Raciology, 1

The Wikipedia article on “scientific racism” has the input of Jews and white liberals, but substantially edited it contains relevant info:
 

Classical thinkers

Benjamin Isaac, in The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (2006), reports that scientific racism is rooted in Greco-Roman antiquity. A prime example is the 5th century BC treatise Airs, Waters, Places by Hippocrates, about which the Pseudo-Aristotle notes: “The idea that dark people are cowards, and light people courageous fighters, is found already in Airs, Waters, Places.”

A further example is the Roman writer, architect, and engineer Vitruvius (70-25 BC), who, relying upon the racial theories of the Greek Stoic polymath Posidonius (c. 135-51 BC), said:

…those races nearest to the southern half of the axis are of lower stature, with swarthy complexions, curly hair, black eyes, and little blood, on account of the sun. This poverty of blood makes them over-timid to stand up against the sword… On the other hand, men born in cold countries are, indeed, ready to meet the shock of arms with great courage and without timidity.

 
Enlightenment thinkers

Historian Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658-1722) divided the French as two races: the aristocratic “French race” descended from the invader Germanic Franks, and the indigenous Gallo-Roman race (the political Third Estate populace). The Frankish aristocracy dominated the Gauls by innate right of conquest, the contrary of modern nationalism. Despite supporting hagiographies and epic poetry, such as La Chanson de Roland, c. 12th century, he sought scientific legitimating by basing his racialist distinction on the historical existence of genetically and linguistically distinguished Germanic and Latin-speaking peoples in France.

Voltaire found biblical monogenism laughable, as he expressed:

It is a serious question among them whether the Africans are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence.

The Scottish lawyer Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782) was a polygenist: he believed God had created different races on Earth in separate regions. In his 1734 book Sketches on the History of Man, Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.

Meanwhile, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), the Swedish physician, botanist, and zoologist, modified the established taxonomic bases of binomial nomenclature for fauna and flora, and was a pioneer researcher in biologically defining human race. In Systema Naturae (1767), he labeled several varieties of human species: the red Americanus, the Europeanus, the Asiaticus, the Africanus.

In 1775, Immanuel Kant published Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen, which proposed natural or purposive causes of variation, as opposed to mechanical law or a product of chance. He distinguished four fundamental races: whites, blacks, Kalmuck, and Hindustanic, and attributed the variation to differences in environment and climate, such as the air and sun, but clarified by saying that the variation served a purpose and was not purely superficial. Kant argued that “the yellow Indians have a meager talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.”

Charles White (1728-1813), an English physician and surgeon, tried to scientifically prove that human races have distinct origins from each other. He believed that whites and blacks were two different species. White was a believer in polygeny, the idea that different races had been created separately. His Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (1799) provided an empirical basis for this idea. White defended the theory of polygeny by refuting French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s interfertility argument, which said that only the same species can interbreed. White pointed to species hybrids such as foxes, wolves, and jackals, which were separate groups that were still able to interbreed.

Christoph Meiners (1747-1810) was a German polygenist and believed that each race had a separate origin. Meiners studied the physical, mental and moral characteristics of each race, and built a race hierarchy based on his findings. Meiners split mankind into two divisions, which he labelled the “beautiful white race” and the “ugly black race.” In Meiners’ book The Outline of History of Mankind, he said that a main characteristic of race is either beauty or ugliness. Meiners also claimed the “Americans” were an inferior stock of people and wrote that the noblest race was the Celts. They were able to conquer various parts of the world, they were more sensitive to heat and cold, and their delicacy is shown by the way they are selective about what they eat.

 
Post-Enlightenment thinkers

Racial studies by Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the French naturalist and zoologist, influenced scientific polygenism and scientific racism. Cuvier believed there were three distinct races: the Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow) and the Ethiopian (black). He rated each for the beauty or ugliness of the skull and quality of their civilizations. Cuvier wrote about Caucasians: “The white race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilized people of Europe belong and which appear to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, courage and activity.” Regarding blacks Cuvier wrote:

The Negro race… is marked by black complexion, crisped or woolly hair, compressed cranium and a flat nose. The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism.

