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Race
During the past fifty years the emphasis has been of the likeness, common features and equality of races. Yet interracial tensions and hostilities persist today as never before. Race by Dr. John R. Baker deals in an objective manner and informative way with the "ethnic problem"-what is meant by "race," whether race can be related to intelligence, and whether or not one race can be considered "superior" to another. Written with a thoroughness uncharacteristic in the usual treatment of race, Race, is the only book that embraces history, biology, paleontology, the ancestry of man, his ascent to civilization, and the psychology of race.
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First published February 14, 1974
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About the author
John R. Baker
62 books5 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
John Randal Baker was a Britisch biologist, physical anthropologist, and professor at the University of Oxford (where he was the Emeritus Reader in Cytology) in the mid-twentieth century.
He is best remembered for his 1974 book Race, which classifies human races in the same way in which animal subspecies are classified.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
John Randal Baker was a Britisch biologist, physical anthropologist, and professor at the University of Oxford (where he was the Emeritus Reader in Cytology) in the mid-twentieth century.
He is best remembered for his 1974 book Race, which classifies human races in the same way in which animal subspecies are classified.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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February 16, 2024
Published by OUP in 1974, ‘Race’ represents a landmark in intellectual history—the last time a major publisher published a racialist work.
Inevitably, it is dated. Without access to genetic data, Baker had to infer what he could from phenotypes.
Yet I found only one case of genetics falsifying his conclusions. Where Baker classes the Ainu of Japan as ‘Europid’ (p171; p625), genetics show they are wholly Asian.
Yet this limitation means that, in much of the material he does cover, especially on morphological differences, ‘Race’ is scarcely dated at all, as new research on this topic has all but ceased.
Baker’s ‘Race’ represents, then, the final summation of the racial anthropology of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries published at the very moment this intellectual tradition was in its death throes.
History
The book suffers from an excessive historical focus. Not content with writing science, Baker wants to write history of science too.
The first section covers the history of race science, but his account from the mid-nineteenth century on is restricted to those thinkers who “favoured belief in the inequality of [races]” (p33).
Yet thinkers championing egalitarianism—Boas, Montagu—have proven more influential, at least in the medium-term.
Baker then concludes his survey altogether in 1928, as this:
Moreover, it is untrue that one cannot:
Biology
Baker declares, “Racial problems cannot be understood by anyone whose interests and field of knowledge stop short at the limit of purely human affairs” (p3).
But his nine-pages on race differences in crested newts went too far!
Species?
For sexually-reproducing organisms, a species is usually defined as the largest group of organisms that interbreed and produce fertile offspring.
But things are not so simple.
First, some subspecies do not interbreed with one another but do interbreed with intermediaries, resulting in some gene flow (i.e. ring species).
Second, one species evolves into another gradually with no abrupt dividing line—and, for extinct species, the question of interfertility is mostly guesswork (p69-73).
Therefore, Baker distinguishes different ‘species concepts’—paleontological, morphological and genetical.
On morphological criteria, Baker questions humanity’s status as a single species:
Even the ability to produce fertile offspring is a matter of degree, with offspring of some pairings sometimes being fertile, sometimes not (e.g. Haldane’s rule: p94-5).
Baker concludes:
For Baker this is decisive since he approvingly quotes Blumenbach as asserting:
Is Race Real?
Using ‘race’ as a synonym for ‘subspecies’, Baker gives no definition. He simply explains:
Thus, he criticises the notion that racial clines disprove the reality of races by observing that, if races did not interbreed and produce intermediaries, they would not be races but separate species:
Baker’s other examples are also problematic:
Perhaps a better example, if only because it is sure to annoy sociologists, is social class. As criminologist Anthony Walsh puts it:
With increased migration and intermarriage, we may be approaching that point.
Debunking Diamond
Baker anticipates in advance one recent objection to the race concept raised by Jared Diamond, who argued that racial categories are invalid because, rather than classified by color, races could be grouped by lactose tolerance or sickle-cell, producing very different taxonomies (Diamond 1994).
In fact, Baker reports, races are not classified by skin color (p159). Thus, some South Asians are very dark but are still classed as Caucasoid (p160).
Certainly, race differences go beyond color:
As for sickle-cell and lactose tolerance, these are, for Baker, “secondary characters” that cannot be used for classification because they are not present in all members of any group but differ only in prevalence (p186).
Moreover, the sickle-cell gene evolved independently in separate groups (p189). It is therefore cladistically irrelevant (p187).
