Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:205216

DOI 10.1007/s11673-010-9224-8

The Policing of Race Mixing: The Place of Biopower

within the History of Racisms
Robert Bernasconi

Received: 8 May 2009 / Accepted: 20 November 2009 / Published online: 20 April 2010
# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract In this paper I investigate a largely untold

chapter in the history of race thinking in Northern
Europe and North America: the transition from the
form of racism that was used to justify a race-based
system of slavery to the medicalising racism which
called for segregation, apartheid, eugenics, and,
eventually, sterilization and the holocaust. In constructing this history I will employ the notion of
biopower introduced by Michel Foucault. Foucaults
account of biopower has received a great deal of
attention recently, but because what he actually has to
say about race tends to be vague and radically
incomplete, many race theorists have been critical of
his contribution. However, even if the account of the
holocaust in terms of biopower is incomplete, there is
still a great deal to be learned from Foucaults
identification of this biologizing, or medicalising
racism.
Keywords Biopower . Foucault . Eugenics . Racism .
Medicalisation . Segregation

Introduction
In this paper, by investigating a largely untold
chapter in the history of race thinking in Northern
Europe and North America, I identify a hitherto
largely unrecognized transition from the hierarchical form of racism that was used to justify a racebased system of slavery to the medicalizing racism
that called for segregation, apartheid, eugenics, and,
eventuallyalthough I will only be able to touch
on it in this brief accountsterilization and the
holocaust.1 In the course of constructing this account
I will take up the question of whether Michel
Foucaults notion of biopower is a valuable tool for
those engaged in the task of clarifying the history of
racism. Foucaults account of biopower has received
a great deal of attention recently, but because what
he actually had to say about race tends to be vague
and radically incomplete, many students of the
history of racial thinking have been understandably
1

R. Bernasconi (*)
Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA, USA
e-mail: rlb43@psu.edu

Sometimes very different discourses were employed away

from North America and Northern Europe and a study of this
would uncover different kinds of racism that had different kinds
of effects, but the unprecedented racial violence of European
nations in the twentieth century provides justification enough
for my focus, especially given the fact that the link between
North American and Northern European racisms, although
recognized in some of the historical literature, still needs further
examination.

206

critical of his contribution. 2 For example, the

account of the holocaust in terms of biopower is
incomplete and needs to be supplemented (Stone
2006, 217). I will argue that in spite of the flaws in
Foucaults account, there is still a great deal to be
learned from his identification of this biologizing, or,
as I prefer to say, medicalizing racism.
Foucault himself indicated that there was a
transition from an historical discourse on race to a
biological one, but perhaps because he wanted to
insist on the continuity between these two discourses,
he offers little assistance in identifying when or how
this transition took place (Foucault 1997, 170;
Foucault 2003a, 190). Nevertheless, it is necessary
to do so if we are both to isolate those elements of
the history of race thinking that contributed most to
the violence committed in the name of race in the
twentieth century and to clarify the nature and
genealogy of the racisms that still persist. Most
accounts of racism do not do enough to differentiate
the different forms of racism, reducing it to a belief in
the essential inequality of the human racesbut there
are many racisms. They include essentialist, xenophobic, environmentalist, gradualist (in terms of the
alleged spread of civilization), as well as medicalizing
racism. It is important to be aware of all these
different forms and their different targets, both
because they often coexist and also because attempts
to combat one form of racism can reinforce another.
It is here that the notion of biopower makes a
contribution: it helps to identify one of these
racisms and in this way contributes to bringing
the history of racisms into focus, albeit I do not
believe one can adopt Foucaults notion without
major modifications, the most important of which is

Ann Stoler, the first person in the English language discussion

to take seriously Foucaults account of racism, already drew
attention to his failure to address race-based slavery, colonialism, and imperialism in all but the most perfunctory terms
(Stoler 1996, vii. See further Stoler 2002, 140-61). It is possible
that at one point Foucault intended to make good this lack,
insofar as the original plan for The History of Sexuality, the
sixth and final volume was to have been called Population and
Races (Davidson 1994, 117). Unfortunately McWhorters
Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America (2009)
appeared after my essay had already been completed. A quick
reading suggests that she defends more forcefully than I would
the value of Foucaults reflections on racism and in particular
she seems less interested than I am in differentiating the
varieties of racism, but we agree on much else.

Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:205216

to highlight the role played by a new fear of racemixing that was authorized by medical discourse. It
is surprising that Foucault does not pay this form of
racism more attention, as it not only could be
accommodated by his account, but it helps make
better sense of the character of twentieth century
racism with its emphasis on isolation and segregation than otherwise is the case.

