The Myth of Race by Robert Wald Sussman

The Myth of Race by Robert Wald Sussman

Author:Robert Wald Sussman [Sussman, Robert Wald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780674417311
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2014-10-06T07:00:00+00:00


Summary of Boas’s Contributions

In his classic book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn examines how scientific paradigms change over time. He states: “Though a generation is sometimes required to effect the change, scientific communities have again and again been converted to new paradigms.… Though some scientists … may resist indefinitely, most of them can be reached one way or another. Conversions will occur a few at a time until, after the last holdouts have died, the whole profession will again be practicing under a single, but now a different paradigm” (Kuhn 1962, 151). By the mid-1930s, the old guard of strict biological determinism and eugenics was dying off. Osborn died in 1935, two years after his forced retirement. Grant was devastated. He had visited or spoken to Osborn every day since 1895 and had worked with him in creating a number of organizations, including the Bronx Zoo, the New York Aquarium, the Galton Society, and the AES. Grant died two years later, in 1937, at the age of seventy-two, having been debilitated with arthritis for many years. As mentioned previously, in his final days, Grant had been helping Herman Goering organize an international hunting exposition. Goering was commander in chief of the Luftwaffe (Nazi Air Force) and Hitler’s designated successor. The exposition did take place and culminated with a few selected delegates accompanying Goering in a hunting party. Grant had been one of these selected guests but did not live to attend the hunt. Laughlin died in 1943 (Black 2003). He remained a staunch eugenicist to the end. Davenport, who had retired from Cold Spring Harbor in 1934, died in 1944 of pneumonia at the age of seventy-eight. He was an active elder statesman of eugenics to the end, protesting the increasing opposition in America to Nazism and to racist policies at home and abroad. None of the big four of scientific racism produced students or academic “offspring.” As Spiro (2009, 339) states: “Finally, the simple fact of human mortality played an inescapable role in the demise of scientific racism.… The same men who organized the movement were still in charge three decades later, when they were old, reactionary, and tired. And as they began to die off, almost nobody was interested in taking their place.”

Thus, from the fifteenth century to the commencement of World War II, Western Europeans and Western European colonists of the United States defined “others” mainly within two fairly unchanging paradigms: polygenism and monogenism. The polygenecists (or pre-Adamites) believed that people who were not 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. The monogenecists believed that all humans were created by God but that some had degenerated from the original ideal because they lived in less than ideal environmental conditions (either bad climate and/or uncivilized social conditions). To the monogenecists these poor creatures could eventually be “saved” if they could be reintroduced to Western European civilization.



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