Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Phrenology: The Bastard Science of Racism

Episode Date: December 6, 2018

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 the new host of End of the World. How are you doing today, my 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. Oh, I was going to keep going with it, but yes, it's just a few minutes later. Yeah, just a few minutes later, nothing's changed. Except for now it's part two, so I'm going to get into it. When we last left the science of phrenology, it had spread like wildfire throughout the United States and later Europe.

Colonialism really got going in the mid-1800s, 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. You may have read the weird Kipling poem of the same name. Now Kipling wrote that poem, White Man's Burden, in 1899, and his goal with it was to essentially urge the United States on in our brutal conquest of the Philippine Islands, during which over 200,000 civilians died. The fingerprints of phrenologic thought are all over Kipling's poem.

I'm going to 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 captive's need, to wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild, your new caught sullen peoples, 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 of colonialism.

He's not portraying it as 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 terrible thing going on colonialism, which is by this period, already killed tens of millions of people, particularly in India and 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 just, I'm very interested in that. So another section from the poem kind of gives, I think, a little bit more direct evidence of phrenology's impact on Kipling.

Take up the white man's burden and reap his old reward, the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard, the cry of host ye humor, aw slowly to the light, why brought ye us from bondage, our loved Egyptian knight. So again he's saying the people that we're conquering are incapable 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. That's the thinking that's going on in Kipling's head. You know, I read an article, I think in Nautilus magazine not too long ago, and it was about how the South was planning on globalizing slavery. They were planning on bringing it to Latin America, South America. And one of the ways they justified it was that kind of thinking that if they freed their slaves, they wouldn't know what to do with themselves.

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 justified, I guess. Yeah, yeah, and Kipling's saying the same thing. You know, why brought he us from bondage? I loved Egyptian night. They enjoy being sort of tramped down in this way. And Kipling, it's not so different for Kipling to say that these peoples need to be brought into the light than it is for Dr. Caldwell to say that certain races must have a master.

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 in 1884 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, 35 years before that, an American medical doctor named Naught gave a lecture where he used cutting-edge phrenological science in order to justify colonialism.

This is before colonialism had really kicked off into its highest state that it didn't like the late 1800s. He stated that, quote, the deep-rooted intellectual and physical differences seen around us in the white, red, and black races are too obvious and too important in their bearings to be longer overlooked. Dr. Naught claimed that each of these races was fundamentally different and had no common ancestors between them, as a result, 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, 50 millions of blacks would have to be civilized. Now, I can't speak to how influential that particular speech by Dr. Naught might have been, but it was emblematic of the common attitudes of the era.

36 years after that speech, President Grover Cleveland would 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. The fact that colonialism ought to also be a for-profit enterprise was taken for granted by many people at the time. The three C's of colonialism were civilization, Christianity, and commerce. It's interesting that Christianity takes the second position there. Although I guess good that they put it in front of commerce, but... Now, there were men who were colonialists who had legitimately good hearts 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 a microscope and try to study stuff like malaria with a microscope to figure out what the fuck is going on with his disease. For a little bit of perspective, scientists suspect that malaria has killed more human beings than any other single cause throughout human history. Is that right? Yeah. Obviously, there's no 100%, but it is believed to be the leading cause of death for humans and the length of our species' life. I'm sure this guy wanted to know what was going on there. Yeah. He's a decent man who sees European medical technology, especially now that we have microscopes and stuff, as a gift to the uncivilizable peoples of the empire.

