Modern scientific racism emerged out of Enlightenment taxonomy of human subspecies
Evidence
The scientific thought of the Enlightenment created types of human beings that served as the framework from which modern racism, based on physical typology, could emerge. The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus is credited with first slotting people into different subspecies within the broader genus of human. He created a schema differentiating between Europeans, Africans, Asians, and American Indians. While this was an advance on medieval human typologies, monsters (a medieval preoccupation) were given credence in his work. It was for the German scholar Johann Friedrich Blumenbach to dispense with monsters as a human type and to produce a scientific means of classification. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 124
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- DEFINE: Explains the genealogy from Linnaeus’s typologies through Blumenbach’s classification system as the origin of modern racial science.
Related
- Eighteenth-century naturalists laid groundwork for scientific racism as ideology justifying slavery (similarity 0.85)
- Respectable scientific pioneers, not just racists, furnished racism’s racial hierarchies (similarity 0.81)
- Blumenbach joined cultural and physical traits while ranking Caucasians as the original human race. (similarity 0.81)
- Scientific racism followed from placing humans in the animal kingdom (similarity 0.81)
- Racial theory needed post-Enlightenment science to become a legitimation system (similarity 0.80)
- Late-nineteenth-century Darwinian race science underpinned homo islamicus typologies (similarity 0.80)
- Modern scientific racism displaced religion from the race concept. (similarity 0.79)
- Race-thinkers needed anthropology to classify Europeans into distinct hereditary types (similarity 0.78)
- Early race scholars were often not deliberate racists (similarity 0.78)
- Racism’s earliest statements came from anatomists claiming hierarchical human races (similarity 0.78)
- Racial categories are relative, situational constructs engendered by historical processes. (similarity 0.78)
- Racial science gave subjective prejudice a patina of objective authority (similarity 0.78)