"Scientific" racism
"Scientific" racism refers to the attempt to apply scientific principles and methods to justify racial hierarchies and discrimination. This phenomenon emerged in the nineteenth century, influenced by Enlightenment ideals that emphasized rationality, classification, and a scientific view of the world. Intellectuals sought to categorize human variation similarly to how species were classified in biology, leading to theories that divided humanity into distinct races, such as Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. Prominent figures like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau contributed to these ideas, with Gobineau famously asserting that civilization originated solely from the "White Race."
However, contemporary science has fundamentally discredited the biological basis of race, demonstrating that the genetic differences among humans do not correspond to the traditional racial categories. Instead, variations are seen as adaptations to environmental conditions and result from complex interactions within populations. Although the concept of race lacks scientific validity today, it persists as a cultural construct, influencing societal attitudes and behaviors. Understanding "scientific" racism is crucial for recognizing the historical misuse of science in promoting racial discrimination and the ongoing impact of these beliefs in contemporary society.
On this Page
"Scientific" racism
For as long as humans have recognized differences between groups of people, there has been racism in the form of cultural prejudice. In the nineteenth century, racism acquired a scientific character, primarily as a result of intellectual developments in Western Europe. The roots of that change lie in the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement of the latter part of the eighteenth century. Rationality, a scientific view of the world, and a penchant for classifying natural phenomena motivated Enlightenment thinkers. They sought to find an order in the human and social world comparable to the order of the physical universe. In many ways, the Enlightenment merely applied the insights of the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century to human affairs.
Just as the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) had classified every living species known to him within a system of taxonomy, so Enlightenment thinkers endeavored to specify the full range of human variation with a similar system. The young science of anthropology, the study of humans, provided such a conceptual framework. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, often regarded as the father of physical anthropology, divided humans into five races. Other anthropologists later condensed his scheme, and the division of humanity into three races—Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid—became standard.
Biological theory seemed to offer support for this view. Naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection posited the constant divergent evolution of all species in response to different environmental conditions. Because humans inhabit almost all areas of the world, this process would presumably be most pronounced among humans. The research of Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics, explained differences between variations within a species in terms of gene frequencies, or the frequency of occurrence of genes embodying particular traits found in a population. Gene frequencies are reflected in phenotypes, visible expressions of the traits embodied in genes. Dark or light skin; curly, straight, or kinky hair; and facial bone structure are all examples of phenotype.
After 1850, inspired by evolutionary theory, various writers began scholarly studies of race. Principal among these was Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, who published his four-volume Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races between 1853 and 1855. This work placed human differences into a hierarchy, asserting that “all civilization flows from the White Race.” Later, the architects of the European empires that swallowed the globe toward the end of the nineteenth century legitimated the domination of “inferior” races by referring to scientific theories such as Gobineau’s.
Since Gobineau’s time, science has shown that the concept of biological race is untenable. The supposed direct link between genes and their corresponding phenotypes has been disproven. What appeared to earlier theorists to be racial distinctions were in fact only adaptations to the environment among populations that had been geographically isolated from each other for a long period of time. Because increasingly effective means of transportation have gradually created a global community and have all but ended geographic isolation, genetic traits are now combined in infinite variations, thus hollowing out the concept of race, which suggests a finite number of mutually exclusive categories. Though bankrupt as a scientific concept, race lingers as a cultural construct, and so does racism.
Bibliography
Biddiss, Michael D. Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970.
Dennis, Rutledge M. "Social Darwinism, Scientific Racism, and the Metaphysics of Race." Journal of Negro Education, vol. 64, no. 3, 1995, pp. 243–52, doi:10.2307/2967206.
Messer, A'ndrea Elyse. "Scientific Racism's Long History Mandates Caution." Penn State, 14 Feb. 2014, http://news.psu.edu/story/304151/2014/02/14/research/scientific-racisms-long-history-mandates-caution. Accessed 31 Mar. 2017.
Redman, Samuel J. Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums. Harvard UP, 2016.
"Skulls in Print: Scientific Racism in the Transatlantic World." University of Cambridge, 19 Mar. 2014, http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/skulls-in-print-scientific-racism-in-the-transatlantic-world. Accessed 31 Mar. 2014.
Tucker, William H. The Science and Politics of Racial Research. U of Illinois P, 1994.