![]() Only a few years ago, Glayde Whitney, a prominent geneticist and former President of the Behavior Genetics Association, claimed that the intermarriage of "distant races" could produce a harmful genetic mixture in offspring, citing the wide range of health problems afflicting African Americans and their high infant death rate as examples of the effects of "hybrid incompatibilities" caused by white genes that were undetected due to the "one drop" convention defining all "hybrids" as blacks. However, while there has been absolutely no evidence that racial interbreeding can produce a disharmony of any kind, warnings of some kind of genetic discord are still far from entirely extinct. Naturally these claims were not tenable for long, but they were soon replaced by assertions less easily disprovable, as some social scientists insisted that the children of mixed race parentage were morally and intellectually inferior to either of the parents.Īlthough belief in such genetic mismatches was once fairly widespread within the scientific community and cited specifically to rationalize various racially oppressive policies, this notion now enjoys far less credibility. Charles Benedict Davenport, a world renowned researcher at the time, observed, for example, that if a member of a tall race, such as the Scots, should mate with a member of a small race, such as the Southern Italians, their offspring could inherit the genes for large internal organs from one parent and for small stature from the other, resulting in viscera that would be too large for the frame. In the early twentieth century, shortly after the scientific community's discovery of Gregor Mendel's work led to a new, exciting branch of biology, geneticists warned that the intermarriage of "far apart" races could produce what they called genetic "disharmonies". In addition, were persons of mixed race to intermarry, according to leading anthropologists at the time, they became progressively less fertile, eventually becoming completely sterile. The first supposed evidence for this conclusion was provided in the mid-nineteenth century primarily by physicians, who claimed that, as a result of their mixed blood, "mulattoes" were considerably more susceptible to disease than either of their parents and thus exceptionally short-lived. ![]() Indeed, it was precisely on the basis of this belief that in the United States and South Africa for many years there were statutory prohibitions against intermarriage. One approach has been to claim that there are biological dangers involved in racial interbreeding. In societies in which there has been systematic discrimination against specific racial groups, inevitably it has been accompanied by attempts to justify such policies on scientific grounds.īroadly speaking, there have been three types of scientific explanations offered in putative support for racial discrimination, each of them having a lengthy history. That is, racism arose as a result of the contradiction between egalitarian principles coupled with the exclusionary treatment of specific ethnic groups: the rejection of organically hierarchical societies brought with it the implied necessity to account for the fact that some groups were subjected to servitude, enforced separation from the rest of society, or ghettoization.īeginning around the end of the eighteenth century, as Enlightenment rationalism replaced faith and superstition as the source of authority, the pronouncements of science became the preferred method for reconciling the difference between principle and practice. However, as societies have become increasingly committed to the belief in freedom and equality - as once revolutionary ideas about equal rights for all have become more widespread, especially in the West - then those groups that are systematically denied these entitlements are claimed to possess what Fredrickson calls "some extraordinary deficiency that makes them less than fully human". If a society is premised on an assumption of inequality, producing an accepted hierarchy - one unquestioned even by those relegated to its nadir - then there is no need to locate the cause of the underlings' position in some specific characteristic on their part that makes them less worthy than others. ![]() Fredrickson notes the paradox that notions of human equality were the necessary precondition to the emergence of racism. In his exceptionally insightful book, Racism: A Short History, Stanford University historian George M.
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