"In direct and pointed contrast to recent efforts to minimize or obscure the significance of race as a factor in social life, Baker argues for renewed emphasis on its ubiquitous social reach and power."—Waldo Martin, author of The Mind of Frederick Douglass

Lee D. Baker is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and African and African American Studies at Duke University.

From Savage to Negro

By Lee D. Baker

University of California Press

Copyright © 1998 Lee D. Baker
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520211681
Introduction

Race in the United States is at once an utter illusion and a material reality, a fiction and a "scientific" fact. It is a political wedge and a unifying force. It is structured by legislation yet destabilized by judicial fiat, shaped by public opinion but also configured by academic consensus. Though historically contingent, it is constantly being transformed. The history and reality of race and racism in the United States force individuals to negotiate daily between the ideological pillars of democracy—justice, freedom, and equality—and stark racial inequality. Whether one looks to Alexis de Tocqueville or Studs Terkel, this negotiation is recognized as a fundamental character of U.S. society—what Terkel calls "the American obsession."

In the United States, people use "commonsense" racial categories every day to identify strangers and social situations or to help form their own identities. Racial categories are often seen as "natural" or as having some inherent biological component. But some have understood for decades that categories of race in the United States have little to do with natural history and a great deal to do with social and political history.

Although they often seem immutable, racial categories are always in flux; indeed, sometimes they change rapidly. Racial categories are produced and reproduced ideologically and culturally: they are constructed. In turn, these categories structure the access of specific groups to opportunities and resources. Complex political, economic, and cultural processes on a global scale produce various racial constructs that vary during particular periods in history from solid and generally accepted totenuous and vigorously contested. The dynamics of this variation will become clearer as this narrative unfolds.

Since the founding of the Union, contests over what racial groups in the United States signify have been political enterprises. Though dating to the colonial period, the politics of race was woven into the Constitution and continues to dominate American culture and politics. As with most political endeavors in the United States, various individuals, groups, and coalitions simultaneously wield power, marshal authority, and sway public opinion. The construction of race is no different. No political party, interest group, or scientific organization has itself structured racial inequality. Although various interests worked in concert, the structuring of racial inequality was not orchestrated. Yet ideas about race are articulated in ways that reinforce legal, social, and economic relations among groups.

Historically, there has been a certain "resonance" between laws regarding race passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court, ideas about race articulated in the mass media, and studies on race published by scientists. These institutions share specific notions about race that converge, are sometimes linked, and often influence one another. Researching, theorizing, and classifying racial groups has always been the province of anthropology.

In this book I explore the relationships and linkages between the shifting discourse on race within anthropology and the racial constructs undergoing transformation in the United States. One of my goals is to explore how anthropologists and the texts they produce contribute to the various dynamics involved in the formation of the racial category used for African Americans. I focus on the first half of the twentieth century because ideas about racial inferiority were supplanted by notions of racial equality in law, science, and public opinion; each arena played off and reinforced the other. Anthropology also matured as a discipline during these years and was affected by these changes, yet it helped to effect them. Simply put, I integrate the history of anthropology and the history of the African American experience, and by doing so I reveal intersections and linkages that have not been considered previously.

The first half of the twentieth century is bounded by two landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning the Fourteenth Amendment. Each codified a significant shift in U.S. race relations. In 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson upheld racial segregation and put forth the doctrine known as separate but equal, which allowed unequal segregated public facilities. In 1954 the Brown v. Board of Education decision essentially overturnedthe separate-but-equal doctrine, and the Supreme Court began to mandate racial desegregation. This shift in the legal significance of racial categories coincided with a striking shift in anthropology, which provided scientific validation for first one, and then the other, interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. In 1896 Social Darwinist thought informed anthropological writings on race and offered scientific validation to proponents of racial hierarchies. By 1954, however, cultural relativism informed the anthropological research on race and culture and provided scientific support for champions of racial equality.

The relationship between the anthropological discourse on race and the prevailing racial construct has been close and often reciprocal. The processes that construct race have also helped to shape the field of anthropology; anthropology, in turn, has helped to shape various racial constructs. The social context from which turn-of-the-century constructs of race emerged—industrialization, poll taxes, public lynchings, unsafe working conditions, and Jim Crow segregation—at the same time gave rise to a professional anthropology that espoused racial inferiority and, as a consequence, supported and validated the status quo. Three decades later, social and political movements like the Great Migration, the rise of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Harlem Renaissance, the African American alliance with the Democratic Party, and the struggle for desegregation all contributed to the rise of a new paradigm in anthropology that espoused, and in turn quickened the struggle for, racial equality.

Between 1896 and 1954 anthropology played an integral role in helping to change the meaning and structure of race for African Americans. Although one can never adequately document all facets of how racial categories transform, one can identify how the justices on the Supreme Court incorporate changing scientific ideas about race in their various interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment. The variance of the Supreme Court's interpretations of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is perhaps the best barometer of race relations and the changing significance of race in the United States.1

Since its inception in the eighteenth century, American anthropology has been the science that takes the explanation of race and culture as its central charge. Anthropological explanations of race and culture have changed in step with larger social transformations. These explanations have not been left idle in an ivory tower but have become an active part of the social machinery that constructs racial categories, and that machinery has helped sustain the discipline of anthropology.

The anthropological discourse on race feeds into the larger discourses out of which it is itself constructed. For example, lawmakers have used anthropology to write legislation that shapes public policy, and journalists have used it to produce media that...