“Every modern era has had its science of race. Scientists were instrumental in inventing the concept of biological races, in specifying their demarcations, and in justifying the social inequities between them. Scientists created the classification systems that placed human beings in distinct racial categories. Scientists elaborated the philosophies that explained why human races differ. Scientists made race seem like a natural condition they had discovered about human beings rather than a system of governance imposed on human beings. As Harvard science historian Evelynn Hammonds observed, “The appeal of a story that links race to medical and scientific progress is in the way in which it naturalizes the social order in a racially stratified society such as ours." Science is the most effective tool for giving claims about human difference the stamp of legitimacy. And once scientists were committed to understanding human beings as divided into races, they believed that human biology could not be studied without attention to race.
It would be a mistake to think of this work as confined to “scientific racism." The term implies an exceptional use of science to support racist ideas. Calling it scientific racism identifies the problem as scientists’ corrupt misuse of race rather than their support of race itself. By rejecting only specific instances of extreme scientific abuse, scientists proceed to reinforce race in novel ways that are supposedly free of past biases. When the worst abuses of racial science are revealed, the next generation of scientists disavows the “scientific racism" of its predecessors or conveniently forgets that scientists used to think that way at all. Many people, for example, point to the Nazis’ eugenicist theories as the prime example of scientific racism. Seeing scientific racism as restricted to extreme cases like Nazi genocide mirrors the view of racism in general as an extremist position that falls outside of enlightened Western thinking …
There is a similar problem with calling the racial science of prior eras pseudoscience. In hindsight, we see the flaws in bizarre means of measuring racial difference, such as craniometry, which anatomists used a century ago to determine intelligence by calculating skull volume, and brand these methods a ridiculous pretense at the scientific method. Scientists today can then claim that it was pseudoscience that fell victim to racial prejudice, not real science, which studies racial difference objectively. But what we call racial pseudoscience today was considered the vanguard of scientific progress at the time it was practiced, and those who practiced it were admired by the scientific community and the public as pioneering geniuses. Could it be that our grandchildren will brand as pseudoscience today’s racial classifications generated by computerized genome scans?”
- Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (via thecurvature)
It would be a mistake to think of this work as confined to “scientific racism." The term implies an exceptional use of science to support racist ideas. Calling it scientific racism identifies the problem as scientists’ corrupt misuse of race rather than their support of race itself. By rejecting only specific instances of extreme scientific abuse, scientists proceed to reinforce race in novel ways that are supposedly free of past biases. When the worst abuses of racial science are revealed, the next generation of scientists disavows the “scientific racism" of its predecessors or conveniently forgets that scientists used to think that way at all. Many people, for example, point to the Nazis’ eugenicist theories as the prime example of scientific racism. Seeing scientific racism as restricted to extreme cases like Nazi genocide mirrors the view of racism in general as an extremist position that falls outside of enlightened Western thinking …
There is a similar problem with calling the racial science of prior eras pseudoscience. In hindsight, we see the flaws in bizarre means of measuring racial difference, such as craniometry, which anatomists used a century ago to determine intelligence by calculating skull volume, and brand these methods a ridiculous pretense at the scientific method. Scientists today can then claim that it was pseudoscience that fell victim to racial prejudice, not real science, which studies racial difference objectively. But what we call racial pseudoscience today was considered the vanguard of scientific progress at the time it was practiced, and those who practiced it were admired by the scientific community and the public as pioneering geniuses. Could it be that our grandchildren will brand as pseudoscience today’s racial classifications generated by computerized genome scans?”
- Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (via thecurvature)