Race and anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s

In this episode we attempt to set the background for the scientific consensus that grew in the 1960s and 70s that race is a cultural construction, not a biological fact.  Since anthropology is the discipline most intimately entwined with race and biological anthropology is the part of the discipline that has the greatest history with race, this discusses some of the key players in driving the cultural consensus and some opposing it. 

Transcript:
 
Jo: Hi, I'm Jo, the cultural anthropologist.
 
Erik: And I'm Eric, the historian.
 
Jim: And I'm Jim, The physical anthropologist. And this is Speaking of Race, a podcast where we explore present past and future debates and issues and thoughts about race in the light of science.
 
Jo: So today we want to take a first stab at the big question “what does science say race is?” We're planning on doing that today by looking at the changes in that concept, just during our own lives. And we felt as a group that this was a good time to address this question because there's so much debate right now in the United States about what race is and what it should be. In future episodes we’ll look more at the main players in the concept of race historically and how researchers are discussing race today.
 
Erik: I think it's good to start with you, Jim. You've definitely had more experience with this than Jo or I. What was the first time that you encountered race as a concept in the classroom? How is it defined? What have you seen?
 
Jim: The first time I can actually recall having race addressed in the classroom was in a course on human variation I took at Berkeley from Vince Sarich in 1972. Sarich is on the same academic phylogenetic tree that I'm on. He is one of Ernest Albert Hooton's grandchildren, just like I am, and Hooton was the Harvard professor who trained most of the students, who trained, most of the students who trained most of the students that populate physical anthropology, not just across the U.S. but across the world today. Sarich was teaching a version of race in 1972 that would have been very consistent with what Hooton had to say about race in 1926. That is, that races were major subdivisions of the species that had physical and genetic differences. Sarich also taught a model of the origin of races that came from another Hooton student, Carleton Coon. Coon suggested that there was very substantial evolutionary separation between the races. 1972 was an interesting time period in the history of how anthropology deals with race, because it was during the 1970s that there was a major changeover in the way that physical anthropology textbooks dealt with race. It went from being a true biological phenomenon to being a cultural construction to there not being any biological reality to race.
 
Erik: That's a good start. Hooton seems like he was a really, really important figure, then. Do you think could you tell us more about who Hooton was and exactly what more of his influence was like?
 
Jim: Ernest Albert Hooton had a Ph.D. in classics from Wisconsin. He had been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and he delayed taking it. When he finally did take it, he had become interested in archeology and he pursued the study of archeology at Oxford. But during that process, he also began looking at skeletons, and that introduced him to the Scottish anatomist by the name of Sir Arthur Keith. Keith today is best known historically for his role in accepting the Piltdown fraud as a valid human fossil, as a representation of the earliest origins of humans in the British Isles (see Tobias et al., 1992). Knowing what we know today about Keith's attitude on race, it makes perfect sense that he would argue for a British origin for humans because he was extremely both racial and racist in his views, and he shared those views with Hooton. And Hooton really brought a lot of the racialist thinking into the discipline of physical anthropology in the U.S. Hooton was hired at Harvard to revive the discipline of anthropology in the early 1900s, and he trained many, many dozens of students that peopled the academic departments across the U.S. (see Barr, Nachman, & Shapiro). And many of those students carried on the ideas about race that Hooton had borrowed from Keith.
 
Jo: For those who don't know what the Piltdown fraud is, can you just give us a one sentence?
 
Jim: Piltdown was a fraudulent combination of a modern human skull with an orangutan jaw that was being passed off as a very early fossil human from the British Isles.
 
Jo: And the idea was to prove that humans had originated in the British Isles, rather than in sub-Saharan Africa, right?
 
Jim: Rather than anywhere else.
 
Jo: or anywhere else.
 
Jim: Yeah.
 
Jo: So, Jim, you told us a little bit about Sarich, but you only briefly mentioned Coon. That's somebody that I have heard come up a lot with reference to race and ideas of race in the United States. So can you tell us a bit more about Coon and what he was up to?
 
Jim: Carlton Coon was born 100 years too late.
 
