Black Doctoral Studies: The Radically Antiracist Idea of Molefi Kete Asante

It was a defining year in the history of racist and antiracist ideas, not just due to the unexpected success of Jesse Jackson’s antiracist platform, not just due to the winning success of the Republicans’ racist platform. After years of suffering through police violence, after years of suffering through older Black people blaming them for their dire conditions, urban Black youth forged their own public forum in 1988. After a decade of growth from the concrete of the South Bronx, the rose of Hip Hop started to blossom in 1988. BET and MTV started airing its popular Hip Hop shows. The Source hit newsstands, beginning its reign as the world’s longest running rap periodical. The first sounds of the flower blooming—for the idyllic age of Hip Hop—could be heard from the rhymes of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Niggaz Wit Attitudes’ Straight Outta Compton and the album’s smash and smashing hit, “Fuck tha Police” (Ogbar, 2007).

As 20-year-old Black youngsters cursed out police harassers to the beat, a 20-year-old discipline finally received an institutional foundation to withstand academic harassers. The blooming of Hip Hop came side by side the blooming of Black Studies in 1988, when Molefi Kete Asante established the world’s first doctoral program in Black Studies at Temple University in the heart of Black Philadelphia. Thirty years later, doctoral programs in Black Studies have been established on at least 13 university campuses, including Harvard University, Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, University of Louisville, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and University of Pennsylvania.

Asante was the leading theorist of a radical new academic and philosophical and cultural movement, a movement that by the 1990s had flung the terms “Afrocentric” and “Eurocentric” into common academic and popular usage. By 1987, he had released The Afrocentric Idea, outlining the Afrocentric philosophy he encouraged every African to adopt, the Afrocentric intellectual approach he encouraged every Black Studies scholar and department to adopt. Too many African people are not “looking out” at themselves, at the world, from their own “center,” but from center of Europeans that has masqueraded as the only center, Asante wrote. European religions have masqueraded as world religions. European history has masqueraded as world history. European cultures have masqueraded as cultures for the world. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” Asante (1988, pp. 104-105) argued in his revised version of Afrocentricity. There were multiple ways of seeing the world, being in the world, theorizing about the world, studying the world—not just European worldviews, cultures, theories, and methodologies. “When I call for Afrocentricity, I am . . . calling for a new historiography founded on African aspiration, visions, and concepts,” Asante (1988, p. 1) explained. Profoundly antiracist, Asante called on African people from the United States to France to Brazil to Kenya to readopt traditional African languages, names, religions, rituals, and dress. He called for the study of African people from the perspective of African people, a perspective rooted in African cultural traditions.

Asante’s own Afrocentric perspective allowed him to look at his own traditional academic training differently than most. By the time he arrived at Temple University, he had committed what he calls “academic suicide” from communications and rebirthed himself in Black Studies. Asante’s own Afrocentric perspective also allowed him to look at the 20-year-old Black Studies differently in the mid-1980s. He did not view a thriving discipline. He viewed a dying discipline. Asante’s establishment of Black doctoral studies in 1988 saved the life of Black Studies. A people will become extinct if a people cannot reproduce itself. It is the same for a discipline. Asante recognized that Black Studies had to produce and raise Black Studies scholars to survive through creating its own doctoral program.

During its first 20 years, Black Studies courses, programs, and departments had been wholly filled with people trained in other disciplines. Perhaps many, if not most, of those White and Black professors saw Black Studies as a diversifier of the existing disciplines created by White people. The Ford Foundation promoted this “integration rationale” when offering funding to found Black Studies programs and departments in the late 1960s (Rooks, 2006). The integrationists considered Black Studies to be the constructive study of Black folk by Black folk in all the existing disciplines like history, sociology, and psychology, where Black professors and subjects had traditionally been as rare as the constructive study of Black folk. They saw Black Studies as an area of study like Asia in geography.

Some of those professors resided in Temple University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and resisted Asante’s proposal for Black doctoral studies. One especially angry Black history professor wrote a letter challenging the potential program. “This shocked me because I had expected (and received) resistance from some whites but had not anticipated that a black woman would write such a cruel piece about creating a ‘ghetto’ in the university,” Asante (2011) explained in his memoir. “My response to her objections cut right to the core of the problem with her own blackness” (p. 272).

