{"id":41149,"date":"2015-05-18T16:52:52","date_gmt":"2015-05-18T16:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41149"},"modified":"2015-05-18T17:02:44","modified_gmt":"2015-05-18T17:02:44","slug":"the-myth-of-race-the-troubling-persistence-of-an-unscientific-idea-by-robert-wald-sussman-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41149","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea by Robert Wald Sussman (review)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea by Robert Wald Sussman (review<\/a>)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Journal of Interdisciplinary History<\/a>
\nVolume 46, Number 1, Summer 2015<\/a>
\npages 109-111<\/p>\n

Ruth Clifford Engs<\/a><\/strong>, Professor Emeritus of Applied Health Science
\nIndiana University, Bloomington<\/em><\/p>\n

Sussman, Robert Wald, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea<\/a><\/em> (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sussman\u2019s<\/a> stated purpose in the introduction to this book is to \u201cdescribe the history of our myth of race and racism\u201d (3). However, a few pages later, he admits that he has not done archival research himself but instead has \u201cdepended upon the published works of many historians, biographers, and philosophers\u201d (9). In other words, he is basing his premises upon secondary sources that may have their own biases. He does not present a hypothesis or even a research question but boldly states what he is trying to find and backs up his thesis with interpretations that support it. This methodology could be considered historiographical<\/a> research. However, rarely does he compare the interpretation of one historian with that of another in an objective manner or compare interpretations from one time period to those from another, as other historiographical researchers usually do. Researchers in the past, or present, who do not agree with his conclusions are considered \u201cracists\u201d or part of \u201cthe eugenic bigot brigade.\u201d The research methods in Sussman\u2019s work cannot be deemed historical precisely because it uses few primary sources.<\/p>\n

Sussman suggests that for a number of years, most researchers in the fields of biology, anthropology, and genetics have agreed that biological \u201craces\u201d do not exist among modern humans and that race is a cultural construct, albeit with phenotypical differences among population groups. In this work, you \u201ccan\u2019t tell a book by its cover\u201d or, in this case, its title, since the book\u2019s main emphasis is the evolution of the nineteenth-century hereditarian and early twentieth-century eugenics<\/a> movements and its leaders and detractors into contemporary times. The book focuses on what Sussman perceives to be \u201cracist\u201d researchers and organizations\u2014those who suggest the possibility of biological differences between human population groups. It glorifies the anthropological school of Franz Boas<\/a> and discusses the hidden agenda of obscure philanthropic groups to re-institute immigration-restriction reform or rescind voting rights from minorities in contemporary American society.<\/p>\n

Chapter I introduces two early concepts of race since the Middle Ages<\/a> that recur throughout the book\u2014the pre-Adamite<\/a> (polygenism<\/a>) and degenerate (monogenism<\/a>) theories. The pre-Adamites believed that races, other than whites, were created before Adam and Eve<\/a> and that they were biologically fixed. Degenerate theory suggested that environment influenced \u201cracial\u201d characteristics, and that all humans were created by God, though non-whites were inferiors who needed guidance from whites. The chapter discusses the many early eighteenth-and nineteenth-century scientists and thinkers who embraced these various theories, including John Locke<\/a>, Carl Linnaeus<\/a>, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck<\/a>, David Hume<\/a>, Immanuel Kant<\/a>, Arthur de Gobineau<\/a>, Charles Darwin<\/a>, Ernst Haeckel<\/a>, Herbert Spencer<\/a>, and Francis Galton<\/a>, among others.<\/p>\n

Chapter 2 and 3 detail the early twentieth-century, American eugenics movement with a focus on various leaders, including Madison Grant<\/a>, Charles Davenport<\/a>, Henry Osborn<\/a>, Harry Laughlin<\/a>, and Henry Goddard<\/a>, discussing their influence on the immigration-restriction movement, iq tests<\/a>, and negative eugenics, characterized by sterilization. Sussman also covers such organizations as the Eugenics Records Office and the Galton Society, as well as international eugenic conferences and related issues. In his opinion, the entire eugenics movement amounts to \u201cblatant racism\u201d (85). He is silent about the fact that many aspects of the eugenics movement were intertwined with early twentieth-century public-health measures that sought to improve the health of the American people\u2014regardless of ethnicity\u2014by raising public awareness of tuberculosis<\/a>, sexually transmitted diseases, and alcohol\/drug abuse and by promoting exercise, clean water, good nutrition, personal hygiene, healthy children, immunization, etc.<\/p>\n

Chapter 4, in which Sussman shows the interlinking of American with German eugenics, portrays the various leaders of the German eugenics movement, including Ernst R\u00fcdin<\/a>, Eugen Fischer<\/a>, Fritz Lenz<\/a>, Alfred Ploetz<\/a>, and Otmar von Verschurer<\/a>, through the end of Nazi Germany<\/a> and World War II<\/a>. Chapter 5 treats Boas\u2019 development of the concept of culture and its effect on human populations. Chapter 6 goes into greater detail about cultural anthropology and covers the conflict between various schools of thought, each side accusing the other of not doing true science.<\/p>\n

The remainder of the book examines the downfall of the eugenics movement in the United States and the acceptance of culture…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea by Robert Wald Sussman (review) Journal of Interdisciplinary History Volume 46, Number 1, Summer 2015 pages 109-111 Ruth Clifford Engs, Professor Emeritus of Applied Health Science Indiana University, Bloomington Sussman, Robert Wald, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,666,2039,8],"tags":[20098,17988,20097,20095,20096],"class_list":["post-41149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-gaylesbian","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","tag-ournal-of-interdisciplinary-history","tag-robert-wald-sussman","tag-ruth-c-engs","tag-ruth-clifford-engs","tag-ruth-engs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41149\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}