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. Ross devoted an enormous amount of effort to studying malaria in Sierra Leone, which was a dangerous and risky thing. He is risking his life to try to save people. He's also a colonialist and a racist. Again, this is complicated, morality is complicated. In a December 1899 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 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. You can't have much commerce if the people over there colonizing can't stay alive, you know? Yeah, exactly. So science was really one of the major underlying foundations of colonialism at its height. 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, both reinforced each other. Sir Francis Galton, one of the founding fathers of eugenics, borrowed terms from phrenology when he stated, quote, the average intellectual standard of the Negro race is some two grades below our own Anglo-Saxon. Charles Darwin, who rejected phrenology as essentially Hockham, also believed that the, quote, savage races like the Negro or the Australian were closer to apes than white Western men. So even people who rejected phrenology have clearly taken up some of its terminology, 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 they're D&D classes or whatever, 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 of the terms that it created. So the horrific racism, you know, behind phrenology led to totalitarian nonsense in many colonized nations. Since Europeans felt like they knew so much more than the races they were capturing, 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 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-1830s. So the first really, really big merchant of human skulls for phrenological research in Australia was a guy named Thomas Mitchell. He was an 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,

I might as well take the skin off their skulls and sell their skulls for some extra cash. So this is... Commerce. Yeah, commerce, exactly. It's number three, you know, it's on 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 them were sold to medical schools, hospitals, and colleges across the Western world.

If your university bought any skulls in the 1800s or early 1900s, there's a very good chance Major Mitchell or someone like him provided those skulls for profit via murder. Throughout the late 1800s, Australia serviced an enormous demand for the bones and particularly the skulls of her Indigenous people. Modern estimates suggest that as many as 900 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, yeah.

I believe India is a pretty big supplier of those, but I had not heard that a lot of the skulls had come from murdered people. 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 get up his boat. So grave robbing is probably more of these than outright murder because it's just easier to steal a dead body. Sure. You know, but it's both. There's definitely a lot of murder going on. Man.

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 their remains desecrated. Quote, some of the other remains held in the boxes at Mitchell belong 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 mass. So that's what I was just talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Anatomized is a nice term for stealing someone's bones.

We did a live show of stuff. You should know live show on grave robbing 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 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 be used for science. Why does it matter? Sure. Right.

But we're not and it's messed up, but also science was advanced by it. We're a tad 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 real science of anatomy, which is, again, history is complicated and weird. So on Yong, the last full-blooded man of the Negambri people of the limestone plains in Australia, died at the end of a rival spear in about 1850. Settlers dug him up and turned his skull into a sugar bowl.

On Yong's descendants suspect that the sugar bowl is in a private home in Canberra, but the guy who's believed to actually own 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, the usual. Yeah. 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 this particular show. It's so dark. What can you do? I mean, good lord. Yeah. I mean, we could all go to that guy's house. He'd probably give up the sugar bowl then. Yeah. I mean, if you know who has Anyang's head sugar bowl, this is a situation in which I approve of doxing. People who owned the remains of... anyway, yeah.

So Dr. William Ramsey Smith, a Scotsman who became state coroner in South Australia in the early 1900s, was another prolific skull merchant in this skull-obsessed era. Since he was coroner, 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, 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 came from a man who was murdered by the Australian police and then the coroner sold his skull to a foreign university. That sounds about right. Edinburgh was a hotbed of grave robbing and body part dealing for sure. They love bones in Scotland. Big bone town, Edinburgh. Bone capital of the British Isles. You heard it here. So 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 600 people's bodies away to a professor of anatomy at that school.

While skulls were a popular item, Smith also sent in tongues, skin, male genitals, and organs. So that's fun. As Australia became known as the place where you could get your hands on a shitload 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 going to continue talking about the trade in human corpses because it goes even further. And again, by the end of this episode, we'll be talking about the couple of genocides that were sort of sparked by phrenology. But right now, it's time to talk about the wonderful products and or services that support this podcast and or show. So please take a listen, Lou, get your credit card out, throw some money down and buy some stuff.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns.

