From Darwin to Dr. Seuss: Doubling Down on the Dumbest Approach to Combatting Racism
If you believe our society is deeply racist, how do you go about changing it? You may start by trying to change your country’s laws, but what happens if the injustice persists after racism has been officially outlawed? Further, what happens when you realize large swaths of the population fail to see racism as a serious problem?
This challenge lies at the heart of many bizarre trends today among not just activists but academics, journalists, and even businesspeople. Why, for instance, are we suddenly so concerned with whether historical figures lived up our modern moral standards? What can we hope to achieve by pointing out all the areas in which they fell short?
This trend is partly the natural outcome of a misdiagnosis. Racism is embedded in our culture, it is argued, so we need to change our culture to eradicate racism. That begins with a reevaluation of the characters we hold up as heroes. Dr. Seuss, for instance, is read by millions of kids. Well, it so happens that Dr. Seuss early in his career created some racist propaganda. But does anyone outside of graduate school ever see these WWII-era cartoons? Who knows? Either way, it warrants a deeper look at the books so many of us do read, because the bringing to light of this man’s subtle racism, the thinking goes, will likely raise our collective understanding of how racism works and how we can recognize it. So, let’s write some academic papers examining the racism implicit in, say, The Cat in the Hat. Even better, let’s cease publication of some of Dr. Seuss’s more dubious early works like And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
One problem here is that it’s unlikely in the extreme that any nonracist person ever read a Dr. Seuss book or saw a Dr. Seuss cartoon and was transformed into a racist for having done so. It’s only slightly less unlikely that anyone was ever nudged into being even slightly more racist for having read these works. Starting a conversation about Dr. Seuss’s alleged racism, at least as part of an effort at combatting racism in general, is predictably and resoundingly futile. But there’s an even bigger problem the activist academics fail to appreciate. We love our heroes. People love Dr. Seuss. So, if you campaign to stop some of his books from being published, or if you simply argue publicly that he was a racist, not only are you going to fail to reduce racism by even the most negligible margin, you’re also going to provoke a backlash that could easily hamstring less ill-conceived efforts in the future.
The response to Dr. Seuss’s estate ceasing to publish some of his books—and countless high-profile liberals defending the move as something other than another instance of “cancel culture”—was that these books jumped to the top of the bestseller lists. Along the way, many centrist liberals (like me) and nearly all conservatives became less receptive to any messages about alleged racism. You can imagine someone saying something like, “You say this guy’s a racist, huh? You idiots think Dr. Seuss was a racist.” And there’s no doubt the political party least likely to push for reforms that may lead to better conditions for minorities is the very one that’s going to be campaigning on the idiocy of the folks who think “canceling” Dr. Seuss was a stellar idea.
The mistaken assumption leading to debacles like this is that prejudice and racial animosity are entirely cultural. The reality is that all over the world people tend to be suspicious of others who are different from them. And it only takes a few bad experiences to push this suspicion into full-blown hatred. This isn’t just a white people problem. It’s a human problem. Further, the answer to why some groups within a larger society don’t do as well as others isn’t always to be found in the attitudes and beliefs of the groups that are doing better. Inequality, including racial inequality, arises from a multitude of factors. I have little doubt one of the factors behind racial inequality in America today is our racist history. But I don’t think tearing down a statue of Robert E. Lee—or anyone else for that matter—is going to help at all. The issue is simply too complicated to be addressed by calling a bunch of people racists and striking their names from history.
Okay, so the Dr. Seuss episode was silly. But what about historical figures who made explicit claims and arguments that can be used to justify racial oppression? The anthropologist Agustin Fuentes recently published an editorial in the journal Science to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin. What did Fuentes see fit to say about the great man of science and his still controversial but undoubtedly brilliant work? Well, it turns out some parts of the book are less than charitable to people who aren’t of European descent. Some of the things Darwin wrote about women are pretty awful too. To be fair, Fuentes acknowledges that Darwin was a “trailblazer.” In a later podcast episode with science writer Robert Wright, he goes so far as to say that Darwin is one of his heroes. All the more reason, he explains, to challenge the “problematic” ideas he put forth in his magisterial work on human evolution.
