Henry Pratt Fairchild (1880–1956) spent the bulk of his academic career at New York University where he was on the faculty for twenty-six years, serving as Chairman of the Department of Sociology in the Graduate School. He published research on race, nationalism, and ethnic conflict; he also was involved with the founding of Planned Parenthood and served as president of the American Eugenics Society. In his book The Melting-Pot Mistake (1926), Fairchild argued that the melting pot metaphor coined by Israel Zangwill in his 1909 play “The Melting-Pot” was picturesque, but it was a fallacy that failed to account for the apparent disintegration of American society that had been in the making during the past fifty years of unbridled immigration. According to Fairchild, the group unity necessary for national cohesion and well-being was endangered because the differences of ‘groups’ are not ‘meltable,’ as “the primary basis of group unity is racial.”For Fairchild, America represents “truth, beauty, goodness, morality, justice, propriety, efficiency, custom, order, and – home,” and to maintain those stellar qualities, it must remain a white man’s country. Today, it is mainly white nationalists and neo-Nazis who openly and unapologetically express such overtly racist views.

In Re-forging America (1927), Lothrop Stoddard (1883–1950) provides a compelling narrative of the American nation. Stoddard uses language and rhetorical techniques to convince the reader that the story he tells is true because it is based on historical facts and common sense, and because he is a patriot who is deeply concerned about the future of the country he loves. However, if we carefully examine how Stoddard constructs his arguments by analyzing the content of his discourse and the rhetorical devices he employs, we find that he has a particular goal in mind in writing his book, mainly, to characterize an American identity that is inextricably tied to a particular and exclusive ethnic/cultural identity: Anglo-Saxonism. Yet, stark differences existed among the thirteen original colonies in terms of economic interests, social customs, ethnicity, cultural norms, religious affiliations, languages spoken, and class stratification that rendered the colonial world a disparate patchwork of largely unconnected entities. Despite these differences, in the colonial era and well into the nineteenth century, America was widely understood to be a nation founded, ruled, and owned by white, Northwestern European–origin, mostly Christian (if only in name) men. There was little public pushback against this account.

Ancient theories of human diversity and identity strongly influenced most modern forms of scientific racism, including eugenics, tropicalism, craniometry, environmental theories of human development, social evolutionary theories, and theories connecting ‘race’ and intelligence. This chapter explores three of these areas of influence: (1) environmental determinism; (2) models of evolution and the ‘progress’ of civilisations; and (3) population management schemes linked to eugenic thinking. These ideas spread throughout Europe as part of the Enlightenment project to classify everything and throughout much of the globe under the influence of European imperialism and colonialism culminating in the Nazi eugenics program. But this chapter focuses on developments in the United States, the country that pioneered the colour-based bioracism that still dominates contemporary racist thinking between 1870 and 1930, the years when the ‘science of man’ became academic and political dogma.

This chapter claims that Emerson’s consideration of slavery occurs in terms that are by definition contradictory, as he both emphasizes and tries to reconcile a series of oppositions within transcendentalist principles. These oppositions include conflicts between self-reliance and social reform; between labor as a means of self-development and of economic development; between absolute moral law and temporal statute law; between teleological history and evolutionary history; and, finally, between the refusal of violence and the use of violence as a political expedient. The chapter examines the complexities of Emerson’s formulations of these transcendentalist oppositions, showing how his commentaries on slavery can play out in counterintuitive ways, such that Emerson’s idiosyncratic version of antislavery “free labor” ideology supports his expressed resistance to a career as an abolitionist, his argument that slavery contravenes a “higher” law than statute law equivocally denounces slavery, and his defense of abolitionist violence transforms physical force into moral force.

The term “race” was widely used in the 1500s to describe many types of blood relationships but gradually became focused on ethnicity and skin colour. The elevation of Anglo-Saxons as a superior race developed alongside “scientific racism” in the 1800s, and in turn gave an impetus to eugenics and Aryianism. By 1900, the language of race was found everywhere in England, and it declined very slowly throughout the subsequent century.

Over the twentieth century, a college education increasingly functioned as a ladder to professional occupations and ample-paying employment. Until the GI Bill, access to college remained tightly limited, although the expansion mostly served White matriculants.

In the 1970s, tuition, room, and board (TRB) rates remained beyond the financial grasp of talented young adults from low-wealth families. Lois Dickson Rice, herself a first-generation college student, worked tirelessly to expand access to college and eventually persuaded Congress to fund what became known as Pell Grants. These awards were distributed inversely to household income and given directly to the recipients, who could then decide where to enroll.

At one time, maximum Pell awards could finance nearly 40 or 80 percent, respectively, of the TRB costs of attending a private or public four-year college. Over the past half century, the Pell Program has assisted tens of millions of students from marginalized communities enroll and graduate from college.

This chapter examines how the promise of Pell unraveled. Middle-class parents wondered why their kids did not benefit. The Clinton Administration shifted emphasis toward using tax policies to assist families with the cost of college. Enrollment management strategies shifted institutional aid from need-based to merit-based aid.

The introduction defines and historicizes aestheticism and evolutionism, stressing their concurrent emergence in Britain in the 1850s. The introduction then lays out the book’s central claims, provides an accessible review of relevant scholarship on both aestheticism and the history of Victorian science, and situates the project within this broader field. In the course of this overview, the introduction also addresses the problematic Eurocentrism endemic in evolutionary aesthetic conceptions of cultural progress and lays out why the book does not engage directly with questions of race. Finally, the introduction explains the methodology of the project and summarizes its trajectory.

