Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century

Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century By Michael Yudell (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2014) (274 pages; $40.00 cloth)In Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century, historian Mike Yudell analyzes the race concept and the role that scientists have played in c ontributing to the idea of race over the twentieth century. He explores assumptions of racial science, defined as "the use of science, both by scientists and laypersons alike ... as part of a greater arsenal of oppression" (p. 115). Using primary sources of books, research studies, and other writings by prominent eugenicists, geneticists, and evolutionary biologists, he argues that racial science rooted in biological notions of difference did not die out after World War II and, in fact, has persisted into the twenty-first century. As well, science has played a critical role in the formulations of ideas about race and America's changing views of African Americans. Although people have tried to use science to justify racial difference, the "science" they used was no more real than saying that race is real. Science was only real to the extent that scientists said it was so.Yudell traces the idea of race back to the eighteenth century when Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus established racial classification systems based on biological traits such as skin color or hair texture. His categories of Asiaticus, Africanus, Europeaeus, and Americanus were infused with distinct physical and behavioral characteristics. Yudell's primary interest is the twentieth century, however, and his first chapters explore the thinking of eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Charles Davenport. Galton examined hereditary traits both within and between humans, and he had a significant impact on the formation of race as a biological concept. Supported by his Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Davenport applied Galton's eugenic doctrines to immigration policies and Black/White differences. By rooting human differences and perceived inferiorities in blood relationships, these eugenicists used the scientific method to preserve White supremacy.Significantly, Yudell contextualizes this early twentieth-century work within the push to formulate new immigration policies and the activities of anti-Black groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the 1920s. Eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, for example, actually advised the KKK, while other eugenicists disseminated their ideas that were used to enforce segregation for some and exclusion for others based on "inferior" traits. Ideas about racial difference also were put on public display through the American Museum of Natural History meeting in 1921. Models, diagrams, and research presentations in 131 exhibits asserted subtle but distinct differences between Blacks and Whites that reinforced the immutability of bodily characteristics. Yet some biologists, geneticists, and anthropologists challenged the assumptions of racial science. Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas, for example, rebuked the White supremacists and eugenicists at the museum gathering. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, formed in 1909, became more vocal in the 1920s, with W.E.B. duBois attacking racial science even as genetics began to replace eugenics as the authority on the race concept.Yudell continues the thesis that biological assumptions in racial science drove researchers in the twentieth century by focusing on the National Research Council studies that investigated the impact of "interbreeding" between Blacks and Whites (p. 60). Contextualized in lieu of the demographic shift of Blacks from the South to northern cities after World War 1, studies included human intelligence testing and mechanical aptitude tests to develop an approach to organic differences regarding pathology. For example, in the hopes of using intelligence testing to help people adjust better and thereby serve a positive social function, Joseph Peterson's study on Blacks was a "'gentleman's' way of articulating racism" (p. …