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Scientific Racism (Evolution #3)
Lea and Sophia continue their evolution series, this time talking about Scientific Racism.
!!! WARNING!!! This episode will discuss how the theory of evolution has been used to commit cultural, structural, and direct violence against people of color. !!! WARNING!!!
Sources:
- https://thegreatlakeseye.com/post?s=The–Hamitic–Myth—–A–theological–anthropology–that–contributed–to–the–1994–Genocide–against–the–Tutsi_701
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18239065/
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/1746562?searchText=stephen+jay+gould&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dstephen%2Bjay%2Bgould%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fspellcheck_basic_search%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A288d52e801ebc8a32ce35e8cbb8c25f8&seq=1
- https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Scientific-Racism
- https://perspectives.americananthro.org/Chapters/Race_and_Ethnicity.pdf
Transcript:
Sophia: Hello friends and welcome back to Anthro mp3. We’re students from UMass who love anthropology. Anthro Hub is a website we help run that’s full of all things anthro. Make sure to check it out and look at some incredible blog posts and creative works made by students from our school and others. My name is Sophia and I’ll be one of your hosts for today’s episode.
Lea: And I’m Lea.
Sophia: So we’ve been your host so far for the Evolution series, the previous two episodes, Feeling Finchy: Darwin and the Origins of Evolution and Monkey and Ape Business: an Introduction to primatology cover the basics of the theory of evolution, some of the science behind it, as well as the history.
Sophia: So if you’re interested in learning the basics, we suggest going back and listening to those episodes. Our next episode, we’ll cover the evolution of mankind, but before we get to that, we need to address how evolution, primarily with regards to how the human race evolved, has been used as a tool of racism and imperialism. Which brings us to today’s topic, scientific racism.
Lea: And before we get into it, we wanna go ahead and acknowledge that this is a really heavy topic. We’re gonna be talking about how the theory of evolution has been used to commit cultural, structural, and direct violence against people of color, which has the potential to be very distressing, especially to those who have been impacted by it.
Lea: To anyone who feels that the subject matter might cause distress, we encourage you to click away now and listen to one of our other episodes.
Sophia: And a trigger warning is only as effective as you take it. So please take your mental health seriously.
Lea: And with that said, let’s get into today’s episode.
Sophia: Yes. So evolution, which we’ve talked about for several episodes, is fundamental to our understanding of the world and ourselves. It has opened so many doors for new lines of inquiry and discovery, but it has also been a central tool of scientific racism and has originated and perpetuated harm against billions of people basically, since its inception.
Lea: Can you define scientific racism, please?
Sophia: Yes. Scientific racism is racist, pseudoscience. It is the belief that our potential is determined by our race, and furthermore, that we can be rated by this classification.
Lea: And to be clear here, that’s not true. Race is a social construct that has biological implications, meaning that the way we treat people based on the perception of them, has a real and observable impact on outcomes.
Lea: The American Anthropological Association has denounced the use of the word race in any other terms. More accepted terminology when referring to superficial genetic variation, like in skin color or hair texture is ethnic cline. We do see melanin levels change across ancestral groups, typically related to the environment that our ancestors occupied. Towards the poles of the earth, pale skin helps individuals absorb vitamin D in places where there’s less sunlight. In equatorial regions, darker skin protects individuals from too much sun exposure. If we were to take two people, one whose ancestors lived near the equator and one whose ancestors lived near to the poles, on the surface, they might look very different.
Lea: However, discounting the fact that peoples have moved over time and we don’t occupy the same regions our forefathers did. If we were to travel by foot from the equator to the North Pole, the superficial changes we would see in the people we come across would change gradually along the way.
Lea: And you can think about it this way as well, how many white people by contemporary US classification have the same complexion? More Northern European ancestors would have white pale skin, whereas someone whose ancestors are from Southern Europe might be more tan, accounting for the increased sun exposure. There’s immense variation in superficial genes across Europe, and yet because of the cultural biases that we have developed over centuries. We lump people into groups based on what reinforces the existing power structure.
Sophia: Exactly. And obviously this didn’t originate with the theory of evolution. Ibram X. Kendi and his 2016 book “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” gives a really succinct explanation of this.
Sophia: Early race-based classifications date back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle said that those from extreme environments, hot or cold, were intellectually inferior to those from more temperate regions. This climate theory was popular around the same time that travelers like Ibn Battuta were charting across the known world to bring back accounts of the things and people they came across.