Moreover, these integrationists did not realize or denied the racist origins of their disciplines. They did not want to accept that their disciplines were racist ideas, that Black doctoral studies is an antiracist idea. The popular accounts of scientific racism do not show scientific racists founding the disciplines. These accounts have scientific racism ailing after World War I, and then scholars, the holocaust, and civil rights movement carrying scientific racism to its marginal deathbed by the 1930s or 1940s. It had long passed away from the mainstream by 1965 on the eve of birthday of Black Studies. By the time Asante created Black doctoral studies, scientific racism was ancient news, according to the traditional narrative (Degler, 1991; Gossett, 1963).

But this traditional narrative is wrong. In this essay, I interrogate the origins of scientific racism in several disciplines to understand why Asante did not believe any of these disciplines could train Black Studies scholars.

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“There is . . . no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and differ much from each other,–as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportion of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convulsions of the brain,” British biologist Charles Darwin wrote in his 1872 work, published in the United States, Descent of Man. Furthermore, Darwin contended, feeding eugenicists, that “the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.” Justifying Western colonialism, Darwin stated the “civilized races have extended, and are now everywhere extending, their range, so as to take the place of the lower races.” To Darwin, this natural selection, this evolution will create “the great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies.” This future break will be “between man in a more civilized state” with “the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla” (pp. 163, 192-193, 208). People of African descent were not subhuman closer to animals as pre–Civil War scholars maintained, but rather sub-White intermediaries closer to animals on the evolutionary scale.

Evolutionary theory galvanized a movement in the final decades of the 19th century among pioneering American academics to study the evolutionary process through measuring race differences from almost every disciplinary perspective. “Evolution and quantification formed an unholy alliance,” Stephen Jay Gould (1981, p. 1973) disclosed. And the racist claims kept coming to shore on the rising tide of numbers—quantification and even documentation—with the titans of new disciplines steering the way (Gossett, 1963).

English theorist Herbert Spencer was one of those titans. After reading Darwin and adding a new wrinkle to his evolutionary theory, Spencer coined the two terms most commonly associated with evolutionary theory: “the struggle for existence” and “the survival of the fittest.” “This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection,’ or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life,’” Spencer (1904) wrote, introducing the fabled term in Principles of Biology in 1864 (p. 530). As perhaps the most popular English intellectual for the rest of the century, Spencer argued that social engineering in any form was a futile governmental exercise. “You cannot in any considerable degree change the course of individual growth and organization—in any considerable degree antedate the stages of development” (Spencer, 1904, p. 530). At the same time, Spencer believed behavior was inherited and therefore the characteristics of the “dominant races” and the “inferior races” were hereditary. Thus, this strict conservative spoke out against many government social programs: public education, free libraries, post officers, vaccinations, welfare, and regulations of industry. He wanted nothing to interfere with natural selection. His ideas touched many maturing disciplines in the Western academy, including economics, education, biology, anthropology, psychology, and sociology (Gossett, 1963).

In fact, the major founding pioneers of both sociology and psychology in the United States were intellectual disciples of Herbert Spencer. His chief American adherent was William Graham Sumner. In 1875, Sumner taught the first course in the English-speaking world called “sociology” at Yale, focusing on the thought of Spencer and Auguste Comte. In 1881, Sumner wrote a groundbreaking essay titled “Sociology,” defining it as “the science of life in society” (Sumner, 1919, p. 167). He argued that society is dictated by the twofold “struggle for existence”: humankind versus nature, and “the competition of man with man in the effort to win a limited supply.” Spencer maintained, “The law of the survival of the fittest was not made by man and cannot be abrogated by man. We can only, by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest” (Sumner, 1919, pp. 177-178).

Sumner was an outspoken American opponent of reformers and radicals, and practically all social programs and laws benefiting the powerless. He opposed Black suffrage. He professed Jefferson “was not talking about negroes” when he declared all men to be equal, and once wrote that “a man may curse his fate because he is born of an inferior race,” but that will not change his doomed destiny (Gossett, 1963, pp. 153-154).

