 I'm just going to make a little announcement before we start since I have just a few minutes and we'll certainly finish on time. So just for everybody's interest. This is going to be the last lecture series before April. Okay, we're going to reconvene. It's April 5th, if I'm not mistaken. April 5th is going to be our old friend Caleb Alexander going to talk about April, April 6th, April 6th. Thank you. Okay, April 6 Wednesday, April 6 so that we have a couple of weeks off a couple of Wednesdays. But ending the winter quarter. It is my great pleasure to introduce today's speaker. Rana Hogarth is an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her talk is titled The Shadow of Slavery in the Era of Eugenics, Charles B. Davenport's Race Crossing Studies. Rana Hogarth is an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds her PhD in history with the concentration in history of science and history of medicine from Yale University. She also has an MHS in health policy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Policy. Her work in research focuses on medical and scientific constructions of race during the Era of Slavery and beyond. Her scholarship brings together the fields of African American history, history of medicine, and Atlantic world history. In her first book, Medicalizing Blackness, Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840, Professor Hogarth examines how white physicians medicalize blackness, a term she uses to describe the process by which white physicians define blackness as a medically significant marker of difference in slave societies of the American Atlantic. Her second project examines the genealogy and deployment of terms used to describe mixed race offspring of black and white people such as mulatto or quadrune in American medical and lay discourse. It traces how these terms were used in colonial Caribbean context and in the mainland North America during the Era of Slavery and illuminates how American eugenicists adopted these terms to correlate mental and physical capacities of mixed-rate people to their racial ancestral makeup. In doing so, they refashion these terms from crude labels to precision tools with valid scientific meanings. In the early 20th century, American youth genesis looked southward to the Caribbean to conduct race-crossing studies, viewing that region as an ideal experimental site to undertake the study of a topic once considered taboo in the United States during that time. The results of these studies gave credence to the notion that race was a fixed and quantifiable biological feature and confirmed white anxieties about the perils of racial mixing. Finally, this project centers on the Caribbean ex-slave colonies as experimental spaces that allowed eugenicists to extract data from mixed-race people for the benefit of American scientists and the lay public. Rana has received the George S. and Gladys W. Queen Award for Excellence in Teaching in the History Department and the University of Illinois, the Arts and Sciences Dean Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Provost Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and the Helen Corley Pettit Scholar, all in 2020, the period of time when most of us were trying to just come to terms with COVID. Her books include Medicalizing Blackness, Racial Differences in the Atlantic World. She also has a number of other publications including the American Journal of Public Health, the American Quarterly, African and Black diaspora, and in a couple of weeks, Rana will be one of the featured speakers at the National Library of Medicine. So it is my great pleasure and privilege to introduce our next speaker, our colleague, my friend, Rana Hogarth to give a terrific talk that's timely and appropriate. Oh my gosh, thank you so much for this very generous introduction. I really do want to say a very big thank you for inviting me to share my work with you today. I'm actually kind of, I'm honored and a little intimidated to be included with such distinguished lecturers in this series. Many of the speakers are trailblazers in the history of medicine. I have great admiration for them. And I actually read a lot of their books for my qualifying exams. And I'm not trying to like date anybody but I'm just trying to basically say that their work actually transformed the field and their work is enduring and amazing. So I also want to just have a big thank you to Dr. Mindy Schwartz who's just been the most amazing friend and wonderful supporter. I really appreciate being a part of this and thank you so much Mindy for having me here. I'm hoping one day I'll get to like see you not in a Zoom box but like in person and give you a big hug. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and going to share with you some of my research and what I want to do if I can just hide this. There we go. A couple of things I wanted to just say, you all are sort of going to be guinea pigs in a little bit no sense because that this is part of my new work so this is from my second book project. So I'm testing out some ideas here and I'm sharing some of my preliminary data with you. The other thing that I want to do is just offer a content warning for the audience. So there's going to be certain language that will appear in my talk that includes terms like Negro, racial hybrid, miscegenation, mulatto, octaroon, etc. These are all terms that are going to appear in my presentation today, but I only use those terms to stay in keeping with the terminology of the historical context and my use of these terms is in no way an endorsement. So my talk today is going to focus on slavery and eugenics, two topics that are not frequently discussed together I found. Now I deliberately like chose this challenge for myself for a number of reasons. One, and as Dr. Schwartz mentioned, I'm trained as a historian of medicine, but I bring together African American history, Atlantic World slavery, the African history of Western medicine and public health all together in my research. And I am interested in how race was made in North America and the Anglophone Caribbean. I focus generally on the era of slavery but as you'll see I'm kind of dipping my toes into the 20th century. And essentially what I do with my research is to illuminate how the system of slavery and the creation of race were actually mutually constitutive. And they are in fact responsible for the ideas about innate racial difference that still I would argue linger with us today. So in a nutshell, you might say that I'm quite interested in how race became thought of as an element of biology. Now eugenics was very much premised on biological determinism, and I wanted to sort of explore if the biological determinism of the eugenics era, built upon the same kind of biological determination of the era of slavery. So this is sort of my research trajectory and explains how I got to where I am. I spent a lot of time reading through medical writings and scientific writings to see how and when race emerges and what significance it has with respect to the development of medical knowledge and advancing and progressing the field. So a number of, you know, scholars will say okay I was stumbles across this while working on my first book. And for me that's also true. I should be, you know, honest I also was interested in this prior to writing the first book I actually wrote a graduate seminar paper on eugenics and slavery, and, you know, I kind of put it aside. And as I started working on the first book. I just kind of really focused on the 18th and early 19th century. And a lot of the research questions I found were actually kind of similar in terms of this theme of how did race become sort of viewed as something biological. So for my first book, the research questions for that project really converged around how white physicians were producing and circulating an institutionalizing medical knowledge about blackness. And that means that I was looking at this as a process right and I was also thinking about, you know, where these ideas about racial difference might appear just like it's like two or three sentences of paragraph and aside in bigger broader medical and I noticed that every time race was brought up or blackness is brought up. It was sort of talked about as if it was a real thing that one could see and notice at the bedside that had significance. So, the other thing that I found in doing and my research is that really this wasn't about protecting slavery so this was sort of one of the big interventions and a lot of prior work had suggested that some of the very wrong headed ideas about racial difference stems from a desire for pro slavery physicians to sort of defend the institution and say oh there's a biological reason for this and this is why things have to be unequal. But what I actually found is that physicians had actually been medicalizing blackness and just out of sort of seeing difference it didn't really matter, necessarily about protecting slavery and I talked quite a bit about physicians who are actually opposed to slavery, who