He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We are talking about Australia and phrenology, and I'm going to 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, I've given out a lot of nicknames, rapid fire, 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 specifically on behalf of visiting Europeans. So as this bone industry goes on, it moves from 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 of already dead people, to scientists coming over to Australia and being like, I could use a skull of a man of this tribe, and then someone's just going out and killing that guy and taking his head. You're directly culpable at that point for sure. I mean, you were culpable already just buying the bones and knowing what their providence was, but when you travel and select the person for murder, you might as well be pulling the trigger yourself. You're a murderer at that point. So the trade in indigenous corpses in 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 Wunamachu, a Yarawaka 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 1903, Ramsay Smith defleshed him. Wunamachu's bones remained in Edinburgh until they were repatriated in the 1990s. 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. Yeah, I could totally see that actually. And I think it's good that that person used the word defleshed because I think we cover up a lot of past crimes and unpleasantness by using euphemisms, stand-ins for things like defleshing. Because when you say something like defleshing, 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 grim what we're talking about. And a number of the cases that have been uncovered have a seriously dark conspiratorial air to them. We talked about sort of how that one skull in Edinburgh that seemed 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 Ramsay Smith. Like they would murder a guy and give him a body and then he would give them some of the money that he got for the skull. Like that is possible.

And if you try to do anything about it, you're told, forget about it, Jake. It's bone town. It's bone town, yeah. Both Edinburgh and Australia. Both are bone town. Wherever you are. There's sister cities in it. Yeah, sister bone cities. So another case is the case of an aboriginal named Poltapalingada, aka Tommy Walker, who was a Negar and Jerry man 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 1901, the city's stock exchange paid to give him a decent funeral. That sounds nice, right? Sure, yeah. I'm sure nothing terrible is going to happen.

Let's read the next paragraph. I should say they gave most of his skin a decent funeral. Ramsay Smith removed his skeleton and sent it to Edinburgh. They buried his skin and just his skin, actually, in the city. They defleshed his ass is what they did. Yeah, they defleshed 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 Ramsay Smith's undoing. It launched 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 deflesh them. Other witnesses said Ramsay would regularly shoot corpses with a rifle in order to study their wounds. So this case was a big deal in Adelaide, but because this was 1903, Ramsay Smith was exonerated of any wrongdoing. When he died in 1937, over a hundred human skulls were found in his house. 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 and medical schools. We did a whole two-part episode on King Leopold and the rapaciousness of Belgians towards 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 Belgians felt towards African body parts and sort of this desire to commodify them and sell their skulls and their bones led to a myth in the Congo that all white people were cannibals. Now, 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. When his father told him as a young boy that he would be going to live with Bentley, who was the Belgian missionary, Levmo was terrified and as it was thought that, quote, the white man sometimes ate Congo people. In Central Africa, it is common knowledge that a witch 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.

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 is 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 to some extent. But I suspect many of the stories of cannibalism circulating in colonial circles in the early 20th century were of the non-physical variety, misinterpreted by colonial observers. So what he is saying is that, I am sure everyone listening has heard some myths about cannibals in Africa in this period of time.

There were constant stories about them, constant tales of cannibals in the Congo and whatnot. What this scientist is essentially suggesting is that most of those stories were not actual cannibalism. They were tribes talking about cannibalism because they believed that if you kill an enemy, you eat some aspect of his essence. And so the tribes considered that cannibalism even though no actual flesh was being consumed. So both Europeans believed that 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 the Congolese people were. Yeah, yeah. I think that's fascinating. I had no idea. I'd never read about this until just now. There was a guy named, I can't remember, someone Ayers and he wrote a paper in the 70s or 80s where he was basically saying like, I don't think cannibalism actually ever really happened. I think we may have really misinterpreted some things. And he of course was shouted down in the Academy, but his whole comeback was like, show me, show me the evidence. Show me that 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 widespread idea that Africa was overrun with cannibals

