In the chapter ‘getting inside heads’, Samuel Otter deciphers the responses of Melville and other 19^th century literary personas toward pseudo scientific approaches to race that were highly popular throughout the 19^th century.

 With the rise of Enlightenment, science became a primary source for probing and understanding the world and its contents. As the social conflict in antebellum America became more and more explosive and the tension between the slave holding south and the abolitionist north was about to burst, justifications had to be found to defend the oppression and genocide directed toward the blacks and native Americans. Otter focuses on different pretentious scientific methods, which tried to unveil the enigmas of the human physiology and create a methodological sachem that reinforces the inferiority on all but Caucasians.  Those theories create, as Otter puts it, a distinction between characteristics and character. Melville, though a man of his time, scorns these theories and projects through them his contemplations on race and racism.

Melville, in the Cetology (chapters, concludes that a whale's shape can't be reconstructed merely by the gathering of its bones.  The whale is more complex, and its significance lies in its soft tissues. By that, Melville denounces the emphasis cranium 'scholars' ascribe to the shape of the head as a major constituent  in the definition of 'men'. There is also an interesting discussion about Queequegs role as the 'other' and Ishmael's wish to understand him - first by trying to be him and figuring the impossibility of that reversal, later by trying to decipher him through a western set of inherited values, and then, shedding all the biases – by seeing him as a true friend and companion. Melville's approach toward race and racism is unique and enlightened considering the time and the social tensions that took north America to a  boiling point, which exploded less than a decade later.