1.
When Foucault introduced his notion of biopower to
the general public in 1976 in the first volume of The
History of Sexuality, he referenced race. He explained
there that he coined the term bio-power to refer to
what brought life into the realm of politics as an
object of explicit calculation where what was at
stake was not the life of the individual but of large
units of population such as races, nations, or even the
species as a whole (Foucault 1976, 188191; Foucault
1990, 143145). Foucault was well aware that he had,
with this perspective, established the resources with
which to write at least one chapter in the history of
racism. Early in the contemporary lecture course
Society Must Be Defended, he announced his ambition to trace the full development of a biological
social racism (Foucault 1997, 52; Foucault 2003a,
61). He distinguished racism in its modern, biologizing, statist form (Foucault 1976, 197; Foucault
1990, 149) from racism in the traditional sense of the
term (Foucault 1997, 75; Foucault 2003a, 87), which
he elsewhere called ethnic racism (Foucault 1999,
294; Foucault 2003b, 316). But biologizing racism
was not, for him, just one chapter in the history of
racism among others. In Society Must Be Defended,
Foucault wrote that it is only when the State adopts a
biological and medical concept of race that one finds
what one can properly call racism (Foucault 1997, 70;
Foucault 2003a, 80). Highlighting the transformation
that the notion of degeneration allegedly underwent in
Morels Trait des Dgnerescences Physiques, Intellectuelles et Morales de lEspce Humaine (Foucault
1999, 311; Foucault 2003b, 328), Foucault presented
biologizing racism as covering all forms of degeneration, including alcoholism, even while he restricted it
historically to the period that began only in the second
half of the nineteenth century (Foucault 1976, 197;
Foucault 1990, 149). In Society Must Be Defended, he

Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:205216

even suggested that the term racism should be

reserved for a period that began even later, at the end of
the nineteenth century (Foucault 1997, 57; Foucault
2003a, 65).
This has the unfortunate but telling consequence
that in one of his rare remarks about colonization,
after acknowledging that racism first develops with
colonizing genocide, he proceeds to locate it in the
second half of the nineteenth century (Foucault 1997,
229; Foucault 2003a, 257), as if all forms of
colonization prior to that time were free of racism
and the desire to exterminate indigenous populations.
His omission of race-based slavery from his account
of racism is arbitrary and misleading. Nevertheless, I
believe that Foucault was right to mark the difference
between medicalizing racism and the racisms that
preceded it. However, to do so persuasively one needs
to locate it within that broader history of racism in
the traditional sense of the term that Foucault chose
not to write (Foucault 1997, 75; Foucault 2003a, 61).
Foucaults discussion of racism is only one part of
his overriding argument that a fundamental shift took
place when the sovereigns power to take life or let
live was complimentedand to a certain extent
displacedby biopower, which was announced by
the attribution to the state of a new right: the right to
intervene so as to make live or let die (Foucault 1976,
181; Foucault 1990, 138. Foucault 1997, 214221;
Foucault 2003a, 241248). Among the ways in which
this new right of the State to let die manifested itself
was through genocides sustained by the discourse of
eugenics and racial hygiene, where it is a question
of eliminating biological threats to the population
(Foucault 1997, 228; Foucault 2003a, 256). If it
seems strange at first that it is under the rubric make
live or let die rather than take life or let live that
genocide takes place, this is because genocide tends to
hide behind natures purposes as understood by the
Social Darwinists. It is only because nature, working
through history, will extinguish the weak that one can,
as it were, hasten the process or give it a helping hand
(Brantlinger 1997, 51; Bernasconi 2005).
On Foucaults account, the shift from sovereign
power to biopower was preceded in the seventeenth
century by a modification within the exercise of
sovereign power: the Roman idea of sovereignty,
which located in the father of the family the right to
dispose of the life of his children and slaves, was by
this time restricted to the political sovereigns power

207

to employ the death penalty in self-defense (Foucault

1976, 178; Foucault 1990, 135). However, Foucault,
who so far as I can see, showed little or no interest in
the transformations brought about by the Atlantic
slave trade, made no mention of the transfer of a form
of sovereign power to slave owners in the Americas.
The standard seventeenth-century justification of
slavery appealed to the Roman idea not only that
one could legitimately enslave prisoners caught in a
just war, and those who assisted them, but also that
their children born in slavery should remain slaves
(Grotius 1650, 547; Grotius 2005, 1495. Pufendorf
1682, 113; Pufendorf 1991, 129). To be sure, there
were people at that time who were aware that all too
often no care was taken to ensure that the African
slaves had been taken under the appropriate conditions, which meant that the new practice of slavery
did not fit the justification employed to sustain it.
But because this practice was notwith very few
exceptionschallenged in its early years from
within those nations that expected to benefit from
it, there was no need for a detailed defense of all
aspects of its operation.
This meant that there was no need for a sophisticated racial doctrine at this time upon which to base
slavery. There was some talk among the planters in
the West Indies of Preadamism or polygenesis (Godwyn
1680, 1419), but it was not until later that explicit
racial doctrines were needed to legitimize the
system. It was not as Africans but as prisoners of war
that they were enslaved. As late as 1815 Thomas
Jefferson explained to a correspondent that one could
be enslaved following the condition of the mother
(partus sequitur ventrum) and yet have so much white
parentage that on being emancipated one would be
counted a free white man, and a citizen of the United
States to all intents and purposes (Jefferson 1903,
270). Nevertheless, even though there were slaves in
the Americas who were not Black, there can be no
doubt that the number of slaves and even the
conditions under which they were transported and held
would have been different had not most of them been
categorized as Negroes.
The question that exercised Lockes contemporaries was not whether slavery itself was legitimate, but
whether Africans could continue to be enslaved
legitimately after they had been baptized as Christians
(Godwyn 1680, 41-42). This was addressed by the
Lords Proprietors of Carolina, of which John Locke