Erik: [Laughing]
 
Jim: He was a 19th century scientist practicing in the 20th century. I mean, he would have fit in perfectly with the American School of Anthropology and the polygamists of the mid-19th century that were trying to support slavery with with biological arguments about race. Coon truly had that kind of sensibility. He wrote about race in many different contexts, including perhaps his best known works were published in the 1960s. 1962, he published a book about the origin of races, and in that he made the argument that our predecessor species, Homo erectus, had migrated out of Africa and settled in five different regions of the world and then speciated into Homo sapiens separately so that the races had very long, deep evolutionary separations that went all the way back into our predecessor species (Coon, 1962).
 
Erik: I think there are several terms that used a minute ago. I think people kind of know what we mean when we say species, and I think people kind of know what we mean when we say race. But then there's that term subspecies and how does that fit in with all the rest of these terms?
 
Jim: A subspecies is a taxonomic division of a species, and there are two different ways to biologically define a subspecies (see Templeton, 2013). Darwin used the idea of an evolutionary lineage. This is what he's talking about when he uses the term race in On the Origin of Species (Darwin, 1859). He sees it as a distinct phylogenetic branch within the species that has the potential to become a new species. And then the second way that biologists define a subspecies today is as a geographic group that has relatively sharp genetic and sometimes physical feature boundaries with other groups. In the definition of a species, we have a clear cut guide from evolutionary biology to focus on reproductive traits, because species is about a degree of reproductive isolation between groups. There is no such principle to guide what it is we should use to separate races into different categories. So we have historically chosen to use highly visible, easily detectable characteristics such as skin color or nose width or hair form. But there is absolutely no evolutionary justification to use these characteristics.
 
Jo: So to summarize the reason why we care about the idea of subspecies when we're talking about the history of race is that many of the scientists we're touching on were trying to argue that human races were essentially subspecies. That is, that they were groups of people who were perhaps, if left alone, going to become separate species, eventually.
 
Jim: Be the scientists that were weren't already arguing that they were separate species in fact.
 
Jo: Yeah. Yeah. And and what I believe you're saying is that we know or or biologically speaking, a species is defined along the degree to which it is or is not able to reproduce with similar...
 
Jim: Similar organisms.
 
Jo: Give us a second on that.
 
Jim: Yeah.
 
Jo: Right. So you mentioned the reproductive potential, but just because some listeners might not know what you mean by that, can you just explain.
 
Jim: Species boundaries are defined by reproductive isolation in sexually reproducing organisms, some degree of decrease in the ability to reproduce with similar organisms.
 
Jo: Right. So in order for human races to be separate species, they would have to be incapable of reproducing with each other. We know that, of course, that's not true.
 
Jim: There'd have to be some sort of barrier to fully fertile and viable reproduction.
 
Erik: So that seems crazy to me because it seems clearly that humans don't have any barriers to reproduction. So how in the world could anybody be using race as anything, like a research tool in science?
 
Jim: I'm glad you asked that because my mentor has written several times about the use of race as a research tool. He presented a paper in a 1966 American Association for the Advancement of Science Symposium that was organized by Margaret Mead and Theodosius Dobzhansky to address how science was dealing with race in the mid 1960s (Mead, Dobzhansky, Tobach, & Light, 1968). In this presentation, he was talking about using race as a device to choose samples to then measure and determine if there were differences and to try and help explain parameters of human variation and he recounts in his memoir that during his presentation, Margaret Mead kept pounding her house post on at the speaker's table and shouting her disagreement while he was talking (P. T. Baker, 1996).
 
Jo: I liked the way Erik had you sort of break down person by person in concept by concept, your first point earlier in the podcast. So let's do that here as well. So first tell us a little more about Paul Baker.
 
