Race in the Modern World

Abstract

Ed Howe said he knew all about women, said he once visited a place where young men were trained to be doctors and watched the students cut one up. For a long time now we have been photographing, measuring, and cutting up Negroes; Caucasians, and Mongolians and to some of us, as to Ed Howe, the knowledge gained has been sufficient. Our scientists have given us the facts. Hankins shows us that race is only a highly variable statistical concept,' while Barzun dismisses it as a mere superstition.2 Benedict and Weltfish argue with sweet reasonableness that all men are really brothers under the skin,3 and Huxley and Haddon explain that there really is no such thing as race and that we ought to substitute such terms as ethnic group or sub-species. But the people remain impervious to all these scientific facts. Huxley and Haddon may be willing to give up race but ordinary men and women will not do so, and it is in the minds of ordinary men and women, not in the concepts of scientists, that the race problem exists. The recent. reaffirmation of the doctrine of white supremacy by the legislature of the State of South