The Triumph of Antiracism

How did racial science fall out of fashion in America?

What led to the triumph of “antiracism” in the 1930s and 1940s?

The following excerpt comes from Philip A. Klinker and Rogers M. Smith’s book The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America:

“That shock led to an intellectual battle in 1938 that was less publicized but in some respects as significant as Joe Lewis’s second clash with Schmeling. That year the American Anthropological Association, the leading organization in a profession that had done so much to legitimate notions of natural racial hierarchies in the late nineteenth-century, considered a resolution denouncing racism. Anthropologists and scholars in the related disciplines of psychology and sociology had been debating race differences intensely through the 1920s and 1930s, but by the late thirties the conflict was one-sided. The resolution passed unanimously. It was a resounding triumph for the longstanding campaign of anthropologist Franz Boas, his student Ruth Benedict, his admirer Otto Kleinberg, and others to establish that apparent racial differences were fundamentally matters of environmental influence, not biology.

Despite tireless efforts by egalitarian-minded social scientists in the journal wars of the 1920s and 1930s, sadly the triumph cannot be traced (HW: emphasis added) to the discovery of decisive scientific evidence sustaining Boas’s view. Instead, as the resolution indicated, the results of volumes of research were inconclusive: significant differences between the races “have not been ascertained by science,” but neither had they been disproved. Instead, more and more social scientists had simply decided in face of continuing uncertainty to presume that the races, were essentially equal in genetic endowments rather than hierarchically arranged. Social scientists had done so in part because the notion that differences among the races were environmental suggested that social scientists might play a vital role in redesigning environmental conditions to promote human flourishing. They did so, also, because many more were now themselves of immigrant origins and inclined to oppose racially and ethnically based immigration restrictions. Some were impressed by the cultural accomplishments of blacks during the Harlem Renaissance. Some were moved by black suffering in America.

But American scholars adopted premises of racial equality most of all, the historian Carl Degler has concluded, as a result of “the impact Nazi practices had on American scholarly thinking about race and biology in human affairs.” Even a formerly ardent eugenicists and defender of Nazi racial science, Paul Popenoe, later said “the major factor” in the declining popularity of his views “was undoubtedly Hitlerism.” Degler contends this “impact can hardly be overestimated in explaining why during the 1930s and 1940s concepts and terms like ‘heredity’, ‘biological differences’, and ‘instinct’ dropped below the horizon in social science.”

Oh.

So that is how it happened?

There was never any evidence discovered which decisively debunked racial science in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, it was the immigrant origins of social scientists, the political opposition of liberals to Hitler and the Nazis and the fact that social scientists could play a larger role in social engineering by going along with the idea of a purely environmental explanation of racial differences.

About Hunter Wallace 12378 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

30 Comments

  1. IQ, societal development, technological advancement, contributions to STEM fields, crime statistics, etc., etc., all show that there are racial differences. Whites don’t even come to the top in some of those areas, like in IQ. But facts don’t care about your preferences. Once you learn about where your strengths and weaknesses are, you can learn to compensate for them, or at least get assistance with them. Not dealing with uncomfortable facts, and trying to cover up inadequacies through filing all of them under “Racism,” helps no one. You can’t defeat human nature, especially with a weak weapon like nomenclature.

    • I cannot find the link now (my apologies) but I read recently that the Stanford-Binet IQ test that was the yardstick used to measure IQ for a couple of generations consistently showed Whites a few points ahead of Northeast Asians. Whites had the highest scores, certain Asian groups (NE Asians) next then other groups. The Stanford-Binet test was replaced in the 1960’s by the Wechsler IQ test under pressure from the American Psychological Association et al.

      Part of the reason for the change in tests was the change of attitudes in the 1960’s regarding inequality and the fact that blacks and some other groups consistently scored lower than Whites. These results were at odds with the zeitgeist of the period after WWII when talk of things like racial inequality was no longer allowed in professional circles, that was a career ender. Since that time the U.S. Government has been pounding square pegs into round holes in its misbegotten, never ending quest for that mythical beast known as ‘equality’.

