Scientific racism required moving humans out of biblical divine-child status

Evidence

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. Indeed, during much of the nineteenth century, one of the most persistent projects for which Western science was employed was the attempt to demonstrate what was already understood to be the natural order of the races. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 408 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Racialization of religion not only reinforces the privileging of Protestantism (later expanded to Judeo-Christian) in American society but also bolsters White dominance. Over time, religious justifications have been conflated with purported scientific theories of race to justify conquest and subordination of those deemed inferior. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 179 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Race also dominates American social structures. Christian arguments morally justified the US government’s subjugation of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans. In conjunction with pseudoscientific theories of eugenics and phrenology, Christian theology supported claims that Africans, … Native Americans, and Asians were uncivilized, barbaric, and unfit for selfgovernance. That a sizable number of enslaved Africans were Muslims only confirmed Whites’ beliefs in their inferiority. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 173 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Modern scientific racism emerged out of Enlightenment taxonomy of human subspecies; Scientific racism followed from placing humans in the animal kingdom; Modern scientific racism displaced religion from the race concept. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 156 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern Western science merely updated older religious rationales for racial hierarchy #complicates (0.76) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 408
• Religious justifications merged with scientific racism to justify conquest. #complicates (0.75) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 179
• Christian theology and pseudoscience jointly justified racial subjugation #complicates (0.74) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 173