Scientific Racism

The Swedish physician/botanist/zoologist Carl Linnaeus’s book Systema Naturae published in 1767 defined the five ‘varieties’ of the human species, and was the premier Scientific Racism study for many years. The following short biographical sketches highlight a few of the people who came after Linnaeus and expanded on his work. These brief examples of their efforts to structure humans into categories is noteworthy from the standpoint of how Scientific Racism has endured.  Admittedly, it only survives in small segments of the population, but it is still present at a disturbing level within colonized societies throughout the world, in spite of being universally recognized as an unacceptable scientific discipline.

John Hunter was a Scottish surgeon who lived in the latter part of the 18th century and believed that the Negroid race was originally white. He thought they had turned dark-skinned over time because of the sun.  His position was based on the evidence that blisters and burns would turn white on a Negro, which he asserted proved their ancestors were originally white.

Charles White was an English physician and surgeon who lived from 1728 to1813 and believed in polygeny – the idea that different races had been created separately. For him, each race was a separate species, divinely created for its own geographical region.

The French naturalist Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) and the German anatomist Johann Blumenbach (1752–1840) were both proponents of monogenism – the concept that all races have a single origin.  However, they proposed a “degeneration theory” which asserted that both Adam and Eve were white, and that other races came about by degeneration owing to environmental factors, such as climate, poverty, and hybridization that made the original race “degenerate” from the original white race by a process of “raciation.” 

Benjamin Rush signed the Declaration of independence and was active in the framing of the U.S. Constitution.  In many areas he was a progressive activist opposing slavery, supporting public education (including girls), improving prisons and abolishing the death penalty.  As a Scottish trained physician he was less ‘advanced’, continuing to use blood-letting long after it had been discounted as a viable cure.  He also proposed that being black was a hereditary skin disease, which he called “negroidism,” and that it could be cured.

The Dutch scholar Pieter Camper (1722–89), was a craniometric theoretician, using interior skull-volume measurements to ‘scientifically’ justify racial differences. He also conceived a facial angle measurement that he claimed indicated intelligence quotient among species of men.

The racial studies by Georges Cuvier, a late 18th to early 19th century French naturalist and zoologist, concluded there were three distinct races: the Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), and the Ethiopian (black). He rated each for the beauty or ugliness of the skull and quality of their civilizations.  According to Cuvier not only was the white race the most beautiful, it is also superior to others by its intellect, bravery, and actions.  

It’s interesting to note that one of Cuvier’s pupils, Friedrich Tiedemann, was among the first to take exception to Scientific Racism. Tiedemann asserted that based upon his documentation of craniometric and brain measurements of people from different parts of the world, that the common European belief that non-white individuals have smaller brains, and are thus intellectually inferior, was scientifically unfounded.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) attributed ‘civilizational primacy’ to the white races, who he thought had gradually became white after they had emigrated early to the north, where they had to develop their intellectual powers, and overcome struggles for their basic needs, build hope, and battle despair, all of which were the direct result of the harsh climate.

Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) was an aristocratic author, not a scientist, but nevertheless made a significant impact in the field of Scientific Racism with his book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races which proposed that the three human races (black, white and yellow) were natural barriers and that race mixing would lead to the collapse of culture and civilization. 

The German scientist, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), put forward a theory that different races of men were linked to the development of their language. He felt the development of a language had completed the transition from animals to man, and depending on the complexity of the language,  humans had evolved as separate species, which could then be subdivided into races. With this theory, Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian was the one with the most complex language and therefore the one with the highest intellect.

In the 19th century, an American physical anthropologist and physician, Samuel George Morton (1799–1851), collected human skulls worldwide and developed a classification scheme that influenced the contemporary racialist theory.  Morton judged racial intellectual capacity by measuring the interior cranial capacity – a large skull denoted a large brain and high intellectual capacity; a small skull indicated a small brain and low intellectual capacity.  Based on his ‘craniometry’ data, Morton classified Caucasians with the biggest brains, Native Americans were in the middle and Negroes had the smallest brains.

And finally, Charles Darwin was conducting his studies and research during the period of time when Scientific Racism was attracting some attention.  Darwin never made any scientific claim to support a superior standing of any race or specie over another – human, animal or plant.

But unwittingly, his 1859 book On the Origin of Species had this subtitle – by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.  That phrase was used as a crucial positive reference in any argument or discussion by those who claimed white racial superiority. 

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