Thus, Diamond classifies races on a single character that independently evolved in different groups, instead of a whole suite of intercorrelated traits indicative of common ancestry.
This type of error recurs, Baker reports, because:
Measuring Morphology?
Baker’s third section focuses on morphological differences—which Baker describes in painstaking technical detail.
Unfortunately, he rarely discusses if the differences are statistically significant.
Thus, he claims, for example, that Ashkenazi Jews “can generally be recognised by certain physical characters that distinguish them from other Europeans” (p238). These include a nose “large in all dimensions” (p239), the characteristic shape of which Baker purports to illustrate in a delightfully offensive diagram (p241).
But he cites no nose measurement data to confirm this.
His choice of which groups to focus on is quite arbitrary. Asians are entirely omitted.
The San
Whereas Aborigines are, Baker reports, morphologically ‘primitive’ (i.e. retain traits of early hominids), Bushmen are pædomorphic (i.e. retain into maturity traits characteristic of juveniles). Baker concludes:
Baker stresses the secondary sexual traits of San women, including their buttocks (‘Steatopygia’), which are, he says, qualitatively different in shape and composition from those of other races (p318).
Baker denies that they evolved, like camel humps, as a “storehouse of nutrient on which the body may call in times of scarcity”, as Sanids are not “adapted by natural selection to desert life” (p318).
The San are now confined to the Kalahari Desert, but Baker presumably views this as a recent displacement due to the Bantu expansion.
Instead, Baker implicates sexual selection.
This might explain why they are restricted to women—but Coon explains this by reference to the caloric demands of pregnancy (Racial Adaptations: p105).
Yet, while a Google image search produces photographic evidence of Bushmen buttocks, their enlarged labia prove elusive.
Perhaps the modesty of San women, or Victorian anthropologists, is a factor. But it is telling that, even in this age of ‘Rule 34 of the Internet’ (“If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions”), photographic evidence is scant.
Superiority
Baker critiques the very notion of equality.
Contemporary racialists thus disclaim any imputation of supremacy. Yet these same hereditarians also emphasize the correlation of IQ with many social outcomes generally viewed in anything but value-neutral terms—e.g. crime, unemployment.
From a biologic perspective, no species is superior. Each is adapted to its own ecological niche.
But this implies a dung beetle is equal to Beethoven!
Measuring Superiority
Baker focuses on two types of evidence:
But his comparative discussion of different civilizations remains worth reading, especially in conjunction with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Defining Civilization
Baker identifies several criteria for civilization (p507-8). They come in two forms:
Yet moral superiority is entirely subjective.
Any person ranking cultures on moral grounds will inevitably rank his own as superior because he is judging these societies by the moral standards of his own culture that he has internalized as his own.
Thus, Baker’s first criterion, namely that “In the ordinary circumstances of life in public places they cover the external genitalia and greater part of the trunk with clothes” (p507) is both puritanical and biased against tropical cultures.
Only in temperate/arctic zones is clothing needed to survive.
Africa
Baker acknowledges the adoption of advanced technologies in sub-Saharan Africa, but attributes this to outside influence.
To assess the indigenous culture of blacks, Baker relies on the reports of seven Victorian European explorers of “the secluded zone” (i.e. most of East, Central and Southern Africa, excluding the Horn of Africa, coast of West Africa and Gulf of Guinea), where outside influence was, at that time, minimal.
He thus concludes there is no evidence sub-Saharan Africans ever fully domesticated any plants (354-6) or animals (p373-7) or invented the wheel (p373) or devices with interacting parts (p354). Neither (with some partial exceptions discussed in Chapter 21) did they construct two-storey buildings or devise a written script.
The only animal domesticated in sub-Saharan Africa is the guineafowl, and, although some plants were domesticated in the Sahel and West Africa, these lie outside Baker’s “secluded zone”.
But it must be remembered that Europeans did not invent the wheel or a written script either. Instead, these technologies were invented in the Near East, then copied/adopted by Europeans.
The real question, then, is why sub-Saharan Africans failed to adopt the wheel.
Art
Baker also compares the art of different cultures. Like moral judgement, such assessments are inevitably subjective.
Thus, Baker disparages black African art as non-naturalistic (p381) but extols Celtic art, which is mostly non-figurative (p261-2).
Yet, with regard to music, he recognises the possibility of cultural bias, arguing that westerners failed to recognise the rhythmical qualities of African music (p379).
A Reminder of What Was Possible?