also participated in this. One of the concerns though was that I would stumble across and doing this research was that there might have been a reference to somebody who was mixed race. And it was not always uniform, which sort of parent race they were sort of following in terms of their sickness so for example, a physician might write in the 18th century. These are the people that are liable to get yellow fever, and they would say white Europeans. And then they would say mulatto's mixed race people were liable to get it, but then they will say black people do not get it. I thought okay well well why because technically we're looking at people who are mixed race. Why wouldn't they be immune, much like black people. So, these are some of the ways in which I started thinking about how does this idea of naming blackness. As a clinical marker or something that's significant in terms of health. How did that work for mixed race people. And so really it is true that in writing the first book, a lot of new questions were raised for me. If anything I wanted to know how was each racial component of the mixed race person viewed in lay and scientific discourses. So what, what was thought process how did that work and when did this really start taking place in earnest. In fact, I wanted to know sort of what the logic was behind it. If slavery had anything to do with this, and I started to think through, you know, what other instances are there of physicians thinking about race in this way. And of course that led me to studies of mixed race people. And it turns out of course that there were quite a few studies of mixed race people in the early 20th century conduct by you Genesis. There are studies on racial crosses between Chinese and native Hawaiians. There's a whole slew of work by Leslie done who was sort of an early 20th century figure in sort of the anthropology movement where he was actually looking at mixed race people. And so I thought okay this was clearly something of interest, but I also started to think about okay what did this mean for people who are mixed with white and black ancestry. And it turns out that Charles Davenport who I will talk about today, really was sort of the pioneer in focusing on black and white so called racial hybrids and trying to understand their fitness their health and sort of assess them. So, this is sort of how I ended up at my second book project which I'm tentatively titling measuring the imagination the legacies of slavery and eugenic race crossing studies. And so, as I said before, what I want to do the sort of simple question is, you know to examine how you Genesis came to measure mixed race people, those of black and white ancestry and classify them as physically mentally and socially unfit. And so this project is going to describe how slavery era ideas related to racial fitness endurance intelligence and abilities of people with African ancestry actually laid the ideological groundwork for eugenic race crossing studies in the early 20th century. I should say and I'm going to kind of put on my historian hat here. If we think about sort of the long history of thinking about racial mixture. We can see a history of discomfort. Indeed, white American commentators often referred to mixed race people sort of unnatural products of an unspoken but much carried on racial transgression. And in the late 20th, obviously where there's legal, there was legal and social prescriptions against black and white sexual and marital relations. The persistence of new lottoes or mixed race people implied that interracial sex was actually a feature and not an aberration, it was continuing, it had been a concern from the era of slavery and it continued to be a concern. And so, of course, slavery itself created the material conditions for racial mixture to take place. What I found is that mixed race people with black and white ancestry were not necessarily unique they had always sort of been seen as this problem group. And I was interested in understanding the trajectory of the scrutiny of their bodies, how they became objectified and discussed and discussed and described with curiosity, desire, and revulsion by those concerned about the future of racial fitness and purity across the world. And this is of course, absolutely the case in the era of eugenics if we think about the early decades of the 20th century. Now, that said I was super excited about this project I'm like okay I'm going to see what other folks have written about mixed race people in eugenics. And I actually found that there was not a whole lot. So there is no shortage of work on mixed race people in general. There is no shortage of work on the history of eugenics at all. What I found is that there were a few works that were explicitly dedicated to examining how mixed race people's bodies were socially constructed by eugenics. Now I think, and this is sort of my hypothesis I have a lot of this has to do with how we view eugenics. And often it's referred to immediately as a pseudoscience that we look back on it now today and say okay that was obviously nonsense. And I always take the view that you know I'm not going to be present as the moment I'm going to say, this is the context, these individuals like Tom Hort, and others on Aros Hurtlika, they were funded by the government, they were taken quite seriously they applied for grants they published papers that were peer reviewed. We can't just say okay they were all just wrong and forget about it. I try to situate myself within the context to understand like how this actually gathered momentum and was considered to be legitimate science. We also think of eugenics as naturally bound up with a sort of anti immigrant sentiment anti Semitism ableism, all of those things are quite true right when we think about studies of eugenics, these are sort of the themes that emerge. So I would actually say though that we can take a more expansive view of eugenics. One that includes early ideas about quantifying and measuring humans capabilities and racial fitness through anthropological and anthropometric study. And I actually, you know, in thinking through, I obviously had to read through a lot of really great books and so for example, and Daniel Kevles who's very well known as a historian of science and a leading scholar of eugenics. So he pointed out that 20 years before Francis Galton actually coined the term eugenics. So that's 1883 is when we say the term eugenics is coined by Galton. He had already had some ideas about fitness. So you'll see here this is an image of his of Galton's hereditary genius. This is published in 1869. And there I would say is where the Galton is dabbling in ideas on how to improve human stock. I would go as far as saying that Galton had a nation understanding of racial fitness, well before eugenics really comes onto the scene. And as he thought about racial fitness, Galton did not hesitate to pronounce black people as mentally inept in Galton's musings that appeared in hereditary genius. To see him using language that's quite explicit about a racialized idea of fitness or intelligence. So, Kevles notes that hereditary genius is one of Galton's first attempts to investigate the origins of so-called natural abilities. And Galton contemplated the intellectual capacities of non whites, and he theorized that quote Negro intelligence was on average two grades below that of the English, and evidently not a sign of good stock. So, Galton continues quote the number among the Negroes of those whom we shall call half-witted men is very large. Every book alluding to Negro servants in America is full of instances. I myself was much impressed by this fact during my travels in Africa and quote. So essentially Galton is saying, here are the sort of gradations of people who I consider to have high intellectual abilities and those that don't. He references people of African descent. He draws on his own knowledge from his travels throughout Africa, of which there's a lot of rich material, but he also makes this reference to so-called quote Negro servants in America saying this is where I'm drawing on some of that information. So what we see in Galton's writing is someone who's willing to collapse fitness, mental and physical, into a feature of one's race. And I would say that Galton is using this terminology as if it is a feature of one's biology. Historian Marius Turda, who's also a really well-known historian of eugenics, has actually mentioned that with respect to Galton's writing, while he doesn't define race, he did use it frequently, and he understood it biologically speaking to be quote, a community of people sharing similar physiological and psychological characteristics transmitted from one generation to the next end quote. So what that means is that when we're employing this idea of eugenics, we can start to think about how non-white people, including people with black ancestry and black and white ancestry, became targeted by those who are interested in assessing their fitness. Beyond that, we can consider that this group of people