Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ is no accident that modern ideas of race were formed during the heyday of European colonialism, when those in power had already decided on their superiority. By the nineteenth century, the possibility that races existed and some were inferior to others gave colonialism a moral kick in the drive for public support. The truth – that European nations were motivated by economic greed or power – was harder to swallow than the suggestion that the places they were colonising were too uncivilised and barbaric to matter, or that they were actually doing the savages a favour.

      In the United States, the same tortured logic was used to justify slavery. The transatlantic trade in slaves officially ended in 1807 once the United Kingdom passed its Slave Trade Act, but the exploitation continued for far longer. The use of slave labour continued, people’s bodies plundered both in life and death. Dead black slaves, for instance, were routinely stolen or sold for medical dissection. Daina Ramey Berry, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, has documented the economic value of slavery in the United States. She notes that there was a brisk trade in black corpses in the nineteenth century, some exhumed by their owners for a quick profit. It’s ironic that much of our modern scientific understanding of human anatomy was built on the bodies of those who were considered at the time less than human.

      ‘If you could say that the slavers were naturally distinct from the slaves, then you have essentially a moral argument in favour of slavery,’ explains Jonathan Marks. Given this distinction, many feared that the abolition of slavery would set free the human zoo, unleashing chaos. In 1822 a group calling itself the American Colonisation Society bought land in West Africa to establish a colony named Liberia, now the Republic of Liberia, motivated largely by the desperate dread that freed black slaves would want to settle among them, with the same rights. Repatriation to the continent of their ancestors seemed like a convenient solution, ignoring the fact that after generations in slavery, most black Americans simply didn’t have a tangible connection to it any more – let alone to a new country that their ancestors may never have seen.

      Louis Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist who had been mentored by Georges Cuvier and moved to America in 1846, argued passionately against blacks being treated the same as whites. Shaken by such an intense physical disgust towards black domestic workers serving him food at a hotel that he almost couldn’t eat there at all, he became convinced that separate races originated in different places, with different characters and intellectual abilities.

      Enslavement was turned back on the slaves themselves. They were in this miserable, degrading position not because they had been forcibly enslaved, it was argued, but because it was their biological place in the universe. At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Plymouth in 1841, an American slave owner from Kentucky named Charles Caldwell had already claimed that Africans bore more of a resemblance to apes. In their 1854 book Types of Mankind, American physician Josiah Clark Nott and Egyptologist George Gliddon went so far as to sketch actual comparisons between the skulls of white and black people, alongside those of apes. While the typical European face was artfully modelled on classical sculpture, African faces were crude cartoons, exaggerating features that made it seem they had more in common with chimpanzees and gorillas.

      Propelled by a belief that black people had their own unique diseases, Samuel Cartwright, a medical doctor practising in Louisiana and Mississippi, characterised in 1851 what he saw as a mental condition particular to black slaves, coining it ‘drapetomania’, or ‘the disease causing Negroes to run away’. Harvard University historian Evelynn Hammonds, who teaches Cartwright’s story to her students, laughs darkly when she recounts it. ‘It makes sense to him, because if the natural state of the negro is to be a slave, then running away is going against their natural state. And therefore it’s a disease.’

      For Hammonds, another chilling aspect of Cartwright’s work is the way in which he methodically described the sufferers of drapetomania. ‘The colour of the skin is the main difference,’ she reads for me from her notes, ‘… the membranes, the muscles, the tendons, all fluids and secretions, then the nerves, and the bile. There’s a difference in the flesh. The bones are whiter and harder, the neck is shorter and more oblique.’ Cartwright continues this way, couching racism in medical terminology. ‘These kinds of observations turned into questions to be explored going forward. Since the 1850s, people have been trying to figure out if black bones are harder than white bones,’ Hammonds explains. Cartwright’s medical ‘discoveries’ were patently rooted in the desire to keep slaves enslaved, to maintain the status quo in the American South where he lived. In place of universal humanity came a self-serving version of the human story, in which racial difference became an excuse for treating people differently. Time and again, science provided the intellectual authority for racism, just as it had helped define race to begin with.

      Race science became a pastime for non-scientists, too. French aristocrat and writer Count Arthur de Gobineau, in An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, published in 1853, proposed that there were three races, with what he saw as an obvious hierarchy between them: ‘The negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder … His intellect will always move within a very narrow circle.’ Pointing to the ‘triangular’ face shape of the ‘yellow race’, he explained that this was the opposite of the negroid variety. ‘The yellow man has little physical energy, and is inclined to apathy … He tends to mediocrity in everything.’ Neither could be a match for Gobineau’s own race.

      Reaching his predictable pinnacle, Gobineau added, ‘We come now to the white peoples. These are gifted with reflective energy, or rather with an energetic intelligence. They have a feeling for utility, but in a sense far wider and higher, more courageous and ideal, than the yellow races.’ His work was a naked attempt to justify why those like him deserved the power and wealth they already had. This was the natural order of things, he argued. He didn’t need hard evidence for his theories because there were plenty of people around him ready and willing to agree that they, too, belonged to a superior race.

      It would be Gobineau’s ideas that would later help reinforce the myth of racial purity and the creed of white supremacy. ‘If the three great types had remained strictly separate, the supremacy would no doubt have always been in the hands of the finest of the white races, and the yellow and black varieties would have crawled forever at the feet of the lowest of the whites,’ he wrote, promoting a notion of an imaginary ‘Aryan’ race. These glorious Aryans, he believed, had existed in India many centuries ago, speaking an ancestral Indo-European language, and had since spread across parts of the world, diluting their superior bloodline.

      Myth and science coexisted, and both served politics. In the run-up to the passage in 1865 of the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States, the race question wasn’t resolved – it just became thornier. Although many Americans believed in emancipation on moral grounds, fewer were convinced that full equality would ever be possible, for the simple reason that groups weren’t biologically the same. Even Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln believed that blacks were inherently inferior to whites. Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, agreed with those who thought that the best way to deal with freed slaves was to send them to a colony of their own. Freedom was framed as a gift bestowed on unfortunate black slaves by morally superior white leaders, rather than a reflection of a hope that everyone would one day live alongside each other as friends, colleagues and partners.

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      Not all scientists were quite so self-serving. For those who wanted to establish the facts about human difference, there were unanswered questions. The biggest puzzle was that there was no fleshed-out mechanism to account for how different races – if they were real – might have emerged. If each race was distinct, then where did they each come from, and why? Going by the Bible, as many Europeans did, one explanation for the existence of different races was that, after the big flood, Noah’s children spread to different parts of the earth. How we truly originated, and how physical differences appeared between us, were anyone’s guess.

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