Early race scholars were often not deliberate racists

Evidence

What was left to racism was merely to postulate a systematic, and genetically reproduced distribution of such material attributes of human organism as bore responsibility for characterological, moral, aesthetic or political traits. Even this job, however, had already been done for them by respectable and justly respected pioneers of science, seldom if ever listed among the luminaries of racism. Observing sine ira et studio the reality as they found it, they could hardly miss the tangible, material, indubitably ‘objective’ superiority that the West enjoyed over the rest of the inhabited world. Thus the father of scientific taxonomy, Linnaeus, recorded the division between the residents of Europe and inhabitants of Africa with the same scrupulous precision as that which he applied while describing the difference between crustacea and fishes. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 199 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Respectable scientific pioneers, not just racists, furnished racism’s racial hierarchies — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 199; Respected scientists published absurd race-based claims during World War I; Early Aryanism stemmed from Enlightenment humanism not racism (+2 more)

Related

• Respectable scientific pioneers, not just racists, furnished racism’s racial hierarchies (similarity 0.91)
• Respected scientists published absurd race-based claims during World War I (similarity 0.86)
• Racism’s earliest statements came from anatomists claiming hierarchical human races (similarity 0.84)
• Enlightenment race science was contradictory, not uniformly racist (similarity 0.83)
• Early racial science ranked African women between humans and orangutans (similarity 0.83)
• Blumenbach joined cultural and physical traits while ranking Caucasians as the original human race. (similarity 0.83)
• Early racial scientists classified species downward from humans without any theory of evolution. (similarity 0.82)
• Early race science was naive speculation, not deliberate ideology (similarity 0.81)
• Early racial scientists lacked modern skills and some falsified their findings (similarity 0.80)
• Pre-Civil War race-thinking was vague and non-biological (similarity 0.80)
• Leading progressive scientists advanced biological race classification using then-cutting-edge methods. (similarity 0.79)
• Scientific racism followed from placing humans in the animal kingdom (similarity 0.79)
• Racial typing drew scientific legitimacy from downwards-directed species categories. (similarity 0.79)
• Ancient notions of race as biology do not match reality (similarity 0.78)
• Race scholarship challenges the clean divide between modern science and ethnoscience (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Respectable scientific pioneers, not just racists, furnished racism’s racial hierarchies #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 199