As a disciple of Spencer, Sumner was not alone in America’s burgeoning crop of sociologists. According to Charles Cooley, a founding member and eighth president of the American Sociological Association from the University of Michigan, Spencer’s writings lured most of the new sociologists from 1870 to 1890 toward the infant discipline. And Spencer’s popularity among the businessmen on many of the collegiate boards of trustees accelerated the founding of new sociology departments (Gossett, 1963). In addition, Spencer also influenced G. Stanley Hall, who earned the first doctorate in psychology in the United States in 1878. Two of Spencer’s books published in 1860—Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical and System of Philosophy on the Basis of the Doctrine of Evolution—became Hall’s “intellectual bibles” (Goodchild, 2012, p. 65). Hall, a specialist in child psychology, went on to open the first American experimental psychology research laboratory at John Hopkins in 1883, started the American Journal of Psychology in 1887, and became the first president of the American Psychological Association when it formed in 1892.

Hall, therefore, is the founding father of American psychology. Hall built on Spencer’s (and Haeckel’s) concept that the mind of the child recapitulates the history of the human race in its evolution from savagery to civilization. Hall used this evolutionary theory of recapitulation to suggest that people of African descent (or rather all the non-White races) were just beginning evolution in a naturally arrested childhood (Gossett, 1963).

If a nation reduces the number of unfit, inferior, childlike peoples, then it will reduce crime, Cesare Lombroso conjectured. An Italian prison doctor, founder of the Italian school of criminology, and to many, the father of criminology, Lombroso ushered Darwin’s theory of evolution into the study of criminals. He was one of the chief scholarly contributors to biological positivism in criminology or innate criminality through his Criminal Man, released in 1876. “Crime. . .appears to be a natural phenomenon,” he once wrote (Gould, 1981, pp. 123-126). And, he conjectured crime to be a normal phenomenon among the savage races.

In his lifetime, Lombroso released five editions of Criminal Man, each time arguing more forcefully about innate criminality. In all, he published more than 30 books on jurisprudence and crime. Lombroso also suggested the criminal had a physical manifestation that marked an evolutionary retrogression that could be studied, measured, and quantified, which he did in his scrupulous examinations of criminals. Lombroso’s ideas influenced criminologists building the discipline in the final quarter of the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Actually a student of Lombroso, Italian law professor Raffaele Garofalo, invented the term criminology (criminologia) in 1885 (Gould, 1981, pp. 123-126).

Lombroso’s new discipline came to America in 1888 upon the publication of a scholarly article summarizing Lombroso’s work. Releasing his compendium The Criminal in 1890, English physician Havelock Ellis was most responsible for popularizing Lombroso into the United States (Gibson, 2002). Anthropological Society President Robert Fletcher praised Lombroso in his retirement address in 1891. “The influence of hereditary,” he said, “in the formation of criminal character has been long since admitted” (Degler, 1991, pp. 35-36).

Scientific racists like Lombroso’s American disciples dominated the scholarship and the curriculums. During no other period in the history of American higher education did scientific racists have such a stranglehold on the academy. Ironically, during this same period, the American university system emerged, boosting the size and power of the scholarly community. The swelling force of American scholars mimicked the highly esteemed German model, specializing and splintering scholarship into discipline-based departments, elevating research over teaching in the diffusion of knowledge, and erecting doctoral programs. As racist ideas jumped off their scholarly pages, American scholars were especially enamored with the German ideal of the disinterested, unbiased pursuit of truth through original scholarly studies, and academic freedom to propagandize African inferiority and European superiority.

In 1879, G. Stanley Hall observed, understating the point, that “the influence of German modes of thought in America is very great and is probably increasing” (Hall, 1879, p. 178). Yale offered the first doctoral degree in 1860. By 1876, about two dozen institutions conferred a mere 44 doctorates. By 1918, more than 500 doctorates were being awarded annually, as the doctorate and thus ratified academic research had become the prerequisite for a collegiate professorship.

John Hopkins University, founded in 1876, emerged as one of the preeminent centers of graduate schooling and scholarship. It was there in 1880 that Herbert Baxter Adams began his famous graduate seminar, introducing the first scholarly historical series. Adams, who “thought it difficult for black and white men to live peaceably together with equal civil rights,” trained America’s first generation of professional historians (Meier & Rudwick, 1986, p. 3). As Adams helped found the American Historical Association in 1884, geologist Nathaniel Southgate Shaler published A First Book of Geology (Shaler, 1884a), and as the dean of the Lawrence Science School made Harvard the center for geological research in America. That year, he also found time to write “The Negro Problem” (Shaler, 1884b), in Atlantic Monthly in which he championed the disenfranchisement of African Americans since they were physiologically incapable of overcoming the lower moral passions of life. In 1904, Shaler published The Neighbor: The Natural History of Human Contacts and pledged that African Americans are and will remain the patients of civilization.

