Mixed Race Studies

From Eugenics to Genomics: A History of the Race Concept and Its Impact on Contemporary Health Disparities

American Public Health Association Annual Meeting
San Diego, California
2008

Michael Yudell, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor, Department of Community Health and Prevention
Drexel University

At the dawn of the 21st century, the idea of race—the belief that the peoples of the world can be organized into biologically distinctive groups, each with their own physical, social, and intellectual characteristics—is understood by most natural and social scientists to be an unsound concept. The way scientists think about race today, after all, is different than it was in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement when some promoted black genetic inferiority as an argument against egalitarian social and economic policy, and certainly different than one or two centuries ago as scientific justifications for slavery and later Jim Crow were articulated. In other words, race, its scientific meaning seemingly drawn from the visual and genetic cues of human diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, identifiable present, and uncertain future. These changes are influenced by a range of variables including geography, politics, culture, science, and economics.

Today, despite the growing consensus among scientists that race is not, in fact, a useful classificatory tool, an understanding of human difference and diversity remains a hallmark of contemporary scientific practice, and thus presents a seeming contradiction—how can one study human difference without talking about race? On the one hand, beginning in the 1930s, advances in population genetics and evolutionary biology led many to conclude that the race concept was not a particularly useful or accurate marker of biological difference. By the 1970s, many prominent biologists, including the geneticists Richard Lewontin and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, came to see the race concept as a deeply flawed way to organize human genetic diversity that is inseparable from the social prejudices about human difference that spawned the concept in the 18th century and have accompanied its meaning since. Historians and social scientists believe that race is socially constructed, meaning that the biological meaning of race has been constrained by the social context in which racial research has taken place…

…During the first three decades of the 20th century, eugenicists and many geneticists fiercely advocated “the belief that human races differed hereditarily by important mental as well as physical traits, and that crosses between widely different races were biologically harmful.” American eugenicists dedicated considerable resources to the study of black-white differences during the first three decades of the 20th century, and sought to apply these ideas to the public sphere. Well-respected geneticists wrote openly that “miscegenation can only lead to unhappiness under present social conditions and must, we believe, under any social conditions be biologically wrong.” In his seminal work on race and intelligence, Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929), Charles Davenport, a Harvard trained biologist and the titular head of the American eugenics movements from the outset of the 20th century until the 1930s, wrote “we are driven to the conclusion that there is a constitutional, hereditary, genetical basis for the difference between the two races [whites and blacks] in mental tests. We have to conclude that there are racial differences in mental capacity.” In their influential text Applied Eugenics (1933), eugenicists Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, who endorsed segregation as a “social adaptation,” wrote “that the Negro race differs greatly from the white race, mentally as well as physically, and that in many respects it may be said to be inferior when tested by the requirements of modern civilization and progress.” Moreover, they suggested “negroes, both children and adults, have been found markedly inferior to white in vital capacity… Differences in temperament and emotional reaction also exist, and may be more important than the purely intellectual differences.” It must be stated that the genetic claims of racial difference advocated by eugenicists—from differences in intelligence to disease rates to musicality—have all been shown to be false.

Eugenic propagandists gave race an unalterable permanence; neither education, nor change in environment or climate, nor the eradication of racism itself could alter the fate of non-whites. In the United States, the impact of eugenics on matters of human difference was felt widely. In Virginia, as head of the State’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, eugenicist and white supremacist Walter Plecker helped to shape the State’s segregation policies. For example, Plecker helped push Virginia’s anti-miscegenation Racial Integrity Act of 1924, and used that law to expose individuals he believed were passing as white in an attempt to stop what he feared to be the mongrelization of the races…

Read the entire paper here.