Racial theory needed post-Enlightenment science to become a legitimation system

Evidence

While this assimilationist vision is closely linked to the politics of national unity, its legitimacy has primarily been based on science. Racial theories were only made possible by the advent of scientific knowledge in Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards, as science offered a whole new episteme from which a relationship between culture and biology could for the first time be systematically imagined. Racial theories, first in parts of Europe and gradually in other points of the globe, sought to explain cultural differences as natural differences and to represent social groups as biological units: racial theorists appropriated science, from craniology to genetics, in order to present the group boundaries they had constructed as objectively grounded in natural laws. In Europe, China, and many other parts of the globe, negative attitudes about the physical appearance of individuals or population groups can be found before modernity, but these attitudes rarely formed a coherent system which could provide legitimacy to social inclusions or exclusions. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3303

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes premodern prejudice from systematic racial theory — racial science as episteme requires modern science to bind culture to biology.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that premodern negative attitudes ‘rarely formed a coherent system’ is a dense, well-trodden theoretical boundary — worth sitting with for its implications about what counts as racism and why science was a necessary condition.
• XREF: connects to: Immanuel Kant supplied the first scientific definition of race in 1775. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 264; The Enlightenment laid the basis for modern ideas of race