Philosophy of Race essay ,8 to 10 pages, Compare and contrast 2 ideas

How does Gobineau believe that civilizations fall?

What is eugenics and what role does heredity play in eugenics?

John. P Jackson, “The Origins of Scientific Racism”

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 50 (Winter, 2005/2006) pp. 66-79

Jackson argues that scientific racism grew from a merger of two thoughts: heredity and the idea of passing down stable traits, and ideas of north European supremacy. These lines joined in the idea of eugenics.

Darwin had to answer the question of how survival traits were transmitted from generation to generation. Natural selection was the process but he had not put forth a mechanism by which selection took place. His theory was confronted by two problems. It was not clear how the most advantageous traits got passed down when two different individuals with differing traits mixed. There was also the problem of

In a review of Darwin’s Origin of the Species Fleeming Jenkins imagines a white man shipwrecked on an island inhabited by Negroes. This white man, he argues, would be unable to pass down his superiority through the generations, as his whiteness would be overtaken by blackness. Interestingly, some of the traits that Fleeming deems superior about the white man are his ability to conquer, oppress and rape. (see pgs 66-67)

The second problem was inheritance of “acquired” characteristics. In the nineteenth century environmental influences and biological influences were not separated. It was believed possible to acquire traits through one’s environment and pass down these newly acquired traits. This idea of inheritance was developed by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829).

While the idea of acquired traits had many adherents, it also had its enemies. Francis Galton (1822-1911), Darwin’s cousin, introduced the phrase “nature versus nurture,” as well as the notion of eugenics. Galton fell on the side of nature and did not believe that environment could change what nature has created. In other words, education, etc., would not improve individuals. He was a champion of induction—the method of reasoning from the specific or particular example to the more general. The inductive method begins with facts and based on these facts arrives at a conclusion that is said to be objective. Using this method he skirted the problem of how traits are passed down by arguing that we can observe the effects of heredity and not worry about the mechanism by which it came down. Biometrics was born as the science that focused on the study of measurable biological traits. Based on his study of Genius, Galton concluded that the government should put forth measures that insure the breeding among the best and most intelligent people. While his ideas were admired, many criticized Galton for excluding God’s grace, individual’s control over their lives and privileging heredity over environment. There is also a prejudice built into his inductive method, which he used to study the traits of the most educated and economically successful in his community. He only interviewed those who were already privileged and educated and did not look into how the poor and uneducated became so by adverse social conditions.

Support for Galton’s notion of heredity came from Cytologists who studied cells. Weismann divided cells into two –germ cells, which were the cells contained in egg and sperm and immune to the environment. The other cells were simply carriers of the germ cells and were called somatic cells. The Austrian monk Mendel (1822-1884) challenged the idea of blending and argued that he could predict the traits passed down and they were discontinuous.

Ideas of heredity worked nicely with ideas of race. Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) defended whiteness or the Teutonic race as the only race able to build civilizations and engage in creative thinking. He believed Teutons were superior because they were able to dominate and conquer other civilizations. He thought African civilization was weak because Africans coexisted peacefully with their neighbors. But Gobineau believed there was a heavy price to pay by conquering. By civilizing the conquered, he believed the superior race would be weakened by race mixing. This is how civilizations fall- when there is race mixing.

Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936) – Anthroposociology- He developed the first full version of scientific racism by building on Darwin. He built on the cephalic index , which classified people according to head size and added to this classification other socially desirable characteristics. Arayans he called dolichocephalic- long headed , blond, blue eyed, creative, strong, natural leaders. Brachycephalic were dark-skinned, round-headed, timid and natural followers. He was an advocate of selective breeding. He did not believe in the Lamarckian notion of acquired traits and therefore improvement through environment. The only way to address the racial crisis for Lapouge is elimination of inferior race. This idea gave birth to the rise of Eugenics movement that was dominant between 1900-1945. Eugenics was the way people chose to address social problems in scientific terms. (1870-1939 industrialization and movement away from small towns)

The rest of the article has a rich historical discussion of eugenics in Europe, the US and Nazi Germany.