Concluding commentary on Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s The Races of Mankind:

Race prejudice isn’t an old universal “instinct.” It is hardly a hundred years old. Before that, people persecuted Jews because of their religion-not their ”blood”

Jews have been treated differently because they are different, they demand to be treated differently. Their ancient cover story, which is a lie, is that the difference is just religion. Jewishness is a racial identity in the sense it is inherited, that there are distinct jewish blood lines. Jews as a group are are biologically distinct from other groups.

They will think we were crazy. “Why should race prejudice have swept the western worid,” they will say, “where no nation was anything but a mixture of all kinds of racial groups? Why did nations just at that moment begin talking about ‘the racial purity’ of their blood? Why did they talk of their wars as racial wars? Why did they make people suffer, not because they were criminals or double-crossers, but because they were Jews or Negroes or non-Nordic?”

The same reason any group of people does anything. They think it’s the RIGHT thing to do, they have different ideas WHY it is RIGHT. Some think in universal terms, others more particularist. The example here is that a variety of deceitful arguments – based on “science”, religion, etc – have been used to convince people that the RIGHT way was the way that was best for those who were afraid of being excluded.

The Russian nation has for a generation shown what can be done to outlaw race prejudice in a country with many kinds of people. They did not wait for people’s minds to change. They made racial discrimination and persecution illegal.

Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States:

In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.

J. Stalin

January 12, 1931

No part of the Russian program has had greater success than their racial program.

Yet when the USSR collapsed in 1991 it divided along racial/ethnic lines.

What Is Being Done?

In the United States a considerable number of organizations are working for democratic race equality.

Benedict and Weltfish dedicate 4-5 pages to describing the organized efforts to impose their anti-“racist” ideology on others.

The Rosenwald Foundation has sponsored southern Negro schools, elementary, high school, and college, in order to make up for the deficiencies of southern Negro education.

THE CHURCHES

. . . race superiority or inferiority are un-Christian

COMMISSION ON INTERRACIAL COOPERATION

Some information about the CIC. Commission on Interracial Cooperation, Wikipedia:

Will W. Alexander, pastor of a local white Methodist church, was head of the organization

was formed in the aftermath of violent race riots that occurred [in 1917]

In spite of its official “interracial” title, the commission was formed primarily by liberal white Southerners.

African Americans and whites had meetings to confer the African American’s problems

Commission on Interracial Cooperation, NCpedia:

with support from the Julius Rosenwald Fund

Julius Rosenwald, Wikipedia, born in 1862 to a jewish immigrant couple:

He established his Rosenwald Fund in 1917 for “the well-being of mankind.”

his fund donated over 70 million dollars to public schools, colleges and universities, museums, Jewish charities and black institutions

Back to The Races of Mankind:

BY UNIONS

when Negroes were first placed on machines previously manned by white operators, a work stoppage shut down a whole section of the Packard plant. R. J. Thomas the president of the [United Auto Workers] union, ordered the white strikers to return to work or suffer loss of union membership and employment. Within a few hours the strikers were back, with the recently promoted Negroes still at their machines.

Where “science” and argument failed the anti-Whites used threats and sanctions.

THE GOVERNMENT

The justification here was to loosen racial restrictions to maximize the workforce for the war effort, in effect not letting a good crisis go to waste.

COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES

Beaumont, Texas, similar effective action was not undertaken and a serious riot occurred.

JUST FOLKS

In the most disastrous of recent riots in Detroit, a number of obscure bystanders performed heroic actions.

From a History Channel program, Stories from the Road to Freedom, 2013:

In 1943, there were 68 racial confrontations at U.S. military bases.

Naturally. The consequences of compulsory integration were and still are disastrous and destructive for Whites. The anti-“racist” thrust in 1943 was to champion integration. The thrust today has shifted to demonizing any Whites who ever opposed or now advocate ending it.

The conclusion of The Races of Mankind sums up its purpose:

The Challenge

With America’s great tradition of democracy, the United States should clean its own house and get ready for a better twenty-first century. Then it could stand unashamed before the Nazis and condemn, without confusion, their doctrines of a Master Race. Then it could put its hand to the building of the United Nations Organization, sure of support from all the yellow and black races where the war was fought, sure that victory in this war is to be in the name, not of one race or another, but of the universal Human Race.

This was a lecture about what “we” should do, based on lies and wishful thinking. This characteristically jewish shaming and guilt-tripping has only gotten worse as Whites have ceded power in the name of equality. The equalization of non-Whites, non-Europeans, has produced ever more explicit efforts to boost non-Whites. It has all come at the expense of Whites.

As mentioned in Race and Fraud: Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, United Productions of America (UPA) produced an animated cartoon based on the pamplet 1945/1946. Two versions are available on YouTube. The Brotherhood of Man – Post-WWII Animated Cartoon Against Prejudice and Racism (1946) is in color. The Brotherhood of Man (1946) is in black and white. A credit screen announces:

SPONSORED AS A CONTRIBUTION TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BY THE UAW-CIO

There are 4 characters:

• narrator – calm, confident, all-knowing “scientist” (jewish/communist anthropologist)
• White guy – naive optimistic rube, target of the propaganda
• green devil – paranoid, nervous, the scapegoat
• non-Whites – non-entity stereotypes, inert except to cheer on White naivete

Narrator: Everyone has his own special dream about what the world’s going to be like in the future, but we all know it’s steadily shrinking. One of these days we’re going to wake up and find the people and places we used to just read about are practically in our own back yard.

White rube: It’s happened!

Green devil: Uh unh, I don’t like the looks of this.

White rube: Why not? It’s going to be wonderful!

Green devil: Ahh, it’ll never work. We can’t get along with those people. They’re too different.

White rube: We’ll get along. We’ve got to. The future of civilization depends on brotherhood!

Non-Whites: YAYYYYYYY!

The cartoon boils the jewish anti-“racist” fraud down to its essence: Disingenuous propaganda, aimed directly at Whites, intended to convince us, even with outright lies, that we must share our societies with everyone else, and to oppose this is stupid, crazy, or evil.

Like the pamphlet, the cartoon concludes with an appeal to utopian fantasy – if “we” give “everyone” an “equal chance”, “then we can all go forward together”. The burden is placed on “we” Whites to subordinate our own best interests for benefit of everyone else.

Seventy years on, we know how this vision turns out. There is little pretense any more that “everyone” is or even should be trying to move forward together. There is no equality. The negative consequences which inevitably arise when this false ideological belief meet biological reality are constantly and consistently blamed on Whites.

Margaret Mead’s obituary for Ruth Benedict in American Ethnography Quasimonthly, 1948:

The small pamphlet, Races of Mankind, which she wrote with Gene Weltfish, went into millions of copies, was translated into film, and film script and cartoon forms, and has proved perhaps the most important single translation into genuine popular education of the many years of careful research on race differences to which anthropologists have made a major contribution.

I couldn’t fit this into the podcast, but I think it’s worth considering this epitome of jewish/communist fraud concerning race that we’ve examined in detail for these past four installments, and contrasting it with White anthropolgy, before it was derailed, as typified by this article, also titled The Races of Mankind, written by Edward Tylor and published in the July 1881 issue of Popular Science Monthly.

These excerpts illustrate a clear and objective understanding of race, sixty years before the WWII-era propaganda calculated to sow doubt and confusion about it:

ANTHROPOLOGY finds race-differences most clearly in stature and proportions of limbs, conformation of the skull and the brain within, characters of features, skin, eyes, and hair, peculiarities of constitution, and mental and moral temperament.

In comparing races as to their stature, we concern ourselves not with the tallest or shortest men of each tribe, but with the ordinary or average-sized men who may be taken as fair representatives of their whole tribe.

It thus appears that a race is a body of people comprising a regular set of variations, which center round one representative type. In the same way a race or nation is estimated as to other characters.

The people whom it is easiest to represent by single portraits are uncivilized tribes, in whose food and way of life there is little to cause difference between one man and another, and who have lived together and intermarried for many generations.

It is not enough to look at a race of men as a mere body of people happening to have a common type or likeness. For the reason of their likeness is plain, and indeed our calling them a race means that we consider them a breed whose common nature is inherited from common ancestors. Now, experience of the animal world shows that a race or breed, while capable of carrying on its likeness from generation to generation, is also capable of varying.

As the influence and power of jews increased, jewish views on race came to prevail. False uncertainty transformed gradually into outright condemnation. Social Evolutionism, Anthropological Theories – Department of Anthropology – The University of Alabama:

[Marvin] Harris called Morgan and Tylor racists (1968:137,140), but they were some of the great thinkers of their time. Today, students continue to learn Tylor’s definition of culture and all cultural anthropology classes discuss Morgan’s stages of development. These men got the ball rolling in terms of anthropological theory.

Marvin Harris is on the Jews in Anthropology short list.

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More on Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s The Races of Mankind:

BLOOD THE SAME

For ages men have spoken of ‘blood relations” as if different peoples had different blood. Some people have shouted that if we got into our veins the blood of someone with a different head shape, eye color, hair texture, or skin color, we should get some of that person’s physical and mental characteristics.

Modern science has revealed this to be pure superstition. All human blood is the same, whether it is the blood of an Eskimo or a Frenchman, of the “purest” German “Aryan” or an African pygmy— except for one medically important difference. This medical difference was discovered when doctors first began to use blood transfusion in order to save life. In early attempts at transfusion it was discovered that “agglutination” or clumping together of the red cells sometimes occurred and caused death. Gradually investigators learned that there are four types of blood, called O, A, B, and AB, and that although blood typed O can be mixed successfully with the other three, none of these can be mixed with one another without clumping.

These four types of blood are inherited by each child from its forebears. But whites, Negroes, Mongols, and all races of man have all these blood types. The color of their skin does not tell at all which blood type they have. You and an Australian bush-man may have the same blood type.

For ages the use of blood as a metaphor for inheritance was a reasonable, intuitive understanding of the mechanics.

Rather than mocking this as “pure superstition”, and falsely insisting that “all human blood is the same”, someone interested in making an honest argument concerning blood and heritability based on science could have cited August Weismann’s germ plasm theory (“inheritance only takes place by means of the egg and sperm cells”) and the Weismann barrier (“other cells of the body—somatic cells—do not function as agents of heredity”), which had been known since c1900.

Ongoing scientific inquiry, known as genetics, had by 1943 further refined the understanding of the mechanism of heritability. Among the more prominent geneticists were the “purest” German “Aryans”, scientists like Alfred Ploetz and Fritz Lenz.

The blood intuition was valid in the sense that head shape and other heritable traits are encoded within our bodies. If the “blood” (which we now understand is DNA) could be changed then the expression of those traits would change. A more realistic example is what happens when one person “mixes their blood” with another to produce children.

Benedict and Weltfish minimize blood differences, ignoring what was understood about the relation to race even in 1943: that the distribution of blood types among races is distinctive.

As the American Red Cross puts it, even in today’s extreme anti-“racist” zeitgeist:

Different ethnic and racial groups … have different frequency of the main blood types in their populations.

There are other significant facts about blood type and race, some understood in 1943 and others which have come to light since. RH- is entirely a White trait, highest in the Basque at 20-35%, 15% among Europeans in general, near 0% in everyone else. Amerindians and Australoids are nearly 100% O+. In addition to A, B, AB, and O, there are many less common, lesser known blood subtypes which are unique to certain ethnic groups.

If you’re European there’s a good chance you have some combination of A, B, or RH- blood, and in this case the blood of an Australian bushman is almost certainly incompatible.

The best donor for blood or organs are those most biochemically compatibile with the recipient. This is more likely to be a close relative. The more different genetically, the less likely they are compatible.

Having more people like yourself around you increases the likelyhood of blood/organ compatibility. Diversity and race mixing reduces that likelyhood. When it comes to blood, diversity is plainly not a strength.

Returning to The Races of Mankind:

COLOR

Finally, let us take skin color, the most noticeable of the differences between peoples. Few traits have been used as widely to classify people. We all talk about black, white, and yellow races of man.

Recently scientists found that skin color is determined by two special chemicals. One of these, carotene, gives a yellow tinge; the other, melanin, contributes the brown.

People of browner complexions simply have more melanin in their skin, people of yellowish color more carotene. It is not an all-or-nothing difference; it is a difference in proportion. Your skin color is due to the amount of these chemicals present in the skin.

So the visible difference in skin color is caused by an underlying chemical difference, which ultimately reflects a biological, genetic heritable difference. The key, here again, is that races exhibit different distributions, different proportions.

In other words it is evidence in favor of the reality and significance of race, not against it.

HOW ARE RACES CLASSIFIED?

THE three primary races of the world have their strongest developments in areas A, B, and C on the map on page 9. In these parts of the world most of the inhabitants not only have the same skin color but the same hair texture and noses. A is the area of the Caucasian Race, B of the Mongoloid Race, C of the Negroid Race.

