The Evolutionary Invention of Race: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Conservation” of Race and George Schuyler’s Black No More

Abstract

For humanities scholars debating the contours of W. E. B. Du Bois's notoriously conflicted account of racial identity, the field of evolutionary psychology has seemed completely irrelevant. Similarly, the experts busy debating evolutionary psychology's claims would not consider it particularly interesting that Du Bois offered a conflicted account of racial identity. This essay argues that both groups are mistaken, and that twentieth-century debates over racial identity and twenty-first-century debates over the study of human psychology have suffered as a result. Writers like Du Bois, I argue, were steeped in notions of evolutionary psychology, so our account of them and of their historical moment will be profoundly skewed if we ignore that discipline. By the same token, these writers' work can offer us new perspectives on how we debate this controversial discipline, and more broadly how we understand the relationship of biology to culture at stake in it. Evolutionary psychology, which uses principles of Darwinian evolutionary theory to make and test predictions about human psychology, has become astonishingly popular over the last twenty-five years, both as a research program and as a pop culture phenomenon. Its proliferating publishing venues, academic societies, and textbooks are echoed by journalism, novels, and movies that have trumpeted the field's hypotheses, making them as ubiquitous in US culture today as psychoanalytic notions, such as Freudian slips. (1) Someone who has never heard of evolutionary psychology is nonetheless likely to believe that men find physical cues of female fertility (like youth) attractive because it helps them pass on their genes. popularity of such claims has done little to secure their acceptance. Critics charge that evolutionary psychologists create too simple or direct a link between biology and complex psychological or sociological phenomena. And although titles like Triumph of Sociobiology suggest that the field has emerged victorious from these debates, the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara (home to two of the field's most influential members) tells a different story: it maintains an active website that, like an election-season war room, assembles responses to emerging criticisms (Cosmides and Tooby). (2) Perhaps because of the field's current aura of both glamour and threat, scholars have paid little attention to its own evolution. notion of an evolutionary psychology actually arose along with Darwinism in the late nineteenth century, much earlier than the 1975 academic birth usually marked by the publication of E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology. Yet scholars have only just begun to unpack the cultural development of the principles that coalesced into this academic field, and virtually no attention has been paid to the relation between its cultural and academic practices. In particular, questions of the relation of biology to human behavior arise nowhere more insistently than in debates over race in the early twentieth century. demise of comparative anatomy, the development of relativist forms of cultural anthropology, and the development of evolutionary theory itself have already been explored as contexts for those debates, but their relationship to evolutionary psychology remains to be acknowledged. (3) This essay investigates this relationship by turning to two writers who epitomize the potentially polarizing complexity of questions about racial identity: Du Bois and George Schuyler. Du Bois has become a famous example of a thinker who tried and failed to generate a nonbiological account of race. According to Kwame Anthony Appiah's influential analysis, Du Bois's The Conservation of Races rejected the biological or scientific meaning of race only to insist on neat divisions of racial history that would be incoherent without that biological meaning propping them up. In Appiah's analysis, only biological community can yield those common histor[ies] that align properly with racial identity, making Du Bois's attempt to reject biology but preserve race circular (Uncompleted Argument 27). …