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Darwin’s Borrowed Allegory and the Apocryphal Six Races of Buffon

6/1/2017

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          When I was in the process of developing my course on human variation I discussed the course with my colleague and friend, Doug Crews, professor of anthropology at the Ohio State University.  He had been teaching a course in human variation and the two of us decided we would try to put together a reader that we could use for both our classes.  One of the articles I proposed was chapter VII of Darwin’s Descent of Man, the chapter entitled “On the Races of Man” (1871).  While there are many 19th century racial anachronisms in this chapter, in it Darwin makes a strong argument for the unity of the human species, all groups coming from a common ancestor, and for the differences being largely the result of adaptation to environmental circumstances.  For many years I required my students to read this chapter to contextualize the 19th century race concept and to see the argument Darwin made against polygenism or the separate origins of the races.  Graves, in The Emperor’s New Clothes which I have used in my race class, summarizes the critical paragraph from The Descent of Man in table form (2001:66).  This is the same paragraph to which many introductory anthropological texts call attention when discussing human variation.  In this selection, Darwin argues for the lack of clear boundaries between races and that therefore there is only a single human species with a single origin:

But the most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed. Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory de St-Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them (Darwin, 1871:232-233).

          ​I have used this statement in my presentations many times to help convince students of the social nature of the concept of race.  But something about it troubled me.  I knew that many anthropological works cite Buffon as contributing to the 18th century understanding of human variation.  His suggested means of adaptation leading to race formation within the human species includes ideas that are still being investigated today. As he notes:

​Three causes … must be admitted, as concurring in the production of those varieties which we have remarked among the different nations of this earth: 1. The influence of climate; 2. Food, which has a great dependence on climate; and, 3. Manners, on which climate has a still greater influence (Buffon, 1749-1788, Volume V:139-140).

          But I also had been teaching throughout my career that Buffon was the anti-Linnaeus, he opposed the idea of classification as a valid pursuit in natural history.  After using Jon Marks’ book Human Biodiversity (1995) as a required text in several courses, this idea was strongly reinforced by his extensive coverage of the contrasting approaches of Linnaeus versus Buffon in early anthropology.  This led me to question the place of Buffon in understanding the history of the concept of race in anthropology.  If Buffon was anti-classification, why would he divide the human species up into a small number of races like other 18th century scholars?  Why would he use the concept of race in this “modern” sense of a few large groups?

Uses of the term “race”
​

           The idea that Buffon brought the term race into scientific discourse goes well back in the anthropological literature.  Montagu (1942) blames Buffon for the term while arguing how dangerous it is.  Montagu understands, however, that Buffon’s use of the term “race” is nothing like the usage seen since the early 19th century:

It is commonly stated that Buffon classified man into six races.  Buffon, who was the enemy of all rigid classifications, did nothing of the sort.  What he did was to provide an account of all the varieties of man known to him in a purely descriptive manner.  This is how he begins: “In Lapland, and on the northern coasts of Tartary, we find a race of men of an uncouth figure and small stature.”  and this is the type of Buffon’s description.  Here the word “race” is used for the first time in a scientific context, and it is quite clear, after reading Buffon, that he uses the word in no narrowly defined, but rather in a general sense.  Since Buffon’s works were widely read and translated into many European languages, he must be held at least partially responsible for the diffusion of the idea of a natural separation of the races in humankind, though he himself does not appear to have had such an idea in mind (Montagu, 1996:69).

          ​As a contrasting view, Nott and Gliddon (1857) assert that Buffon’s work was secondary and it was Cuvier who was truly responsible for the scientific classification of mankind:

Hence, although Linnæus, in his Systema Naturæ, brought together the genera Homo and Simia, under the general title Anthropomorpha, and although Buffon, filled with the importance of human Natural History, devoted a long chapter to the varieties of the human species, yet the first truly philosophical and practical recognition of the zoological relations of man appears in the anthropological introduction with which the illustrious Cuvier commences his far-famed Règne Animal. (Nott and Gliddon, 1857:215)

