The eminent black historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois recognized racial differences in behavior, but disagreed on the cause. In his famous study, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), he reported that blacks in Philadelphia, although only four percent of the population, committed 22 percent of the serious crimes. He also called attention to what he called “the unchastity of a large number of women.” “The great weakness of the Negro family,” Du Bois wrote, “is . . . lack of respect for the marriage bond. . . . . Sexual looseness then arises as a secondary consequence, bringing adultery and prostitution in its train.” In a talk to one group of blacks, Du Bois declared that “the first and greatest step [toward solving America’s racial problems] is the correction of the immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes themselves.”[6]
At the same time, Du Bois shifted the paradigm by arguing that racial discrimination by whites was largely responsible for the condition of blacks. He emphasized that whites, because they established racial barriers to good jobs, were responsible for black failure. Du Bois did not ignore the weaknesses of blacks, but he emphasized the culpability of whites.
A century later, it is Du Bois’s view that prevails. Most people attribute racial disparities to the influence of history, culture, and discrimination. This is “the sovereign doctrine of twentieth century social theory,” naturalist E. O. Wilson has written, adding that this modern consensus eschews the importance of biology, pays “little attention to the foundation of human nature,” and has “almost no interest in its deep origins.”[7]
George M. Fredrickson, who taught history at Stanford until 2002, acknowledged that earlier generations of scientists and scholars often mentioned evolution as the source of racial disparities, but he insisted they were motivated by racism. They “raised prejudice to the level of science; thereby giving it respectability.” Fortunately, Fredrickson wrote, in the 20th century there occurred a “fundamental change . . . in white racial thinking.” In “respectable” circles, “liberal environmentalism” emerged as a pervasive “racial creed,” and most mainstream social scientists now maintain that there are “no differences between the races which [are] likely to affect their social, cultural, and intellectual performance; all apparent differences [are] the result of environment.”[8]
This is what I was taught when I was a student at Stanford and Berkeley from 1956 to 1965. My professors implied that with the right social reforms, ethnic and racial gaps could be abolished. They implied that emphasis on biology was a sign of bigotry. My professors subscribed to the blank-slate theory that all races of humanity have the same innate distribution of aptitudes and talent. One of my favorite professors, historian Kenneth M. Stampp, summed up the prevailing wisdom in a memorable sentence: “Negroes are after all only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less.”[9]
What caused this turnabout? I believe four considerations are especially important. One is a phenomenon that has been called “Hitler’s posthumous revenge.” Then there is the logic and legacy of the civil rights movement. There was also a new pattern of thinking in social science. And, eventually, there were programs to re-educate–or indoctrinate–students.
I first became acquainted with the term “Hitler’s posthumous revenge” when I read Peter Brimelow’s 1995 book, Alien Nation.[10] Mr. Brimelow noted that during the Second World War most Americans came to loathe Nazi Germany. After the war, the United States and its allies decided to put as much distance as possible between their nations and Nazism, which they came to define as the refusal to accept diversity. In retrospect, we can see that this set the stage for dismantling the existing particularisms in Western societies. Rejecting nationalism and distinctions between racial groups as retrograde–and even as akin to Nazism–eventually led to the Immigration Act of 1965. Repudiation of national traditions paved the way for massive immigration of non-whites into Europe as well as North America–immigration that is transforming and could ultimately destroy the victors in World War II. In the last few years, Angela Merkel has opened Germany to massive Third-World immigration as well, so the vanquished may be submerged along with the victors.
The Civil Rights Movement also led many whites toward egalitarianism and a hyper-critical attitude toward their ancestors. In some circles, this attitude has come to be known as “ethnomasochism.”
The Civil Rights Movement began long ago, but its high point came in the 1950s and 1960s, when blacks demanded the right to vote, an end to formal segregation, and the abolition of racial discrimination in public accommodations. Most white people thought these demands were reasonable, especially since civil rights leaders insisted that their movement be nonviolent and dignified. As journalist James J. Kilpatrick noted, for tactical reasons the leaders of the Movement emphasized the contrast between “well-dressed, studious blacks peacefully protesting” and violent mobs of whites, “a ragtail rabble, slackjawed, black jacketed, grinning fit to kill.”[11] According to legal historian Michael Klarman, the freedom riders “count[ed] upon the racists of the South to create a crisis,” and black leaders “calculated for the stupidity of Bull Connor.” Conner did not disappoint. He and his police dogs became the most widely recognized symbols of white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. Civil rights leaders carefully chose to hold demonstrations in areas where local authorities were likely to over-react. Sheriff Jim Clark of Selma, Alabama, was one of many examples.[12] Meanwhile, the racial implications of evolution were relegated to a few scholarly journals and some small academic societies.
