Part Two: Phrenology: The Bastard Science of Racism

When we last left the science of Phrenology, it had spread like wildfire throughout the United States and, later, Europe. Robert is joined again by podcast pioneer Josh Clark (Stuff You Should Know, The End of the World) to continue discussing scientific racism.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hello everybody. I am Robert Evans, and this is yet
again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you
everything you don't know about the very worst people in
all of history. Now, my guest for part two of
this episode on phrenology is Josh Clark, who was with
me last time as well. Josh, you're the host of
Stuff You Should Know and uh, the new host of

(00:24):
End of the World. How are you doing today? A man,
I'm doing good. How are you? I'm good, I'm good.
This has just been minutes after we recorded part one,
but sometimes we pretend it's a different day. Um oh,
I was going to keep going with it, but yes, yeah,
it's just a few minutes later. Yeah, just just a
few minutes later. Nothing's changed except for now it's part two. Uh,
so I'm gonna get into it. When we last left

(00:45):
the science of phrenology, it had spread like wildfire throughout
the United States and later Europe. Colonialism really got going
in the mid eighteen hundreds, and phrenology helped to provide
the scientific justification behind the so called white man's burden. Now,
most of you have probably at least heard that term. Uh.
You may have read the weird Kipling poem of the
same name um Now. Kipling wrote that poem white Man's Burden,

(01:08):
in and his goal with it was to essentially urge
the United States on in our brutal conquest of the
Philippine Islands, during which over two thousand civilians died. The
fingerprints of phrenologic thought are all over Kipling's poem. I'm
gonna read an excerpt from that poem. Take up the
white Man's Burden, Send forth the best, ye breed, Go
send your sons to exile, to serve your captives, need

(01:31):
to wait in heavy harness, on fluttered folk and wild
Your new caught, sullen people's half devil and half child.
So you might notice a similarity between sort of the
thinking in this poem and the thinking behind our old
friend Dr Charles Caldwell. So Kipling in this poem is
not enthusiastic in the traditional propagandistic sense about the idea

(01:51):
of colonialism. He's not portraying it is all sunshine and roses.
He's not pretending it's this wonderful fun thing. It's go
send your sons to exile. You know. He compares the
people they're conquering as captives. He's not pretending it's this
bright and fluffy thing. Instead, he's saying it's a necessary duty.
It's a duty that white men have, right. So that's
the way he's angling this. So again, you've got this

(02:13):
terrible thing going on, colonialism, which is by this period
already killed tens of millions of people, particularly in India,
and been behind a couple of different genocides. And so
instead of just saying we deserve these territories because we
want to conquer them, Kipling is essentially saying this is
our duty, and it's an unpleasant duty. It's just something
we have to do because we're such good people. I'm

(02:34):
just I'm very interested in that. So another section from
poem kind of gives, i think a little bit more
direct evidence of phrenologies impact on Kipling. Take up the
white man's burden and reap his old reward. The blame
of those e better, the hate of those ye guard,
the cry of hosty humor, Ah slowly to the light,
why brought key us from bondage, our loved Egyptian night.

(02:57):
So again he's saying, the people that we're conquering are
in capable of raising themselves up to civilization. Now he's
not saying it's because of the shape of their skull,
but he's clearly bought into the scientific logic of the day,
which is basically saying, these are fundamentally different races, and
in order for them to become civilized and to gain
access to wonderful Western science and technology, we have to
conquer them. You know, That's that's the thinking, and that's

(03:18):
going on in Kepling's head. You know, I read an article,
I think in Nautilus magazine not too long ago, and
it was about how, um, the South was planning on
globalizing slavery. They were planning on bringing it to Latin America,
South America, and they one of the ways they justified
it was that kind of thinking that that if they
freed their slaves, they wouldn't know what to do with themselves.

(03:41):
They had to be taken care of. And dare they
say that they enjoyed being slaves? That was kind of
one of the ways that it was. Um, it was justified,
I guess, yeah. Yeah. And and and Keppling saying the
same thing, you know that why brought us from bondage.
I loved Egyptian night. They enjoy being sort of tramped
down in this way, and and Kipling there. It's not

(04:03):
so different for Kipling to say that, like, these people's
need to be brought into the light than it is
for Dr Caldwell to say that certain races must have
a master. Like. They're not the same thing because Kipling
didn't believe in slavery. Obviously he was not a supporter
of slavery, but you can see the intellectual through line
in their thoughts. So colonialism in Africa kicked off officially

(04:24):
in eighteen eighty four with the Berlin Conference. Now, the
Berlin Conference was part of a scheme by our old
friend and bastard pod subject, King Leopold of Belgium. He
basically wangled his way into creating this conference in order
to secure his own domination of the Congo. Now, thirty
five years before that, an American medical doctor named Not
gave a lecture where he used cutting edge phrenological science

(04:47):
in order to justify colonialism. This is before colonialism had
really kicked off into its highest state that it didn't
like the late eighteen hundreds. He stated that, quote, the
deep rooted intellectual and physical difference is seen around us
in the white red and black races are too obvious
and too important in their bearings to be longer overlooked.
Doctor Not claimed that each of these races was fundamentally
different and had no common ancestors between them. As a result,

(05:10):
it was impossible for Africans or anyone else not currently
tooling around with rifles and steamboats to reach civilization on
their own Africa, and her quote, fifty millions of blacks
would have to be civilized. Now, I can't speak to
how influential that particular speech by doctor Not might have been,
but it was emblematic of the common attitudes of the era.
Thirty six years after that speech, President Grover Cleveland would

