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Reblogged by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
rebeccasear@fediscience.org ("Rebecca Sear") wrote:
Just read a paper published in 1961 titled "Scientific" racism again?, which describes how arguments about intelligence are misused to claim evidence for racial hierarchies. It ends with a quote from 1926.
"Scientific" racism has literally 👋been 👋debunked 👋for 👋a 👋century 👋
Attachments:
- INTRODUCTION "MIGHT MAKES RIGHT" has been, through the ages, suf- ficient justification for territorial conquest, economic exploitation, and the enslavement of some human groups by others. In time, however, "might makes right" ceased to be acceptable, and it was necessary for dominant groups to develop other arguments which would permit them, with a semblance of morality and even of justice, to continue their socio-economic con- trol of great regions of the world. If the people domi- nated could be shown to be physically and mentally in- ferior to the ruling group, their control by a "superior race" could be regarded as fitting and logical; hence the rise of "scientific" racism, devoted to collecting data from anthropology, biology, and psychology to support theories of "superior" and "inferior" races. (remote)
- To conclude, we quote some phrases of Hooton's which seem to apply with full force to Garrett and his associates of The Mankind Quarterly. The illustrious Harvard anthropologist wrote (1926: 81): Certain writers on racial subjects, usually not professional anthropologists, associate cultural and psychological charac- teristics with physical types on wholly insufficient evidence. These race propagandists commonly attribute to the physical subdivision of mankind to which they imagine that they themselves belong all or most of the superior qualities of mankind, physical, mental and moral. They talk of the psy- chological characteristics of this or that race as if they were objective tangible properties, scientifically demonstrated. Starting from an a priori assumption that physical types have psychological correlates, they attempt to refer every manifes- tation of the psychological qualities assumed to be the exclu- sive property of this or that race to the physical type in question. Great men of whatever period are claimed to be members of the favored race on the basis of their achievements and sometimes with a total disregard of physical criteria. In no case has any serious effort been made by such ethnomaniacs to isolate a pure racial type and to study either its mental qualities or its material culture. The fact that most if not all peoples are racially mixed is consistently ignored. While some of the conclusions of such writers may be correct, none (remote)