were subject to intense scrutiny of their abilities well before we have this sort of formal advent of eugenics in the early 20th century. And so what I want to do is consider this long history, if you will, of medical and scientific assessment of mixed-race people. And it turns out that if we kind of go backwards in time, we can find quite a bit of written commentary on mixed-race people from the era of slavery, and it shows this very long preoccupation with the fitness of mixed-race people. And of course projections of fears about racial purity. So, one thing that I thought about was okay, well, here's Galton in 1869 saying that where might we also see this, and in thinking about reframing the targets of the eugenic gaze, I was drawn to the United States Sanitary Commission study. There was a study that was conducted, this is during the Civil War, by the Union. So they conducted a very large anthropological study on the fitness of soldiers. So this is published in 1869, but the data is collected during the war. And this particular study, as I said, it's a US Sanitary Commission study of investigations of the military and anthropological statistics of American soldiers. This study not only relied on anthropometry in its section on Black troops' bodies, and including troops that were categorized as mulatto, but it became an actual kind of clearinghouse of data on the fitness of these men. Now, when I'm talking about anthropometry here, I'm talking about the idea of measuring physical human proportions, so they would measure things like tests, like the girth, the chest, their height, their stature. They went and looked at how much hair was on the body, so they actually were really, truly examining and observing these men. Now, it's really important here to think about what this means that the Union army while fighting this war to end slavery is really interested in ferreting out and understanding innate racial differences. This particular study was conducted under the ages of Benjamin A. Gould. Now, Gould was actually not a physician. He went on to have a distinguished career as an astronomer. He was also an actuary. But he sort of was in charge of this study of this of this data and he indeed felt that there were any differences between black, white and mulatto troops. And I should say that historians, such as Margaret Humphries, Lundy Braun and Leslie Schwann have also used this particular source to sort of say, look, here is a very troubling collection of data that feeds into this idea of innate racial difference. And I should say that beyond that, Gould's approach to studying and measuring humans was actually quite influential. So here is just sort of a snapshot here from the study. So you'll see I've highlighted this portion in examining Negro troops, give answers to question 30 an estimate of the proportion of black blood such as full black mulatto quadrant octarune, as well as of the Negro race. So just to give you a sense here, a questionnaire was sent out to military surgeons in which they were supposed to either eyeball it or ask the men. Okay, what are you explain this to me, and then answer questions about their bodies about their intelligence about what they could do. So I just want to sort of highlight as I like to say I always wanted to be transparent as a historian so these are like the sources that I'm working with this is sort of the kind of data that I use when thinking about the significance of race and how it appears in some of these scientific studies. Okay, that this is all again spearheaded by Gould, and Gould's work is actually quite influential. So we can think about what it means to have the Civil War, right Civil War going on and the creation and collection of this data during the Civil War, helping to sort of boost anthropometry and anthropology as a legitimate means of assessing racial fitness and reading fitness onto differently raised bodies. So for example, this is a excerpt from a paper that Davenport wrote later on in the 20th century, called the measurement of men. And he's basically saying what are some of the methods. How do we do this, and he actually mentions that ghouls study right the idea of measuring shoulders. That is sort of a model for how one does this. And I should say that ghouls comes up again as sort of a reference point of like oh here's a person who knows how to measure men house to measure these racial differences. So what I would like to say then is that we should be certainly considering how slavery and its legacies actually laid the foundations for methodologies and research questions and assumptions that you Genesis had when they started to try and precision measure mulattoes and other people of mixed race. So my slide to my top day is really going to focus on Charles Davenport of course here is an image here. As I said before, Davenport is really led the way and he's a little bit unique in his very very negative views of mixed race people so he published to him race crossing studies. The first one the 1913 study which is the heredity of skin color and negro white crosses, and his follow up 1929 study race crossing in Jamaica, I should add here that race crossing in Jamaica was just hand, it was just his colleagues other you Genesis found his methodology and his grasp of genetics to be completely faulty. That said, they were more annoyed with his methods. Some people felt like, okay fine we just agree with you that race crossing is bad but we don't like your methods. So we were also stood out for having the belief that there was no hybrid bigger when blacks and whites next. So this idea of with mixed these distinctive people, perhaps, there will be sort of an improvement. Davenport sort of stands out as saying, there will not be. So, the other thing that I think is also quite fascinating here is that it was not only white eugenicists and white anthropologists and sociologists and scientists who are interested in this question of mixed race people. What's been fascinating about doing this research before the pandemic. I was able to look at the papers of Carolyn one day, who herself as a mixed race woman. She also trained at Harvard like Charles Davenport. She received a master's in anthropology and she studied under Ernest Houghton, and she actually published her master's thesis, which is called the study of some negro white families in the United States, and she publishes this after Davenport's 1929 race crossing study. And in my preliminary research I see these works as in conversation with each other and in fact, what Carolyn bond a tries to do is she does use the same kind of anthropometric measurements so she goes and measures and queries people about their ancestries. And she basically tries to say mixed race people are not intellectual. They contribute much to society, they are perfectly racially fit, but she does appropriate some of this kind of similar language that other anthropologists and eugenicists to use. And so really day wants to kind of use these same methods but really does have to underscore the great civic and intellectual accomplishments of mixed race people. I want to kind of just jump ahead to say okay well what does Davenport, what was it that Davenport said about mixed race people specifically. Well I will tell you in a 1917 article. He declared that mulatto's were quote a nuisance to others and quote, he surmised that these hybridized people were quote badly put together and ineffective and quote. And this is these statements come from an article that appeared in the proceedings of the American philosophical society. And this was just one of many publications, where Davenport outlined the dangers of race crossing and the problems with mixed race people. Davenport noted quote mulatto's combined something of a white man's intelligence and ambition with an insufficient intelligence to realize that ambition, and quote. I wouldn't specifically say that it's the mulatto's black ancestry that is the source of this defect and ambition and intelligence, but it was certainly implied. Indeed a glance at his body of work basically shows us that there is little doubt that anti black racism certainly framed his view of mixed race people's bodies. So in looking at his papers and looking at some of his studies, I actually found that when he was answering questions about mixed race people or thinking about his methods like what question do I want to answer. He was very much informed by slavery era assumptions and hearsay and myths about mixed race people. So I want to talk a little bit about some of those myths, and then kind of show you how Davenport either address them. In some cases he tried to debunk these myths using precision science. But the point being is that he is looking back towards the era of slavery in framing his approach to studying mixed race people. So let's talk about myth making of mixed race people's bodies. I want to walk you through some of the conjectures from physicians in particular to actually played up or heightened the physical limitations of mixed race people. So I'll start