucker 2002). By 2000, the Fund had provided more than $10 million (in 2014 dollars) to support these enterprises. I will discuss the first two of these topics in this chapter and the Pioneer Fund’s spearheading of the modern anti-immigration agenda in the next.

Burt was a Kantian who believed that “primitive races” were unable to acquire civilization and that slum dwellers and the Irish were innately inferior. His work on the correlation between IQ scores of identical twins raised apart and those raised together was proven to be patently fraudulent (Kamin 1974; Brace 2005). Known cases of identical twins separated at birth and raised apart are extremely rare. There had been only three published studies of this kind before Burt’s.

Robert A. Gordon (1932–) is a retired sociologist who taught at John Hopkins University from 1963 to 2005. Gordon’s ex-wife, Linda S. Gottfredson (1947–), who for many years was the only woman to receive funds from the Pioneer Fund, is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director, with Gordon, of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society.

Gordon believes there are direct correlations between race, IQ, poverty, juvenile delinquency, criminality, and even involvement in conspiracy rumors, all of which he argues are genetically based characteristics (Miller 1995; Tucker 2002). His major theme is that genetically based IQ differences are more accurate determinants of black-white differences in crime statistics than are income, education, or occupation.

In 1999, when asked by a reporter if he thought people with low IQs should be paid to be sterilized, as Shockley had suggested, Gordon flippantly answered: ...

I would prefer not paying people. As far as black people are concerned.… I think it’s right to give them the proper information in order for them to do that” (quoted in Papavasiliou 1999). He has defended the Pioneer Fund as one of “the last sources of private support that courageously op...

Gottfredson wrote a letter that was published in the Wall Street Journal and signed by fifty-two scientists in defense of the volume The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994), which summarized the rhetoric of the new scientific racism. The letter was written after the book was criticized by a large group of competent scientists (see Jacoby and Glauberman 1995, for example). In this letter, the members of the new bigot brigade claimed that since as many as fifty-two scientists signed this letter, the contents of the book and of the letter must be true. Using this logic, since the vast majority of anthropologists and other social scientists and of geneticists do not agree with the conclusions of this volume, does that mean it must be false? Obviously not. However, it is the actual science that began with Boas and his colleagues and that has continued to this date that makes these authors’ beliefs and approach untenable at any level.

Lynn (2011) argued that the eugenicists of the early twentieth century correctly predicted the deterioration of Western civilization as a result of medical technology and charitable assistance to the poor. This allowed an underclass of genetically less intelligent and less moral people to persist. Thus Lynn (1972) has concluded: “What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the ‘phasing out’ of such peoples.… Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality.” He has repeated this sentiment many times since (Lynn 2011). For example, adding to this quote, Lynn stated in 2004, “Survival of the fittest, extinction of the unfit. This is the way to a better world.”

Modern Racism and Anti-Immigration Policies In the last couple of chapters, I stressed that the Pioneer Fund was implementing an agenda, essentially mirroring the Satterfield plan that it had unsuccessfully attempted to establish in Mississippi in the 1960s. The fund was determined to influence policy throughout the United States and in other Western countries. One major goal was to convince the public of the different nature of black (now often referred to more vaguely as brown) and white citizens and to convince them that brown inferiority is due mainly to inheritance and not to environmental factors.

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Dickson has given the closing remarks at the American Renaissance conferences since their inception in 1994 (including the 2012 conference). Tanton’s letters have expressed his anti-Semitism and his problems with the Roman Catholic Church and several Protestant denominations, especially the Lutheran Church, because they see themselves as universal and transcending national boundaries (Beirich 2008).

Tanton is surrounded by a group of employees and colleagues with similar racist views. Wayne Lutton is a longtime deputy of Tanton’s who works at his Petoskey, Michigan, office and edits the journal The Social Contract, published by Tanton’s press. Lutton is a white supremacist who holds leadership positions in a number of white nationalist hate groups and at a number of publications of such groups, including American Renaissance.

The lead article for a special issue on “Europhobia” was written by John Vinson, president of the AICF. In the article, Vinson argues that multiculturalism is replacing “Euro-American culture” with “dysfunctional Third World cultures” (quoted in Southern Poverty Law Center 2009b). Tanton also contributed to this issue in an article that blamed unwarranted hatred and fear of whites on multiculturalists and immigrants (Southern Poverty Law Center 2009b). FAIR still advertises the journal on its website, and Tanton serves on its editorial board.