Two years after Shaler’s piece, former slaveholder and Columbia professor John William Burgess established the Political Science Quarterly in 1886 on route to establishing himself as the father of political science in the United States. Burgess (1903) professed that Reconstruction was the rule “of uncivilized Negroes over the whites of the South” and that “a black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind” (pp. 133, 218). To allow them to become politicians, “and to do this in communities with a large white population is simply to establish barbarism in power over civilization” (p. 133). Curiously, Burgess prided himself and his students on rigorous scientific, detached study, helping to carry the German model to Columbia and the American academy.

Burgess did not merely view the creation of his Political Science Quarterly in 1886; he witnessed the launch of the career of his greatest student—William Archibald Dunning. Known as the premier of the Dunning School of Reconstruction history at Columbia, Dunning racially reconstructed the Reconstruction era more than any other scholar, while becoming one of the most influential historians of his day. Aside from Herbert Baxter Adams, it is hard to imagine another scholar as critical to the early growth of the discipline of history. “For the first time meticulous and thorough research was carried on in an effort to determine the truth rather than to prove a thesis,” was how Beale (1940) described the impact of the Dunning school (p. 807). In reality, the more than a dozen “model” studies of Reconstruction on Southern states issued by the Dunning School were based on the same thesis: sympathy for the White supremacist South, scorn or silence about the Black South, and that the North mistakenly forced federal intervention during Reconstruction but corrected itself after a decade by leaving the South to its own wits. Dunning (1907) contended that “all the forces that made for civilization were dominated by a mass of barbarous freedmen” (p. 212). From 1886 until his death in 1922, Dunning trained a generation of duteous researchers, who were also duteously carrying racist ideas to the helms of history departments around the nation (as Burgess sent racists to new political science departments). Some of Dunning’s more influential students were Vanderbilt department head Walter L. Fleming (1874-1932), principal slavery historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877-1934), UNC Chapel Hill department head J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton (1878-1961), and University of Texas professor Charles W. Ramsdell (1877-1942), known widely as the “dean” of southern historiography (Taylor, 1938).

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Rudimentary education suited African Americans better, if any education at all, because they had “peculiar mental temperament which has become hereditary and general, or a nature to disqualify them for the atmosphere of modern enlightenment.” University of Pennsylvania professor Daniel G. Brinton offered these words in August 1895 during his presidential address to the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science. The fitting title of his talk was “The Aims of Anthropology.” Although accepting “psychical unity” between the races, he posited that “ethnic or racial peculiarities,” not environment, were “the factors of culture-evolution.” Thus, the races were not “equally endowed,” and “the black, brown, and red races” cannot “escape the mental correlations [sic] of its physical structure.” Brinton concluded that differences in humankind’s “component social parts, its races, nations, tribes . . . supply the only sure foundations for legislation; no a priori notions of the rights of man” (Lofgren, 1988, pp. 104-105). The U.S. Supreme Court agreed a year later, upholding the constitutionality of segregationist legislation and making the “separate but equal” doctrine the law of the land in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. The American academy had embraced slavery with scientific approval. Now, it was embracing and approving Jim Crow.

There were many disciplinary arms fiercely embracing Jim Crow with the arms of their racist ideas in the 1890s. Medical statistician Frederick Hoffman was the seventh president of the American Statistical Association and a founder of the American Lung Association and American Cancer Society. One of America’s preeminent pioneers in public health research, Hoffman’s The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro in 1896 catapulted him into scientific celebrity in the Western world. Packed with statistical tables and published by the American Economic Association, Hoffman “proved” that African Americans racially inherited extreme mortality rates and high rates of disease due to their inherent immorality. They were dying out as a race, he argued, and their very existence posed a threat to those of “Aryan descent.” As the vice president of Prudential Insurance Company, his research popularized the racist myth of the uninsurable African American with “excessive mortality,” particularly in life insurance, segregating this industry for almost a century (Gossett, 1963; B. Hoffman, 2001).

