Scientific racism flowed from Europe to southern Africa to be tested in practice

Evidence

By the second half of the nineteenth century, though, what was becoming South Africa was more a political and cultural laboratory for elaborating modern racial understandings and orderings, not yet a laboratory to assess or really to “advance” claims of the day’s racial science. It would add the latter conceit later, only with the approach of the twentieth century. If travelers returning to Europe in this period brought back with them reinforcing stereotypes of black people, standard ideas of scientific racism tended to flow in the counter-direction, from Europe to southern Africa where they might be tried, placed into practice, and tested at least politically and in popular culture. The laboratory was already the generator and incubator of racial arrangement and state policy. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1429 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Robert Knox began his racial anatomies at the Cape before 1820, and Darwin’s cousin and the first to formulate eugenics, Francis Galton, spent two years at mid-century mapping the physical attributes and cultural habits of racial groups in Damaraland and Ovamboland (both now in Namibia). Their southern African scientific beginnings set the stage for later elaboration of their racial theories back in Britain. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1427 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racial science flowed from Europe to Africa for practical political testing — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1429; Southern Africa functioned as a colonial laboratory for early racial science — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1427; Racism creates races through practice, and the practice hides itself as its own evidence — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 322

Broader Connections

• Racial science flowed from Europe to Africa for practical political testing #corroborates (0.97) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1429
• Southern Africa functioned as a colonial laboratory for early racial science #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1427