Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini
colours and textures have been placed in the middle and the least acceptable at the margins. This simple little gauge tells a story of pure horror.
‘Fischer used this device in Namibia in 1908 to establish the relative whiteness of mixed-race people,’ reveals Das. In what is now remembered as the first genocide of the twentieth century, in the four years preceding 1908, Germany killed tens of thousands of Namibians as they rebelled against colonial rule. According to some estimates, up to 3,000 skulls belonging to those of the Herero ethnic group were sent back to Berlin to be studied by race scientists. ‘Namibia was the first place that the Germans built a concentration camp. Depending on where your hair fell on the scale was the difference between life and death.’ Similar methods would be used again, of course, a few decades later. Fischer’s work would also go on to inform the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, outlawing intermarriage between Jews, blacks and other Germans. He became a member of the Nazi party in 1940.
Das takes out another box that belonged to Pearson, this time containing rows of glass eyes in different colours, framed in aluminium eyelids so eerily real that I fear one of them might blink. They are prosthetics of the kind that would have been fitted in patients who had eyes missing. In the context of eugenics, though, they served another purpose. ‘This object, I have seen its twin brother on display in an exhibition about race hygiene in Germany at the Berlin Museum of Medical History at the Charité. This device was appropriated by Nazi scientists and, again, used to judge or measure race, particularly in Jewish people,’ Das explains. ‘You’ll find photographs of Nazi scientists measuring people’s heads, measuring people’s noses, matching their eye colour.’
The eye and hair colour charts reveal just how slippery the dogged mantras of rationality and objectivity can be when it comes to studying human difference. ‘Any scientist who claims that they are not politicised, or that they are asking questions out of pure curiosity, they are lying to themselves,’ she continues. ‘The structure in itself is fundamentally, structurally racist, because it has always been taken at its face. Never going back and taking apart those underpinnings.’ What does it matter if one person has black hair and brown eyes, and another has blonde hair and blue eyes? Why not compare heights or weights or some other variable? These particular features matter only because they have political meaning attached to them.
In the United States, arguably the most racially charged place in the world at the time, evolutionary theory and eugenics came along at just the moment when intellectual racists could deploy them to full effect. Immigration into the US from countries considered to be undesirable had been curbed by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the country’s first major law restricting immigrants. Twelve years later, three Harvard College graduates formed the Immigration Restriction League, arguing in favour of a literacy requirement for those who wanted to come to the US. The group’s secretary, Prescott Farnsworth Hall, used Darwin’s ideas of natural selection to caution against allowing into the country ‘undesirable’ immigrants who weren’t ‘kindred in habits, institutions and traditions to the original colonists’. In a lengthy racist tract in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1904, he added, ‘The doctrine is that the fittest survive; fittest for what? The fittest to survive in the particular environment in which the organisms are placed’ (his emphasis).
By 1907 the Bellingham riots would see hundreds of white men, themselves recent arrivals from Europe, attack Indian immigrants living in the city of Bellingham in the state of Washington, blaming their ‘filthy and immodest habits’. Reportedly, seven hundred Indians had to flee. The local Bellingham Herald complained, ‘The Hindu is not a good citizen. It would require centuries to assimilate him, and this country need not take the trouble.’
It was against this backdrop that a new ideologue emerged. In 1916 a wealthy American law graduate named Madison Grant published a book that took eugenics to another level. Grant was known as a conservationist (as one of the co-founders of Bronx Zoo in New York, he had lobbied to put Congolese man Ota Benga on display among the apes there in 1906) but he wasn’t a scientist. He recognised, however, the power of the language of science. In The Passing of the Great Race: or The Racial Basis of European History
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