Sophia: Meanwhile, a Christian doctrine of racism was beginning to take form called hamitic theory. Ham was one of the sons of Noah, the guy with the boat and he disrespected God by having children on the arc when he wasn’t supposed to. Supposedly, God cursed these children, and according to some theologians, this was the origin of black people. The justification for racism became more popular as transatlantic slave trade became more lucrative. Many enslavers perpetuated the belief that they were either helping the cursed descendants of ham, or at the very least acting on God’s will towards them.
Lea: Well, of course they would say that.
Sophia: Yeah, and although there were some groups of people that were opposed to what was going on, they were not able to generate enough support to counteract the wealth and influence of those benefiting from enslavement.
Sophia: That is the central point that Kendi makes throughout, stamped from the beginning. That racism did not originate with ignorance, but actually is the result of material, greed, colonizers, and enslavers, desired resources, goods, land and labor, and invented reasons for taking it. And these were absorbed by the common people who even though they didn’t benefit from the active enslavement, benefited from the proximity racism gave them to power the quote unquote 1% of the time to use modern jargon made impoverished and oppressed majority feel slightly more aligned with themselves based on their whiteness than to people of color, whose material conditions they were actually more similar to. I saw a quote the other day that kind of reminds me of this, which went something like, you are much closer to needing food stamps than you are to being a billionaire, which is referring to people who vote for candidates that approve tax cuts for billionaires while slashing budgets for social support.
Sophia: Although the circumstances are different, the same logic still applies. People associate themselves with other people who have power based on superficial similarity, like the color of their skin, despite the gaping difference of wealth and privilege that exists between them. This system gives them access to power in this way, but by holding onto it, they lose the ability to work with people who they actually have more in common with. And it is immensely beneficial to people in power to intensify these divisions. They dispense a fractional amount of their power to their invented in-groups, which encourages common people to do the work of monitoring other more oppressed groups and keeping them from challenging the power structure. And this is absolutely not to excuse or justify people who accepted these early racist ideologies, they too made a choice based on greed. They saw something they wanted power and hurt other people to obtain it.
Lea: Yeah, I mean, dare I say class consciousness. That’s a really good point. But, uh, where does the science come in?
Sophia: Yeah, sorry, it got a little sidetracked. So, biblical justifications for enslavement were the predominant racist ideology into the enlightenment when science supplanted religion as the way we understood the world. Carl Linneaus, a foundational member in the field of taxonomy who formalized the use of binomial nomenclature, which is using two names to describe a species, believed homo sapiens had subspecies. He divided the human race into Europa, specifically light haired and light eyed Europeans, Asiaticus, the yellow skinned, people with dark hair and dark eyes from Asia. Americanus, he described as having red skinned with long black hair, and Afer, people with black skin. In 1795, German physician and physical anthropologist, which is a subfield we now call biological anthropology, Johann Blumenbach argued that there were five races, Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malayan. He also insisted that their quality and potential as human beings was ranked in that order. Specifically, his theory was that the Caucasian people, those hailing from the caucus mountains in Europe were the original race, and that all others represented a degeneration from them.
Sophia: By the beginning of the 20th century, the three race system was the most commonly accepted subdividing humanity into caucasoid, white people of European descent, mongoloid, people of Asian descent, and negroid, people of African descent. And besides completely omitting entire groups of people, it was also based on science that was constructed around existing cultural biases.
Lea: Yeah, I actually was going to say, what about the whole continent? One of many that were, um, missing, Latin America, but exactly. The measures people took to prove that they were right were also immensely cruel. Take Sarah Bartman, an enslaved woman descendant from the Hottentot or Khoikhoi, in their native language, people of Southern Africa. She was born with Steatopygia, which is a normal polygenic trait that caused higher than average distribution of fat among the hips and buttocks that was more common among people of Khoikhoi descent. Her physique, which in itself was a genetic mutation that differentiated her, even among her own people, was taken to be proof of African people’s inferiority. She was paraded around Europe and called the Hottentot Venus, and eventually became a subject of study for people like Georges Cuvier, who also appears in other episodes of the series. Her skeleton, which wasn’t returned to her descendant communities until 2002, was found to be similar to that, a woman from other so-called races, but that didn’t matter. Georges Cuvier described her as closer to an ape than to man.
Sophia: That’s horrible.
Lea: Yeah, it is. And what’s worse is that Sarah’s memory is still disrespected by people who just think of her as the Hottentot Venus, which was a hypersexualized, dehumanizing label she was given by her enslavers.
Sophia: And this is all before even getting to Darwin.
Lea: Yeah. And we’re definitely gonna get to him, but first we’re gonna talk about Morton. Samuel George Morton was an American physician and naturalist who argued against Monogenism. And for Polygenism.
Sophia: What are mono and polygenism?