(05:31):
be the first world leader to recognize King Leopold's Congo
Free State, which was basically just a giant rubber plantation
that ran on human blood. Uh. The fact that colonialism
ought to also be a for profit enterprise was taken
for granted by many people at the time. The three
seas of colonialism were civilization, Christianity, and commerce. It's interesting
that Christianity takes the second position there. Um, I guess

(05:54):
good that they put it in front of commerce. But
now there were men who were colonialists who had legitly
good hearts, uh, and who thought that what they were
doing was making the world better. One of these men
was the British doctor Ronald Ross. He was one of
the very first people to have access to like a
microscope and try to study stuff like malaria with a
microscope to figure out like what the fund is going
on with this disease that you know, for a little

(06:17):
bit of perspective, scientists suspect that malaria has killed more
human beings than any other single cause throughout human history. Yeah,
it's I mean, obviously there's no but it is believed
to be the leading cause of death for humans and
the length of our species life. Like, I'm sure this
guy wanted to know what was going on that. Yeah.
So he's a decent man who's trying to and he

(06:38):
sees European medical technology, especially now that we have like
microscopes and stuff, as a gift to the uncivilizable peoples
of the Empire, and he believed that their brains would
not let them develop good medicine, so it was a
kindness for Europe to take them over and introduce them
to stuff like stethoscopes. Now, Ross devoted an enormous amount
of effort to study malaria and Sierra Leone, which was
a dangerous and risky thing. So he is risking his

(07:00):
life to try to save people. He's also a colonialist
and a racist. Again, this is complicated. Morality is complicated.
In a December report, he wrote, quote, in the coming century,
the success of imperialism will depend largely upon success with
the microscope. Now, not all of that was because, of course,
he wanted to help the local peoples. A lot of
it was the acknowledgement that white people in places like

(07:23):
Africa died like crazy from the local diseases. So he
was also acknowledging that, like, we need to get better
at science and medical science in order to survive in
these places we're trying to conquer. Well, you can't, you
can't have much commerce of the people over there, colonizing.
I can't stay alive, you know, yeah, exactly. So science
was really one of the major underlying foundations of colonialism

(07:44):
at its height. Uh as I said, this was a
time when microscopes were starting to become available widely, and
this is also a time in which germ theory is
first beginning to be puzzled out and tied to the
very real and remarkable success of Western medicine was the
very bogus and bullshit science of phrenology, but reinforced each other.
Sir Francis Galton, one of the founding fathers of eugenics,

(08:04):
borrowed terms from phrenology when he stated, quote the average
intellectual standard of the Negro racism two grades below our
own Anglo saxon. Charles Darwin, who rejected phrenology, is essentially
hoke um, also believed that the quote savage races like
the Negro or the Australian were closer to apes than
white Western men souven people who rejected phrenology have clearly

(08:25):
taken up some of its its terminology because this idea
of categorizing races in that way of saying, oh, you know,
this race is two grades higher than that, like speaking
about human races like their D and D classes or whatever. Um,
that didn't really exist before phrenology. That was the first
time people started doing it. So even when a guy
like Darwin, who is clearly intelligent enough to know phrenology
is nonsense, it still winds up using, you know, some

(08:48):
of the terms that it created. So uh, the horrific
racism you know behind phrenology lead to totalitarian nonsense in
many colonized nations. Since Europeans felt like they knew so
much more than the races they were captured, They felt
like they owed it to their subjects to limit what
their subjects could eat, where they could travel, and to
attempt to force them to behave in certain ways for
the benefit of their health. Historian David Arnold calls this

(09:10):
colonization of the body, and it went way beyond legislation
of the diets of captive people. And that brings us
to the Great nation slash continent of Australia and the
thriving trade of non white people's corpses that kicked off
starting in the mid eighteen thirties. So the first really
really big merchant of human skulls for phrenological research in
Australia was a guy named Thomas Mitchell. He was an

(09:32):
explorer and a surveyor in New South Wales. And you know,
at this time, being an explorer means you run into
contact with unfriendly local peoples on a regular basis, which
means that you're shooting unfriendly local people on a regular basis,
and so Mitchell decides, well, while I'm killing all these
Aboriginal peoples, might as well take the skin off their

(09:53):
skulls and sell their skulls for some extra cash. So
this is yeah, commerce exactly, it's number three. You know.
It's all there. So whenever Mitchell murdered an Aboriginal Australian,
he would de skin the man or woman's skeleton and
essentially sell the parts. In some cases, the body parts
became sought after antiquities in colonial homesteads, but many of

(10:14):
them were sold to medical schools, hospitals, and colleges across
the Western world. If your university bought any skulls in
the eighteen hundreds or early nineteen hundreds, there's a very
good chance Major Mitchell or someone like him provided those
skulls for profit via murder. Throughout the late eighteen hundreds,
Australia serviced an enormous demand for the bones and particularly
the skulls for indigenous people. Modern estimates suggest that as

(10:37):
many as nine hundred different Indigenous Australians are still owned
by schools in the UK, Germany, France, the United States,
and other Western nations. So again, some of the body
parts this guy collected via murder are still being used
to teach students today. You know, I've heard that a
lot of those articulated skeletons are from rob Graves even today. Yeah,
I believe India is a pretty big supplier of those.