At the end of his section on the history of racial thinking, Baker, bemoaning the impact of censorship on science and publishing in his own time, recommends a book published some forty years earlier (Contemporary Sociological Theories) as worth reading, even then, as “as a reminder of what was still possible before the curtain went down” (p61).
Today, some forty years later still, I recommend ‘Race’ in the same spirit, as “as a reminder of what was still possible”.
Full (i.e. vastly overlong) review here
References
Diamond 1994 Race without Color, Discover
Relethford 2009 Race & global patterns of phenotypic variation, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139(1):16-22
Inevitably, it is dated. Without access to genetic data, Baker had to infer what he could from phenotypes.
Yet I found only one case of genetics falsifying his conclusions. Where Baker classes the Ainu of Japan as ‘Europid’ (p171; p625), genetics show they are wholly Asian.
Yet this limitation means that, in much of the material he does cover, especially on morphological differences, ‘Race’ is scarcely dated at all, as new research on this topic has all but ceased.
Baker’s ‘Race’ represents, then, the final summation of the racial anthropology of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries published at the very moment this intellectual tradition was in its death throes.
History
The book suffers from an excessive historical focus. Not content with writing science, Baker wants to write history of science too.
The first section covers the history of race science, but his account from the mid-nineteenth century on is restricted to those thinkers who “favoured belief in the inequality of [races]” (p33).
Yet thinkers championing egalitarianism—Boas, Montagu—have proven more influential, at least in the medium-term.
Baker then concludes his survey altogether in 1928, as this:
“Marks the close of the period in which both sides in the ethnic controversy were free to put forward their views, and authors… could give objective accounts of the evidence pointing in each direction” (p61)But, if this were true, Baker’s own book could never have been written.
Moreover, it is untrue that one cannot:
“Follow the general course of controversy on the ethnic problem, because, for the reason just stated [i.e. the inability of authors on both sides to express their views], there has been no general controversy” (p61)In fact, controversy continues unabated, with each year a new figure excoriated or excommunicated for some racial heresy.
Biology
Baker declares, “Racial problems cannot be understood by anyone whose interests and field of knowledge stop short at the limit of purely human affairs” (p3).
“No one knows man who only knows man” (p65)His discussion of race differences in apes is interestingly but outdated. Bonobos are now known to differ behaviourally from other chimps, but also classed as a separate species.
But his nine-pages on race differences in crested newts went too far!
Species?
For sexually-reproducing organisms, a species is usually defined as the largest group of organisms that interbreed and produce fertile offspring.
But things are not so simple.
First, some subspecies do not interbreed with one another but do interbreed with intermediaries, resulting in some gene flow (i.e. ring species).
Second, one species evolves into another gradually with no abrupt dividing line—and, for extinct species, the question of interfertility is mostly guesswork (p69-73).
Therefore, Baker distinguishes different ‘species concepts’—paleontological, morphological and genetical.
On morphological criteria, Baker questions humanity’s status as a single species:
“Even typical Nordids and… Alpinids, both… subraces of a single race… are very much more different from one another in morphological characters… than many ‘species’ of animals that never interbreed with one another in nature, though their territories overlap” (p97)Quantitative data confirming that morphological differences between human races exceed those between some separate species of nonhuman primate is provided in Race: The Reality of Human Differences (reviewed here).
Even the ability to produce fertile offspring is a matter of degree, with offspring of some pairings sometimes being fertile, sometimes not (e.g. Haldane’s rule: p94-5).
Baker concludes:
“There is no proof that hybridity among human[s] is invariably eugenesic, for many… possible crosses have not been made, or if they have their outcome does not appear to have been recorded” (p97)He concedes that complete infertility is unlikely but speculates:
“Statistical study might reveal a preponderance of female offspring [and] one would have to prove that filial generations in the direct line, without back-crosses… retained their fertility” (p98)A final point is that some species, widely recognized as separate species because they never interbreed in the wild, do interbreed in captivity (e.g. lions and tigers).
For Baker this is decisive since he approvingly quotes Blumenbach as asserting:
“Man is ‘of all living beings the most domesticated’” (p95).Thus, Baker concludes:
“The whole concept of species is vague because the word is used with such different meanings… Some significance can be attached to [the criterion of interfertility] in so far as it applies to animals existing in natural conditions… But it does not appear to be applicable to human beings, who live under the most extreme conditions of domestication” (p98)Yet, whether humans can be said to be domesticated depends on how we define ‘domesticated’. If we are domesticated, then we are unique in having domesticated ourselves—or perhaps one another.