One of Cuvier’s pupils, Friedrich Tiedemann, was one of the first to make a scientific contestation of racism. He argued based on craniometric and brain measurements taken by him from Europeans and black people from different parts of the world that blacks have smaller brains, and are thus intellectually inferior.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) attributed civilizational primacy to the white races, who gained sensitivity and intelligence via the refinement caused by living in the rigorous Northern climate:

The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste, or race, is fairer in color than the rest, and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins, the Inca, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention, because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers, and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want, and misery, which, in their many forms, were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature, and out of it all came their high civilization.

Franz Ignaz Pruner (1808-1882) was a medical doctor who studied the racial structure of blacks in Egypt. In a book which he wrote in 1846 he claimed that Negro blood had a negative influence on the Egyptian moral character. He published a monograph on blacks in 1861, where he said that the main feature of the Negro’s skeleton is prognathism, which he claimed was the Negro’s relation to the ape.

Raciology, 2

Racial theories in physical anthropology, 1850-1918

The scientific classification established by Carl Linnaeus is requisite to any human racial classification scheme. In the 19th century, unilineal evolution (a.k.a. classical social evolution) was a conflation of competing sociologic and anthropologic theories proposing that Western European culture was the acme of human socio-cultural evolution.

The proposal that social status is unilineal—from primitive to civilized, from agricultural to industrial—became popular among philosophers, including Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant and Auguste Comte. The Christian Bible was interpreted to sanction slavery and from the 1820s to the 1850s was often used in the antebellum Southern United States, by writers such as the Rev. Richard Furman and Thomas R. Cobb, to enforce the idea that Negroes had been created inferior, and thus suited to slavery.

 
Charles Darwin

Darwin’s influential 1859 book On the Origin of Species did not discuss human origins. The extended wording on the title page, which adds By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, uses the general term “races” as an alternative for “varieties” and does not carry the modern connotation of human races. The first use in the book refers to “the several races, for instance, of the cabbage” and proceeds to a discussion of “the hereditary varieties or races of our domestic animals and plants.”

In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Darwin examined the question of “Arguments in favour of, and opposed to, ranking the so-called races of man as distinct species.” In Richard Weikart’s 2004 book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany he wrote:

Darwin clearly believed that the struggle for existence among humans would result in racial extermination. In Descent of Man he asserted, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

The quoted passage, in full context, reads:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. (The Descent of Man, 1871, Volume I, Chapter VI: “On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man,” pages 200-201).

Darwin contrasted the “civilized races” with the “savage races.” Like most of his contemporaries, except the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, he did not distinguish “biological race” from “cultural race.” Moreover, he noted that savage races risked extinction more from white European colonialism, than from evolutionary inadequacy. On the question of differences between races, Darwin wrote:

There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other—as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of structural difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatisation, and in liability to certain diseases.

Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual, faculties. Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the light-hearted, talkative negroes. There is a nearly similar contrast between the Malays and the Papuans, who live under the same physical conditions, and are separated from each other only by a narrow space of sea.

In An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-55), Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), a French aristocrat and writer, proposed three human races and claimed that miscegenation would lead to the collapse of civilization. He established the equation of the terms “Germanic race” and “Aryan race.”

Raciology, 3

At the 19th century’s end, scientific racism conflated Græco-Roman eugenicism with Francis Galton’s concept of voluntary eugenics to produce a form of coercive, anti-immigrant government programs influenced by other socio-political discourses and events. Such institutional racism was effected via craniometric skull and skeleton studies; thus skulls and skeletons of black people and other colored volk were displayed between apes and white men. In 1906, Ota Benga, a Pygmy, was displayed as the “Missing Link”, in the Bronx Zoo, New York City, alongside apes and animals.

The most influential theorists included the anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936) who proposed “anthropo-sociology”; and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who applied “race” to nationalist theory, thereby developing the first conception of ethnic nationalism.