(10:59):
But I had not heard that a lot of the
skulls had come from murdered people. I usually it was
Rob Graves that I had run into. That is super dark,
and it's also very common for people too, because once
guys like Mitchell prove how much of a market there is,
people will start, you know, an Aboriginal person dies and
is buried and then they'll dig up. So grave robbing

(11:20):
is probably more of these than outright murder, because it's
just easier to steal a dead body, you know. But
it's both. There's definitely a lot of murder going on. Yeah. Yeah.
The bad news or good news, depending on how you
look at it, is that not all of the people
whose bones got sent to universities were murdered before having
the remains desecrated. Quote. Some of the other remains held

(11:40):
on the boxes at Mitchell belonged to Indigenous Australians who
died in colonial institutions, jails, hospitals and asylums and scarcely
cold were anatomized, a benign term for butchery. Thousands more
who might have died naturally and remained buried were exhumed
in muss That's what I was just talking about. Yeah,
anatomized as a nice term for stealing someone's bones. We
did a live show of Stuff you Should Know, live

(12:02):
show on grave robbing um in London and it was
a really crazy time. Medicine was certainly advanced by it,
but there was a lot of stolen cadavers, just a
huge trade in it. Yeah, and that that is one
of those ones where it's not like a clear right
or wrong thing, because it's like, if we were robots,
we would be like, oh, of course everyone's bones should

(12:23):
be used for science, why does it matter? But we're not,
and it's messed up. But also science was advanced by it.
We're had more sentimental about our bodies than robots. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And I guess you could argue that if scientific institutions
are getting used from these stolen people's bones, then it's
an example of like the pseudoscience of phrenology advancing the

(12:45):
real science of anatomy, which is again history is complicated,
yeah and weird. Uh so. On Young, the last full
blooded man of the Negambrie people of the Limestone Plains
in Australia, died at the end of a rival spear
in about eighteen fifty. Settlers dug him up and turned
his skull into a sugar bowl. On Young's descendants suspect

(13:06):
that the sugar bowl is in a private home in Canberra,
but the guy who's believed to actually owned this sugar
bowl has never returned any phone calls about it. So
there are clearly still some collectors who I'm going to
guess are pretty racist living in Australia right now, with
like furniture and sugar bowls and stuff made out of
the bones of Aboriginal people, right, lampshades made of skin,

(13:28):
the usual, And the people who are descendants of those
folks know it, like we know this guy has my
great great great granddad's head and he's using it to
put hard candy in and he's clearly blocked our number.
He's blocked our number. I shouldn't be like that kind
of like horrifying dead laugh that you often get in

(13:49):
this particular show. It's well, can you do I mean,
good lord, I mean we could, we can all go
to that guy's house. He'd probably give up the sugar
bowl then. Yeah, I mean, if you know who has
on Young's head sugar bowl. This is a situation in
which I approve of doxing uh people who owned the
remains of uh. Anyway, yeah so uh. Dr William Ramsey Smith,

(14:11):
a Scotsman who became state coroner in South Australia in
the early nineteen hundreds, was another prolific school merchant in
this skull obsessed era. Since he was corner, he had
regular access to the bodies of murdered indigenous victims. He
was probably supposed to bury them, but that would have
just been throwing money in the ground. One museum file
note for a skull that he sold them, and this
is a museum file from the University of Edinburgh states quote.

(14:35):
The skull is clearly that of a murder victim, with
a bullet entry wound in the back of the skull
and an exit wound in the front. The path of
the bullet suggests deliberate execution rather than defense. It is
possible Ramsey Smith obtained the skull through local police. He
was a man of suspect ethics who collected remains widely.
So what it sounds like is saying here is there's
at least one skull that was in Edinburgh University that

(14:56):
came from a man who was murdered by the Australian
police and then the corner sold his skull to a
foreign university. And that sounds about right. Was a hotbed
of grave robbing and body part dealing. They love bones
in Scotland, big big bone town, big bone town and yeah,
bone capital of the British Isles. Uh you heard it here. So,

(15:20):
according to The Guardian, Ramsey Smith was quote almost single
handedly responsible for Edinburgh University's indigenous Australian bone collection. Smith
is believed to have given as many as six hundred
people's bodies away to a professor of anatomy at that school.
While schools were a popular item, Smith also sent in tongues, skin,
male genitals and organs. So that's that's fun um. As

(15:43):
Australia became known as the place where you could get
your hands on a shipload of dead natives, scientists from
around the world, professional and amateur, traveled there and bribed
local doctors to provide them with body parts. So we're
gonna continue talking about the trade in human corpses because
it goes even further and uh again. By the to
this episode, we'll be talking about the couple of genocides
that were sort of sparked by phrenology. But right now

(16:06):
it's time to talk about the wonderful products and or
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(16:27):
We are talking about Australia and phrenology. And uh, I'm
gonna read another quote from a lovely Guardian article about
the bone industry that erupted in Australia. So we are
still talking about Australia, which in this podcast will forever
now be named bone town, although maybe that's Edinburgh. I
don't know. Given out a lot of nicknames, rapid fire,

(16:47):
I can't keep track of them anyway, here's the Guardian quote.
Some of the anthropologists attracted to phrenology asked for skulls,
while others wanted skin with elaborate tribal markings. Medical schools
still under the spell of Darwinism wanted full corpses and
skeletons to compare with the Anglo Saxon dead, so they
might reinforce the fallacious orthodoxy that each race represented a
distinct evolutionary phase. Some Indigenous Australians may have been killed

