The Anthropological Approach to the Problem of Modifying Race Attitudes

Abstract

Today the entire world is preoccupied with race attitudes. An aggressor nation is using racism as a rationalization for precipitating the most destructive war of all time. Yet the use of race as a determining factor in human affairs is a relatively recent development. Indeed, it is but the latest chapter in the age-old story of the sheep and the goats. Today, it is the color of the skin and the texture of the hair which distinguish the sheep from the goats. In discussing scientific work on race it is difficult to separate arbitrarily the roles of anthropology, biology, psychology and sociology. The findings of each have been the starting place for the others, and the work of all is interrelated. We shall emphasize the work of anthropology in this paper, but must of necessity bring in other scientific contributions which have a direct bearing on the anthropological work. Biology, and more specifically, the science of genetics, contributed much to the scientific work on race. Until the end of the nineteenth century it was taken for granted by everyone, scientist and layman alike, that acquired characteristics were inherited. If the members of one generation developed their brains and muscles, their children were supposed to inherit this development. But by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century geneticists in different countries, experimenting simultaneously on this problem, reached conclusions which thoroughly discredited the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. All the geneticists finally agreed that any evolutionary changes which did take place came through mutations, that is, spontaneous changes in the chromosomes. Professor Thomas Hunt Morgan summed it up very well when he said that, "the belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics is not based on scientific evidence, but on the very human desire to pass on one's acquisitions to one's children".' With the scientific acceptance of the fact that acquired characteristics were not inherited, it could then be assumed, at least by the scientist, that whether a man became a cannibal or not, whether he was polygamous or monogamous, whether fishing or agriculture was his main occupation, or whether he worshipped ancestors or believed in God, was culturally determined and had nothing to do with biological inheritance. Neither African culture, nor French culture, nor American culture, nor any part of culture could be biologically inherited. The physical anthropologist starting from this base, asked himself a different question: What did the biological characteristics which he knew were inherited, mean? Did the color of the skin, the texture of the hair, the shape