Scientific Racism - Wikipedia
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3/5/2021 Scientific racism - Wikipedia Scientific racism Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism (racial discrimination), racial inferiority, or racial superiority.[1][2][3][4] Historically, scientific racism received credence throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific.[2][3] Dividing humankind into biologically distinct groups is sometimes called racialism, race realism, or race science by its proponents. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.[5]:360 Scientific racism employs anthropology (notably physical anthropology), anthropometry, craniometry, and other disciplines or pseudo- disciplines, in proposing anthropological typologies supporting the classification of human populations into physically discrete human races, some of which might be asserted to be superior or inferior to others. Scientific racism was common during the period from the 1600s to the end of World War II. Since the second half of the 20th century, scientific racism has been criticized as obsolete and discredited, yet has persistently been used to support or validate racist world-views, based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.[6] After the end of World War II, scientific racism in theory and action was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO's early antiracist statement "The Race Question" (1950): "The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering."[7] Since that time, developments in human evolutionary genetics and physical anthropology have led to a new consensus among anthropologists that human race is a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one.[8][9]:294[10][11] The term scientific racism is generally used pejoratively when applied to more modern theories, such as those in The Bell Curve (1994). Critics argue that such works postulate racist conclusions, such as a genetic connection between race and intelligence, that are unsupported by available evidence.[12] Publications such as the Mankind Quarterly, founded explicitly as a "race-conscious" journal, are generally regarded as platforms of scientific racism because they publish fringe interpretations of human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, language, mythology, archaeology, and race. Contents Antecedents Enlightenment thinkers François Bernier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism 1/38 3/5/2021 Scientific racism - Wikipedia Robert Boyle vs. Henri de Boulainvilliers Richard Bradley Lord Kames Carl Linnaeus John Hunter Charles White Buffon and Blumenbach Benjamin Rush Christoph Meiners Later thinkers Thomas Jefferson Samuel Stanhope Smith Georges Cuvier Arthur Schopenhauer Franz Ignaz Pruner Racial theories in physical anthropology (1850–1918) Arthur de Gobineau Carl Vogt Charles Darwin Herbert Hope Risley Ernst Haeckel Nationalism of Lapouge and Herder Craniometry and physical anthropology Samuel George Morton Nicolás Palacios Monogenism and polygenism Typologies Ideological applications Nordicism Justification of slavery in the United States South African apartheid Eugenics Interbellum to World War II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism 2/38 3/5/2021 Scientific racism - Wikipedia Early intelligence testing and the Immigration Act of 1924 Sweden Nazi Germany United States After 1945 See also References Bibliography Further reading External links Antecedents Enlightenment thinkers During the Age of Enlightenment (an era from the 1650s to the 1780s), concepts of monogenism and polygenism became popular, though they would only be systematized epistemologically during the 19th century. Monogenism contends that all races have a single origin, while polygenism is the idea that each race has a separate origin. Until the 18th century, the words "race" and "species" were interchangeable.[13] François Bernier François Bernier (1620–1688) was a French physician and traveller. In 1684 he published a brief essay dividing humanity into what he called "races", distinguishing individuals, and particularly women, by skin color and a few other physical traits. The article was published anonymously in the Journal des Savants, the earliest academic journal published in Europe, and titled "New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or 'Races' of Man that Inhabit It."[14] In the essay he distinguished four different races: 1) The first race included populations from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, India, south-east Asia, and the Americas, 2) the second race consisted of the sub-Saharan Africans, 3) the third race consisted of the east- and northeast Asians, and 4) the fourth race were Sámi people. The emphasis on different kinds of female beauty can be explained because the essay was the product of French Salon culture. Bernier emphasized that his novel classification was based on his personal experience as a traveler in different parts of the world. Bernier offered a distinction between essential genetic differences and accidental ones that depended on environmental factors. He also suggested that the latter criterion might be relevant to distinguish sub-types.[15] His biological classification of racial types never sought to go beyond physical traits, and he also accepted the role of climate and diet in explaining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism 3/38 3/5/2021 Scientific racism - Wikipedia degrees of human diversity. Bernier had been the first to extend the concept of "species of man" to classify racially the entirety of humanity, but he did not establish a cultural hierarchy between the so-called 'races' that he had conceived. On the other hand he clearly placed white Europeans as the norm from which other 'races' deviated.[16][15] The qualities which he attributed to each race were not strictly Eurocentric, because he thought that peoples of temperate Europe, the Americas and India, culturally very different, belonged to roughly the same racial group, and he explained the differences between the civilizations of India (his main area of expertise) and Europe through climate and institutional history. By contrast he emphasized the biological difference between Europeans and Africans, and made very negative comments towards the Sámi (Lapps) of the coldest climates of Northern Europe[16] and about Africans living at the Cape of Good Hope. He wrote for example "The 'Lappons' compose the 4th race. They are a small and short race with thick legs, wide shoulders, a short neck, and a face that I don't know how to describe, except that it's long, truly awful and seems reminiscent of a bears face. I've only ever seen them twice in Danzig, but according to the portraits I've seen and from what I've heard from a number of people they're ugly animals".[17] The significance of Bernier for the emergence of what Joan- Pau Rubiés call the "modern racial discourse" has been debated, with Siep Stuurman calling it the beginning of modern racial thought,[16] while Joan-Pau Rubiés think it is less significant if Bernier's entire view of humanity is taken into account.[15] Robert Boyle vs. Henri de Boulainvilliers An early scientist who studied race was Robert Boyle (1627–1691), an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor. Boyle believed in what today is called 'monogenism', that is, that all races, no matter how diverse, came from the same source, Adam and Eve. He studied reported stories of parents' giving birth to different coloured albinos, so he concluded that Adam and Eve were originally white and that whites could give birth to different coloured races. Theories of Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton about color and light via optical dispersion in physics were also extended by Robert Boyle into discourses of polygenesis,[13] speculating that maybe these differences were due to "seminal impressions". However, Boyle's writings mention that at his time, for "European Eyes", beauty was not measured so much in colour, but in "stature, comely symmetry of the parts of the body, and good features in the face".[18] Various members of the scientific community rejected his views and described them as "disturbing" or "amusing".[19] On the other hand, historian Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722) divided the French as two races: (i) the aristocratic "French race" descended from the invader Germanic Franks, and (ii) the indigenous Robert Boyle Gallo-Roman race (the political Third Estate populace). The Frankish aristocracy dominated the Gauls by innate right of conquest. In his time, Henri de Boulainvilliers, a believer in the "right of conquest", did not understand "race" as biologically immutable, but as a contemporary cultural construct. His racialist account of French history was not entirely mythical: despite "supporting" hagiographies and epic poetry, such as The Song of Roland (La Chanson de Roland, c. 12th century), he sought scientific legitimation by basing his racialist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism 4/38 3/5/2021 Scientific racism - Wikipedia distinction on the historical existence of genetically and linguistically distinguished Germanic and Latin-speaking peoples