The roots of this new paradigm went deeper, however, back to the work of anthropologist Franz Boas, who was at Columbia University from 1896 to 1942. It was Boas who, more than anyone else, persuaded anthropologists and other social scientists that racial differences were not the result of genetic inheritance but were shaped by historical events.[13]
Franz Boas
Early in his career, Boas had reported that “the average size of the Negro brain is slightly smaller than the average size of the brain of the white race,” and therefore Boas thought it likely “that differences in mental characteristics of the two races exist.”[14] But by the 1920s, he was teaching that “the variations in cultural development” could be explained “by a consideration of the general course of historical events” and without recourse to innate racial differences.[15] Instead of stressing the importance of race, he insisted that “patterns of culture” were primarily responsible for differences in behavior.
Carl Degler (1921 – 2014), a Pulitzer-prize winning historian at Stanford, has noted that Boas did not present “conclusive evidence” that “unambiguously disproved” the Darwinists. Instead, Boas managed to substitute his own “unproved (though strongly held) assumption.” Boas established a new orthodoxy, one that held that “the well-recognized diversity among human groups derived not from race but from different histories and environments.”[16]
How did Boas do it? According to Degler “changes in the ethnic makeup of the social science community”–that is, the increasing numbers of Jewish scholars, which led eventually to Jewish domination of the social sciences–explained “a large part of the explanation for this shift in outlook on race.”[17] Degler was, himself, Jewish. Kevin MacDonald adds that “ethnic networking by Jews with access to prestigious academic institutions, academic presses, and the elite media created dominant intellectual and political movements that effectively excluded dissenters from positions of authority and influence.”[18]
George Stocking (1928 – 2013) had a different argument. He conceded that Boas had a strong sense of Jewish identity; that Boas was sensitive to anti-Semitism in his native Germany; that he “bore scars from several duels he had fought with fellow students who had made anti-Semitic remarks.” But Stocking believes that Boas’ fieldwork with Eskimos in northern Alaska was even more influential. There Boas found himself living as “as a true Eskimo,” eating and hunting with the natives, and celebrating “the sea-change that comes from immersion in another . . . culture.” It was “a beautiful custom,” Boas wrote, “that these ‘savages’ suffer all deprivation in common, but in happy times when someone has brought back booty from the hunt, all join in eating and drinking.” Boas concluded that men and women who knew so much about surviving against the odds, about ice fishing, dog sledding, and polar bears, were not intellectually inferior. They, and other supposedly “inferior” groups, were not shaped by Darwinian adaptations but by their own history, climate, and culture.[19]
Whatever the reasons for Boas’ “culturism,” he instilled this views [sic] in scores of graduate students who eventually came to dominate anthropology. One of these students, Margaret Mead, wrote the best-selling anthropology book of the 20h century, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). Another, Ruth Benedict, wrote the most influential “culturist” book of the era, Patterns of Culture (1934). A third, Ashley Montague, was the principal author of UNESCO’s influential 1950 “Statement on Race,” which argued that race was unimportant.
