Racial Nonsense

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 432, 3 October 1947, Page 9

Racial Nonsense

OST of us have felt, especially since Hitler first began to exalt the Nordics, that the idea of racial superiority is nonsense; but it was good to have our opinions confirmed in no uncertain manner in a talk from 4YA by Dr.-W. E. Adams, Professor of Anatomy at the Otago Medical School. Many people, however, while stating their abhorrence of the Teutonic idea of a Master Race, will shirk the implicit assumption that if no zace is superior to their own, then no race is inferior. Especially when the vexed question of the colour bar arises, the same hater of Hitler will claim that certain. of the coloured races are "undeveloped," "backward," and so on, which is merely another way of saying that they are inferior to himself. Dr. Adams made short work of such woolly thinking. In all ways, physical and psychological, he said, the difference between races is negligible compared with the differences between individuals belonging to the same race. In any case, a nation is not synonymous with a race; migration, conquest, and other factors ensure pretty successfully that no race remains a pure stock, and Defoe was right when he referred to "that heterogeneous thing, an Englishman"-W. S. Gilbert notwithstanding.