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Editor's Note: Two hundred fifty years ago scholars in the West divided mankind into two categories. On the one hand there was the black man who was said to be subhuman and of lower intelligence and therefore a natural slave. Then there was the white man who uniquely possessed the glorious traits of Newton and Milton. Here is the story of Franz Boas, the Columbia University sociologist who was largely responsible for destroying the academic consensus that blacks were a lower order of humanity.
BY THE END of the eighteenth century a whole new body of intellectual endeavors termed "science" had begun to emerge as a distinct domain of Western culture that challenged theology and moral philosophy. Enlightenment writers saw science emanating from the "rational mind of man" unfettered by emotion or superstition, and by the middle of the eighteenth century science was becoming a dominant discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Between the middle of the eighteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth century, science played an important role in establishing the "fact" that savages were racially inferior to members of civilized society. During the second half of the eighteenth century continental scholars such as Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon, and Johann Blumenbach fused their aesthetic judgments and ethnocentrism to form an elaborate system to classify the races into a rigid, hierarchical scheme. In North America this scientific system, coupled with colonists' popular thinking about racial hierarchies, buoyed existing power relationships, political goals, and economic interests, which in turn institutionalized racial inferiority and socially structured the categories in new and enduring ways.
European scientists' ideas about racial inferiority became more influential in North America as revolutionary fervor began to sweep the colonies. As English and colonial relations became more antagonistic, revolutionary philosophies about citizens' rights, freedom, and liberty rose to a crescendo. The duplicitous contradiction of fighting the tyranny of England while denying freedom to enslaved Africans fueled antislavery attempts to challenge the institution of slavery. The morality claim presented by abolitionists was eviscerated by using scientific studies about racial inferiority to explain that Negroes and Indians were savages not worthy of citizenship or freedom. The abolition movement was not easily curbed. At the dawn of the Civil War, abolitionists insisted on...