Race: Science and Politics

By Ruth Benedict and Judith Schachter

In science, race can be a useful concept—for specific, limited purposes. When race, as a way of classifying people, is drafted into the service of politics, religion, or any belief system, then danger follows. That is the focus of this classic repudiation of racism, which is as readable and timely now as when it first appeared.

Race: Science and Politics was first published in 1940, in response to the global rise of fascism and its pseudoscientific rationales for marginalizing and even exterminating “inferior” people. Writing for a general audience, Ruth Benedict ranges across the history of Western thought and research on race to illuminate rifts between the facts of race and the claims of racism. Rather than take issue only with the Nazis and their allies, Benedict set out to show that all racist beliefs are objectively groundless—and that is the key to the book’s ongoing relevance.

The book’s bonus content includes The Races of Mankind, a pamphlet-length distillation of the book with its own controversial role in dismantling racist theory. This edition also includes a new foreword by Judith Schachter. An anthropologist, historian, and Benedict biographer, Schachter discusses the book’s importance for current readers. Also included is a foreword by anthropologist Margaret Mead from 1958, a time when colonial ties around the world were unravelling and civil rights unrest was a daily occurrence in the United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780820356778

Ruth Benedict

RUTH BENEDICT (1887–1948) was a prominent American anthropologist, a protégée of Franz Boas, and a contemporary (and close friend) of Margaret Mead. Benedict’s other major books include Patterns of Culture and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. She was also an accomplished poet, often writing under the pseudonym Anne Singleton.

Book preview

FOREWORD TO THE 2019 GEORGIA EDITION

by Judith Schachter

Eighty years after publication, Race: Science and Politics has remarkable relevance. The book is about race as the basis for persecuting designated others. Ruth Benedict argues, then, that racism is a relatively new phenomenon, a product of a particular time and place, historical period and culture. The widespread occurrence of racism in Western societies, she continues, should not result in eliminating race from scholarly discourse. Subject to strict scientific inquiry, race is a crucial tool for providing a record, written in the bones and other bodily characteristics of men, of the history of mankind (65). Throughout the 164-page book, Benedict distinguishes between race, a scientific category, and racism, a political abuse of science.

In considering racism the product of a time and place Benedict’s book asks readers to confront the rise of racism in the present—and to question its virulent spread across contemporary nation-states. Race: Science and Politics (RSP) presents an anthropologist’s analysis of the mechanisms through which race becomes racism, the basis for persecution and, under certain conditions, the basis for the extermination of selected others. The analysis, however, is not an academic exercise but an address to the public in an effort to grant responsibility to educated laymen, in Mead’s phrase (foreword, p. xxix). Accessible and measured, RSP introduces the terms of a debate that persists in popular as well as scholarly writings.

As in her earlier anthropological writings, Benedict assumes the value of knowledge for producing culture consciousness, the source of a critical perspective on familiar structures of life. Mead emphasizes the anthropologist’s goal of directing change when she writes: This is what Ruth Benedict meant this book to be, a kind of handbook for those who carried a pilgrim’s staff in their hands on the steep journey into an unknown world (foreword, p. xxxiii). The sentence comes from the 1959 Viking Press paperback edition, reprinted here. The edition also contains The Races of Mankind, a pamphlet Benedict wrote with Gene Weltfish in 1943 that simplifies the arguments in RSP. Together the texts are a prime example of Benedict’s efforts to apply anthropology to a world in which racism, nationalism, and imperialism endanger individual societies and, significantly, threaten humanity. The following discussion is based on the book, supplemented with references to the pamphlet and its controversial history.

Ruth Benedict spent her sabbatical year, 1939, drafting the book. She did so partially in response to the lessons her mentor, Franz Boas, taught about the importance of applying anthropological method and theory to real-life problems. In the 1930s these problems included an American eugenics movement, exclusionary immigration laws, and the rise of fascism across the Atlantic. In taking up the responsibility of scientist as citizen (foreword, p. xxix) at that historical moment, Benedict extended the Boasian approach to the role of science by drawing on her decades-long critique of the pattern of American culture. Beyond the drive of events abroad lay her commitment to the urgent need for change at home. To this task, she brought a practiced style in which the customs of them shed light on the customs of us. A reader of RSP, as well as The Races of Mankind, finds a mirror of the (still) familiar in the account of the (evolving) strange.

