Racist policy drives successive new biological theories to justify it

Evidence

When the press conference ceased and the reporters broadcast their stories, the old racist saying that a human book can be judged by its cover should have ceased. The refrain of “White blood” and “Black diseases” should have ceased, and the segregationist chorus saying that human beings were created unequal, that played for five centuries, should have also ceased. Science did not start the singing, though, and science would not stop it. Segregationists had too many racist policies to hide, racial disparities to justify, scientific and political careers to maintain, and money to make. The racial progress of Clinton’s 99.9 percent announcement brought on the next segregationist theory: the 0.1 percent genetic difference between humans must be racial. First curse theory and then natural slave theory and then polygenesis and then Social Darwinism and now genes—segregationists had produced new ideas to justify the inequities of every era. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1178

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Kendi’s causal inversion thesis: each era’s inequities generate their own justifying ‘science’ — connects to the core reading purpose of placing arguments in the segregationist bucket. — connects to: Nativism’s ideological enemies got remade as biologically fixed racial ones — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1580
• QUESTION: Kendi claims science did not start the singing — a strong causal claim worth stress-testing against cases where ‘scientific’ ideas seem to precede policy (e.g. early polygenesis).