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APPROPRIATING THE IDIOMS OF SCIENCE The Rejection of Scientific Racism Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L. Gilman This paper considers some writings of minority groups, as they responded to and resisted the claims of scientific racism. In exploring the relationship between language and resistance we focus on two very different groups of individuals stereotyped as different and inferior in the biological, medical, and anthropological sciences, namely African-Americans and Jews. We concentrate specifically on the period of transition to modern science between 1870 and 1920, when the claims of scientifically established inferiority were pressed most insistently by the mainstream scientific community. Our analysis reveals a body of literature by minorities and the marginal about the sciences of themselves that has been virtually untouched by historians of science. What did the men and women categorized by the biological and medical sciences as racially distinct and inferior say about the matter? How did they respond to the claims made about them in the name of science? Limitations of space have made us very selective with materials. Examples have been chosen for their effective illustration of points, and the goal is to open up a problem for discuss!on in the history of science and racism that has hitherto been almost entirely ignored. The Problem Defined This paper derives from a consideration of two intertwined issues: the centrality of scientific racism to the Western intellectual tradition, and the absence of sustained criticism of scientific racism from within mainstream science in the period under study. Historians have long been aware of the existence of scientific racism in Western societies, especially its intensification and institutionalization in the second half of the nineteenth century. Scientific racism was significant because it provided a series of lenses through which human variation was constructed, un- APPROPRIATING THE IDIOMS OF SCIENCE I 171 derstood, and experienced from the early nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century, if not until the present day.l We assume in this paper that the races that peopled the texts of science in the past were "artifactual," constructed categories of social knowledge. These categories had material weight in the lives of individuals and groups; racial identities were embodied in political practices of discrimination and law, and affected people's access to education, forms of employment , political rights, and subjective experience. Scientific language was one of the most authoritative languages through which meaning was encoded, and as a language it had political and social, as well as intellectual, consequences.2 In studying the history of scientific racism, we have been struck by the relative absence of critical challenges to its claims from within mainstream science. This absence is in itself an interesting problem in the sociology of scientific knowledge, since controversy and contention are often taken to be characteristic of science and the route by which empirical certainty is established. When it came to the sciences of race difference, however, disagreements tended to be minor and technical.3 Since racial science was invariably a science of inequality, produced by European men in an age of widespread racism, to a large (but not predetermined) extent the scientists' own racial identities and identifications prevented them from asking critical questions about their own science-its assumptions , its methods, its content. The concepts within racial science were so congruent with social and political life (with power relations, that is) as to be virtually uncontested from inside the mainstream of science.4 One place one encounters a "critical tradition" in relation to scientific racism is in the writings of those stereotyped by the sciences of the day. These writings had a problematic relation to the mainstream, since by the very definitions of racial science the stigmatized were largely outside, or at the margins, of science. Their exclusion was part of the very process of the construction of the sciences of difference and inequality, a result of the scientific expectation that the so-called lower races served mainly as objects of study, but not as scientific truth-seekers themselves. Yet many individuals reacted to scientific racism by actively seeking to enter the relatively closed circle of science, or to use its tools and techniques, to define and defend themselves. There is far more writing by such individuals than is generally recognized by historians of science. Much of the historical work of uncovering the "struggles and strategies" (in Margaret Rossiter's words) of minority writers, as they confronted a hostile and stereotyping science of race, remains to be done. Our purpose here...

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