ARCHIVAL SOURCES CONSULTED
American Museum of Natural History, New York
Henry F. Osborn Papers
American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia
American Eugenics Society Records
Franz Boas Papers
Charles B. Davenport Papers
Theodosius Dobzhansky Papers
Leslie C. Dunn Papers
Eugenics Record Office Papers
Genetics Society of America Papers
Michael Lerner Papers
Richard Lewontin Papers
Ashley Montagu Papers
Thomas Hunt Morgan Papers
Raymond Pearl Papers
Herbert Spencer Jennings Papers
Curt Stern Papers
Sewall Wright Papers
Columbia Center for Oral History Collection, New York
Reminiscences of Theodosius Dobzhansky
Reminiscences of Leslie C. Dunn
Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
E.O. Wilson Papers
National Academy of Sciences Archives, Washington, D.C.
National Research Council Collection
Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Tarrytown, N.Y.
Social Science Research Council Collection
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Collection
Stanford University Archives, Palo Alto, Calif.
Stephen Jay Gould Papers
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass.
W. E. B. Du Bois Papers
A NOTE ON SOURCES
It would be an oversimplification to say that all books begin with a single ancestral source. But in the case of this work, that would largely be true. In the mid-1990s, I read a review essay by Paula Fass in Reviews in American History titled “Of Genes and Men” (vol. 20 [June 1992]: 235–41). That essay, critical of Carl Degler’s book In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), helped me, as a young doctoral student, begin to shape my thoughts about the relationship between biology and society and the often uncritical way that biological explanations for a wide range of social phenomena were quickly being embraced by natural and social scientists, and even by those (Degler was her primary target) in the humanities. Fass pointed to two important issues (among many) in Degler’s work that I reacted to. First, the claim by In Search of Human Nature that “racism is largely irrelevant to sociobiology”—chapter 10 of the present volume was written in rebuttal to Degler’s wrongheaded analysis of sociobiology and race. Second, Fass attacked Degler’s assertion that “facts—not ideology—can govern belief.” It was this second point that interested me most and led me on a path to interrogate the meanings of race over the course of the twentieth century, particularly how science was considered an objective arbiter of the truth about what race was and what it was not.
My approach to thinking and writing about the biological sciences has been informed by an interdisciplinary background in history, public health, and biology. I have been particularly influenced by my time as a researcher in the Molecular Laboratories at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Working at the museum shaped considerably how, as a historian, I think about the nature of scientific practice. As a nonscientist with complete access to and participation in a molecular laboratory, I was always a bit of a fish out of water. But as evolutionary theorists, the scientists at the AMNH were historically minded, and in that way our professional objectives overlapped: we all sought to develop an understanding of our present by reconstructing the past.
The nature and practice of science have faced considerable scrutiny by philosophers, historians, and scientists, among others. At the center of this discussion, as the philosopher of science Michael Ruse put its, is “whether science should be considered something different and special—something with independent standards which in some way guarantees its truth and importance,” or whether science is “basically just a product of the same general culture as most everything else, no worse but certainly no better than those who produce it.” (Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999], 9). At the extremes of this debate are the ideas of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Whereas Popper’s hypothetico-deductive method maintains that science is both testable and falsifiable, Kuhn’s belief in scientific revolutions claims that all scientific knowledge and practice are relative to the scientific paradigm—the authoritative research program that dominates science between revolutions. This does not mean that science is somehow unreal, but it does mean that it is not necessarily possible to falsify scientific theories within their paradigms (Thomas H. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962]; Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery [New York: Harper and Row, 1968]). What my own experiences as a historian with training in the natural sciences has shown me is that on the one hand, science operates within a specific cultural and historical milieu. On the other hand, however, over time the scientific method tests data, theories, and ideas and discards science that does not cut the proverbial mustard. In the end, science can be both a social construction and an objective search for truth.