​           Smedley (1996) cites Scheidt (1950) as her source for Buffon bringing race into the vocabulary of the natural sciences.  The Scheidt piece is actually a 1925 German language publication which was translated, edited, and reprinted by Count in his 1950 reader, This is Race.  I point this out because one of the problems with understanding Buffon’s influence on the concept of race has been the use of secondary sources, translations, and abridgements of his work that do not always clearly capture the intent of Buffon.  Scheidt adds in a footnote to his article, “the word ‘race’ to all appearance was introduced into the language of natural science by Buffon,” Scheidt (1950:360).  Smedley (1996) goes on to suggest that the term was used by other earlier workers but none as significant for subsequent natural historians as Buffon.
           While Buffon may have been responsible for influencing many other workers to use the term race for what had been called varieties of the human species, as Montagu clearly points out, he was not using it the way later workers used it.  Here are some examples of the use of race in Buffon’s 1749 of the Varieties of the Human Species:

The Danish, Swedish, and Muscovite Laplanders, the inhabitants of Nova-Zembla, the Borandians, the Samoiedes, the Ostiacks of the old continent, the Greenlanders, and the savages to the north of the Esquimaux Indians, of the new continent, appear to be of one common race…[the Ostiacks] appear to form a shade between the race of Laplanders and the Tartars…[or] the Laplanders, the Samoiedes, the Borandians, the Nova-Zemblians, and perhaps the Greenlanders, and the savages to the north of the Esquimaux Indians, are Tartars reduced to the lowest point of degeneracy…the Ostiacks are less degenerated than the Tongusians, who though to the full as ugly, are yet more sizeable and shapely…Those of Formosa, and the Mariana islands, resemble each other in size, vigour, and features, and seem to form a race distinct from that of every other people around them…In Ceylon there is a species of savages, who are called Bedas; they occupy a small district on the north part of the island, and seem to be of a peculiar race…in the island of Mindoro, which is not far from Manilla, there is a race of men called Manghians, who have all tails of [four to five inches], and some of these men had even embraced the Catholic faith. [Emphasis added].

           These examples, drawn from Barr’s translation of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle illustrate even more clearly than Montagu’s that Buffon is using race in a 17th and early 18th century sense as synonymous with people or nation or society.  His usage is closer to what would be called an ethnic group today (Crews and Bindon, 1991).
           The last example also calls attention to another issue with Buffon’s discussion of the varieties of man and that is his uncritical acceptance of the existing literature for most of the groups that he discusses.  Gossett (1963) says that Buffon’s work was sometimes referred to by other authors as “unnatural history” making a play on the title of his huge volume of work to reflect the fact that Buffon’s credulity was greater than that of many of his successors and competitors.
           If we want to continue to credit Buffon with introducing the word race to the “scientific” literature, we need to do so the way that Montagu did, noting that it was a usage that would not be familiar to most readers today—or even through most of the 19th century.

How many races?

          Now for the idea that Buffon divided humanity up into six races; as noted by Montagu this is apocryphal, but it has had substantial staying power within the anthropological literature, from the 18th century up to the present. In a 2007 article in Annals of Human Biology, Biondi and Rickards repeat the six race orthodoxy, and the same year, Madrigal and Barbujani compile a table on the premise of Darwin’s paragraph and they also cite Buffon as having a six race system. The latter pair also attribute six races to Linnaeus (who never used the term “race”) by including his wild men and his monstrous men! In the 2006, 6th edition of Molnar’s Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups, he not only claims that Buffon had a six race system, he names the six races: Laplander, Tartar, South Asiatic, European, Ethiopian, American (Molnar, 2006:6). These six are the same ones listed by Madrigal and Barbujani and I suspect Molnar is the source for that part of their compilation.  Barbujani repeats this table in a 2010 publication with Colonna.  So this claim has continuing legs.
          In my presentations to various anthropology and biology classes over the years I have used variations on the table that Molnar presents the same way that I have used Darwin’s paragraph to illustrate the difference of opinion on how many races there are. This issue of Buffon’s six races was something that I just could not put out of my mind so I decided to try to find out how this got into the anthropological literature.
           I started with Darwin’s mention of Buffon’s six races in The Descent of Man.  After completing the list of numbers of races discussed by the various workers, Darwin has a footnote that reads as follows: “See a good discussion on this subject in Waitz, Introduction to Anthropology, Eng. translat., 1863, pp. 198-208, 227. I have taken some of the above statements from H. Tuttle’s Origin and Antiquity of Physical Man, Boston, 1866, p. 35.”  Here is the statement of Tuttle’s to which Darwin refers:

​Buffon makes six varieties of mankind; viz.,--Polar Negro, Tartar, American, Australian, Asiatic, European [emphasis added].  Kant divides man into four varieties, white, black, copper, and olive; Hunter into seven varieties; Netzau, into two; Virey, into three; Blumenbach into five; Desmoulins into sixteen species; Bury de St. Vincent, into fifteen; Morton into twenty-two families; Pickering, into eleven races; Burke, into sixty-three; Jacquinnot, into three species of one genus.  Such are the disagreements of those who have devoted themselves to this study.  Granting that mankind are classified by any of these systems, I cannot see how knowledge is advanced.  We cannot admit that mankind can have diversity of origin, while so united by one great plan.  If a species or variety of the genus Homo sprang up in Europe, and another in America, by agency of conditions existing in those localities, it would be beyond probability that they should both be formed on the same plan: what then of the possibility of sixty-three or more species being formed on the same model?  Deny we may, with plausibility, the origin of the diverse races from a single pair six thousand years ago; but the bond of union which exists between them points to a common source (Tuttle, 1866:35).

​           As we can see, Darwin took quite a lot of Tuttle’s treatment for his own use.  The preceding paragraph in the two pieces is remarkably similar.  It is interesting to note that the list of races that Tuttle lists for Buffon does not include any race from Africa.  Since other writers had taken issue with Buffon’s disdain for Africans before Tuttle, it is surprising that the absence of Africans did not raise an alarm.  The other source that Darwin lists, Waitz, reviews Buffon’s work in great detail and relies on many of his biological and ethnological statements, but never suggests that Buffon classified humans into a discrete number of races.  Once I had looked up Tuttle’s confusing statement and Waitz’s (1863) fairly clear treatment of Buffon, I was at a dead end because Tuttle cites no source for the six races of Buffon and Waitz does not mention them, so I began looking for other authors who could lead me to a source.  I quickly found Brewer’s statement about Buffon:

           The number of races proposed in these several systems varies from two to twenty or more.  One of the most convenient and popular divisions is that in which the white the black the red the yellow and the brown skins afford a basis for classifying mankind in five races but the classification proposed by Buffon into six primary races is now very generally accepted [emphasis added] and is for many reasons the most convenient for use in the study of Physical Geography.
           In accordance with the system of Buffon the six primary races are (1) the Caucasian (2) theMongolian (3) the American (4) the Malay (5) the African and (6) the Australian.
           Each of these is divided into a great number of sub races most of which are so connected by the intermediate shades of gradation and are so blended with one another that no sharp line of distinction can be drawn between them (Brewer, 1890:117).

​           Already we can see that the races are very different in the version given by Tuttle and the one from Brewer and neither one exactly corresponds to the list given by Molnar (derived from Hrdlička, but Molnar cites Slotkin, 1965 and Montagu 1960).  Like Tuttle, Brewer names no source for his races of Buffon, although it is “now very generally accepted” (Brewer, 1890:117).
           The one Buffon aficionado who actually espouses a six race system for man is Goldsmith ([1774] 1854).  Much of Goldsmith’s 1774 natural history is based on the work of Buffon, but when he comes to humans he takes a very interesting tack giving his own list of races:

​If we look round the world there seem to be not above six distinct varieties in the human species, each of which is strongly marked and speaks the kind seldom to have mixed with any other.  But there is nothing in the shape nothing in the faculties that shows their coming from different originals and the varieties of climate of nourishment and custom are sufficient to produce every change (Goldsmith, [1774] 1854:209).

​           We see here that the explanation for the origin of these races is essentially the same as that espoused by Buffon, a single human origin with adaptation to different environments accounting for the races.  The six races enumerated by Goldsmith are: Laplanders, Tartars, Southern Asiatics, Africans, Americans, Europeans, essentially the same as Molnar’s list, although Goldsmith doesn’t actually label the races the way Molnar suggests Buffon did.  Goldsmith offers the following note after saying that humanity is divided into six varieties: “I have taken four of these varieties from Linnaeus, those of the Laplanders and Tartars from Mr. Buffon,” (Goldsmith [1774] 1854:209).  Slotkin (1965) cites this note, attributing the six race system to Goldsmith, but it appears that few have bothered to take notice of it in the continuing attribution of this system to Buffon.
           In my search for the six races of Buffon, two authors cited sources for the number and name of the races: Molnar (2006) and Hrdlička (1941).  Molnar lists Buffon’s six races as part of a table, comparing the four races of Linnaeus, six of Buffon, five of Blumenbach, and three of Cuvier.  He notes at the bottom of the table:

Examples of attempts to divide mankind into discrete divisions according to their physical characteristics. These four foremost natural scientists of the eighteenth century agreed with the major divisions of Europe, African, and Asian peoples, but there was some difficulty in placing Native Americans, Southeast Asians, and Pacific Groups. Sources: Slotkin, J.S. 1965, and Montagu, A.M.F., 1960. (Molnar, 2006:6).

