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. For the scientific community to listen to Hoffman he needed to appear credible. In this analysis Hoffman uses logos to appeal to this community because it interpreting objective data is the only thing this community will consider if they are to be persuaded. Hoffman used data provided from this community to strengthen his argument. When Hoffman was talking about the difference between whites, blacks, and mixed people he used data gather by a Dr. Hunt who would have been part of the science community and his work to be seen as objective and reliable. Hoffman knew that and so he was able to take acceptable data from this community and draw, at the time, a reasonable conclusion based on the data. When Hoffman is trying to analyze his main issue of interracial marriages, he supplies the reader with marital statistics that they might not be familiar with and be from a credible source being the government.

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. The physical measurements used were of the lungs gathered by Dr. Gould. From Gould’s data he found that blacks had the highest vital capacity, followed by whites then people of mixed race. Also looking at the respiration rate, how fast they were breathing, he found that whites need to take few breaths, then blacks followed by people of mixed race. Hoffman was able to take this data, that was objective, and was able to draw a conclusion that breeding between the two races causes their children to be seen as the most inferior race group in terms of physical traits and just slightly higher in intelligence than blacks. 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 data Hoffman provides is interracial marriages in Michigan, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Boston, and Bermuda. These were records gathered by the state, city, or country and would be considered reliable. Hoffman compares the number of interracial marriages to the total number in that area and then he looks at the data in recent years to conclude that interracial marriages are on the decline. Hoffman neglected to add marital data provided by the South and only looked at Northern states, since it was more acceptable there, to project what might happen in the South. The types of data he has presented would be acceptable to the science community, since it was data collected by them and in turn they would 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. Hoffman had published books and worked as a statistician but analyzing raw objective data collected by the scientific community, he was able to make himself apart of this group. The science community shares their information in books and journal articles using clear and concise logic and objective data which is what Hoffman did in this analysis. The goal of Hoffman and many scientists at this time wanted to find a way to objectively classify people of different races. Hoffman used the same lexis that would be used by the science community like raw data and conclusion on that data. Since Hoffman was able to do all of these things, he was able to force himself into the community and use its platform to spread his opinions that he backed up with objective data that was gathered by the same community he took advantage of.