I visited approximately ten archives in writing this book and looked at twenty-five manuscript collections in that process. The collections at the American Philosophical Society (APS) in Philadelphia provided the most fertile material for this study, and the correspondence and other materials in its collections provided great insight into the history of the biological race concept. Theodosius Dobzhansky’s papers were, as can be seen from his prominence in this book, at the center of my research, and by the time I was done working my way through them, I felt a closeness to my subject and a deep sadness as I read through the final pages of his journal written just days before he died of cancer in 1975. I would encourage scholars to mine these journals carefully; they hold wonderful material about Dobzhansky’s experiences traveling the world—from the Brazilian rain forest to the Yosemite Valley—collecting his specimens and meeting many people along the way. Much of the journal is written in Russian, despite a written promise in the 1940s to begin writing only in English so that his daughter could someday share all his reflections. He did not keep that promise, and the journals, spanning almost fifty years (from his days in Russia to his death) constantly switch back and forth between Russian and English. Despite what was once a good grasp of the Russian language, I can’t claim to have digested much of what was written in Russian, and another scholar is sure to find rich material in those entries.
For the history of eugenics and race, collections at the APS, the AMNH, and the National Academy of Sciences Archives were incredibly useful. The Stephen Jay Gould Papers at Stanford and the E. O. Wilson Papers at the Library of Congress were unprocessed when I utilized them. As these collections are processed, I suspect that more information on race and sociobiology will become available. Finally, the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Archives have been digitized since my visit there, and I suspect that in time more information will be revealed about Du Bois’s thoughts on the creation of his project on the Health and Physique of the Negro American.
As with all projects, I owe much of my thinking in the area of race and science to the important works that preceded my own. The following areas of historiography have been the most influential to this work, and the books and articles cited below are not an exhaustive accounting of works in the field or, for that matter, works cited in this book. Rather, I describe works that had a significant impact on this book, focusing primarily on books instead of articles. The notes are also an accounting of the state of the field.
Pre-Twentieth-Century Race and Science
The best surveys of pre-twentieth-century racial science in the United States are Bruce R. Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); William R. Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America, 1815–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); and Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). See also Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1996); George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971); and, Drew Gilpen Faust, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 138–40, 143. For a broader discussion of Jefferson’s role in the formation of a distinctly American conception of racial science, see Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind; Alexander O. Boulton, “The American Paradox: Jeffersonian Equality and Racial Science,” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1995): 467–92; Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1996); Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2011).
Race, Genetics, and Eugenics
Historians who have explored the history of genetics and eugenics in the context of racial science have generally approached the topic as institutional histories examining internal developments in the field. For example, Daniel Kevles’s seminal work on eugenics, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), is a history of the relationship between eugenic and genetic research programs and examines the internal changes in these disciplines that helped to create the nature and texture of modern racial science. Similarly, Mike Hawkins’s Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) tackles the issue of racial science through the lens of social Darwinism. Nancy Stepan’s The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982) has race and science at its core. Stepan suggests that after World War II the study of human diversity superseded the study of race in the sciences. The ascension of population genetics and the downfall of typological thinking facilitated this change. Stepan’s book focuses primarily on science and race in Great Britain. The story of the evolution of race and science, while parallel in some ways between the United States and Britain before World War II, has a different trajectory in postwar America. While studies of human groups do begin to shift away from typological to population studies, racial science remains a powerful element of postwar biological thought in the United States.
William B. Provine’s seminal articles on race, biology, and eugenics (“Geneticists and the Biology of Race Crossing,” Science 182 [November 23, 1973]: 790–96, and “Genetics and Race,” American Zoologist 26 [1986]: 857–87) offer an important perspective in the earlier literature on race and genetics. Unlike some of the more institutionally focused histories that examined genetics and race, Provine’s periodization of how geneticists conceptualized race differences continues to provide insight into the theories and actions of these formative thinkers in the field.