The Dutch scholar Pieter Camper (1722-89), an early craniometric theoretician, used “craniometry”—interior skull-volume measurement—to scientifically justify racial differences. In 1770, he conceived of the facial angle to measure intelligence among species of men. The facial angle was formed by drawing two lines: a horizontal line from nostril to ear; and a vertical line from the upper-jawbone prominence to the forehead prominence.

Camper’s craniometry reported that antique statues (the Græco-Roman ideal) had a 90-degree facial angle, whites an 80-degree angle, blacks a 70-degree angle, and the orangutan a 58-degree facial angle—thus he established a racist biological hierarchy for mankind, per the decadent conception of history. Such scientific racist researches were continued by the naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844) and the anthropologist Paul Broca (1824-80).

In the 19th century, an early American physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), collected human skulls from worldwide, and attempted a logical classification scheme. Influenced by contemporary racialist theory, Dr Morton said he could judge racial intellectual capacity by measuring the interior cranial capacity, hence a large skull denoted a large brain, thus high intellectual capacity. Conversely, a small skull denoted a small brain, thus low intellectual capacity; superior and inferior established. After inspecting three mummies from ancient Egyptian catacombs, Morton concluded that Caucasians and Negroes were already distinct three thousand years ago.

In Morton’s Crania Americana, based on craniometric data, he reported that the Caucasians had the biggest brains, averaging 87 cubic inches, Native Americans were in the middle with an average of 82 cubic inches and Negroes had the smallest brains with an average of 78 cubic inches.

In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), the historian of science Stephen Jay Gould argued that Samuel Morton had falsified the craniometric data, perhaps inadvertently over-packing some skulls, to so produce results that would legitimize the racist presumptions he was attempting to prove. A subsequent study by the anthropologist John Michael found Morton’s original data to be more accurate than Gould describes, concluding that “contrary to Gould’s interpretation… Morton’s research was conducted with integrity”. Jason Lewis and colleagues reached similar conclusions as Michael in their reanalysis of Morton’s skull collection.

In 1873, Paul Broca, founder of the Anthropological Society of Paris (1859), found the same pattern of measures—that Crania Americana reported—by weighing specimen brains at autopsy. Other historical studies, proposing a black race / white race, intelligence / brain size difference, include those by Bean, Mall, Pearl, and Vint.

One of the first typologies used to classify various human races was invented by Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936), a theoretician of eugenics, who published in 1899 L’Aryen et son rôle social. In this book, he classified humanity into various, hierarchized races, spanning from the “Aryan white race, dolichocephalic”, to the “brachycephalic”, “mediocre and inert” race, best represented by the Jew.

Vacher de Lapouge’s classification was mirrored in William Z. Ripley in The Races of Europe (1899), a book which had a large influence on American white supremacism. Ripley even made a map of Europe according to the alleged cephalic index of its inhabitants. He was an important influence of the American eugenist Madison Grant.

After the War of the Pacific there was a rise of racial and national superiority ideas among the Chilean ruling class. In his 1918 book physician Nicolás Palacios argued for the existence of Chilean race and its superiority when compared to neighboring peoples. He thought Chileans were a mix of two martial races: the indigenous Mapuches and the Visigoths of Spain, who where ultimately from Götaland in Sweden. Palacios argued on medical grounds against immigration to Chile from southern Europe claiming that mestizos who are of south European stock lack “cerebral control” and are a social burden.

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Eugenics

Joseph Deniker’s contribution to racist theory was La Race nordique, a generic, racial-stock descriptor, which the American eugenicist Madison Grant (1865-1937) presented as the white racial engine of world civilisation. Having adopted Ripley’s three-race European populace model, but disliking the “Teuton” race name, he transliterated la race nordique into “The Nordic race,” the acme of the concocted racial hierarchy, based upon his racial classification theory, popular in the 1910s and 1920s.

Statens institut för rasbiologi and its director Herman Lundborg in Sweden were active in racist research. Furthermore, much of early research on Ural-Altaic languages was coloured by attempts at justifying the view that European peoples east of Sweden were Asian and thus of inferior race, justifying colonialism, eugenics and racial hygiene.