Meanwhile, other Boas students became heads of the anthropology departments at such places as Berkeley (Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie), Chicago (Edward Sapir and Fay Cooper Cole), Northwestern (Melville Herskovits). In addition, between the 1920s and the 1950s, several of Boas’s students served as editors of the American Anthropological Association’s flagship journal, American Anthropologist, (John Swanton, Robert Lowie, Leslie Spier, Melville Herskovits). From these perches, Boas’s former students made it difficult for biologically-oriented anthropologists to publish or find jobs. Boas, it seems, employed the Gramscian strategy of infiltration by means of a “long march” through his profession.[20]
Beginning in 1934 with funding from the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Boas and his proteges also launched a campaign to persuade teachers and administrators to revise the standard curriculum in social studies. They wanted grade school and high school students “to learn that it was [not evolution but] the concept of culture, learned customs in a specific social and historical context, that explained the extraordinary diversity of human life.” To that end, Ruth Benedict wrote an influential pamphlet, The Races of Mankind, which was used as a textbook to explain that “differences between individuals of any group . . . were due to variations in social environment and historical circumstances and [were] not biologically determined.“ Margaret Mead explained the goal, saying, “[C]hanging the climate of opinion in which young people are reared . . . will inevitably have profound reverberations in the social order . . . . [It] is well within the power of educational leaders.”[21]
This proved to be the case. According to Zoe Burkholder, the author of a solid academic monograph on this effort to reform the public schools, Boas and his “early civil rights warriors . . . forever change[d] the way American schools taught about [the] human race . . . .”[22] They showed that there was a measure of truth in a statement that has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “The philosophy taught in the classrooms in one generation will become the philosophy of the government in the next.”
Many of those who taught Boas’s program believed what they were teaching. Boas, however, admitted that the program was a form of propaganda. At one point in the 1930s, even Ruth Benedict lamented that Boas had “given up science for good works . . . such a waste!” In 1939, after concluding that Boas had become more a propagandist than a scientist, the American Jewish Committee stopped funding Boas’s work for school reform.[23]
During the Cold War, when the Boasian program came to be associated with the propaganda of the Communist Party, there was a decline in the public schools’ use of what Boasians called “tolerance education.”[24] But in recent decades the left-liberal, culturist version of race relations has been revived and has become the dominant, central theme in America’s elementary and high school classes. For the last 50 years, America’s elementary students have been taught that different races have the same distribution of innate aptitudes and talent.
Culturism also gave rise to a new form of intolerance. In some colleges there have been efforts to silence those who give Darwinian or biological explanations for race and sex differences in achievement. Meanwhile, many colleges and school districts pay the expenses of students and teachers who attend conferences where leftist fanatics maintain that persistent racial and ethnic disparities are the result of “white privilege.” Culturists have also silenced candid discussion of other topics, especially feminism, homosexuality, trans-genderism, and gay marriage. We have moved beyond the days when the exceptions to free speech were limited to incitement, sedition, pornography, and blasphemy.
According to one recent poll, 71 percent of college freshmen now think universities should “prohibit racist [and] sexist speech on campus.”[25] Since these freshmen had only recently arrived at college, their opinions were most likely not the result of indoctrination by professors, but were shaped earlier through the modern counterpart of the Franz Boas’s “tolerance education” of the 1930s. America’s schools, as well as its major media, claim that all group disparities can be eliminated only if whites get over their racism, renounce their privilege, and reshape their culture.
However, since the 1950s there has been a slow revival of Darwinism among scholars in biology and psychology and even in anthropology and sociology. In 1975, the eminent Harvard naturalist, E. O. Wilson, reviewed and added to this research in his magnum opus, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. This synthesis united social and natural science. It conceded that history matters, but also maintained that there is a biological basis for culture.
In 1991, Carl Degler published a 400-page book that described scores of recent academic studies that also have pointed toward a Darwinian understanding of the biological basis of social behavior.[26] By the time a 25th anniversary edition of E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology was published in 2000, Amazon.com listed 416 titles under “sociobiology” and 1,218 under “human evolution.”[27] Three years later, New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade explained that racial differences arose “because after the ancestral human population in Africa spread throughout the world . . . , geographical barriers prevented interbreeding. Consequently, under the influence of natural selection . . . people . . . diverged away from the ancestral population, creating new races.” In his 2014 book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, Mr. Wade summarized a large body of research that indicates that evolution in different environments has led to different distributions of genes that influence not just skin color but also behavior, intelligence, and personality.[28]
The climate of educated opinion is shifting, but the neo-Darwinians have by no means supplanted the culturists. In part, this is because some of the Darwinian sociobiology is provisional and debatable. But there is also stiff resistance, not so much from scientists as from politicians, the media, students, many professors, and doctrinaire reformers. Culturism has become dogma, not only in the United States but in Canada and Europe as well.
