Franz
Boas
was born in Minden, Germany, on 9th
July, 1858. His Jewish parents had been supporters of the 1848 German
Revolution and he was brought up with progressive political views.
Boas studied physics at the universities of Heidelberg and Bonn before
completing his doctorate at Kiel in 1881.
Boas developed an interest in anthropology and took part in expeditions
to Baffin Land (1883-84) and British Columbia (1885). Boas worked
at the University of Berlin but resigned in 1887 after a new law required
all staff to make a declaration concerning their religious beliefs.
In 1887 Boas decided to emigrate to the United States. He settled
in New York and found work as assistant
editor of Science Magazine.
The following year he began teaching anthropology at Clark University.
He was also the chief assistant for anthropology at the World's Columbian
Exposition in Chicago (1892-93).
Boas joined Columbia University as a lecturer in physical anthropology
in 1896. Promoted to professor in 1899, Boas became the world's most
important anthropologist. It has been claimed that his work "changed
the understanding of human nature by eliminating the predeterminism
of instinct and heredity and making human institutions cultural, subject
to human control for human ends."
Boas argued that it was necessary to study ethnology, linguistics,
physical anthropology and archaeology before generalizations might
be made about any one culture or comparisons about any number of cultures.
As well as teaching at Columbia Boas worked as curator of the American
Museum of Natural History in New York
(1901-05). He also established the American Anthropological Association
and the journals, Anthropologist
and the International Journal
of American Linguistics.
Boas applied his knowledge of anthropology to social and political
issues. In articles and books such as Anthropology
and Modern Life (1928) and Race
and Democratic Society (1945), Boas exposed the
fallacies of racial prejudice. He completely rejected chauvinistic
nationalism and was a life-long internationalist.
In his final years Boas spent much of his time battling against unscientific
theories of racial inequality being used against African
Americans in the United States and the Jews
in Nazi Germany. Appalled by the
emergence of fascism in Europe during the 1930s, Boas established
the Committee for Intellectual Freedom, an organisation that
gained the support of 10,000 American scientists.
Franz Boas died on 21st December, 1942.
(1) Frank Boas, lecture at
Columbia University (7th March, 1917)
My
opinions are founded to a great extent on the truths taught by the
retrospect upon the history of mankind, the study of which is the
business of my life. We see in primitive society the feeling of solidarity
confined to the small horde, while every outsider is considered a
being specifically distinct, and therefore as a dangerous enemy who
must be hunted down. With the advance of civilization, we see the
groups which have common interests, and in which the bonds of human
brotherhood are considered binding, expand until we reach the concept
that all men are created with equal rights. Socrates, Buddha, and
Christ are the milestones which indicate the birth of this great idea.
The 2,000 or more years
which have elapsed since their time have not sufficed, however, to
bring about the realization of these ideals. Based on this knowledge,
it is my opinion that our first duties are to humanity as a whole,
and that, in a conflict of duties, our obligations to humanity are
of higher value than those toward the nation; in other words, that
patriotism must be subordinated to humanism.
A second principle to
which I hold is also based on anthropological knowledge. We see everywhere
that the form of thought of man is determined by the prevailing emotions
which are intimately connected with the traditional mode of thought.
The fact that certain ideas are held sacred in a community and that
they are upheld by intelligent thought is no proof of their truth;
for we know that in every society the development of thought is shaped
more or less by traditional attitudes; that men are more likely to
justify their way of feeling and acting by reasoning than to shape
their actions and to remodel their emotions on the basis of reasoning.
Only the greatest minds can free themselves of this tendency, and
they are the ones who in course of time revolutionize the course of
our civilization. We should bear in mind all the time the difficulty
of developing such strength of character and of reasoning power as
to free ourselves of the prejudices that are the foundation of our
whole life.
I consider it of fundamental
importance to bear in mind all the time these conditions of human
thought, and to watch that in the education of the young the respect
and love for ideals be tempered by a rational understanding of the
principles on which these ideals are based.
For this reason I believe
that the purely emotional
basis on which, the world over, patriotic feelings are instilled into
the minds of children is one of the most serious faults in our educational
systems, particularly when we compare these methods with the lukewarm
attention that is given to the common interests of humanity. I dare
say that if all nations cultivated the ideals of equal rights of all
members of mankind by emotional means such as are now used to develop
passionate patriotism, much of the mutual hatred, distrust, and disrespect
would disappear.