(17:11):
specifically on behalf of visiting Europeans. So as this bone
industry goes on, it moves from you know, guys who
are out in the middle of nowhere, killing people, sometimes
in self defense, sometimes just murder, and then taking their
bones to a mortician, essentially taking the skulls have already
dead people to scientists coming over to Australian being like

(17:32):
I could use the skull of a man of this tribe,
and then someone's going out and killing that guy and
taking his head. You're directly culpable at that point, for sure.
I mean like you were coupable already just buying the
bones and knowing what their providence was. But when you
travel and select the person from you might as well
be pulling the trigger yourself. You're you're a murderer at
that point. Uh So, the trade in indigenous corpses in

(17:54):
Australia was so brisk and so profitable that soon particularly
good specimens were earmarked before they even had a chance
to die. One example was a man named Winnama Chu,
a Yaruwaka man who was tried in English despite speaking
no English, after an alleged tribal murder. He was sent
to an asylum in Adelaide and marked for dissection while
he was still alive. When he died in nineteen o three,

(18:15):
Ramsey Smith de fleshed him. Winnama choose bones remained in
Edinburgh until they were repatriated in the nineteen nineties. So
again there's people who probably at least one person listening
to this podcast who was trained on a corpse that
was acquired this way and there. Yeah, I could totally
see that next year. And I think I think it's
good that that person used the word de fleshed, because

(18:36):
I think we cover up a lot of past crimes
and unpleasantness by using, um, you know, euphemisms stand ins
for things like de fleshing, because when you say something
like de fleshing, it gets across what that person was doing.
It puts you in the room with them, and it
really kind of sinks in what was actually going on
if it hadn't already. Yeah, and it is this grim

(18:58):
what we're talking about, and a number of the cases
that have been uncovered have a seriously dark conspiratorial air
to them. You know. We talked about sort of how
that that one school in Edinburgh that seems to have
been murdered by the police, right where it's possible, although
there's no hard evidence, that maybe the police got kickbacks
from Ramsey Smith, Like they would murder a guy and

(19:20):
give him a body and then he would give them
some of the money that he got from the skull.
Like that is possible, and if you're trying to do
anything about it, you're told forget about it. Jake, it's
bone it's bonetown. Yeah, both Edinburgh and Australia both are bonetown.
Where there's sister cities, Yeah, sister bones cities. Uh So.
Another case is the case of an Aboriginal named ak

(19:43):
A Tommy Walker, who was a negar and jerryman who
lived on the streets of Adelaide. He was something of
a popular local figure, so it wasn't seen as odd
that when he died in nineteen o one, the City
Stock Exchange paid to give him a decent funeral. That
sounds nice, right, Sure, nothing terrible is going to happen.
Read the next paragraph. Uh, I should say they gave

(20:05):
most of his skin a decent funeral. Ramsey Smith removed
his skeleton and sent it to Edinburgh. They buried his skin,
and just his skin actually in the city. They de
fleshed his ass, and they buried his flesh, and they
sent his bones to Edinburgh for cash. Let's not dance
around what they did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This bone caper,
though almost proved to be Ramsey Smith's undoing. It launched

(20:27):
an inquiry into his morgue and local papers filled with
articles claiming he'd sold skeletons for ten pounds apiece. One
of his former assistants was interviewed and talked about seeing
heads stored in kerosene tins to skeletonize them or to
flesh them. Other witnesses said Ramsey would regularly shoot corpses
with a rifle in order to study their wounds. So
this case was a big deal in Adelaide. But because

(20:49):
this was nineteen o three, Ramsey Smith was exonerated of
any wrongdoing. When he died in nineteen thirty seven, over
a hundred human skulls were found in his house. Yeah. Now,
Australia was not the only part of the colonial world
where organs were bought and sold like funko pop figurines.
The Belgian Congo was another popular source for body parts
for universities in medical schools. Now, we did a whole

(21:11):
two part episode on King Leopold and the rapaciousness of
Belgians towards you know, Africans in the Congo. But I
think what we didn't get into that time, that I
really just learned while researching this podcast is that the
degree of rapaciousness that Belgian's felt towards African body parts
and sort of this desire to come modify them and
sell their skulls and their bones led to a myth

(21:34):
in the Congo that all white people were cannibals. Now
I found yeah, I found all this out in a
fascinating study by the National Institute for Health called Cutting
the Flesh, Surgery, Autopsy and Cannibalism in the Belgian Congo.
The article discusses a man named Levmo who was sent
to work with a Christian missionary while he was still
very young. Quote when his father told him as a

(21:54):
young boy that he would be going to live with Bentley,
who was the Belgian missionary and the Levmo was terrified
and it was thought as it was thought that quote
the white man sometimes eight Congo people in Central Africa.
It is common knowledge that a which from a distance
eats the soul of the various organs of his or
her victim's body. These organs die and eventually the bodies die.
It is not metaphorical. Even though it is not tangible,

(22:15):
this act cannot be seen. Only its secondary effects can
be viewed in the illness of the individual being consumed
from the inside. Again, it is literally cannibalism, but not
a physical cannibalism. But to understand it as such as
to understand that the body is something more than the material.
European stories of indigenous stories of cannibalism fail to realize this.
Did the eating of the physical body exist most certainly

(22:36):
to some extent. But I suspect many of the stories
of cannibalism circulating and colonial circles in the early twentieth
century where of the non physical variety misinterpreted by colonial observers.
So what he's saying is that I'm sure people have people.
Everyone listening has heard some myths about cannibals in Africa.
You know, in this period of time, there were constant
stories about them, constant tales of cannibals in the Congo,

(22:58):
and whatnot with this Hiss is essentially suggesting is that
most of those stories were not actual cannibalism. They were
tribes talking about cannibalism because they believed that like if
you kill an enemy, you eat some aspect of his essence,
and so the tribes consider that cannibalism even though no
actual flesh was being consumed. So both Europeans believed that

(23:21):
the Congolese people were cannibals even though they weren't actually
eating people, because they misunderstood sort of what they were
talking about when they said cannibalism. But also the Congolese
people began to think that the Europeans were cannibals because
the Europeans, even though they weren't consuming African flesh, were
in a way consuming African flesh far more than than
the Congolese people were. Yeah, yeah, it's I think that's fascinating.

