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

Joseph Graves Jr. (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 081352847X | ISBN-13: 978-0813528472 | Publication Date: February 1, 2001 | Edition: 1

A scientific dismantling of the concept of "race."

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

In this groundbreaking book, Joseph Graves traces the development of thought about human genetic diversity. He argues that racism has persisted in our society because adequate scientific reasoning has not entered into the equation. Graves champions the scientific method, and explains how we may properly ask questions about the nature of population differentiation and how (if at all) we may correlate that diversity to differences in human capacity and behavior. He also cautions us to think critically about scientific findings that have historically been misused in controversies over racial differences in intelligence heritability, criminal behavior, disease predisposition, and other traits. 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.

According to Graves, this country cannot truly address its racial problems until people understand that separate human races do not exist empirically. With the biological basis for race removed, racism becomes an ideology, one that can and must be expunged.

About the Author

Joseph L. Graves Jr. is a professor of evolutionary biology with appointments in the departments of Life Sciences and African American Studies at Arizona State University's West and Main Campuses.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press; 1 edition (February 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081352847X
• ISBN-13: 978-0813528472
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #310,947 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A cautionary tale of research bias, August 25, 2001

By 

Paul E Turner (New Haven, Connecticut USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (Hardcover)

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.

38 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Biological Theories of Race, May 21, 2001

By 

C. Loring Brace, Professor Biological Anthrop... (Ann Arbor, Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (Hardcover)

A book that concludes with the declaration that biological races do not exist and that the concept of Race . . . was socially constructed arising from the colonization of the New World and the importation of slaves, mainly from western Africa? (p. 193) merits a salute right off the bat. Of course anyone can just say such things, and a public bombarded by claims and counter-claims might be tempted to dismiss such statements as simply manifestations of ?political correctness.? In this instance, however, the author, Joseph L. Graves, Jr., is a lab geneticist, and he has made his case based upon solid science and not on feel-good social motivations. Of course, the social circumstances cannot be ignored, and in this case, the author, who identifies himself as ?an African-American intellectual? (p. 2), can speak from personal experience. The intentions are declared in the first page with the words, ? Specifically, my goal is to show the reader that there is no biological basis for separation of human beings into races and that the idea of race is a relatively recent social and political construction? (p. 1). It is race itself and the grip it has on the public mind that he is presenting as the emperor without clothes. If races are social constructs and not manifestations of biological reality, how did the universal acceptance of their existence ever come about? The structure of the book is an exploration of the development and application of that perspective from the Greeks to the present day. It gets off to a somewhat rocky start. Aristotle is credited with authorship of the Systema Naturae and the idea that living creatures are hierarchically organized in a scala naturae. In fact that title was used by Linnaeus in the 18th century. Aristotle?s Historia Animalium may have qualified him as the ?Father of the Biological Sciences,? but in it he did not arrange the creatures described in a logical hierarchy of differential worth. It was the Enlightenment application of Aristotelian logic that actually accomplished the construction of that ?Great Chain of Being,? and Linnaeus did embody that approach. After that somewhat bumpy beginning, the book gets better and better as it goes on. It really comes into its own with the discussion of the establishment of eugenics in the 19th century. In Chapter 6, Pseudoscience and the Founding of Eugenics, he characterizes its founder, Sir Francis Galton, as ?an intellectual mediocrity, a sham, and a villain? (p. 100), and he backs this up with a demonstration of why that was the case. This is worth the price of the book in the first place. In chapter 7, Graves makes the case that the leader of the American eugenics movement, Charles B. Davenport, director of the Eugenics Records Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, had engaged in ?one of the largest medical frauds of the twentieth century: the pellagra cover-up? (p. 121). The next chapter, Eugenics, Race, and Fascism, is subtitled ?The Road to Auschwitz Went Through Cold Spring Harbor.? After the subsidence of eugenic enthusiasm following the realization of its applications in Nazi Germany, Graves traces its resurgence in chapters 9 and 10. In the latter, ?The Race and IQ Fallacy,? he declares that ?No one better typifies the return to scientific racist ideology in the period after World War II than eugenicist Arthur Jensen? (p. 159), Professor emeritus of Educational Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen, most recently in The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (1998), takes race to be a self-defined entity and assumes the existence of racial differences in mental ability as his ?default position.? This constitutes his null hypothesis although there is nothing null about it. It is a racialist assumption by definition. Graves goes on to discuss the misunderstanding and misuse of the concept of heritability by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in America (1994). Joe Graves is a laboratory scientist which is both a strength and a weakness in the book. His scientific grasp and up-to-date sources puts his presentation on a rock-solid basis. On the other side of the coin, many of his most important points are backed up in the kind of crabbed and minimalist writing that is de rigeur in scientific journals, ultimately being rendered in symbolic form as equations. This is no problem for the scientifically literate, but it will be less satisfying for the general public who could well stand to benefit from the case that is being made. The text is only 200 pages long, and could easily have been fleshed out for the general reader. As Graves shows when the occasion demands, he is quite capable of rendering things in perfectly fluent prose. One could only wish that he had kept that up throughout. Even with this caveat, however, The Emperor?s New Clothes is a fine start for thinking about race at the dawn of a new millennium.

C. Loring Brace University of Michigan

14 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Transforming our Views of "Race", May 7, 2001

By 

E.C. DeLamotte (Tempe, AZ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (Hardcover)

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.