What Contribution Has Science made To the Development of Racism Essays

What Contribution Has Science made To the Development of Racism Essays What Contribution Has Science made To the Development of Racism Essay What Contribution Has Science made To the Development of Racism Essay At the time of writing this essay, the British press is full of stories concerning race within British party politics. Conservative MP John Townend made a statement in which he claimed that post war immigration was a threat to Britains homogeneous Anglo-Saxon culture and was threatening to turn us into a mongrel race. Conservative leader William Hague made him apologise for this, but interestingly enough did not expel him.There was public mud slinging regarding which politicians signed an anti-racist pledge, whilst in the same week, former Labour activist, Marc Wadsworth claimed that Britains African-Caribbean communities are losing out to increased Asian influence in the corridors of power and that they are not given the same opportunities as their Asian counterparts (The Voice, April 30th 2001). With the majority of politicians utilising racial rhetoric, it seems that ideas of race are still held by many. In this essay I will attempt to address the role scie nce has played in constructing notions of race and the consequent racism(s).There is little evidence to suggest that ideas of race were in circulation prior to the Reformation. Ivan Hannaford (1996) states that there were three distinct periods in which contributions were made to the development of notions of race. The first period occurred during the years 1684-1815, the era of the discovery of the New World and the ensuing triangular slave trade. Hannaford claims that in this period major writers dealt explicitly with race as an organising idea and came to understand it as an ethnic grouping rather than as a race and order or course of things or events (1996, p.187). In 1775, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach wrote The Natural Varieties of Man in which he classified modern humans into five broad categories; Caucasian, Mongoloid, Malayan, Ethiopian and American, based mainly on cranial measurements.The period of 1815-70 saw writers, influenced by Barthold Georg Neibuhr (1776-1831), using history and philosophy to evoke notions of blood/soil links. Writers such as Kant believed that temperament, character and soul were inherited through the blood. During this period we see the development of an ideology that the origins of nations and states are not political, but rather naturalised by linguistic and natural criteria. What burst upon the scene in 1842 and 1859 through the works of Spencer and Darwin was a movement that treaded political activity as subject to the same rules of evolution that applied to the natural biological world and thus provided a scientific basis for decrying all those aspects of the Greco-Roman polity and Christian civilisation that were out of step with modernity (Hannaford, 1996, p.p.275-6). Thus where, prior to the Enlightenment, religion had once explained inequalities amongst people(s), ideas of natural laws, evolution and the survival of the fittest replaced religious ideology.What was left to racism was merely to postulate a systematic, and genetically reproduced distribution of such material attributes of human organism as bore responsibility for characteroligical, moral, aesthetic or political traits. Even this job, however, had already been done for them by respectable and justly respected pioneers of science, seldom if ever listed among the luminaries of racism (Back Solomos, 2001, p.218). The fact that these pioneers of science were of European origin and how much this would have compromised their assumed objectivity cannot be overstated. The development of taxonomy, the science of naming or classifying organisms saw Linnaeus describe the differences between the inhabitants of northern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa in the same way as the differences between, say, dogs and cats. He described the former as inventive and orderly whilst the latter were described as lazy, devious and unable to govern themselves (Back ; Solomos, 2001, p.218).Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82) is regarded by many as the intellectua l founder of scientific racism. In his work Essay on the Inequalities of Human Races (1853-55), which drew heavily on Blumenbachs 1775 study, he put forward that human beings are divided into observable races and that those races are innately unequal. Using Linneus work as a template, according to Zygmunt Bauman, he did not have to exercise much inventiveness to describe the black race as of little intelligence, yet of overdeveloped sensuality and hence a crude, terrifying power (just as the mob on the loose), and the white race as in love with freedom, honour and everything spiritual (Back ; Solomos, 2001, p.218).Gobineau did not envisage social factors as deterministic in producing inequalities. He believed that the life chances of an individual were determined by inherited qualities and that these qualities were distributed unevenly amongst scientifically observable races. Gobineau believed that the white Aryan race was superior to others and that those others could not improve t hemselves through social organisation because they were programmed to be inferior.The publication of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species in 1859, lent support to Gobineaus work. Darwin studied the natural world and found that species evolved to meet the criterion of survival within their environment. Species that did not evolve became extinct. This became known as natural selection.The period of 1870-1914 mixed the ideas of Volk with development in the human sciences to become the main era of racialised thought and the development of scientific racism.