Is Race Real?
Using ‘race’ as a synonym for ‘subspecies’, Baker gives no definition. He simply explains:
“If two populations are so distinct that one can generally tell from which region a specimen was obtained, it is usual to give separate names to the two races” (p99)Neither does he give a definition of any race:
“The definition of any particular race must be inductive in the sense that it gives a general impression of the distinctive characters, without professing to be applicable in detail to every individual” (p99)In his chapter on “the Species Question”, Baker concludes that one cannot prove that all humans are a single species. Yet, in the rest of the book, he proceeds on the assumption that we are indeed one species.
Thus, he criticises the notion that racial clines disprove the reality of races by observing that, if races did not interbreed and produce intermediaries, they would not be races but separate species:
“Intersubracial and interracial hybridization is so far from indicating the unreality of subraces and races, that it is actually a sine qua non of the reality of these ethnic taxa” (p12)The existence of continuous variation does not disprove the existence of races, since:
“In other matters no one questions the reality of categories between which intermediaries exist. There is every graduation… between green and blue, but no one denies these words should be used” (p100)This is an unfortunate example, since colors don’t really exist. The electromagnetic spectrum varies continuously and discrete colors are imposed only by the human visual system.
Baker’s other examples are also problematic:
“The existence of youths and human hermaphrodites does not cause anyone to disallow the use of the words, ‘boy’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’” (p100)Yet hermaphrodites are rare, while terms like ‘boy’ and ‘youth’ are not scientific. Relethford (2009: p21) observes, “We tend to use crude labels in everyday life with the realization that they are fuzzy and subjective”. But more precision is needed in science.
Perhaps a better example, if only because it is sure to annoy sociologists, is social class. As criminologist Anthony Walsh puts it:
“Is social class… a useless concept because of its cline-like tendency to merge smoothly from case to case across the distribution, or because its discrete categories are determined by researchers according to their research purposes and are definitely not ‘pure’” (Race and Crime: p6).Yet sometimes intermediaries are so common that they can no longer be called intermediaries and all that can be said to exist is continuous variation.
With increased migration and intermarriage, we may be approaching that point.
Debunking Diamond
Baker anticipates in advance one recent objection to the race concept raised by Jared Diamond, who argued that racial categories are invalid because, rather than classified by color, races could be grouped by lactose tolerance or sickle-cell, producing very different taxonomies (Diamond 1994).
In fact, Baker reports, races are not classified by skin color (p159). Thus, some South Asians are very dark but are still classed as Caucasoid (p160).
Certainly, race differences go beyond color:
“An albino… Negrid who is fairer than any non-albino European appears even more unlike a European than a normal… Negrid” (p160)A google image search confirms this.
As for sickle-cell and lactose tolerance, these are, for Baker, “secondary characters” that cannot be used for classification because they are not present in all members of any group but differ only in prevalence (p186).
Moreover, the sickle-cell gene evolved independently in separate groups (p189). It is therefore cladistically irrelevant (p187).
Thus, Diamond classifies races on a single character that independently evolved in different groups, instead of a whole suite of intercorrelated traits indicative of common ancestry.
This type of error recurs, Baker reports, because:
“Each of the differences that enable one to distinguish all the most typical individuals of any one taxon from those of another is due, as a general rule, to the action of polygenes…[i.e.] numerous genes, having small cumulative effects” (p190)But, since polygenes are not amenable to analysis, almost inevitably:
“Attention is focussed… on those ‘secondary differences’… that can be studied singly… [which] has led… to a tendency to minimise or even disregard the extent to which [races] do actually differ from one another” (p543)Baker even provides a reductio ad absurdum of Diamond’s approach, observing:
“From the perspective of taste-deficiency the Europids are much closer to the chimpanzee than to the Sinids and Paiwan people” (p188)Are Caucasians then a subspecies of chimp?
Measuring Morphology?
Baker’s third section focuses on morphological differences—which Baker describes in painstaking technical detail.
Unfortunately, he rarely discusses if the differences are statistically significant.
Thus, he claims, for example, that Ashkenazi Jews “can generally be recognised by certain physical characters that distinguish them from other Europeans” (p238). These include a nose “large in all dimensions” (p239), the characteristic shape of which Baker purports to illustrate in a delightfully offensive diagram (p241).
But he cites no nose measurement data to confirm this.
His choice of which groups to focus on is quite arbitrary. Asians are entirely omitted.
