ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Meanings and Measures of Skin Color: Eugenics, Race, and the Legacy of Slavery

• In Event: Hidden Legacies of Slavery and Freedom in the History of Science

English Abstract

Mixed race people with Black and white ancestry in the Americas found themselves on the receiving end of unwanted (and harmful) attention from twentieth-century eugenicists. American biologist, Charles B. Davenport, and British statistician, Karl Pearson, for example, undertook small scale investigations of “racial hybrids” that blended their respective interests in predicting the heredity of certain physical traits with their anxieties about how mixed race people could breach the color line by passing. Through respective studies of mixed race people conducted in the former slave colonies of the British West Indies, Davenport and Pearson prognosticated about how pronounced or hidden certain Black traits might appear in a mixed race person. Thus, mixed race people in islands like Jamaica had their bodies scrutinized and photographed; their hair texture, nose and lip shape assessed alongside charts and equations that purported to explain variances in their skin color. In essence these mixed race people—many just a few generations removed from slavery—found themselves conscripted for the service of affirming eugenic fantasies about racial types. Though Pearson and Davenport ultimately came to competing conclusions about the heredity of skin color, they shared similar faith in the ability of science to make Blackness and Black traits legible on seemingly racially ambiguous bodies. The clash between these experts, as it played out in the pages of scientific journals, reveal the under examined ways the legacies of slavery and anti-Blackness shaped eugenicists’ approaches to the study of race and heredity.

Author

• Rana Asali Hogarth, University of Pennsylvania