The Horrors of Scientific Racism

A History of Scientific Justifications for Racism from Forums to Internet Forums

By History RoundtablePublished 6 years ago • 7 min read

This image is a diagram of what parts of the skull correspond to what attributes in the pseudoscience of phrenology, one of the most well-known pieces of scientific racism.

From the White Man’s Burden to the “culture wars,” justifications of prejudice have been used for as long as people have been prejudiced—in other words, forever. Racism is one of the most horrifying prejudices based on the atrocities committed because of it, and has had plenty of justifications in its own right. One such justification, and probably the most resilient, is scientific racism. Scientific racism uses misinterpretations of science and pseudoscience as proof that racism is not only okay, but good for humankind. It evolves alongside society in order to remain socially acceptable, reflecting the changing societal standards and the scientific interest of the time.

Scientific racism dates back to the ancient era when Greek and Roman writers like Vitruvius stated that “those races nearest to the southern half of the axis are of lower stature, with swarthy complexions, curly hair, black eyes, and little blood, on account of the sun. This poverty of blood makes them over-timid to stand up against the sword.” Despite the fact that the classifications that we today conceive of as race had yet to come into existence, what was known of science at the time was used to justify prejudice against those who looked different from the “normal” Greeks or Romans. This trend continued throughout the ages, but was often ignored in favor of moralistic arguments until Carl Linnaeus’s classification system led to the social theory of unilineal evolution, spread by philosophers like Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and Auguste Comte. This linear view of society bred the idea that there is a superior society—that to the Europeans being, of course, European society.

What we think of today as racism did not truly develop until the beginning of the slave trade. There were developments upon the proto-racism of the Greeks and Romans along the way, particularly during the period of the crusades when antisemitism and Islamophobia flourished and quickly took on a pseudo racial theme, including the first instance of the people of Europe calling themselves Europeans in order to distinguish themselves from the Islamic world. None of this would have nearly as much of a focus on physical characteristics as modern racism would, though, and that idea was developed in part to defend the slave trade. Even from this early point in racism’s history, pseudoscience was used as justification for that racism. Craniometry and phrenology, as well as an older practice, physiognomy, all used skull measurements to predict things about the owner of the skull. Craniometry was used to determine a variety of things, including part of Darwin’s evolutionary research (although his use of craniometry was to prove the link between humans and apes, not the inferiority of non-whites), but most importantly was used to “show” the lack of cranial capacity in non-white races by many scientists. Phrenology used the shape of the skull to “prove” various inferiorities of non-whites, including criminality and decreased intelligence. Physiognomy had the same goals as phrenology, but used facial features to prove the biases of the researchers instead. All of this misguided research would culminate in a theory known as Polygenism.

Polygenism was a theory that put forth that all of the races had separate origins with little to no relation between them. Polygenism had been used in the antebellum South to justify slavery long before Darwin’s theory of evolution was published in 1859, but in the late 1830s and 1840s, an American physical anthropologist named Samuel George Morton released his evidence for polygenesis, mostly based on craniometry, the “science” of skull measurement. After Darwin published his theory, Morton’s followers suggested that the races of the world were evolutionarily unrelated, rolling their previous ideas into evolutionary theory. Others suggested that “Negroes” were a transitional stage between the chimpanzee and the “Greek,” phrenology playing a large role for this theory. In 1871, Darwin wrote his own idea on the origins of man in The Descent of Man, proposing that all the races had a common origin and were directly related, so none of this racist pseudoscience was even suggested by Darwin himself, only those that chose to use his theory as a means to prove their bigotry justified.

The evolutionary approach to race led to attempts to formally classify the races into typologies, one of the first being by a eugenics theoretician, Georges Vacher de Lapouge. He wrote "L'Aryen: son Rôle Social" (1899, "The Aryan: His Social Role"), in which he opposed the Aryan, dolichocephalic races with the brachycephalic races, supposedly best represented by “the Jew.” In addition to introducing eugenics to France, Vacher de Lapouge inspired much of the Nazi race ideology.

In the meantime, sociologists around the world began using intelligence tests to prove the inferiority of non-whites. These sociologists ignored the many flaws of these intelligence tests, including cultural biases inherent in the tests, and the fact that many of the non-white subjects could not afford the same level of education the white subjects could. Despite this, these intelligence tests convinced the US legislature to limit immigration from southern and eastern Europe, due to those people’s lower scores. All of this ultimately culminated in the Nazi Germany racial policy, the pinnacle in racism justification and scientific racism.

“Scientist” Hans F. K. Günther was the major arbiter of racial theory in Germany. Günther divided the European population into six races: the Nordic, Phalic, Eastern, Western, Dinaric, and East Baltic, with the Nordic race defined as the noblest and the great creative force in history. Günther claimed to have found evidence that tall, blond Nordics were the founders of influential cultures almost everywhere, while the Jews were "a thing of ferment and disturbance, a wedge driven by Asia into the European structure." He also considered the East Baltic race inferior, as mentioned repeatedly in his book, The Racial Elements of European History, and argued that the Nordic peoples should unite to secure their dominance. His racial theories set the standard for who should be preserved and who should be exterminated in Hitler’s Final Solution.

In the modern day, overt racism is generally frowned upon. This results in a split of racism into overt racism, which is marginalized and mainly found online where anonymity shields its proponents; and dog whistle racism, which uses any technique possible, mostly code words and bad science, to hide the racism for broader appeal. Modern scientific racism relies heavily on the social sciences. Psychology and sociology in particular are used to justify racist beliefs, especially the oft-touted black crime statistics, which categorize criminal acts committed in America by race and show that the proportion of criminal cases involving African-Americans is vastly larger than the proportion of American citizens who are black. Racists interpret this data as proof that African-Americans are genetically predisposed to be more violent and “primitive” and commit more crimes, ignoring obvious social factors like the fact that African-Americans are also disproportionately poor, and that the crime rates for poor blacks and poor whites are similar. Of course, these racists also believe that the reason blacks are disadvantaged economically is a mental inferiority that prevents them from excelling, something that ignores social factors from modern racism, to the lasting effects of the Jim Crow era, to the lasting effects of the slave trade. This ignorance also extends to citation of the IQ test demographics, an aforementioned tactic from the late 1800s, but the problem persists because it is easy to deny racism plays a part, making it a great dog whistle. In the overt racism community, most easily seen on the website Stormfront, instead of using good studies with bad interpretations, they use bad studies with worse interpretations, for instance their pet project of documenting “White Genocide.” Some of them continue to cling to the old research mentioned above, but they also have newer research conducted by hucksters and charlatans full of confirmation bias and straight out lies.

Racism adapts to fit the times. Scientific racism attaches to the latest advances in science, and attempts to justify racism in a way that’s more appealing because it seems factual. From its obvious roots to the dog whistle version of today, scientific racism ironically seems to be the most fit style of racism and may never truly go away. As such, it is important to examine it so that when it is used it can be countered with real science. The enemy of racism is knowledge.