My new book is a compact version of that and will be available at online sites within the next few days. It is called A Short but Full Book on Darwin's Racism. It's about 200 pages. Here is the table of contents for the main chapters:
1 Brother
Ant, Sister Worm
2 Never,
Never Trust an Indian
3 Defenses
of Darwin
4 Georg
Gerland: Who
Rejected Whom?
5 I Weep
for You, I Deeply Sympathize
6 J.
Langfield Ward: Strangers
in the Land of Their Birth
7 Connect the Whirling World: More
Holistic Evolutionists
8 Small
and Broken
9 A
Strange Coming and Going
And here is the descriptive paragraph on the back of the book:
Darwin
once pondered what it would be like to talk to an ape, “if he could take a
dispassionate view of his own case.” The ape, he said, would have to admit he
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, 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 previous evolutionists, as well as some of his contemporaries,
were more holistic and humanitarian than he was. They looked for connections
rather than disconnections and ranking. They defied the ideology of conquest
and domination of their day and paid a price. We can continue to eliminate them
from our memories, or we can retrieve their voices and let them inspire.
I hope this shorter book will prove to be more accessible than the longer, definitive work.
© 2017 Leon Zitzer
