How a “Racial Brain Collection” Revealed Our Racist Language History
We still haven't resolved all the language questions that the Smithsonian's abominable anthropologists had a century ago.
In last week’s blockbuster multimedia story about the shameful history of the Smithsonian’s “racial brain collection” — an assemblage of hundreds of brains immorally harvested for the purpose of proving the superiority of white people — the Washington Post revealed more than just the racist history of science.
It also put on grand display the way in which racist language shaped and was shaped by that racist history.
What’s more, some of the racially questionable writings from a century ago look eerily similar to language issues we’re still grappling with today.
When a doctor contacted the museum in 1933 to see if it was interested in his recently deceased patient’s brain, the collection’s curator, Ales Hrdlicka, responded via telegram: “If the subject full-blood brain desirable” (just like that — with no period and no verb).
First, this buttresses my hypothesis that language historians haven’t sufficiently covered the similarities between terrible modern text-message grammar and terrible old-timey telegram grammar.
Second, it’s a shining example of how casually scientists — along with, you know, everyone — used racist language to put a technical sheen on abhorrent ideas. Today, we shudder at the term full-blood in such a context, but at the time, it was commonplace.
Read the full column at Smerconish.com.