Respectable scientific pioneers, not just racists, furnished racism’s racial hierarchies

Evidence

What was left to racism was merely to postulate a systematic, and genetically reproduced distribution of such material attributes of human organism as bore responsibility for characterological, moral, aesthetic or political traits. Even this job, however, had already been done for them by respectable and justly respected pioneers of science, seldom if ever listed among the luminaries of racism. Observing sine ira et studio the reality as they found it, they could hardly miss the tangible, material, indubitably ‘objective’ superiority that the West enjoyed over the rest of the inhabited world. Thus the father of scientific taxonomy, Linnaeus, recorded the division between the residents of Europe and inhabitants of Africa with the same scrupulous precision as that which he applied while describing the difference between crustacea and fishes. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 199

Categorization

• XREF: This grounds the claim that Orientalism/racism built on ‘innocent’ scientific classification — connects to the epistemic construction of the Other. — connects to: Nineteenth-century scientific racism supplied latent Orientalism’s biological grounding; Early race scholars were often not deliberate racists; Respected scientists published absurd race-based claims during World War I (+10 more)

Related

• Early race scholars were often not deliberate racists (similarity 0.91)
• Respected scientists published absurd race-based claims during World War I (similarity 0.89)
• Scientific racism followed from placing humans in the animal kingdom (similarity 0.86)
• Racist science invented chromosomal genes for racial traits (similarity 0.83)
• Racial typing drew scientific legitimacy from downwards-directed species categories. (similarity 0.83)
• Early racial science ranked African women between humans and orangutans (similarity 0.82)
• Blumenbach joined cultural and physical traits while ranking Caucasians as the original human race. (similarity 0.82)
• Nineteenth-century scientific racism supplied latent Orientalism’s biological grounding (similarity 0.82)
• Modern scientific racism emerged out of Enlightenment taxonomy of human subspecies (similarity 0.81)
• Race-thinkers needed anthropology to classify Europeans into distinct hereditary types (similarity 0.81)
• Racism’s earliest statements came from anatomists claiming hierarchical human races (similarity 0.81)
• Racism in science operates at three distinct levels of practice (similarity 0.81)
• Moral and physiological traits were fused onto racialized types to ground genetic universal claims (similarity 0.80)
• Racial theory needed post-Enlightenment science to become a legitimation system (similarity 0.80)
• Race scholarship challenges the clean divide between modern science and ethnoscience (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Racist science invented chromosomal genes for racial traits #expands (0.85)
• Preexisting race-thinking gave racism a false veneer of respectability #contradicts (0.85)
• Racist science invented ‘racial-linked’ genes for cannibalism alongside sex-linked genes. #exemplifies (0.85) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 437
• Modern science extended, not ended, the fiction of racial inferiority. #corroborates (0.85)
• The Negro and whiteness were invented in Europe through scholarly effort #corroborates (0.80)