The most recent foray into this subject is Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), a narrative that broadens the context of forced sterilization into a history that begins in the mid-nineteenth century and continues to the turn of the twenty-first. In Largent’s telling, eugenics is only part of the story behind coerced sterilization in the United States, a procedure begun in the nineteenth century by American physicians to prevent crime and punish criminals. There is, however, barely any mention of the role that race played in coerced sterilizations, either in the context of black-white or white-white ethnic differences.
Finally, Alondra Nelson’s important book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) has a short but important discussion (45–47) of W. E. B. Du Bois’s seminal work on race, health, and science, The Health and Physique of the Negro American. In Body and Soul Nelson shows how Du Bois understood how “the arbitrariness of the American racial categories” had a “significant bearing on both the corporeal and social well-being of African Americans” and that the race concept was “explicitly linked to health and medicine.” While the present volume argues that Du Bois’s work in this area anticipated twentieth-century critiques of the race concept, Body and Soul argues that it was similarly influential “in future health activist projects, including those of the Black Panther Party,” in framing arguments about “the quantity and quality of medical facilities for African Americans” and the attention to “racial health disparities as a key cause of concern,” among others. See also Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001); Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920, History of American Thought and Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Michael G. Kenny, “Toward a Racial Abyss: Eugenics, Wickliffe Draper, and the Origins of the Pioneer Fund,” Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences 38 (summer 2002): 259–83; Raymond E. Fancher, “Biographical Origins of Francis Galton’s Psychology,” Isis 74 (June 1983): 228–29; Raymond Fancher, “Francis Galton’s African Ethnography and Its Role in the Development of His Psychology,” British Journal for the History of Science 16 (1983): 67–79; Garland Allen, “Genetics, Eugenics, and Society: Internalists and Externalists in Contemporary History of Science,” Social Studies of Science 6 (February 1976): 105–22; David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996); Frank Dikötter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” American Historical Review 103 (April 1998): 467–78; Diane Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995).
African Americans, Race, and Eugenics
There are only a few books that have begun to explore the relationship between eugenics, the idea of race, and the lives of African Americans. The historiography has unfortunately ignored the fact that eugenicists devoted considerable resources to the study of black-white differences from the beginning of that movement in the late nineteenth century. Eugenics was not just about preserving whiteness from ethnics, nor was it only social movement; it was also about the construction of scientifically justified color differences. Edward Larson’s Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) has a short discussion of the effects of eugenic sterilization programs on African Americans. William H. Tucker’s The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994) looks at the relationship between eugenics, racial science, and race and the mental health community. As such, the book focuses primarily on the psychometric crusades of the twentieth century and on the influences that psychologists had in the courts in abolishing state-sanctioned segregation. Tucker’s latest effort, The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), is an important addition to the historiography as it explores the funding mechanisms that helped both eugenic and posteugenic racial science thrive. Gregory Dorr’s Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008) surveys the rise and impact of eugenics on Virginia’s racial mores by examining the ways in which eugenics influenced twentieth-century notions of white supremacy in Virginia and how eugenic thinking impacted African American approaches to racial uplift. Dorr’s work shows how eugenics quickly became the scientific justification for racial purity in twentieth-century Virginia, and the book is a powerful illustration of how eugenicist ideas about African Americans and about race relations more generally did not simply conform to racial theory but rather shaped it to a very large degree. Lee D. Baker’s From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) explores many of the same questions explored in Race Unmasked but does so in the context of anthropology. A chapter in Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 159–82, looks at the career of obstetrician and eugenicist Walter Plecker and his impact on racial and segregation policy in Virginia as the head of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. Daylanne K. English’s Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) offers particularly interesting insight into the relationship between the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and eugenic ideology. Finally, Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) documents the shift from a scientific and eugenic focus on racial superiority to race difference during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The Charles Davenport Papers at the APS reveal a striking series of correspondence, lectures, and notes that have generally been ignored by scholars examining the relationship