or Papua New Guinea is, or Australia is, or wherever, some dark continent filled with shadows and mystery because we've never really been there before, it's full of cannibals. That's just a western concept from misunderstanding with this guy's position. Yeah, and I think that's very true. And in fact, the only place on the globe right now that I would be willing to say is filled with cannibalism is Maine. Yep, yep, you heard it here. Cannibals in Maine, Maine listeners. I'm not going to take it back, so stop eating people. Manors. Anyway, let's get back to the Congo. The Congolese people start to view the white people who are coming into their country 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, in the late 19th century, avid skull collector and Congo explorer George Schweinfirth found skulls 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 a cannibal. The example of scientists creating their truth could be seen even more clearly in the case of Scottish naturalist James S. Jameson. James S. Jameson was the heir to the Jameson whiskey fortune. So this is the son of the guy who invented Jameson whiskey, and he paid a local tribal leader in Central Africa, 10 handkerchiefs for his men to eat a 10 year old girl. Possibly apocryphal, there's some debate 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 cannibalism's rampant. Right, we paid them handkerchiefs. They wanted to do it, basically. I love the idea of this Belgian explorer, Schweinfirth, becoming convinced that the sheer ease with which 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 20 years that King Leopold ruled the Congo, half of the people there died, you know, about 10 to 13 million. Good Lord. Yeah. Again, there's going to be a lot of bones when you kill 13 million people, you know? Sure, and you might as well sell them, I guess. Yeah, you're just leaving money in the ground, which is where you should leave it if it's bones, but anyway. So Belgium first started occupying land in what is now Rwanda in 1912, and their holdings grew at the end of World War One when they were given Germany's land in Africa as retaliation for the German occupation. I'd like to quote now from a fascinating study titled Phrenology and the Rwandan Genocide by Charles Andre. At the time of European colonization, a myth of ancient Ethiopian ancestry and racial superiority of the Tutsis was introduced. In 1864, the British explorer John H. Speck wrote that the Hutus were a primitive race.

The true 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 1931 documentary, The Congo I Knew, made by Armand Dennis, probably contributed. All this led to increasing tension and discrimination against the Hutu and Tua populations. I think you can probably see where we're ramping up to get to here. So it was extremely common for colonial occupiers to have favored tribes within their domain. If you remember from our episode on Idi Amin and his tribe at the Kakwa, they were used as elite colonial super-soldiers in the British Empire. The Belgians in Rwanda preferred the Tutsis, thus launching a racial dichotomy that would end in tremendous bloodshed. And we will talk about that tremendous bloodshed after this ad pivot.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns.

He's a shark, and not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 dichotomy between the Tutsi and the Hutu people. So the Tutsi had first settled in Rwanda around the 14th 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. And in this era, you know, before the Europeans arrived, most of the rulers in Rwanda had been Tutsi. But there had been intermarriage between the Hutu and the Tutsi, and the vast majority of both groups were super poor peasants. There was no history 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 1933, their avowed preference for the Tutsi was codified in colonial law. Every person in Rwanda was issued a racial identity card that noted their ethnic origins.

These origins were verified using the best phrenologic science of the era. Craneo-official and body measurements were taken and a number of distinguishing features were considered for ethnic classification of the population. Tutsis 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 considered to resemble white Europeans. So again, you've got that scientist 100-something years before this point who's saying that, like, you can rank the races by how similar they are to the Greeks, and that's a descendant of what the Belgians are doing here. The Tutsis look closer to us than the Hutus do, so they're the dominant race. They're okay. They're okay in our book. We're going to support them 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 and Belgian dominance, Hutus were restricted from higher education, from owning land and from working in the government. They were conscripted to provide forced labor under Tutsi masters and for Belgian profit. Since the Hutus made up the majority of the Rwandan population, it's not surprising that this whole situation turned into a powder keg. In 1957, 1959 through 61, and 1962, this anger manifested itself in violent pogroms by Hutus against the Tutsi minority. When Belgium abandoned the colony in 1962, it was split into two nations, Burundi and Rwanda. In 1963, Tutsi dominated Burundi, flushed with Belgian guns, invaded Rwanda, and held the country until 1974,

when a coup re-established Hutu dominance in the government. The fighting and bloodletting between Hutus and Tutsis continued in the former colony until, in a 100-day period in 1994, between 800,000 and 2 million mostly Tutsi victims were massacred in an orgy of violence. 70% 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 ID system the Belgians had set up in the 30s was still active in the 1990s. Despite renewed discussion and an apparent willingness to discuss its termination from 1990 on, the classification system was still in use and became a central instrument to rapidly identify and kill Tutsis during the 1994 genocide.

