The Legacy of Scientific Racism in Western Thought

Yesterday, Slate’s Chief Political Correspondent, Jamelle Bouie, wrote an article titled The Enlightenment’s Dark Side in which he explored the ways in which scientific racism and colonialism grew up alongside the Enlightenment’s loftier ideals, often in the same thinkers.  Rather than rehash the article here, I’ll simply encourage my readers to read the article for themselves.  I’ll briefly touch upon a few points he made, but my intention is to build upon his work, not respond to it.

My main takeaway from the article is that secular and classical liberal thinkers are just as vulnerable to self-delusion and self-justification as religious thinkers, if not more so.  Scripture says what it says, no more or less, but the process of rationalization can make anything say what you want it to say.  If you start with a conclusion, e.g., that the white race is superior other races and instead of examining whether your assumption is true, simply begin to examine why it is true, then you’re going to end up with a lot of garbage science, which is what racial taxonomy is.  And yet its influence still pervades our society, much like the more recent garbage science involving vaccines and autism.  Once the pseudoscience takes on a following, it’s nigh impossible to snuff it out.  Yet if we are to limit the spread of its nefarious influence, we need to start at the beginning.  That’s where Bouie’s article takes us.

As an aside, and I don’t wish to dwell here for too long, but Bouie writes, “Colonial domination and expropriation marched hand in hand with the spread of “liberty,” and liberalism arose alongside our modern notions of race and racism.”  I think it’s worth noting that European colonialism began following a roughly four century campaign by the Ottomans to conquer Europe.  For quite a long time, Western civilization was quite literally under siege.  I don’t wish to justify Europe taking its turn at the trough as it were, but I feel it’s worth noting that their campaign of colonialism didn’t come out of a vacuum.

An attempt to trace the line of scientific racism and its continuing influence on otherwise “liberal” thought should not be construed as necessarily discrediting its loftier goals.  I have no desire to “throw the baby out with the bathwater,” as it were, but we do need to remove the baby from the bathwater and recognize that all the grime in the bathwater did come off of that baby.  Bouie focused mainly on 18^th century thinkers such as Kant, Locke, and Jefferson.  Their subscription to scientific racism is important because they were greatly influential in both the Enlightenment and in the founding of the United States.  Pressing forward to the 19^th century, when the institution of slavery began to collapse, Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man wrote:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

What’s notable about this quote is that Darwin’s intent wasn’t to make an argument for this future development; he simply saw it as the natural progression of evolution.  What has actually transpired through history is quite different.  Rather than being wiped out by so-called “civilised” peoples, so-called “savage” peoples have begun rising up and developing civilization of their own.  The population of Africa is growing just as other parts of the world did when they began industrializing.  Far from being exterminated, Africa is beginning to thrive.  The reasons for this are worth exploring in a different piece.  However, the point here is that the assumptions of scientific racism were so ingrained that the founder of evolutionary science assumed that his conclusions meant that “inferior” races of humans would eventually be overtaken by strong races, perhaps just as the Neanderthal or other extinct hominid species were.

In the early 20^th century, the progressive movement began embracing eugenics as a way of perfecting humans by removing undesirable traits from the gene pool.  Given racist assumptions of the time, this naturally led to eugenics policies aimed at limiting the breeding of inferior races or the creation of “mongrel” races (i.e., mixed race.)  The practice of involuntary sterilization was widespread, but particularly rampant in California.  As recently as between 2006 and 2010, California authorized the sterilization of nearly 150 female inmates.  Even though eugenics has been largely discredited, it still holds currency in some quarters, just like scientific racism.  At the root of population control movements, there is always the assumption that “certain types” of populations need to be controlled.  White populations and especially middle to upper class populations are never among those numbers.  When people discuss the impending continued growth of the human population, it’s worth pointing out that developed nations have largely leveled off in their anticipated growth and that much of the anticipated growth is in Africa, where there is no shortage of natural resources.  Then ask what they have in mind in trying to avert this “crisis”.  In truth, the ascent of the African continent will undoubtedly be a boon to the world, bringing with it cultural enrichment and new trading partners.  The starvation which has been rampant was not a natural result there being too many people, but of nefarious social engineering in the mold of the Holodomor, Mao’s engineered famines, and even the current crisis in Venezuela.  They didn’t need our charity, which largely wasn’t reaching them anyway.  They needed regime change.

But I digress.  Leaving aside the ascent of Nazism, which undoubtedly traced its roots at least partly in scientific racism, Darwinism, and eugenics, (and I leave it aside partly because this is ground well covered and partly because it deserves more attention than I’m able to devote to it here), scientific racism continues to pop up in things like discussions on IQ differences among races.  Here, we risk again justifying disparate treatment among races by implying inherent differences among races.  I won’t delve into the merits of the racial IQ debate too much, of which there is little if any, except to point out that some variation is to be expected and the racial differences in mean, such as they are, are not as significant as people make them out to be, especially since there are many other factors at play.  And yet, people latch onto these differences, demonstrating the continued legacy of scientific racism in our thinking.

There is much more ground to be covered, but I will leave that to others.  I will say in closing that just as the Enlightenment cannot be divorced from the scientific racism it produced, the progressive movement cannot be divorced from its enthusiastic embrace of eugenics in the early 20^th century.  And just as the Enlightenment has its sins to atone for, so does the progressive movement as the Enlightenment’s inheritors.  Ideas such as the minimum wage didn’t simply grow up alongside racist Southern Democrats, it was actively supported by them with racist intent.  A racist business owner might hire a black man if he can pay the black man less than a white man, but if he has to pay them the same, he’d just as soon hire the white man.  Many New Deal programs were intended for whites only.  None of this means that things like minimum wage or social security are bad in and of themselves, but the racist stain of the original intent can’t be washed away until it’s at least acknowledged.