On the one side, there has been the massive if contested authority of the Bible and, on the other, a remorseless racism. Colin Kidd has valuably decided to plot the relationship between these two foci of modern belief and thought. After preliminaries, he sketches his plot in six chapters which deal with early modern ideas; the Enlightenment; Victorian debates about monogenesis, slavery, and scepticism; the ‘Aryan moment’ from the late nineteenth century to the National Socialists; and two forms of modern racialized religion, white and black. Throughout he ranges from Britain, to the United States, and to continental Europe, roughly in that sequence of expertise and fullness, but always with a high intelligence and learning. Here as in his former scholarship, Kidd shows a gift for offering patient summaries of both canonical figues (Blumenbach, Hume, Moses) and the little known, for whom he has a fondness, perhaps significant.
The topic is a serious one, though perhaps not, as Kidd suggests, ‘shocking to most readers’ (p. 1). But The forging of races is a surprisingly funny book, though the reader – at least, this reader – is hard put to know whether a deadpan humour is intentional. This doubt about tone commences with the book's prologue, which offers a swingeing deconstruction of the logic of racial theory. Kidd's premise that ‘race is in the eye of the beholder’ and ‘does not enjoy a genuine claim to be regarded as a fact of nature’ is conventional enough, to be sure, but he knocks down this sand castle with much skill (p. 3). If, he tells us, we wish to use bodies as a way to construct racial groupings, skin colour is not our only option. What of fingerprints? ‘Loops are more common among most Europeans, black Africans and east Asians; whorls among groups such as Mongolians and Australian Aborigines; and arches among the native Khoisians of southern Africa and some central Europeans’ (pp. 3–4). Ear wax? ‘Ear wax polymorphism’, we are told, upon high scientific authority, ‘separates east from west, and unites black and white Americans.’ Possession of the lactose enzyme? (This is a more esoteric standard.) ‘While east Asians tend to excrete a lot of the non-protein amino acid beta-aminoisobutyric acid in their urine, it is rarely excreted in any appreciable amount by Europeans or by Australian Aborigines’ (p. 5). Body hair? Blood groupings? Height? ‘Epicanthic folds over the corner of the eye’ (p. 6)? After occasioning this possibly merry mayhem, Kidd moves easily into a brief discussion of the confusing inconsistency with which racial typologies have been invented and applied. So, we need not take race seriously as an intellectual proposition.
Scripture is accorded more respect. The Bible is deemed ‘colour-blind with regard to racial difference’, if by race we mean ‘race-as-biology’, though Kidd is careful to show that – this is central to his story – scripture can be read as having an abundance of ‘race-as-ethnicity’, since it is so populated by Jews, Moabites, the children of Ham and Shem, and lost tribes which seem to be found with great regularity in surprising places (p. 19). Indeed, he rightly argues that the venture of using the Bible to justify racial theory has depended upon the elision of what the Bible seems to say about ethnicity into what modern science once said about the biology of race. So this is a chronicle of what, Kidd admits, was a disappointment for him. He had expected to show that the lessening grip of scriptural authority over a secularising modernity had made intellectual life easier for racists, who thereby were relieved of the inconvenient notion that all are God's children, all descendants of a single man and a spare rib. Instead, Kidd shows how complicit have been scriptural exegetes in the modern venture of race, though also how the difficulty of aligning, for example, Leviticus with Aztec history insistently occasioned a dizzyingly complex dissent among those anxious to prove that Adam was white, or black, or beige.
Kidd seems to cling to the notion that a racist needs unusual ingenuity to torture the sacred texts into usability. This clinging may explain the narrative strategy of the book, which leaves the vague implication that elsewhere, away from these ingenious torturers, were sensible ‘mainstream’ Christians full of universalist toleration. Kidd is especially insistent that very modern Christianity has been notably instrumental in advancing anti-racism, that racialized theologies ‘have been shunted to the margins of [Christian] discourse’ (p. 275). Perhaps so, but Kidd's own narrative calls these implications into question, as he offers a cabinet of curiosities so splendidly stuffed that the category of strangeness tends to dissolve, since there seems to be almost no one left outside the cabinet who is available to be thought not-strange. As usual, the United States is profligate of religious weirdness, but British vicarages are more than competitive, and Kidd is especially interesting on recent theologies, on British Israelites, the Christian Identity movement, the Angelcyn Church of Odin (founded by an ‘Australian pagan apologist’ (p. 225)), Theosophy, Rastafarianism, Black Judaism, the Nation of Islam. Kidd's own evidence shows how significant are the racial dimensions of the theology professed by many modern sects, not only those just listed, but even ‘mainstream’ groups like the Southern Baptists, Pentecostalists, and Mormons (too numerous to be thought marginal). Indeed one is forced to ask, as Kidd demands we ought, whether the usual historical narrative, which tells of modern thought inventing and then uninventing racial theory, is cogent. The persistent entanglement of religion and race makes it hard to see that, in fact, we live in a post-racial intellectual world. Kidd sees it, if only just, but his absorbing book makes me doubtful.
