Racial science gave subjective prejudice a patina of objective authority

Evidence

Brian Street, in his reconstruction of the history of the relationship between scientific thought and the racial theories that wove through English literature of the Victorian period, concludes: “The link between race and culture, physical and mental qualities, having been established, any subjective feelings with regard to the ‘character’ of other races can be given scientific backing. If the criteria for distinguishing between races of men depended upon such subjective considerations, Voltaire and Rousseau could claim that Negroes were naturally inferior to Europeans in mental ability, and Hume that ‘there never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white’ …, with as much justification as Blumenbach could claim that the Caucasian was the most beautiful … chauvinism was rendered in ‘scientific’ terms in the late nineteenth century.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1711

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the mechanism by which racial ideology gets naturalized as science — the load-bearing process behind the tradition’s rise.
• XREF: connects to: Discredited phrenology was succeeded by IQ testing defending racial hierarchy — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 60