(23:44):
I had no idea. I'd never read about this until
just now. This guy there was a guy named I
can't remember his airs, someone Airs, and he wrote a
paper in the seventies or eighties, where he's basically saying like,
I don't think cannibalism actually ever really happened. I think
we may have really misinterpreted some things. And he of

(24:05):
course was shouted down in the academy, but his whole
comeback was like, showed me, showed me the evidence there is, like,
how show me that, like genuine physical evidence of cannibalism,
And there is some, but it's typically linked to climate
change from what I've seen. Apparently it has been documented
in real life. But the idea, that's just the general

(24:26):
widespread idea that Africa was overrun with cannibals, or or
p Papua New Guineas, or Australia's or wherever, some dark
continent filled with shadows and mystery because we've never really
been there before, it is full of cannibals. That's just
a Western concept from misunderstanding. Was this guy's position. Yeah,
and I think that's that's very true. And in fact,

(24:47):
the only place on the globe right now that I
would be willing to say is filled with cannibalism is
main YEP cannibals and main main listeners. I'm not gonna
take it back, so stop eating people manners. Anyway, let's
get back to the Congo. The Congolese people start to
view the white people who are coming into their country

(25:08):
as cannibals because they're literally devouring the Congolese people. But
at the same time, in a I don't know, irony
might be the right term to use for this. The
colonial authorities in Belgium start to become convinced that cannibalism
is rife in Central Africa just because of how easy
it is to find the bones of dead Africans. Quote.

(25:28):
In the late nineteenth century, Avid skull collector and Congo
explorer George Schweinfurth found skull so easily attainable in the
Congo that for him this was ample proof of African cannibalism.
At the same time, he spent considerable effort attempting to
explain phrenology to the very populations he collected from to
allay the growing fears that he himself was at cannibal
The example of scientists creating their truth could be seen

(25:48):
even more clearly in the case of Scottish naturalist James S. Jamison.
James S. Jamison was the heir to the Jamison Whiskey
fortune So this is the son of the guy who
invented jamison whiskey, and he paid a local tribal leader
in Central Africa ten handkerchiefs for his men to eat
a ten year old girl. Possibly apocryphal. There's some debate

(26:10):
as to whether or not this happened, but there's writings
about it, and it was certainly used as evidence that
cannibalism was happening. Well, we were able to pay these
people to eat someone, so clearly cannibalisms rampant. You know,
we paid handkerchiefs, they wanted to do it, basically. Well,
and I love the idea of this Belgian explorer schwein
Ferth becoming convinced that the sheer ease with which you know,

(26:30):
he can find bones is proof that there's cannibalism in Africa.
At the same time as he's trying to explain phrenology
to these people, so they don't think that he's a cannibal.
It's pretty wild. And of course there were so many
bones in the Congo because during the twenty years that
King Leopold ruled the Congo, half of the people there died,
you know, about ten to thirteen million. Good lord, yeah, again,

(26:53):
there's gonna be a lot of bones. When you kill
thirteen million people, you know there's you might as well
sell them. I guess yeah, you're just leaving money and ground,
which is where you should leave it if it's bones.
But anyway, uh So. Belgium first started occupying land in
what is now Rwanda in nineteen twelve, and their holdings
grew at the end of World War One when they
were given Germany's land in Africa as retaliation for the

(27:13):
German occupation. I'd like to quote now from a fascinating
study titled Phrenology and the Rwandan Genocide by Charles Andre Quote.
At the time of European colonization, a myth of ancient
Ethiopian ancestry and racial superiority of the Tutsis was introduced
in eighteen sixty four. The British explorer John H. Speck
wrote that the Hutus were a primitive race, the true

(27:35):
curly headed, flab nosed, pouch mouthed Negro, while the Tutsis
descended from the best blood of Abyssinia and were therefore
far superior. Belgian settlers disseminated this myth an influential nineteen
thirty one documentary The Congo I Knew made by armand
Dennis probably contributed all this led to increasing tension and
discrimination against the Hutu and Tuah populations. I think you

(27:57):
can probably see where we're we're ramping up to get
to here. So it was extremely common for colonial occupiers
who have favored tribes within their domain. If you remember
from our episode on ed Amine and his tribe at
the Kaqua, they were used as elite colonial super soldiers
in the British Empire. The Belgians in Rwanda preferred the Tutsis,
thus launching a Rachel dichotomy that would end in tremendous bloodshed.