The Caucasian Race inhabits Europe and a great part of the Near East and India. It is subdivided in broad bands that run east and west: Nordics (fair-skinned, blue-eyed, tall, and long- headed) are most common in the north; Alpines (in-between skin color, often stocky, broad-headed) in the middle; Mediterraneans (slenderer, often darker than Alpines, long-headed) in the south. The distribution of racial subtypes is just about the same in Germany and in France; both are mostly Alpine and both have Nordics in their northern districts. Racially, France and Germany are made up of the same stocks in just about equal proportions.

American Indians are Mongoloid, though they differ physically both among themselves and from the Mongols of China.

The natives of Australia are sometimes called a fourth primary race.

In the map A is centered on Sweden, B on China, and C on Congo. Benedict and Weltfish continue to minimize the differences, both by literally minimizing their geographic extent, and by glossing over the many different shades, eg. the very black skin in India and Australia.

It is a willful blindness, interesting in contrast to illustrator Ad Reinhardt’s later Black paintings, the “art” of which was in the appreciation of the significance of subtle, near imperceptible shades of black.

This portion of the pamphlet presents a general understanding of race that could just as well have been written by any contemporary proponent of race, eugenics or racial hygiene. Benedict and Weltfish acknowledge the existence of “racial subtypes” (Nordic, Alpine, Med) amongst Europeans, and the difference of opinion over the number of major races – without using these points as arguments against race. Instead they cite it to steal for themselves a measure of sciency credibility in support their ulterior anti-“racist” agenda, specifically to prepare the ground for the next issue, which is at the very heart of that agenda:

THERE IS NO JEWISH “RACE”.

Aryans, Jews, Italians are not races. Aryans are people who speak Indo-European, “Aryan” languages. Hitler used the term in many ways— sometimes for blond Europeans, including the Scandinavian; sometimes for Germans, whether blond or brunet; sometimes for all who agreed with him politically, including the Japanese. As Hitler used it, the term “Aryan” had no meaning, racial, linguistic, or otherwise.

Jews are people who acknowledge the Jewish religion. They are of all races, even Negro and Mongolian, European Jews are of many different biological types; physically they resemble the populations among whom they live. The so-called “Jewish type” is a Mediterranean type, and no more “Jewish” than the South Italian. Wherever Jews are persecuted or discriminated against they cling to their old ways and keep apart from the rest of the population and develop so-called “Jewish” traits. But these are not racial or “Jewish”; they disappear under conditions where assimilation is easy.

I don’t know about Hitler’s use of the term Aryan. Perhaps someone who does can leave a comment about it. The arguments this pamphlet makes where Hitler is concerned are a kind of fallacy, increasingly common since WWII, known as Reductio ad Hitlerum.

Beyond Hitler, they’re deliberately obfuscating reality which is not difficult to explain. Aryan is not simply linguistic, no more than jew is simply a religion. Aryans were a people who left traces of their language, artifacts, and genetics among those they conquered. Jewish traits are racial in the sense that they are heritable, genetically based.

Benedict and Weltfish misrepresent the cause and effect of jewish distinctiveness and “persecution”, which is more objectively (scientifically) understood in terms of mutual alienation, not the one-sided narrative favorable to jews that they present.

Jewish genetic differences arose and were maintained by jews discriminating and separating themselves from their host populations, on the whole refusing to intermarry. Jews don’t assimilate, otherwise they would long ago have ceased to exist. The core of jewry is utterly hostile to assimilation of jews to their hosts. Instead they organize and demand and generally get special rights and privileges for themselves, causing the host to assimilate to their desires and way of seeing things. Even supposedly assimilated jews lend their hands to this effort.

Religion is one component, but the key component of jewish identity is biological, not ideological. It is an identity passed from parents to children, whether their children want it or not.

Harlan Schulke and Carolyn Yeager had an insightful discussion of jewish identity in the first half of How the translator affects meanings in the Protocols of Zion.

Benedict and Weltfish continue:

Italians are a nationality, Italians are of many different racial strains; the “typical” South Italian is a Mediterranean, more like the Spaniard or the Greek or the Levantine Jew than the blond North Italian. The Germans, the Russians, and all other nations of Europe are nations, not races.

This is argument by conflation and confusion. The classic meaning of “nation” is roughly equivalent to “racial strain”. The use of “nation” as a synonym for country or state causes misunderstanding. The existence of several “racial strains” within the borders of a single country doesn’t mean that “racial strain” isn’t racial in nature.

This disingenous argument leads directly into the next:

Racial Mixture

As far back in time as the scientist can go he finds proof that animals and men moved about in the world. There were different kinds of animals, and many of them went great distances. But wherever they went, the different kinds could not breed together. A tiger cannot mate with an elephant. Even a fox and a woif cannot mate with each other. But whenever groups of people have traveled from one place to another and met other people, some of them have married and had children.

Lions and tigers are capable of breeding. Likewise wolves and dogs. Left to themselves, in nature, they generally don’t. Primates and even humans, left to ourselves, demonstrate a similar, general aversion to mixing. The Aryan conquerers in India codified the aversion as caste. In the US there were laws against miscegenation. An objective scientist, who could set his “race”/anti-“racist” agenda aside, would recognize both the capability of mixing and tendency to discriminate and compete as a perfectly natural step toward speciation.

Racial strains which set their “race” agenda aside will be outcompeted by those who don’t. The key understanding here is that among man, argument and communication are part of the fitness equation of the competition. Lying and fraud and propaganda and psychological warfare are all part of the fitness equation.

We are used to thinking of Americans as mixed. All of us have ancestors who came from regions far apart. But we think that the English are English and the French are French. This is true for their nationality, just as we are all Americans. But it is not true for their race. The Germans have claimed to be a pure German race, but no European is a pure anything. A country has a population. It does not have a race. If you go far enough back In the populations of Europe you are apt to find all kinds of ancestors: Cro-Magnons, Slavs, Mongols, Africans, Celts, Saxons, and Teutons.

Yes, Whites are diverse in the true sense of the word.

The crime commited by the Germans, from a jewish point of view, was to recognize jews as aliens, not Germans.

There is nothing inherently wrong with purity as an ideal, nor with the notion that a dilution of purity is something to be avoided. These are normal, traditional values. Anti-“racists” succeeded in flipping these values and today promote degenerate, destructive mixing as the ideal, while pathologizing purity.

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Picking up from the last installment, more on Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish’s anti-“racist” pamphlet The Races of Mankind.

The Editor’s introduction from Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature, by Philip Nel, Google Books:

In 1948, Weltfish and Violet Edwards, under the supervision of Benedict, adapted Brotherhood of Man for In Henry’s Backyard: The Races of Mankind, illustrating it with images from the cartoon.

The New York Times Book Review . . . disagreed with the book’s central claim of racial equality . . . also discredits the authors on the grounds that both work in anthropology, “not a true science at all, but . . . a kind of specialized reportage.”

From the 1930s through the 1960s, the FBI believed opponents of racism were also Communists. As David H. Price points out, what “were scientists like Gene Weltfish to do” when America’s main political parties condoned Jim Crow racism and “the Communist Party’s position on racial equality was in total alignment with the scientific findings of biological and anthropological research”?

the activism of Benedict and Weltfish was rooted in the empirical methods of scientific inquiry, not in the procrustean confines of ideological doctrine.

Only a few small portions of the book itself can be made out. Here’s one:

sensible people learn to live in peace and friendship. They know that the differences in the way people behave are not inherited from their ancestors. They come from something called cultural experience or environment.

Sensible people stop kicking each other around and apply their boots to the seats of…

…the ugly Green Devils of prejudice, stupidity, hate

The artist in the original pamphlet was Ad Reinhardt, Wikipedia:

Adolph Frederick Reinhardt (“Ad” Reinhardt) (December 24, 1913 – August 30, 1967) was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism.

Reinhardt is best known for his so-called “black” paintings of the 1960s, which appear at first glance to be simply canvases painted black but are actually composed of black and nearly black shades.

Boasian anthropology is a series of just-so stories. Just-so story, Wikipedia:

In science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. The pejorative[1] nature of the expression is an implicit criticism that reminds the hearer of the essentially fictional and unprovable nature of such an explanation. Such tales are common in folklore and mythology

Benedict was a folklorist.

The Races of Mankind, Internet Archive:

Public Affairs Pamphlet No. 85

by Professor Ruth Benedict and Dr. Gene Weltfish

Department of Anthropology

Columbia University

Copyright 1946

The World is Shrinking

The war, for the first time, brought home to Americans the fact that the whole world has been made one neighborhood. All races of man were shoulder to shoulder. Our armed forces were in North Africa with its Negro, Berber, and Near-East peoples. They were in India. They were in China, They were in the Solomons with its dark-skinned, “strong”-haired Melanesians. Peoples of all the races of the earth became our neighbors.

Americans know better than most how much hard feeling there can be when people of different races and nationalities have to live together and be part of one community. They know that there is often conflict. When what we all wanted more than anything else was to win- this war, most Americans were confident that, whatever our origins, we would be able to pull together to a final victory.

Science and the Race Front

In any great issue that concerned the war we turned to science. When we needed new fuels, substitutes for rubber, lighter metals, or new plastics, we asked scientists to tell us what was possible and what was impossible. The chemists told us how to make the plastics we needed, and the physicists told us how to detect and locate an approaching airplane, and the engineers told us how to build a better fighting plane. When we were faced with war shortages, they told us what essential materials we had been throwing out on the dump heap.

We needed the scientist just as much on the race front. Scientists have studied race. Historians have studied the history of all nations and peoples. Sociologists have studied the way in which peoples band together. Biologists have studied how man’s physical traits are passed down from one generation to the next. Anthropologists have studied man’s bodily measurements and his cultural achievements. Psychologists have studied intelligence among different races. All that the scientists had learned became important to us at this crucial moment of history. They told us: “this is so,” “this is not so,” “this occurs under certain conditions,” or “this occurs under opposite conditions.”

This booklet cannot tell you all that science has learned about the races of mankind, but it states facts that have been learned and verified. We need them.

One Human Race

The Bible story of Adam and Eve, father and mother of the whole human race, told centuries ago the same truth that science has shown today: that all the peoples of the earth are a single family and have a common origin.

No difference among human races has affected limbs and teeth and relative strength so that one race is biologically outfitted like a lion and another biologically outfitted like a lamb. All races of men can either plow or fight, and all the racial differences among them are in nonessentials such as texture of head hair, amount of body hair, shape of the nose or head, or color of the eyes and the skin.

After the discovery of America by Columbus, Europeans began traveling to every quarter of the globe, and all the new peoples they met were complete strangers to them. For one thing, the Europeans couldn’t understand their languages. They looked and acted strange. Europeans thought they were different creatures and named a lot of different “races.” Gradually the Europeans described each one as having a skin color, kind of hair, kind of lips, height, and head shape that was peculiar to that “race.” Nowadays we know that this was a false impression.

Or let us take the brain itself. Because the brain is the thinking organ, some scientists have tried to find differences in the size and structure of the brain among different groups of people. In spite of these efforts, using the finest microscopes, the best scientists cannot tell ftom examining a brain to what group of people its owner belonged. The average size of the brain is different in different groups, but it has been proved over and over again that the size of the brain has nothing to do with intelligence.

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Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish

In this installment we examine two specific characters and one significant contribution they made to the larger anti-“racist” fraud. These two women were students of Franz Boas and their efforts represent only part of the long-term team effort to carry on the crusade Boas began: to derail race science and replace it with cultural narrative, to decouple academic investigation and understanding of human beings and human relations from biology and change the focus instead to sentimentalism and moralizing. To replace clarity with obfuscation. That project, reduced to a word, is anthropology.

Kevin MacDonald’s The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences, on the anti-science of anthropology:

An important technique of the Boasian school was to cast doubt on general theories of human evolution, such as those implying developmental sequences, by emphasizing the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior, as well as the relativism of standards of cultural evaluation. The Boasians argued that general theories of cultural evolution must await a detailed cataloguing of cultural diversity, but in fact no general theories emerged from this body of research in the ensuing half century of its dominance of the profession (Stocking 1968, 210). Because of its rejection of fundamental scientific activities such as generalization and classification, Boasian anthropology may thus be characterized more as an anti-theory than a theory of human culture (White 1966, 15).

“It’s all so confusing!!!”, is the suggestion, and that’s exactly what is produced – confusion, doubt and demoralization. Hand-waving and smoke-blowing are other terms for such tactics.

Ruth Benedict, Wikipedia:

Ruth Benedict (born Ruth Fulton, June 5, 1887 – September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist and folklorist.

She was born in New York City, and attended Vassar College and was graduated in 1909. She entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1919, studying under Franz Boas, receiving her Ph.D and joining the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she may have shared a romantic relationship,[2] and Marvin Opler were among her students and colleagues.

Benedict’s father died when she was 2 or 3.