Nevertheless, genetic information continues to slip out of the laboratories, and this information is showing that people with different ancestries have different distributions of DNA. Thanks to these studies and to better methods for dating ancient remains, the vast majority of scholars agree that mankind separated into two parts well over 50,000 years ago. One part remained in Africa, the ancestral homeland, and the other crossed into Southwest Asia. The second group separated again and again until there were human populations living in reproductive isolation in almost all parts of the world. This continued for hundreds of generations and, over time, there were numerous adaptations to differing climates and conditions.
This is how racial and other group differences evolved. Groups with different ancestries or different ways of living developed different genes because those genes were suited to their respective environments. Anthropologist Greg Cochran says someone would have to be an “idiot” to believe that “the optimum mental phenotype . . . [is] the same in the tropical hunter-gatherers, arctic hunter-gatherers, Neolithic peasants, and medieval moneylenders.” [29]
As an historian, I am primarily a story teller. I describe and try to explain what others have done, said, written, or thought. Nevertheless, my students sometimes ask what I think. They may ask, “What was the major cause of the American Civil War?” Or, “What do you think about Woodrow Wilson’s plan for a new world order?” Or, “Did Roosevelt’s economic policies end the Great Depression or did they prolong it?”
These questions give me pause. They can be answered plausibly but not definitively. Of course, I have opinions. In fact, now that I am retired I seem to have more opinions than I did when I taught full-time at the University of Delaware.
I think the Darwinists of 1900 were correct when they said the characters of different races had been influenced by natural selection, but I believe they went too far in dismissing the significance of “culture.”[30]
I also think Boasian culturists went too far in discounting the importance of heredity. It is not correct to affirm, as one college textbook does, that “there is no logical reason to expect that the number of minority students [in advanced classes] would not be proportional to their representation in the general population.” It is a mistake to write, as one New York Times columnist has, that “given the opportunities, most people could do most anything.”[31]
I think we should acknowledge that in accounting for racial disparities “the data . . . tip toward a mixture of genetic and environmental influences.”[32] Heredity and culture are both important. Human behavior should be understood as the product of an interplay between biology and culture.
We should also recognize that this balanced view prevails among many scholars and scientists, although most politicians, the media, and most schools are mired in politically correct culturism. The task before us, I believe, is to inculcate in our teachers, social scientists, journalists, and politicians a realistic, scientifically-based understanding of racial disparities.
Phil Rushton passed on in 2012 at the age of 68. If Phil were with us today, I would have a mixed message: one part gloom and the other more hopeful. Gloom because our culturist establishment has embraced a sentimental, scientifically-unwarranted egalitarianism that, if it continues, will doom the white race and its civilizations.
But there is also good news. I would tell Phil that informed scientific opinion is shifting. I would tell him that Darwinism is regaining its cachet with scientists, although not yet with molders of opinion. I would tell him that his own work is now recognized as a significant contribution to the revival of Darwinism in our time.[33] And I would remind him of a statement that Martin Luther King made at the end of his famous march from Selma to Montgomery, “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.”
When King said that in 1965, he was drawing on William Cullen Bryant’s work of 1839, “The Battlefield.” But history is replete with ironies, and King was not the first to paraphrase Bryant. Among his predecessors was Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, who, in 1868, declared, “Truth crushed to earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again.”[34]
[1] Charles Darwin, On the Origin of the Species (London: Murray, 1859).
[2] Charles Darwin, quoted by George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1971), 230. Also see Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (London, 1969) 343; George W. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution (New York: 1968), 113. Admittedly, Origin of the Species focused on the animal kingdom, but in his sequel, The Descent of Man (London: Murray, 1871) Darwin emphasized that mankind was part of this kingdom.
[3] John De Forest, Francis Walker, James Bryce, and Joseph Le Conte, quoted and paraphrased by George M. Fredrickson, ibid., 241-43, 238, 245, 246, 247.
[4] Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 62.
[5] George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1968), 132; Kevin MacDonald, Review of Joseph. W. Bendersky, The ‘Jewish’ Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U. S. Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000), at Kevin MacDonald.net.
[6] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899; reprint, Millwood, N. Y.: Kraus-Thompson Organization, 1973), 50, 249; Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races” (1897), reprinted in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Pamphles and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois (White Plains, N.Y.: Kraus Thomson Organization, 1986), 8, 7, 6.