with a, let's say an easy example of proslavery physician and editor of the Memphis medical reporter AP Merrill, who complains loudly in 1855 that mulatto's were quote less curable than white persons on account of their greater feebleness of constitution, and quote, I could also give you sort of a laundry list of proslavery physicians. But let's think about those who were maybe opposed to slavery. So for example, Benjamin a cool to I've mentioned before, actually noted the quote, well known phenomenon of mulatto's inferior vitality, and quote. So this is ruled again on the union side, saying that no they're actually very weak. I would say that there wasn't always a uniform view amongst union medical officers. So for example, JH Baxter, who was the chief medical officer for the provost Marshall general actually wrote a study or compiled a study where he noted that some black troops, some of those troops were fairly suitable for service, he didn't see a problem with them. But in his excerpts of reports from other sort of military officers were meant to assess the men. There was a sort of constant or sort of an undercurrent of them claiming that mulatto's were not as strong as pure or full blacks. So this is again giving you a sense of both sides both those were proslavery and their views of physical assessment and race. So these are all from around the 1860s 1870s. Now for Davenport, he is looking back in time and when I say he's looking back in time, he goes all the way to the 18th century, and I will tell you what I mean in just a moment. So we can think about this myth about mulatto people being innately weak, or having the inability to reproduce together which was another really big myth that circulated in the era of slavery. We can actually find such references in 1774. So really, going back in time, the Anglo-Jamaican planter Edward Long wrote that it was quote extraordinary that to mulatto should be unable to continue their species. The women either proving therein or their offspring if they have any, not attaining to maturity. The subject deserves a further and very attentive inquiry and quote. So this is a 1774 pro-slavery planter in Jamaica making this claim. And he says it deserves further attentive inquiry. Well it certainly received further and attentive inquiry in the 19th century. Josiah Knot, who was a pro-slavery physician in 1843 penned an article called quote the mulatto a hybrid, probable extermination of the two races if whites and blacks are allowed to intermarry. Clear political overtones going on here. Basically Knot says it's true mixed race to people they can't reproduce together. And he devotes a whole article to this and appears in the Boston Medical and Search for Journal in 1843. And in it, he actually cites Edward Long, the seventh, the 18th century planter. Knot claimed that Long, who is a high authority in his history of Jamaica, asserts unhesitatingly that the male and female mulatto do not produce so many children together. Knot also noted that quote mulatto's have shorter lifespans than either whites and blacks, and the women were plagued by quote physiological delicacy and an inability to conceive children and quote. Now we can think about the political context in which these two pro-slavery commentators lived. What's interesting is that if we flash forward to the 20th century, when Davenport publishes his first study on the heredity of skin color in the white process. One of the things he wants to do is to debunk the myth that there is a problem of infertility, and he actually specifically names Edward Long and Josiah Knot in his 20th century discussion of this. So he says that, you know, yes, there are many problems with mulatto bodies, there's a lot of difficulty in predicting the skin color of so called these hybrid crosses, but Davenport admits quote, there's no support in our data for the notion of a lack of dependency of Negro white crosses, nor of their deficient viability, end quote. And when he says that this is completely untrue, as I say he points directly to these slavery era commentators. To me this suggests that in doing his scientific work and collecting his data, however precise he thinks he is, he still felt the need to kind of park and back to this kind of lore about mixed race people, which had endured for quite some time. I also wanted to just mention that Davenport tries to add some nuance to claims that mulatto's are a lately weak. So in an undated lecture. He talks about race crossing Davenport does, and he says quote the Negro has many advantages and physical quality over the white. He's much less apt to suffer defects of the spine. Boiter obesity deaf mutism and deafness mulatto show much of the excellent qualities of the Negro and quote. Now I want to be clear and Davenport saying this. He's not actually progressive or trying to rehabilitate mulatto people because in that same lecture he says that mulatto show an extraordinarily high rate of tuberculosis, and the material disease rate is several times higher than among the whites and so he doesn't see them as being going to be extinct or inability to reproduce, instead he kind of transfers them into being vectors for possibly spreading diseases to tuberculosis which is of course a great concern in the early century, visited to be contagious, and of course venereal disease also a concern at this time in the 20th century. So, what I'm seeing here is Davenport is saying okay those are all myths, the real problem with mulatto is this, and I have the data to prove it. And again, this is, for me, seeing this kind of trajectory of an interest in this kind of these mixed race people, and sort of using science to sort of shape the narrative around them. And in Davenport's cases he thinks that he's being objective, and he thinks that he's relying on data and not hearsay, but he's still propagating these equally damaging and sort of racially deterministic ideas. Another really interesting thing that I found about doing this research is sort of the discussion of physical care, so physical characteristics and how some of the ideas about physical characteristics of mixed race people from the era of slavery linger through in 20th century studies. So for example, we can think about the writings of mixed, of people from the 18th century about mixed race features. So we can look back to Edward Long 1774, where he writes quote of mulatto's they seem to partake more of the white than the black. Their hair has a natural curl. In some it resembles negro fleece, but in general, it is of a tolerable length and quote. So long, this is again 18th century slave owning planter who's writing about the features of mixed race people. And his attention to mulatto here you might say okay this is a trivial physical characteristic, but in reality, it had much greater meeting. I say this because data port, especially the eugenics record office actually has such specimens of mixed race people's hair. I have to tell you I was doing research at the American philosophical society in 2019, and this was not in the finding that I made so like I like opened an envelope and like human hair like fell out so as little bit. It was a jarring experience, but this sort of goes to the point that eugenics were quite interested in measuring and capturing these physical, these features, these characteristics of mixed hair. So Davenport spilt quite a bit of ink, talking about the color and texture of mixed race hair. In fact, in all of his family pedigree analysis that he published in his 1913 study. He noted the color length and texture of mixed race hair. And the eugenics record office, which was founded by Davenport in 1910, actually house data collected from families, some of which included these hair specimens. This is an example from a dossier labeled the McDonald family. They sent their family tree to the ERO, the eugenics record office. It was in an envelope labeled Negro white cross, and there is a hair sample from the mother father to daughters and other family members. Now I am still trying to figure out how and why it is this family who hails from Jamaica sent their hair to the eugenics record office in the United States. But the fact that it's there and that Davenport spent a lot of time studying this and talking about it to me is quite significant. So we can also think about how he relates having hair texture to the expectations of what mixed race people should look like. So he writes in the 1913 study in how far is the absence or presence of Negro skin pigment associated with the absence or presence of other Negro characteristics. There are two traits that are associated with dark pigmentation of the skin and Negro of which we can trace the association the offspring of hybrid, namely the color of the hair and the form of hair degree of curving. Now Davenport did concede quote black skin color and woolly hair are closely associated in pure bread Negroes, but this association is quote accidental and quote. Davenport nevertheless thought kinky or woolly hair is a so called Negro trait. He also