She developed a close friendship with Boas, who took on a role as a kind of father figure in her life – Benedict lovingly referred to him as “Papa Franz”

Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict are considered to be the two most influential and famous women anthropologists of their time.

Benedict died of a heart attack in 1948

Her major work:

Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) was translated into fourteen languages and was published in many editions as standard reading for anthropology courses in American universities for years.

The essential idea in Patterns of Culture is, according to the foreword by Margaret Mead, “her view of human cultures as ‘personality writ large.'”

In other words, culture is a collective expression, reflecting the tastes and personality traits of the people creating it. Culture is an expression of race but anti-“racists” simply deny it.

Benedict, in Patterns of Culture, expresses her belief in cultural relativism. She desired to show that each culture has its own moral imperatives that can be understood only if one studies that culture as a whole. It was wrong, she felt, to disparage the customs or values of a culture different from one’s own. Those customs had a meaning to the people who lived them which should not be dismissed or trivialized. We should not try to evaluate people by our standards alone. Morality, she argued, was relative to the values of the culture in which one operates.

Indeed, as noted previously, morality is relative to the group it concerns, who/whom, who is concerned about whom.

Boasian anti-“racism” is a disparaging, dismissmive, and trivializing criticism of Western culture – openly and approvingly acknowledged by anti-“racists” as a radical challenge to long-standing Western cultural norms. When it comes to the West, the anti-“racist” criticism is not constrained to our culture either, but is aimed also at the supposed moral and mental flaws of White people.

The root of this hypocrisy, which is especially visible in jew-dominated Boasian anthropology, is the jewish “culture of critique”. Jews are the most acid critics of everyone else, who cry foul when anyone criticizes them, and by extension oppose any White criticism of non-Whites.

The anti-“racist” critique is based on fraud – lies and hypocrisy, universalist and scientific sounding language disguising a pursuit of narrower loyalties and motives (both ethnic and ideological).

When Boas retired in 1937, most of his students considered Ruth Benedict to be the obvious choice for the head of the anthropology department. However, the administration of Columbia was not as progressive in its attitude towards female professionals as Boas had been, and the university President Nicholas Murray Butler was eager to curb the influence of the Boasians whom he considered to be political radicals. Instead, Ralph Linton, one of Boas’ former students, a WWI veteran, and a fierce critic of Benedict’s “Culture and Personality” approach was named head of the department.[14] Benedict was understandably insulted by Linton’s appointment and the Columbia department was divided between the two rival figures of Linton and Benedict, both accomplished anthropologists with influential publications, neither of whom ever mentioned the work of the other.[15]

More on Benedict’s motives for taking up Boas’ crusade:

Ruth Benedict, columbia.edu:

In 1921, Dr. Franz Boas waived the admission requirements and admitted Dr. Ruth Benedict as a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University anthropology program. Dr. Boas was extremely important to Dr. Benedict, who wrote to him in 1940, “I can’t tell you what a place you fill in my life.”

She did field reserach with American southwestern tribes, with the Serrono of California and the Blackfoot of Canada.

Wikipedia’s description of The Races of Mankind:

One of Benedict’s lesser known works was a pamphlet “The Races of Mankind” which she wrote with her colleague at the Columbia University Department of Anthropology, Gene Weltfish. This pamphlet was intended for American troops and set forth, in simple language with cartoon illustrations, the scientific case against racist beliefs.

the writers explicate, in section after section, the best evidence they knew for human equality. They want to encourage all these types of people to join together and not fight amongst themselves.

Gene Weltfish, Wikipedia:

Gene Weltfish (Born Regina Weltfish) (August 7, 1902 – August 2, 1980) was an American anthropologist and historian working at Columbia University from 1928 to 1953. She studied with Franz Boas and was a specialist in the culture and history of the Pawnee people. Her 1965 ethnography The Lost Universe is considered the authoritative work on Pawnee culture to this day.

She is also known for the 1943 pamphlet for the U.S. Army called The Races of Mankind, which she co-wrote with Ruth Benedict, meant to teach military personnel about the cultural differences between the peoples of the world. In the text they argued that perceived differences between the races are cultural rather than biological. Among the data used in the text was an IQ study that had found higher scores among some northern Blacks than among some southern Whites. The pamphlet was not widely circulated within the army, and eventually it was banned as subversive. Weltfish was engaged in social activism and attracted the attention of the FBI which suspected her to be a communist.