[7] E. O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 2004.
[8] George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1971), 89, 255, 320-332, and passim. Writing twenty years later, however, another historian, Carl Degler, noted that since the 1950s there has been a decided “revival” of Darwinian thought among scholars. Degler, In Search of Human Nature.
[9] Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956) vii.
[10] Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation (New York: Random House, 1995).
[11] James J. Kilpatrick, quoted by Randall Kennedy, “Lifting as We Climb,” Harpers (October 2015).
[12] Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 385, 429; Klarman, “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,” Journal of American History 81 (June 1994) 81-118) .
[13] Sol Tax, “Franz Boas,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed on-line, March 6, 2016.
[14] Franz Boas, “The Real Race Problem, Crisis 1 (November 1910), 2, 23. One of Boas’ most prominent Ph.D. students, Alfred Kroeber of Berkeley, made a similar point. “. . . the anatomical differences between races would appear to render it likely that at least some corresponding congenital differences of psychological quality exist. These differences might not be profound, compared with the sum total of common human faculties, much as the physical variations of mankind fall within the limits of a single species. Yet they would preclude identity. As for the vexed question of superiority, lack of identity would involve at least some degree of greater power in certain respects in some races. These pre-eminences might be rather evenly distributed so that no one race would notably excel the others in the sum total or average of its capacities; or they might show some minor tendency to cluster on one rather than on another race. . . . “ A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), 204.
[15] Franz Boas, “The Real Race Problem,” Crisis 1 (November 1910), 2, 23; Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: McMillan, 1911), 5, 11, 22, 29.
[16] Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 187, 192.
[17] Ibid., 202.
[18]Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique (Westport: Praeger, 1998, First Paperback Edition, 2002), Chapter 2 and passim; MacDonald, “The Alt Right,” VDare.com, 18 April 2016.
[19] George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 147, 148, 150, 204 and passim.
[20] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, Chapter 2; Gary Bullert, “Franz Boas as Citizen Scientist,” smashcm[cultural Marxism].blogspot.com.
[21] Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, paraphrased by Zoe Burkholder, Color in the Classroom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7-8, 76, 85.
[22] Zoe Burkholder, Color in the Classroom, 11, 45.
[23] Zoe Burkholder, Color in the Classroom, 67, 63.
[24] Zoe Burkholder, Color in the Classroom, 153.
[25] See Victor S. Skinner, “Thousands of Teachers Flock to ‘White Privilege’ Conference, EAG News, 15 April 2016; and to the articles listed under “indoctrination” at AmRen.com and under “white privilege” at DailerCaller.com; Catherine Rampell, “Liberal Intolerance Is on the Rise on America’s College Campuses, Washington Post, February 11, 2016).
[26] Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
[27] Steve Sailer, “Sociobiology at Age 25,” National Review, 19 June 2000.
[28] Nicholas Wade, “’Two Scholarly Articles,” New York Times, 20 March 2003); Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2014). Also see Kevin Lamb, “The Reality of Race: Understanding the Nature of Racial Differences,” in Samuel Francis, ed., Race and the American Prospect (Mt. Airy, Maryland: The Occidental Press 2006), 21-65.
[29] See William Saletan, “Created Equal, Slate.com (28 November 2007); Gregory Cochran, “Pygmification,” posted at Westhunt.wordpress.com (August 24, 2014).
[30] Paul B. Barringer and Joseph A. Tillinghast, quoted and paraphrased by George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 253-54.
[31] Mary M. Frasier, “Gifted Minority Students,” in Nicholas Colangelo and Gary A. David, Handbook of Gifted Education (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997) 498; Deborah Solomon, interview with Charles Murray, quoted by John Derbyshire, “The Straggler” (1 December 2008) at JohnDerbyshire.com/Opinions/Straggler; Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).
[32] Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press, 1994), 311.
[33] Helmuth Nyborg, ed., The Life History Approach to Human Differences: A Tribute to J. Philippe Rushton (London: Ulster Institute for Social Research, 2015).
[34] Bryant put it this way: “Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; The eternal years of God are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes with pain, And dies among his worshippers.”