thought that certain typical Negro features such as a flat nose, thick lips, woolly kinky hair was again something that was a specifically designed Negro trait, but he did recognize that there were cases where a lighter skin person could have some of these so called traits. So you'll see here I have these arrows just giving you a sense of the use of this terminology so there is, you know, the opter room daughter has curly, but not at all kinky hair by a white man had at the bottom. You see a reference to a son with a swarly complexion and deeply tan skin with much yellow dark brown eyes and hair that shows a trace of a tendency curl. So again, this is not trivial this is quite serious for you Genesis to really pay attention to every inch of the body to see if you can actually see these traits these black traits coming through. And again, I want to remind us that what Edward long just mentioned as an aside that he noted in living in a slave society. Here we have a you Genesis writing down and taking very copious notes on the significance of such features. And Gabyport does conclude that he does not see a correlation between skin color and the curliness of hair. I will say that Carolyn bond day, who I mentioned before, also did collect samples for mixed race people her papers which are at the Peabody Museum archives at Harvard. And I kind of tucked away and I would also say that because of the delicate nature of her interviewing her subjects in the southern United States. Many people may have been passing and so a lot of the, the hair samples are anonymous. So she doesn't want to connect people she actually tried to maintain people's anonymity, simply because of the temples around race crossing and the possibility of people passing. I also wanted to kind of say, you know, this is what scientists are talking about people who are measuring looking at this intently. I wanted to draw your attention to lay people like so just non trained professional scientists who are interested in racial mixture, and who are well. So, again, in doing some work at the American Philosophical Society, reading through some of Davenport papers, I stumbled across this letter, which both talks about features but also the specter of slavery and understanding sort of the approaching the study of mixed race people. So this is a letter that Davenport received is from 1928. And it's from the wife of a school superintendent in Michigan. Let me get a little bit from it. Well, the township of Calvin is largely inhabited by colored people declared Mrs Edmond shows out in her 1928 letter to Davenport. He provided a brief history of the mixed race population of Cass County, Michigan, mentioning how Cass County, Michigan was holding to several stops on the underground railroad. Indeed, Calvin township in Cass County had a non trivial number of black residents in the mid 19th century. Some even arrived accompanying their white owners. This is a picture here. And that sort of highlighted portion. Mrs showed sound reveals the open secret of interracial mixing, frankly referencing the white planter who brought his quote slaves, some of whom were his children and quote. So the idea is that how did these people come into Michigan. Well they were brought over by slave owners. So you never get to see sort of this idea of where slavery fits in with this idea of propagating mixed race people. She mentioned, for example, that some families are able to pass for white. So this is the first page of the letter where she basically says, a lot of these people came up from slavery. They were brought over by white owners who father there, who were the father of the children. In her next letter, she then starts to talk about the features of some of the mixed race people that she knows about. And the quote other families with white blood are the Lawson's mornings and some of the stewards, the bun family are light to look like white people. Many times those who are light in complexion have negro features and vice versa. Now I should say, she also mentions by name, a young woman who is actually passing for white and teaches in Denver. So you might think, okay, this is just a nosy neighbor outing somebody who's passing in the early 20th century when lynching is at an all time high during sort of the nature of race relations when you think about what that means is extremely dangerous. But what we have here is a neighbor a nosy neighbor who is interested in eugenics who writes to the ERO who wants to share this information with somebody like Charles Davenport. So she feeds right into this idea of here is sort of where they came from directly tied to slavery. Look at their features. It's so hard to tell they all look, you know, very mixed and you might mistake them. Now, what he reflects on as an amateur eugenicist is of a serious concern for somebody like Davenport, because Davenport writes quote from observation of skin color alone. This is not an accurate conclusion as to the genetic constitution of a person and quote, and he mentions that he makes that statement in his 1929 race crossing study. And this is certainly something that's articulated by Mrs. Schoetze. Davenport actually acknowledged the challenges of this kind of racial dilution. He says quote with such extreme dilution with white, the progeny pass for white, optically socially and politically and quote. So he finds the notion of racial purity, but it also in a sense justifies what Davenport is doing and saying that he can fair it out and study and pay attention to these features, so that one could know if somebody was passing and crossing the color line that one could know, sort of if somebody was going to marry and possibly have a so-called tainted bloodline. Other aspects where we see these issues of sort of relating to slavery and the study of mixed race people emerges certainly in claims about intelligence and some of the mythology about so-called mixed race intelligence we can most certainly trace to the era of slavery. This belief of intermediate intelligence of mixed race people being sort of in the middle between black at the lowest mixed race in the middle and white at the top is something that's very prevalent in anti-bellum writings. So for example, in a publication on agriculture in the southern United States from 1852, the author noted quote, it appears at all events certain that the mixed race exhibits powers more susceptible to cultivation than the pure African. They are selected at the south for the performance of duties requiring higher capacities than are possessed by the mere field Negro and at the north, every day's observation shows that the mulatto is endowed with mental gifts superior to his black brother and quote. Now I should add here that this idea that mulatto's were so-called were highly intelligent very much lingers into the 20th century. In fact, University of Chicago train sociologist, E.B. Reuter, who publishes a book entitled the superiority of the mulatto 1917 notes that quote in all times in the history of the American Negro and in all fields of human effort in which Negroes have entered the successful individuals with very few exceptions have been mulatto's and quote. So what Reuter does is actually takes up this 1852 notion of oh of course mixed race people have intermediate and much higher intelligence. And this is sort of because of their white ancestry, which is what is implied. Davenport, however, was not convinced. So in race crossing in Jamaica, which is title page pictured here, Davenport goes out of his way to make the claim that mixed race people are actually less intelligent. And what he does is that he kind of does this in a very kind of tricky way of how he interprets the data. So this is what he says. He first concedes that mulatto's were indeed in between blacks and whites with respect to their scores on intelligence. But he saw in mulatto's potential for wide variation. According to Davenport, they were prone to having individuals of unusually low intelligence in their group in relation to whites and blacks. So he summed this up in a quite lengthy quote, this is from a lecture called is the crossing of the races useful. Davenport writes quote, the whites scored higher than the blacks, while the browns toward an intermediate score. But a study of the distribution of grades showed in many cases this remarkable fact that about 5% of the browns received lower scores than any of the blacks or whites. In different tests, it's not always the same individual who thus scores extraordinarily low. Thus the result is not due merely to a chance inclusion among the browns of some individuals of unusually low intelligence. Rather, among the various browns are individuals who find themselves unable to even start the beginning of a mental test. There are fewer full blooded blacks who show such complete incapacity. It seems reasonable to ascribe this idiosyncrasy of the browns to their hybrid nature and so he's basically saying that because they are mixed race. There are these people that are just unable to even begin a basic intelligence