Status Updates From Gods of the Upper Air: How ...

Boas's last words, spoken to Paul Rivet, "We should never stop repeating the idea that racism is a monstrous error and an impudent lie."

The strongest moral schemas rest on the proven truth that humanity is one undivided whole.

Some Americans had taken to using shorthand acronyms--such as MIAFA, for "My interests are for America"--to signal their support for the values advanced by the Klan and other self-defined patriotic organizations.

Now what does that remind me of?

Must one always kick the other fellow just because one likes one's way of life?

Boas was making a point that required readers to make a difficult conceptual leap: he was asking Americans and western Europeans to suspend their belief in their own greatness.

...different ways of being human but also, in a way, to love them.

Boas was coming to see his profession not just as a science but also as a state of mind, even a prescription for a good life. Properly practiced, it could cultivate a disposition that pointed toward "a higher tolerance" -- one that would leave even the pitying smile behind. It was a blueprint for how anthropology might turn itself into the most hopeful of sciences, one who's job was not just to catalogue the many...

In 1907 the US Congress kicks off a special commission looking at immigration. Were countries sending their criminals and the infirm?
WHO DOES THAT SOUND LIKE?

It has been 118 years. There is no excuse for this stupid lie to still be circulating.

Some annoying, childish woman is screaming "Stop it! This is a Christian country!" at the 1893.

Things really don't change, do they? America has never been a Christian country and I hope it never becomes one. Separation of church and state, baby!

In ethnology all is individuality. It is my opinion that the main object of ethnological collections should be the dissemination of the fact that civilization is not something absolute, but that it is relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.