One of the tightest holds in the 1890s on the diseased academy was undoubtedly sociology. Sumner’s contemporaries, Spencer’s ideological pupils, were making them proud. Albion Small, a native of Maine who had studied in Germany, established the nation’s first sociology department at the University of Chicago in 1892, and founded the American Journal of Sociology in 1895. In 1894, Small published the discipline’s first major textbook, An Introduction to the Study of Society, along with George E. Vincent, a fellow at the University of Chicago and future president of the University of Minnesota and American Sociological Association. “The race question is full of interest to the sociologist,” Small and Vincent wrote. “Are differences of race so fundamental that it is impossible to combine all of them into organic unity, is the problem which confronts many nations, especially the United States” (Small & Vincent, 1984, p. 179). The authors went on to proclaim that America “is to be the laboratory where the combining possibilities of races will be tested.” They listed only three outcomes for the “weaker” races: extinction, slavery, or assimilation. “Many fear the first possibility for the Indians; the second fate is often predicted for the negroes; while the third is anticipated for the Chinese and other Eastern peoples” (Small & Vincent, 1984, p. 179).

While Small’s textbook entered sociology classrooms in 1894, Franklin Giddings, the former journalist and Bryn Mawr professor, entered Columbia’s faculty as the first full professor of sociology in the United States, and his department’s founding chairman. Behind his veil as one of America’s leading quantitative sociologists, Giddings’s racism was ubiquitous and long-tenured as he published until his death in 1931. Giddings spent his career describing and classifying people (including races) into natural hierarchies—products of evolution. Giddings categorized people, physically and mentally, into an “inventive” group with extraordinary bodily vigor and life span, an “imitative” group with adequate bodily vigor and life span, and a “defective group” with poor bodily vigor and life span. To Giddings, White people filled the inventive group, which ruled societies (and the lower groups), while the defective group was filled with Black folk nearing extinction. Furthermore, Giddings surmised there were four stages of human evolution: zoogenic (animals), anthropogenic (savage people), ethnogeny (semi-civilized), and demogenic (civilized). “The beliefs and customs of civilized peoples contain many survivals of beliefs and practices that still exist in full force in savage communities,” he wrote in 1911 when he was the third president of the American Sociological Association. “These indicate not only that civilized nations have developed from savagery, but that existing savage hordes are in a state of arrested development, and therefore approximately in the condition of primitive men.” These natural racial hierarchies led to permanent conflicts, Giddings believed, in what Spencer called “the struggle for existence” (Watkins, 2001, pp. 64-65, 74-75).

Giddings, Small, Sumner, and Lester Ward can be considered the four founders of American sociology. They were the first four presidents of the American Sociological Association, founded in 1905. The association’s fifth president was Social Darwinist Edward A. Ross at the University of Wisconsin. And the sixth president in 1916 was Vincent, who partnered with Small on their pioneering, though racist, sociological textbook. Lester Ward, who had been recently named the sociology chair at Brown University, claimed the association’s first presidency in 1906 (Gossett, 1963). Like his trio of fellow founders, he championed the use of the scientific method. But unlike them, he was no conservative. If anything, many of his sociological positions were ahead of their time. Generally though, on race, he seemed to be more confined to his age. Most troubling was Ward’s position on lynching, a diabolical act of White supremacy that peaked throughout the nation at the turn of the century. In a textbook he used at Brown University, Ward (1921) claimed that Black men who raped White women and White mobs lynching in retaliation were both ordered by nature. The Black rapist was impelled by an “imperious voice of nature commanding him at the risk of ‘lynch law’ to raise his race to a little higher level.” And

although the enraged citizens who pursue, capture, and “lynch” the offender do not know any more than their victim that there are impelled to do so by the biological law of race preservation, still it is this unconscious imperative, far more than the supposed sense of outraged decency, that impels them to the performance of a much greater and more savage “crime” than the poor wretch has committed. (Ward, 1921, p. 359)

Extremities, illogic, and unscientific works were normal in America in 1900, normal among the scientific racists who dominated the academy. Most scholars simply were silent on the African subject. But those who spoke almost always lectured with ridicule and condescension. Historians were justifying slavery and writing against the evil days of Reconstruction. Anthropologists and sociologists were situating African people as either sub-White or subhuman on the evolutionary scale close to the ape. Political scientists were proclaiming that they were unworthy of the ballot, unworthy of American citizenship. Biologists were finding their physical features beastlike or inferior to Whites. Psychologists were quantifying their primal immorality and ignorance. Criminologists were proclaiming them a national menace. Educators were championing training for submission as the penultimate pedagogy for African Americans. Physicians were gauging their disease levels and predicting eventual extinction, while eugenicists were calling for their immediate eradication. Ironically, all of this came in the age of zealous avowals of detached, unbiased, scientific assessments (Lewis, 2013). All of this was rushing into journals and book stores as the American academy was proclaiming itself to be undergoing a revolution toward objectivity and the mass use of the scientific method.

