Pranking Lieberman

A YOUNG PROFESSOR of anthropology writes to tell us he recently received one of those “questionnaires” in the mail: It was cooked up by a Central Michigan University Professor of Sociology and Anthropology named Leonard Lieberman. Mailed to all the “Chairpersons” of college anthropology departments in the US and Canada, it endeavored to find out exactly what each anthropologist thought and felt about race and how he handled the subject in the classroom. (ILLUSTRATION: We are not kidding. This actually is Leonard Lieberman.)

The first part of the questionnaire delved into the teacher’s ethnic origin, going back as far as his four grandparents. Other questions probed the writings and books which had influenced his thinking on race. The bulk of the questionnaire was carefully designed to assess the respondee’s conscious and subconscious racial attitudes by a series of graduated responses from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.”

No one need be surprised to know that these questions were phrased in such a way as to strongly support the equalitarian position, provided they could be translated from sociological jargon into English. Sample question: “Races vary from populations differing only in the frequencies of a few genes to those groupings that have been totally isolated for tens of thousands of years and are at least incipient species.”

We were impolite enough to fill out the questionnaire in the name of an anthropology professor called Julius Striker III, who had a lineage that began with Haman and ran through Titus, Ferdinand and Isabella, Edouard Drumont, down to Colonel Sanctuary and Louis Ferdinand Destouches. Gobineau, Vacher de Lapouge and Alfred Rosenberg were listed as being the principal shapers of Professor Striker’s ideas on race. Required reading included Mein Kampf, the Protocols and the poetry of Dietrich Eckart. Publications favored were Der Stuermer reprints and the irregularly issued newsletters of Louis Zoul. The questionnaire will probably afford Mr. Lieberman a chuckle before he forwards it, along with his more serious responses, to the local chapter of the ADL.

* * *

Source: Instauration magazine, August 1976