Scientific racism

Scientific racism is the use of the methods and authority of science to argue that some human groups, usually white Europeans, are naturally superior to others. Its roots lie in eighteenth-century efforts to classify human beings. Carl Linnaeus divided humanity into four geographic varieties and mixed physical traits with claims about temperament and customs, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach later named five varieties, while noting that they blended into one another without clear lines. In the nineteenth century, many writers turned these descriptive categories into ranked hierarchies, and the rankings were used to justify slavery and colonial rule.²³

The French diplomat and writer Arthur de Gobineau gave the idea one of its most influential forms in his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, published in 1853 to 1855. Gobineau argued that the great civilizations had all been created by white peoples, that a group he called the Aryans was the purest of them, and that mixing between races caused civilizations to decline. His ideas influenced the composer Richard Wagner and the writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose glorification of Germanic peoples was later taken up by Nazi race theory. In 1883 the English scientist Francis Galton coined the word 'eugenics', meaning 'good birth', for the project of improving a population by controlling who had children. Eugenics societies spread across the industrialized world in the early twentieth century, especially in the United States, Britain and Germany. About 30 American states passed laws under which at least 60,000 people were sterilized without their consent, and the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 used eugenic arguments to limit immigration.¹³⁴

Nazi Germany carried these ideas furthest. Its 1933 sterilization law led to the forced sterilization of about 400,000 people, and eugenic thinking underpinned a secret program that killed an estimated 250,000 disabled patients. After the Second World War, scientists moved decisively away from the field. UNESCO's 1950 statement 'The Race Question', drafted by leading anthropologists and sociologists, found no proof that human groups differ in innate intelligence or temperament and called race as popularly understood a social myth. Later genetic research confirmed that human variation does not fall into sharply bounded groups, and most scientists today regard biological race rankings as unsupported, though debates continue over how to describe human genetic diversity.³⁴⁵⁶