The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium

by Joseph L. Graves Jr.

Book Overview

In this groundbreaking book, Joseph Graves traces the development of biological thought about human genetic diversity. Greek philosophy, social Darwinism, New World colonialism, the eugenics movement, intelligence testing biases, and racial health fallacies are just a few of the topics he addresses. Graves argues that racism has persisted in our society because adequate scientific reasoning has not entered into the equation. He champions the scientific...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813533023
• ISBN13: 9780813533025
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Outstanding book on the history of racist thinking

Graves' book, "The Emperor's New Clothes," is outstanding. Graves describes the history of racist thinking and prejudice from the ancient world to the Middle Ages and up to colonial America and the present day. Graves then addresses two of the biggest myths and misconceptions regarding race: diseases and intelligence. I find it funny how so many racist, Jensen-influenced reviewers accuse Graves of being a fraud and dismissing his work as a ploy of "political correctness." The racist, Bell Curve thinking regarding intelligence, for example, is so contradictory that even those who subscribe to its premise are too blind to see it. For example, Jensen and his followers maintain that Asians are the smartest "race," followed by Jews, then whites, and then blacks. Additionally, Bell Curve advocates will lump Latinos into the same category as blacks regarding intelligence. Now here is the real contradiction. Mexicans, for example, have a geographic ancestry that is by and large a blend of European (Spanish) and East Asian (those who crossed the Bering Straight and settled into Mesoamerica). By the Bell Curve's own logic, Mexicans (as a blend of European and Asian) would fall between these two groups in the hierarchy of intelligence. Mexicans would be slightly less intelligent than Asians, but of a greater intelligence than Europeans/whites/Caucasians. When Bell Curve advocates and Jensen supporters acknowlege the superior intelligence of Central Americans (induced from their very own arguments), I will start to take them a bit more serious...but I'm not going to hold my breath on this one. Back to "The Emperor's New Clothes." My favorite part of this book is actually the chapter where Graves discusses the notions of inequality and prejudice in the ancient world. The author discusses the way in which people have abused and taken the Holy Bible out of context to promote racist ideologies, which actually have no basis in actual Biblical scripture. The author goes on to discuss how the ancient Romans admired Egyptians and Ethiopians, once the locations of great civilizations, but regarded the people of modern-day Ireland, Britain, and Germany as "primitives," "savages," "brutes," "barbarians," and inferior peoples for having never achieved any worthwhile accomplishments. Later, this same essential logic was used by the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch to brand Africans, Australians, and indigenous Americans as inferior. As we can see, ideas about racism grow out of extreme ethnocentric viewpoints. If you lack a background in biological sciences or genetics, Graves's chapters on intelligence and disease may be a little difficult to comprehend. Other than that, the book is a fairly easy and enjoyable read, even for those without extensive backgrounds in science. My biggest critique with this book is that Graves chooses to focus on notions of race strictly within the North American world. It would have been nice to see some data and analysis on concepts o

A cautionary tale of research bias

As the title suggests, The Emperor's New Clothes lays bare the fallacy of race as a meaningful biological concept in human society. Despite the inability for science to justify race classifications in the human species, Graves explains how racists have historically abused the scientific method to promote their own agendas, such as unfounded claims for intelligence differences among the so-called races. This book provides a deeply moving account of the abuses of the race concept throughout the ages. In these pages we read about the dire consequences when a handful of researchers (intentionally or unintentionally) claim that their results prove certain members of society should be held low; thus, the book spins a cautionary tale regarding the critical need for diversity in research science. The work provides an enjoyable (yet stirring) introduction to the subject suitable for a lay audience. In addition, as evidenced by his Notes and Bibliography sections, Graves has thoroughly and meticulously researched his topic and he provides us with an invaluable list of resources for further exploration. Thus, this book is highly recommended for both the casual reader as well as the experienced scholar.

