Scientific racism

"Racial biology" redirects here. For the biological concept of race, see Race (biology).
"Race theory" redirects here. For the intellectual movement and framework, see Critical race theory.

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Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "races",[1][2][3] and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, or racial superiority.[4][5][6][7] Before the mid-20th century, scientific racism was accepted throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific.[5][6] The division of humankind into biologically separate groups, along with the assignment of particular physical and mental characteristics to these groups through constructing and applying corresponding explanatory models, is referred to as racialism, race realism, or race science by those who support these ideas. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.[8]

Scientific racism misapplies, misconstrues, or distorts anthropology (notably physical anthropology), craniometry, evolutionary biology, and other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines through proposing anthropological typologies to classify 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, and was particularly prominent in European and American academic writings from the mid-19th century through the early-20th century. Since the second half of the 20th century, scientific racism has been discredited and criticized as obsolete, 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.[9]

During the 20th century, anthropologist Franz Boas and biologists Julian Huxley and Lancelot Hogben were among the earliest leading critics of scientific racism. Skepticism towards the validity of scientific racism grew during the interwar period,[10] and by 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".[11] Since that time, developments in human evolutionary genetics and physical anthropology have led to a new consensus among anthropologists that human races are a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one.[12][13][14][15]

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.[16] 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.

  1. ^ Garros, Joel Z. (January 9, 2006). "A brave old world: an analysis of scientific racism and BiDil". McGill Journal of Medicine. 9 (1): 54–60. PMC 2687899. PMID 19529811.
  2. ^ Norton, Heather L.; Quillen, Ellen E.; Bigham, Abigail W.; Pearson, Laurel N.; Dunsworth, Holly (July 9, 2019). "Human races are not like dog breeds: refuting a racist analogy". Evolution: Education and Outreach. 12 (1): 17. doi:10.1186/s12052-019-0109-y. ISSN 1936-6434. S2CID 255479613.
  3. ^ Kenyon-Flatt, Britanny (March 19, 2021). "How Scientific Taxonomy Constructed the Myth of Race". Sapiens.
  4. ^ "Ostensibly scientific": cf. Theodore M. Porter, Dorothy Ross (eds.) 2003. The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 7, The Modern Social Sciences Cambridge University Press, p. 293 "Race has long played a powerful popular role in explaining social and cultural traits, often in ostensibly scientific terms"; Adam Kuper, Jessica Kuper (eds.), The Social Science Encyclopedia (1996), "Racism", p. 716: "This [sc. scientific] racism entailed the use of 'scientific techniques', to sanction the belief in European and American racial Superiority"; Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Questions to Sociobiology (1998), "Race, theories of", p. 18: "Its exponents [sc. of scientific racism] tended to equate race with species and claimed that it constituted a scientific explanation of human history"; Terry Jay Ellingson, The myth of the noble savage (2001), 147ff. "In scientific racism, the racism was never very scientific; nor, it could at least be argued, was whatever met the qualifications of actual science ever very racist" (p. 151); Paul A. Erickson, Liam D. Murphy, A History of Anthropological Theory (2008), p. 152: "Scientific racism: Improper or incorrect science that actively or passively supports racism".
  5. ^ a b Gould 1981, pp. 28–29. "Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within".
  6. ^ a b Kurtz, Paul (September 2004). "Can the Sciences Help Us to Make Wise Ethical Judgments?". Skeptical Inquirer. Archived from the original on November 23, 2007. Retrieved December 1, 2007. There have been abundant illustrations of pseudoscientific theories-monocausal theories of human behavior that were hailed as "scientific" – that have been applied with disastrous results. Examples: ... Many racists today point to IQ to justify a menial role for blacks in society and their opposition to affirmative action.
  7. ^ Kaldis, Byron, ed. (2013). Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences. Sage Publications. p. 779. ISBN 9781452276045.
  8. ^ Templeton, A. (2016). "Evolution and Notions of Human Race". In Losos J. & Lenski R. (Eds.), How Evolution Shapes Our Lives: Essays on Biology and Society (pp. 346–361). Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv7h0s6j.26. That this view reflects the consensus among American anthropologists is stated in: Wagner, Jennifer K.; Yu, Joon-Ho; Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O.; Harrell, Tanya M.; Bamshad, Michael J.; Royal, Charmaine D. (February 2017). "Anthropologists' views on race, ancestry, and genetics". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 162 (2): 318–327. doi:10.1002/ajpa.23120. PMC 5299519. PMID 27874171. See also: American Association of Physical Anthropologists (March 27, 2019). "AAPA Statement on Race and Racism". American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Retrieved June 19, 2020.
  9. ^ Cf. Patricia Hill Collins, Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (2nd ed., 2000), Glossary, p. 300: "Scientific racism was designed to prove the inferiority of people of color"; Simon During, Cultural studies: a critical introduction (2005), p. 163: "It [sc. scientific racism] became such a powerful idea because ... it helped legitimate the domination of the globe by whites"; David Brown and Clive Webb, Race in the American South: From Slavery to Civil Rights (2007), p. 75: "...the idea of a hierarchy of races was driven by an influential, secular, scientific discourse in the second half of the eighteenth century and was rapidly disseminated during the nineteenth century".
  10. ^ Rattansi, Ali (2007). Racism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0192805904.
  11. ^ UNESCO, The Race Question, p. 8
  12. ^ Gannon, Megan (February 5, 2016). "Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue". Scientific American. Retrieved December 25, 2018.
  13. ^ Daley, C. E.; Onwuegbuzie, A. J. (2011). "Race and Intelligence". In Sternberg, R.; Kaufman, S. B. (eds.). The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 293–306. ISBN 9780521518062.
  14. ^ Diana Smay, George Armelagos (2000). "Galileo wept: A critical assessment of the use of race in forensic anthropolopy" (PDF). Transforming Anthropology. 9 (2): 22–24. doi:10.1525/tran.2000.9.2.19. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 18, 2018. Retrieved July 13, 2016.
  15. ^ Rotimi, Charles N. (2004). "Are medical and nonmedical uses of large-scale genomic markers conflating genetics and 'race'?". Nature Genetics. 36 (11 Suppl): 43–47. doi:10.1038/ng1439. PMID 15508002. Two facts are relevant: (i) as a result of different evolutionary forces, including natural selection, there are geographical patterns of genetic variations that correspond, for the most part, to continental origin; and (ii) observed patterns of geographical differences in genetic information do not correspond to our notion of social identities, including 'race' and 'ethnicity
  16. ^ Tucker 2007