Frank Mazzaglia| Guest Columnist

This is a gift to those militant protesters who have been screaming about racism and calling for social change. Instead of pointing in the wrong direction, take a good hard look at our recent history and consider the harm done by the influence of some lesser known British and American racists.

This is not to say that racism was not already a serious problem here, but it was people like British born Francis Galton who made the idea of racism quite fashionable in the United States. .

Born in 1822 into a family of great wealth, Francis Galton, whose famous cousin was Charles Darwin, inherited a vast fortune by the time he was 22 enabling him to live the life of an English gentleman. Galton was an extraordinary man in some ways. Obsessed with numbers and data he discovered the individuality of fingerprints and the statistical law of regression to the mean. Yet, for all his contributions to society, he was also responsible for a pandemic of racist ideas that were adopted by Adolf Hitler.

It all sounded so harmless at first.Galton simply introduced three inherited attributes necessary for great achievement: ability, zeal, and a capacity for hard work. The problem was how he defined inheritance.

Galton failed to recognize that social factors could prevent a genius from rising to the top, and he certainly didnt believe that neurosis could interfere with success nor did he consider the role of inspiration or the power of the will.

An ardent abolitionist, Galton, without seeking any evidence to support his beliefs, also held that African Americans were inferior people. Whats more, they were not the only ones. Galton concluded that if selective breeding could improve the heredity of cats and dogs as well as cows and even plants, then why couldnt selective breeding improve the heredity of human beings?

By the time he was 69, he introduced the idea that we could modify the heredity of human beings because some people were naturally better than other people. Out of that came the idea of a hierarchy of peoples worth.There were desirable people and then there were other people who were undesirable.To the proponents of Galton style genetics, the danger came in intermarriage between a desirable and an undesirable. In such cases, the childrensuffered by becoming less desirable.

In the 1900s, race and ethnic origin was a big deal. The Womens Home Com[anion created a Better Babies Bureauthat examined 150,000 babies and scored them 50% on heredity over an infants visible charms. Heredity became another word for race. The question, of course, is: who are the desirables and who are the undesirables?In the early 1910s, eugenicswas so popular that the U.S. Public Health Service issued official heredity certification to racial desirables to help them meet and marry otherracial desirables.

The desirables were Nordic, lighter-skinned, blondes, with blue eyes, and a straight nose. The undesirables were southern European like the Italians, Greeks, Poles, and Russian Jews. These people were deemed to endanger Americas purity of race."

Racial superiority appealed to the Nazis who used genetics as the scientific rationale for the Holocaust.It also appealed to American politicians who enacted the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 which effectively barred the identified undesirable people from entering the United States for forty years.

So, some of those summer protesters had the right idea. They just blamed the wrong people. Skin color was just one of the many marks of discrimination. It makes no sense to pit one discriminated group against another discriminated group.

Yes, racism is a serious problem in this country. However it is far more complicated than some would have us believe. Of course, there has been social injustice in our country. Understanding its roots and working together to overcome discrimination against all people, however,is a wiser choice that can unite people rather than divide them.

Frank Mazzaglia can be reached at frankwrote@aol.com.

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Win the battle and the war. Unite rather than divide by fighting discrimination together - Milford Daily News