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Topics of Ashley Montagu's other published works include prenatal influences on human development, human heredity, and physical and biological anthropology more generally. (Undated photograph courtesy of Ashley Montagu Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries)
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This article complicates the established historical narrative of Ashley Montagu's intellectual and implicitly political project by focusing on his concern for the civil and human rights of African Americans. Montagu's assault on the concept of race in the 1940s involved an equally trenchant critique of constructions of "the Negro" that has received...
Citations
The species Homo sapiens results from interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans that occurred tens of thousands of years before the beginning of human migration from Africa. Human beings share 99.9% of the same DNA. People can have diverse ancestry, resulting from the crossing of their ancestors, not only within the same population, but also with other population groups. Molecular studies of DNA have contributed to the elaboration of the evolutionary history of life, particularly human ancestry. In the biological and social sciences, the consensus is clear: “race” is a social construct, not a biological attribute. Moving away from the social connotation of the term "race" implies that science has been changing the way it refers to human populations and accepting the existence of a single species, Homo sapiens. New terms and other standards must be found to describe the biological diversity of people, included in public policies for negative non-negative discrimination at international and national levels.
As many social critics are just now discovering the racial treatise W.E.B. DuBois advanced more than 100 years ago, the academy continues to devalue, marginalize, and ignore specific voices while choosing to champion, protect, and canonize others. This exclusion allows, or directs, each generation of new scholars to carefully dance around the real problems in education by judiciously repackaging the discourse of their predecessors. This is not to suggest that the intellectual past of a discipline should not be revisited. This does suggest that some aspects of that past, a past often marred by cultural incompetence and the intellectual marginalization of specific groups a discipline pretends to be educating, needs to be considered and critiqued by those groups the discipline has objectified and transformed into others. Intentionally connecting educators to the history of Black self-determination in education may potentially serve to assist in the creation of pedagogy and programs to address the challenges of Black males in education.
A genealogy of the English word racism shows that its dominant sense was shaped by Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu around 1940 in order to establish a broad consensus against a narrow form of antisemitism found among some anthropologists in Nazi Germany. Their strategy, which was to challenge the biological concept of race on which racism, on their account, was said to be parasitic was subsequently adopted by UNESCO in 1950 and is still advocated by many today. But this approach was not formulated to address anti-black racism. The limitations of this strategy were quickly exposed by black thinkers such as Oliver Cromwell Cox and Frantz Fanon. They understood that the problem was a form of systemic racism that could not be separated from the economic inequalities produced by slavery and colonialism. It could not be reduced to a system of thought open to scientific refutation: the problem had been misdiagnosed from the outset.
An anthropological investigation of the development of race theory’s dangerous effects in Nazi Germany and ethnic disputes in contemporary Israel-Palestine