The San
Whereas Aborigines are, Baker reports, morphologically ‘primitive’ (i.e. retain traits of early hominids), Bushmen are pædomorphic (i.e. retain into maturity traits characteristic of juveniles). Baker concludes:
“Although mankind as a whole is pædomorphous… [those races] that are markedly more pædomorphous… have never achieved the status of civilization, or anything approaching it… When carried beyond a certain point, pædomorphosis is antagonistic to purely intellectual advance” (p324)Yet other authorities class East Asians as pædomorphic, and neoteny is usually associated with increased brain-growth (cf p428).
Baker stresses the secondary sexual traits of San women, including their buttocks (‘Steatopygia’), which are, he says, qualitatively different in shape and composition from those of other races (p318).
Baker denies that they evolved, like camel humps, as a “storehouse of nutrient on which the body may call in times of scarcity”, as Sanids are not “adapted by natural selection to desert life” (p318).
The San are now confined to the Kalahari Desert, but Baker presumably views this as a recent displacement due to the Bantu expansion.
Instead, Baker implicates sexual selection.
This might explain why they are restricted to women—but Coon explains this by reference to the caloric demands of pregnancy (Racial Adaptations: p105).
Yet, while a Google image search produces photographic evidence of Bushmen buttocks, their enlarged labia prove elusive.
Perhaps the modesty of San women, or Victorian anthropologists, is a factor. But it is telling that, even in this age of ‘Rule 34 of the Internet’ (“If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions”), photographic evidence is scant.
Superiority
Baker critiques the very notion of equality.
“Anyone who accepts it as a self-evident truth… that all men are created equal may properly be asked whether the meaning of the word ‘equal’ is self-evident” (p421)Each group can only be shown to be, on average, superior in a specific activity (e.g. IQ tests, sports, tanning, crime). But the value ascribed to each activity is wholly subjective.
Contemporary racialists thus disclaim any imputation of supremacy. Yet these same hereditarians also emphasize the correlation of IQ with many social outcomes generally viewed in anything but value-neutral terms—e.g. crime, unemployment.
From a biologic perspective, no species is superior. Each is adapted to its own ecological niche.
But this implies a dung beetle is equal to Beethoven!
Measuring Superiority
Baker focuses on two types of evidence:
1) Standardized testsBaker’s discussion of the former is dated (see here).
2) Different groups’ record in founding civilization
But his comparative discussion of different civilizations remains worth reading, especially in conjunction with Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Defining Civilization
Baker identifies several criteria for civilization (p507-8). They come in two forms:
1) Scientific/technologicalTechnological superiority can be judged objectively. A technologically superior culture will outcompete an inferior one economically and militarily.
2) Moral
Yet moral superiority is entirely subjective.
Any person ranking cultures on moral grounds will inevitably rank his own as superior because he is judging these societies by the moral standards of his own culture that he has internalized as his own.
Thus, Baker’s first criterion, namely that “In the ordinary circumstances of life in public places they cover the external genitalia and greater part of the trunk with clothes” (p507) is both puritanical and biased against tropical cultures.
Only in temperate/arctic zones is clothing needed to survive.
Africa
Baker acknowledges the adoption of advanced technologies in sub-Saharan Africa, but attributes this to outside influence.
To assess the indigenous culture of blacks, Baker relies on the reports of seven Victorian European explorers of “the secluded zone” (i.e. most of East, Central and Southern Africa, excluding the Horn of Africa, coast of West Africa and Gulf of Guinea), where outside influence was, at that time, minimal.
He thus concludes there is no evidence sub-Saharan Africans ever fully domesticated any plants (354-6) or animals (p373-7) or invented the wheel (p373) or devices with interacting parts (p354). Neither (with some partial exceptions discussed in Chapter 21) did they construct two-storey buildings or devise a written script.
The only animal domesticated in sub-Saharan Africa is the guineafowl, and, although some plants were domesticated in the Sahel and West Africa, these lie outside Baker’s “secluded zone”.
But it must be remembered that Europeans did not invent the wheel or a written script either. Instead, these technologies were invented in the Near East, then copied/adopted by Europeans.
The real question, then, is why sub-Saharan Africans failed to adopt the wheel.
Art
Baker also compares the art of different cultures. Like moral judgement, such assessments are inevitably subjective.
Thus, Baker disparages black African art as non-naturalistic (p381) but extols Celtic art, which is mostly non-figurative (p261-2).
Yet, with regard to music, he recognises the possibility of cultural bias, arguing that westerners failed to recognise the rhythmical qualities of African music (p379).