between eugenics and African Americans and the way eugenicists thought about race in a black-white context. In the introduction to “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) historian Nancy Leys Stepan writes that despite “the historical significance of eugenics…it is still surprising how restricted the study of eugenics is, especially when we consider…its connections to many of the large themes of modern history” (2). In this context it is therefore not surprising that even given the centrality of racial matters to the eugenics movement the historiography of eugenics and the historiography of racial science have rarely intersected with African American history. Some scholars might argue that this is because race in the context of eugenics was not about the black-white divide in America but about attempts to define whiteness in relation to the immigrants who had been arriving on America’s shores since the 1840s. (See, for example, Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 39–90). Susan Reverby’s new book on Tuskegee, Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), is an important addition to the historiography of racial medicine that, in part, examines the way scientific thought (including eugenics) enabled the horrors of the Tuskegee Study. See also, for example, James Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: Free Press, 1981); Joseph L. Graves Jr., The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 157–72; Gould, Mismeasure of Man; N. J. Block and Gerald Dworkin, eds., The IQ Controversy (New York: Pantheon, 1976); W. Michael Byrd and Linda A. Clayton, An American Health Dilemma: A Medical History of African Americans and the Problem of Race (New York: Routledge, 2001); Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris. Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960, Studies in the Social History of Medicine (London: Routledge, 1999); George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); David Theo Goldberg, Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963); Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Sandra G. Harding, ed., The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (New York: Braziller, 1959); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Diane B. Paul, The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998); Vanessa N. Gamble, “A Legacy of Distrust: African Americans and Medical Research,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 9 (1993): S35–S38; John H Stanfield II, “The Myth of Race and the Human Sciences,” Journal of Negro Education 64 (1995): 218–31; Lisa Gannett, “Theodosius Dobzhansky and the Genetic Race Concept,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science 44 (2013) 250–61; Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006.
The “Rise and Fall” of the Race Concept
Elazar Barkan addresses the historical status of racial science during the twentieth century in The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). His book argues that through the efforts of progressively minded scientists, scientific racism was by and large pushed out of biological and genetic thought. He contends that scientists in the 1940s took on racial science in true Popperian fashion—falsification. While some mainstream scientists left the idea of race behind, Race Unmasked shows that many did not and that racial science remained a force to be reckoned with both because science never divests itself of the biological race concept and because racial science did not need the approval of biologists and geneticists to survive and to thrive. Kenneth Ludmerer also addresses the evolving history of racial science, but only in the context of the evolution of eugenics and its relationship with the emerging field of genetics in a 1969 article titled “American Geneticists and the Eugenics Movement, 1905–1935” (Journal of the History of Biology 2 [September 1969]: 337–62). The article later became a chapter in Ludmerer’s classic book on the history of genetics, Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972). Ludmerer’s argument about the relationship between the eugenics movement and the field of genetics, and of the attitude of geneticists toward the race concept is problematic. In his view “new findings of heredity dampened the enthusiasm of many geneticists for the movement; by demonstrating that inheritance is a much more complex process than had previously been thought, these findings indicated to many geneticists that the task of constructing sound and valuable eugenic schemes is not so simple.” This awareness was followed by a renunciation of the movement by geneticists “alarmed by the movement’s participation in the vitriolic debates over immigration restriction and by its apparent endorsement of the race theories of Nazi Germany” (Ludmerer, “American Geneticists,” 338–39). While this was true for many geneticists (including T. H. Morgan and L. C. Dunn) as Race Unmasked argues the relationship between eugenics and genetics was never this clear-cut. Specifically, when looking at the relationship between the race concept and the field of genetics, it is clear that the impact of eugenics on genetic thinking outlasted the exodus of geneticists from the eugenics movement. Alexandra Minna Stern’s Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) is the most recent addition to this literature and offers an alternative time line for the decline of eugenics. Stern examines the history of eugenics in California through the 1970s and concludes that it was not until the “protest and liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s” that the “legacy and longevity of eugenics in the United States” was challenged in a sustained and meaningful way (25).
