“Racism was at base the belief in the inheritable reality of race itself - an idea trussed up in the language of science and, as such, every bit as much a product of Western culture as, say, a painted mask was the product of the Kwakiutl. When there was no evidence for a theory, Boas had suggested in The Mind of Primitive Man, you had to let it go — especially if that theory just happened to place people like you at the center of the universe. Otherwise, what you called science was nothing more than nonsense on stilts.”