Benedict did not push racism away from the shores of her own country. Her focus on race-based persecution extended her condemnation of a mode of defining difference that, in the United States, disenfranchised large parts of the population and did severe damage to the social fabric. The conclusion of Benedict’s 1934 book Patterns of Culture finds its culmination in RSP’s account of the potentially genocidal consequences of designating some members of society as unfit. Exhausted from the effort, when she finished RSP, Benedict wrote to Mead: I feel I’ve done my good works (Young 2005, 85). In fact the 1940 book was not to be her last statement on race and racism.

The book is a dialogue between the anthropologist and her reader, a conversation that is substantiated by an interchange of statements about difference drawn from past civilizations and contemporary cultures. Each chapter ends with What They Say, quotations from literary, historical, and philosophical sources that illustrate the contested terrain she describes; for instance, Gobineau is answered by Huxley, Chamberlain by Toynbee. Moreover, the constancy of dispute and disagreement affirms for Benedict the use of race as an assertion of superiority. In this, too, she shows how history becomes a tool for those who use race in their judgments of civilizations and cultures; the past is justification for a politics of race in the present. Thus the fall of Rome came to be for Teutonic racists a moral tale that proved the necessity of racial hygiene. But history tells the tale otherwise, Benedict adds, attributing the fall of Rome to administrative failings (49–50).

The example of Rome occurs in chapter 4, Migration and Mingling of Peoples. The title predicts the primary thrust of her argument: racial mixtures provided vigor to the Roman Empire and the intermingling of peoples granted Rome greatness. Any attribution of the famous fall to the inroads of barbarians is a false use of history for the sake of present politics—the justification for an expedient ideology. Behind Benedict’s reference to Germany lies a warning to the United States of the dangers to a nation that come from barring the entry of diverse peoples. Her insistence on the benefits of racial mixture for sustaining a culture as well as a political entity runs through subsequent chapters. To the extent that she is responding to those who would restrict migration, she avoids confronting her country’s dispossession of Native Americans.

The reference to racial hygiene in Rome by current-day Germans (Teutons, she says, in subtle mockery) underlines the exploitation of race as the marker of I am the Elect. The designation of difference as racial, Benedict argues, is a product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically in Western societies. Once religion, now race serves to distinguish the us from the them; once the perception of heresy, now a perceived danger of mixing results in persecution and even killing. While RSP does not minimize the horrors of religious persecution, Benedict’s concern lies with the outcome of the modern "ism": the extermination of a group defined as different on the basis of race.

Racism, Benedict opens her book, is a creation of our own time (4). It is equally, as news reports, government policies, and statements by heads of state demonstrate, a product of our time. The phenomenon is evident in alt-right movements and in misinterpretations of genetics, in arguments defending white supremacy and condemning the mixing of races, and in the exoneration of attacks on African Americans in American cities and towns. All rest on an assumption of the hereditary superiority of the Caucasian (81). All assume the inheritance of biological traits, as well as the link between racial purity and the highest levels of civilization. Benedict does not mince words in chapter 6, Who Is Superior? There is no proof, she writes, that race bears any link to civilization or that patterns are eternal and biologically perpetuated (87). On the next page she brings it home: White intelligence has not shown the ability ensure a secure future for our civilization (88). Her warning rings loud at the end of the chapter: We shall not blindly trust the racists’ flattery that the highest attainments will always be ours however we muddle through in our social life (95)—an ironic dismissal of the claims made by racists. The role of the citizen scientist was to demolish any assumption of superiority. In a first step Benedict outlines the facts, or the science, of race.

The Science

It is essential, if we are to live in this modern world, she writes in the first chapter, that we should understand racism and be able to judge its arguments. We must know the facts first of race, and then of this doctrine that has made use of them. For racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed (5). The second chapter, Race: What It Is Not, distinguishes race from language and culture and, in the process, stresses the complexity and the flexibility of racial groups. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 can be read as what race is. In chapter 3, Man’s Effort to Classify Himself, Benedict constructs an analogy between the classification of human species and classifying in botany and zoology. Then, in her Swiftian mode, Benedict reverses the analogy to stress the variability in human species.

Chapter 4, Migration and the Mingling of People, locates the source of variability in environmental factors—in the impact of context on the physical features of human beings. As with her reference to scientific fact, Benedict cites the historical fact of hither and thither journeyings (48) to support her argument that migration inevitably leads to racial mixtures. Given the age-old inclination of man to move, she continues, no group or culture can be racially pure (the exception of highly isolated groups proves the rule). Then she turns to the science of genetics further to disabuse her readers of the myth of racial heredity (55).

