Racial science flowed from Europe to Africa for practical political testing

Evidence

By the second half of the nineteenth century, though, what was becoming South Africa was more a political and cultural laboratory for elaborating modern racial understandings and orderings, not yet a laboratory to assess or really to “advance” claims of the day’s racial science. It would add the latter conceit later, only with the approach of the twentieth century. If travelers returning to Europe in this period brought back with them reinforcing stereotypes of black people, standard ideas of scientific racism tended to flow in the counter-direction, from Europe to southern Africa where they might be tried, placed into practice, and tested at least politically and in popular culture. The laboratory was already the generator and incubator of racial arrangement and state policy. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1429

If travelers returning to Europe in this period brought back with them reinforcing stereotypes of black people, standard ideas of scientific racism tended to flow in the counter-direction, from Europe to southern Africa where they might be tried, placed into practice, and tested at least politically and in popular culture. The laboratory was already the generator and incubator of racial arrangement and state policy. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1429

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the colony as a testbed where metropolitan theory gets grounded in coercive practice, then feeds back — a two-way exchange through which ‘laboratory’ means different things at either end.
• XREF: Inverts a common assumption (that colonies produced racial science sent home); instead Europe was the theory source and the colony the experimental site.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1429