Ethnic classification in identity cards was only abolished in 1997. Wow. So three years 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 Hutu people saw each other as different races. There was no evidence that there was this sort of... When you go in and prop up one group over another, it's definitely going to create some hard feelings. It's pretty understandable.

Exactly. And when you believe that, 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 racial card system and you're measuring people's skulls to determine what their card says, yeah, it's not surprising that what happened happened. It's kind of the logical conclusion of this type of bigotry. So as ridiculous as most of its tenet sound today, with our much greater understanding of human biology and heredity, phrenology still exerts a massive influence on the world. The British Phrenological Association was active until 1967.

No. Yeah, it's still... 1967. 1967, yeah. Wow. Sorry for interjecting. I literally could not hold that one. No, it's crazy, right?

The civil rights movement is going off in the United States and there's people in Britain being like, we should measure their skulls. Right. Here's the skull of an Irishman. There were just two of them left, but still. They were holding out the ghost. Yeah, and again, this racial ID system that's based in phrenology was active in Rwanda until 97. So it's a bit difficult to comprehensively uncoil the full impact of phrenology on 20th century racist violence.

There were numerous other strains of racist scientific thought, and even perfectly valid theories like Darwin's Theory of Evolution were misused in the 20th century to justify racial policy. But phrenology was the first organized scientific attempt to categorize human races in an official capacity. As such, its impacts extended to the racial policies of history's most racist regime, the Nazis. Quote, Early works focused on miscegenation and studies by Eugene Fisher in German Southwest Africa, today's Namibia, involved physical measurements and led to prohibition of mixed race marriages in all German colonies in 1912. After losing its African colonies at the start of World War I, similar studies on mixed populations were held in Germany

and 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 in 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 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, it's not talked about much today, but phrenology was very much part of the intellectual development of the Nazi racial policy. Yeah, and from what I understand, the Nazis got a lot of their ideas from America in the earlier, the beginning of the 20th century. A lot of American scientists inspired a lot of Nazi thought from what I understand. Yeah, American and British scientists.

So phrenology, unfortunately, still has some adherence 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 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 worse deductions to justify their racism today. In 1994, psychologist Richard Hernstein and political scientist Charles Murray published The Bell Curve, a book about IQ that was essentially the scientific underpinning of the movie Idiocracy. The Bell Curve argued that intelligent people were at risk of being outbred by stupid people.

Intelligence, of course, was based on IQ tests, a highly problematic metric that Murray and Hernstein basically embraced as infallible evidence of mental potential. The Bell Curve argues that welfare and 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 IQ 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 IQ individuals.

These people could handle, perhaps, menial work while high IQ individuals. And I'm going to let you guess which color of people Murray thinks high IQ 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. And in fact, Murray has identified Aristotle as a major influence on his work and his thinking. Because, hey, we really peaked at mental thought 2300 years ago. Everything else is just redoing the original, right? It's all covered.

Yeah. Those guys who died when they scraped their knees on a rock really had some shit down. Had it all figured out. Had it all figured out. Now, last year 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 at Middlebury College. The Daily Wire, founded by Ben Shapiro, covered the protest by posting a lengthy multi-paragraph excerpt where Charles Murray defended his science,

which again argues that there are inherent intelligence differences between the races. And again, he's really pointing out that one race is not as smart as others. On March 23rd, 2018, The New York Times published an article by David Reich where he stated, quote, it is simply no longer possible to ignore the average genetic differences in races. Now, I want to stop here for a second just to point out that there's been quite a lot of study on why there are differences in IQ tests. And it 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 it's the same thing with 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 IQ 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 IQ test was an immutable representation of your intelligence, you wouldn't be able to change your IQ score by like 20 points by studying. You can impact your IQ test massively by studying for the IQ test. There are a lot of problems with IQ and it is the height of, I'm going to call it idiocy, to presume that this test is like the objective measure of intelligence. And I will point out that guys like Albert Einstein didn't brag about their IQs. Other people talk a lot more about Einstein's IQ than he ever did. Real smart people don't need to brag about their IQ. But anyway, that's a little bit of a rant here.