208

was Secretary, when in 1669 they declared in the

Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina that Every
freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and
Authority over his Negro slaves, of what opinion or
Religion so ever (Parker 1963, 164). This Article
granted an exception to the convention that Christians
could not enslave their fellow Christians on condition
that the latter were Africans. At the same time the
Article placed Negro slaves under a death sentence.
This condition was the ultimate source of the
sovereignty that the slaveowner had over his slaves,
even though by the end of the seventeenth century
there were in most areas laws in place restricting the
exercise of that right, not least because they were the
source of the wealth of a given colony as well as of
their owner. The fact that Locke in Two Treatises of
Government (1988) denied that slavery was a hereditary condition has led some to try to present Locke as
critical of the form of slavery being developed in the
Americas, but what needs to be explained is why he
felt obliged to offer any justification of slavery given
the fact that the primary purpose of the book was to
argue for the freedom of the English from the alleged
absolute power of the monarch and why in that book
he also went beyond Grotius and Pufendorf, in giving
to slaveowners a right to kill their slaves.3 It is in
Locke, therefore, that the transfer of sovereign power
from the monarch to the slaveowner finds its voice.

2.
Biopower is an entirely different matter from this kind
of sovereign power, and different also are the racisms
associated with each. Of course, Foucault does not
attempt to chart the transition between them, but in
writing the genealogy of biopower he follows the
French tendency to highlight the racial discourse of
Henri de Boulainvilliers and its transformation across
the historical narratives of the Thierry brothers,
Augustin and Amdie, into the theory of races in
the historico-biological sense (Foucault 1997, 51;
Foucault 2003a, 60). To insist on this radical shift and
locate it where he did, he needed to ignore the
3

In making this point I am responding to James Farrs criticism

of Bernasconi and Mann 2005 in Farr 2008. See Grotius 1650,
159; Grotius 2005, II, 558. Pufendorf 1682, 114; Pufendorf
1991, 130.

Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:205216

specifically racial discourse directed against Negroes

and others toward the end of the eighteenth century. One
of the main points of the present essaywhich is not
dependent on whether or not one believes in radical
breaks in historyis to indicate the steps taken behind
Foucaults back, as it were, that leads from the historical
accounts of the Thierry brothers early in the nineteenth
century, to William-Frderic Edwards and, in particular
Victor Courtet de lIsle, and ties his account of biopower
to a history of racism that he largely ignored. This is the
point called for by Foucaults account, but never
identified by him, where the historical discourse on race
comes to be joined with and, to a certain extent,
displaced by a biological discourse.
One of Foucaults major contributions to this task
is that he located in the eighteenth century the
emergence of a discourse of population which
monitors birth and death rates, life expectancy, state
of health, and so on: this was the first time that a
society had affirmed, in a constant way, that its future
and its fortune were tied not only to the number and
the uprightness of its citizens, to their marriage rules
and family organization, but to the manner in which
each individual made use of his [or her] sex
(Foucault 1976, 37; Foucault 1990, 26). It was then
that sex became a police matter in the sense of an
ordered maximization of collective and individual
forces (Foucault 1976, 35; Foucault 1990, 24-25).
Foucaults use of the term police might sound like
an exaggerated metaphor, but in fact it is historically
precise. During the eighteenth century the French
began to use the term police to refer to the ordering
or governing of a city. The word was quickly adopted
in England and particularly in Prussia, where a
number of chairs in Polizeiwissenschaft were established. Foucault references two professors of Polizeiwissenschaft: Heinrich Gottlob von Justi and Johann
Peter Frank (Foucault 1976, 35; Foucault 1990, 25;
Foucault 1994, 18 and 212).
I will focus here on Frank, who is the better
known, at least in the English-speaking world (Figal
2008, 98127). In a footnote to the second page of his
magnum opus, A System of Complete Medical Police,
Frank explained that The Task of the Medical Police
is to make liberal use of the possibilities of nature and
its energy in such a way that from every given couple
of persons of both sexes, and under the supervision of
good laws, the best, healthiest and most desirable fruits
will be obtained (Frank 1786, 2n; Frank 1976, 12n).

Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:205216

Frank advocated the regulation of marriages so that

they would work together with nature to maximize the
production of a healthy population (Bevlkerung) and
minimize the transmission of hereditary diseases. For
example, to improve both the physical and moral
health of the human race he proposed that each couple
before marriage should be obliged to swear an oath
that they, as far as they could and had to know, do not
suffer from any grave, infectious, or hereditary disease,
whereby the intentions of the married state would be
frustrated and the country cheated in its expectations
and only miserable and sickly fruits be produced
(Frank 1786, 340-341; Frank 1976, 51).
When sex became a police matter, so did race, but
not merely in the sense that both were regulated, but
because it was thought that it was through the
controlling of sexuality that the potential of a race is
maximized. In proposing a renewed regulating or
policing of sexuality, Polizeiwissenschaft understood
itself not just as a more concerted effort to intervene
in nature to maintain the health of a population
through breeding, but as directed by specifically
medical concerns. This population was already on
occasion identified as a race. So, for example, Frank
explained the weakness of so-called Native Americans as a result of their failure to mix with other races
(Frank 1786, 405n).
From its introduction as a scientific concept by
Franks contemporary, Immanuel Kant, the idea of
race was organized around the possibility of race
mixing. Kants groundbreaking attempt in 1775 to
reconcile the existence of permanent inheritable
characteristics such as skin color with a belief in the
unity of the human species was based on Buffons
rule about the fertility of sexual unions over time
(Bernasconi 2001, 2124). Furthermore, Kant believed that, just as only successful mating established
the unity of any given species, so only an examination
of the offspring of two purportedly different races
would reveal whether they were indeed different races
and which of their characteristics were specifically
racial. Racial characteristics were permanent characteristics that the offspring shared in equal measure
from both parents. Kant had some trouble specifying
physical characteristics, other than skin color, but he
included moral and intellectual characteristics too.
Differences that were not inheritable in equal measure
from both parents were not racial but varietal (Kant
1968a, 42731; Kant 2000, 811).

209

On Kants account, race-mixing led to a certain

uniformity in the sense that the two races were
brought closer together, but he argued further that
if different varieties, such as nations, mingled, the
result was, by contrast, more variety (Kant 1968b,
320-1; Kant 2007, 415-6). These ideas soon became
widespread and found support in France in the
1820s. When Augustin Thierry denied that race
mixing eradicated their very different characteristics,
he was thinking not of what Kant called races but
of the nations that constituted France (Thierry 1839,
633). The same distinction was made by William
Frderic Edwards in 1829: he confirmed from a
biological point of view that when neighboring
racesthat is to say Kantian varietiesmix, their
characteristics are preserved, whereas when very
different races mix the result is a hybrid that shares
the racial characteristics of the parent races equally
(Edwards 1829, 2229). The Saint-Simonians took
up these ideas and developed them into a political
program: Victor Courtet de lIsle in 1838 and in the
following year Gustav dEichthal both advocated
race mixing between Blacks and Whites (Courtet
1838, 389391; DEichthal and Urbain 1839, 18-19,
62-63, and 68-69).4 In this they were following
James Cowles Prichard, who had already argued
that the breeding of animals had shown that
mixing breeds might improve a stock on the basis
in part of Felix de Azaras report that the mixed
Hispanic population there were superior in height,
beauty, and even the whiteness of their skin to the
Spanish of Europe (Prichard 1836, 148-149; Azara
1810, 367).
This promotion of race mixing reversed a tendency
among Northern Europeans, including the mature
Kant, to be against race mixing (Bernasconi 2002,
1568). This tendency was not confined to them, as is
clear from the purity of blood statutes in Spain of
1492 and similar edicts in Mexico in the sixteenth
century (Martinez 2004). In North America there
were from early on frequent references to racial
identities in the context of attempts to police
sexuality. Opposition to race mixing was usually

Courtet follows Kant in thinking of the children of parents of

different races as being midway between the two (Courtet 1838,
8384). See also Boissel 1972, 143170, Rignol and Rgnier
2002, 127152; and Lemaire 2002, 153175.