Lea: Monogenism is the belief that we all originate from the same place, whereas polygenism is the belief that we have come from different places. You mentioned Blumenbach a little earlier, and how he believed that all of the races were degenerates of Caucasians, which is Monogenist. That we all come from the same place, but we’re not equal, the Hamitic theory, was monogenicist as well. Polygenism is the belief that the different human races evolved separately and are basically different species. Polygenism did more explicitly draw the line between races, but Monogenism, as I mentioned, had the capacity to be just as harmful,
Sophia: and Morton was a polygenist.
Lea: Yeah, and the way that he liked to prove that was through phrenology or measuring skulls. He had a collection of over 600 skulls from people all over the world, and from the measurements he took, he claimed that he proved that the Caucasian people had the largest heads and were the most intelligent race. Anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould revisited these studies in the 80s and 90s and was actually able to disprove them. In his book, “The Mismeasure of Man”, he reexamined Morton’s collection and analyzed the data showing that there were not noticeable differences between the invented racial groups Morton was comparing. Moreover, he was actually able to show that Morton had fudged data in some places to prove his point, which goes to show how people who practice scientific racism are not practicing science at all, they’re just practicing racism.
Sophia: When does Darwin come in?
Lea: Well, okay. Yes. Now we get to Darwin. So the theory of evolution that we covered in episode one of our series, which you should check out if you wanna know more, basically states that all living creatures come from a common ancestor, and that everything has evolved over time in response to environmental pressures. So he got a lot of backlash for this, especially for his application of this theory to humans. But some people saw this as an opportunity.
Lea: Now Darwin himself never made this argument, but many use his work to argue that certain races were more evolved and therefore superior to others. English polymath, Herbert Spencer, coined the term “survival of the fittest” and believed that human behavior was inherited, and that superior traits made superior races, which of course was based on a Eurocentric standard of what was good or right.
Lea: Darwin’s own cousin, Sir Francis Galton was the first to use nature vs. nurture to describe traits that he believed were inheritable, like intelligence, and those that could be instilled, like a person’s demeanor. He also suggested that the government could selectively breed out unfavorable traits by preventing certain groups from reproducing, which is what we now call eugenics. That’s the area of social darwinism, where the theory of evolution was used to quote unquote, improve inferior races, or to justify their eradication.
Sophia: And these ideas have been the foundation of some of the most horrific acts of violence in human history. It was foundational to enslavement and has been an instigator of several acts of genocide. Adolf Hitler was famous for using race science to explain why whole ethnic and religious groups needed to be eradicated. And Hamitic theory, which we talked about earlier, was a major reason behind the Rwandan genocide.
Sophia: As students of anthropology at this point, we have to acknowledge how the history of our field has contributed to this. Early anthropologists intellectualized violence, ranked and ordered the human race, abused people of color directly and through their work, and have benefited from power dynamics inherent in racism, imperialism, and colonialism. And this is not to be a downer or to say that we should cancel or get rid of anthropology, obviously we wouldn’t be here if that were the case. However, I think we have a responsibility to understand where we came from as a discipline and to do better in the future. And a lot of anthropologists have been doing just that. We talked about Stephen Jay Gould earlier, and he actually said one of my favorite quotes that I’ve ever come across while studying anthropology, and it’s that “human equality is a contingent fact of human history”. Meaning that it wasn’t ever guaranteed that homo sapiens would be the only species from the genus homo to exist To this day, throughout most of our evolution, we shared this world with one or more other species from our genus, but for one reason or another, which are still the subject of debate, we are the only ones left. The directions of Earth’s natural history has determined that we are all homo sapiens and therefore all equals.
Lea: That’s so true. And I do just wanna add that if our natural history had gone differently and we shared the earth with other members of our genus, would we have intraspecies grouping like we have now? Would we essentially view homo sapiens as superior to Neanderthals, for example, or would we also define ourselves by our characteristics within our group, further promoting racism while also othering Neanderthals.
Sophia: Yeah, we can only speculate, but it’s an interesting point. And to end today’s episode, I want to charge listeners to think a little bit more about how we know what we know, where our knowledge came from, and what sociocultural dynamics informed how it was produced. Hopefully by doing so, we can continue producing better and more ethical anthropology.
Sophia: Thank you all for tuning into our show today. Another thanks to our team members and our collaborators with Anthro Hub, especially our tech crew to stay connected. You can find us on Instagram at anthro mp3, and you can also find our sources, transcripts of each episode, and more in our Anthro Hub show notes. I was one of your hosts today. Sophia joined by other host
Lea: Lea
Sophia: and our tech crew. If you enjoyed this episode, you’ll love our next one. Keep an eye out on our Instagram for future updates on shows, specials and events. Catch us next time and have a great day, friends!