      By now all the social programs of uplift, all the psychologists’ quack theories, all the evil laws and all the money has been spent to force equality down the throats of Whites in contradiction to Nature itself. The result is predictable; failure at all levels. Now the Left and their “conservative” allies have switched gears from arguing failed theories to Salem style, 17th century witch hunts against those who harbor a grain of doubt about their destructive plans. Their “equality” has taken on the form of a religion with assent to their poisonous doctrines now required.

      • No need to apologize, 12AX7. I’m not paying you to do research. I always enjoy reading your comments, anyway.

        Ted Sallis of EGI Notes has done plenty of writing about why the East Asian/Ashkenazi IQ superiority is bunk. It’s generally accepted in scientific circles right now, though. Sallis emphasizes the importance of supporting fellow Europeans regardless of our genetic intelligence endowment (or lack thereof), though. Screw non-existent racial equality, we’ve got to save our people!

  2. Sounds like they are downplaying how Boas and his followers, once they had helped each other rise to positions of power in academia, actively discriminated against dissenters rising up the ladder that might challenge them. There was no fair competition of ideas. It’s the same situation we find today, and why there are hardly any conservative professors. And it’s why conservatives always lose, tolerance vs. intolerance.
    http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/10/18/liberal-bias-in-academia-will-being-self-conscious-about-it-help/

    • @November…

      “Our society isn’t collapsing. It’s all ready fallen.”

      Absolutely true.

      It was falling decades ago, and we are only now getting the full wind of it.

    • Well, OK but one of the new republics must be called Wakanda and that’s where all the Third World would go to be free of “system racism”, whatever that is and other forms of White oppression. Any lunatic White people who have done the diversity thing must move there too.

      • Of course. The blacks get “their own Utopia too.” It’s win win win, that’s the main reason it’ll work. Now … if we could just get the conversation going.

        • I have asked liberals and cuckservatives if they believe in “equality”. Of course, like parrots the only answer is: YES! I then have asked if they believe housing should be integrated and give a brief explanation of how now defunct housing covenants worked. They are shocked, shocked that this rayciss country had housing covenants and yes, minorities should be able to live anywhere. They are glad their children won’t grow up in a “Leave it it Beaver”, white bread neighborhood and they have “all kinds of friends (i.e. races)” from school and it’s great.

          I then explain how the Government plans to use AFFH to sprinkle wogs all over their town, even their own neighborhood and they and their children will now enjoy cultural enrichment from Jontavious, Shaneeqa and their chocolate colored friends up close and personal. After that sinks in to their thick skulls they nervously reply that ” . . . they aren’t racists” and as long as they “keep up their yards” everything will be great. They check that their ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign is up straight along with their rainbow fag flag and hurry in to the house.

          They don’t know that the BLM signs don’t work as a talisman to keep the chocolate hordes away. They should watch videos of the BLM maniacs screaming at White diners, 95% of whom would describe themselves as anti-racists. Experience is the best teacher and it’s going to be giving PhD. level lessons in diversity to these morons.

          • @12AX7…

            Oh, Yes, Sir – I would like to be a fly on the wall to watch Smalltown and rural New Englanders cope with the influx of minorities, for, though they pride themselves on their egalitarian views, my 12 years up there convinced me that they have no practical experience.

            Yep, that’s right – in my 12 years in smalltown New England, and in driving all around New Hampshire, Vermont, and Northeastern New York, I might have seen one non-White, once.

            Maybe, maybe not.

            Yep, it was like a White Nationalist Paradise!

  3. On pages 36-7 of the document at https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000073351 is evidence that at least one scientist, circa 1951, was willing to entertain publicly the possibility that the races should be classified as different SPECIES.

    Said scientist was Professor F. Lenz, of the “Institut fur Menschliche Erblehre,” of Germany’s University of Gottingen, as he is identified on page 94 of the same document; and he said the following:

    “In my opinion, the Linnaen theory that all men belong to a single species is inaccurate. Moreover, it is by no means true that this theory is accepted by scientists in general. In his well-known Lehrbuch der Anthropologie (Manual of Physical Anthropology), Rudolf Martin speaks of the ‘Sub-groups of the Homi- nids’; ‘Opinions are divided on the question whether these sub-groups are to be regarded as species or simply varieties of species in the zoological sense of the term.’ (2nd Ed., Vol. I, Jena, 1928, p. 7.)

