Racism shaped Western science, not the reverse

Evidence

Why such understanding had not persisted in European thought, Davis is at a loss to explain. Having come to the proposition that slavery had always been problematic to Western culture, Davis, like Jordan, resorted to mystery: “For reasons that can perhaps never be fully explained, it was the African’s colour of skin that became his defining characteristic, and aroused the deepest response in Europeans.” Davis in conforming to racial convention has inherited its tautology: racial distinctions are the basis of racial sensibilities. He would have been better served by a less presumptuous inquiry into the ideological traditions resident in Western history. Then he might have realized that after some centuries of racial indulgences the substratum of Western thought was unprepared for anything else. Even the shift in eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century Western thought from a basis of a religious and philosophical epistemology to that of modern science had made little difference. In point of fact, it had merely served to extend the terms and rationales for the fantasy of racial inferiority (for the Jews, Irish, Slavs, and Asians as well as for Blacks). Western scientific thought simply took its place as the latest formal grammar for the expression of a racial metaphysics to which its most natural response was acquiescence. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 408

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Robinson’s central methodological critique: historians like Davis treat racism as unexplainable mystery rather than the product of a Western ideological tradition saturated with racial metaphysics — science merely provided a new grammar for an old faith.
• XREF: Resonates with Robinson’s broader argument later in Black Marxism that even Marxism absorbed this racial metaphysics — connects to James Baldwin’s and Frantz Fanon’s critiques of European universalism. — connects to: Scientific racism framed lack of Western knowledge as grounds for extermination — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 265; An economist created the influential racial typology because professional anthropologists declined — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 921; Scientific racism followed from placing humans in the animal kingdom (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Robinson claims racial metaphysics predated modern science — worth pursuing what earlier sources (religious/theological) constituted that metastructure.