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Race As a Scientific Hot Potato 101 Race as a Scientific Hot Potato: a Review of The Retreat of Scientific Racism Randoif Arguelles Elazar Barkan. The Retreat ofScientific Racism: Changing Concepts ofRace in Britain and the United States between the World Wars. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xiv, 381. professor of rhetoric once told me jokingly that the easiest way to win an argument is to compare your opponent to Hitler. Ironically, some historians of Ascience have contended that this is precisely the reason for the decline of once- prevalent theories of racial hierarchies in the biological and social sciences. According to this argument, the atrocities committed by the Nazi party during and immediately preceding the Second World War—atrocities motivated by the belief in the inherent superiority of the Aryan race—so repulsed the rest of the world that biological and social scientists in the United States and Great Britain abandoned their own theories of innate racial traits and hierarchies. Under this explanation, argued by such scholars as Leon Poliakov, Thomas F. Gossett, Nancy Stepan, Michael Banton, and Hamilton Cravens (1, note 1), controversial scientific arguments for the superiority of certain races and the corresponding inferiority of others finally lost their currency as the result of political pressures and shifting public sentiment against Nazism. Such views credit the fortuitous rise of right-minded political influences—namely, opposition to Nazism—with disabusing scientists of wrong-headed scientific theories—namely, scientific racism. Elazar Barkan finds this view too simplistic. Global politics, he claims, did have an influence on the judgments of the scientific community, but previous historians have overplayed its significance. More accurately, says Barkan, changes in the nature of the scientific disciplines, changes in the composition of the scientific community, and the personal histories of the scientists active during the interwar years were in fact responsible for scientific racism’s fall from grace (2). Thus, unlike previous historians, in addition to politics, Barkan brings sociological and psychological factors to bear in his analysis. More importantly, Barkan notes, this convergence of sociological, political, and psychological causal dynamics on the scientific thought of the interwar years preceded the rise of Nazism. Barkan’s fuller account is cogent, insightful, and thought-provoking. Barkan argues that a general pattern can be discerned in the American and British scientific communities’ shift away from scientific racism. First, discord occurred among the scientists themselves with respect to the interwar era’s commonly accepted racial typologies and race-based theories of human behavior. According to Barkan, the reification of race had been in vogue since the nineteenth century, and was first articulated in the writings of Count Arthur de Gobineau (15-16). Barkan contends that by the 1920s and 1930s, the lack of solid empirical evidence and the absence of epistemological foundations for scientific racism led inevitably to competing theories of race, which in turn led to scientists questioning the ontological status of race itself. Second, in the midst of this disagreement over the nature and function of racial hierarchies, a new breed of scientists joined the professional ranks. These scientists 102 enjoyed a peculiar dual status: that of simultaneous insider and outsider in the scientific community (9). They were insiders in terms of their professional expertise and position, but outsiders with respect to some characteristic that placed them in an ethnic, gender, geographical, or political minority within their professional peer group. Thus, Jews, women, immigrants, and leftists figure largely in Barkan’s account. As insiders, they had sufficient professional credibility to challenge the scientific status quo. As outsiders, they had a vested interest in promoting egalitarianism within the scientific community and society in general—or at least tended towards egalitarianism more readily than their old- stock, “mainline” colleagues (177). Barkan does not go so far as to say that these insider- outsider scientists were the only ones in their profession arguing against racial hierarchies. He does claim, however, that they were the first to offer a unified public front for anti-racist views (280). This touches upon the third component of Barkan’s thesis: that from 1933 to 193$ the retreat of scientific racism moved from an intra-disciplinary discussion to a full-fledged public discourse when these insider-outsider scientists took it upon themselves to disseminate their anti-racist analyses in a public forum (10-11, 279). Borrowing a term from Michel Foucauk, Barkan marks this transformation of the scientist into a politically active “universal intellectual” as the beginning of the end of scientific racism. The book is organized into three parts, each corresponding to the various stages by which the reification of racial hierarchies in science became undone. Within each section, Barkan covers the material in a similar fashion, examining relevant secondary sources and surveying in detail the published works and private correspondence of the American and British scientists who involved themselves in the ongoing discussions surrounding race. Part One examines the various conceptions of race entertained by British and American anthropologists. Barkan’s discussion of racial theories in British anthropology traces the professionalization of the discipline—from annchair ethnologists to physical and cultural anthropologists working in the field—as much as it discusses concepts of race. According to Barkan, the field of British anthropology was too diffuse for practitioners within the discipline to arrive at a consensus on the function or importance of race. By contrast, the American anthropological community was more clearly defined into two camps: the racists, best exemplified by the theories of Charles Benedict Davenport and his eugenicist Galton Society; and the egalitarians, led most prominently by the German-born Franz Boas and his students, including Alfred Kroeber and Margaret Mead. Barkan notes, however, that even an egalitarian such as Boas did not think to question the reality of racial categories. Boas argued for a basic equality among various racial types, not against racial types as valid scientific categories. Nevertheless, Barkan contends that even in this climate of institutionalized scientific racism, the discrediting of race as a valid causal dynamic in human behavior and differentiation had begun. He argues that the “theoretical chaos” of British anthropology “left the door open to the explicit rejection of racism” (65). Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Boas and his followers’ managed to distinguish physical anthropology from cultural anthropology, initiating the novel view that race might be a function of society, not heredity (78). Part Two of The Retreat of $cientfic Racism discusses the debates and controversies surrounding race in the biological sciences. Since anthropologists failed to arrive at a consensus on how to define race, let alone how to utilize racial categories in 103 their work, Barkan contends that the task then fell to biologists to expound the nature and meaning of racial categories and hierarchies (137). In this chapter, he focuses on geneticists such as the liberal egalitarian Herbert Spencer Jennings and the conservative egalitarian Raymond Pearl, biometricians such as Karl Pearson (the inventor of the correlation coefficient R in quantitative analysis), the racist Charles Davenport, and Julian Huxley, a convert to the egalitarian camp. Barkan’s main point in this section is that both racist and egalitarian biologists in Britain and America “presented hypotheses divorced from scientific data” (142). for instance, in a re-evaluation of data collected on immigrants by racist biologist Harry H. Laughlin, Herbert Spencer Jennings criticized Laughlin’s statistical interpretations, offering his own politically motivated egalitarian take on the evidence (199-201).’ The hope that biology could settle the disputes over the function and relevance of race was dashed, for, as Barkan notes, “Science could lend itself as easily to either a racist or an anti-racist interpretation, whether by biologists or social scientists. ... [TJhe evolution of anti-racism in science was not inevitable” (228). Part Three of this monograph deals with the repercussions that resulted from a lack of a unified scientific front: from the ashes of this scientific agnosticism arose the phenomenon in the late 1930s of scientists as political activists. The insider-outsider scientists (discussed above) took it upon themselves to oppose racism in a public forum as well as within their respective academic disciplines, even though this practice was generally discouraged by the British and American scientific communities (11). Here, Barkan treads on more familiar ground, since the political activities of scientists in the late 1930s—most notably, Franz Boas in the United States—are well documented. Barkan does not dispute that politics played a large role in the discrediting of scientific racism. In fact, he maintains that “political beliefs had a greater impact in attitudes toward race than did scientific commitments” (343). But he also maintains that the political activities of scientists, even the opposition to Nazi racism, would not have been possible if the social and biological scientific disciplines had not
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