    “If an unprejudiced scientist were confronted with a West-African Negro, an Eskimo and a North-West European, he could hardly consider them to belong to the same ‘species’. Numerous ‘good’ species by no means reveal such considerable differences. Only one thing is certain: all men belong to the same genus.

    “It seems to me that the term ‘species’ cannot be appropriately applied to the whole of mankind, though I will not maintain dogmatically that there are different human species.”

    Professor Lenz was commenting on the first paragraph of the first section of UNESCO’s “STATEMENT ON THE NATURE OF RACE AND RACE DIFFERENCES by Physical Anthropologists and Geneticists–June 1951,” which paragraph read as follows:

    “Scientists are generally agreed that all men living today belong to a single species, Homo sapiens, and are derived from a common stock, even though there is some dispute as to when and how different human groups diverged from this common stock.”

    Wikipedia’s account at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Race_Question indicates that the 1951 statement was a revision of a 1950 UNESCO statement that had been criticized because “chiefly sociologists” had created it and it did not “carry the authority” or, “in all its details, carry the conviction” of physical anthropologists and geneticists.

    You won’t be surprised, not incidentally, to learn that our friend (((Ashley Montagu))) was involved in UNESCO’s production of these documents. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Montagu#Statement_on_Race

  4. Anti racism is a moronic cult by big nose tribe ,self hating white libtards and cuckservatives try to prove me wrong on that there is too much evidence to prove otherwise

  5. Hunter, JANE ADDAMS is another interesting historical subject from the late Victorian (Opium Queen) and early Progressive era. Like Bourne, she had Potts’ Disease in youth and was deformed,,though to a lesser extent than Bourne. She was an anti-imperialist and more pacifistic and anti-war than Bourne, and had a much stronger impulse to help the poor. Sadly, her relationships with some other women appear to have been immoral. As far as I can tell she had no Jewish heritage.

  6. Anything Hitler and the Nazis believed in or taught had to be not only false but evil. The Allied victory of WWII forever closed the door to all racial inquiry not conforming to “blank slate” and “universal equality”.

    The triumph of Anti-Whitism followed but would not be fully evident until the Sixties.

    • @More of The Same…

      The battle that occurred in the 1940s was, below the surface, between Mobility and The Stationary.

      The Internationalist World Order, as long advocated by Organized Jewry, and for which The United States came to be tailor made, is the supreme advocate of mobility – intellectual mobility, physical mobility, class mobility, economic mobility, idealogical mobility, cultural mobility, political mobility, religious mobility, and, yes, racial mobility, and, now, in the 21st century – even gender mobility.

      That it is so is because of the rage for creation that, as a whole, Jews possess, and, that so, the more they beat back obstacles to that, and the more that they convince others to join them, in playing tennis without a net, the more they can indulge the principal compulsion that is within them.

      In the end, that is precisely the discussion we have been having, over the last century – one between what is mobile and what is stationary, and, at this point, we are not only having a conversation about whether we ought play tennis without a net, we are entertaining one about whether we need a tennis racket or a court, even, for there to be a score.

  7. Jews. Every Single. Time. And now we have the godless Moslem CRIMINAL CLASS to deal with, as well? Make America WHITE Again- anyone!

    “I think MPLS has far WORSE things to deal with. Namely, vote tampering and a racketeer, who is an elected official. AG Barr, what are you doing about this?”
    https://dailystormer.su/ilh… AG Barr, what are you doing about this?

  8. As a child growing up in the 1960s, I thought we, or, at least, where I lived – in North Carolina – we overboard about race.

    I could never see the point why Negroes had to eat outside restaurants, when, vin many cases, they were already growing the food and cooking it for us.

    Nor could I see the need for why they had to drink at their own water fountains, when a lot of us were raised by Negro mammies who lived with us and attended to us in all matters.

    Certainly they drank the water from our kitchen faucet, just as we did.

    That said, now we are on the other extreme – where race is not supposed to matter one bit, in anything, and where being White is something akin to a born pact with Satan.

    To tell the truth, I think we had a decent balance, for a time, in the 1970s-1990s.

    That, however, has proved to be fleeting, for it was just moving from one extreme to the other.

    • The former was designed to prevent the latter. Separation is natural.