A Reminder of What Was Possible?
At the end of his section on the history of racial thinking, Baker, bemoaning the impact of censorship on science and publishing in his own time, recommends a book published some forty years earlier (Contemporary Sociological Theories) as worth reading, even then, as “as a reminder of what was still possible before the curtain went down” (p61).
Today, some forty years later still, I recommend ‘Race’ in the same spirit, as “as a reminder of what was still possible”.
Full (i.e. vastly overlong) review here
References
Diamond 1994 Race without Color, Discover
Relethford 2009 Race & global patterns of phenotypic variation, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139(1):16-22
Read
January 9, 2018an old book that comes across as pretty dated at times, but still much better than what is peddled in society today.
May 10, 2015
In any course on data analysis for the physical sciences, we're warned about avoiding three major pitfalls that make our data analysis worthless: assuming our conclusions, throwing out data, and making our metrics so hazy that we can change them at will (making them "untestable").
This book is a fantastic example of all three in a very concise fashion; it's worth a look solely to see how atrocious arguments can become when someone does analysis this badly.
This book is a fantastic example of all three in a very concise fashion; it's worth a look solely to see how atrocious arguments can become when someone does analysis this badly.
April 26, 2020
A very good book even today. Of course, not for some nonwhites and white liberals.
October 16, 2018
Racists can be poor and racists can be rich. Racists can be under-educated and racists can be very educated, especially when that education takes place during an overwhelming racist period in society. Baker was such an affluent, educated racist. He earned a Ph.D in the 1920s, and he became a fellow in the Royal Society in the 1950s. Still, the leisure and ability to earn several degrees did not eliminate his feelings of threatened superiority as he was entering his dotage in 1974.
Fortunately, even upon first publication, book reviewers saw clearly through his inadequate use of science and ancient, racist quotations to "prove" his point. Do not mistake this book for science, either genetics, anthropology, sociology, or other valid sciences. It's just an old racist's blatherings with a facade of science. If you have a sincere question about why Europe attained ascendancy for its few centuries, a much better read is Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize winning book, which is long but very readable.
Fortunately, even upon first publication, book reviewers saw clearly through his inadequate use of science and ancient, racist quotations to "prove" his point. Do not mistake this book for science, either genetics, anthropology, sociology, or other valid sciences. It's just an old racist's blatherings with a facade of science. If you have a sincere question about why Europe attained ascendancy for its few centuries, a much better read is Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize winning book, which is long but very readable.
Read
November 20, 2022Comment:
At the end of his conclusion our author writes,
"Every ethnic taxon of man includes many persons capable of living responsible and useful lives in the communities to which they belong, while even in those taxa that are best known for their contributions to the world's store of intellectual wealth, there are many so mentally deficient that they would be inadequate members of any society. It follows that no one can claim superiority simply because he or she belongs to a particular ethnic taxon."
Exactly right. That last sentence renders the typical violent racist garbage who shriek about their supposed superiority while barely able to hold a job hilarious. Even if racist ideology were entirely right (and it certainly is not!) it still would say nothing about this or that particular individual.
Given the rise of Trumpist America, many non-Trumpists want to understand their ideology. -Of which Racism, however disguised, is a vital component. If in these changing times you are looking for a non-hateful, non-crazy understanding of the racial viewpoint you couldn't do much better than this temperate intelligent book.
Note that this book is from the 1970's, thus it does not have access to later anthropological and scientific work. It is dated. But I believe it is still worth reading. -If you are interested...
At the end of his conclusion our author writes,
"Every ethnic taxon of man includes many persons capable of living responsible and useful lives in the communities to which they belong, while even in those taxa that are best known for their contributions to the world's store of intellectual wealth, there are many so mentally deficient that they would be inadequate members of any society. It follows that no one can claim superiority simply because he or she belongs to a particular ethnic taxon."
Exactly right. That last sentence renders the typical violent racist garbage who shriek about their supposed superiority while barely able to hold a job hilarious. Even if racist ideology were entirely right (and it certainly is not!) it still would say nothing about this or that particular individual.
Given the rise of Trumpist America, many non-Trumpists want to understand their ideology. -Of which Racism, however disguised, is a vital component. If in these changing times you are looking for a non-hateful, non-crazy understanding of the racial viewpoint you couldn't do much better than this temperate intelligent book.
Note that this book is from the 1970's, thus it does not have access to later anthropological and scientific work. It is dated. But I believe it is still worth reading. -If you are interested...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews