Two theories, one people.
Polygenists and Monogenists and All of Us.
I felt a contagious, liberating frustration rising from the page right from the very start of a very different book, titled “Come As You Are”.
Dr. Emily Nagoski -the writer- is frustrated because she is a science communicator, but her job requires her to also contend with wild, destructive assumptions that have gripped the culture. She cannot simply relay helpful facts of biology but must cut through centuries of culturally based assumptions and ideas that warp the plain reality of human bodies. Differences in shape, color, and size of the same parts of a person were not correctly viewed as “same parts, different arrangement” but as judgments of a person’s “goodness” or “badness”.
It’s not enough for Dr. Nagoski to teach the names of certain anatomy, but to break down the way biologists back in the day “made meaning” out of what they were seeing and how it affected that naming, which in turn affected how people felt about their bodies.
Breaking through unnecessary shame and useless baggage about perfectly normal anatomical structures and experiences has been key for Dr. Nagoski to help people heal, but also in helping people to not perpetuate harm by passing down false narratives and assumptions which affect the future of someone’s likelihood to seek care and as well as find respectful care. Her research and experiences have left a deep impression that all people are far more alike than different.
And that message is precisely why readers feel a sigh of relief, a sense of connection, and greater empathy towards themselves and the people around them by the time they finally put one of Dr. Nagoski’s books down.
That’s also an incredibly dangerous message if you need to uphold any kind of social hierarchy and claim it is “naturally” intended by God, Nature, Heaven, or Goodness.
We established in the previous post that using the word “race” to denote what was believed to be (erroneously) biologically different types of humankind only rose as a practice in the 18th century.
We understand that around this time there was an entire agricultural and business industry of over four billion dollars in America that was made profitable and possible by free, stolen, and enforced labor and enslavement of various African populations. That’s not to mention the profit on the bodies of enslaved people as well, as they were routinely sold, hired out, and forced to carry children that would become new “property”.
How was this justified by the scientific and medical establishment?
Harriet Washington’s research found that even “…after the meaning of race came to include subgroupings of man, it held several meanings.”
A quick summary of two key race theories that shaped how the world and the societies around it perceived and treated people believed to be “Black” because of it:
1: Races are understood as “entirely different species of humans”.
The Polygenists were the champions of this theory that believed human beings had different origin points and were distinct, separate races.
Harvard’s Louis Agassiz ran with this idea and helped popularize the thinking that Europeans and Africans and Asians did not share ancestors. The different “species” were ruled by different things such as “caprice”, “superstition” or “intelligence”. This was a thinly veiled fetishization or crude reduction of cultures that these European and American scientists barely understood in their true complexity. They saw a difference and fabricated meaning out of it. If “Black” people were not as human as them, or “badly” or “barely” human as them, it justified all sorts of things.
2: Races are understood as “biological subspecies of humans”.
This theory posited that inherently, all people were equal or had been equal as they all came from a single origin point. The Monogenists believed everyone had come from a single forefather and mother, Adam and Eve, and over time geographic and natural forces had shaped and changed people into subgroups. These divergent characteristics were not proof of a different race, but just a different “breed”.
The famous Swedish naturalist Carl von Linne was a proponent of this theory. Unfortunately, while this theory was closer to the reality that all humans are one species, there was cultural prejudice and pressure to denigrate the differences. African features were “less” than others, and scientists believed that with “breeding” and time, these “unfortunate deficiencies” could disappear.
All of these ideas, however, were constantly bent and revised to fit whatever economic and political aim of the year.
An allegedly stupid, naturally inferior, beastly, and simple people group could not feel the pain or hate their enslavement. But as abolitionists of all backgrounds started to gain ground in arguing against the cruelty and evil of slavery forced on fellow humans, pro-slavery physician-scientists would lobby back defenses of “cataloged deficiencies” which were just collections of phenotypical differences. They were arguing that people believed to be “Black”, politically created as “Black”, and socially designated as whatever “Blackness” was and wasn’t due to the ideas of the day, could never become equal to that of people deemed to be “White”.
I use quotation marks because while we know that while variations in genetic expression and differences in melanin count are real, the distinct categories of “White” and “Black” are not based on any kind of biological reality. “Blackness” and Whiteness” are social constructs that take physical differences and make political, spiritual, social, and economic meaning out of them.
While very few people today would outright claim or say that elements of these two theories are true out loud, these theories complicate and confuse all conversations and policies about race. In part because we have not been educated to articulate and understand this cultural and historical legacy. The wide-reaching sway and impact of these theories and how they warped our sight for generations have been felt but rendered invisible by silence.
If you have time, look up the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s past exhibit “Fictions of Emancipation”. The artistic rendering and image-making of the meanings the physician-scientists fabricated are recorded forever in these depictions of other people and cultures. The colonial reach of these “viral” images and sculptures shaped an entire societal opinion of unknown civilizations.
Moving forward will not come from destroying these images and scrubbing this embarrassing, biased record of pseudo-science in high-profile college records, but by naming the myths and tracking their impact.