The Pseudoscience of Race and the Popular Western Collective Subconscious

In Curtis Keim’s article “Changing Our Mind About Africa” the author explores pervasive Western – specifically European and American – myths and stereotypes in popular culture and collective consciousness. Most Americans know very little about Africa and what we do know is largely fed by poorly researched text books, and news reports that seem to gravitate towards items that confirm Western assumptions about the nature of Africa and her problems. This essentially justifies to the Western reader, not merely the continued European and American intervention in African events, but subtly also historical Western activity in Africa.

Word associations provide illustrative examples of the images of Africa fed to our subconscious. Keim first gives examples from his own experience as a teacher, of what images are conjured up for student when Africa is mentioned, and then corroborates this with statistical percentages in “How We Learn” (13). The results are startling, with a clear majority of those surveyed associating negative, colonial stereotypes with Africa and Africans. Keim demonstrates that this is not so easily reduced to simple racism on the part of the individuals, but a collective social legacy of racial stereotypes fed to us through cartoons as children, through ad campaigns and Safari imagery of amusement parks. American society did not formerly bat any eye at such racial advertizing of Arab tour guides and Africans in loin cloths in the background, as a cheerful, white patriarch looked on with his submissive wife and excited children by his side (19).

Some of these examples are taken from a campaigns and cartoons a few decades ago. Yet while there were the advertisements for Busch Garden’s “Dark Continent”, there is today a similarly unreal portrayal of “Pygmy War Camps” (which do not exist) at Disney attractions. While there was Looney Tunes decades ago, today there is Johnny Quest, still depicting Africa in a manner that makes use of the stereotypes of collective Western consciousness. We can, nevertheless, chart marked improvements. Western advertisers, media and the like seem to be attempting to defuse the racist imagery of the past, but in the collective subconscious, the media still feeds into this by highlighting only the “exotic” stories of Africa, or politically safe issues, when the world has already chosen sides (as in National Geographic’s late reporting on South Africa). Often it reinforces stereotypes, even when it is apparently not deliberately trying to.

Keim continues in his “Origins of Darkest Africa” to demonstrate the dichotomy between Western visions of “the Dark Continent” – a land filled with cannibalism, ritual murders, incest, witchcraft and constant warfare – and traditional African self-perceptions. In the Sundiata epic, we see that the savanna land is described as “the Bright Country.” Keim notes that in many ways, the racist perceptions of Africa are largely a Modern phenomenon. In ancient Greece and Rome, he points out there was a notion of ethno-national supremacy, but not a hatred of African or of blackness. He similarly notes this in regard to Jewish and Christian perceptions. Jewish discrimination was a religious one, and the Jewish culture – traditionally – was borne of religious practice of the mitzvot, not of a Modern notion of race.

He notes the so-called “Curse of Ham” (actually a curse of Canaan), claiming that this was not seen as anti-African. Indeed, he is right, as the other offspring of Ham were said to have stuck to the pack of the Children of Noah. Canaan was cursed, in Jewish tradition, for violating that agreement. In the Book of Jubilees, central to both Ethiopian Jewry and the Essenic Jews, we find that Ham was regarded as a Jewish prophet and that he personally admonished Canaan. It would thus be impossible to link these earlier versions of the story with later racist interpretations. It seems that there was simply no view of what came to be called “race” in the Hebrew scriptures.

Keim notes that until the 1700s, “the best knowledge of the interior of sub-Saharan Africa came from Arab sources.” (38) By this time, however, it would seem that there was in fact considerable anti-black racism amongst certain Jewish and Arab communities (see al-Jahiz for commentary on this in the Arab world, and examples such as Maimonides’ anti-Sudanese diatribe). Related to this, we find Keim’s reference to historian Michael Adas’ assertion that perspectives on non-Europeans was typically formulated by both European missionaries and philosophers. (ibid)

All in all, however, Keim’s main point with regards to pre-Colonial European perspectives, is that all evidence seems to point to a general regard for the sub-Saharan African as a human being. He cites examples of black knights who were not only respected and valued, but often extolled for their contributions as members of European societies. As we observe Western attitudes closer to, and in, the eighteenth century, we find a popular tendency towards what the author calls “moderate racism” where links between race and culture were “largely unconscious and imprecise” (39). This sort of “moderate racism” permeated many groups which purported to help freed American slaves return to Africa, as well as later abolitionist movements.