Jim: Paul was a student of Hooton's at Harvard, and throughout his career he became best known and ultimately became a member of the National Academy of Science based on his work in understanding human adaptation. It's part of this program to look at human variation, and I guess Hooten got all of this started measuring individuals, measuring differences between individuals and trying to come up with group differences as a way of sorting out criminals from non-criminals and different races from one another. And Baker moved that into an evolutionary context, perhaps spurred on by another Hooton student, Sherry Washburn, who starting in 1950, tried to move the discipline of physical anthropology in the direction of evolutionary explanation. So Paul looked at different groups and tried to measure thermoregulation, heat and cold stress and how different groups in his dissertation he was looking at black and white GIs and how they adapted the heat stress in the desert. He later had a major interdisciplinary project at high altitude in Peru, studying how humans had adapted to the stress of living with very reduced oxygen availability. And then his final research project was looking at Pacific Island peoples and their response to rapid cultural change. And what could we see in terms of biological outcome variables as a result of culture stress. He also played a major role in getting human adaptation a legitimate role in both national and international scientific bodies in anthropology and outside of anthropology.
 
Jo: You mentioned Margaret Mead, one of my personal heroes. Who was she? Why was she so angry? What was up with the house post?
 
Jim: Margaret Mead was a student of Boas's. Franz Boas, by the way, is who we owe our understanding of race as a cultural construction, to. And he was a very important player in the early part of the 20th century, in American anthropology, in building multidisciplinary departments of anthropology, in building the infrastructure, and his students held the offices of the American Anthropological Association. And Boas brought his students to think of race as being a cultural construction. And Margaret Mead took this and went out to the field. And her most famous work, of course, is Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead, 1928), where her whole argument is about the fact that adolescence can be different in different groups without any genetic basis of the difference, but rather because of different cultural practices. And so she was an extreme environmentalist, nurturist, on that end of the spectrum.
 
Jo: Hold on, by which you mean she believed that all human difference was a result of cultural and environmental influences rather than genetic?
 
Jim: Pretty much, yes. Yeah, she she was on the extreme end of that spectrum. While Boas and Hooton carried on a dispute about race throughout their careers, so did their students. And we'll talk at great length, I'm sure, about Ashley Montague At some point, one of Boas's students who was instrumental in overturning the way anthropology viewed race during the 20th century. But Margaret Mead, I'm sure, was working from that environmental perspective and just furious that Paul was talking about using this as a as a research tool to explain biological differences between groups. Mead wasn't the only one who was criticizing Baker's use of race. Montague Cobb Howard University professor of physical anthropology and the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology called Baker a racist for his 1958 American Journal of Physical Anthropology publication of black, white differences and heat tolerance. Paul was attempting to establish relationships between population morphology and environmental variables. His research was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Army Climatic Laboratory. He was incredibly shocked when he was attacked in this manner by Cobb. With regard to Mead, Paul's prior contact with cultural anthropologists had been primarily with ethnographers who were data rich in terms of gathering information about the cultures they studied. He considered Margaret Mead basically a politician, and he was very shocked when she began reacting to his presentation as she did. As a result, it stands out in his memoirs (T. S. Baker, 2017).
 
Erik: So I can imagine her standing there. And she wasn't a very big woman, right? She was relatively small, but she's standing there and she had been a major, major figure in the field for decade after decade. And here is a guy that's telling her that basically the ideas that were current when she was herself a graduate student are suddenly back on the table again.
 
Erik: And now she's wagging her stick. I wish I was there. All right. So I imagine that in this huge confrontation, there must have been something that came out of it. So what happens after 1966 when they have this big conflict of the triple AS?
 
Jim: Yes, This was one of three different sessions that was part of this major symposium that was being held. There were psychologists talking, there were biologists and geneticists talking, and there were the anthropologists and population biologists in this session. But it was all over the map. There is no consensus in the different papers that are part of this presentation, which were published two years later in the book Science and the Concept of Race (Mead et al., 1968). And it's been noted by several of the reviewers that this was coming to no kind of scientific consensus about what race was, how it had value or no value or what could be done with it. C. Loring Brace especially, was scathing in his review of the papers in the book (Brace, 1969). Whereas Dobzhansky’s friend L.C. Dunn, gave it a very nice and kind and favorable review (Dunn, 1969). But it really is a mess and that's not a bad record of what race was in science in the 1960s, really, because they were really were all over the place. You have to understand the cultural context of this confusion about race, though. A lot of it had to do with the fact that we were really in the midst of the civil rights movement at that point in time. And that had a definite impact on how scientists and social scientists were viewing race. But it was the 1972 article by evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin (1972) that really set the scientific side of race. In his article The Apportionment of Human Diversity, he used data that had been collected from a variety of populations around the world to show that race accounted for only about 6% of human genetic variation. That finding has since been confirmed and refined by multiple studies on DNA from world populations. To suggest that race actually accounts for something less than 5% of the genetic variation that we find in worldwide human populations. This illustrates how little race accounts for patterns of human biological variation and why we should stick to a cultural, not a biological definition of the phenomenon of race. We'll talk more about using this technology to try to understand race and biology when we talk about the Human Genome Project and how it had an impact on more recent ideas about race in biology (Bindon, Peterson, & Weaver, 2017).
 