Published in 2011, Paul Farber’s book Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) explores the historical trajectory of the race concept but falls into the same trap as earlier volumes on the subject—it reinforces the “rise and fall” claim that presumes a rejection of the concept by scientists in the post–World War II period. Still, the book does draw attention to Dobzhansky’s role in reshaping the race concept in evolutionary biology. Finally, Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) traces the dismantling of miscegenation laws in the United States and how their downfall was shaped by and reshaped notions of race in legal and popular thinking. See also Robin O. Andreasen, “A New Perspective on the Race Debate,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (1998): 199–225; K. Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 21–37; Guido Barbujani, Arianna Magagni, Eric Minch, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “An Apportionment of Human DNA Diversity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 94 (1997): 4516–19; Edward H. Beardsley, “The American Scientist as Social Activist: Franz Boas, Burt G. Wilder, and the Cause of Racial Justice, 1900–1915,” Isis 64 (1973): 50–66; Juan Comas, “‘Scientific’ Racism Again?” Current Anthropology 2 (1961): 303–40; W. E. B. Dubois, “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 9 (1897): 127–33; Bentley Glass, “Geneticists Embattled: Their Stand Against Rampant Eugenics and Racism in America During the 1920s and 1930s,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 30 (1986): 130–54; Julia Liss, “Diasporic Identities: The Science and Politics of Race in the Work of Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois, 1894–1919,” Cultural Anthropology 13 (1998): 127–66; Lisa Gannett, “The Biological Reification of Race,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (2004): 323–45.
Anthropology and Race
In From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) anthropologist Lee Baker has covered some of the same ground this book covers from the perspective of anthropology. By examining the anthropological discourse from Plessy to Brown, Baker argues that anthropology played a primary role in “helping to change the meaning and structure of race for African Americans” (3). Anthropological discourse is important to the study of the impact of scientific racism, but ultimately it was biologists, and a discussion in the narrower context of genetics, that dictated the ground rules for the geneticization of race and racism and thus the parameters of debates on the nature of race in both scientific and popular discourse during the twentieth century. See also Rachel Caspari, “From Types to Populations: A Century of Race, Physical Anthropology, and the American Anthropological Association,” American Anthropologist 105 (March 2003): 65–76; Philippa Levine, “Anthropology, Colonialism, and Eugenics,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine. 43–61 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Peter Pels, “The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of Western Governmentality,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26 (October 1997): 163–83; Alan H. Goodman, “Why Genes Don’t Count (for Racial Differences in Health),” American Journal of Public Health 90 (1995): 1699–1702; S. O. Y. Keita, R. A. Kittles, “The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence,” American Anthropologist 99 (1997): 534–44; Jonathan Marks, Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (New York: Aldine, 1995); Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999); Carol C. Mukhopadhyay and Yolanda T. Moses, “Re-establishing ‘Race’ in Anthropological Discourse,” American Anthropologist 99 (September 1997): 517–33.
