the neck is shorter and more oblique.’ Cartwright continues this way, couching racism in medical terminology. ‘These kinds of observations turned into questions to be explored going forward. Since the 1850s, people have been trying to figure out if black bones are harder than white bones,’ Hammonds explains. Cartwright’s medical ‘discoveries’ were patently rooted in the desire to keep slaves enslaved, to maintain the status quo in the American South where he lived. In place of universal humanity came a self-serving version of the human story, in which racial difference became an excuse for treating people differently. Time and again, science provided the intellectual authority for racism, just as it had helped define race to begin with.
Race science became a pastime for non-scientists, too. French aristocrat and writer Count Arthur de Gobineau, in An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, published in 1853, proposed that there were three races, with what he saw as an obvious hierarchy between them: ‘The negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder … His intellect will always move within a very narrow circle.’ Pointing to the ‘triangular’ face shape of the ‘yellow race’, he explained that this was the opposite of the negroid variety. ‘The yellow man has little physical energy, and is inclined to apathy … He tends to mediocrity in everything.’ Neither could be a match for Gobineau’s own race.
Reaching his predictable pinnacle, Gobineau added, ‘We come now to the white peoples. These are gifted with reflective energy, or rather with an energetic intelligence. They have a feeling for utility, but in a sense far wider and higher, more courageous and ideal, than the yellow races.’ His work was a naked attempt to justify why those like him deserved the power and wealth they already had. This was the natural order of things, he argued. He didn’t need hard evidence for his theories because there were plenty of people around him ready and willing to agree that they, too, belonged to a superior race.
It would be Gobineau’s ideas that would later help reinforce the myth of racial purity and the creed of white supremacy. ‘If the three great types had remained strictly separate, the supremacy would no doubt have always been in the hands of the finest of the white races, and the yellow and black varieties would have crawled forever at the feet of the lowest of the whites,’ he wrote, promoting a notion of an imaginary ‘Aryan’ race. These glorious Aryans, he believed, had existed in India many centuries ago, speaking an ancestral Indo-European language, and had since spread across parts of the world, diluting their superior bloodline.
Myth and science coexisted, and both served politics. In the run-up to the passage in 1865 of the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States, the race question wasn’t resolved – it just became thornier. Although many Americans believed in emancipation on moral grounds, fewer were convinced that full equality would ever be possible, for the simple reason that groups weren’t biologically the same. Even Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln believed that blacks were inherently inferior to whites. Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, agreed with those who thought that the best way to deal with freed slaves was to send them to a colony of their own. Freedom was framed as a gift bestowed on unfortunate black slaves by morally superior white leaders, rather than a reflection of a hope that everyone would one day live alongside each other as friends, colleagues and partners.
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Not all scientists were quite so self-serving. For those who wanted to establish the facts about human difference, there were unanswered questions. The biggest puzzle was that there was no fleshed-out mechanism to account for how different races – if they were real – might have emerged. If each race was distinct, then where did they each come from, and why? Going by the Bible, as many Europeans did, one explanation for the existence of different races was that, after the big flood, Noah’s children spread to different parts of the earth. How we truly originated, and how physical differences appeared between us, were anyone’s guess.
In 1871 biologist Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, sweeping away these religious creation myths and framing the human species as having had one common ancestor many millennia ago, evolving slowly like all other life on earth. Studying humans across the world, their emotions and expressions, he wrote, ‘It seems improbable to me in the highest degree that so much similarity, or rather identity of structure, could have been acquired by independent means.’ We are too alike in our basic responses, our smiles and tears, our blushes. On this alone, Darwin might have settled the race debate. He demonstrated that we could only have evolved from shared origins, that human races didn’t emerge separately.
On a personal level, this was important to him. Darwin’s family included influential abolitionists, his grandfathers Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood. He himself had seen the brutality of slavery first-hand on his travels. When naturalist Louis Agassiz in the United States spoke about human races having separate origins, Darwin wrote disparagingly in a letter that this must have come as comfort to slaveholding Southerners.
But this wasn’t the last word on the subject. Darwin still struggled when it came to race. Like Abraham Lincoln, who was born on the same day, he opposed slavery but was also ambivalent on the question of whether black Africans and Australians were strictly equal to white Europeans on the evolutionary scale. He left open the possibility that, even though we could all be traced back to a common ancestor, that we were the same kind, populations may have diverged since then, producing levels of difference. As British anthropologist Tim Ingold notes, Darwin saw gradations between the ‘highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages’. He suggested, for example, that the ‘children of savages’ have a stronger tendency to protrude their lips when they sulk than European children, because they are closer to the ‘primordial condition’, similar to chimps. Gregory Radick, historian and philosopher of science at the University of Leeds, observes that Darwin, even though he made such a bold and original contribution to the idea of racial unity, also seemed to be unembarrassed by his belief in an evolutionary hierarchy. Men were above women, and white races were above others.
In combination with the politics of the day, this was devastating. Uncertainty around the biological facts left more than enough room for ideology to be mixed with real science, fabricating fresh racial myths. Some argued that brown and yellow races were a bit higher up than black, while whites were the most evolved, and by implication, the most civilised and the most human. What was seen to be the success of the white races became couched in the language of the ‘survival of the fittest’, with the implication that the most ‘primitive’ peoples, as they were described, would inevitably lose the struggle for survival as the human race evolved. Rather than seeing evolution acting to make a species better adapted to its particular environment, Tim Ingold argues that Darwin himself began to frame evolution as an ‘imperialist doctrine of progress’.
‘In bringing the rise of science and civilisation within the compass of the same evolutionary process that had made humans out of apes, and apes out of creatures lower in the scale, Darwin was forced to attribute what he saw as the ascendancy of reason to hereditary endowment,’ writes Ingold. ‘For the theory to work, there had to be significant differences in such endowment between “tribes” or “nations”.’ For hunter-gatherers to live so differently from city-dwellers, the logic goes, it must be that their brains had not yet progressed to the same stage of evolution.
Adding fuel to this bonfire of flawed thinking (after all, we know that the brains of hunter-gatherers are no different from those of anyone else) were Darwin’s supporters, some of whom happened to be fervent racists. The English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, argued that not all humans were equal. In an 1865 essay on the emancipation of black slaves, he wrote that the average white was ‘bigger brained’, adding, ‘The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.’ For Huxley, freeing slaves was a morally good thing for white men to do, but the raw facts of biology made the idea of equal rights – for women as well as for black people – little more than an ‘illogical delusion’. In Germany, meanwhile, Darwin’s loudest cheerleader was Ernst Haeckel, who taught zoology at the University of Jena from 1862, and was a proud nationalist. He liked to draw connections between black Africans and primates, seeing them as a kind of living ‘missing link’ in the evolutionary chain that connected apes to white Europeans.
Darwinism