My
email pal Sean once told me that historical Jesus studies needs a good kick in
the arse. How true. The same can be said of Darwin studies and even the history
of science, especially as it relates to evolution. When will we wake up and be
truthful about what the evidence tells us?
Every
time I come across a book or article on scientific racism in the 19th
century, they always do the same thing. They make it seem like it was an
aberration that was endorsed only by lesser figures. Charles Darwin is never
mentioned or at best a glancing comment on his racism is offered. Same goes for
Thomas Huxley. We have enforced this forgetfulness that scientific racism was a
mainstream position. The top-notch scientists of the day promoted it. And every
one of them would have sworn that their “racism” was objective and based
soundly on the evidence.
How
did the best scientists of the day go so wrong? How could they have so deceived
themselves? These questions never get asked because we live in denial that it
ever happened.
At
the end of the American Civil War, Thomas Huxley gave a brief lecture entitled
“Emancipation—Black and White” (the white part referred to women). He was glad
that slavery was finally at an end in the west, but he emphasized that half the
arguments brought in favor of abolition were wrong. In particular, the argument
of equality between the races was dead wrong, as far as he was concerned: “no
rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the
equal, still less the superior, of the average white man … The highest places
in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our
dusky cousins …”
Scientific
racism went deep. It was not just a slight mistake. And science was not self-correcting
about this. No profession is self-correcting. It is only when plenty of
criticism from the outside makes inroads that science makes corrections.
We
not only have ignored mainstream science’s devotion to racist ideas, but we
have failed to take note of many of the anti-racists who were trying vainly to
make a course correction. In 1864, just one year before Huxley’s lecture, Alfred
Wallace made some interesting remarks on the subject. They were offered in a
discussion following someone else’s paper delivered at a meeting of the London
Anthropological Society. Unfortunately, we don’t have a record of Wallace in
his own words, but rather a summary made by a third party. If we can trust the
summary, Wallace made the following points:
He
began by agreeing that the Negro is intellectually inferior to Europeans. “The
only question to be determined,” he said, “was, how far that inferiority
extends.” He then went on to challenge any ideas of inferiority by arguing, in
effect, that these opinions are not based on any evidence. We have only seen
Negroes in the most unfavorable conditions. How can one draw any fair
conclusions from that? “We had never seen the negro under favourable
circumstances. We had always seen him either as a slave or perfectly free
without any stimulus to exertion … We had not yet seen the negro under the
circumstances that would show him to the greatest advantage.” Wallace also made
the point that if Negroes seemed to avoid work unless pressed by necessity, the
same was true of all mankind (i.e., including white people), so that was no
argument for inferiority.
A
year before Huxley firmly stated his racist leanings, Wallace was already
rebuking such thinking. We forget that, along with the fact that mainstream
science ignored him and other anti-racists. Racism, in other words, went so
deep that it forced the best scientists of the day to distort their view of the
evidence and they would not pay attention even when their errors were pointed
out. We ought to pay that more heed than we have—if only because it means that
the dangers of mainstream science making mistakes is still with us.
©
2015 Leon Zitzer
