The Skull Measurer's Mistake: And Other Portraits of Men and Women Who Spoke Out Against Racism Book

Sven is a master. He writes short, easy to read books that get past your defenses and enter your emotional life.

This one is published in 1995. This means that he hasn't yet developed his trademark extraordinary form -- part memoir, part travelogue, part literary criticism, part historical context, and part critical self-reflections that implicate the reader. More so, this one is a series of short notes, or, as the subtitle has it, "portrait of men and women who spoke out against racism."

But this subtitle tells only half the story. Mixed in are also portraits of men and women who developed racism. (Of course). Within the 22 sections of the book (average section is 7 pages of big font), Sven creates a tension between those who created racism and those who opposed it. Sometimes the tension is within one person.

On the face of this may not seem like much of an accomplishment. But I think it is. Here is why: whenever anyone points to the injustices of a previous time there is always a voice that shouts, "but you have to judge those people according to values of their own times." This historical relativising is important. And yet, it often banks on the assumption that everyone in that period believed that, for example, slavery was acceptable.

Sven's book diffuses this move before it can be made. By showing that there were all kinds of people who, in the time period in question, opposed institutions like slavery and scientific racism, he moves the debate from the contemporary to the past. Or more accurately, he allows the debate to travel from the present to the past back to the present without being delayed by the conversation-killing historical border police.

One of my goals to read everything he has written (and has been translated into english), within the year.