Abstract
The Introduction makes clear the historiographical interventions and theoretical insights Boasians at War contributes to the history of US anthropology and the study of race. The Introduction offers a brief contextualization of Boasian anthropology within the Long Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century, which was comprised of domestic, transnational, and global activism. In addition, the Introduction provides a road map of the book by providing a brief history of the construction of race as a relational concept in the United States beginning in the colonial period, followed by descriptions of each chapter. The Introduction closes by offering thoughts on how Boasian anthropology remains relevant to scholarly activism around race and racism in the twenty-first century.
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Notes
- 1.
Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981 [1963]), 43.
- 2.
Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010 [1967]), 73–74.
- 3.
Thomas C. Patterson, “An Archaeology of the History of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Anthropology,” Journal of Anthropological Research 69, 4 (Winter 2013): 459–484; Cristin Ellis, Douglass’s Animals: Racial Science and the Problem of Human Equality (New York: Fordham University), 23–60; Joseph L. Graves Jr., The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 48–49. Polygenicists emerged in the antebellum period within the American scientific community, arguing that God had created distinct races which were ranked hierarchically according to intelligence and cultural development. Methodologically, polygenicists practiced craniometry, the study of measuring skull sizes to determine “racial” characteristics. Many of the leading figures were medical doctors and pro-slavery advocates. On Antenor Firmin see Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, “Antenor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 102, 3 (September 2000): 449–466; Asselin Charles, “Race and Geopolitics in the Work of Antenor Firmin,” Journal of Pan African Studies 7, 2 (August 2014): 68–88; Laurent DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Antenor Firmin, and the Making of U.S.-Haitian Relations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016): 95–110.
- 4.
Nat Brandt, Harlem at War: The Black Experience in World War II (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996); Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Eduardo Obregon Pagan, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime Los Angeles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Douglas Walter Bristol, “Terror, Anger, and Patriotism: Understanding the Resistance of Black Soldiers during World War II,” in Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation since World War II. Douglas Walter Briston and Heather Marie Stur, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press): 10–35.
- 5.
Richard Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” Journal of American History 55, 1 (June 1968): 90.
- 6.
Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck, “Introduction,” in Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 13.
- 7.
Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, 4 (March 2005): 1233–1247; Kevin Gaines, “A World to Win: The International Dimension of the Black Freedom Movement,” OAH Magazine of History 20, 5 (October 2006): 14–18; Kevin Gaines, “The Civil Rights Movement in World Perspective,” OAH Magazine of History 21, 1 (January 2007): 57–64.
- 8.
Anthony Q. Hazard Jr., Postwar Anti-Racism: The United States, UNESCO and “Race,” 1945-1968 (New York: Palgrave: 2012); Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
- 9.
George Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Vernon J. Williams, Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996); Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Published more recently, a handful of existing monographs explore in part, themes related to the overall content and goal of Boasians at War. For example, see Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the 20th Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) by Michael Yudell, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) by Robert Wald Sussman, and Samuel Redman’s Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism in Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016) offer broad examinations of the history of anthropology and race, but do little to engage the work of Boasian anthropologists during the World War II era.
- 10.
Peter Mandler, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead won the Second World War and lost the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); John L. Jackson & Nadine Weidman, Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Lois Banner, Intertwined Lives: Magaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and their Circle (New York: Knopf, 2005); Jerry Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
- 11.
Tracy Teslow, Constructing Race: The Science of Bodies and Cultures in American Anthropology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Leah Gordon, From Power to Prejudice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Zoe Burkholder, Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900-1954 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 12.
David Roediger, Class, Race, and Marxism (New York: Verso, 2017), 49–72.
- 13.
Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).
- 14.
Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1994); Stefano Luconi, From Paesani to White Ethnics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Verso, 1995); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); David Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); David Roediger, Class, Race, and Marxism (New York: Verso, 2017).
- 15.
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2004); Michael Banton, The International Politics of Race (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Joseph L. Graves Jr., The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Thomas Patterson, A Social History of U.S. Anthropology (Oxford: Berg, 2001).
- 16.
Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
- 17.
Paul Alkebulan, The African American Press in World War II: Toward Victory at Home and Abroad (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014): 1; Gerald Horne, The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett’s Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 65–74.
- 18.
Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro, 13.
- 19.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Winter 1992): 253; Natalia Molina, “Understanding Race as a Relational Concept,” Modern American History 1 (2018): 101–105.
- 20.
Painter, The History of White People (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigration and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
- 21.
Leonard Lieberman, Andrew Lyons, and Harriet Lyons, “An Interview with Ashley Montagu,” Current Anthropology 36, 5 (December 1995): 839.
- 22.
Karen Brodkin, How Jews became White Folks, 138–174.
- 23.
Beth Bailey and David Farber, First Strange Place (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Harvey Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2001).
- 24.
Please see David Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,” American Historical Review 108, 5 (December 2003): 1363–1390.
- 25.
Anthony Q. Hazard Jr., “A Racialized Deconstruction? Ashley Montagu and the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race,” Transforming Anthropology 19, 2 (2011): 174–186; Michael Banton, The International Politics of Race (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Thomas Patterson, A Social History of Anthropology in the United States (New York: Berg, 2001); Susan Sperling, “Ashley’s Ghost: McCarthyism, Science, and Human Nature,” in Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA. Edited by Dustin Wax. (London: Pluto Press, 2008): 17–36. The relatively recent trilogy by David Price Threatening Anthropology (2004), Anthropological Intelligence (2008), and Cold War Anthropology (2016) offer arguably the most penetrating analyses of anthropologists’ relationships to the state apparatus vis a vis the military and intelligence agencies, during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. These works utilize multiple archives, and look squarely at wartime and postwar anthropology. Boasians at War traverses similar terrain, but with the added context of the black freedom struggle, or the long civil rights movement .
- 26.
C. Douglas Lummis, “Ruth Benedict’s Obituary for Japanese Culture,” in Reading Benedict Reading Mead: Feminism, Race, and Imperial Visions, ed. Dolores E. Janiewski and Lois W. Banner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004): 126–140; Sonia Ryang, “Chrysanthemum’s Strange Life: Ruth Benedict in Postwar Japan,” Asian Anthropology 1, 1 (February 2002): 87–116.
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Hazard, A.Q. (2020). Introduction. In: Boasians at War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40882-4_1
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