In chapter 5, What is Hereditary?, Benedict reads the peapod experiments of Gregor Mendel against the grain. She cites his findings as proof of the countless variations that occur in the passage of traits from parent to child. The chapter begins with the claim that racial heredity in Western civilization is a myth which sets up, in place of true heredity in family lines, an absurd picture of heredity from a race (55–56). In her detailed summary of Mendel, Benedict effectively demolishes the ideology of the American eugenics movement and, implicitly, undercuts the adaptation of Mendel to the politics of National Socialism. In a barely veiled reference to Germany, she writes: It is ironic that it is those very European nations in which anthropometric investigation shows no pure race which base their claims to superiority on allegations of their ‘pure’ blood (62). The heart of her argument comes out in the next chapter, Who Is Superior?

Benedict draws on three fields that have tested the innate superiority of one racial group to another (66). The facts gathered by physiologists, psychologists, and historians produce the same conclusion: nurture not nature determines achievement. In the psychology section, Benedict summarizes the facts of intelligence testing, drawing on World War I army tests. But first the anthropologist notes the impact of culture on test taking, with the disarming example of Balinese children who fail the color test by arranging beads to make a pretty belt (74). She then moves from culture to societal factors in analyzing the test results for African Americans and Caucasians. Beyond the individual’s perception of a test format lies the influence of environment, education, and opportunity. The result, that Negroes in Northern states did better than southern whites (75), substantiated Benedict’s conclusion that wherever environmental advantages are equal, ability and achievement will also be equal. There is, in other words, no such thing as innate inferiority.

That was Benedict’s answer to the American eugenicists, who claimed the superiority of whites and the necessity of keeping the races strictly separate and keeping America a white nation (Gross 2008, 224). Benedict used part 1 of RSP to disprove every bit of that claim, from belief in the stability of biological traits and the dismissal of social conditions to, finally, the assumption that a nation’s strength lay in racial purity.

Eighty years after the publication of RSP, DNA has replaced the biological traits of Benedict’s era, and genetics has entered popular discourse. Yet the outcome remains disturbingly the same. Instead of long-discounted proxies like skull circumference and family pedigrees, according to experts who track the far-right, today’s proponents of racial hierarchy are making their case by misinterpreting research on the human genome itself, according to a New York Times reporter (Harmon 2018). The misinterpretation begs for intervention by the citizen scientist. But in contrast to Benedict, many geneticists at the top of their field say they do not have the ability to communicate to a general audience on such a complicated and fraught topic (ibid.). The withdrawal of DNA experts from public discourse leaves interpretations open to white supremacists, nationalists, and, in a word, racists.

The topic has been taken up by anthropologists who extend Benedict’s distinction between race and racism. Discussion in the discipline reflects advances in the knowledge of DNA and the response of genetic traits to the environment. Bringing culture into human biology carries forward Benedict’s summary of Mendel by demonstrating how social conditions regulate gene actions (Goodman 2013, 368). Writing in professional journals, anthropologists also recognize the necessity of diffusing their science to a general public—the duty of counteracting racism by providing fuller information on race (e.g., Hazard 2011; Sussman 2014).

Benedict trod lightly around the potential rise of a white supremacist movement in the United States. Instead, she confronted the claim of racial superiority by condemning race-based immigration laws that favored the Nordic race. Her argument for the advantages of racial mixing results in an emphasis on opening borders that can detract from her equally strong condemnation of policies that fail to equalize educational and economic opportunities for all members of society.

The Politics

RSP is about the conditions that turn race into the basis for discrimination against a designated other; it is not about Nazism. Racism is the dogma, Benedict writes, that one ethnic group is condemned by Nature to hereditary inferiority and another group is destined by Nature to hereditary superiority. . . . It is a dogma rampant in the world today and which a few years ago was made into a principal basis of German policy (98). Part 2, Racism, embeds Germany in a longer story, while not slighting its extreme, devastating implementation of racist policies. This replicates the strategy of Patterns of Culture, where the anthropologist presents striking portraits of the other to awaken in readers a critical consciousness of the familiar. Part 2 of RSP, then, is about the United States, first indirectly through history and then directly when she proposes solutions to racism.