210

expressed on theological grounds as frustrating Gods

providential plan. The very existence of different
races was evidence that nature or providential design
intended them to persist: race mixing was regarded as
unnatural or against nature. But it did not have any
bad effects other than that of blurring the boundary
lines between the races and so interfering with a
system of social stratification that was easy to
maintain by virtue of its sheer visibility (Bernasconi
2000, 76-7). However, in 1810 Friedrich Ludwig Jahn
transformed the argument claiming in his Deutsches
Volkstum that race-mixing had disastrous physical and
moral consequences (Jahn 1884, 1647). Nevertheless, this view had few adherents until the middle of
the nineteenth century (Blanckaert 2003, 4853),
because it relied on a widely dispersed theoretically
grounded idea of race.
That race mixing contaminated nations and could
possibly lead to their downfall was claimed by Robert
Knox in 1850 when he insisted, with specific
reference to race mixing, that race is everything:
literature, science, art, in a word civilization depends
on it (Knox 1850, v). A similar argument was made
four years later by Count Arthur de Gobineau who
popularized the biologization of the philosophy of
history, which we already saw in Edwards and
Courtet de lIsle. In the nineteenth century, theoretical
racism was always an historical discourse as much
as a biological discourse insofar as there was at a
time no clear distinction between nature and
culture. However much race was seen as a natural
powerful force, it was also recognized that historical races are not given, and are always to be made
and remade.
Gobineau insisted that the racial question (la
question ethnique) overshadows all other problems
of history, that it holds the key to them all, and that
the inequality of the races from whose fusion a
people is formed is enough to explain the whole
course of its destiny (de Gobineau 1884, I, vi; de
Gobineau 1915, xiv). However, what underlay their
belief in the explanatory power of race was not so
much a belief in the hierarchy of races as in the
impact of race mixing, although it should not be
forgotten that Gobineau believed that race mixing
had not always been negative in history (de
Gobineau 1884, I, 217-8; de Gobineau 1915, 208-9)
and was only in his time beginning to lead to
decadence (de Gobineau 1884, II, 563).

Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:205216

3.
Although the contributions of Knox and Gobineau are
well known, the decisive step in the biologization of
the case against race mixing predates their contributions. On October 12, 1842 the prestigious Boston
Medical and Surgical Journal published an anonymous letter under the title Vital Statistics of Negroes
and Mulattoes (Anon. 1842). If one wanted an
answer to the question, as Foucault himself did not,
of when race thinking first came under the sway of
biopower (Foucault 1994, 140; Foucault 1977, 144),
this would seem to be a better place to locate it than
with Frank. On the basis of anecdotes and a few select
statistics, the anonymous author of Vital Statistics of
Negroes and Mulattoes, who chose for himself the
most inappropriate name of The Philanthropist,
argued that hybridity was a medical condition that
should be treated as such. There had long been a
debate about the physiological effects of race mixing,
but this brief, deeply flawed and yet absurdly
influential letter seems to have been the first time
that anyone suggested that if those of mixed race were
more likely to suffer certain diseases, then it should
be considered a disease in its own right and
prevented, just as we try to prevent other diseases.
This is what lay behind the fears associated with what
would twenty years later be called miscegenation
(Bernasconi and Dotson 2005, III, 3892).
The point was not lost on Josiah Nott, a doctor
from Mobile, Alabama, who would become known
internationally for his promotion of polygenesis, the
theory that the races did not share the same origin.
Nott was writing to defend the values and institutions
of slavery. He quickly published in the American
Journal of the Medical Sciences an essay that quoted
extensively from the anonymous article in the Boston
Medical and Surgical Journal. Notts own thesis was
clearly stated in his title: The Mulatto A Hybrid
probable extermination of the two races if the Whites
and Blacks are allowed to intermarry (Nott 1843).
Whereas Buffons rule had claimed that the mixing of
different species would lead directly to sterility, Nott
effectively modified this claim: it would have that
effect only in the long run. However, the social
impact of such ideas was anything but vague, leading
to the proactive project of racial hygiene or eugenics
as an attempt to cleanse or decontaminate the social
body. With the medicalization of race mixing under

Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:205216

the label degeneration, the policing of race mixing

would be pursued with an entirely new urgency: the
health of society depended on it; the health of society
must be defended. Nott found a ready audience, not
just in the Southern United States, but also among the
scientific elite in France with Paul Broca and George
Pouchet. It was to Nott and the authorssuch as
Samuel George Morton and Louis Agassizincluded
in his extraordinarily popular collection Types of
Mankind (Nott and Gliddon 1854) that Pouchet was
referring when, in 1864, in the second edition of De
la pluralit des races humaines, he wrote that: At
present France and England walk entirely in the
scientific path opened by the American school
(Pouchet 1864a, 10; Pouchet 1864b, 7). Through the
work of the French scientists and the adoption of their
ideas more broadly, and long after Darwinism had
made the debate between monogenesis and polygenesis irrelevant, the promotion of racial purity on the
biological grounds of fear of extermination would
persist. One sees the spread of these ideas into
Germany in, for example, Ludwig Gumplowicz,
who added an appendix to the second edition of his
Der Rassenkampf that made the point that racial
contact would, after conflict, lead to race mixing and
thus to stagnation (Gumplowicz 1909, 397).
Foucaults focus on Morel rather than Nott perhaps
reflects a French bias. It is true that they had different
concerns, but insofar as Foucault highlighted degeneration as a way of isolating, covering and cutting
out a zone of social danger while simultaneously
giving it a pathological status as illness (Foucault
1999, 110; Foucault 2003b, 119), he might as well
have been talking about Notts view of hybridity. To
be sure, Phillipe Buchez, a friend of Morel, can be
cited in support of Foucaults contention that Morel
broadened the notion of degeneration beyond race,
even if race in the traditional sense remained central
to Morels case (e.g., Morel 1857, 73).5 But the sense
of degeneration found in Morel is entirely consistent
with that found in contemporary discussions of race
mixing, as is apparent from his characterization of