      The 1970s were just a step in the direction of now. You don’t get to stay there.

  9. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Environment does also play a factor.

    African immigrants have a lower IQ than African Americans and yet outperform them in education and work ethic.

    I’m very skeptical about placing human value on IQ tests and involvement in the STEM fields. I’m just a working class blue collar grunt. I’ve embraced my working class status. I also have a Bachelor degree.
    I’m not going to accept some elite asshole thinking his life is more valuable than mine just because he has a White collar job and never had to do a day of honest labor.

    Always keep in mind that there are no opportunities in this world. There is only luck. Luck to obtain opportunity. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a lying asshole.

    • @Gryphon Alinor…

      Yes, you are quite right – you cannot evaluate people from the point of view of their I.Q. There is simply too much else that makes a man.

      Passing through young adulthood, I learned the lesson that, as a gifted child who had received the very finest education, I was not only NOT better than anyone else, I was also just as susceptible to making errors, and exercising poor judgement, as the rest.

    • If you think that technological advancement and scientific development doesn’t matter, feel free to live someplace without much of either. I look forward to your reports from Lagos!

  10. While IQ is not the end of the discussion, it is terribly important to the ability of a people to create and maintain a functional society. Not everyone should be or needs to be a 140 IQ genius, but reality is reality.

    IQ is a large determiner of human functionality, although not the only one. It can be a prohibitive one though.

    • Indeed. S. Africa’s electrical grid has collapsed because the nogs are now in charge of it and their thieving, illegal hook ups and general incompetence has ruined it. A few White engineers are kept on staff to prevent total collapse. The mines and politically connected neighborhoods have priority but the utility can no longer wheel power from one part of the country to another to maintain continuous service.

      People are switching to solar power where possible to avoid the grid but solar is expensive, doesn’t work at night and cannot substitute for a real, reliable grid. Most people will just suffer increasingly severe blackouts but since many of their electrical hookups are illegal anyway they are just stealing power. Industry simply cannot function under those conditions but with the general level of stupidity and incompetence of the people in charge of S. Africa modern society is becoming a thing of the past anyway.

      IQ is certainly not everything, perhaps not the most important thing but it is still very important for a healthy, decent place to live.

      https://ca.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1YF13E

  11. “Sounds like they are downplaying how Boas and his followers, once they had helped each other rise to positions of power in academia, actively discriminated against dissenters rising up the ladder that might challenge them. There was no fair competition of ideas. It’s the same situation we find today, and why there are hardly any conservative professors. And it’s why conservatives always lose, tolerance vs. intolerance.”

    All these Enlightenment ideas may have sounded wonderful at the time, but how durable is a system which allows itself to be overthrown? A meritocracy sounds all great and fair, but in practice it only allows our own psychopaths dominate, let alone crafty outsiders to come in and hijack your society. Before this, for better or worse, under an aristocracy at least they were held in check and could never be aristocrats themselves. But they learned the lesson well and in practice have set themselves up as our new aristocracy.

  12. Ronald Reagan’s “Bedtime for Bonzo” (1951) perfectly captures the zeitgeist of post-WWII. It’s hilarious to watch the gipper spout lines about how the environment – not heredity – is the primary force that molds personality. Heck, even chimpanzee can be “honest” and “decent” if raised correctly!

    https://youtu.be/LVd5xiA8_QY?t=28

  13. These views on race are the same as the views of radical abolitionists who dominated the intellectual establishment in the North prior to and immediately after the Civil War. Such views on race were not uncommon among Evangelical Protestant preachers the secular liberal intellectuals in Europe as far back as the late 1700’s.

  14. Anti-racism was long preceded by anti-ethnocentrism among the much of the founding WASP population. That’s why it took so long to restrict immigration. Sentimentalist views of assimilation were the mainstream among WASP elites long before modernism had any impact.

    This article by Madison Grant makes it clear that the problem with WASP low ethnocentrism goes back far into the 19th Century.

    https://www.unz.com/print/NorthAmericanRev-1924mar-00343

    Ironically, some of the modernist intellectuals that Hunter is attacking were influential in increasing racialism and ethnocentrism among WASP Americans during the period under discussion, leading to the 1924 Immigration Act.

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