"Scientific Paper Number 183: Science and the Race Problem"
Excerpt from Weltfish, Gene, “Scientific Paper Number 183: Science and the Race Problem.” In Forty-Third Annual Report of the South Dakota State Horticultural Society (Sioux Falls, SD: South Dakota State Horticultural Society, 1946) (permission Reverend Neil A. Margetson)
Scientific Paper Number 183: Science and the Race Problem by Dr. Gene Weltfish, Dept. of Anthropology, Columbia University
(This Scientific paper was mentioned in the 227th of a series of broadcasts entitled "Excursions in Science.")
The race problem has many sides to it—social, political, economic and many others. But here I shall limit myself more to the scientific aspects of the problem than to the others.
First, let me take you back to your school days when you were studying geography. Much of what you think about race today dates back to that early experience. The geography book was a big one with many interesting pictures that led the mind toward far-off places. There was a black man leaning against a palm tree and dressed in a loin cloth, doing nothing; and a yellow man pulling a rickshaw like a human horse; and on still another page, a white man dressed in a collar and tie with a lot of smoke stacks behind him. Most of us got the idea then that dark skin was somehow connected with doing nothing, and wearing a sarong instead of a business suit; and that yellow skin was connected with pigtails and menial labor.
We were not yet mature enough to untangle these things and to realize that clothing and occupations are not hereditary in the same way as blue eyes or red hair.
Very few of us have had the occasion to reexamine these old childhood categories. But today with the race problem one of the most serious issues of our time, it is important for every citizen to consider the problem again. Clear thinking is part of our fight for a better world.
If you were asked to name the races of man, what would you say? Most likely: the white, the black, the yellow—you might add the brown and the red. Your first impulse, in any case, would be to classify people by the color of the skin. Then you might add, that the yellow race has straight black hair and flat faces, the black race kinky hair and broad noses, and the white race all kinds of hair from kinky to straight, and all kinds of noses. And I will grant you that you might observe such broad differences in different parts of the world's population.
But how can these external differences help you to judge a man's moral character, his ability to participate in a democratic society, his ability to think up new and fruitful ideas, and his artistic capacities—or even his ability to be your neighbor, your business partner, or your good friend? A human being is more than skin, hair, and nose.
It is the job of the anthropologist to live in distant lands among strange and unfamiliar peoples—to learn their languages and to investigate the whys and wherefores of their life and customs. At first their actions are strange and incomprehensible, but in the course of time, through the veil of unfamiliar custom, the investigator begins to discern personalities—people so like those he has known at home—the grouch, the cheat, the generous man, the practical joker and the meddling mother-in-law—that he forgets their unfamiliarity and begins to be part of the new community in which he finds himself. This discovery of fellow-minds in different skins is one of the most important discoveries that the anthropologist has made. But, like things seen under a microscope, the scientist finds it hard to convey it to those without his technical skills.
It is, however, not too much to hope that in the near future, our educational system will produce [sic] the mist of cultural and physical differences to find the human being underneath. The booklets to promote intercultural understanding designed for our armed forces abroad, as a practical necessity, are equally necessary in our civilian life.
One of the most widely misunderstood scientific techniques is that of the intelligence test. It was hoped at first that these would clearly show hereditary intelligence. Most scientists believe that there is some hereditary ingredient in what we are pleased to call intelligence. But since their extensive use during and following the last war, the intelligence test is little used for this purpose. For we now know that the intelligence score shows hereditary intelligence plus the effects of everything that happens to the child in the course of his life.
After three months extra reading lessons, the IQ scores of some Pennsylvania school children rose nearly twelve points; poor children placed in good foster homes gained as much as twenty points on their intelligence scores. So that, if schooling and home environment can have such marked effects upon test scores, then the intelligence test alone cannot be used to test inborn intelligence.
The fact that negroes often make lower scores than whites on intelligence tests, has often been pointed to as proof of racial inferiority. However, we all know that no other group in the United States is more consistently at a disadvantage than the negro. Schooling, housing, medical attention, and diet are far worse for the negro population as a whole, than for the whites. it has been roughly estimated that there is 1 hospital bed for every 2,800 negroes, compared with 1 bed for every 150 whites. The average pay of the colored teacher in rural districts is $388 per year, as compared with $945 for white teachers in the same period; and in the negro schools, classes are larger and the school term only four-fifths as long as that of the white children.
It is, therefore no wonder that negro intelligence test scores are sometimes lower than those for white.
Among New York City school children, however, negro and white make the same scores, and in the class of gifted children at Hunter College Model School, New York, a proportionate number of negro children are admitted every year.
In spite of these data, many of us find it difficult to eliminate our habitual reactions to physical differences. What are these physical differences? One of the major ones is skin color. Upon chemical analysis we find that the main color ingredients of the skin are carotene (like carrots) giving a yellowish tinge, and melanin, contributing the brown tones; pink shades are derived from the blood vessels that show through the skin. All human skin, blonde, brunet, or brown, with the exception of the albino, has some of these chemicals in it—the darker shades more melanin, the lighter shades less, and the yellower tints more carotene. In all human beings, the neck and elbows have more melanin, the palms and soles more carotene. So that, while to the eye, skin color differences appear great, analysis reveals them to be a matter of degree rather than of kind.
Since we so commonly refer to blood relatives it is worth considering this factor in connection with racial categories. The four groups into which blood has been classified A, B, AB, and O according to its agglutinating qualities—occur in all the varieties of mankind. Even the percentages of each are same among Lapps and Swedes, Australian natives and West Europeans. And it is genetically possible for you to have a different blood type from your mother and the same blood type as an African native or a Philippine Igorrote.
The physical structure of the brain has also been the subject of scientific investigation, and despite the most careful dissection, the anatomist is unable to distinguish the brain of a Javanese from the brain of a Dutchman or the brain of an African Zulu from that of a U.S. business man or a baseball player.
Distaste for physical differences is a cultivated thing like a taste for olives. We know that all standards of beauty have changed down through the ages and the Venus de Milo or the rotund beauty of Reubens [sic] would not appeal to us now as would Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Mae West, or Lana Turner. We can, through education, broaden our margin of tolerance for the beauty and the ways of many different people and make our living-together a world-wide cooperative effort rather than a disastrous conflict.
Ignorance accounts for much of race prejudice, but besides, there is the factor of fear. Technically, in individuals, unfounded fears and suspicion of others is called paranoia. However, the fear reactions that are manifest in group prejudice have very real historical bases.
It is little realized that in the old South only 16 per cent of the white people were large plantation owners, —while the rest of the Whites were poor farmers and artisans. Their prospects for work and for making a success of their farms were seriously threatened by negro slave labor, or by the negro freeman who would feel impelled to work for less returns. Any yet if we look at the matter objectively, it was not the negro who was to blame, nor is a paranoid-like hatred of the negro, the solution.
Similarly with the Chinese, the Mexican, and the southeast European, all have at various times in the past been brought here as a cheap and docile labor supply, threatening the interests of the resident workers. The answer does not lie in group hatred, but in group planning—on the part of the workers in their organizations, and of management in the shops—and a general readiness to plan together and to compromise if need be.
Various types of insecurity and fear are important elements in race prejudice, but job insecurity heads the list. Only by a combination of a humane and realistic employment policy and a program of constructive education, can race prejudice—one of the sorest spots of our social life—be eliminated.