Roger Pearson (born 1927) is a British physical anthropologist, eugenicist, white supremacist, political organiser for the extreme right and publisher of political and academic journals.
Pearson was a part of the faculty of the Queens University of Charlotte, the University of Southern Mississippi, and Montana Tech, before his retirement. It has been noted that Pearson was surprisingly successful in combining a career in academia with political activities on the far right."Pearson has succeeded in combining such right-wing politics with a conventional academic career." – Kühl, Stefan (2001). The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. Oxford University Press, p. 4.
Pearson served in the British Army after World War II, and was a businessman in South Asia. In the late 1950s, he founded the Northern League. In the 1960s, he established himself in the United States for a while working together with Willis Carto publishing white supremacist and antisemitic literature.Winston, A. S. (1996). The context of correctness: A comment on Rushton. Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 5(2), 231-250. He was a member of The Heritage Foundation's editorial board.
Pearson's anthropological work was based in the eugenic belief that "favourable" genes can be identified and segregated from "unfavourable" ones. He advocated a belief in biological racialism, and claimed that human races can be ranked. Pearson argues that the future of the human species depends on political and scientific steps to replace the "genetic formulae" and populations that he considers to be inferior with ones he considers to be superior.Kohn, M. (1995). The race gallery: The return of racial science. London: Jonathan Cape. pp. 52-54Shared Eugenic Visions: Raymond B. Cattell and Roger Pearson. Andrew S. Winston, University of Guelph
Pearson was still alive .
Early life Roger Pearson was born in London in 1927. Pearson's only sibling and four of his cousins died in World War II. Pearson later described World War II as a "fratricidal war" in which the mutual destruction of Germanic peoples contributed to the gradual downfall of the Nordic race.
Pearson joined the British Army's Queen's Royal Regiment in April 1945 in England, and was commissioned in 1946 from the British Indian Army's Officers Training School Kakul, North-West Frontier Province, which is now the Pakistan Military Academy. He served with the British Indian Army in Meerut in 1946 before the Partition of India, with the British Indian Division in the Occupation of Japan, and with the British Army in Singapore in 1948, before returning to university in England. Pearson later directed various British-controlled companies in East Pakistan, which is present-day Bangladesh.
Academic career In 1967, Pearson began teaching anthropology as an assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM). In 1969 he received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of London. In 1971, USM granted Pearson full professorship and appointed him chair of the department of anthropology and sociology. Three years later, Pearson left USM and taught at the Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology for one year. After resigning from that school, Pearson founded the Institute for the Study of Man.
Anthropological views Pearson's anthropological views drew on the theories of British anthropologist Arthur Keith, who had argued that human races were distinct evolutionary units destined to compete for resources. Pearson's early writings directly cited Keith as a major influence even while recognizing that "many will see [Keith's observations] as a defence of Hitlerite philosophy."Pearson, Roger. 1957. "Sir Arthur Keith and Evolution." Northern World 2, no. 1 (1957): 4– 7. cited in Jackson, J. P. (2005). Science for segregation: Race, law, and the case against Brown v. Board of Education. New York: New York University Press. p 46 Pearson summarizes Keith's racial and evolutionary philosophy in the following manner: "If a nation with a more advanced, more specialised, or in any way superior set of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide, and destroys the work of thousands of years of biological isolation and natural selection."
In his work, Pearson described racial types as subspecies, which he defined as "a distinctive group of individuals which are on their way to becoming separate species, but which have not been isolated long enough, or had time to become sufficiently diversified to lose the power to inter-breed". He argued that mixing between subspecies is detrimental as one subspecies will always be better suited for life than the other, and will therefore tend to avoid miscegenation.A. S. Winston. (1996). The context of correctness: A comment on Rushton. Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, 5, 231—250. "Pearson was clear about the problem of contact between races: ". . . evolutionary progress can only take place properly amongst small non-cross-breeding groups. Always, a cross between two types meant the annihilation of the better type, for although the lower sub-species would be improved by such a cross, the more advanced would be retarded, and would then have a weaker chance in the harsh and entirely amoral competition for survival." (1959a, pp. 9-10) Pearson, R. 1966 . Blood groups and race. London: Clair Press.: "There is no way of eliminating undesirable genetic qualities except by annihilating the 'line,' that is by preventing the individual who carries the unfortunate genes from reproducing at all. If one does not wish to go so far as that then one must at least prevent cross-breeding between 'healthy and unhealthy stock, for once the entire stock is contaminated there is no solution other than the annihilation of the entire species.": "To think and practice eugenic and racial morals ourself is our duty, but this is not enough in the troubled state of the world today. It is necessary for each and every one of us to work to bring these ideas home to our fellow beings. We must talk and write about eugenics and race; we must help to make the ideas "fashionable" as quickly as we can. Let there be no confusion, also, between the two concepts for basically they are one and the same. A race is a group of individuals who possess a similar genetic heritage, and who when crossed are capable of breeding true. A race is consequently pure or impure according to its ability to breed true, and to produce its own kind. Biological accidents do occur, and these may result in the defects which eugenics seeks to remove from the mainstream (not necessarily by inhumane means), but differences in emotive, intellectual and physical constitution, where not acquired, are largely racial, the product of the importation of a different pattern of genes. ... We can only prevent the destruction of this edifice if we take it upon ourselves to overcome our· inherent shyness of such topics, to forget that we might possibly say something that might offend our neighbours, and start talking about race, racial hygiene and human eugenics. Only thus can we ensure that our children and-their children-will be able to find fitting partners for marriage. Only thus can we ensure the survival of our own kind and our own species and also lay the foundations for a noble future. Human stock-breeding is surely not a bad thing when exercised voluntarily and intelligently, and when its aim is to preserve an aristocracy of mankind."
