{"id":55807,"date":"2018-02-25T18:33:34","date_gmt":"2018-02-25T18:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55807"},"modified":"2018-02-25T18:35:58","modified_gmt":"2018-02-25T18:35:58","slug":"frederick-douglasss-fight-against-scientific-racism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55807","title":{"rendered":"Frederick Douglass\u2019s Fight Against Scientific Racism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frederick Douglass\u2019s Fight Against Scientific Racism<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2018-02-22<\/p>\n

Eric Herschthal<\/strong><\/a>, Fellow
\nSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. New York Public Library<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nFrederick Douglass<\/a> in the 1870s. Scientists, he wrote, sometimes \u201csacrifice what is true to what is popular.\u201d
\nCredit Corbis, via Getty Images<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The 200th birthday of one of America\u2019s greatest thinkers, Frederick Douglass<\/a>, is being celebrated this month. Douglass is remembered as many things: a fugitive slave who gained his freedom, an abolitionist, an advocate for women\u2019s rights, a gifted writer and orator. But we should also remember him as someone whose insights about scientific theories of race are every bit as relevant in our era as they were when he wrote them.<\/p>\n

When Douglass rose to prominence, in the 1840s, he was living in a world just as excited and anxious about his era\u2019s new inventions, like the railroad and the telegraph, as we are about modern-day innovation. But he understood that the ends to which science could be used were forever bound up with the moral choices of its practitioners. \u201cScientific writers, not less than others, write to please, as well as to instruct,\u201d he wrote in 1854, \u201cand even unconsciously to themselves (sometimes) sacrifice what is true to what is popular.\u201d<\/p>\n

That statement was part of a lecture in which he attacked one of the most prominent scientific fields of the antebellum era<\/a>: ethnology, or what was sometimes called \u201cthe science of race.\u201d Though often dismissed today as pseudoscience<\/a>, at the time Douglass was writing, it was considered legitimate. The most accomplished scientists engaged in it, and the public eagerly consumed it…<\/p>\n

…Of course, engaging with ethnology on its own terms was a dangerous game. It sometimes meant that Douglass perpetuated scientific ways of thinking about race rather than simply dismantling its logic and insisting on race as a product of history. He borrowed from the ethnological theories of his friend James McCune Smith<\/a>, a fellow black abolitionist and the nation\u2019s first credentialed black physician, to argue that both black and white people would be improved by racial mixing.<\/p>\n

Yet it would be wrong to dismiss these ideas as merely the result of Douglass\u2019s own mixed racial heritage \u2014 his father, possibly his owner, was white \u2014 or as a backhanded insult to black history, to black culture. They were always written in the service of a clear political agenda, one that was radical for his time: full black integration rather than segregation…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though often dismissed today as pseudoscience, at the time Douglass was writing, it was considered legitimate. The most accomplished scientists engaged in it, and the public eagerly consumed it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,459,8,20],"tags":[10400,84,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-55807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-eric-herschthal","tag-frederick-douglass","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55807","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=55807"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55809,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55807\/revisions\/55809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}