Race and democratic society / Franz Boas.

  • Franz Boas
Date:
[1945]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Race and democratic society / Franz Boas. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    assimilated Italians and Jews no longer gesticulate in the ex¬ pected “racial” fashion. On the other hand, Englishmen who have spent most of their lives in Italy have been known to use their hands as if they were Italians. Why this should be so is easily explained. We either unconsciously imitate friends or associates whom we esteem or consciously repress mannerisms that set us apart from the rest of the community and perhaps hold us back economically or socially. Even the records of crime teach the lesson that, in the end, the environment is irresistible. When the descendants of im¬ migrants violate the law, they run more or less true to Amer¬ ican form. If kidnapings account for x per cent of all crimes committed by Americans of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, then kid¬ napings will amount to approximately x per cent of all the crimes committed by second-generation Italians. Dr. Stofhet has brought this out by comparing the transgressions of im¬ migrants and their children. If the second generation is more criminal than the first, the explanation is to be sought in the difficulty of overcoming social and economic obstacles. VI The tragedy of these undemocratic prejudices lies in their absurd falsity. Just as there is a stage Jew, a stage French¬ man, a stage Chinese, so in real life there is a symbolic Jew, a symbolic Frenchman, and a symbolic Chinese. We carry this method of generalization so far that we also have a symbolic socialist, a symbolic college professor, a symbolic longshore¬ man. Each symbol stands for a whole group, and each mem¬ ber of the group is supposed to be the mirror image of the symbol. And, the stronger the popular belief that each class constitutes a clearly defined social group, the more readily is every one tagged with a class label. The nazis have driven this form of logic to its fanatical extreme. They ignore the elementary facts of anthropology; they confuse race and nation; they seem to believe, that lan¬ guages are inborn, so that Jews or Japanese, even though born
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