Austin Frisby

Dr. Bailie

2089 Intermediate Comp.

7/16/19

Between the Text

            America is a country that has accomplished truly good things and is praised by its citizens and the world. People tend to often neglect the dark periods in American history like during times of slavery or racial discrimination. For example, people praise the achievements of scientists during these time periods but don’t often think about their views or the type of person they are. One person during this time was Frederick Hoffman, who was apart of the science community, used statistics and scientific data to support his discriminatory views on interracial marriage.

Frederick Hoffman was a statistician for a large insurance company and had access to the leading science at that time. He published many books the fit the racial discrimination belief using his knowledge in statistics and became part of the scientific community. In one of these books he wrote a statistical analysis on “Race Amalgamation” where he examines if interracial marriage is becoming more popular/going to be a problem. Hoffman is writing this for the scientific community because he is trying to get his beliefs to become a common fact that everyday people have to accept. The thing that ties the readers to the issue is the marital statistics taken from different places.

At the beginning of his analysis, Hoffman claims that interracial marriage will not be a problem, by it not existing, as time progresses. To support this Hoffman uses “objective” science that claims that black Americans are lesser than white Americans based on an average of physical measurements of the skull and lungs. Hoffman also uses marital data of Northern states and data from other countries to support this idea that people will want to marry someone the looks like them. In Hoffman’s case this means people will naturally want to marry someone of the same race. The type of data he has presented would be acceptable to the science community to listen to his claim and conclusions and any of the anecdotal evidence he provides.

From this analysis of Hoffman’s essay shows how he was able to frame his views in a way to fit the scientific community and be accepted as fact or a reasonable conclusion. It also shows how the science community allowed for bad science and misleading statistics to influence them and be accepted because it fit their preconceived notions. It unfortunate that the science community wanted data to fit what they already knew instead of looking at data with an open minded and this allowed the people in this community to be okay with widespread discrimination against black Americans.