On the Inequality of Skulls and Bones

In recent years, natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists have, in disparate ways, chipped away at the concept of race. We are not done with racial categories, but the meanings we attach to them are historical and cultural, not biological. We recognize that various communities of human beings who, over long periods of time, shared territorial space exhibit common physical traits, skin color being one. However, even in a largely bygone world of immobile populations, these communities did not span continents. Traits that owed something to genetic inheritance did not mark the most salient differences between one tribal group and its neighbor. Premodern human beings had many ways to differentiate themselves, but race was not among them.

The Skull Collectors, Ann Fabian’s timely and insightful book, reminds us of how laborious and curious a task it was to construct scientifically a fixed typology of races out of the world’s polyglot and multicolored populations. Fabian places the initial focus of her book on Samuel George Morton, a well-educated doctor turned skull measurer, who inherited a notion of five racial groups—Caucasian, Mongolian, American, Malay, Ethiopian—each of which was originally located on a specific continent. Starting with this preposterous notion, Morton’s science could hardly proceed in a way that would earn him a permanent niche in a pantheon honoring the world’s great scientists. However, he was a painstaking observer and avid collector whose findings reinforced what we now call Eurocentrism. In time, Morton’s empirical researches convinced him that each race was a distinct, fixed species representing a separate act of a divine creator. His point of view on this matter was controversial, since many churchmen preferred a scientific racism that preserved the notion that all human beings descended from Adam and Eve. The passions that underlay this disagreement are hard to recapture since Darwinian theory swept away both notions. On the other hand, underlying both theories was a common belief in racial hierarchies that Darwinian science did little to disturb.

This second point constituted the more important reason why Morton’s work got attention. His scientific measurement of the size of skulls convinced him that Caucasians were the smartest of God’s people and Ethiopians were the least. His conclusion rested on a simply expressed finding: Caucasians had larger cranial capacities to store brain matter. Thus, the scientific “invention” (a word Fabian is careful to use instead of “discovery”) of race became scientific racism. Morton’s influence on the divisive issues of his time is difficult to track, since he did not write about the politics of slavery. His major work, Crania Americana, published in 1839, was an expensive tome that sold poorly both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line. Nonetheless, Frederick Douglass, in a commencement address delivered at Western Reserve College in 1854, appropriately gave most attention to Morton in a list of other respected figures whose claims pleased Southern slaveholders. Their defense of slavery as “benevolent” argued that black people were too mentally incompetent to take care of themselves if released from bondage. That assumption, as we have long recognized, was not special to Dixie. It was shared in the North by many abolitionists and was a founding principle of the “humanitarians” who launched the American Colonization Society.

Many of Fabian’s themes build on the work of others. George Fredrickson is one of a number of historians who have traced the development of scientific racism from its origins in Enlightenment projects to make rational sense of the world. Enlightenment philosophers relied upon reason to declare the equality of all men. They used it again to create fixed exceptions to that principle. Scientists of the late eighteenth century dealt with the expanding European knowledge of the world by simplifying and categorizing what they found. An overriding and understandable goal of nineteenth-century science was taxonomy. We still live usefully with many of the results of that endeavor. The work was careful and...