In the United States, scientific racism justified African slavery to assuage moral opposition to the Atlantic slave trade. Alexander Thomas and Samuell Sillen described black men as uniquely fitted for bondage, because of their “primitive psychological organisation.”

At the time of the American Civil War (1861-65), the matter of miscegenation prompted studies of ostensible physiological differences between Caucasians and Negroes.Early anthropologists, such as Josiah Clark Nott, George Robins Gliddon, Robert Knox and Samuel George Morton aimed to scientifically prove that Negroes were a human species different from the white people species; that the rulers of Ancient Egypt were not African; and that mixed-race offspring (the product of miscegenation) tended to physical weakness.

After the Civil War, Southern (Confederacy) physicians wrote textbooks of scientific racism based upon studies claiming that black freemen (ex-slaves) were becoming extinct, because they were inadequate to the demands of being a free man—implying that black people benefited from enslavement.

In South Africa white scientists, like Dudly Kidd, who published The essential Kafir in 1904, sought to “understand the African mind.” They believed that the cultural differences between whites and blacks in South Africa might be caused by physiological differences in the brain. Rather than suggesting that Africans were “overgrown children,” as early white explorers had, Kidd believed that Africans were “misgrown with a vengeance.” He described Africans as at once “hopelessly deficient,” yet “very shrewd.”

Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) was “the most influential tract of American scientific racism.” In the 1920s-30s, the German racial hygiene movement embraced Grant’s Nordic theory. Alfred Ploetz (1860-1940) coined the term Rassenhygiene in Racial Hygiene Basics (1895), and founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1905. The movement advocated selective breeding, compulsory sterilisation, and a close alignment of public health with eugenics.

Racial hygiene was historically tied to traditional notions of public health, but with emphasis on heredity—what philosopher and historian Michel Foucault has called state racism.

In 1869, Francis Galton (1822-1911) proposed the first social measures meant to preserve or enhance biological characteristics, and later coined the term “eugenics.”

Galton, a statistician, introduced correlation and regression analysis and discovered regression toward the mean. He was also the first to study human differences and inheritance of intelligence with statistical methods. He introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys to collect data on population sets, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for anthropometric studies. Galton also founded psychometrics, the science of measuring mental faculties, and differential psychology, a branch of psychology concerned with psychological differences between people rather than common traits.

In 1901 Galton, Karl Pearson (1857-1936) and Walter F. R. Weldon (1860-1906) founded the Biometrika scientific journal, which promoted biometrics and statistical analysis of heredity.

Charles Davenport (1866-1944) was briefly involved in the review. In Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929), he made statistical arguments that biological and cultural degradation followed white and black interbreeding. Davenport was connected to Nazi Germany before and during World War II. In 1939 he wrote a contribution to the Festschrift for Otto Reche (1879-1966), who became an important figure within the plan to remove populations considered inferior from eastern Germany.

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Raciology studies continued through the early 20th century, and soon intelligence testing became a new source for racial comparisons. Before the Second World War scientific racism remained common to anthropology, and was used as justification for eugenics programs, compulsory sterilisation, anti-miscegenation laws, and immigration restrictions in Europe and the United States. After the war the anti-white propaganda by the treasonous US and UK discredited scientific racism in academia, but racist legislation based upon it remained in some countries until the 1960s.

Before the 1920s, social scientists agreed that whites were superior to blacks, but they needed a way to prove this in order to back social policy in favour of whites. They felt the best way to gauge this was through testing intelligence.

The Swedish Institute for Racial Biology, founded 1922, was the world’s first government-funded institute performing research into racial biology. It was housed in what is now the Dean’s House at Uppsala. Following the creation of the first society for the promotion of racial hygiene, the German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1905, a Swedish society was founded in 1909 as Svenska Sällskapet för Rashygien as third in the world.

By lobbying Swedish parliamentarians and medical institutes the society managed to pass a decree creating a government-run institute of racial biology in 1921. By 1922 the institute was built and opened at Uppsala University. It was the first such government-funded institute in the world performing research into “racial biology.”

