Two faces of earnest A. Hooton

Abstract

The American Anthropological Association's multimedia project, “Race: Are We So Different?” alleges that Earnest A. Hooton (1887–1954) of Harvard University was a racist eugenicist who “perhaps more than any other scientist of his time… did more to establish racial stereotypes…” and infers racism from his having sat on a National Research Council Committee on the Negro in the 1920s. I take issue with this perspective to argue against Hooton as a racist by exploring Hooton's relationship with African American students, particularly Caroline Bond Day, and with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People when it awarded a medal to Charles R. Drew, M.D. In the heyday of eugenics, Hooton was an atypical eugenicist in espousing a resolutely nonracial view of the woes of humankind perpetuated by what he considered the biologically unfit. As eugenics and Nazism became conflated in the late 1930s, Hooton hewed to a path that was more antiracist than many of his anthropological colleagues and publicly disputed Nazi racial ideology. Am J Phys Anthropol 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Understanding racism in physical (biological) anthropology

“…Every aspect of his speeches and writing about race (take his favored, The Old Americans, in 1925, Hrdlic ˇka 1921, 1927, and 1928) was explicitly White supremacist and sexist (Blakey, 1987(Blakey, , 1991(Blakey, , 1996Rankin-Hill & Blakey, 1994). Earnest Hooton, who admired Hrdlic ˇka and led the next generation of physical anthropologists, was little better (read about innately rapist Blacks in Up From the Ape, 1931Ape, , 1946 despite efforts to salvage his reputation as a softline racist (Giles, 2012). Clearly, Ortner had also bought into the late 20th century notion of racism as incivility.…”

Antropologia física na primeira metade do século xx e a proposta tipológica de Earnest A. Hooton.

“…Outros eram ainda mais radicais, aceitando medidas como a esterilização (American Anthropological Association, 2007). Atualmente, existe um forte debate acadêmico sobre se as ideias de Hooton eram ou não racistas e eugênicas (Giles, 2012), e seu papel na luta contra o racismo durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial (Giles, 2010), considerando que Hooton foi dos poucos antropólogos que apoiou Franz Boas desde cedo quando falou em contra do racismo nazista (Little, 2010).…”

“…Contudo, várias das posições do Hooton têm sido classificadas por diversas fontes como racistas e eugênicas (American Anthropological Association, 2007;Giles, 2012). No entanto, fica claro o interesse do Hooton em fazer esclarecimentos sobre o assunto racial, considerando as confusões de conceitos existentes na época e sua premissa de que todas as pessoas do seu tempo eram racialmente misturadas.…”

Fake News, Fake Science?: Reflections of Teaching Introduction to Biological Anthropology in the Era of Trump

“…Other well-known early biological anthropologists such as Aleš Hrdlička and Earnest Hooton would go on to serve under Madison Grant on the American Board of Eugenics, along with many American geneticists and evolutionary biologists during the 1920s (Marks 2012). There are debates about the extent of Hooton's involvement in the eugenics movement during his early and later career (Giles 2012). One of the most notable historical examples of the influence of biological anthropology was the use of anatomy and measurements of basic human variation in Nazi medicine to determine who was ethnically Jewish and to create the racial definitions used by the National Socialist German Worker's Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) to separate "true Aryans" from others (Alexander 1949;Tenenbaum 1956).…”