The kind of patriotism
that we inculcate is intended to develop the notion that the members
of each nation, and that the institutions of each nation, are superior
to those of all others. Under this stimulus the fact that in each
country, normally, people live comparatively comfortably under the
conditions in which they have grown up is too often translated by
the citizens of that country into the idea that others who live under
different conditions have a civilization or institutions of inferior
value, and must feel unhappy until the benefits of his own mode of
feeling, thinking, and living have been imposed upon them. I consider
it one of the great objects worth striving for to counteract this
faulty tendency.
(2)
Frank Boas, The Problems of the American Negro (January, 1921)
Even
if there is neither a biological nor a psychological justification
for the popular belief in the inferiority of the Negro race, the social
basis of the race prejudice in America is not difficult to understand.
The prejudice is founded essentially on the tendency of the human
mind to merge the individual in the class to which he belongs and
to ascribe to him all the characteristics of his class. It does not
even require a marked difference in type, such as we find when we
compare Negro and white, to provoke the spirit that prevents us from
recognizing individuals and compels us to see only representatives
of a class endowed with imaginary qualities that we ascribe to the
group as a whole. We find this spirit at work in anti-Semitism as
well as in American nativism, and in the conflict between labor and
capitalism. We have recently seen it at its height in the emotions
called forth by a world war.
It is not by any means
the class consciousness of the segregated group that determines this
feeling. It is rather the consciousness of the outsider who combines
a large number of individuals in a group and thus assigns to each
the same character. The less feeling of unity the heterogeneous members
of the group possess, the harder it is for them to bear the discrimination
under which they suffer.
This is obviously the
psychological basis of the present situation of the American Negro.
To the popular mind, the Negro appears as a class, and the impressions
made by the life of the poor Negro are generalized by the white man
and are combined with dogmatic beliefs regarding the physical and
hereditary mental makeup of the race.
Mankind has traveled a
long road from the time when every stranger was an enemy. According
to our modern theoretical standards, we maintain that justice should
be given to the individual, that it should not be meted out to him
as to a representative of his class. And still, how very far removed
are we from the realization of this ideal! The natural habit of protecting
ourselves against a supposedly hostile foreign group determines our
life in great matters as well as in small details, and the life of
nations as well as the life of the individual and of the family.
For this reason there
is no great hope that the Negro problem will find even a half-way
satisfactory solution in our day.
We may, perhaps, expect that an increasing number of strong minds
will free themselves from race prejudice and see in every person a
man entitled to be judged on his merits. The weak-minded will not
follow their example.
But the greatest hope
for the immediate future lies in a lessening of the contrast between
Negroes and whites which will bring about a lessening of class-consciousness.
As I have already pointed out, under present conditions a penetration
of the white race by the Negro does not occur, while the effects of
intermixture in which the fathers are white and the mothers Negro
will lead in all probability to an increase of the amount of white
blood in the Negro population. This should allay the fears of those
who believe that the white race might deteriorate by race mixture.
On the other hand, intermixture will decrease the contrast between
the extreme racial forms, and, in the course of time, this will lead
to a lessening of the consciousness of race distinction. If conditions
were ever such that it could be doubtful whether a person were of
Negro
descent or not, the consciousness of race would necessarily be much
weakened. In a race of octoroons, living among whites, the color question
would probably disappear.
There is absolutely no
biological evidence which would countenance the assumption that race
mixture of itself would have unfavorable results, that the children
of white fathers and of mulatto or quadroon mothers would be inferior
to their Negro ancestors.
It would seem, therefore,
to be in the interest of society to permit rather than to restrain
marriages between white men and Negro women. It would be futile to
expect that our people would tolerate intermarriages in the opposite
direction, although no scientific reason can be given that would prove
them to be detrimental to the individual. Intermixture between white
males and Negro females has been common ever since Negroes were brought
to our continent, and the efficacy of the modern attempts to repress
this intermingling is open to grave doubt.
Thus it would seem that
man being what he is, the Negro problem will not disappear in America
until the Negro blood has been so much diluted that it will no longer
be recognized, just as anti-Semitism will not disappear until the
last vestige of the Jew as a Jew has disappeared.
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