(28:19):
And we will talk about that tremendous bloodshed after this
ad pivot and we're back. We're back and we finally
got into Rwanda, and we're talking about how the Belgians
were the first ones to really set up the racial
economy between the Tutsi and the Utu people. So the

(28:42):
Tutsi had first settled in Rwanda around the fourteenth century
from their original homelands in the Congo. They'd grown to
become something of the dominant feudal elite in the region
prior to colonialism. Uh and in this era. You know,
before the Europeans arrived, most of the rulers in Rwanda
had been Tutsi, but there had been inner marriage between
the do In the Tutsi, and the vast majority of
both groups were super poor peasants. There was no history

(29:05):
of mass race based violence between the two groups and
no enforced racial laws. It was fine and fairly normal
for Hutu and Tutsi people to intermarry and have children.
All this changed for the worse when Belgium took over
in nineteen thirty three. Their avowed preference for the Tutsi
was caughtified and colonial law. Every person in Rwanda was
issued a racial identity card that noted their ethnic origins.

(29:27):
These origins were verified using the best phrenologic science of
the era quote, cranioficial and body measurements were taken and
a number of distinguishing features were considered for ethnic classification
of the population. Tutsi's had a taller stature, probably related
to better nutrition. The head format, color of the eyes
and skin lighter, and the size of the noses longer
and narrower were important features which as a group was

(29:49):
considered to resemble white Europeans. So again you've got that
scientist hundreds something years before this point who's saying that, like,
you can rank the races by how similar they are
to Greeks, and that's a descendant of what the Belgians
are doing here. The Tutsis look closer to us than
the Hoodoos do. So they're the dominant. They're they're okay,
they're okay in our book, we're going to support them

(30:12):
ruling this area. So since the Rwandan colony was a
for profit endeavor for Belgium, the Belgian authorities avoided exercising
much direct control over the government because you know that
costs money. Instead, they handed power to the Tutsi and
backed that power up with European guns. Under Tutsi in
Belgian dominance, Hutus were restricted from higher education, from owning land,

(30:33):
and from working in the government. They were conscripted to
provide forced labor under Tutsi masters and for Belgian profit.
Since the jutu Is made up the majority of the
Rwandan population, it's not surprising that this whole situation turned
into a powder keg In nineteen fifty seven, nineteen fifty
nine through sixty one, and nineteen sixty two. This anger
manifested itself in violent programs by Hutus against the Tutsi minority.

(30:55):
When Belgium abandoned the colony in nineteen sixty two, it
was split into two nations, but Ndi and Rwanda. In
nineteen sixty three, Tutsi dominated Burundi, flushed with Belgian guns,
invaded Rwanda and held the country until nineteen seventy four,
when a coup reestablished Hutu dominance in the government. The
fighting and blood letting between Hutus and Tutsis continued in
the former colony until in a one hundred day period

(31:17):
in nineteen ninety four, between eight hundred and thousand and
two million, mostly Tutsi victims were massacred in the orgy
of violence. Seventy percent of the Tutsi population was wiped
out in the space of a summer. The efficiency with
which this murdering occurred was only possible due to the
lingering influence of phrenology see The racial i d system
the Belgians had set up in the thirties was still

(31:39):
active in the nineteen nineties. Quote despite renewed discussion and
an apparent willingness to discuss its termination. From nineteen ninety on,
the classification system was still in use and became a
central instrument to rapidly identify and killed Tutsis during the
nineteen ninety four genocide. Ethnic classification and identity cards was
only abolished in nineteen ninety seven. Wow, so three years

(32:01):
after the Rwandan genocide. Phrenology is still a central part
of the government of Rwanda, enforcing a racial dichotomy and
violence between two races that again, prior to Belgian dominance,
there was no evidence that Tutsi and Whotu people saw
each other as different races. There was no evidence that
there was this sort of when you go in and

(32:21):
prop up one group over another, it's definitely going to
create some hard feelings, pretty understandable, exactly, and when you
believe that, like, for example, because different people with different
skull types and whatnot are effectively different species, and you
have to keep them apart in order to stop one
species from intermarrying with the other. And you develop a

(32:42):
racial card system and you're measuring people's skulls determine what
their cards says like, Yeah, it's not surprising that what
happened happened. It's kind of the logical conclusion of this
This type of bigotry um so as ridiculous as most
of its tenants sound. Today, with our much greater under
standing of human biology and heredity, phrenology still exerts a

(33:02):
massive influence on the world. The British Phrenological Association was
active until nineteen sixty seven. Yeah, it's still nineteen sixty seven. Yeah, Yeah,
there's a sorry interjecting, I literally could not hold that one. No,
it's it's crazy, right, Like, there's the civil rights movement
is going off in the United States and there's people

(33:23):
in Britain being like, yeah, we should measure their schools.
He is still an irishman. There were just two of
them left, but still and then they were they were
holding out, the holding out the ghost. Yeah. And again
this racial I D system that's based in phrenology was
active in Romanda until ninety seven. So it is a
it's a bit difficult to comprehensively uncoil the full impact

(33:45):
of phrenology on twentieth century racist of violence. There were
numerous other strains of racist scientific thought, uh and even
perfectly valid theories like Darwin's theory of evolution were missed
used in the twentieth century to justify racial policy, but
phrenology was the first or an ize scientific attempt to
categorize human races in an official capacity. As such, its
impacts extended to the racial policies of histories most racist

(34:08):
regime the Nazis quote early works focused on misaggenation, and
studies by Eugene Fisher in German Southwest Africa today's Namibia
involved physical measurements and led to prohibition of mixed race
marriages and all German colonies in nineteen twelve after losing
its African colonies at the start of World War One.
Similar studies on mixed populations were held in Germany and

(34:29):
led to the sterilization of German blacks also called the
Rhineland Bastards. Similar methods were later used for physical anthropological
characterization of Jews and the justification and racial purification and
the Holocaust. So the Nazis were measuring skulls. They believed
in all this, and you can find Nazi drawings and
stuff of like the skulls of shapes of heads of

