Eighteenth-century naturalists laid groundwork for scientific racism as ideology justifying slavery
Evidence
What is most significant about Blumenbach, Linnaeus, and other eighteenth century ethnologists’ work is that, as Frederickson argues, it “opened the way to a secular or scientific racism by considering human beings part of the animal kingdom rather than viewing them in biblical terms as children of God endowed with spiritual capacities denied to other creatures.” This set the stage for modern scientific notions of race. The shift from religious to scientific modes of thought and analysis, while initiated in the Renaissance period, underwent a significant deepening in the eighteenth century; this informed the development of scientific racism as an ideology to justify slavery and conquest. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 126
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to Kennedy’s work on racism as ideology in American history, and to the broader critique of Enlightenment universalism.
- SEED: Angle: the Enlightenment’s turn from biblical to zoological framing of humans as the deep root of modern race ideology.
Related
- Modern scientific racism emerged out of Enlightenment taxonomy of human subspecies (similarity 0.85)
- Eighteenth century ethnology secularized racism into a scientific ideology justifying conquest. (similarity 0.84)
- Scientific racism emerged to justify slavery once religious justifications failed (similarity 0.83)
- Scientific racism followed from placing humans in the animal kingdom (similarity 0.81)
- Modern scientific racism displaced religion from the race concept. (similarity 0.80)
- Modern Western science merely updated older religious rationales for racial hierarchy (similarity 0.80)
- Late-nineteenth-century Darwinian race science underpinned homo islamicus typologies (similarity 0.78)
- Racism scholarship long confined itself to biological black-white and antisemitic models (similarity 0.78)
- Racial science gave subjective prejudice a patina of objective authority (similarity 0.78)