“Scientific Racism”—Mid-Century Science, Silence, and White Supremacy
Chapter Twelve of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
Anecdotes we share to amuse our family and friends can, at times, be oddly revealing of our most cherished desires and our deepest fears. The trivial stories we narrate can reconfirm for ourselves and for others our core beliefs, identity, and values.
My mother had a lifelong habit of making light of the trauma we both experienced when I was born. She retold a story about my birth countless times.
The story — a not-so-funny joke —had the quality of a “knock on wood” talisman. My birth had been difficult. My mother was heavily-sedated and only foggily aware of what was happening.
My first breath was a long time coming. The umbilical cord was coiled snugly around my throat. My face turned mottled blue then gray. The set-up for the punch line of the anecdote was a callous remark by the doctor about my complexion.
According to my mother, the moment I was born, the doctor barked, “He’s blacker than the ace of spades!” — which, as my mother would inevitably confide with a wink, caused her to wonder, in her exhaustion and drug-induced haze, who my “colored” father might be.
I think my mother liked to repeat this story because of its power to shock. Race was not something my mother’s friends and acquaintances talked about lightly or openly or often. It was an audacious anecdote.
I also think the story and its frequent retelling reveal something slightly subversive about my mother’s thinking about race.
For her time and place—mid-century, rural, Midwestern, White conservative Christian — my mother was a free spirit. She was an elementary school art teacher and a painter, primarily in watercolors.
In her paintings, my mother sometimes played with negative space — in Japanese, Ma (間)— leaving portions of the painting blank and open to interpretation. Her anecdote about the momentary ambiguity of my racial identity at birth also made use of Ma — what was left out in the telling was just as important as what was said.
What was left unsaid, what added shock value to my mother’s anecdote, was the unexamined faith in White supremacy my mother suspected her listeners harbored but rarely dared to reveal.
I think my mother might have meant for her anecdote about my birth to be a subtle poke at her friends’ unvoiced racial bias. I think she might have wanted her friends to know she could envision a world, albeit a world far removed from her real life, in which her son might be born Black.
Although to speak about such things was neither comfortable nor necessary, rural Midwestern White folks of my parents’ generation did not often appear to question the “facts” of racial differences and of White supremacy. “Caucasian” racial superiority was assumed to be a matter of settled science.
For my parent’s generation of Americans, raised in the shadow of the Depression and coming of age during the Second World War, science seemed to rule the world and hold out hope for a better tomorrow. Faith in science was strong.
At its best, science is a self-improving work in progress. But not all the science my parents and their contemporaries learned to trust was good. Some of it was bad science, none more so than the pseudoscience of human racial classification and its attribution of civilization, progress, and modernity to Whiteness.
Outside of the anecdote about my birth and other indirect references I rarely heard my mother explicitly voice an opinion on American racial politics. There are large gaps in my knowledge of what my mother thought about race and racism.
I know something of the White supremacist propaganda my mother and her age peers were exposed to in school. In his 2022 book, Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and Forging Our National Identity, Daniel Yacovone reviews hundreds of U.S. history textbooks used in American schools from 1832 to the present. By Yacovone’s account, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, history textbooks used in American schools “hardened the idea that African Americans represented alien and inferior beings…”
Not only school history, but also the school science my mother and her generation were taught supported the assumption of White racial superiority and Black racial inferiority. Mid-century scientific racism posited deterministic links between social and economic differences among human groups and biological differences of race, sex, and class.
Some White scholars — the anthropologist Franz Boas, for one — took direct aim at the bias implicit in the pseudo-science of human racial classification that dominated American school curricula and much of higher education in the first half of the twentieth century. But academic critics of scientific racism did little to dampen the popularity of American “experts” on race like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard who argued that racial biology was destiny and that “colored” people posed a dire threat to “white civilization.”
My mother was twelve in August 1941 when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor. At that age, I imagine my mother’s innermost assumptions about race and racial differences among humans were fully formed, or nearly so. But the experience of the war years cannot have failed to have made a deep impression on her beliefs about race.