Fuentes doesn’t want people to stop reading Darwin. In fact, he insists what he wants is for us to read more Darwin, so we can appreciate the genius in all his complexity, which means acknowledging he wasn’t as great as he could have been. The crucial lesson Fuentes gleans from Darwin’s failure to see through to our modern understanding of race—when he took so many tantalizing steps in that direction—is that as much of a genius as he was, even he couldn’t see past the prejudices of his day. It’s enough to make you wonder, what makes Fuentes so confident he can see past the prejudices of his own day?
It’s a safe bet that the publication of Fuentes’ editorial will make not a single soul a scintilla less racist, though I’m certainly open to evidence to the contrary. Nor will Fuentes’ writing do anything to improve the material well-being of minorities in this country or any other. I would also have predicted, had I known about the article in advance, that it would provoke a heated backlash. As it happened, I watched that backlash play out on Twitter. (I even participated in it.) The people who read editorials in Science, mirabile dictu, love Darwin. And many of them were less than pleased to see his name dragged through the mud in the nation’s most prestigious scientific journal.
Was Darwin really racist? Fuentes, with his considerable geeky charisma, is the type of pedant who would ask you six other questions before answering that one, just to key you in on how complex of an issue we’re dealing with. What do we even mean, for instance, by the term racist as applied to someone in the Victorian Age, an era that had neither our modern understanding of racism nor our modern scientific understanding of population genetics? Both our morals and our science have evolved. And, unlike biological evolution through natural selection, the evolution of our mores and theoretical frameworks represents clear progress.
Fuentes credits Darwin for pointing out that races can be difficult to categorize because each race grades into the others with no bright line demarcating one from the next. Darwin also realized that there were no single traits or features found solely among the members of one race that could be used to distinguish them from members of another group. He even argued against the hypothesis that racial differences arose due to natural selection (an idea that could be taken to imply one race was somehow better adapted to its environment, i.e., superior). In addition, Darwin was personally aghast at the cruelty of slavery, which was why he supported abolition. (He was in fact highly sensitive to suffering in all its forms, whether in animals or humans—of any race.)
So, he was sophisticated enough, morally and scientifically, to understand these truths, but he nonetheless failed to arrive at the understanding of race Fuentes advocates, that it’s a biologically incoherent concept. Worse, he accepted the hierarchical ranking of the races that was prevalent in his time, with Africans, Native Americans, and Australian aborigines at the bottom and Caucasians at the top. Meanwhile, at multiple points in his writing he refers to the lesser cognitive capacity of women.
The impression we get of Darwin then is that he was intensely empathetic, had great prescience and insight, but that he also harbored some loathsome beliefs. Those observations alone would have made for an outrageously banal editorial. I think “Well, duh” would be the proper response. He was writing after all in the years just after slavery was abolished in the US. As historian of science Robert J. Richards writes in an essay defending Darwin from charges of racism leveled by creationists, “When incautious scholars or blinkered fundamentalists accuse Darwin or Haeckel of racism, they simply reveal to an astonished world that these thinkers lived in the nineteenth century.” Who are any of us to fault someone for not arriving at conclusions we had the benefit of being taught directly? But Fuentes raises the stakes at a couple points in his essay. For instance, he claims that Darwin
went beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through “survival of the fittest.” This too is confounding given Darwin’s robust stance against slavery.
That first line is the one Robert Wright took issue with, beginning the exchange that culminated in the two conversing on Wright’s podcast.
Did Darwin really offer justification for evils like colonialism and genocide? Wright points out the phrase “survival of the fittest” wasn’t coined by Darwin, and he let it be known he wasn’t too keen on its use. But is there anything in Descent that would imply Darwin thought genocide was a good idea? Fuentes points to sections where he describes the process of one race supplanting and exterminating another through conquest. Wright then poses the appropriate follow-up: isn’t there a difference between explaining and justifying? Fuentes doesn’t have a good response to this question. He merely says that by “justification” he means “the right and reasonable explanation for what’s happening in the world” before going on to agree with Wright that he’s relying on the naturalistic fallacy—taking what’s natural for what’s moral—that Darwin himself challenged.
