Assignment 1

Race Amalgamation

1896, what a time to be alive. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing and ingenuity was at an all-time high. Science was a powerful driving force for this time, but while the science was progressing, some men behind it were not. Fredrick Ludwig Hoffman immigrated from Germany in 1884 and published a book in 1896 titled “Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro”. This was a time when the scientific discourse community was using data to support their own rhetorical message of  desired segregation. History is a powerful reminder that human thinking is flawed, even in our authoritative communities. If science can be manipulated to spread misinformation, fear, and even hate, how else can it propagated?

Hoffman’s book contained various information and comparative studies of black, white, and mixed people. He compared everything from the morality of offspring and the manner in which they were conceived, to the volume of air each race could get in their lungs. The data that Hoffman acquired was through biased means however. Hoffman would choose visibly larger skulls of whites when comparing cranial sizes whites and blacks. He would also strive to make every other physical and mental comparison favorable to whites. A real scientist would know that methods must be consistent for results to be valid. How could a man of science not know what he was doing was unethical? Hoffman himself even states that his German origin makes him free of “personal bias”. He adds that a “a vast sum of evil consequences” could arise from a biased view being applied to scientific racial trait comparison. I find it ironic that this is exactly what Hoffman and his discourse community helped create. The entire purpose of his book appears to preach that whites were superior to blacks and that mixed races were inferior to both. This leads me to believe that at that time, he and others like him were afraid of whites and blacks co-mingling. The idea of whites and blacks having children together was looked at negatively. The established status quo at that time had whites placed firmly at the top of the food chain and interbreeding threatened that. Science was the attempted weapon that white supremacists would use to show the nation that their racism couldn’t be their fault as it was based on scientific fact and not just their own bigotry.

Hoffman attempts to prove that interbreeding and intermarriage is immoral due to the harm inflicted upon the offspring. This harm would come in the form of diseases and physical limitation. His book also shows data in column form showing the amount of interracial marriage. The data is laid out in such a way with the bodies of text explaining the data that it really feels like a “call to arms” to the potential reader. He again is using fear to demonstrate that these “immoral” things are occurring and that the reader best beware or they will happen in their towns.

Thankfully it is not 1896 and we get to enjoy the benefits of the great scientific discoveries made around that time. But best of all, we get to see junk science based off of manipulated data at the hands of  analysts like Frederick Hoffman be disproven.