Oh yeah, this one is gonna make me popular.
So yeah, there was a time where racism was not only mainstream but scientifically approved.
We had top scientists in their fields writing long diatribes about “race science” all
of which turned out to be… well, racist conjecture.
And while we put it in the realm of goofy Victorian ideas, it still affects today, and
we still have best selling authors spouting the same thoughts.
Not to mention, the facts aside, self-described sceptics and rationals on the internet and
the comments of this video dig up these long-dead ideas.
I’ve rambled long enough, this is the scientific racism video.
Hi, I’m Tristan Johnson, and this is Step Back History.
Be sure to click the subscribe button as well as the bell notification to never miss a new
Step Back video or live stream.
Scientific racism is pretty much what it says on the tin.
It was and is the use of various forms of pseudoscience to “prove” race is a biological
fact of humanity.
For a long time, scientists made the argument different races were literally different species.
This concept of race was the prevailing scientific consensus for centuries.
It began to decline when conjecture was no longer form of evidence.
By the way, there’s going to be a lot of preposterously racist theories described in
this video.
They have zero merits, but they most definitely can be distressing to hear about as these
ideas, while ridiculous and wrong are still popular in some circles.
The origins of scientific racism go all the way back to some classical age thinkers.
In the Greco-Roman tradition, you had Hippocrates writing about dark people being cowards and
light people being courageous fighters.
Roman writers like Posidonius used to refer to “those races nearest to the southern
half of the axis” as not having enough blood, making them have features different from them.
This was pretty much the extent of it before the age of enlightenment.
Remember how you used to like JK Rowling before you found out she has a twitter?
Well, if your JK Rowling is Enlightenment philosophers, you might wanna turn off now.
Voltaire, like THE Voltaire, believed different races developed independently of each other.
Apparently being the enlightenment version of an edgy atheist because this broke with
church doctrine about Adam and Eve and such.
In his book Systema Naturae, Carl Linnaeus, the founder of modern-day taxonomy outlined
five “varieties of humanity” as a sort of sub-species list.
Immanuel Kant waxed lyrical about his ideas about what races were good and bad based on
stereotypes while claiming it to be reasoned philosophy.
And Benjamin Rush, the founding father thought being non-white was a disease.
However, scientific racism hit its zenith in the Victorian era.
Developing scientific theories meshed with presupposed conclusions about race, to result
in some of the weirdest concepts ever called legitimate, accepted scientific fact.
Especially if they could use it to defend slavery or colonisation.
The first big debate in the old-timey race science circles that thankfully doesn’t
exist today (until someone links me to someone who really does believe it of course) is whether
or not different races are the same species.
Yes, until recently, some even in the 20th century, people denied all Humans are of the
same lineage.
They called it Polygenism and many enlightenment thinkers debated over this.
It was really just debates using conjecture and assumed stereotypes so you can imagine
how productive it went.
These were debates which came more down to whether not being white was because they were
a different species, or because they had a skin condition where a mole covered their
entire body.
We’re working with this kinda stuff.
Another theory had to do with skull shape.
You can find this in various scientific journals of the period.
Long descriptions about how every person’s skull from this region has these features
and that features which somehow made them less than white people.
They even used this to try and claim southern European or Irish people were somehow not
white.
This developed into a prominent scientific Victorian science called phrenology which…
Oh… well, then please go on Well, I guess you should click on the thingy
and go see Xander’s video all about it then on ARTExplains.
He can have the fun, kooky Victorian science and I can keep covering the grim discussion
of people with horrible worldviews.
The analytics say you folks love that stuff… sigh…
Another prominent word from these long-discredited race scientists and modern day comment sections
is the term degeneracy.
Go look at the comments, I’m sure you’ll find it.
A French naturalist named Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and German anatomist Johann
Blumbach showed off their Buffonery with their own racial theories.
They believed humans were of a single stock, which is at least one small relief, but from
the Caucasian Adam and Eve…sigh… they “degenerated” from different environmental
factors such as too much sun or bad food.
They believed if you changed your diet and went to a new climate you could turn back
into a proper white person…
this is genuinely distressing stuff to read my dudes.
And now we must get to Darwin.
Charles Darwin was undoubtedly a massive shaker in the field of biology, spearheading the
theory of evolution via natural selection.
He’s often quote-mined by creationists because he used the word race and species rather fluidly,
as was a concept at the time.
So he referred to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.
He was referencing different types of broccoli, but people either attributed human races to
this, to attack Darwin or promote racist ideas.
In his book The Descent of Man, he does talk about the savage races as being exterminated
by the “civilised ones” but not as an aspirational statement.
It was simply something he was observing as those “civilised” Europeans were brutally
conquering and subjugating people around the world.
Once Darwinism became more of a standard scientific theory they began to claim different races
as more or less evolved from our primate ancestors.
You can probably guess where this is going.
Some doctors like Franz Ignaz Pruner claimed through looking at skulls and thinking about
it, that black people were naturally closer to apes… sigh…
They also used this to make the Irish into a non-white race.
Independent of Darwin, the idea began to pick up of using the concept of the struggle of
life and natural selection to develop it to refer to groups of people.
We call this Social Darwinism, and coupled with the concept of nations, builds an ideology
around different for survival.
You know, the ideology behind the Nazis.
So why was this so prevalent?
If race science and scientific racism had no basis in reality, why was it so popular?
Well, it had to do with the cultures which developed it.
See Europe had been through this centuries-long project of looking at other people’s lands,
saying it's their’s and either subjugating, enslaving, or eradicating the people who lived
there.
