Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ as mentally feeble, physically weak, and criminal types, needed convincing to have fewer children. Managing reproduction was the linchpin of eugenics, even attracting a fan in women’s rights activist and birth control pioneer Marie Stopes. To support her first clinic, Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. Philosopher Bertrand Russell, too, suggested that the state might improve the health of the population by fining the ‘wrong’ type of people for giving birth.

      Eugenics was more than a theory, it was a plan in search of policymakers. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was welcomed as vice-president at the first International Eugenics Congress, held at London’s grand Hotel Cecil in 1912. Other vice-presidents included the Lord Mayor of London and the Lord Chief Justice. Delegates came from all over Europe, Australia and the United States, including Harvard and Johns Hopkins University. The US state of Indiana had already passed the world’s first involuntary sterilisation law in 1907, informed by eugenicists who argued that criminality, mental problems and poverty were hereditary. More than thirty other states soon followed, with enthusiastic public backing. By 1910 a Eugenics Record Office was established at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island in New York, with support from oil industry magnate John D. Rockefeller and later funding by the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

      A news item in the journal Science announced that one of the purposes of the new office in New York would be ‘the study of miscegenation in the United States’, the mixing and intermarriage of different racial groups. Its board of scientific directors included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and the economist Irving Fisher. The hardware behind at least one of America’s most ambitious eugenics projects came from none other than IBM, the same company that went on to supply the Nazi regime in Germany with the technology it needed to transport millions of victims to the concentration camps.

      In the first decades of the twentieth century, all over the world, eugenics began to be conflated with nineteenth-century ideas about race. In Japan, Meiji-period thinker and politician Katˉo Hiroyuki used Darwinism to make the point that there was a struggle for survival between different nations. In China in 1905, the revolutionary Wang Jingwei argued that a state whose members were of a single race was stronger than one comprising multiple races. Other politicians advocated sterilisation as a means of human selection, and racial intermarriage to produce children with whiter skins. Historian Yuehtsen Juliette Chung has noted that during this time, ‘China seemed to accept passively the notion of race as the West understood it.’

      In India, too, European notions of racial superiority were easily absorbed by some, partly because they mirrored the country’s existing caste system – itself a kind of racial hierarchy – but also because Germany’s Aryan myth placed the noble race as having once lived in their region. The ideological quest for the true ‘Aryans’ remains alive in India, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a bestseller in Indian bookshops. Each nation utilised the idea of race in its own ways, marrying it with science if it could be of use. Eugenics, then, became just another tool in what were longstanding power dynamics.

      By 1914 the word ‘eugenics’ was being used with such abandon that it had almost became synonymous with being healthy, complained American eugenics professor Roswell H. Johnson in the American Journal of Sociology. ‘A school for sex education is called a school of eugenics. Even a milk and ice station has been similarly designated,’ he grumbled.

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      In its early days, particularly for its mainstream supporters, eugenics focused on improving racial stock by weeding out those seen to be at the margins of society, the feeble-minded, insane and disabled. But as time wore on, the umbrella inevitably expanded. Karl Pearson, who succeeded Galton as the main force behind eugenics when he died in 1911 and shared his views on race, believed that since other races than his own were inferior, intermixing was also dangerous to the health of the population. By this logic, the very existence of those other races represented something of a threat. ‘Pearson’s argument is that if you have uncontrolled immigration the welfare of British people is at stake,’ Subhadra Das tells me.

      At the time, despite the mainstream popularity of eugenics, some did notice the slippery slope. This is one reason why, despite all the support it attracted from politicians and intellectuals and how popular it became in other countries, eugenics never managed to gain a firm toehold in Britain and was not implemented by the government. British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley argued that privilege and upbringing could surely more accurately explain why some people were successful and others weren’t. He noted that many remarkable people had unremarkable relatives. Another vocal critic was biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had come from humble beginnings to become an important and well-loved researcher, credited with formulating evolutionary theory at the same time as Darwin. ‘The world does not want the eugenicist to set it straight,’ he warned. ‘Give the people good conditions, improve their environment, and all will tend towards the highest type. Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft.’

      But it’s important to remember that history might well have gone another way. Das pulls out another object from the archive. It’s a narrow tin box, resembling a cigarette case but twice as long. It was brought to London by Karl Pearson, but had been designed by Eugen Fischer, a German scientist who had been director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. The box still bears Fischer’s name. Inside is a neat row of thirty locks of artificial hair, ranging in colour from blonde (numbers 19 and 20) and light brunette in the centre, to bright red hair at one end and black Afro hair (number 30) at the other. At first glance it looks innocuous, like a colour chart you might find at the hairdresser’s. But the disturbing story behind it is betrayed by the order in which the hair samples are placed. The most desirable colours and textures have been placed in the middle and the least acceptable at the margins. This simple little gauge tells a story of pure horror.

      ‘Fischer used this device in Namibia in 1908 to establish the relative whiteness of mixed-race people,’ reveals Das. In what is now remembered as the first genocide of the twentieth century, in the four years preceding 1908, Germany killed tens of thousands of Namibians as they rebelled against colonial rule. According to some estimates, up to 3,000 skulls belonging to those of the Herero ethnic group were sent back to Berlin to be studied by race scientists. ‘Namibia was the first place that the Germans built a concentration camp. Depending on where your hair fell on the scale was the difference between life and death.’ Similar methods would be used again, of course, a few decades later. Fischer’s work would also go on to inform the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, outlawing intermarriage between Jews, blacks and other Germans. He became a member of the Nazi party in 1940.

      Das takes out another box that belonged to Pearson, this time containing rows of glass eyes in different colours, framed in aluminium eyelids so eerily real that I fear one of them might blink. They are prosthetics of the kind that would have been fitted in patients who had eyes missing. In the context of eugenics, though, they served another purpose. ‘This object, I have seen its twin brother on display in an exhibition about race hygiene in Germany at the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité. This device was appropriated by Nazi scientists and, again, used to judge or measure race, particularly in Jewish people,’ Das explains. ‘You’ll find photographs of Nazi scientists measuring people’s heads, measuring people’s noses, matching their eye colour.’

      The eye and hair colour charts reveal just how slippery the dogged mantras of rationality and objectivity can be when it comes to studying human difference. ‘Any scientist who claims that they are not politicised, or that they are asking questions out of pure curiosity, they are lying to themselves,’ she continues. ‘The structure in itself is fundamentally, structurally racist, because it has always been taken at its face. Never going back and taking apart those underpinnings.’ What does it matter if one person has black hair and brown eyes, and another has blonde hair and blue eyes? Why not compare heights or weights or some other variable? These particular features matter only because they have political meaning attached СКАЧАТЬ