Colonial extermination was read as proof of natural racial hierarchy

Evidence

Philip Curtin reminds us that “aboriginal mortality” was taken as one proof of the natural racial order by nineteenth-century British scientists: “The exterminated people were all of ‘the colored races,’ while the exterminators always appeared to be European. It seemed obvious that some natural law of race relations was at work, that the extinction of the non-Europeans was part of the natural evolution of the world.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1712

Categorization

• QUESTION: The inversion — victims blamed by ‘science’ for their own genocide — is worth remembering as a rhetorical move echoed by later racial discourse.