You know, as civilised people do.
Humans don’t typically think its ok to do such horrible acts of violence to their fellow
humans, so they constructed elaborate justifications for it.
Early on, it was about civilising them or bringing Christianity, but as it turned more
into straight up murder and conquest, they needed a better justification.
Science was a way to do it.
And do it they did.
Scientific racism justified the genocide of the first nations of the Americas and apartheid
in South Africa.
When they weren’t conquering, a lot of Europeans were busy keeping people in slavery based
on racial categories.
If race isn’t biological and you believe in equality and liberty, and all those ideals
enlightenment people believed in, you needed a way to justify keeping an entire group of
people in chains.
So, wrapping up a nonsensical science to do so was the easy answer.
Race science became prominent in the United States primarily for justifying why black
people just weren’t capable of handling freedom, and their skin colour made them docile
and happy to work as slaves.
One such book in 1851 by Samuel Cartwright was called “Diseases and Peculiarities of
the Negro race” which was popular among slave owners.
It argued black people were mentally unfit for self-determination and the only black
people seeking freedom suffered from a disease he pulled out of his ass called drapetomania.
He believed it was a mental illness that made black people want to escape from slavery.
And this might sound like crazy Victorian stuff, but this is the root why assertiveness
in black people is considered crazy and dangerous, while the same behaviour in white people makes
them commanding and leaders.
He also argued black people don’t experience much pain compared to white people, legitimising
their rough treatment.
This still comes to haunt us in how black people experience pain and pain management
in hospitals to this day.
It wasn’t until the mid-20th century this race science was formally dismissed on the
world stage, so there was still plenty of more brutality based on pseudoscience to come.
One person you might have heard about is Francis Galton and the concept of eugenics.
He argued we needed to prevent race mixing, and sterilise people undesirable to strengthen
the species.
This is the same Francis Galton who invented regression towards the mean.
Eugenics was another pillar of the Nazi project of extermination, but eugenics societies were
all over the west, and popular.
Doctors sterilised untold amounts of people under the justification of improving the gene
stock.
Sometimes they called this… ugh… racial hygiene.
But this is the subject of a future patreon stretch goal video.
These concepts of race were essential to nationalists, who wanted to make sure anyone different from
them couldn’t live close by.
They used eugenics and racial theories to justify shutting down immigration from non-European
countries.
Maybe even calling them shithole countries sometimes.
The decline of this phase of our scientific history was in the wake of the Second World
War.
Seeing the atrocities the Nazis conducted in the name of nationalism, racial hygiene,
and eugenics made everyone do a bit of a double take.
Groups like UNESCO tried to interrogate what the real science was behind race and came
up quite empty.
After the Second World War, scientists became slowly more sceptical of their assumptions.
We tested the human genome and found out a lot about human genetic diversity, or precisely
how it’s quite lacking.
Compared to other animals, we are very genetically similar to each other, so much so we theorise
the human race almost went extinct at some point in our distant past.
We only differ by about .3% of our genetic code on average compared to .7% of chimpanzees.
Most of the genetic diversity in humans is between different groups living in Africa.
Judging how long we’ve lived in Africa, this is not surprising.
So, race is really not much of anything biologically.
It’s a few small morphological adaptations based on climate.
That’s really it.
Skin pigment is really just a matter of how big a particular type of skin cell is.
But race is real.
It’s like the sex and gender thing.
Race is the social categories we have built around these small morphological differences,
and the expectations and performances we make in those categories.
Just like how gender is the set of expectations, and performances we build around our sex.
This is what is meant by social construct by the way.
It doesn’t make it fake, it just means it’s something we built.
If we created it, then we can change it, or destroy it if we want to and with enough effort.
Race is in many ways the wounds of colonialism our species still bears, and we can work to
mend them.
And scientific racism isn’t dead.
Authors like Nathan Wade, Richard Herrnstein, Charles Murray, and Amy Chua still preach
racism using the trappings of scientific language.
They take correlations based on socioeconomic class and go to race as the causation.
It’s been disproven time and time and time again, but still, these books come out.
Because it’s not about accuracy, it’s about a worldview.
It’s working backwards from an assumption.
It’s trying to justify why different racial groups have things so different from each
other without doing introspection.
This was not a fringe part of science for a long time.
It was mainstream accepted science.
It was not until we interrogated our own assumptions, and examined not only the world, but how we
look at the world, and what blinders we were wearing that we began to fix it.
That interrogation is the crucial driving force behind the postmodernist movement.
Maybe that explains why the founders of postmodernism like Michel Foucault started by trying to
figure out what happened to cause the Nazi regime.
It’s why we need to examine our own assumptions every day and listen to people whose experiences
of the same material world are different from ours.
Because we’re all wearing blinders, and the only way to make the most accurate model
of how the world works is through something scholar Elsa Barkley Brown called Gumbo Ya-ya,
which is Creole for when many voices are spoken at once.
And in my mind, it’s why the humanities aren’t just an interesting pastime.
It’s crucial to understanding ourselves and others.
Ok, so my plug for this week is about the Step Back subreddit.
I’m trying to find out what to do with it, so if you have a thought about what a good
Step Back subreddit would have, leave a comment, or better yet go to reddit.com/r/stepback
and let’s build something there!
This video was made possible by these great humans, as well as the rest of my Patrons
over at Patreon.
I’d especially like to thank Don and Kerry Johnson as well as Kolbeinn Mani and Garrick
Kwan for their generosity.
The theme song is by 12Tone and come back next time for more Step Back.