As a result of the institute’s work a law permitting compulsory sterilisation of certain groups was enacted in Sweden in 1934. In the decade after the Hellstorm Holocaust committed by the Allied forces on the Germans, the Swedes inverted their values and the institute closed down.

Raciology, 6

In the late 19th century, the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) United States Supreme Court decision upheld the constitutional legality of racial segregation under the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

Eugenicists such as Harry H. Laughlin and Madison Grant sought to scientifically prove the physical and mental inadequacy of certain ethnic groups to justify compulsory sterilisation and restrict immigration, per the Immigration Act of 1924.

Lothrop Stoddard published many racialist books on what he saw as the peril of immigration, his most famous being The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy in 1920. In this book he presented a view of the world situation pertaining to race focusing concern on the coming population explosion among the coloured peoples of the world and the way in which white world-supremacy was being lessened in the wake of World War I and the collapse of colonialism.

Stoddard’s analysis divided world politics and situations into “white,” “yellow,” “black,” “Amerindian,” and “brown” peoples and their interactions. He argued that race and heredity were the guiding factors of history and civilisation, and that the elimination or absorption of the white race by coloured races would result in the destruction of Western civilisation.

Like Madison Grant, Stoddard divided the white race into three main divisions: Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. He considered all three to be of good stock, and far above the quality of the coloured races, but argued that the Nordic was the greatest of the three and needed to be preserved by way of eugenics. Unlike Grant, Stoddard was less concerned with which varieties of European people were superior to others (nordicism), but was more concerned with what he called “bi-racialism,” seeing the world as being composed of simply coloured and white races.

In the years after the Great Migration and World War I, Grant’s racial theory would fall out of favour in the U.S. for a model closer to Stoddard’s. An influential publication was The Races of Europe (1939) by Carleton S. Coon, president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists from 1930 to 1961. Coon was a proponent of multiregional origin of modern humans and divided Homo sapiens into five main races.
 
Racial policy of Nazi Germany

The Nazi Party and its sympathizers published many books on scientific racism, seizing on the eugenicist ideas with which they were widely associated, although these ideas had been in circulation since the 19th century. Books such as Rassenkunde des Deutschen Volkes (“Ethnology of the German People”) by Hans F. K. Günther and Rasse und Seele (“Race and Soul”) by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss attempted to scientifically identify differences between the German, Nordic, or Aryan people and inferior groups. German schools used these books as texts during the Nazi era.

In the early 1930s, the Nazis used racialised scientific rhetoric based on social Darwinism to push their eugenic social policies. During the Second World War, raciology studies became anathema in the United States, and Boasians such as Ruth Benedict consolidated their institutional power.

After the war, the malicious propaganda by the Allied forces led most of the scientific community to repudiate the scientific support for racism.

Raciology, 7

After 1945

In April 1966, Alex Haley interviewed American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell for Playboy. Rockwell justified his belief that blacks were inferior to whites by citing a study by G.O. Ferguson showing that the intellectual performance of black students was correlated with their percentage of white ancestry, stating “pure negroes, negroes three-fourths, mulattoes and quadroons have, roughly, 60, 70, 80 and 90 percent, respectively, of white intellectual efficiency.” Playboy published the interview but botched it with a pseudoscientific editorial note. The next year Rockwell was assassinated.

Today, the term “scientific racism” is used to refer to Raciology: research seeming to scientifically justify racist ideology. The accusation of scientific racism often is cast upon the raciologists that discovered quantifiable differences in intelligence among the races, especially if said differences are partly genetic in origin.

Post WW2 researchers include Arthur Jensen (1923-2012), Philippe Rushton (1943-2012), Chris Brand (1943-2017), Richard Lynn (1930-); and also Charles Alan Murray (1943-) and Richard Herrnstein (1930-1994), the authors of The Bell Curve, among others. These authors, while seeing their work as scientific, may dispute the term “racism” and may prefer terms such as “race realism” or “racialism”.

Presently Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance is internet’s premier race-realist site.