(34:49):
Jewish people as a way to recognize them and try
to ferret out people with Jewish blood in them, and
such like this was again you. It's not talked about
much today, but phrenology was very much part of the
intellectual development of the of Nazi racial policy. Yeah, I'm
from what I understand, the Nazis got a lot of
their ideas from America in the earlier the beginning of

(35:11):
the twentieth century. A lot of American scientists inspired a
lot of Nazi thought from what I understand, Yeah, American
and British scientists. Uh So. Phrenology unfortunately, still has some
adherents today. You can find people in weird little corners
of the Internet talking about it, especially if you spend
as much time reading stuff racist right on the Internet
as I do. But it has been thoroughly discredited as

(35:33):
a pseudoscience and no longer has much or any poll
in mainstream academic circles. Today, it's best known as an
example of scientific racism. But the collapse of phrenology hasn't
meant the end of scientific racism. There are still prominent
racist scientists using bad logic and worst deductions to justify
their racism today. In nineteen four, psychologist Richard Hernstein and

(35:54):
political scientists Charles Murray published The Bell Curve, a book
about i Q that was a centily the scientific underpinning
of the movie Idiocracy. The Bell Curve argued that intelligent
people were risk of being outbred by stupid people. Intelligence,
of course, was based on i Q tests, highly problematic
metric that Murray and Hernstein basically embraced as infalliable evidence
of mental potential. The Bell Curve argues that welfare and

(36:17):
all forms of social support for poor mothers should be
ended because they encourage dumb people to breed. It states, quote,
the most efficient way to raise the i Q of
a society is for smarter women to have higher birth
rates than duller women. The Bell curve does not argue
in favor of genocide, and instead suggests that there ought
to be quote a place for everyone, even low i
Q individuals. These people could handle perhaps menial work, while

(36:40):
high i Q individuals and I'm gonna let you guess
which color of people Murray thinks high i Q individuals
tend to be. These people should manage society, which is,
you'll notice, basically the same thing Aristotle proposed two and
a half thousand years ago. Yeah uh, And in fact,
Murray has identified Aristotle as a major influence on his

(37:00):
work and his thinking, because hey, we we really peaked
in mental thought years ago. Everything else is just redoing
the original, right all cover. Yeah, those guys who died
when they scraped their knees on a rock really had
some shipped down and it all figured out now. Last year,

(37:23):
Murray was a guest on an atheist pundits podcast Sam Harris.
The episode was titled Forbidden Knowledge. Last March, after anti
racist protesters shut down a speech Murray was scheduled to
give it Middlebury College, The Daily Wire, founded by Ben Shapiro,
covered the protests by posting a lengthy, multi paragraph excerpt
where Charles Murray defended his science, which again argues that

(37:44):
there are inherent intelligence differences between the races, and again
when he's really pointing out that one race is not
as smart as others. On March eighteen, The New York
Times published an article by David Reich where he stated, quote,
it is simply no longer possible to ignore or the
average genetic differences in races. Now, I want to stop
here for a second just to point out that there's

(38:05):
been quite a lot of study on why there are
differences in i Q tests and has to do with
a number of things. One of the factors is that
people of different races and different economic classes use the
same words to mean different things, because you know, it's
the same thing with like how people speak differently in
Louisiana or in Texas where I come than they do
in the East Coast. But the people who write the

(38:27):
i Q tests come from one very specific area and
use words in a specific way, and they base it
off of essentially their experience. So you've got people who
grew up in a very different sort of situation who
are going to score differently even though they're not any
less intelligent. And they've shown that for one thing, if
the if the i Q test was an immutable representation
of your intelligence, you wouldn't be able to change your

(38:48):
i Q score by like twenty points by studying. You
can impact your i Q test massively by studying for
the i Q test. There are a lot of problems
with i Q and it is the height of I'm
gonna call it idiocy to presume that this test is
like the objective measure of intelligence. And I will point
out that like guys like Albert Einstein didn't brag about

(39:11):
their i Q s other people talk a lot more
about Einstein's IQ than he ever did. Real smart people
don't need to brag about their i Q. But anyway,
that's a little bit of a rant here. It's also
worth noting that, you know, these people like Murray, one
of the authors of The Bell Curve. The argument that
guys like him will make is that you know, we're
trying to do real science. We're trying to ask questions,

(39:31):
and science doesn't have to be polite, and you know,
if you're offended, well, I'm sorry that these facts offend you.
But again, Murray is a political scientist. He's not a
genetic scientist. He's not an expert on the human brain.
He's not a neurologist. And actual neurologist and actual people
who know what they're they're talking about and study this
thing for a living have pretty openly condemned all of

(39:51):
this thought and pointed out repeatedly why it is, why
it's dumb. Murray, You're dumb if you listen to this podcast. Somehow,
I'm sorry, The Bell Curve was a bad book, and
you're a bad scientist. So, in other words, scientific racism
continues to this day into the twenty teens now is
in the eighteen thirties. It is dressed up with the
latest and most scientific sounding phrasing possible, but with a

(40:13):
proper historical look at the subject, we can see that
very little has changed since the days of the eighteen hundreds.
Back then, doctor called Well studied the heads of enslaved
black people and deduced that, surprise, surprise, the shape of
their skulls had destined them to be owned by him. Today,
menlike Murray and David Reich look at our very incomplete
data on human intelligence, declare i Q and formal education
to be the objective measures of intelligence, and that ignore

