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Lore & Background

Scientific racism misapplies, misconstrues, or distorts anthropology (notably physical anthropology), craniometry, evolutionary biology, and other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines through proposing anthropological typologies to classify human populations into physically discrete human races, some of which are then typically asserted to be superior or inferior to others. During the 20th century, anthropologist Franz Boas and biologists Julian Huxley and Lancelot Hogben were among the earliest leading critics of scientific racism. Skepticism towards the validity of scientific racism grew during the interwar period, and by the end of World War II, scientific racism in theory and action was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO's early antiracist statement, 'The Race Question' (1950): 'The biological fact of race and the myth of "race" should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes, "race" is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of "race" has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering.' Since that time, developments in human evolutionary genetics and physical anthropology have led to a new consensus among anthropologists that human races are a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one.

In Their Own Story

The term scientific racism was popularized by Stephen Jay Gould who used it in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man to describe the historical role of science in propagating the ideal of white racial superiority. Today, the term is generally used pejoratively when applied to more modern theories, such as those in The Bell Curve (1994). Critics argue that such works postulate racist conclusions, such as a genetic connection between race and intelligence, that are unsupported by available evidence. Publications such as the Mankind Quarterly, founded explicitly as a 'race-conscious' journal, are generally regarded as platforms of scientific racism because they publish fringe interpretations of human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, language, mythology, archaeology, and race.

Reader's Guide

Scientific racism was common during the period from the 1600s to the end of World War II, and was particularly prominent in European and American academic writings from the mid-19th century through the early-20th century. Since the second half of the 20th century, scientific racism has been discredited and criticized as obsolete and actively harmful, yet has persistently been used to support or validate racist world-views based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. During the Age of Enlightenment (an era from the 1650s to the 1780s), concepts of monogenism and polygenism became popular, though they would only be systematized epistemologically during the 19th century. Monogenism contends that all races have a single origin, while polygenism is the idea that each race has a separate origin. Until the 18th century, the words 'race' and 'species' were interchangeable.

Did You Know?

• François Bernier (1620–1688) published a brief essay in 1684 dividing humanity into what he called 'races', distinguishing individuals by skin color and a few other physical traits.
• Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) labeled five 'varieties' of human species in the twelfth edition of Systema Naturae (1767), each described with physiognomic characteristics 'varying by culture and place'.
• Robert Boyle (1627–1691) believed in monogenism, that all races came from Adam and Eve, and studied reported stories of parents giving birth to differently coloured albinos.
• The Scottish lawyer Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) was a polygenist who believed God had created different races on Earth in separate regions.
• UNESCO's early antiracist statement 'The Race Question' (1950) formally denounced scientific racism, stating: 'The myth of "race" has created an enormous amount of human and social damage.'