Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Occam's Razor Disagrees Edition

Title borrowed from this "Fundies Say the Darndest Things" post

The book to which I referred in this post was Can the White Race Survive? by James Denson Sayers, a contemporary of Madison Grant and Ernest Sevier Cox. Sayers, whom I quoted defending his work several months ago, spends 0xFF 255 pages trying to convince the reader that there were in actuality only two peoples, white and black, and that all other races were created merely by intermixture of these two types. I was somewhat startled when I read the book; I hadn't seen a thesis like that outside of Charles Carroll's works. However, Sayers found Carroll's The Negro a Beast distasteful (pg 210):

A number of years ago, in the course of my studies on this subject of ethnic mongrelization, I came across a book written by a man named, if I remember correctly, Charles Carroll. The viewpoint of the writer impressed me as narrow--he sought only to prove by the Bible that the Negro was a beast, without soul and without human rights. I cast his work aside with no more than a hasty reading.

He seemed to come over to Carroll's side afterwards, though (pgs 210-11):

In after years, during the course of my studies in biblical literature, I came across references to "the beast" which seemed time and again to indicate a "beast" not of the ordinary inarticulate, quadruped species, but one capable of more intimate relations with man, and a biped in form. It is not inconceivable that the repeated laws of Moses on the point of man's "lying" with the beast, declaring death as the penalty therefor, could refer to a practice not unknown at the present day of degenerates cohabitating with certain animals. If the Mosaic law only declared the "man" caught in such act should die, and stopped there, it would not have aroused my attention, but it goes further and declares the woman who is guilty of such abomination shall die and, further, that the beast in the case shall also be put to death.

The inclusion of women as forbidden to "lie before the beast" and the death penalty prescribed for the "beast" lends color to the assertion that this peculiar "beast" in Old Testament times was an anthropoid in form and that both parties to the sin should die for some reason. That reason must have been as a warning to prevent the practice as well as to prevent the possible mongrel offspring ever being born. The "beast" must have been capable of understanding the probable penalty for such act.

I don't really understand why the inclusion of women in this law indicates that the "beast" was "anthropoid." Maybe he just thought of women as too chaste to commit bestiality? I dunno.

The above excerpts from the book probably give a misleading idea as to how this book was written. Sayers hardly paid any attention to the bible; the above were from his chapter on the Jews, so some look at the Torah was unavoidable. For the most part he tried to give "scientific" evidence for his assertion. It didn't go too well; I think he had more success with the above religious exegesis, frankly. One of his pieces of "evidence" was the notion that there were differences in the general color of people of the same race, generally split along class lines. This meant to him that "negroid" blood infiltrated the lower classes much more thoroughly, and had slowly trickled up to the upper classes, but hadn't yet had much effect on them. He repeats this constantly, but the best example is probably on pages 110-112, in his brief section on Japan (emphasis mine):

In Japan we find a remarkable variance in racial types. It is easy for the Occidental stranger, reading of the far-away peoples, to conceive of them as all possessing a certain set and regular type. Such a conception is much in error when held in reference to the Japanese. I long since ceased to be surprised on seeing brown and even gray eyes and "Western" faces among the higher classes of Japanese. I have heard or read expressions of mystification by others who noticed such and could find no explanation for it. I have known Japanese to have skin color almost as white as the whitest European, with ruddy cheeks and with such clearly "Western" cut of features as to baffle detection should they wish to pass as one of the darker types of the Occident. But this is only prevalent among that part of the Nipponese descended from the old ruling classes, not yet leveled to a homogeneous national type. Japanese artists of past times represented the old conquering race of warriors who built Japan, as a fine-featured type with aquiline noses. A semblance of such a type is still often found among the Japanese nobility, the descendants of the old warriors.

There are millions of the common laborer and agricultural classes who present unmistakable negroid features with distinctly darker skins than the higher classes. The platyrrhine or at least mesorhine nose and frequently thick, shapeless lips, are common among the lower classes and less observable as we go upward in the social sale. This shows that howevr the origin of mongrelization between the White and negroid element began in Japan--whether between already mongrelized peoples from the mainland or between actual Negro slaves imported from the South in early times--the leveling of the mixture is as yet much short of complete, and lacks completeness in just those layers of the social strata where we might naturally expect to find it. The upper, ruling class, descendants of the old Tungusic Yamato Whites from the western mainland, have naturally refrained longer from receiving the blood of the negroid lower classes just as the whiter peoples all over the eart instinctively recoil at such mixture. As a result we still have in Japan a ruling class whose members, on an average, are nearly White when compared to the full range of so-called races from pure White to the Negro. But during the long centuries of intercourse with the mongrel peoples of the mainland and with infrequent infiltrations from members of the lower classes who raised themselves in social station, even the very top has received enough negroid intermixture to dilute the blood to the point where Japan for centuries stood still in her progress.

Yes, apparently Mr. Sayers could think of no other reason why "the common laborer and agricultural classes" might have "distinctly darker skins than the higher classes."