test, and I will add here that the tests that Davenport relied on are known as the quote knocks moron tests for the knocks imitation cube test and army alpha test. So this is sort of where he how he collects the data and the results are of course published in base crossing and Jacob. And finally, I wanted to mention a few things about where he conducts the studies. So I mentioned a nosy neighbor in Michigan I mentioned Carolyn bonde who did collect her data in the southern United States but I would argue as a mixed race woman she was maybe able to get a closeness to her subjects that Davenport was not able to. What he did is he decided to go to the West Indies for the English speaking Caribbean to conduct his studies and race crossing in Jamaica is conducted there for that reason. I would also add that his first study in 1913 was also conducted in Jamaica the Cayman Island and parts of Bermuda. What Davenport does is he has his field workers go to Jamaica and interview Jamaicans and other inhabitants of English speaking Caribbean islands, because he assumed that they're there relaxed attitudes about racial mixture, and he felt that he could get the data that he wanted, and essentially what he had his he instructed his field workers to do was to knock on the doors of mixed race people. And then he himself explained what they were doing and collect genealogical data, ancestry data to have them actually roll up their sleeves and have their skin colors graded by a color top, where the field worker would just subjectively eyeball how many percentages of black of red of yellow of white that they saw mixed on a color wheel. So this is the precision data collection that Davenport relies on in doing these studies. Now, yes, it's very subjective, of course. But it's quite interesting to dig into the correspondence and sort of the language that he uses when he talks to his research assistant in getting this data and the sort of assumptions about slavery in the background. So if we think about slavery in Jamaica is the black majority island, and there are a few white planters, typically male white planters that lived on the island. But Davenport has to present this data to you to an American audience so we can't really say there was rampant racial intermixture and there's a lot of like sexual exploitation going on in plantations. That would be inflammatory. So he kind of sidesteps this, but you know that he knows how this mixed race population came to be. So, so let me explain. So Davenport would assume that the black women who his researchers were interviewing were possibly permissuous. So he played up this idea of black women being naturally permissuous. What he also did was he got photographs of mixed race families. And what he would do is he would write down the text would say cohabitating or husband and it would be either an Englishman and Irishman a white person, the wife being black. But in the photographs, there are no white fathers. They're not there. What he would do is he would ask his researchers. So for example, his co-author Morris to Gerda, he would basically ask him for photographs of contrasting skin color between offspring and the parent, but the parent was almost always a mother. He said, quote, don't forget the disharmony. One problem I might suggest that of color children from past for white parents. Are there such if so male male me the case with photographs and assurances of the trustworthiness of the mother with respect to paternity. In another instance, he wrote, it is very important to get the genealogical genealogical data from every one of the 200 Negroes and melados by doubt if they have lighter brothers and sisters and the presence of white ancestry three generations and quote. Now what he's doing is he's basically saying, I want color contrast. I don't know how many these these great Asian sort of families, but what's interesting is that when he has a family that is a mixed race family, if they're very light skinned, they're always called near whites or past for whites. The fathers are also called near whites or past for whites. He never just has them as white. The first thing is that in this series of photos, he asked for fair skinned babies from dark mothers. Now, when you would think of doing like a family tree. Father mother offspring, no father, there is no father in these pictures, which to me suggests that the white father is hidden in plain sight. So the first thing you're thinking if you're crossing two generations, you want to see the parents, and there is just one parent missing. And the idea here is that he's wanting to contrast these dark skinned women with these light skinned babies, but not showing this white father, which I think has a lot to do with the issues sort of where mixed race people came from and the politics of racial crossing that linger over from the era of slavery. So in a letter he writes to Morris to Gerda, he said he wanted genealogical data involving quote milado children in which the mother is a full black blood, or nearly so, and the father, white, and quote. Well, here's the photograph. There's the data that's published. No photograph of the father. The observer can really only assume that the photograph light skinned children were produced from the union of the photograph dark skin mother and the absent white father. So as a result the role of white men in creating mixed race offspring remained conveniently hidden in plain sight. So, I just want to wrap up here because I know I've given you a lot of interesting things to think about here, but I want to just sort of just kind of conclude here by saying you know well first of all why does this matter what does this. There are several distinct examples of how the topic of mixed race people created anxiety in various parts of American society from scientists, the nosy neighbors, the US Army anthropologists and physicians. And some of this is naturally very period, but what my research is showing is that this disparate use of sources were part of a larger medical discourse that sought to reify race and prove racial hierarchies. Indeed, race has enjoyed a long career as a useful even a big proctomat marker bodily difference on which medicine and other allied scientific built to pen. In fact, we still inhibit a world, inhabit a world, excuse me, where race causes mischief and damage in the realm of mess with medical decision making. Race still exists as something that we think of as real and possibly biological race can appear in actual medical apparatuses like this parameter which has race correction built into it. I should add that in those arming anthropology studies. I used sclerometers and basically said okay black people have smaller long capacity so London brawn has spoken about this quite eloquently. So that's something from the 19th century and I understand the parameters are still in use. We could maybe think of something that's a little bit more recent in terms of thinking about race correction and the idea of racist biology. This would be the EGFR of which I know my audience is totally very familiar. So I'm hoping that in the Q&A, you guys will teach me a little bit about what your thoughts are about the EGFR, which does indeed have race correction built into it and this is again for the history of kidney function. And so I am pleased to know that this is a discussion happening amongst physicians about the EGFR, talking about you know what should we do instead of using the race correction. So I know that that is a conversation that's happening. But part of what I hope to do with the scholarship is to think about how blackness has been assumed to be a part of one's biology, and how that assumption didn't happen in a vacuum. And how this is actually part of a systemic problem in medical knowledge production related to race. So what I really am seeing with my or hoping with my current work is to amplify this problem of scientific knowledge production that sort of has reified race. And I tried to do this as I said by bringing together history of medicine, slavery, African American history, and I would say that to investigate slavery error roots of eugenic studies of mixed race people in the early 20th century is in a sense to study the anti-blackness and scientific research. One of the many lasting consequences of slavery was the rendering of blackness as a legible discreet physiological phenotypic trait. Looking at race and more specifically blackness in this way is instructive for revealing the subtle and explicit ways we think about and talk about race with vocabularies that are rooted in biology. With assumptions that race is a tangible thing, despite knowing that race is a social construction and not a biological fact. Thank you. Well, Rana, that was terrific and very, very, very, you took something that I think many of us are struggling with because we're living through this moment where we're really rethinking and understanding things in a new way. And I just love you. You used a couple of things that I definitely loved. I love, optically, socially