​About this table of races, Linnaeus, Buffon, and Cuvier emphasized behavioral and cultural characteristics in their discussion of the varieties of man, Blumenbach less so. Following up on Molnar’s sources, I checked Slotkin (1965) and found a very clear statement that Buffon did not divide humanity up into races, and Slotkin took notice of the note from Goldsmith about the six race system. Rather than indicating that Buffon classified races, Slotkin provides lengthy quotations to illustrate the non-modern use of the word race by Buffon. Montagu, on the basis of his 1942 statement, was out of the question as a source for Buffon’s six races, but I checked the 1960 text anyway and found no statement at all about Buffon and race. Buffon was discussed exclusively in the context of the history of the concept of evolution.
           When I read what Montagu had to say about Buffon in his 1942 book, I followed up on a footnote about the six race classification and was led to Hrdlička’s 1941 piece on human races.  Hrdlička not only lists the races, he presents them in a geometrically arrayed fashion as so (1941:174):

Hyperboreans
 
Tartars


Europeans                                                                Ethiopic [African] peoples

Americans
 
South-Asiatic peoples

​While Buffon offered very unflattering descriptions of almost everyone but the French, he never came close to enumerating these six races and he never attempted to arrange them in some geometric or geographic system as Hrdlička implies.  Furthermore, the choice of the term Ethiopic is especially enlightening about the care that Hrdlička took in his scholarship of Buffon since Buffon himself offers this statement, “By confounding the Ethiopians with their neighbours [sic] the Nubians, who are nevertheless of a different race, we have been long in an error with respect to their colour [sic] and features,” (Buffon, [1749-1788] 1792:272).  He also says, “These contrarieties are more than sufficient to confirm us in the opinion that the Hottentots are of a race distinct from that of the Negroes,” (Buffon, [1749-1788] 1792:294). He clearly had no intention of classifying all African or sub-Saharan African peoples in a single race.  Hrdlička cites Buffon’s Methode en histoire naturelle; la theorie de la terre et de l’homme, 1749-1789, as his source for the six race system and list.  A search of the Histoire Naturelle web site (http://www.buffon.cnrs.fr/) provides no such title and a comprehensive Buffon bibliography similarly has no such title by Buffon (Genet-Varcin and Jacques Roger); it appears to be a scrambled version of titles in the series of Histoire Naturelle, but it is clear from what Hrdlička presents that he has not consulted Buffon.  Perhaps he mistook Goldsmith’s list of races for Buffon’s he might have consulted a translation by John Wright (1831) that includes copious notes inserted by the translator including the ideas of other authors such as Linnaeus.  Wright goes on at some length about the classification of Bory de Saint-Vincent and others in the middle of the translation in a way that might mislead the incautious reader.  In any event, if Hrdlička did in fact research Buffon, he must have used some 19th century source that scrambled Buffon’s intent, but no translation nor original of Buffon’s work bears the title that Hrdlička cites or presents the six race system that he indicates and the geometric arrangement is pure fancy.
           Buffon’s work was very influential and it inspired numerous translations into many European languages.  Not all of the translations sought to directly recreate Buffon’s thinking intact.  An 1800 translation published in Edinburgh abridges the 36 volumes of Buffon into two volumes.  On the title page the abridgers note that the work has been compiled chiefly from Swammerdam, Brookes, Goldsmith, etc.  This volume offers the following leader to Chapter VI: “of the apparent varieties in the human species—Laplanders—Tartars—Chinese—Japanese—Formosans—Moguls—Persians—Arabians—Circassians—Turks—Russians—Negroes—Hottentots—Americans—causes of this variety,” (Buffon, 1800:48).  Here the abridgers list 14 races, not including any mainstream Europeans.  This is more indicative of the way that Buffon uses the term race, but even this list is clearly not an exhaustive catalog of Buffon’s races. This chapter leading statement is not a translation from Buffon, as there is no such header to his Volume IV, Chapter IX, “of the Varieties in the Human Species.” Even these abridgers, drawing from Goldsmith as they are, do not suggest a six race system of classification for Buffon.
           I recently found a reference to Buffon’s races that took me into the legal literature.  Reading Dorothy Roberts’ 2011 book on race, I came across a mention of Buffon in reference to the decision against the naturalization of Chinese in the 1878 case In re Ah Yup.  Roberts says the California state jurist, Judge L.S.B. Sawyer, after reciting precedent saying that “white person” referred to someone of the Caucasian race, “then turned for guidance to the racial typologies developed by European naturalists Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, George Louis de Buffon, Carl Linnaeus, and Georges Cuvier, observing that all grouped Caucasians separately from Mongolians” (2011:15).  This led me to the text of Sawyer’s decision where he stated that “[Blumenbach’s five race system] was adopted from Buffon, with some changes in names, and is founded on the combined characteristics of complexion, hair and skull.”  This revelation of a five race system for Buffon was the first time I came across that configuration and the idea that Blumenbach borrowed his system of racial classification from Buffon was completely surprising and baffling.  Sawyer cited the “Ethnology” entry of the “New American Cyclopædia” (Ripley and Dana, 1859).  This source has several pages discussing different racial classification schemes and has this to say about Buffon and Blumenbach:

