Boas evidently still has enemies, and not just among the resurgent forces of nationalism. Starting in the 1960s, Boas’s “scientific anti-racism” came under attack from postmodernist and postcolonialist scholars. These criticisms are summarized by the anthropologist Herbert S. Lewis in his defense of Boas’s legacy:
His life was lived in the service of precisely the values professed by many of his critics, and he achieved positive results that few scholars have ever matched. While it is certainly true that anyone’s best efforts may go wrong, and one’s scholarship may be misused and perverted by others, I believe that Boas’s critics have so far failed to demonstrate that this has been the case.
Once a giant in the field, subsequently whittled down to size, then heaped with calumny, Boas’s work is worth inspecting again in our own fraught time.
Key to this retrospective is an understanding of the United States Boas lived in. It was a place closely studied by the Nazis, who used the American system of racial apartheid as a model for their “Final Solution.” The U.S. court system declared who was and wasn’t white, for example: Chinese were not (1878), but Syrians were (1910). States had “morons” sterilized, a eugenic practice validated by the Supreme Court in 1927. Interracial marriage was illegal—and this was still law in sixteen states until 1967. American women who married non-white foreign men had their citizenship stripped from them by the Married Women’s Act of 1922.
One of Hitler’s favorite books was the popular American pseudo-history, The Passing of a Great Race (1916), by the patrician Madison Grant, who had once exhibited an African in the Bronx zoo. Grant believed the “Teutons” were being replaced by lesser races. The First World War made Grant change the name of the supposedly top-tier “race” (Boas would put the word in quotations) to “Nordics.” He also took personal credit for helping to stop immigration from Asia and severely limiting non-“Nordic” peoples from Europe in the Immigration Act of 1924.
Much of the American racial hierarchy was based on “science” that turned out to be flimsy at best, outright faked at worst. The combative Boas opposed the bogus rationalizations of racism, as well as the allegedly evolutionary classification of races this pseudoscience fostered. As an anthropologist, his biggest point was also his simplest: the assumption that one’s own culture or “race” was superior to others was not just wrong but harmful.