In 1901, the father of American geography denigrated Black people in the section “races of man” in his Physical Geography. After stating that the “separation of the continent” has divided “mankind into several races,” Harvard’s William Morris Davis, and his co-author, William Henry Snyder, labeled “Eurasia” the greatest continent. They claimed “the leading nations of [‘the European race’] are the most advanced peoples of the world” (pp. 111-112). Born to Philadelphia Quakers and a former assistant to Shaler at Harvard, Davis became the leading geographer of his period. He established geomorphology, particularly the cycle of erosion, and built the discipline of geography in the American academy, helping to found the Association of American Geographers in 1904. Davis trained some of the century’s leading geographers, such as Mark Jefferson, Isaiah Bowman, and Ellsworth Huntington.

The first generation of Black doctorates was trained during this era when most White Americans questioned, if not outright rejected, Black brain power. A vocal minority of White scholars and administrators believed African Americans did have brains in the early 20th century. And to have brains at the time, to many of these White scholars, was to have erudition in the study of Europeans. Both W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1890s and Carter G. Woodson (1908-1912)—the first and second Black doctorates at Harvard University—took courses in only (White) American and European history. For example, Woodson’s biographer surmises that he took “The First Eight Christian Centuries,” “The Church in the Middle Ages,” two English history courses, and classes in German and French history. His American history class was with Edward Channing, who Woodson later said did not merely belittle the role of Blacks in American history in class, but argued Black people had no history (Goggin, 1993). His dissertation adviser, Albert Bushnell Hart, who had also advised Du Bois, did not seem much better. Again and again in his book, Hart (1910) termed African Americans the “inferior race” and at times questioned their intellectual capacity. Hart served as a Howard trustee for 24 years and in 1926 opposed the selection of the university’s first Black president (Winston, 1971).

But perhaps no White scholar was more influential in advising some of the earliest Black professors than Franz Boas. A German Jew, Boas had immigrated to the United States in 1886 when racial classifiers were almost uniformly identifying Jews as “swarthy” or Black. The “predominant mouth of some Jews being the result of the presence of black blood,” one anthropologist maintained. “The Jew possess certain racial characteristics of organic inferiority through which he differs from the non-Jew,” another physician maintained. Depictions reigned about sickly and weak Jewish immigrants unable to cope with hard urban American life. Boas, therefore, was subjected to racist ideas about Jews that no doubt shaped him as he began his anthropology career studying Native Americans. Then, again he recycled the racist idea about the Negro. “The brain of the Negro does not grow and develop as long as that of the white man,” he lectured in 1896. But “we must not interpret the fact as meaning that the Negro cannot attain a culture such as the one which we now possess” (Roberts, 2011, pp. 87-88).

In 1899, Boas established the first doctorate granting anthropology department in the United States at Columbia University. By 1911, Boas had emerged as one of the nation’s leading and most controversial anthropologists when he published his classic, The Mind of Primitive Man. Boas (1911) asserted “North American negroes . . . in culture and language” are “essentially European” (p. 127). A decade later, Boas (1921) proclaimed that

the negro problem will not disappear in America until the negro blood has been so much diluted that it will no longer be recognized just as anti-Semitism will not disappear until the vestige of the Jew as a Jew has disappeared. (p. 395).

As the Jews, Irish, and Poles were becoming White, Boas desired the same for African Americans.

Boas saw, assimilationists saw, the United States as a melting pot, the title of a 1909 play by immigrant Israel Zangwill. The play’s hero shouts, “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!” The color of the liquid in Zangwill’s melting pot, in Boas’s melting pot? White. Boas had no problem with Jews and Blacks becoming White (Painter, 2010).