Sociobiology
Historians have been surprisingly silent in their exploration of the sociobiology debate. Daniel J. Kevles’s In the Name of Eugenics and Carl Degler’s In Search of Human Nature are two major historical works on the topic. Kevles’s work includes a brief, dispassionate review of the new synthesis. Degler, however, in the last third of his book, embraces sociobiology, accepting as possible a scientific conception of human nature. Chapter 10 of the present volume was inspired largely by my reaction to Degler’s work. His treatment of the emergence of sociobiology fails to interrogate the tenets of the new science, accepting them as the products of a newly advanced objective science. He virtually ignores the many criticisms of sociobiology and sees no connection between sociobiology and its sociopolitical context. Degler assumes that because “many of the proponents of a recognition of the role of biology in human behavior were and are personally liberal, rather than conservative, in political outlook” and that because “social scientists began to be interested in bringing biology back into the human sciences as early as the 1950s and then through the 1960s, when the political climate can hardly be described as conservative,” meant that sociobiological work could not be the product of, or have particular salience in, a specific historical moment (226–27). This assertion is both wrongheaded and troubling. As historian Paula Fass points out in her review of Degler’s work in Reviews in American History, “In taking sides Degler fails fully to visualize the historicity of the issue, substituting a neo-Hegelian synthesis for the new paradigm that may be required” (240). For overviews of the sociobiology debates from disciplines other than history, see, for example, Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). See also Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985); Richard M. Lerner, Final Solutions: Biology, Prejudice, and Genocide (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992); S. L. Washburn, “Animal Behavior and Social Anthropology,” Society (September–October 1977): 35–41; Howard Kaye, The Social Meaning of Modern Biology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1977); Arthur L. Caplan, ed., The Sociobiology Debate: Readings on Ethical and Scientific Issues (New York: Harper and Row, 1978); Martin Barker, The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe (Frederick, Md.: Aletheia, 1982).
Race and Genomics
Troy Duster’s Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 1990), written at the outset of the Human Genome Project, calls attention to how the technological and philosophical approaches of the then emerging Human Genome Project threatened to reify racial and ethnic constructs in the wake of newly emerging technologies. The book also calls attention to the very fine line that exists between eugenics and genetics, and to how the Human Genome Project could very easily erase any distinction between the two.
Jenny Reardon’s Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), as mentioned in the introduction to this book, highlights what is a persistent problem in the history of the race concept: the notion of a rise and fall in the race concept in the biological sciences. Reardon believes that this idea is so entrenched that it has become “the canonical narrative of the history of race and science.” And I agree with her that as a “dominant narrative,” it “truncates history” (22–23). Her book then moves beyond this narrative by showing the persistence of race concepts in the genomic era, with a particular focus on how the Human Genome Diversity Project struggled with concepts of genetic diversity in the 1990s, and the pushback from advocacy groups and research subjects on the group’s approach. Reardon’s book also helped bring Dobzhansky back into focus as a central character in the history of racial science—an important part of this history that others, including myself, have expanded upon.
Shedding new light on the relationship between race and personalized medicine is the aim of Jonathan Kahn’s Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). The book is an interesting exploration of the legal, historical, technological, and market forces that continue to shape a racialized approach to medicine. The book expands our understanding of how the concept of race is utilized in clinical medicine.
Several new volumes have begun to expand the scope and interest in this area, the most interesting of which is Keith Wailoo, Alondra Nelson, and Catherine Lee, eds., Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012). The collection is packed with essays exploring topics ranging from forensic technology to pharmacogenomics to ancestry testing, and the work in this volume will surely influence future scholars as history continues to turn its attention to this area. Among other new volumes are Catherine Bliss, Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012); Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan, eds., Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2011); Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New York: New Press, 2012); and Paul Farber and Hamilton Cravens, Race and Science: Scientific Challenges to Racism in Modern America (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2009); Evelynn M. Hammonds and Rebecca M. Herzig, eds., The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008); Linda L. McCabe, DNA: Promise and Peril (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Barbara A. Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson, Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Lundy Braun, “Race, Ethnicity, and Health: Can Genetics Explain Disparities?” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45 (2002): 159–74; Morris W. Foster and Richard R. Sharp, “Beyond Race: Toward a Whole Genome Perspective on Human Population and Genetic Variation,” Nature Reviews: Genetics 5 (2004): 790–96; Lisa Gannett, “Racism and Human Genome Diversity Research: The Ethical Limits of ‘Population’ Thinking,” Philosophy of Science 68 (2001): S479–S492; Duana Fullwiley, “The Biologistical Construction of Race: ‘Admixture’ Technology and the New Genetic Medicine,” Social Studies of Science (October 2008): 695–735.