Citing Michael Adas, Keim argues that the real shift in overt racist attitudes towards Africans emerged with the modern global revolutions. He notes that rather than philosophers and missionaries, as in centuries past, the engine of this endeavor was composed of traders, scientists, technicians, soldiers and bureaucrats. The shift was not restricted a change in opinion towards Africa. China had previously been celebrated but now was viewed as corrupt, superstitious; deriding them for failures to achieve technologically (41).

It was at this time that we see the crystallization of European racism and pseudoscientific racial hierarchies which many obsessed over in an attempt to scientifically justify colonial endeavors. The secular domination of Africa was frequently masked in both pseudoscientific ideas of “race” and a self-justifying view that it was the “White Man’s burden” to civilized “your new-caught sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child” (46); part of what Keim calls “Dark Continent Thinking” (47). This thinking was held into the 20th century by president Theodor Roosevelt, to whom the aforementioned poem was written.

Key to such thinking is not evolutionary theory, but elements of proto-evolutionary theory – long out-dated and debunked – that evolution occurs in a “chain” stretching from the simplest organisms to the most complex. Related to this is Herbert Spencer’s notion of the “survival of the fittest” which Keim notes in his previous article is a motif even in current news coverage on Africa (“How We Learn” 16). As a matter of fact, evolutionary theory as it is understood today does not maintain that the most dominant of the species is the one to survive. These are usually the losers in evolution, just as are the weakest. Unfortunately, though this theory does not fit at all with Darwin’s view of “natural selection” the concept of “Social Darwinism” was wrongly named for him (51).

In the older version of evolutionary theory, Keim points out that “white human males of the upper socioeconomic classes are at the very top of the human segment of the ladder.” (50) When Conrad wrote his Heart of Darkness Keim asserts “he did not just mean that he was going back in historical time. He meant that he was going back in evolutionary time. Africans were literal biological specimens of what whites had once been. Whites had left these living ancestors in the evolutionary dust” (51). Roosevelt as well articulates such widespread racism, stating that what we find in Africa – whether man or animal – “does not differ materially from what it was in Europe in the late Pleistocene” (Ibid).

As a result, today scholars attempting to be more precise, refer to this as Social Evolutionism, or just evolutionism. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) developed a popular evolutionism model where human socio-racial evolution was described in three categories of savage, barbarian and civilized. William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), a Yale professor and well known proponent of capitalism, argued that competion amongst the “races” (itself a pseudo-scientific idea from this era and genre ) were inherently unequal and should be eliminated through social competition. Subsequently, he was against any help being provided to lower classes. This, he argued, would prevent their expedient elimination and would deprive the upper classes of the abundance of resources which he saw them as their biological birthright (51-52). Europeans who visited Africa imagined that the Mangbetu kingdom was explainable due to having what they considered “slightly more European physical features” but they nevertheless regarded them as “less evolved than the lighter-skinned Arabs”. Thus, the Manbetu were afforded the classification of “advanced savages” (54).

Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Western academics sought to explain away any African resemblances of Western culture by noting physical characteristics which they believed were European; that is, evolving towards, a European social-evolutionist ideal. All things non-European were regarded as a lower-state of evolution, whether socially, or religiously. Nearly every Western discipline was infected by these pseudo-scientific views of race and racial hierarchy. Academic careers were built upon these baseless theories, and their legacy continues today to live in the collective subconscious of what the Western – and particularly American – world associates with Africa and those peoples more recently emerging from there.