Fuentes’ mealy-mouthed response to Wright’s valid criticism could be ascribed to simple dishonesty, or if we’re charitable we could ascribe it to sloppiness. The word “justification” has the connotations it does. But I think he was simply bowing to the conventions of the genre he’s writing in, with its cliched expressions like “problematize” and its inbuilt insistence that whatever mistakes Darwin made were “harmful.” This type of criticism is required to include references to the purported harm or injury caused by the “problematic” statements under scrutiny, thus providing justification for the project of reevaluation. The part of Fuentes’ essay that most bothered me personally, though, is where he extends this point about the harm of letting Darwin’s ideas go unchallenged.
Today, students are taught Darwin as the “father of evolutionary theory,” a genius scientist. They should also be taught Darwin as an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices that warped his view of data and experience. Racists, sexists, and white supremacists, some of them academics, use concepts and statements “validated” by their presence in “Descent” as support for erroneous beliefs, and the public accepts much of it uncritically.
Fuentes could set me straight on this with some quotes from the white supremacist academics he refers to, along with some survey data showing that the public accepts their statements uncritically. But my sense is that he included these lines not because he’s familiar with any such evidence but because he needs them to convince readers that his highlighting of Darwin’s mistakes is morally important, even imperative.
Fuentes may be right that there are people today who appeal to Darwin’s authority to support their racist arguments. But if there are, I doubt there are many. Darwin’s is the last name you’d expect to hear in any encounter with a white supremacist. In my experience, you’re much more likely to get Bible references. On the other hand, it’s far too easy for me to imagine a naively self-righteous college kid saying something along the lines of, “Darwin, seriously? You know that guy was racist as hell, don’t you?”
Historically, it’s undoubtedly true that the theory of natural selection has been held up as a justification for atrocities. But, again, such justifications relied on the naturalistic fallacy Darwin himself avoided. And it’s probably the case that those atrocities would have been committed even if natural selection had never been propounded. Racial hierarchies trace back to the medieval Great Chain of Being. Darwin wasn’t around to provide justification for the transatlantic slave trade (which he abhorred). As they once did with religion, modern people now often use science the way the proverbial drunk uses a light post: for support, not illumination. (Curious that the far left has found common cause with the creationist right in their mission to tar Darwin as complicit in modern evils.) This gets at the central point of confusion I see tripping up scholar/activists like Fuentes.
In looking for the roots of racism, too many academics flatter themselves by looking to the history of ideas and scholarship, as though every evil attitude and belief can be traced back to some scientist or philosopher just like them, only less moral. If that were the case, it would make sense to go back to those originators in an effort to root out the evil. But what if racism doesn’t merely seep into our minds from our cultural milieu? Indeed, research with infants suggests the first stirrings of racial bias are evident as early as six months. This bias may be solely attributable to a preference for what’s familiar. It may be attributable to inborn favoritism toward those similar to us. But, at 6 months, it’s certainly not attributable to reading books like The Descent of Man—or for that matter, I Saw It on Mulberry Street.
Likewise, if you were a world traveler in times of yore, you didn’t need some aristocratic naturalist to tell you that the natives you were encountering weren’t as intellectually sophisticated as the people back home. You could see it with your own eyes (or at least that’s how it would have seemed). Fuentes may imagine that were he himself in one of those situations of first contact he would think something like, “These hunter-gatherers are obviously exactly the same as us Europeans but for the higher melanin content of their skin, their different culture, and the level of their technological advancement,” but he’d be forgetting the deep cultural influences he himself has been subject to. The more obvious conclusion anyone would draw is that the natives simply aren’t as intelligent as civilized people.
That conclusion is wrong of course. We know from works like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel that there are sufficient geographical and historical reasons for the varying levels of technological advancement achieved by peoples in different regions of the world to make the intelligence hypothesis unnecessary. But that book wasn’t written until 1997. For Fuentes, however, the right answer is so clear, he can’t help being frustrated at Darwin for not arriving at it. Why is Fuentes so blind to all the reasons people might draw racist conclusions that have nothing to do with books or the dominant culture?
