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The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium
In this groundbreaking book, Joseph Graves traces the development of biological thought about human genetic diversity. Greek philosophy, social Darwinism, New World colonialism, the eugenics movement, intelligence testing biases, and racial health fallacies are just a few of the topics he addresses.
Graves argues that racism has persisted in our society because adequate scientific reasoning has not entered into the equation. He champions the scientific method and explains how we may properly ask scientific questions about the nature of population differentiation and how (if at all) we may correlate that diversity to observed human behavior. He also cautions us to think critically about scientific findings that have historically been misused in controversies over racial differences in intelligence heritability, criminal behavior, disease predisposition, and other traits.
According to Graves, this country cannot truly address its racial problems until people understand the empirical evidence behind this truth that separate human races do not exist. With the biological basis for race removed, racism becomes an ideology, one that can and must be deleted.
Graves argues that racism has persisted in our society because adequate scientific reasoning has not entered into the equation. He champions the scientific method and explains how we may properly ask scientific questions about the nature of population differentiation and how (if at all) we may correlate that diversity to observed human behavior. He also cautions us to think critically about scientific findings that have historically been misused in controversies over racial differences in intelligence heritability, criminal behavior, disease predisposition, and other traits.
According to Graves, this country cannot truly address its racial problems until people understand the empirical evidence behind this truth that separate human races do not exist. With the biological basis for race removed, racism becomes an ideology, one that can and must be deleted.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 31, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 29, 2013
The BEST book on the history of eugenics, race theory, and historic and modern racism. Explains human evolution (and Darwinian evolution, for that matter) in a clear, scientific, and irrefutable way. Society would benefit greatly if this book was required reading for all high school students. Know a racist or evolution skeptic? Don't just throw a book at them, insist they read this one! Highly recommended!
December 6, 2023
Presents a rather complete description of "race", largely from a "scientific" point of view, all the way from classical times through slavery in the New World, Darwin and evolution, eugenics, and WWII, to the present moment. Shows that from a "scientific" point of view, "race" simply does not exist; this became clearer and clearer over the last couple of hundred years, until it became indisputable, which it has been for several decades now.
Written by an academic specialist in the field, for reading by laymen. Mostly a pretty good job of writing, as the result is quite readable, but I do have a couple of quibbles. One quibble is the level of detail jumps around precipitously; sometimes the logic is almost ponderous in its presentation, and other times the jump from premises to conclusion happens so quickly it's hard to state the intermediate steps and thus hard to follow. The other is that although the thread of the history of racism and scientific support for it is always in the background, the thread is occasionally so well hidden that the reader wonders why the last several pages were included in the book at all - it always becomes clear and makes sense ...eventually; but the relationship of individual sections to the overarching theme of the book could be made more obvious sometimes.
The presentation is pretty objective; this is not a polemic (except for a few impassioned paragraphs here and there). Readers' likely conclusions about racist views are generated by the readers themselves after learning the presented details, they are not "suggested" by the text. I for example especially took away three things based on the presented material: i] that almost always the "learned" or "scientific" views of racism are ultimately driven by social convention, with the academic details meaning very little, 2] public figures --both politicians and scientists from other fields-- often wade into these issues and say things that sound very reasonable but in fact are based on key misunderstandings and contribute significantly to public misperceptions, and 3] the fact it's now scientifically indisputable that there's no such thing as "race" has not had hardly any impact on what rank-and-file folks actually think or do.
One other thing stood out to me: I already knew that American "eugenics" attitudes influenced Nazi Germany. But I assumed the Germans picked up "old" knowledge, reading out-of-date books and such like. What I didn't realize is that an "active" eugenics movement in America provided "active" support to the Nazis right up until the eve of war, advising, attending the same conferences, and publishing statements of support at least as late as 1939.
The author points out several times that "scientific" thinking about "race" didn't make any sense at all and went nowhere until it could be founded on Darwin's evolution principles. True scientific progress with clear quantifiable statements only happened in the last couple hundred years. This is certainly true. And keeping it in mind certainly helps make sense of the material. Beyond that, it didn't seem to me to be particularly significant.
Written by an academic specialist in the field, for reading by laymen. Mostly a pretty good job of writing, as the result is quite readable, but I do have a couple of quibbles. One quibble is the level of detail jumps around precipitously; sometimes the logic is almost ponderous in its presentation, and other times the jump from premises to conclusion happens so quickly it's hard to state the intermediate steps and thus hard to follow. The other is that although the thread of the history of racism and scientific support for it is always in the background, the thread is occasionally so well hidden that the reader wonders why the last several pages were included in the book at all - it always becomes clear and makes sense ...eventually; but the relationship of individual sections to the overarching theme of the book could be made more obvious sometimes.
The presentation is pretty objective; this is not a polemic (except for a few impassioned paragraphs here and there). Readers' likely conclusions about racist views are generated by the readers themselves after learning the presented details, they are not "suggested" by the text. I for example especially took away three things based on the presented material: i] that almost always the "learned" or "scientific" views of racism are ultimately driven by social convention, with the academic details meaning very little, 2] public figures --both politicians and scientists from other fields-- often wade into these issues and say things that sound very reasonable but in fact are based on key misunderstandings and contribute significantly to public misperceptions, and 3] the fact it's now scientifically indisputable that there's no such thing as "race" has not had hardly any impact on what rank-and-file folks actually think or do.
One other thing stood out to me: I already knew that American "eugenics" attitudes influenced Nazi Germany. But I assumed the Germans picked up "old" knowledge, reading out-of-date books and such like. What I didn't realize is that an "active" eugenics movement in America provided "active" support to the Nazis right up until the eve of war, advising, attending the same conferences, and publishing statements of support at least as late as 1939.
The author points out several times that "scientific" thinking about "race" didn't make any sense at all and went nowhere until it could be founded on Darwin's evolution principles. True scientific progress with clear quantifiable statements only happened in the last couple hundred years. This is certainly true. And keeping it in mind certainly helps make sense of the material. Beyond that, it didn't seem to me to be particularly significant.
August 21, 2021
read for class
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews