Whenever the subject of Darwin and race comes up, someone objects that the critic is quote-mining: pulling a stray phrase out of context to make a good man look bad. I take that objection seriously, so let me be precise about what I am claiming. I am not claiming that Darwin let an ugly remark slip. I am claiming that when he applied his theory to human beings, racial ranking was not a blemish on the argument. It was the argument.
In 1871 Darwin published The Descent of Man and applied his theory to humanity. What follows comes from that book’s own pages.
What chapter six predicts
In chapter six, Darwin forecasts the future of the world’s peoples. He does it calmly, almost as a matter of arithmetic:
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.
In the same passage he explains what that would mean for the gap between man and ape. At present, he writes, the gap stands “between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” Once the lower races are gone, it will stand instead between civilized man and the baboon.
Read it twice, as I had to. Living human beings are placed nearest the gorilla, and their extermination is forecast as progress. This is not a footnote. It is Darwin working out what his theory means for people.
Old age did not soften him
One might hope this was a younger man’s excess, regretted later. It was not. In July 1881, months before his death, Darwin wrote to William Graham of “an endless number of the lower races” being “eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.” The letter sits catalogued at Cambridge. “The lower races” is his phrase, chosen at the end of a long life of reflection.
The concession that seals the case
Now the concession that honesty requires, and I make it gladly, because it strengthens the point rather than weakening it. Darwin sincerely hated slavery. He came from a proud abolitionist family, and he wrote against slavery with real feeling. Both facts are documented.
Put the two facts side by side. Here was a man fully capable of moral reflection on race, a man who felt the wrong of chains deeply enough to write against them. That same man, in his considered scientific work, ranked whole peoples as biologically lower and forecast their elimination as the natural course of things. This was not careless language from an unreflective age. This was considered anthropology from someone who knew exactly how to think morally about race, and did so when the subject was slavery.
So what changed when the subject was his theory? That is the question I want you to sit with. The man who opposed chains could write about extermination without a tremor, because his theory told him it was simply what happens. That is what the theory did to his conscience, and he put it in writing.
Why I raise it
I do not write this to score points against a dead man. I write it because ideas have consequences, and the idea that some human beings are biologically lower than others did not stay on the page. When a theory of origins teaches a thoughtful man to rank his neighbors, something has gone wrong at the root, and the root deserves examination.
In my next article I will turn to what Darwin wrote about women, beginning with a private list he drew up before proposing marriage. One line from it will stay with you: “better than a dog anyhow.”
Sources
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (John Murray, 1871), chapter 6. Darwin to William Graham, 3 July 1881, Darwin Correspondence Project. On his abolitionism, Desmond and Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause (2009).
Get new articles by email
Subscribe and I will send you a short note whenever a new article is published on this site. No spam, and you can unsubscribe at any time.