Making Race Real: Part 2 Southern Discomfort
A few fictions enabled a Southern enslaved labor workforce.
“A careful inspection reveals the body of the negro a mass of imperfections from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet.” - Dr. W.T. English.
“Each body has its art…” - Gwendolyn Brooks.
Once upon a time, around 2008, an American Evangelical church - brightly decorated with flowers and tea cups - filled with hundreds of little girls.
This was as pink and feminine as a church like that would ever get, considering that a main concern of many Conservative strains of Christianity was the advancement of women in society and leadership positions.
Women’s conferences in the American Evangelical world were places of power for women, where their books, ideas, theological perspectives, and speaking gifts were celebrated and shared. The ideas that were presented at conferences like this, and the attendant versions for little girls, offered up by best sellers like Dana Gresh and others, would catch like wildfire. Parents, teachers, Sunday school leaders, Youth group pastors, and young people would buy in the thousands the books on sexual and emotional health and devour them. The nondenominational nature of these books and conferences meant the ideas and the surveys within them traveled across theological creeds and cultures.
Issues inherent in these wildly popular books and ideas would only be noticed years later when Christian therapists realized that the psychological profiles of young people who had grown up under these specific theories of sexuality and emotional health were nearly indistinguishable from the profiles of young people who had been sexually and emotionally abused.
Christian authors like Sheila Gregoire have pointed out that these theories were based not on carefully or critically researched data, but wholly based on old, harmful stereotypes, a handful of experiences, and inaccurate generalizations. The theories were useful politically and socially, as they helped create a culture that consolidated control, reaffirmed patriarchal norms, and protected predators. They didn’t however, reliably provide the advice and care young people needed to be responsible and well-informed.
This is not a unique weaponization of “Scientific” theories. It’s an example of how political and social needs can inform how people in power frame, process, and fabricate the information in front of them to create a useful narrative. This tendency is exactly what laid the ground for fictions of race to take root and shape generations of healthcare experiences for people of color.
“Despite their claims of unique expertise, the shoddy research that Southern physicians conducted into black health consisted of an untested nucleus of mythology about the biological nature of blacks.” - Chapter 1, Southern Discomfort, from Harriet Washington’s “Medical Apartheid”
The “science” of race in the 16 and 19th centuries was not based on experimental data, control groups, evidence-based theories, or any kind of logical methodology. Records reveal that no attempt to remove an ethnocentric bias or to account for cultural bias was made. Instead, doctors would rely on their negative reactions to physical differences, antiquated racist documents of conjecture, and numerous lists of supposed “racial” traits based on nothing but an assumption.
Today we understand what seems obvious, there is one race of humans in which there are expressions of lots of superficial, phenotypic variations. Humans might have more or less melanin or a genetic heritage that connects them to groups of people across the world, for example. Different noses and hair types and eye shapes are not proof of distinct human “species” but of a diversity of genetic information within one race.
Interest and discoveries in animal breeding in the 18th century led to the use of the term “race” to denote “biologically different types of mankind”. Scientists were fascinated with the discovery of animal subspecies and how specific traits could be bred out or in for various purposes.
Washington points out that these ideas conveniently coincide with the burgeoning growth of the slave trade. In the South, Biblical interpretations and scientific “facts” helped solved a labor and climate problem. Who was designed by God to serve the enslavers? Who was cursed to toil under such conditions? Who was mentally “inferior” and fit for forced ownership and harsh oversight? These fabricated categories and labels of mental, physical, and emotional “inferiority” could excuse the enslavement of fellow human beings. Because after all, these people were subhuman and unfit for “civil” society. Conflating what was found in truly different animal species with one race of humans proved to be a brilliant caveat for how African Americans could be abused and treated.
She writes that people of the time who studied the differences in humans were considered ethnologists and the forerunners of anthropologists and reminds us that the science of race was a messy mixture of culture and logic. The nature of what race is has shifted and changed dramatically over the centuries, noting that as far back as the Roman times descriptions of different people were written down and puzzled over. But up until this point, “race” had primarily described someone’s affiliation to a nation, not a subgroup of humanity. Slotting people into subhuman groups gave social permission to abuse and “breed” human beings as if they were lesser animals. Black women then would lack any legal or political status, so in the eyes of society, they could “not technically” be raped and their children were “stock” property whose bonds could be severed at any point. This imaginary subhuman community was also believed to not feel pain the way the enslavers did, which excused the necessary torture, beatings, and physical labor enacted on them to keep them in line.
These theories were accepted at face value, but records show that for all the “facts” about intellectual and physical inferiority, enslaved people were often entrusted with specialized jobs, midwifery, dentistry, medical arts, overseers, skilled apprentices, cooks, nurses, accountants, and herbalists. The enslaved were key to running multibillion-dollar industries, protecting their enslavers’ families, and operating complex business operations.
The nation’s most profitable way of life was enabled and protected by ideas like this that were accepted at the highest institutions, while other scientific papers that argued otherwise conveniently languished in obscurity. In part two we will look at the three main theories of race themselves and which ones persist -in the face of fact and reality- today.
(This is a continuation of reviewing Chapter 1 of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet Washington. The information here is from her book and her helpful, long appendix with source notes.)