Racism, she writes, must be studied historically. We must investigate the conditions under which it arises and the uses to which it has been put (99). Not science but history provides the data with which Benedict refutes an ideological dogma. Chapter 7, A Natural History of Racism, presents the facts, and chapter 8, Why Then Race Prejudice, responds to those facts with a direction for change.

The term natural history underlines Benedict’s view that historical observations are equivalent to scientific fact. The chapter proceeds through a collection of examples—variations in the implementation of the age-old formula I belong to the Elect. It is history told by an anthropologist: comparison over time exposes diverse cultural claims to superiority. Thirty-three pages precede Benedict’s discussion of Germany. From primitive groups she moves to Rome and Christianity, the dual bases of Western civilization. Her description of the secular and the religious administration emphasizes the creation of community, a doctrine of the brotherhood of man that is lost in modern times (106). The reason for that loss is imperialism, the discovery of the New World and the exploitation and settlement of hitherto unknown islands and continents (107).

To explain modern racism, however, she turns to its origin in class conflict. An analysis of nineteenth-century racist literature supports her account of the transformation of class superiority into nationalist ideology. Racism, the doctrine of the innate superiority of a class, became in Europe . . . a doctrine of the superiority of nations, she writes (122). To further her claim, Benedict uses Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Human Races to condemn the distortion of class-based analysis into a gospel of nationalism (115). Gobineau, she claims, did not propose the idea of a nation built on racial purity; instead National Socialists in Germany adopted his construction of the civilized Nordic race to fuel extermination policies.

In her mode of contrast, she distinguishes the impact of racist literature in the United States from its use in Germany. Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race did not become a cry of nationalism, she writes, but a justification for the quotas written into immigration law. Furthermore, she interprets the effect of those laws as wasting human potential rather than serving as the grounds for extermination of a minority group. The section, Racism and Nationalism, further differentiates Germany from the United States through a condemnation of nationalism.

In Germany, racist literature became more and more inspirational, less and less hampered by facts (133). A discussion of Houston Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century brings her to Hitler and the evolution of racism into anti-Semitism. While she describes the Nuremberg Laws, she also points to the manipulation of race as Germany forms alliances in the war: Racialism has become involved in scientific absurdities under the Third Reich, and it is obviously only a front used to justify negotiations and persecutions of the moment—a support for German nationalistic-racist policies (137). Again there is a veiled (or not-so-veiled) reference to her own country, a warning against the appropriation of race to uphold nationalistic interests. The last paragraph is a warning to the United States entering a war of nation against nation. The unescapable conclusion is that racist claims hide self-seeking aggressions and alliances (138).

The final chapter of RSP reveals Benedict’s faith in change. She suggests the measures we can trust to bring about a cure for the racism of our times (140). Following an account of earlier modes of persecution, she concludes: Racism is merely another instance of the persecution of minorities for the advantages of those in power (148). The rest of the chapter examines the "old problem of unequal citizenship rights" (153). The problem explains European anti-Semitism and, as well, the history of African Americans, in what is perhaps the most controversial aspect of RSP.

The case of the Negro since the Civil War in America points the same social lesson (153–54). The provocative statement introduces her description of the discrimination African Americans have suffered in the course of American history. The problem of rights suggests a route to change: The only trustworthy objective in any color-line program is the ultimate elimination of legal, educational, economic, and social discriminations (154). In Benedict’s view, the extension of citizenship rights goes hand in hand with the engineered improvement of social conditions. An implicit support of New Deal policies, the comment reiterates Benedict’s wider agenda for eliminating persecution based on race: To minimize racial persecution, therefore, it is necessary to minimize conditions which lead to persecution; it is not necessary to minimize race (155). Politics reduces the conditions that lead to racism; race remains a subject of scientific inquiry.

Where the book is most controversial is also where it is most innovative. Benedict’s emphasis on the conditions under which minorities are likely to be targeted transfers the argument from ideology to the structure of social institutions. She argues that only a change in institutions will eliminate racism: We must ‘strongly resolve’ that all men shall have the basic opportunity to work and to earn a living wage, that education and health and decent shelter be available to all, that regardless of race, creed, or color, civil liberties shall be protected. Implementing the change is a task of the state, she writes, and the development of rules and regulations is the means by which to make democracy work (161). She did not leave her proposal for ending racism with a slogan. In 1943 she collaborated