Hi, I just wanted to give an example of a man who's a racist, who's celebrated in the
university – his name is Francis Galton. There's a collection after his name, there's
a lab after his name, there's even a lecture theatre after his name. What is the basis
for these men to be celebrated when black academics, black alumni are not given that – basically,
there is no basis for black academics or alumni to be celebrated in this campus while racists
racists such as Francis Galton are overly celebrated without even mentioning the racism in the
writing, and as a student, we were never taught that these people are racist – we're only
taught that they're polymath or the most influential men in the history of Britain, but we have to
do our own research to find out that these men hated us.
You're not the first person to make that point to me. My only defence is I inherited him.
I was introduced to Francis Galton as a polymath, as a great man who is
of immense importance to the sciences, especially psychology and individual differences.
So I wanted to look at what he had to say about individual differences and ethnicity
or did he ignore that? But when I researched online, I found his essay or his letter
'Africa for the Chinese'. He goes into explicit details on what he thinks of people that he
views as inferior to the Anglo Saxon white race, and he just makes an assumption that
everyone is inferior, even the Chinaman that he says is the best option to displace the people
of Africa – he literally says, "the gain would be immense to the whole civilised world if we
were to outbreed and finally displace the 'n word'". I was really shocked while walking around UCL
seeing his collection, Francis Galton's collection, seeing a lecture theatre named after him,
and I just wondered, on what basis does this university celebrate him. I mean, I'm not denying that
he was a polymath, but I want to know what good he has contributed to people like me and
other students who have been dehumanised by his science.
My name is Subhadra Das and I am the curator of the Galton collection here at UCL.
Francis Galton was a scientist. He was born in 1822 and died in 1911, so he's pretty much
as Victorian as you can get. Most people have probably never even heard of him,
if they have it's because they know he's the man who came up with the idea of eugenics.
This particular draw shows us some of the personal effects of the man, and it's the same as
any historical collection – you can an idea of who he is as a person, you get the idea that
he's probably a little bit pernickety because we've got things like mirrors and combs,
mending kits. But the collection also contains objects to do with Galton's work
and these are some very iconic objects.
So this for example is a craniometer, which was used to measure people's heads,
and you can measure in different planes, so you can take a measurements
from here to here, or in profile for example, at set points across a person's features.
The Galton Collection is a historic museum collection, which includes the personal effects of Sir Francis Galton
and also the objects that relate to his work, so his very early prototypes working on certain projects,
and objects that he would have used in the pursuance of his science.
It also includes objects from the Galton Laboratory, which was set up at UCL in 1904,
and there are things that have been added into the collection since then.
For example, we know that Karl Pearson, who was Galton's disciple in a way, added things
into the laboratory which then became part of the museum's collection over
the course of the early half of the twentieth century – there are certainly things that have come in
after that point as well. But it was something he was interested fundamentally
understanding the effects of the environment had on the way someone grew up
versus their genetic inheritance. He was very firmly on one side of that argument
but he was nonetheless interested in measuring the different aspects of how that made up an
individual. It's generally known that Galton was racist in his approach to understanding humans and understanding
human society and biology. The objects in this collection relate to that work that he did with
biometrics, with anthropometrics, measuring people, and the objects that are used here
relate also to the work of the Galton Laboratory before it came to use
at UCL and after, in terms of measuring people.
But they are interesting because they exemplify the work that was done on people
who came voluntarily to be measured, but they're still the same objects that we used on
people all around the world who didn't necessarily consent to that process in the same way.
I'm Carol Reeves and I'm a senior lecturer in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL.
Eugen Fischer was a German professor of medicine and anthropology and eugenics.
Now like many anthropologists of his time working at the turn of the twentieth century,
he was interested in race and its associated ideas of the evolutionary superiority
and inferiority of peoples. The success of white middle-class Europeans
in colonising and subjugating indigeionous peoples was believed to reflect their evolutionary
and racial superiority. And Fischer conducted field research in German south west Africa,
now Namibia, in 1908, using instruments designed to scientifically measure
race and by implication inferiority. These included head spanners to measure
skull shapes and size, eye and hair colour scales, and of course, this is the hair colour scale
that he created. This hair gauge manufactured in about 1905 to the design of the anthopologist
Eugen Fischer, is important because it contributed to the making of the science of race.
The hair scale supposedly represented all the races of the world in a hierarchical manor,
from flaxon blonde to deep black. It was designed to be a scientific measuring instrument,
a standard hair scale, and as such, all race scientists could invests in its truth.
Wool is the hair of animals, and in humans, it was supposed to denote a status as way down
And the truth as far as hair was concerned was that black wavy and so-called 'wooly' hair belonged to
the inferior races of the world – people of the southern mediterranean, middle east and above all Africa.
Wool is the hair of animals, and in humans, it was supposed to denote a status
way down the evolutionary scale – up from the ape but only just.
I'm Debbie Challis, I work at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL.
We're in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology.
The Petrie Museum is named after its founding archaeologist, William Matthew Flinders Petrie.
He's sometimes known as the 'father of scientific archaeology', partly because he bought
new methodologies to archaeology in terms of stratification, sequence dating, using photography.
Part of his interest in science meant that he also had an interest in something called
'racial science', and he was very influenced by Francis Galton, in fact
he was kind of a protege of Francis Galton's. Galton helped him in his early stages of
his career, he helped him get his first book published through the Royal Geographical Society,
then when Petrie went freelance, Galton actually gave him his first 'gig', if you like,
taking photographs of 'racial types' on the Egyptian monuments.
In the book that Galton defines eugenics in 1883, he mentions Flinders Petrie as having
this superb mathematical mind. It's clear from letters between them that they had
this connection and this shared interest in race.
This is a draw of heads representing so-called 'racial types'.
Petrie excavated these, or bought them, at a site called Memphis, which is quite near modern
day Cairo, and he thought that all these different heads represented a racial type
carefully recorded by Greek artists working in Memphis about 300-0 BC.
When I first started working at the Petrie Museum, it was this draw that got me interested
in Petrie's ideas about race, and I realised looking at this draw and looking at
a lot more of his writing, how deeply influenced he was by racial theory and so-called
'racial science' for all of his work.
Well these objects exist and have a history and we need to tell that story.
I first discovered Galton and eugenics when I was a student at UCL doing a Masters degree
in history and philosophy of science, and I was both irresistibly drawn and repelled by it.
And in turn, I haven't yet met a student who doesn't go through the same emotions of
fascination and incongruity when confronted with the head scale, or anything
else in the Galton collection, particularly as Galton and
Darwin were cousins, came out of the same family and had very similar values.
But there's also an argument that eugenics is still with us in the form of
preimplantation genetic diagnosis and sterilisation of drug users.
In order to become a post racial society, we don't just ignore race and pretent that
it doesn't happen, like 'oh, it's social construct', 'racism doesn't really happen',
because it does and a lot of our institutions, a lot of our scientists – the gatekeepers of our knowledge
are racists, and we don't really question that, we just think, 'it was part of their times, it was okay
to be racist back then', but we're just going to take the good of their science?
Like this fingerprint technology, which was made to differentiate between Indians and British Empire
because "they all look the same" apparently? Which is a deeply racist concept of homogenising
an entire people, and not respecting their differences,
or not humanising them enough to pay enough attention to see that they're not all the same,
but we can't just benefit from these technologies, from these privileges while ignoring what
they were built on.