In this way, Reinhardt asks viewers to adopt a flexible, inquisitive attitude toward reconsidering their racial assumptions. This character performs several roles in the pamphlet - as an interrogative actor, a diegetic agent, or a source of curiosity concerning how to look at people. Countering this group, the figure on the right returns their gaze while scratching his head looking closer, we see that he also appears in the group, though in a different pair of shoes, which undermines facile judgments of similarity and difference. In the cartoon on the pamphlet’s cover (figure 1), seven figures with different skin tones stand arrayed in various costumes, but the perception of such differences is contradicted by identical body shapes, poses, and facial profiles. Reinhardt exploited the graphic language of cartoons to engage and expand their argument, often by creating incongruous situations which evoke perceptual uncertainty. The anthropologists’ initial sketches for the cartoons indicate that they intended Reinhardt to minimize the significance given to physical differences and to dismantle associations of race with intelligence, language, culture, and religion.

Courtesy Ad Reinhardt Foundation.Īlthough Benedict and Weltfish did not challenge the concept of biological races, they marshaled anthropological facts to stress the commonality of the three so-called primary races. Ad Reinhardt, ∺n American brought up in China will speak Chinese, The Races of Mankind.

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