In 1995 and 1996, Pearson published a trilogy of articles in Mankind Quarterly regarding the "Concept of heredity in Western thought", a defense of hereditarianism and a denouncement of the "onslaught of egalitarianism". Pearson here repeated his defense for the view of racial groups as subspecies and he repeated his dedication to eugenicist ideas, although with the caveat that negative eugenics ought to take place as a voluntary act of altruistic sacrifice for one's species.Pearson, R. (1995). The concept of heredity in Western thought. III: The revival of interest in genetics. Mankind quarterly, 36(1), 73-103. "Once science can determine which individuals and populations have disproportionately high gene frequencies for advantageous traits, and which are handicapped by deleterious genetic qualities, societies which are prompted by a higher altruism dedicated to the wellbeing of future generations, rather to the sole gratification of the selfish needs of those who are currently living, will be able to effectively select eugenic over dysgenic reproduction. If true altruism prevails, the result will be eugenic decisions, made voluntarily and without coercion." "Any species that adopts patterns of behavior that run counter to the forces that govern the universe is doomed to suffer a painful, harshly enforced and totally involuntary eugenic process of evolutionary reselection and readaptation - or an even more severe penalty, extinction." The same views were repeated in the 1996 book Heredity and Humanity: Race, Eugenics and Modern Science.
Business in South Asia Pearson served as president of the Pakistan Tea Association, Chittagong, in 1963."Pakistan Tea Association chairman's Speech." Eastern Examiner, Dacca, 30 April 1963. He also served on the managing committee of the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry.Pakistan Tea Association Annual Report Pearson sold his business interests in East Pakistan in 1965 and moved to the United States. It was during his time in South Asia that he became interested in Aryanism, and the linguistic, cultural, and genetic connections between Northern Europe and the Indo-Aryan populations of the Subcontinent.
Academic career in the U.S. Recently arrived in the United States, Pearson contributed to some of the publications of anti-Semite Willis Carto, such as Western Destiny. From 1966 to 1967 as "Stephan Langton", Pearson published The New Patriot, a magazine devoted to "a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question." As Lanton he published articles such as "Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa," "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power" and "Swindlers of the Crematoria." His books of this era, all published in 1966 in London by Clair Press, including Eugenics and Race, Blood groups and Race, Race & Civilisation and Early Civilizations of the Nordic Peoples were later distributed in the United States by The Thunderbolt Inc., an organ of the National States' Rights Party. Pearson's co-founder of The New Patriot was Senator Jack Tenney, who for sixteen years was Chairman of the California Senate Committee on Un-American Activities and who wrote frequently for that journal. Pearson joined the Eugenics Society in 1963 and became a fellow in 1977.
In 1973, Pearson founded the Journal of Indo-European Studies, and in 1976 he founded Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies. In 1978 he took over the editorship of the journal Mankind Quarterly, which had originally been founded in 1960 by Robert Gayre, Henry Garrett, Corrado Gini, Ottmar von Verschuer and Reginald Ruggles Gates.Schaffer, Gavin "'Scientific' Racism Again?":1 Reginald Gates, the Mankind Quarterly and the Question of "Race" in Science after the Second World War Journal of American Studies (2007), 41: 253-278 Cambridge University Press
In 1971, he was appointed chair of the department of Anthropology Comparative Religious Studies at the USM. According to William Tucker's description, he fired most of the non-tenured faculty, hiring instead scholars such as Robert E. Kuttner and Donald A. Swan, both with similar political backgrounds to Pearson. The dean at USM later stated that Pearson had "used his post as an academic façade to bring in equal-minded fanatics."