I can recall, as a young child, feeling my mother’s discomfort whenever her father, my Grandpa Culberson, made a nakedly racist anti-Black remark. Grandpa Culberson’s attitudes on race had been formed in an earlier and more violent era in American race relations, a low-point in anti-Black fear and loathing among White Americans.
My mother’s silence about race was much harder for me to read than my Grandpa Culberson’s occasional overtly racist utterances. I suspect my mother’s faith in science had something to do with her silence on race.
Like many other mid-century Americans, my mother was a firm believer in science as the engine of social progress, a belief that might well have been reinforced by her experiences as a teenager in rural Illinois during the time of the Second World War.
I never asked and my mother never talked about what the war years were like for her. The war was very distant from her direct experience, but news of the war must have been a constant buzz in the background, an ever-present reminder of imminent danger, disaster, and death.
The day after the Pearl Harbor attack, on December 8, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. On December 12, 1941, the United States declared war on Germany and Italy. Three and half long years later, Nazi Germany surrendered to the allies on May 8, 1945, less than a month after my mother had her sixteenth birthday. The war with Imperial Japan continued into the summer of 1945 with no clear end in sight.
On August 6 and again on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs and killed about two hundred thousand people in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many were incinerated and died instantly. Others lingered in pain for weeks or months before dying. Imperial Japan surrendered on August 12, 1945.
The surrender of Japan must have been wonderful news for my mother. None of the boys she befriended in high school would be risking their lives in the fight to conquer Japan.
I don’t know what my mother thought about the massive death and destruction wrought by the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan. I don’t know if the reality of so many civilians dying so suddenly and horribly ever caused her to question whether dropping the bombs was the right decision.
I suspect her faith in science was reinforced by the ability of America’s atomic scientists to bring a quick end to the war. I also suspect schooling in scientific racism helped her and helped the majority of Americans alive at the time to accept the logic and correctness of the decision to drop the bombs.
From the very start, scientific racism played a role in shaping and differentiating American attitudes towards our White World War II enemies in Europe and our “colored” enemies in Japan. The difference was not so much in military decisions on acceptable levels of civilian casualties — tens of thousands died in the fire bombing of Dresden and Hamburg. The influence of scientific racism was most evident in the war-time treatment of American citizens of Japanese descent.
On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the U.S. Army to remove “alien enemies” from “military areas.” The army officers charged with carrying out the order understood that “alien enemies” effectively meant Japanese and Japanese-Americans.
Some German and Italian immigrants were also interned in the U.S. during the war, but not in numbers comparable to the roughly 120,000 interned Japanese and Japanese-Americans. FDR had issued Proclamation 2525 on December 7, 1941 declaring all Japanese citizens over 14 to be enemy aliens. Proclamations 2526 and 2527, issued the following day, did the same for German and Italian citizens.
Anyone at least one-sixteenth Japanese was considered dangerous and eligible for evacuation and internment. The loyalty of Americans of German and Italian descent might have been questioned at times, but they were not interned.
My mother was one-quarter German, her mother was half-German, and her grandmother was the daughter of German immigrants, but I doubt any of them ever felt their loyalty to the U.S. was in doubt or worried about being interned during the war.
The allied victories over Germany, Italy, and Japan might have served to confirm my mother’s trust in science to lead America into a bright future. But the aftermath of the war almost certainly caused her to reconsider whatever faith she might have had in scientific racism. I imagine my mother had a strong reaction, as many other mid-century Americans did, when she learned of the racialist cruelty and horrors of the Holocaust.
I firmly believe my mother was a compassionate person who firmly believed in the civil rights and dignity of all humans regardless of their race or gender or religion or nationality. However, in the face of my mother’s silence on such matters, I can only base my opinion on my affection for her and on my faith that her life experience and character made it possible for her to fully abandon the scientific racism she had been taught early in life to accept as truth.