(40:36):
the fact that both of those measures are heavily impacted
by income level and of course, centuries of brutal oppression
and subjection. They claim that we're just looking at facts
will ignoring historical facts that revealed them to be nothing
but yet another generation of scientific racists. That's the NIMI spiel.
I loved your spiel, Robbert. I Um, I've been sitting
here absorbing everything that you've been saying, half the gross

(41:00):
but also half in awe because you've got some research
skills that are something special. Well, I I have to
thank all of the and again all of the sources
will be on our website. Behind the Bastards, I read
a lot of smart PhD people's papers and stuff for this.
You know, I didn't do any original research. This is
a lot of very smart people whose names I have forgotten,

(41:20):
but you can check out on our bibliography. Well, I mean, yes,
of course you didn't do the primary research. You wouldn't
have time to do this show if you had. But
I think you put a put put all this disparate
research together in a remarkable way. Sorry, I feel like
I'm talking to my teenage SI or something like that.
You've got a ribbon or something. I really am in
awe and I love what you're doing and thanks what

(41:42):
you're doing. Well. I appreciate that a lot. I think
this is an important story because I think I think
one of them that's really important to understand about racism
is that it's not a human inevitability. It's not something
that has always been present. People have always been distrustful
of people who come from far away, like you know,
during the Roman Empire, you know, when the Romans made
contact with like a traitor from han China, they were

(42:03):
probably a little bit weirded out. They're like, oh, this
guy looks really different, what's going on with this? But
there was no like racism the way we have it
didn't exist in the Roman Empire. They had slaves, but
it didn't matter what color those slaves were, and there
were black people who were emperors of their Roman Empire,
Like there was no attempt to categorize people based on
what the color of their skin was. That ship is recent.

(42:24):
It started with We're gonna do a whole episode at
some point on the invention of whiteness, but like there's
some evidence that the idea of white people started as
a way to essentially prove that the Irish were not
human um and then gradually, like the the Irish was
sort of the prototype, and the tactics that were used
to subjugate the Irish evolved, and we're used to subjugate

(42:46):
the Native Americans, and then we're used to subjugate the
Africans on the continent of Africa, and so it's like
this whole very long, dark intellectual tradition, but it really
doesn't kick off until five years ago, you know, And
before then, we didn't have racism the way that we
have it now. Which isn't to say people weren't shitty
or didn't enslave each other, but it was not what

(43:06):
we all live with right now. Um. I think it's
important to know that that's new and that it's the
result of people who wanted to feel smart and also
have a way to justify treating other people like ship like,
that's the that's the that's the basis of phrenology, right
like yeah, so, And I wonder also, I mean, like
it was I can't tell if the scientists were out

(43:28):
there doing this work like for the benefit of the
governments or the corporations who were using the work to
justify the colonization subjugation that they were using it for,
or if it was just handy and the governments that
was it in conjunction, or or was it kind of
one one like the horse the horse went before the cart.

(43:48):
I think it's a mix of both. I think it's
like Gall, the founder phrenology. I don't think it started
out of desire for racism or desire to justify slavery.
I think Gall realize that the brain was more important
than people have been giving it credit for, and he
just made some understandable mistakes you know, for that era
in science. But I think that the mistakes he made

(44:11):
provided an opportunity for other people to make use of
this science and also sort of people that called well
who didn't do any of the original research, but when
they read about it, found a way to use it
to justify the things they already believed. Like, I think
you've got that first generation of people who are like
trying to do science, coming at this not out of
a desire for bigotry, but what really helps it spread?

(44:34):
Or the second and third generations who just see it
as a way to justify being shitty like that, I
think that is how it goes. Yeah, racism we Josh,
you want to plug your plug doubles. Oh, I'd love to.
Thanks for the opportunity. I have a podcast of my own,

(44:56):
or I do the talking. It's called The End of
the World with Josh Clark. It's about how we will
probably not be around two hundred years ago, and by
we I mean the human race or two years from now.
And it's pretty interesting. It's ten part heavy on the
sound design, heavy on the original score by a guy
named point Lobo who's amazing um and you can find

(45:17):
it everywhere Apple Podcasts, I Heart Radio, the Whole Bank
and check out hashtag E O T W Josh Clark
everywhere on social Did you know you can just make
up your own hashtag? Yeah, yeah, I've I've tried with
with with hashtag. Charles Murray is not as smart as
he thinks he is. But I think it's a little

(45:37):
bit too long. I don't know. Maybe after this episode
it will really take off. Here we go. So, uh,
once you've listened to my podcast and you are ready
for the end of humanity, listen to Josh's podcast Into
the World and it will be uplifting. Uh. You can
find us on the internet at Behind the Bastards dot com.
You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Bastards odd.

(46:00):
You can find me on Twitter at I right. Okay,
Uh so yeah, this has been Behind the Bastards. I've
been Robert Evans, You've been Josh Clark. Thank you so much, Josh,
thank you, Robert, thanks for having me, and thank you
all for listening. We will be back next week with
another story about someone or someone's terrible. Until then, buy
a T shirt from us at T Public. I was

(46:21):
gonna close it out, but then Sophia re minded me
to plug the T shirt, So yeah, behind the Bastards
t public by a shirt, by a phone case, by
a sticker. They sell branded sandwiches, they don't. They don't
sell branded sandwiches, but you can put a sticker on
the sandwich and eat it. So we'll be back next week.
I love about you.