​The divisions proposed by Buffon were 5: the Hyperborean (including the inhabitants of the polar regions and of eastern and central Asia, or Laplanders and Tartars), Southern Asiatic, European, Ethiopian, and American. Blumenbach adopted these, changing the names of some of the divisions, and more accurately defining their geographical distribution. (Ripley and Dana, 1859:306-307).

Needless to say, there is no more validity in attributing this racial classification to Buffon then there is for any of the other works. Ripley and Dana refer readers to the notorious Types of Mankind (Nott and Glidden, 1854) as their source.
           Josiah Nott is responsible for much of the text of Part I in Types of Mankind, including the section where the history of the classification of human races is discussed (Nott and Glidden, 1854:xiii-xiv). Nott says on page 82, “Buffon divides the human race into six varieties—viz., Polar, Tartar, Austral-Asiatic, European, Negro, and American.” There are two noticeable errors in this statement. First, Buffon was actually quite careful with his definition of species and used the word race—not variety—deliberately to combat Linnaeus’s classification system (Hudson, 1996:253). Second, the six races are not consistent with Buffon’s writings, and I can’t figure out where Nott took this interpretation from. Apparently he was tutored by Louis Aggasiz in the science that was to go into Part I, so he may have gotten this list from him (Horsman, 1987:177-178). The execrable bias and scrambled scholarship of Types of Mankind notwithstanding, this book was the 19th century bible on race when it came out. The fact that evolutionary theory theoretically threw out the notion of polygenesis only five years later had very little effect on the impact of the book. The first edition was sold out before it was printed and the subscribers included Secretary of State Edward Everett, who also purchased a copy for the State Department; the Treasury Department; and Secretary of the Navy John Kennedy purchased a personal copy and one for the Navy Library. By 1871 the book had gone through 10 printings with tens of thousands of copies distributed. It is clear that the book was still exerting influence in Judge Sawyer’s 1878 decision, and it is likely that the idea of Buffon’s six races (ignoring the error in the 1859 Cyclopedia) became so widespread in the scientific literature because of its citation in Types of Mankind. Of course, later in the century people would not want to refer back to it, so when Tuttle, writing 12 years later—post Origin of Species and post-Civil War—in Boston, scrambled the races but kept the number suggested by Nott he also borrowed several of the other classifications that Nott included in that section, without attribution.
           As Montagu pointed out in 1942, Buffon never suggested a six race classification of humans and those who suggest he did cannot agree on what the races are nor can they point to a source in Buffon’s work that would validate this claim.  The fact that Darwin, Hrdlička, and more recent biological anthropologists make this mistake emphasizes the importance of finally getting it right.