Travis Chi Wing Lau addresses the place of race within Romantic-era medical discourse, calling attention to the disabling forms of experimentation on Black bodies that enabled anatomical research. There is, Lau points out, a key irony in these experiments, as the study of those who were understood to be fundamentally pathological led to universalizing conclusions about the nature of normative, white man. If this sounds like a moment of merely historical interest, Lau assures us it is not. Rather, the legacy of the racialized discourse of medicine can be witnessed in ongoing health disparities among differently racialized groups.

Social scientists recently claimed Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) is a racist text; that Darwin’s racism blinded him, impacting his science. Biologists and philosophers countered that Darwin’s work should be championed because it undercut slavery-justifying polygenism (independent origins for human races). Others extol Darwin for his emotional condemnation of slavery when he first encountered it on the Beagle voyage. This essay systematically explores Darwin’s views on human race expressed in Descent and then digs through a half-century of Darwin’s correspondence with prominent scientists to answer the question: what were Darwin’s views not just on the human torture involved in the enslavement process but on human race more broadly?

This chapter examines late nineteenth-century instances of a fictional trope of “mind invasion,” in which the white male unconscious is controlled by the very subaltern mind that Western science associated with “primitive” levels of mental and cultural evolution. The psychical automatism of mind invasion sometimes reproduces the power dynamics of colonialism, but the chapter examines countervailing examples in which the colonizer’s unconscious is dominated by mental powers and occult knowledge attributed to the colonized. It also explores depictions of extraterrestrial or future-human mind invasion, which redraw the racialized hierarches of mind constructed by Western scientists. Reiterations of the mind-invasion trope satirized the claim of educated white males to possess superior rationality, detached objectivity, and the ability to resist automatist mental states. The chapter analyses the multivalent aims of this reversal, including antimaterialism, a defense of paranormal experience, and a decolonizing attack on the very concept of racial hierarchy.

This chapter is about the origins of anti-Black racism in the United States. It describes two separate but related processes. The first process involves historical events, of which slavery is the most important. In addition to systemic exploitation and degradation of enslaved people, slavery produced beliefs that enslaved people were inferior human beings. Reinforcing these beliefs was scientific racism – supposedly scientific theories that purported to prove the innate inferiority of Black people. Even after slavery ended, economic competition, racist laws, and social norms created social and economic disadvantages for Black people. The second process involves the ways humans think about the people they encounter. Humans place themselves and other people in social groups largely based on physical characteristics, particularly those that society considers to be important. Perceived race is a major determinant of how people socially categorize others, which forms the psychological foundation for racial biases at both the conscious and nonconscious levels. Thus, even in the absence of malevolent intent, it is likely that people will develop negative racial beliefs and feelings. These biases lead to the tendency of White Americans to justify the disadvantages experienced by Black Americans by attributing them to inherent defects in Black people.

In the following chapters, I analyse several attempts to interrupt the abyssal nature of the modern state emerging from my previous research on sociology of law. I try to identify the reasons why most of such attempts failed. In this chapter, I analyse some of the most salient features of the state and the legal system in Mozambique proposing the concept of heterogeneous state to highlight the breakdown of the modern equation between the unity of the state and the unity of its legal and administrative operation. The centrality of legal pluralism is analysed in light of an empirical research focused on community courts and traditional authorities. I use the concept of legal hybridisation with the purpose of showing the porosity of the boundaries of the different legal orders and cultures in Mozambique and the deep cross-fertilisations or cross-contaminations among them. Special attention is given to the multicultural plurality resulting from the interaction between modern law and traditional law, the latter conceived of as an alternative modernity.

Writers in Latin America’s Black press frequently publicized and denounced particularly egregious examples of discrimination or racism, including many that involved painful accusations having to do with pernicious stereotypes about Black sexuality. In so doing, they responded to claims by Latin American politicians and intellectuals that racism was mild or non-existent in their countries, and that to speak about racism was itself racist, and would have the effect of dividing the national community. The rhetorical strategies writers in the Black press adopted included barely contained expressions of outrage, skillful deployment of irony, careful efforts at debunking, and, quite frequently, with expressions of agreement with the premise that racism was inconsistent with the local political culture.Authors who wrote about racism consistently presented the United States as a yardstick against which the existence or severity of racism could be measured, or as a source for the importation and imposition of racism that was at odds with local values and tradition.Finally, writers discussed and debated the mechanisms that should be employed to combat racism.

During President Barack Obama’s second term, White medical students and residents at a prestigious public university participated in a research study exploring beliefs associated with racial bias in pain management, an area with well-documented racial disparities in clinical care. These highly educated doctors in training completed a questionnaire asking the extent to which they thought that fifteen factual assertions about biological differences between Blacks and Whites were true or untrue. They also read two mock medical cases about patients (one Black and one White) with a painful condition (kidney stone or ankle fracture), rated how much pain they believed the patients were in, and made recommendations for treating that pain.1

The antebellum era saw an epochal shift in politics: nature transformed into a key site of the political. No longer seen as a refuge from human concerns, biological existence itself became a key new resource for conceptualizing human difference and an administrative target of political power. This essay reveals sentimental literature to march in step with this shift. This mode overwhelmingly associated with the domestic realm and even the trite and saccharine nonetheless reveals an emergent biopolitics attuned to disciplining the individual’s nature and conceiving of humanity as a population whose biological quality could be optimized. An ideology that sutured literature and science together in an era in which divisions between them were just beginning to form, sentimentalism helped move politics into the flesh.

Visions of landownership in America were a key pull factor, associated with equality and social mobility, for Scandinavians who arrived in the United States with ideas of nonwhites shaped by scientific racism.