In 1907, the US government created a commission to look into the causes and consequences of recent immigration to the country. An influx of eastern and southern Europeans had created a rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric, with some politicians declaring the new arrivals — many of whom were Catholic or Jewish — a threat to America. (Sound familiar?) The so-called United States Immigration Commission investigated many aspects of immigration, from conditions on ships crossing the Atlantic to the jobs that immigrants found.
The commission also asked a then little-known professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Franz Boas (himself a German-Jewish immigrant), to study the physical characteristics of immigrant populations in New York. At the time, western academics largely believed that humans could and should be classified into different “races” based on permanent traits passed between generations — with the assumption that western civilisation was inherently superior. That was used to justify all manner of ugly prejudice; indeed, racial ranking, and the related field of eugenics, were so deeply established in US academic thought in the early 20th century that Adolf Hitler later cited them in promoting Nazism.
Boas had a different perspective. Before arriving in the US, he had spent time studying the lives of Inuits on Baffin Island. He became convinced that the consensus around race was a construct.