Buchez wrote: No one [until Morel] had affirmed that certain

diseases, certain forms of poisoning, certain habits of the
parents, have the power to create, in the children, a truly
consecutive state, indefinitely transmissible, unto the extinction
of the stockunless some intervention arrests it. Cited
Friedlander 1973, 3967. See also Pick 1989, 5067.
5

211

half-castes in India as either sterile or with only weak,

wretched and depraved offspring (Morel 1857, 385386). Morel believed that the so-called inferior races
could, in appropriate circumstances, assimilate to the
general progress of the human spirit, whereas the
degenerate were susceptible of only relative amelioration (Morel 1857, 45-46). This meant that the
degenerate were the new site of permanent racial
difference. To the extent that those of mixed race were
degenerate in this new sense in a way in which the
Greenlanders, Esquimos, and Lapps, who had all been
considered degenerate varieties in Buffons day, were
not, then to be of mixed race was to belong to the
inferior race par excellence.
As an English reviewer of Morel explained,
describing the mixture of the Spanish and Portuguese
conquerors with the indigenous people: The conquered races have well-nigh disappeared; whilst the
conquerors have greatly degenerated, and their mixture with the aborigines has produced a degraded
race, which presents no element of perfectibility in the
future (Anon 1859, 456). Morel distinguished two
forms of hereditary transmission, one that allowed for
rapid regression to the previous typeas when
animals or humans having been domesticated return
to their wild stateand another that did notwhich,
according to Morel, was the case with the degenerate
(Morel 1857, 5-6). But for Morel this meant that
nature was already doing the work of policing
degeneration: the existence of degenerate beings is
necessarily limited and, wonderful to say, it is not
always necessary that they arrive at the final degree of
degradation, because they are struck by sterililty and
consequently become incapable of transmitting the
type of their degeneration (Morel 1857, 5). There
was nothing inevitable about degeneration, particularly if society faced squarely the dangers of any
terrible cataclysm that might otherwise be awaiting it
(Morel 1857, 356 and 661). For the late nineteenth
century this racism was natural, and it was not society
but nature that regulated race mixing by favoring
racial purity. It was because race mixing was policed
by nature that the individual States judged themselves
authorized to be more interventional in their support
of it.
The fact that Nott feared the effects of some forms
of race mixing did not mean that he believed that the
present races were pure. Although Foucault at one
point described the role of the state as being the

212

protector of the purity of the race (Foucault 1997,

70-71; Foucault 2003a, 81), it would be more
accurate to say that the state took as its task the
creation of racial purity (see Foucault 1997, 230;
Foucault 2003a, 258), because it was widely recognized that there were no pure racesat least not in the
civilized world. One sees this already, for example,
both in Josiah Notts edited collection, Types of
Mankind, and in Gobineaus Essay on the Inequality
of the Human Races, and scientists insisted on it
increasingly as the century wore on. Nevertheless,
contemporaries already saw problems with Notts
view, which could not account for the population
growth in those parts of South America where
miscegenation was widely acknowledged and practiced more openly than in the United States. Notts
efforts to do so were absurd. He suggested that
problems of infertility arose only when Northern
Europeans mixed with Blacks. Southern Europeans
faced no such problems as they already had a long
history of racial mixing and were the product of both
Caucasians and Blacks. But he offered no explanation
of why this had not led the Southern Europeans into
infertility. Perhaps for this reason some of Notts
contemporaries highlighted the alleged inefficiencies
of South American countries rather than their alleged
problems with infertility.
Nott wrote initially to defend slavery but some of
his biological arguments were readily adapted to
promote the idea that separating the races was
necessary for the very survival of the nation, or, more
precisely the homogenous part of it: Blacksand to a
lesser extent other non-White raceswere mixed and
thus threatened by this biological law. A good
indication of how real Nott thought the changes were
can be found in a short essay he contributed to James
De Bows The Industrial Resources, Statistics, etc. of
the United States, where he warned against offering
slaveowners insurance on their Black slaves (Nott
1854, 2929). The same conclusionthat it was
commercially unsound to offer Blacks insurance
was drawn in the new context of segregation in 1896
by Frederick Hoffman in his Race Traits and
Tendencies of the American Negro. He argued that
statistics showed that that, because most Blacks in the
United States were of mixed race, the American
Negro was, like the American Indian, in danger of
extinction. His proposal shows the extent to which
racial stratification enabled him to identify the

Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:205216

problem as a black problem, even though it was not:

Intercourse with the white race must absolutely cease
and race purity must be insisted upon in marriage as
well as outside of it (Hoffman 1896, 328). The initial
injunction was phrased in such a way as to be clearly
addressed to Blacks, but without saying so, it is clear
from the second half of the sentence that he knew
White men had beenand continued to beto
blame. W.E.B. Du Boiss The Conservation of
Races was in part a response to Hoffman, which is
an indication of its importance (Bernasconi 2009,
5324).
There were still people who saw race mixing as the
solution instead of the problem. Racial Amalgamation would never disappear entirely as a proposal to
correct inequality or as an inevitability, which is how
one finds it in, for example, Frederick Douglass
(Douglass 1886, 439), but such ideas increasingly
came to appear to contemporaries as absurdly
idealistic in the face of the biological case against
race mixing. There was a noticeable shift from a
racism based on racial hierarchy that ordered the
individual races in terms of proximity to Whiteness to
a racial hierarchy that privileged racial purity over
those of mixed race.
If one studies the literature on race of the Southern
United States from the Civil War period and just after,
in such journals as De Bows Review, one finds not
only a concern about protecting Southern Womanhood, but also a discourse about the repugnance
White men were supposed to feel in the face of Black
women. For example, W.W. Wright highlighted an
alleged revulsion to the idea of race mixing which he
called an aversion to hybridity (Wright 1860, 13).
On this account it was supposedly again not so much
society as nature that regulated sexual selection, just
as nature allegedly punished those who went against
its dictates. Gobineau, it should never be forgotten,
believed that the White race alone desired race
mixing, while the other races were repulsed by it.
Needless to say, that idea was downplayed in the
translation of the Essay that Nott organized (de
Gobineau 1856; see Bernasconi 2000, 83). The idea
was that for the purpose of discouraging race mixing,
nature had provided Whites with an instinctual
repugnance for Blacks that needed to be cultivated.
To be attracted to someone of another race was
against natures voice allegedly inscribed in us. The
idea was not entirely new insofar as one can find it

Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:205216

voiced, for example, in the eighteenth century by

Georg Forster as evidence for polygenesis (Forster
1786, 82-3), but it was now understood to be critical
for survival. In this way racism in the form of a
visceral reaction across race and sex was not only
legitimated, it was a sentiment to be cultivated or
developed. One might link this with Foucaults
account of what he calls eugenics as a technology
of the instinct,s in which context he highlights the
problem of heredity, racial purification, and the
correction of the human intellectual system by
purification of the race (Foucault 1999, 124; Foucault
2003b, 133).

4.
The function of racist discourse and segregated
institutions in the United States at that time was
increasingly to separate the population that had
become mixed from that which was understood to
be homogenous, so as to preserve White racial purity.
Nevertheless, generations of race mixing meant that
there was a real danger that one might be mixed and
yet not even be aware of it oneself. The increasing
focus in this period on degrees of racial purity arose
because biology changed the standards of what was
meant by racial purity as a result of transformation in
the understanding of heredity. It is true that the law
courts had long ceased to rely on appearance to
determine racial identity but legal statutes up to this
time still relied on fractions to do the job, which
meant that racial purity could be restored once lost.
With the one drop rule, first introduced in 1910 by
the state of Tennessee, the legal avenue was removed:
The word negro includes mulattoes, mestizos, and
their descendents having any blood of the African
race in their veins (Williams 1934, 307).
Notts notion that race mixing led to a decline in
fertility was not refuted scientifically until Eugen
Fischer published his study Die Rehobother Bastards
und die Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen in
1913. Furthermore, Fischer, relying on a more
traditional account of the hierarchy of races for his
basic framework, affirmed the idea of Social Darwinists, like Otto Ammon, that mixed-race populations
were liable to be annihilated in the struggle for
existence. Furthermore, Fischer in this book claimed
to be the first to apply Mendelian theories of

213

inheritance to human races in a sustained way and

so there is a shift of paradigms here (Fischer 1913,
101). We too often forget that even though race was
scientificallyat least since Kantalways about
heredity, it was not until Francis Galton and Mendel,
when he was rediscovered at the beginning of the
twentieth century, that biologists had at their disposal
a viable account of heredity. It was already widely
recognized that the offspring of parents of two
different races did not share equally in the racial
characteristics of their parent, but reference to the
Mendelian laws of inheritance allowed Fischer to be
the first to have a scientific explanation of why one
should abandon Kants half-breed model of race
mixing, while acknowledging that that remained as a
tendency. That Kant was wrong about skin color had
long been clear, but nobody had supplied a better
account until Mendels account of regressive traits
was adopted to explain the phenomenon. Regressive
traits are variations that once introduced cannot be
bred out: two apparently White parents might well
have a visible Black child if there had been race
mixing. The hiterthto widespread idea of making a
specifically pure race by breeding thus seemed to be
excluded. Fischer argued that a new inheritable
variation, once introduced, could always recur and
could only be eliminated by the death of everyone
who carried the so-called Mendelian trait.
If in the first decades of the twentieth century fears
of race mixing finally gave rise to the one-drop rule in
the legal definition of the Negro in certain parts of the
United States, it was in large part because Mendelism
had shown the difficulties of simply breeding out
earlier race mixtures along the lines proposed by
earlier theorists. Hence the heightened anxiety over
passing. The great fear for Whites was the Black
who could pass for White, as the great fear of Nazis
was of German Jews contaminating the Aryan race.
Concern about passing transforms racism from being
directed against a visible Other onto those within
ones circle. People of mixed racial heritage represented a kind of biological timebomb that could go
off at anytime in the process of reproduction. One did
not know for sure who was the carrier of an alien race
and to the extent that one did not know all the details
of ones own racial heritage, one might even suspect
oneself. This gives a personal dimension to Foucaults
description of State racism as a racism a society
directs against itself to defend itself, the internal

