Coherent racial theory required modern science to emerge

Evidence

While this assimilationist vision is closely linked to the politics of national unity, its legitimacy has primarily been based on science. Racial theories were only made possible by the advent of scientific knowledge in Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards, as science offered a whole new episteme from which a relationship between culture and biology could for the first time be systematically imagined. Racial theories, first in parts of Europe and gradually in other points of the globe, sought to explain cultural differences as natural differences and to represent social groups as biological units: racial theorists appropriated science, from craniology to genetics, in order to present the group boundaries they had constructed as objectively grounded in natural laws. In Europe, China, and many other parts of the globe, negative attitudes about the physical appearance of individuals or population groups can be found before modernity, but these attitudes rarely formed a coherent system which could provide legitimacy to social inclusions or exclusions. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3303 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Immanuel Kant supplied the first scientific definition of race in 1775. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 264; The Enlightenment laid the basis for modern ideas of race; Racial theory needed post-Enlightenment science to become a legitimation system — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3303 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern scientific racism emerged out of Enlightenment taxonomy of human subspecies #expands (0.95)
• Racial theory needed post-Enlightenment science to become a legitimation system #expands (0.93) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3303
• Science followed race-thinking; it did not create it #complicates (0.85)
• Racist policy drives successive new biological theories to justify it #complicates (0.82) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1178