Boas emerged in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, as perhaps the leading American critic of negative eugenics. Negative eugenics sought to massacre or sterilize the “inferior” unfit groups, and many of the founders of American disciplines supported this movement. In 1939, the Carnegie Foundation pulled its funding from the movement’s headquarters, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, and eugenicist Harry Laughlin resigned as secretary of the lab’s Eugenics Record Office. It marked the end of the public legitimacy of the social policy. And American eugenicists were shamed into a mass retreat when reports surfaced in the early 1940s of American eugenicists deep and abiding connections to the holocaust of Jews and others “inferiors” (Roberts, 1997).

With the holocaust still raw, the newly formed United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) assembled an international dream team of race scholars in Paris in December 1949. They were charged with drawing up the final authoritative rebuttal to Nazi-style eugenics and scientific racism, and to a lesser extent Jim Crow and apartheid. Anthropologist Ashley Montagu, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky accompanied the American delegation. The panel was stacked with assimilationists, showcasing their control over the racial discourse, showcasing their reduction of racism to biological racism that allowed them to knowingly or unknowingly hide their cultural racism, their Eurocentric ideas.

“No Scientific Basis for Race Bias Found By World Panel of Experts,” rang the front-page headline of the New York Times on July 18, 1950, joining the world in announcing the publication of UNESCO’s landmark “Statement on Race.” “Scientists,” the statement began, “have reached general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one,” part of the “same species . . . probably derived from the same common stock.” The drafters of the 1950 UNESCO statement on race substantiated what become known as dual-evolution theory. Differences “between groups” are due to the operation of “evolutionary factors” and different frequencies “of one or more genes.” But genetic “likenesses among men are far greater than their differences,” the scholars stated. “There is no proof that the groups of mankind differ in innate mental characteristics,” or that race mixture yields “bad results” (Statement on race, Paris, July 1950, 1969a, pp. 30-35). A day after announcing the “Statement on Race,” the Times praised the statement writers for their “valuable service” in presenting a “truth that needs popularization,” stressing its impact on anti-Semitism and other forms of European racism, refusing to popularize its impact on American race relations (Montagu, 1950).

The Statement mandated: Though the races have physiological and genetic differences, they are equivalent in value—no human populations have any biological evolutionary achievements. Did the scholars make the same case about culture? No. The panel suggested that the “history of the cultural experience” of each group, and not “inherited genetic differences,” is the “major factor” in “producing the differences between the cultures and cultural achievements of different peoples or groups” [emphasis added]. Either there is a universal standard that judges “cultural achievements” and creates a hierarchy of cultures as cultural racists believe, or every culture should be judged from its own standards as Asante has maintained in his Afrocentric scholarship.

But even this panel’s unyielding biological antiracism sparked a critical stampede of geneticists and physical anthropologists running down the 1950 statement as overly political and dependent on sociology. The stampede did not end until they reached their own UNESCO conference in Paris to issue a revised “Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences” in 1951. The second committee of experts rejected the “racialist position regarding purity of the races and hierarchy of inferiority and superior races to which this leads.” And yet, these anthropologists and geneticists—including Montagu and Dobzhansky—differentiated between “non-literate people” and their capacity to be civilized like the “more civilized people”—deeming knowledge of European languages the standard of literacy to forestall having to speak of Germans being illiterate in Wolof and Swahili. While the 1950 statement affirmed the absence of mental differences, these scholars stated,

It is possible, though not proved, that some types of innate capacity for intellectual and emotional responses are commoner in one human group than in another, but it is certain that, within a single group, innate capacities vary as much as, if not more than, they do between different groups. (“Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences,” 1969b, pp. 36-43).

This statement within the UNESCO Race Statement of 1951 became a manifesto of sorts, as scientific racists set out to prove these innate racial differences in intelligence.

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By founding Black doctoral studies, Asante freed Black Studies in 1988 of the contradiction of depending on scholars trained in historically racist disciplines. This essay revealed the founding racist fathers of the disciplines of sociology, psychology, criminology, geology, geography, political science, history, anthropology, and public health. Almost every discipline in the American academy has been bred in racism. Segregationists expressing Black biological and cultural inferiority founded most of the disciplines in the 19th century and assimilationists expressing cultural inferiority transformed them in the 20th century. But the histories of scientific racism—let alone the disciplines—rarely feature the pioneering scientific racists who birthed and reared disciplines. By hiding this history, the racist origins of these disciplines are buried. In burying the racist origins of these disciplines, we are not able to see Asante’s radically antiracist idea: Black doctoral studies.