There’s something fishy about what Philip Kadish calls The Great White Hoax. It’s his new book about America's long con - how racist scientific hoaxes have shaped two centuries of racist politics. From the 1840 Census Scandal to Henry Ford to George Wallace, Kadish exposes the conmen who have tried to sell racism to America. But here's the chilling twist: many of these fraudsters knew exactly what they were doing. They weren't true believers - they were cynical opportunists who saw profit in peddling fake science to justify white supremacy, creating elaborate deceptions that sometimes fooled even legitimate scientists.
1. Many racist "scientific" theories were deliberate, cynical frauds, not misguided beliefs
"The thing that really characterizes the particular thread that I am following in my book and things that I was finding is that they all involved varying degrees of a kind of cynical, very self-aware, purposeful deception."
2. The 1840 Census created the template for American scientific racism through knowing falsification
"So this was a case that was starting out as an accident, but then he knowingly investigated it, saw the falseness, and then re-certified it, and that information was then used in the defense of slavery for decades."
3. Authority and social credibility mattered more than actual scientific expertise
"Madison Grant... did not have a degree in biology. He was trained as a lawyer... the reason he was trusted about race, all of these politicians and wealthy philanthropists, is because, A, he came from a very wealthy family himself."
4. The hoax pattern shifted but didn't disappear after World War II
"It became socially unacceptable to be that, to be making such openly racist arguments... And things shift into a kind of coded mode... while we're talking about state's rights or he's developing a language talking about the federal government as a tyranny."
5. Many hoaxes continued to influence people even after being exposed as fraudulent
"Over half of the hoaxes that I described in the book were revealed as hoaxes in the midst of them. And yet were still embraced by many people and often for a long time after."
I’m in two minds on this. One the one hand, Kadish’ expose of two centuries of selling fraudulent scientific racism is chilling. On the other hand, I wonder if progressive historians like Kadish are themselves becoming overly preoccupied with race and racism. I’m also not convinced that the MAGA movement, RFK Jr or Fox News are a return to the overt racism of D.W. Griffith’s movie Birth of a Nation or the “science” of eugenicists like Madison Grant. History, particularly American history, is too complex to simply repeat itself endlessly. Sometimes it rhymes and sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes, the historical hoax is in the hoax.
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