Blumenbach coined ‘Caucasian’ and founded scientific racial classification

Evidence

Why such understanding had not persisted in European thought, Davis is at a loss to explain. Having come to the proposition that slavery had always been problematic to Western culture, Davis, like Jordan, resorted to mystery: “For reasons that can perhaps never be fully explained, it was the African’s colour of skin that became his defining characteristic, and aroused the deepest response in Europeans.” Davis in conforming to racial convention has inherited its tautology: racial distinctions are the basis of racial sensibilities. He would have been better served by a less presumptuous inquiry into the ideological traditions resident in Western history. Then he might have realized that after some centuries of racial indulgences the substratum of Western thought was unprepared for anything else. Even the shift in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Western thought from a basis of a religious and philosophical epistemology to that of modern science had made little difference. In point of fact, it had merely served to extend the terms and rationales for the fantasy of racial inferiority (for the Jews, Irish, Slavs, and Asians as well as for Blacks). Western scientific thought simply took its place as the latest formal grammar for the expression of a racial metaphysics to which its most natural response was acquiescence. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 408 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Blumenbach joined cultural and physical traits while ranking Caucasians as the original human race.; Blumenbach eliminated monsters from human classification and made it scientific; Modern scientific racism emerged out of Enlightenment taxonomy of human subspecies (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Racism shaped Western science, not the reverse #complicates (0.72) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 408