Conclusion

           So what are the lessons to take away from this exercise? First, attributing the use of the word “race” to Buffon is partially valid, but if you want to make this claim it needs to be qualified as Montagu (1942; 1996) did or contrasted with the Linnaean perspective as Marks (1995) did.  Buffon may be responsible for introducing race into the scientific literature on man, but it was a race concept that has very little to do with the modern concept.  Second, Buffon never classified humans into six races.  The fact that so many formidable anthropologists maintained this apocrypha which is probably derived from the reviled Types of Mankind is testimony to the staying power of academic falsehoods.  However this myth originally crept into the anthropological literature, and my money is on misreading Goldsmith and attributing the system to Buffon, it has been almost impossible to eradicate right into the 21st century.
​           The teaching moment from this project is to not believe what anyone says about anyone else’s work.  In teaching research writing to students for many years, I emphasized the dangers of secondary sources and instruct students to go to the original sources (Bindon, n.d.).  I discovered how easy it is for apocrypha to creep into a reference list when I cited one of my very early papers in another one I was writing, only to find out between submission and revision that I did not actually make the case I was citing the paper for in that particular publication.  If I could mistakenly cite my own work, think what I could do to the work of others!  The case of Darwin’s allegory and Buffon’s apocryphal races provides a good example of the dangers of relying on the scholarship of others.

References Cited
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  • Waitz, T. 1863. Introduction to Anthropology. (Translated and edited with numerous additions by J.F. Collingwood). London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts.
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Race and me