and politically. That is just a terrific line. And racially deterministic ideas. I just think this is interesting. I'm going to open it up for questions in a minute, but I couldn't help thinking when you were talking about these race crossing experiments. Just like kind of the background of not only eugenics, but the whole genetic revolution and the whole idea of like, you know, like breeding different plants and breeding different pigs. And, you know, this idea of having like, you know, healthy babies and bigger livestock. And, you know, it just kept making me think about the analogies to those things. And so I did not realize the sanitary commission that you went back in and we're looking at that I think was terrific because if there's one lesson from this whole series is that it is incredible to look at primary sources like you showed that The precursor of the New England Journal of Medicine. I mean just looking back at these old articles is just it's fascinating on every way and this stuff is available online so anybody can go you know in our library. We actually have our librarian on this talk. She she actually tracks the references and it's going to help me put together references at the end so. But, you know, I love the primary sources because I think there's nothing like reading the language in your own reading yourself because sometimes you're really struck by either how harsh or how different or you know it just strikes you in a very visceral way. Yeah, no totally I mean I, I love sharing my primary sources as a historian like I especially if I'm speaking to like audiences that are not always historians, you know if I just say I'm like oh yeah this person said this about raisin that I'm like well what do you mean I'm like let me let me show you let me like roll up our sleeves and come with me into the archives and sit with me and think about like what all of this means. But also at playing attention to the context right like so for me I think that's what makes them being a historian super fun I love going to the archives are like my tree and love just being in the archives and reading and so all the librarians and archivists out there like very much appreciate everything you do. But the other thing I just wanted to say was talk a little I'm really interested in this concept because you made links that I never really thought of before like this concept of passing, you know in terms of like this racial dilution, you know what I mean. I am very interested in hearing your thoughts about that just because. I don't know I just think that it's is it still as much of an issue now I mean clearly there was a time if you are identified as black, even though. Optically you looked at white it had huge consequences, but is you know there are different consequences in the modern world right and different, you know hierarchies and different. The sociology is really fascinating about, you know, just the whole color and what that means and what it means to actually the idea of passing is so also so provocative and so charged, you know, passing is like you're getting through something you're going, you know, it feels very illicit, you know. No, so I should say is. So that brings up colorism and like how these studies so I should say colorism of course still exists today it's still very much a problem for lighter skin to people feeling getting getting preference over darker skin people or the idea of comfort level. People feeling like sociologists have measured this right they've seen that people who tend to go higher in certain you know corporate organizations or present themselves a certain way it's like, if you're a lighter skin, it tends to show. Better opportunities or better treatment because of this assumption about dark skin and this is very much true actually in Jamaica so I'm a Jamaican person just like cards on the table. And certainly colorism is a concern in terms of you know who tends to be wealthier who tends to get better access who can tends to get treated differently. So that still does exist and I would argue that it still exists today in the United States, I think part of the issue with the race crossing studies and even when I had mentioned African American eugenesis is, there is a concern when people use language to describe favorably so saying that the hair, for example is of a tolerable length, or that it's smooth and curly and not kinky that plays into today the politics of policing black women's hair, for example like we see this in the news like having dreadlocks having curly hair, not professional hair. This is all bound up with assumptions about what is considered to be attractive acceptable or what kind of percentage of whiteness you have and what comfort level then that that sort of can afford someone. And I think that for passing, you know, I haven't seen the new Netflix movie passing that the director herself actually has a history of passing her family that she certainly she realized, but the point here is that passing was often a way for some people of African descent to negotiate life without being without having the obstacles of racism thrown in their face every single day. Obviously some people chose to do that some people did not right so there's the famous story. You know, Walter White for the, from, you know, he could go into the South report on lynching, and he had blue eyes and blonde hair and light skin and nobody knew he was a black person, so he could walk right in there and do it and then when he was found out he had to like leave town immediately so they're all these like mythologies about, you know, mixed race people being able to infiltrate in some ways, other people just trying to make a living so there's actually a really fascinating ebony magazine from 1952 or 195, I think it's 52 around the time of the UNESCO statement on race but the actual ebony magazine has a spread of mixed race people it's in black and white and it says who's black and who's not. And it's a quiz for an African American audience they can you tell who's black and who's who's not black, and there's a series of news articles about black people who've been passing. And one be notes to their white colleagues in, you know, in the cubicle of the secretaries where they are black people so it says you know, white by day black by night. So these were actual, this actually happens this there's a very long history of this and part of what I'm hoping to do with this study because it is in the early stages is I wanted to explore the scientific and medical component of this the idea of passing the gradation or the significance of that, but I believe that this work is in direct conversation with other historical works that look at the social and political aspects of passing, and how that is still a kind of issue today, even thinking about, you know, who gets to be considered black or white, I can think of, you know, Meghan Markle's children, who you know that that. Oh, what will they look like, do you know what I mean like that is of course still present with us like what features will they have like people are to be in the role of families concerned about this. So, yeah, it's still with us today and passing. I feel like there's a really great book by Alison Hobbs. She said Stanford, and she's written a wonderful book on sort of the history and politics of passing and the name of her book will come to me in a moment but it's Alison Hobbs. I had a chance to meet her virtually and she's just delightful. And after that just Dorian Miller, one of my colleagues wrote excellent talk, the implications of colorism and how it plays out individual families is the source of intergenerational trauma I think that's the next. Yes. But I just want to let the audience know, Rana has something to do this afternoon so if he has any questions, comments, you know, we're not, she's not going to be here at the three o'clock thing so I encourage you to have a conversation with her while we still are lucky enough to have her especially since this is such a rich topic and so, you know, we're in such a moment where these things are being rethought and looked at in a way just like you were talking about the EGFR I mean, you know it's interesting to see the backstory about why that came to be and you know at least part of it is just just like you were talking about these observable differences right, you know and one of the big questions at least historically is, why do African Americans, when you control for access to care, socioeconomic status, all these other things seem to have let's say, higher rates of end stage renal disease and the setting of hypertension. I mean, obviously there's some differences are obvious right, if somebody doesn't have blood pressure, if they don't get their blood pressure managed. Of course it doesn't surprise that somebody who's got uncontrolled hypertension for years will go on to develop end stage renal disease, or the issue with why African American physicians, you know women who are like in, you know embedded in the system, why they have poor outcomes after