A while back, I believe I
mentioned that it is quite common for books and articles about 19th
century scientific racism to be published which never mention Darwin as an
example or mention him briefly in a sentence or two and then pass over him. The
latest case of this is Siep Stuurman’s The
Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History
(2017). It is a general review of humanitarian thinking from ancient times to
the present, covering many different civilizations, not just western thought. I
recommend it, if only for the reason that every reader will encounter here very
interesting writers from many different countries, many of whom you never heard
of. We can all learn a lot from this book.
But the silence about Darwin is
stunning. Stuurman devotes one chapter to 19th century scientific
racism in Europe and America. Darwin does not appear, not even once, not even in a brief aside. Yet
he mentions others who espoused the very same ideas as Darwin. He quotes Robert
Knox (whom Stephen Gould also dealt with in The
Mismeasure of Man), “Already in a few years, we have cleared Van Diemen’s
Land of every human aboriginal; Australia, of course, will follow, and New
Zealand next.” Stuurman calls this “Knox’s genocidal vision.” Darwin said the
same in more polished language in his published journal: “All the aborigines
have been removed … so that Van Diemen’s Land enjoys the great advantage of
being free from a native population.”
Stuurman also says, “According to
Knox, the ‘dark races’ would lose the struggle for world supremacy and were
destined for extinction.” Darwin embraced the same exact thought many times in
his letters and at least once publicly in The
Descent of Man: “At some future period, not very distant as measured by
centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and
replace, the savage races throughout the world.” Yet Darwin gets the silent
treatment by Stuurman and so many other scholars.
Stuurman describes a social Darwinist
theory of history as “permitting, and at times demanding, the extermination of
peoples deemed ‘inferior’ …” But this kind of thinking comes directly from
Darwin, which Stuurman neglects to mention. In one of his letters, Darwin said
“… the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank” when all the
lower races have been exterminated. Almost every racist thought discussed by
Stuurman can be found in Darwin.
So what does the scholarly world
accomplish when they write (or rather, fail to write) about Darwin this way? How
can one leave out the major biological scientist of the 19th century
from a discussion of scientific racism? Scholars have created a safe haven for
racism in Darwin’s writings. Darwin gets away with it because academia is
committed to letting him get away with it. And because Darwin was a relatively
polite racist, scholars have given permission to racism to forge ahead as long
as it expresses itself in subtle ways that at least do not appear offensive at
first glance. Be nice about it and academia will allow you to be as racist as
you want to be. This is a very dangerous game scholars are playing. As long as
the full truth about scientific racism is not investigated, it will always
return, and by leaving Darwin out of it, we are covering up that full truth.
© 2017 Leon Zitzer