5/31/2017

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        Hi. My name is Jim Bindon and I’m an old white guy who wants to talk about race. I’d like to start with my background and how I got involved in trying to understand race. I grew up in San Francisco from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. My first exposure to race and racism completely went over my head. When I was five years old I visited Texas and Louisiana. At the same time as the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott was going on to protest Jim Crow laws, I was drinking from the “White” drinking fountain. I remember the labels on the drinking fountains, but they made no sense to me and it never occurred to me that I was witnessing racism in action. I was aware of segregated residential patterns in San Francisco, but it felt to me like there was an air of tolerance in the city.  In hindsight, I realize that was just my white privilege ignoring racism. When I was in grade school, the Hunter’s Point public housing project was built almost exclusively for blacks; earlier public housing projects had been almost exclusively reserved for whites. I didn’t know about this. I thought my high school class was diverse with Italian Catholics and Eastern European Jews and WASPs like me tracing back to England through both parents, as well as African Americans, Mexican Americans, and 2nd or 3rd generation Asian-Americans with mostly Chinese or Japanese roots. Many of the Japanese students, of course, had parents who had only been freed from the “relocation centers” after World War II when they were no longer a threat to national security because of their race. This also was never discussed openly. I learned about it through a family friend in Los Angeles who had a Japanese friend who had lost his property when he was sent to one of the centers. I was about 10 when I met him and I had no real idea of what had gone on. This came back to me in a conversation I overheard between two inductees into my high school Hall of Merit when I was inducted in 2010. Both of their families had been in the camps. It’s interesting what you don’t see when you don’t look.
        I was blithely unaware of the history of racism in the San Francisco Bay Area. If I had studied it, I might have learned about it being a hotbed of eugenics early in the twentieth century. The first president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, played a key role in expanding eugenic sterilization in the U.S. In 1915, the year my dad migrated to San Francisco from Canada, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition was held. The Race Betterment Foundation had a display at the exposition that left no doubt about the superiority of some kinds of Europeans. Mexicans and Chinese had suffered extreme prejudice in California since they first arrived in the nineteenth century. Black migrants started coming in large numbers in the 1930s and were subjected to similar racism. But growing up I was unaware of this history. When I was in the fifth grade, I remember my father yelling at the national news on the television when the Little Rock Nine were prevented from enrolling in high school. It was easy to feel superior to the racist southerners who were blocking their way.  Like most white families steeped in the American “racial smog,” we rarely spoke about race. When we did address it, it was mostly to confirm that we weren’t racists. And for the most part, I thought that was all that was needed.
        I graduated from high school and joined the Naval Reserves to avoid being drafted into the Army at the height of the Vietnam War. I attended U.C. Davis as a freshman, following a pre-med curriculum. At the end of my freshman year, I was called to active duty. I was thrown together with sailors from all over the country during my training as a Hospital Corpsman. That was the first time I confronted true racism in person. When I finished my two-year tour, I went back to school, this time at Berkeley. I was late registering and I couldn’t get the introductory course in psychology that I wanted. I could, however, get into the introduction to physical anthropology. The team teaching it included two members of the National Academy of Sciences, Sherry Washburn and F. Clark Howell. In spite of difficulties including the firebombing of the auditorium where that class was held, and later having to dodge clouds of pepper gas from circling helicopters, I fell in love with this discipline which for me merged the best aspects of science with behavioral studies.
        I got married and didn’t return to Berkeley for two years. One of the courses I took when I returned foreshadowed my later interest in race—that was Human Variation taught by Professor Vince Sarich. He taught a very different version of race than I would when I finally got around to it, one that viewed human races as valid biological units with significant separation. Needless to say, he did not present Richard Lewontin’s then just-published analysis of genetic variation proving how little race actually counted for. From Berkeley, I went to study human adaptation for my grad work at Penn State. My mentor there was Paul Baker, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His mentor at Harvard had been Earnest Hooton, who had almost single-handedly established the biological validity of race in twentieth century American academia. I had no idea of the legacy that I was pursuing. I experienced racism against myself for the first time in my first field season as a grad student when it was difficult to obtain housing in a Japanese residential area of Honolulu.  That was a good lesson—it stayed with me.
        When I taught my first class at the University of Alabama in the late 1970s I was more worried about teaching human evolution in the bible belt than I was about teaching race in the south. My early classes included short modules on the lack of validity of claims about race and intelligence. I cut that topic out entirely later in the 1980s when it seemed to me that the students no longer needed the lesson. One of my running partners in those days was an administrator at the university. I went to his office one day in the late 1980s and saw a shelf of race and IQ books. I realized how ignorant this Ph.D. was on the topic of race. As a result, I started taking more care to cover race in every class, taking a cue for many of my presentations from Steven Jay Gould’s book, The Mismeasure of Man.
        That was where I stood when the Bell Curve was published in 1994. It was clear to me that this was a book that required refutation in the classroom—but, I was in the middle of my stint as chairman of the anthropology department and I didn’t have the time to create a new course focusing on the issues raised by the Bell Curve. I started doing more reading about race and after finishing my gig as chairman, my second semester back as a professor I offered a tutorial on race to build my own background along with the students’, then I proposed my course on race where I could formally try to undo 150 years of bad anthropology. About this same time I became interested in my personal genealogy and began finding my maternal and paternal family lines. At one point, I exchanged emails with a distant cousin on my mother’s side who had done a lot of work at fleshing out that side of the family. When she shared her resources with me, one of the items that she had obtained was an 1815 will from my mother’s great great grandfather that included an appraisal of four slaves, “one Negro woman named Betty, one Negro girl named Milly, one Negro boy named Tom, and one Negro girl named Mariah.” The four humans were appraised at a value of $920. Reading that document changed my understanding of my privilege in a way I don’t think anything else could have. I have since corresponded with another distant relative that comes from a side of my mother’s family formed by one of my mother’s great uncles taking one of the female slaves and starting the black wing of my maternal family. At least he had the good grace to take her as his wife—I don’t want to think about the African American relatives I have out there as a result of rape of female slaves (like in the Jefferson line but on a much smaller scale) in good ‘ol Virginia. Learning these things about my family history made the race course all the more real and important to me.
        The second time I taught the course, I picked up a book by Joseph Graves, “The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium,” that played an important role in developing the course. I loved his description of the history of the race concept and the accessible way he related biological facts about human genetic variation. I already taught a lot about human variation in other courses, so what I needed here was to add in the historical information and make the biology of human variation understandable to folks without a biological background. Over the years I have become much more familiar with the literature on slavery, Jim Crow, institutional racism, white privilege, patterns of DNA variability and other race-related topics.
        The students took to the material—many thinking seriously about the idea of race for the first time in their lives. Because of the student response (and my own love of the class), I continued to teach the course for 8 years after my retirement. I still do guest-lectures on race for my colleagues. One of my anthropology colleagues, Dr. Jo Weaver, has taken over the race class. A former anthropology doctoral student at UA, Dr. Tina Thomas, sat in on the race class and teaches her own variation of it now at Juniata. Through the race class, I also became acquainted with a history professor, Dr. Erik Peterson, who teaches about the history of the race concept and who is letting me collaborate with him on a book project about the history of race and science.
          ​Because of all my work over the last 20 years—and also because of my lived experience, I think I have things to say about race that may be helpful in putting it into perspective for others. At the very least if you listen along, you’ll learn some fascinating trivia for cocktail party talk. Thank you for bearing with me.
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