deliveries why they have higher rates of things like preeclampsia and adverse effects, even though they're actually, it's not for not having care and they're part of the system and you know have ostensibly equity in, you know, things we would say are confounding variables so I think this is really a fascinating, fascinating talk and I would love some of the audience to, you know either ask questions or continue the conversation but it's not so often you have the opportunity to really kind of not only look at the historical aspects but we have some, another thing I'm just going to read some of the things from the chat run is one of our colleagues Richie Conn said, how would Davenport explain the success of black mixed etc in college and professional sports. That is an excellent, excellent question because in some of his measurements of mixed race people and black people in Jamaica, he makes commentary about their length of their legs and musculature. And he sees in some ways and so this is I mentioned this because he thinks that in some ways, so called Negro features, they might be more robust at certain things, physically. So for example, while they're lung capacities they're there, they're there, if we look at spirometer measurements or lung capacities they're supposed to be lower this is from the 19th century but Davenport actually finds, not really a big problem with their chest circumference and actually finds that they have long muscular legs. Now I would say he actually measured the men in Jamaica he choose he chose to measure were actually trying out for the police force or the fire brigade. So they generally tended to be in like would have been in good health so his data sample is all the healthiest black men and brown men he could find in Jamaica. But he did see that he suggested that on average black people tended to have longer limbs. Good muscle tone. Now, the interesting thing is that I believe it is w want to do call that Howard, who tries to push back on these claims of athleticism with the so called like Jesse owns is like because of his blackness and that's why he, he, you know, excels back and you have other physical anthropologists pushing back on this idea that they are naturally superior at athletics, but I think Davenport would probably agree that in some physical ways, African Americans do quite well or people that can believe this in terms of music and being able to memorize or keep a tune. So he actually has several of the research subjects to test for like music and harmony, and he says that black people excel when it comes to music, which I'm just like a stereotype effort before. So he like talks about this and does these tests and it affirms this. But yes, I think he would actually agree with the idea that black people are suited, or better at certain things than whites and other groups, but in terms of the intelligence, not so much. And he still thinks that if you actually mix them together. And this is the part of his study that got widely panned. He claimed that because black people had generally had longer legs, because white people had shorter arms, that mixed race people would have a hard time picking things up off the ground. I'm not actually kidding he put that in his study, and it was just torn to shreds by any respectable which is who read it, they were like are you are you serious that's a conclusion that he did come up with. So, yes to the point of athletics. I think he would see some kind of an advanced. Let me give another comment here, my soul wrote to and apropos to what you said before about how eugenics wasn't a fringe concept. This mainstream this was, I mean, you know the people who were supportive of this were in, you know, high level He writes Charles David point Charles Davenport was a person in power, as a college professor, drink harbor in his international founding of the International Federation of eugenics, and had immeasurable policy consequences. He was also a racist polemicist who violated many ethical and scientific principles and was responsible for the widespread beliefs that polagra alcoholism, bipolar criminality and inter intellectual disability were driven by immigration and people color diluting the white gene germplasm. The entire eugenics movement was criticized for being supposedly based on racist and classist assumption, set out to prove the unfitness of the wide sections of the American population which Davenport and his followers had considered degenerate using methods criticized, even by the British eugenics as specific and it's just interesting, you know, the one of the things you learn as you read this history is how powerful the terminology is when I see it reminds me of the degenerate art, you know, what the Nazis decided that a lot of the, you know, you art was degenerate and therefore should be destroyed and it is interesting how these political movements, the language becomes tainted and fraught and just charged. Oh, yes, so I just want to say that this, the comment is absolutely spot on downward is awful. He, and so what he represented was, I think, the worst, this terrible abuse of science is running to basically just wanting to confirm, right, a priori assumptions. I wouldn't say that part of the reason why I focused on mixed race people is because, you know, I think of Alexandra ministers work on eugenics, I think about Daniel Kevles's work on eugenics. I think is it Robert Proctor's books on the sort of the Nazi doctor like people have downport is essentially as far as I can sort of has zero credibility as a proper scientist and he lost that credibility I think the commenter is absolutely is Carl Pearson, who dabbled in eugenics who used to be buddy buddy with that report tore race crossing in Jamaica to shreds. He's one of the reviewers that just hated it, and they had a huge fight about the segregation of traits and the path. Like, so yes, even terrible British eugenics who also had their own classist political agendas were like, this is just wrong. So it's kind of interesting gap report to me I'm focusing on him, because he was so very very wrong at the time. But also, it's interesting to think that the history of his focus on mixed race people like so has not been sort of put up there so we can talk about alcoholism evil mindedness which is a nonsense term that was a completely socially constructed term at that time. It's literally ableist it targeted for whites it targeted on immigrants. It's just like clear, right and so it's very easy for us now to be like, This is just nonsense. But when I look at the fact that like the social science Research Council, what it is now, at one point I was sponsoring the committee on the study of the Negro that you had all of the best and brightest come together and sit down. And these were people in power, these were people who were taken quite seriously. And I think this is part of what for me as exciting as the historian is to go back and understand like how did that process happen. And I don't want to just dismiss them I want to think about like sort of what what is the nitty gritty details of how figures like that could gave such a tendency, who could sort of have their credibility, right, he, I mean, even after race crossing into Jamaica is like, utterly dragged. He still is is measuring black people in Alabama. He's still being asked to do measurements he's he doesn't sort of just completely disappear as one would think. No, I think you just made the argument for why it's really important to study history because, you know, and it will be interesting for us as we live through this moment. The future will say about this time and I just often think about down the road how Trump's presidency will be viewed in some future lens but this was really terrific run it was a great. It was great on every level. It was an important topic. You know, Davenport is a great point of opportunity you gave us a lot of other links to other resources that we can take a look at. And I think this idea of these race crossing and thinking about that I just think was really very instructive and enlightening and I just, I think everybody here really appreciated your time and we'll look forward to hearing more on your future project. So I want to thank you, Mark. Thank you to Rana you want to say anything or Elena. I want to thank Rana so much for beautiful talk. And I mean, things that I had never heard about or known about. And it was very instructive. Just to remind the audience that we're going to have two weeks off now. And we'll resume our programs. The whole fellowship program will be resumed on Wednesday, April 6. And who will be our speaker on Wednesday, April 6. It's our friend Caleb Alexander. So Alexander talking about his topic that he always does it's called patients providers and pharmaceuticals in the 21st century. So I want to thank everybody for those of you who actually are lucky enough to get a vacation. Enjoy your vacation. When you come back just bring back some of the spring. That's the only thing I asked of you. Have a wonderful time. Thanks.