It's also worth noting that people like Murray, one of the authors of The Bell Curve, the argument that guys like him will make is that we're trying to do real science. We're trying to ask questions 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's a political scientist. He's not a genetic scientist. He's not an expert on the human brain. He's not a neurologist, an actual neurologist and actual people who know what the fuck they're talking about and study this thing for a living have pretty openly condemned all of this thought and pointed out repeatedly why it's dumb. Murray, you're dumb if you listen to this podcast somehow.

I'm sorry, but 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 20 teens. Now, as in the 1830s, it is dressed up with the latest and most scientific sounding phrasing possible. But with a proper historical look at the subject, we can see that very little has changed since the days of the 1800s. Back then, Dr. Caldwell 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, men like Murray and David Reich look at our very incomplete data on human intelligence, declare IQ and formal education to be the objective measures of intelligence, and that ignore 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 while ignoring historical facts that reveal them to be nothing but yet another generation of scientific racists. Nice. That's the end of my spiel. I loved your spiel, Robert. I've been sitting here absorbing everything that you've been saying, half engrossed, but also half in awe, because you've got some research skills that are something special. Well, 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, but you can check out on our bibliography. Nice. Well, I mean, yes, of course, you didn't do the primary research. You wouldn't have time to do the show if you had, but I think you put all this disparate research together in a remarkable way. Sorry, I feel like I'm talking to my teenage son or something like that. You just got a ribbon or something. I really am in awe, and I love what you're doing, and thanks for what you're doing. Well, I appreciate that a lot.

I think this is an important story, because I think one of the things 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 probably a little bit weirded out. They were 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 the Roman Empire. Like, there was no attempt to categorize people based on what the color of their skin was. That shit is recent. It started with, we're going to 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. And then gradually, like, the Irish were sort of the prototype, and the tactics that were used to subjugate the Irish evolved and were used to subjugate the Native Americans, and then were 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 500 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 we all live with right now.

And 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 shit. Like, that's the basis of phrenology, right? Yeah. I wonder also, I mean, I can't tell if the scientists were out there doing this work for the benefit of the governments or the corporations who were using the work to justify the colonization and subjugation that they were using it for, or if it was just handy in the governments? Was it in conjunction or was it just kind of the horse went before the cart? I think it's a mix of both. I think like Gaul, the founder of phrenology, I don't think it started out of a desire for racism or a desire to justify slavery. I think Gaul realized that the brain was more important than people had 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 provided an opportunity for other people to make use of this science and also sort of people like Caldwell, 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 are the second and third generations who just see it as a way to justify being shitty. I think that is how it goes. Yeah. Racism. Wee! Josh, you want to plug your plugables? Oh, I'd love to. Thanks for the opportunity. I have a podcast of my own where 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 200 years ago, and by we, I mean the human race, or 200 years from now.

And it's pretty interesting. It's 10 part heavy on the sound design, heavy on the original score by a guy named Point Lobo. It was amazing. And you can find it everywhere, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, the whole shebang. And check out hashtag EOTW Josh Clark everywhere on social. Did you know you can just make up your own hashtag? Yeah, yeah. I've tried with hashtag Charles Murray's not as smart as he thinks he is, but I think it's a little bit too long. I don't know. Maybe after this episode it will really take off. There we go. So once you've listened to my podcast and you are ready for the end of humanity, listen to Josh's podcast, End of the World, and it'll be uplifting. You can find us on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPod. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. 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 gonna close it out, but then Sofa reminded me to plug the t-shirt. So yeah, Behind the Bastards, T-Public, buy a shirt, buy a phone case, buy a sticker. They sell branded sandwiches. They don't. They don't sell branded sandwiches. But you can put a sticker on a sandwich and eat it. So we'll be back next week. I love about 40% of you. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Alphabet Boys on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.