Why Us? by James Le Fanu

Author:James Le Fanu [James Le Fanu ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007380053
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Paralleling the new science of eugenics, The Descent provided the rationale for scientific racism. Darwin scarcely invented racism, and was himself passionately opposed to slavery, though he had no qualms about describing the human races in terms of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ and likening the ‘lower’ to the ‘higher’ apes. But The Descent, with its claims about the supposed inferiority of the ‘savage’, cloaked racism in the aura of scientific respectability, challenging the progressive spirit of the times that they might aspire to a better standard of life. How could they hope to do so when it would require thousands of years of evolutionary progress to acquire the necessary increased brain capacity and moral standards of the European races?

The Descent prompted the sort of racial stereotyping epitomised by Francis Galton’s description of American Indians, which anticipated their fate in the face of a superior ‘civilisation’.

The men are naturally cold, melancholic, patient and taciturn. [Families] are said to live together in a hut like persons assembled by accident and not tied by affection. The youth treat their parents with neglect and often with such harshness as to horrify Europeans who have witnessed their conduct. The mothers have been seen to commit infanticide without the slightest discomposure … The nature of the American Indians appears to contain the minimum of affectionate and social qualities compatible with the continuance of their race.

In the United States, scientific racism would lead to the introduction of immigration quotas that favoured those of ‘Nordic’ descent over southern Europeans, while barring potential migrants from Africa and Asia as ‘ineligible for citizenship’. ‘America must be kept American,’ declared Calvin Coolidge, the President who signed the 1924 Immigration Act. ‘Biological laws show … that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.’

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