Jo: So, Jim, you were initially taught a biological concept of race, isn't that right?
 
Jim: Yes, that's what Sarich taught me. Yes.
 
Jo: So what's your definition today? What's your working definition of race today?
 
Jim: I use a cultural constructivist definition of race. My very favorite statement of that is the statement that Jonathan Marks gives that race is the intersection of difference and meaning (Marks, 2010). In that he emphasizes that all humans differ from one another biologically. And then what we do is we look around and we choose what differences we're going to privilege and what differences we're going to ignore. And in the past, it's fallen very heavily on the side of highly visible features like skin color and facial features and hair form and things like that. And of course, where it became politically and economically significant to emphasize these differences, that concept has grown; where it was less important, that concept has kind of withered. I should note that another of my favorite takes on race is the definition offered by the anthropologist Audrey Smedley (Smedley, 1999). She emphasizes the folk nature of race by calling it a worldview, a cosmological ordering system. In her definition, she also explicitly includes the fact that racial groups are conceived as unequal by nature and therefore are capable of being ranked along a superiority to inferiority continuum. We’ll consider other attempts by scientists to define race in subsequent episodes. I'm Jim Bindon, an emeritus professor of biological anthropology at the University of Alabama.
 
Jo: I'm Jo Weaver, bio cultural anthropologist at the University of Alabama.
 
Erik: And I'm Eric Peterson. I'm a historian of science at the University of Alabama. And thank you so much for listening to our podcast, Speaking of Race.
 
References
 

1. Baker, P. T. (1996). Adventures in human population biology. Annual review of anthropology, 25(1), 1-18.
2. Baker, T. S. (2017, 7/9/2017). [Email about Paul and race].
3. Barr, W. A., Nachman, B., & Shapiro, B. Earnest Hooton (1911). Retrieved from https://www.bioanthtree.org/detail/Earnest_Hooton/
4. J. Bindon, M. Peterson, & L. J. Weaver (Producer). (2017, 11/14/2017). Race and the Human Genome Project [Retrieved from http://speakingofrace.ua.edu/podcast/race-and-the-human-genome-project
5. Brace, C. L. (1969). [Science and the Concept of Race, Margaret Mead, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ethel Tobach, Robert E. Light]. American Anthropologist, 71(1), 163-165. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org.libdata.lib.ua.edu/stable/671273
6. Coon, C. S. (1962). The Origin of Races. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
7. Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street.
8. Dunn, L. C. (1969). [Science and the Concept of Race, Margaret Mead, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ethel Tobach, Robert E. Light]. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 44(2), 245-245. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2819504
9. Lewontin, R. C. (1972). The Apportionment of Human Diversity. Evolutionary Biology, 6, 381-398.
10. Marks, J. (2010). Foreword. In G. P. Harrison (Ed.), Race and reality: What everyone should know about our biological diversity. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.
11. Mead, M. (1928). Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. New York: William Morrow and Co.
12. Mead, M., Dobzhansky, T., Tobach, E., & Light, R. E. (Eds.). (1968). Science and the Concept of Race. New York: Columbia University Press.
13. Smedley, A. (1999). Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
14. Templeton, A. R. (2013). Biological races in humans. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 44, 262-271.
15. Tobias, P. V., Bowler, P. J., Chamberlain, A. T., Chippindale, C., Dennell, R. W., Fedele, F., . . . Harrold, F. B. (1992). Piltdown: an appraisal of the case against Sir Arthur Keith [and Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology, 33(3), 243-293.