Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race
Ashley Montagu · 1942
"Race, as commonly understood, a set of discrete, biologically fixed categories that determine intelligence, character, or worth, has no basis in human genetics; the boundaries we draw between racial groups are social and historical constructions, not natural biological divisions."
Writing in 1942, as Nazi racial ideology was driving a world war, Montagu, an anthropologist, made an argument that was radical at the time: the biological concept of race, as popularly used, doesn't map onto how human genetic variation actually works. Human genetic diversity is real and measurable, but it doesn't sort neatly into a small number of discrete racial categories — the genetic variation within any so-called racial group is typically larger than the average variation between groups, and traits like skin color are controlled by a small number of genes that vary independently of most other genetic traits.
Montagu's argument was that racial categories are drawn from a small number of highly visible physical traits, mainly skin color, and then, historically, loaded with assumptions about intelligence, character, and worth that have no genetic basis whatsoever — the categorization is real as a social and historical practice, with real social and political consequences, but not as a description of natural, fixed biological kinds. This distinction, race as a social construct with real material effects, versus race as a biological category with predictive power over ability or character, became, in the following decades, the dominant position across mainstream biology and anthropology.
What is Montagu's central argument about race?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of RaceAmazon (Columbia University Press ed.)
- Ashley MontaguWikipedia
Imagined Communities
"A nation is an imagined political community — its members will never meet or even hear of most of their fellow citizens, yet feel a deep, often life-or-death sense of shared belonging with them — a feeling manufactured historically through shared print media, newspapers and novels, rather than discovered as a natural, ancient bond."