Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century by Michael Yudell (review)

Race as a means of categorizing human beings demonstrates a remarkable tenacity despite decades of scientific advancement undercutting its ontological reality. While the old methods of scientific racism such as craniometry have long been debunked, most notably in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981), and newer scientific discoveries call into question the applicability of race, those outmoded categories of oppression still remain employed in the present day. Michael Yudell’s Race Unmasked is the story of this dynamic, illustrating how scientists in America following in the footsteps of Charles Darwin have struggled with race and ultimately failed to overcome this insidious superstition.

Yudell opens with the eugenics movement, which employed Mendel’s laws of inheritance to give “race and racism an unalterable permanence,” such that even education could not alter the fate “of those labeled as belonging to nonwhite races” (15). Francis Galton, Charles Davenport, and other eugenicists, despite the contradictions in their own definitions of race, provided the concept with a genetic backing that served to justify various segregation and anti-miscegenation laws. The National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, as well as the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, supported massive research projects in “racial science” that largely followed eugenic lines of thinking but began focusing less upon differences in European ethnic groups and more upon differences between blacks and whites. Even in this milieu there arose complaints against the employment of race as a useful scientific category, most notably from social scientists W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas. Even progressive geneticists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky and L. C. Dunn, unable to separate social and scientific definitions, “simultaneously argued that race was imprecise and arbitrary as a biological concept … and that it was a legitimate scientific concept” (132). Thus, while old-fashioned scientific racism had been pushed to the margins, population genetics preserved “race”—a word embodying so many historical errors—in scientific and popular discourse.

Even ostensibly race-neutral models can serve to reify race. Yudell devotes a whole chapter to the rancorous debate surrounding Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Wilson, a Harvard biologist, argued that all human behavior had, at its root, a biological foundation—culture, too, should be the purview of biology. Wilson made no claims about race, but by advancing evolutionary explanations for why populations “hated, feared, and distrusted each other, sociobiology contributed to a biological concept of racism” (184)—and, in fact, attracted great support from committed racists. This, combined with the recent rise of racialized medicine (using race as a proxy for genetic diversity), makes it less likely that biology will abandon race anytime soon.

Yudell not only takes his readers on the evolution of race as it played out in scientific tomes and peer-reviewed journals, but he also gets into the inner workings of research groups and into the correspondence between scientists, revealing the personalities behind the public proclamations. Race Unmasked proves itself of enormous importance not only for those who wish to understand the evolution of race as a concept but also for those studying the place of science in American culture. As Yudell argues in conclusion, the history he has surveyed shows that “we should not be waiting for or expecting science and scientists to change our thinking about race” (218). That challenge remains in the hands of all Americans.