Intellectuals As Racists

RACE: THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA IN AMERICA by Thomas F. Gossett. 512 pages. S.M.U. Press. $6.95.

"Negroes have a very strong and disagreeable odor. They seem to require less sleep. Their love is ardent but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. In reason they are much inferior to whites; in imagination, they are dull, tasteless and anomalous. Their griefs are transient."

The words might be those of a Bilbo, a Rankin or any number of rednecks. In fact, they are the considered opinion of the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, who thought that "all men are created equal," except for Negroes. In this painstaking book, Thomas Gossett, English professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, has traced racism to some surprising sources. Racism would not have endured so long, he suggests, if it had not had the wholehearted support of nearly all early American intellectuals. "The frontiersmen either looked forward with pleasure to the extinction of the Indians or at least were indifferent to it," writes Gossett. "The intellectuals were most often equally convinced that the Indians, because of their inherent nature, must ultimately disappear. They were frequently willing to sigh philosophically over the fate of the Indians, but this was an empty gesture."

Falling for Darwin. Racism was rare before the era of colonialism, writes Gossett. People enslaved and oppressed one another, but they seldom justified their action on racial grounds. But in the Victorian age, when white Europeans ruled colored races the world over, racial theories mushroomed. The favorite of these was Social Darwinism, which held that human races evolve like animal species and that the nonwhite races were at the bottom of the evolutionary scale.

American intellectuals, whether liberals or conservatives, scientists or creative artists, fell hard for Social Darwinism. Wrote Jack London, the friend of the masses: "Socialism is devised so as to give more strength to these certain kindred favored races so that they may survive and inherit the earth to the extinction of the lesser, weaker races." Theodore Roosevelt declared: "The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian." Poet-Essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes described the Indians as a "sketch in red crayons of a rudimental manhood. The white man hunts him down like the wild beasts of the forest, and so the red-crayon sketch is rubbed out, and the canvas is ready for a picture of manhood a little more like God's own image."

One "scientific" test after another was devised to prove the inferiority of colored races. First, phrenology, or the study of skulls, was the rage. Enthusiasts claimed that the bigger the brain cavity, the brighter the person. When Negroes and Chinese turned up with huge brains, racists took to measuring noses. The theory was that the lesser races have longer noses--until it was pointed out that Darwin himself had an exceptionally long nose.

Not content with lording it over Negroes and Indians, historians like Parkman and Prescott exalted the Anglo-Saxon "race" as the best of the white races. The Anglo-Saxons, they declared, were hardier, steadier and more talented in politics. Only Henry Adams bothered to point out that the "invincible" Anglo-Saxons had been conquered twice in the 11 th century by supposedly inferior peoples--the Danes and later the Normans.

A Case for the Primitive. Racism was given a big boost by the flowering of intelligence tests during World War I.

A whole school of psychologists sprang up, began to administer tests to one and all. When the children of a white bank president scored higher than the children of a Negro laborer, these psychologists decided that Negroes were born with less intelligence. When more recent immigrants scored lower than earlier immigrants, the psychologists claimed that the U.S. was being overrun by inferior peoples. They never considered that nearly all these tests had a built-in prejudice. Since the tests were based on patterns of thought peculiar to American culture, the children of illiterate immigrant parents naturally scored lower, whatever their intrinsic intelligence.

It was not until the 1930s that the U.S. intellectual community changed its mind about race, and Gossett gives most of the credit to the great anthropologist Franz Boas, who "did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history." Boas came to the U.S. from Germany in 1887, stayed to study and live among the Indians. In his The Mind of Primitive Man, he made a convincing case that alien societies should be judged on their own merits, not from a narrowly Western viewpoint. Every society has its own complex pattern of behavior; one society is not necessarily more progressive than another. Human behavior is shaped by the particular culture, not by racial inheritance.

Gossett too narrowly restricts himself to the sciences in explaining the antiracist revolution. He barely touches on other forces for change: psychological, philosophical and historical. The upsurge of social conscience during the New Deal played a part; so did the upheaval of World War II. But Gossett admirably documents a forgotten revolution, a revolution so complete that no intellectual today would dare speak of other races the way Jefferson or Teddy Roosevelt did. There may be battles ahead before racial prejudice is overcome in the U.S., but the intellectual battles have been won.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.