“The Race Question in the United States”
- John Tyler Morgan:
- 14th and 15th Amendment prove the existence of race aversion and prejudice that can only be held in check by law
- the social and political questions connected to the African race in the United States all relate to and depend upon the essential differences between races that were designed by God
- the race question involves the mental differences between races
- believes that it is not slavery, but social and political aspirations that are causing friction between races
- believes people from Africa have never made a contribution to the arts, sciences, or enterprises
- believes that emancipation has caused more friction between African-Americans and whites
TMM
- Morton: gathered over 600 human skulls to test whether or not a ranking of races could be established objectively by physical characteristics of the brain, particularly by size
- Morton was a leader among American polygenists
- Morton set out to establish a relative rank of races on objective grounds
- Morton ranked races by the average size of their brains, as measured by the size of the skull
- Morton’s findings “conveniently” matched racial prejudices of the time with whites on top, Indians in the middle, and blacks on the bottom
- Gould reanalyzed Morton’s data and found numerous cases of fraud in the interest of matching prior convictions, but finds no evidence of conscious fraud because if the mistakes were conscious, Morton would not have published them so openly
- scientists who lie are typically excommunicated, but unconscious finagling is prevalent and suggests that prior prejudice can be found anywhere and draws conclusions on the social nature of science
English 2089 