214

racism of permanent purification (Foucault 1997, 53;

Foucault 2003a, 62). Nor did it help that it was widely
believed that mixed-race populations tended to be
susceptible to self-hatred and indecisiveness (Carthill
1924, 158; Hitler 1942, 442; Hitler 1971, 400).
There were still, in the 1920s and 1930s, those who
talked as Kant had done in terms of a mulatto sharing
equally in the traits of both parents, and there were
still those who believed, like Nott and Morel, in
degeneration, but the new paradigm was that of
regression supported by Mendelian theories. The
impact of this way of thinking is apparent in the
flurry of activity in state legislatures in the United
States early in the twentieth century circumscribing
Whiteness in terms of the one-drop rule. Similarly, the
German State in the 1930s taught its citizens to
scrutinize potential marriage partners for signs of their
racial history, signs of what they might not even know.
Nothing better shows the distance traveled from the
scientific conception of race defined by hybridityin
which the offspring share equally in the characteristics
of the parentson the one hand and, on the other hand,
a society obsessed with the possibility of passing and the
idea that a single drop of alien blood might
contaminate. It was quite simply a matter of survival,
and Social Darwinism provided the perfect soil in which
such ideas might grow.
In a book review first published on October 14,
1905, William Bateson, who would soon after be
recognized as one of the leading authorities on
Mendelism, posed the question: What will happen
when civilized society thoroughly grasps what heredity means? (Bateson 1928, 456). His answer was:
One thing is certain: mankind will begin to interfere;
perhaps not in England, but in some country more
ready to break with the past and eager for national
efficiency The science of heredity will soon
provide power on a stupendous scale; and in some
country, at some time, not, perhaps, far distant, that
power will be applied to control the composition of a
nation (Bateson 1928, 458-9). One should recall this
warning when one learns that in Eugen Fischers
inaugural address as Rector of the University of
Berlin he praised the Nazis racial policy in these
terms: This intervention can only be characterized as
a biological population policy, biological in this
context signifying the safeguarding by the state of
our hereditary endowment and our race, as opposed to
the unharnessed processes of heredity: selection and

Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:205216

elimination (Mller-Hill 1984, 13-14; Mller-Hill

1988, 10). To be sure, by this time Fischer was
insisting that the endowments of a race were more
important than racial purity, but this did not stop him
from participating in a policing of race mixing that
had its origins in themes that it seems he had already
renounced.
In this paper I have argued that the scientifically
based racial essentialism that most accounts of racism
highlight emerged only after the institutions of
inherited chattel slavery had already been shaped. It
was used to defend the institution of slavery after the
fact and served to strengthen and prolong it, but did
not create it. Nevertheless, it was the medicalizing
racism that opposed race mixing that shaped the
institutions of segregation and apartheid, as well as
various aspects of the sterilization and other eugenic
programs that marked the first half of the twentieth
century. Foucaults tendency to highlight medicalizing
racism at the expense of racial essentialism means that
he is not always a reliable guide to the distinction
between them. One can, in any case, make the
distinction without appealing to Foucaults term
biopower, but it is a term that usefully summarizes
what is meant when one talks about racisms beyond
essentialism: it recalls the impact of the science of
inheritance on state racism, highlights how races are
not given by nature but made by human breeding and
demonstrates that there is a tendency today to misconstrue the role racial purity played in earlier discussions.
The fear that race mixing would contaminate the health
of a population was a very different kind of racism from
that which shaped slavery and different again from the
essentializing racism that was subsequently introduced
to defend it. These and other forms of racism sometimes
come together in the same text but they call for very
different kinds of society and nothing is to be gained
from confusing then. To combat each of them effectively also calls for very different measures, which is
why much is to be gained from differentiating them, as I
have attempted to do here.6

6
Many people have contributed to the discussions that have led
to this paper, most notably Mary Beth Mader, Kristie Dotson,
and David Gougelet, whose Ph.D. dissertation, Life Invested
Biopowers Taming of Chance and Difference, submitted to
the University of Memphis in the summer of 2007, helped
clarify my ideas. I am also grateful to the two anonymous
reviewers.

Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:205216

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