Earlier, Richard Lamm, the three-time governor of Colorado and a current member of FAIR’s advisory board, had voiced similar concerns. Sounding very much like the deadly physicians of the Third Reich, he said that “terminally ill people have a duty to die and get out of the way” (quoted in Beirich 2007). Lamm also expressed fear of race wars in his 1985 novel, Megatraumas: America at the Year 2000. Tanton has also expressed pro-eugenics viewpoints, for example in a 1996 letter that explained how FAIR’s new website emphasized how mankind used eugenic principles in breeding programs for plants and lower animals in order to condition the public about how eugenics might be used on humans.

He stated: “We report ways [eugenics] is currently being done, but under the term genetics rather than eugenics” (quoted in Southern Poverty Law Center 2009b).

Concerning the Alabama law, journalist Jean Damu (2012) writes: “The Nuremberg Laws … addressed economic and everyday social relations. For instance, entering into a contract with a Jew became illegal. Providing social services to Jews became illegal. Jews were relegated to their own schools.… The intent of all this naturally was to get the Jews to leave Germany.… Though the Nuremberg Laws were, we would like to think, far more extensive, invasive and racist than anything that could possibly be accepted anywhere in America in 2012, there is a disturbing overlap of key provisions of the laws; and the intent, to get the Jews in Germany and undocumented immigrants here, to ‘deport themselves,’ is the same.”

As we have seen, Europeans and Western European colonists of the United States first categorized “others” mainly with two fairly unchanging paradigms: polygenism and monogenism. Polygenecists (or pre-Adamites) believed that non-Western Europeans were not created by God but were on the earth before Adam and that physical characteristics and complex behaviors were biologically fixed and immutable. No environmental conditions could improve their lot.

Monogenecists believed that all humans were created by God but that “others” had degenerated from the original ideal because they lived in less-than-ideal environmental conditions (either a bad climate and/or uncivilized social conditions). To monogenecists, these poor creatures could eventually be “saved” by introducing them to Western European civilization.

Within both paradigms, Western Europeans were considered superior to o...

Until Darwin’s time, polygenism was supported “scientifically” by a Humeian/Kantian ethnocentric inductive philosophy that assumed that Western European civilization was superior and could...

Also, they believed that certain physical and behavioral traits (such as skull size and shape and mental capacity) were superior in Western Europeans and had been created by God in that ...

The “science” of the monogenecists was bolstered in the early nineteenth century by Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, the idea that physical traits and complex behaviors could be changed from one...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Lamarck’s theory was discredited and Mendelian genetics was rediscovered (Moore 2001). Laboratory experiments by August Weismann and others had discredited Lamarck’s theories and monogenism was left w...

Biological determinism and polygenic racism were considered the only “scientifically” valid explanations for the differences among human populations and between “unfit” individuals and those with superior heredity. Eugenics was born and became the dominant paradigm; it became conventional wisdom both scientifical...

The polygenecists considered monogenism to be dead: there was no valid environmental explanation for human variation. Some individuals and peoples were simply biologically inferior to (certain) Western Europeans, and they carried and transmi...

Eugenics and scientific racism reached its peak in the United States in the mid-1920s. In 1924, Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act and Virginia passed a sterilization law and a law preventing the marriage of people of two races. In the same year, as follow-ups to Madison Grant’s (1916) Passing of the Great Race, many Grantian eugenicists published similar volumes, inclu...

Eugenics courses became popular in high schools and colleges throughout the United States. American families entered “fitter family” contests and attended popular lectures by leading eugenicists, who by the 1920s had prominent positions in academe, business, and politics. The American Museum of Natural History displa...

We can see a direct linear relationship of racist ideology through the centuries, and we can follow a historical pattern of racial prejudice and hatred. This prejudice is fueled by the same underlying theory that human variation can be easily put into simple categories (racial classifications), that these categories are inherently distinct, that they can be ranked in ways that make some “races” superior to others, and that many of the most important human characteristics (such as intelligence, criminality, aggression, even the ability to navigate ships) are biologically determined and racially variable and cannot (or can only superficially) be influenced by environmental factors.

This ancient ideology can be traced from its beginnings during the Spanish Inquisition and the pre-Adamite scientific justification of racism of the fifteenth century, through the initial period of European colonization, into the period of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the eugenics movement and Nazism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This same ideology can currently be seen in a new “scientific racism” of th...