Race - Eugenics, Social Darwinism, Colonialism

race

Table of Contents

Introduction
The many meanings of “race”
“Race” as a mechanism of social division
- North America
- South Africa
The difference between racism and ethnocentrism
The history of the idea of race
- The problem of labour in the New World
- The enslavement and racialization of Africans
- Human rights versus property rights
- Building the myth of Black inferiority
- Immigration and the racial worldview
- Legitimating the racial worldview
  - Enlightenment philosophers and systematists
  - Scientific classifications of race
  - The institutionalizing of race
  - Transforming “race” into “species”
  - The false assumptions of anthropometry
- The decline of “race” in science
  - The influence of Franz Boas
  - Mendelian heredity and the development of blood group systems
- “Race” and intelligence
Hereditarian ideology and European constructions of race
- Hereditary statuses versus the rise of individualism
- The Germanic myth and English constructions of an Anglo-Saxon past
- Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
- Galton and Spencer: The rise of social Darwinism
“Race” ideologies in Asia, Australia, Africa, and Latin America
- European conquest and the classification of the conquered
- India’s caste system
- Japan’s minority peoples
- Race in Asia
- Latin America
  - The colonial period
  - Postcolonial society
“Race” and the reality of human physical variation
Modern scientific explanations of human biological variation
The scientific debate over “race”

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The most important promoter of racial ideology in Europe during the mid-19th century was Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau, who had an almost incalculable effect on late 19th-century social theory. Published in 1853–55, his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races was widely read, embellished, and publicized by many different kinds of writers. He imported some of his arguments from the polygenists, especially the American Samuel Morton. Gobineau claimed that the civilizations established by the three major races of the world (white, Black, and yellow) were all products of the white races and that no civilization could emerge without their cooperation. ...(100 of 15129 words)

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