One commenter took Fuentes to task for falling prey to a strange reverse of the curse of knowledge. This is the curse that makes experts so lousy at explaining anything in their field of expertise because we humans all struggle to take the perspective of people who don’t know the things that we know. Fuentes makes the opposite mistake, believing no one knows about Darwin’s racist and sexist statements, when almost everyone who bothers reading his books almost certainly understands that his beliefs reflect the attitudes of his time. It’s an important point. And this thoroughgoing lack of perspective regarding their audience is what leaves so many activist academics open to the charge that they’re not as interested in changing minds as in signaling their superior virtue. Still, when it comes to Darwin himself, Fuentes is cursed in just the way we’d expect.
Fuentes and others engaged in similar projects don’t seem to grasp that racism wasn’t invented by scholars and scientists. Racism is the norm in cultures the world over. We have every reason to believe it crops up in most societies all on its own, based on people’s natural perceptions and the most intuitive understandings of group differences. Far from something that needs to be taught, it’s something we need to be taught to transcend. Many critics faulted another scientist, Steven Pinker, for not considering the history of racist colonialism in his case for recommitting to Enlightenment values, and indeed you can easily find quotes from the era’s philosophes that make us cringe today. But insisting that any program begun by racists will forever bear the stain of racism is like saying no species is truly terrestrial because all land-based life had its beginnings in the sea.
Isn’t it better to think of figures like Darwin and Dr. Seuss as akin to transitional species—like Tiktaalik—emerging from a morally less evolved era but containing within them the seeds of a more enlightened, more just society? Doesn’t that framework help to ease the frustration of people like Fuentes who see in Darwin’s writings a mosaic of promising lines of thought alongside the standard prejudices of his time? You could even go so far as to say that Darwin, despite never escaping a racist mindset himself, invented some of the cognitive tools that later generations used to overcome their own racial prejudices.
A glance at a historical timeline shows that while colonialism and slavery persisted for centuries under Christianity as the ascendent authority, when racism went scientific its days became numbered. That’s because the remedy for bad science is better science, and we’ve been getting more and more of that since before Galileo was placed on house arrest for challenging the church.
I don’t think for a second that I’m morally or intellectually superior to Fuentes; it’s entirely possible that two years from now I’ll have been persuaded he was right. The sanctimony and triteness suffusing his editorial notwithstanding, he comes across as likeable and genuinely fascinated with Darwin and the history of science. He’s also been admirably responsive to his critics on Twitter and elsewhere, a practice that sets him apart from many who argue in his vein. His expertise is impressive enough that I’d tune in to hear him discuss evolutionary psychology with Robert Wright anytime. But I think the curse of knowledge that leaves Fuentes so mystified about Darwin’s thinking about race extends to the very people he’d most like to convince today. The one advantage I have over Fuentes—I surmise—is that I have much more experience working and talking with people outside of academia, people who work with their hands and never went to college.
If you tell these people that race is a “social construct,” they’re going to think you’re being both contemptuous and dishonest—either that, or you’ve been indoctrinated to the point of delusion. You can see race with your own eyes, after all. And, sure, some cases are harder to classify, but the existence of El Caminos doesn’t invalidate the concepts of cars and trucks. Likewise, if you start going on about how racist Darwin was, or how Dr. Seuss’s drawings echo tropes from the days of Jim Crow, well, good luck keeping anyone’s attention. You have no chance, at any rate, of changing attitudes about race. What you’ll almost certainly accomplish though is a further widening of the already catastrophic cultural divide between the rural non-college-educated populations of our country and the urban elites who can’t help condescending to them.
I was going to end this essay with a quote from Darwin about the horrors of slavery, but then I came across something more interesting. Early in his career, the great orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass railed against the U.S. Constitution for “supporting and perpetuating this monstrous system of injustice and blood,” by which he of course meant slavery. Indeed, with such provisions as the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause, there was a good case to be made for the Constitution being an inherently racist blueprint. But what Douglass later realized was that those loathsome provisions notwithstanding, our founding document held the key to bringing about a more just society, a better America. In other words, the Constitution had within it the seeds of its own reform. Douglass writes,
I became convinced that … to abstain from voting, was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery; and that the constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, it is, in its letter and spirit, an anti-slavery instrument… Here was a radical change in my opinion.
I hope more of us come to our own change of opinion and start to look at Darwin and evolutionary science and Dr. Seuss, not as irredeemable because of their past mistakes and failures, but as instruments for arriving at a better understanding of the world and how best to live with the rest of its inhabitants.
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