One of two daughters born into a German Jewish family in New York’s Lower East Side, Gene Weltfish grew up speaking German as her first language, taught by a German governess hired by her grandfather. Her father, to whom she was very close, died when she was 13.

One of Weltfish’s minor works, cowritten with Ruth Benedict, had a surprisingly great effect. Published in 1943, The Races of Mankind was a pamphlet intended for American troops. It set forth, in simple language with cartoon illustrations, the scientific case against racist beliefs.[7] The publication of this pamphlet and the subsequent political furor that it caused, when it was decried as a piece of socialist propaganda, attracted the attention of anti-Communist authorities.[8]

The pamphlet represented the Boasian way of thinking about race which later became the standard view in anthropology and was endorsed with a 1948 UNESCO declaration, but at the time this was politically controversial, especially in the American South, where Jim Crow was still in rigor.[9] Weltfish herself described her motivations for writing the pamphlet:

“During the first four years of my graduate training at Columbia, Hitler rose to power in Germany, bolstering his heinous operations with racist theories developed from distorted anthropology. The books of Franz Boas were burned in Germany. In 1942, after [Boas’] death, Ruth Benedict, my senior colleague in the Anthropology Department, and I felt that we should carry the banner on the race question. In 1943, Ruth Benedict and I collaborated on a pamphlet, “The Races of Mankind,” published by the Public Affairs Committee. The pamphlet was originally written at the request of the U.S.O. for distribution to the men in the armed forces who had to fight side by side with allies such as the Huks in the Philippines and the Solomon Islanders. “The Races of Mankind” was used, not only for orientation by the army, but in the de-Nazification program in Germany after the war.”
—(Memo by Weltfish, October 24, 1967, quoted in Pathe 1989:375)

Far-right political groups in the US and elsewhere still consider Weltfish’s work to be part of a conspiracy by Boas and his students to eliminate the study of race in psychology and anthropology in “preparation for the defeat of ‘White Civilization’ by the Jews”.[10]

Basic facts about Benedict and Weltfish’s The Races of Mankind:

• “intended for American troops” (both wikis)
• first published in 1943 (both wikis)
• “had a surprisingly great effect” (Weltfish wiki)
• made “the scientific case against racist beliefs” (Weltfish wiki)
• “The pamphlet was not widely circulated within the army, and eventually it was banned as subversive.” (Weltfish wiki)
• “used, not only for orientation by the army, but in the de-Nazification program in Germany after the war” (according to Weltfish)

More biographical information on Gene Weltfish at webster.edu:

Despite its widespread use until then, “The Races of Mankind” was banned from armed forces libraries in 1944. It continued to be translated and read around the world. There was a dispute over whether or not the pamphlet showed northern blacks as smarter than southern whites.

The original pamphlet price was 10 cents. A used copy on Amazon is priced at $20.

A variant of the original work is In Henry’s Backyard: The Races of Mankind, also at Amazon, published in 1948:

A cheerfully illustrated little story about fighting the “green devils” of prejudice and recognizing all races are equally human.

Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature, at Google Books, includes a copy of In Henry’s Backyard, and in the Editor’s introduction includes more information about the original pamphlet:

debunked racial myths spread by fascists abroad and racists at home

Benedict was the author of Race: Science and Politics (1940) and coauthor of Race and Cultural Relations: America’s Answer to the Myth of a Master Race (1942)

Using science to prove that we are all “one human race” and that culture (not nature) accounts for differences among peoples was controversial in the 1940s.

to be distributed through the USO. But Kentucky congressman Andrew May objected

May persuaded the army to stop distributing the pamphlet, his act inspired public protests, garnered media coverage, and boosted sales. The Races of Mankind sold nearly a million copies in its first ten years, and was translated into French, German, and Japanese.

In 1945, United Productions of America (UPA) made the book into an animated cartoon, Brotherhood of Man.

UPA was an innovative animation studio founded by Dave Hilberman, Zack Schwartz, Steve Bosustow, and John Hubley, all former Disney employees – and ex-Communists – who took part in the 1941 strike. (Disney’s reponse to the strikers was to fire them.) Hubley and Phil Eastman – another ex-Disney-striker and ex-Communist – animated the cartoon, and future Hollywood Ten member Ring Lardner, Jr., cowrote the script. (The UPA studio would go on to produce the Academy Award-winning cartoon Gerald McBoing Boing and the Mr. Magoo cartoons.)

More on this topic in the next installment.

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