Tha naked emperor

This is a valuable book. It deals with three main areas: (1) the development of the concept of race before Darwin; 2) the rise of "scientific" racism; and (3) a demolishing of the idea of a biological basis for the existence of race. Graves does a good job in outlining the changing rationales for the existence of distinct races, and, more perniciously, the ranking of races into superior and inferior ones. Before the 15th century the concept of race was quite nebulous. Most people did not travel widely or see others who differed substantially from themselves. Although, people have always thought of their own group as "better" than others-- in the past this was a more parochial comparison (town vs town; nation vs nation, etc. The beginning of the Age of Exploration brought the existence of people with quite different physical appearances into the public conscience. This, coupled with the desire of Europeans to conquer and subjugate these newly encountered people, led to the idea of different human races and their inequality. Prior to Darwin, the rationale was creationist based on some supernatural design, or based on presumed taxonomic characteristics (Johann Blumenbach, Georges Buffon).Darwin's revolution demolished the rationale for races, but this took a long time to come about. The problem is that even if a correct theory is present, the theory must be properly applied. In the case of human races, Edward Spencer's misapplication of Darwin profoundly influenced Anglo-American thinking. His erroneous "survival of the fittest" paradigm made it easy for self-fulfilling analyses of the level of development in different parts of the world, in the 19th century, to be reified as scientific proof of the superiority of the white race. (If the survey had been taken in the 11th or 12th century, the Chinese and the Arabs would have been the highest ranked : ). Graves does a thorough job of exposing the racism and shoddy research of people like Joseph Comte Gobineau and Francis Galton. These approaches led to the eugenics movement, the sterilization in the United States of thousands of people classified (often erroneously) as mentally retarded, and ultimately to the Nazi Holocaust in t he name of racial purity.The finest part of the book is the last section, in which Graves, a molecular biologist and geneticist, demonstrates his up-to-date command of the scientific literature. In it he rebuts claims by Gobineau's and Galton's successors- Arthus Jensen, Phillippe Rushton, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. In his book, *Descent of Man...* Darwin pointed out that the concept of different races was in trouble because taxonomists could not agree on how many races there were and what characteristics should be used. As Graves points out, "Detailed analysis of the existing morphological variation within and between these racial categories has forced modern physical anthropologists to conclude that no consistent race designations can be constructed, thus valid

Transforming our Views of "Race"

It is rare to find such a cogent and readable book on a scientific topic of such importance, and even rarer to find an uncompromisingly scientific book that lay people can understand, enjoy, and put to important use in their lives. Written by an experimental evolutionary biologist with impeccable credentials both as a scholar and teacher, this is an interdisciplinary book with broad implications in many scholarly fields: public policy, social science, history, literary criticism, psychology, and ethics. Even more crucially, it has urgent implications for the everyday lives of everyone--and this includes all of us, whatever our backgrounds--whose feelings and beliefs, self-knowledge and self-ignorance, actions and sensibilities have been shaped consciously and unconsciously by ideas of "race." It is safe to assume that almost no lay person who reads this book has an inkling of what genetic biologists in general think of the concept of "race," and Graves provides a lucid explanation, together with an invaluable history of changing "scientific" views of the subject. At once scholarly and readable, scientific and impassioned, meticulously documented and aimed explicitly at social transformation, this is a book of monumental importance.Because my own field is literary criticism, I would like to add a comment on the usefulness of this book for literary scholars. While the field of critical race theory has become increasingly important to the study of literature, and the work of Takaki, Gossett, Gates, and many other critics/historians provides crucial background for understanding race as social construction, Graves' book is the only one I know of that addresses these broad issues from the point of view of genetic biology, in terms that can be understood by non-scientists. An innovative and experienced teacher of non-majors in an interdisciplinary course on genes, race, and society, Graves is well versed in history and literature as well as in the problematics of discussing race-as-social-construction with students totally unfamiliar with the concept. This book is full of charts, anecdotes, graphs, terse, quotable examples, and clear explanations of scientific data; thus it is invaluable for teachers as well as being an important scientific resource for those of us whose scholarship focuses on issues of race in literary history. No literary scholar should miss this book.

A Professor And A Scientist That We Can All Learn From

I believe that this book is one of the best books ever written. It's content has the highest potential in changing how we, as a society view "race." This book intelligently goes into detail in defining just what race is and what it is not. It gives a vast amount of research and data in clearly portraying how multiple "races" got started and it leads the reader in the direction of knowing how to not necessarily change the world's views on racism, but more importantly, how to change our own. It shows how society views itself and how much of the whole picture we've been too oblivious to even see. In truth, we see too much; we can't even get past the color of one another's skin. This book teaches that it's okay to see a phenotype as long as we learn not to associate a sterotype with the so called "races" of our society. Lastly, this book taught me that there's no such thing as "race" because in fact we are all of the HUMAN race, therefore one in the same, not so different as some tend to think.