A NEW, SHORT BOOK

Last summer, I published my big book, Darwin's Racism: The Definitive Case, Along with a Close Look at Some of the Forgotten, Genuine Humanitarians of That Time, an 800 page tome.  It is available at all online vendors, but I realize its size may be a bit much for many people. So I recently decided that what is needed is a very short book on the subject. I just finished writing it. It will be called A Short But Full Book on Darwin's Racism and it will be well under 200 pages (probably about 175).  I hope it will be available in a few months.

Here is the description I've written for the back cover of this new book:

Darwin once pondered what it would be like to talk to an ape, if it could be “dispassionate” about its own case. The ape, he said, would have to admit it was inferior to humans. Darwin was obsessed with ranking organisms. It was no different with human beings. It is not hard to prove that racism deeply infected the work of Charles Darwin. Turn the pages of his writings—his letters, his journal, Notebooks, and published works—and it’s there. There is hardly a source that does not contain it. It seems like every time he picked up his pen, he had something to say about the inferiority of certain races. For him, evolution produced inequality. But Darwin and evolution are not synonymous terms. It is possible to criticize Darwin without criticizing the theory of evolution. Some of his contemporary evolutionists were more holistic and humanitarian than he was. They were far more interested in connections than disconnections and ranking. We don’t remember them because they defied the ideology of conquest and domination of their day. The consequence of that is to be erased from history.

I have completely reorganized how I present the evidence.  It's interesting to rewrite a book in this way.  Some points gain in power because the evidence for them is presented more compactly.  Not only the points about Darwin's racism, but the presentation of the humanitarians who had a more holistic vision of evolution than he did gains by being concentrated in a higher strength solution, instead of being diluted by a lot of other facts. Just wait till you hear about Georg Gerland, J. Langfield Ward, Robert Chambers, Emma Martin, and more, all of whom were far more humane in their pursuit of science than Darwin was. We need people like that.

© 2017 Leon Zitzer

zitzerleon@gmail.com