I started looking at _The Mismeasure of Man_(as pointed out I believe earlier on this list, men were doing the mismeasuring) as Carrol suggests. The first Chapter is "American Polygeny and Craniometry before Darwin" with the subtitle "Blacks and Indians as Separate, Inferior Species"
Gould says: "Racial prejudice may be as old as recorded human history, but its biological justification imposed the additional burden of intrinsic inferiority upon despised groups, and precluded redemption by conversion or assimilation. "
and "In assessing the impact of science upon 18th and 19th century views on race, we must first recognize the cultural milieu of a society whose leaders and intellectuals did not doubt the propriety of racial ranking -with Indians below whites, and blacks below everybody else" This included Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin did not believe in biological inferiority of Blacks, but had a sort of aesthetic skin color prejudice -"exclud(e) all blacks and tawneys... increas(e) the lovely white and red." (page 32)
As to late 1800's/early 1900's:
Gould examines an infamous army I.Q test used for eugenics:
Congressional debates leading to passageof the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 continually invoke the army data. Eugenicists lobbied not only for limits to immigration, but for changing its character by imposing harsh quotas against nations of inferior stock ...In short, southern and eastern Europeans, the Alpine an Mediterranean natons with minimal scores on the army tests, should be kept out...The 1890 figures were used until 1930. Why 1890 and not 1920 since the act was passed in 1924 ? 1890 marked a watershed in the history of immigration. Southern and eastern Europeans arrived in relatively small numbers before then, but began to predominate thereafter."
I haven't found Gould speaking direclty on the issue of comparative "inferior" races, but I'm pretty sure that Blacks were still lower in the hierarchy than the other "inferiors" even as the raciality of the prejudice against "tawnier" Europeans heightened in the period. I will look at Dubois' _The World and Africa_ on this.
Dubois wrote _The Philadelphia Negro_ also , circa 1898. My grandmother lived in Phlly then. She told me many Irish were pretty sure that they were racially superior to Blacks in that period. That's anecdotal, but probably not atypical. Her retort to some was interesting in this discussion: " You're not all white".
Charles
>>> Yoshie Furuhashi said
Carrol replies to Rakesh:
>I agree with James H that conflict was thus understood
>> in cultural/ethnic terms in the case of European immigrants. They were
>> never racialized in the same way blacks were (subject to eugenic
>> regulation for the genetic health of the nation and subject to
>
>I'll have to reread Gould soon, but to the best of my memory he does cite
>specific evidence that the eugenics movement (and more particularly,
>racist understanding of intelligence) contributed importantly to the
>immigration act, and formal discussion in Congress would not necessarily
>be any indication one way or another.
Perhaps eugenics was applied to both blacks and marginal whites (immigrants as well as 'white trash'), but it was applied differently in each case? I think that Rakesh's argument that blacks were racialized while Euro immigrants weren't still stands, with some modification.
Without the presence of racialized blacks, the fear of whites becoming 'like' blacks or even becoming black doesn't make sense. My reading of literature of the application of eugenics to the invention of the 'white trash' mythology makes me think that there was this constant fear that 'white blood' was becoming weak, enfeebled, diluted, exhibiting the features of 'blackness,' etc. So I think that racialization of blacks provided an overall framework for thinking about 'whites' on the margins of whiteness, both marked by ethnicity and class.
Fear of 'inbreeding' and that of 'miscegenation,' I believe, are both sides of the same racial coin.
Yoshie