The Blinding Light of Race: Race and Racism in Western Science and Society

The three volumes of The Blinding Light of Race analyze the scientific and social origins of White supremacy found in Christian chauvinism within the context of European colonialism and American slavery, recognizing how white supremacist ideology is used to justify the morally unjustifiable.

In the first volume, Michael Blakey discusses both the background and function of anthropological racism as he questions whether racism has always been with us. Using evolutionary, classical, historical, and ethnographic critique, Blakey definitively answers ‘no.’ The long-standing problem of racism in America, as both an obvious and hidden phenomenon, has been a developing one – with the Civil War as a watershed for American science and society, which has progressed into new versions of the old justifications (as social Darwinism) for continued racial inequity (Jim Crow segregation).

Despite White people’s legal and social barriers to Black’s inheritance of the wealth their ancestors had created, Black people worked under Jim Crow segregation to create institutions for their ‘uplift,’ especially schools and churches. The second volume details how anthropology grew rapidly as a profession in the early 20^th century, producing a worldview in which White people were superior, not by their obvious inequitable laws and brutality, but by ‘nature.’ Even non-Nordic White immigrants were racialized by U.S. science, while Germany hoisted its imperial arrogance on racial supremacy, launching a bloody eugenical Holocaust. With their defeat, the United Nations formed and assessed racial science to be technically and morally bankrupt. In the U.S., African Americans led a Civil Rights Movement to integrate society. A growing social science literature battled with continuing attempts of natural science to dominate the discussion of human possibility. The term ‘race’ was sanctioned against, but biodeterminism and racism continued.

The third volume addresses late 20^th and 21^st century White supremacy. The silencing of the word, ‘racism’ as if its mention is its cause, the advocacy of a mythological ‘level playing field’ and an otherwise counter-intuitive ‘reverse racism,’ the dismissal of acknowledged racism as ‘playing the race card,’ and the denial of the existence of ‘White people’ represent the irrationality of today’s discussion of racism. These represent White people’s unreasoning obstruction of programs to equalize societal opportunities (affirmative action or reparations) as though standing on the new high ground of anti-racism. Instead, race goes underground as genetic determinism. ‘Criminal’ becomes the new n-word. Prisons effect ‘slavery by another name.’ Performative ‘diversity’ efforts spread to show anti-racist intent while averting recognition of White supremacy. A tangled web of denial causes an impairment some call, ‘white fragility.’ They censure other’s history in order to maintain the lie of White innocence and justify their loot at the expense of the ‘other’s’ humanity. Many White people remain too blinded by racism to conceive of the possibility of Black scientific excellence that challenges their long consensual false assumptions. The example of New York’s African Burial Ground is described. The only real solution to the continuing nonsense of White supremacy, the author proposes, is for White people to learn to face the factual reasons for their rise to power and wealth and pay their debts to ‘others.’

Michael L. Blakey is a leading anthropologist at William & Mary University, whose training and productive research career (80 publications in major journals) integrates human biology, history, and culture, including critical writings on the history and philosophy of science. He is the recipient of many awards, including the President’s Award of the American Anthropological Association, the Legacy Award of the Association of Black Anthropologists, an Honorary Doctor of Science from CUNY, and the Plumeri Award.