Scientific racism is the use of purportedly scientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify the belief in racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority, or alternatively the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races.[1][2][3] According to the United Nations convention, superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous, and there is no justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in practice, anywhere.[4]
As a category of theory, scientific racism employs anthropology (notably physical anthropology), anthropometry, craniometry, and other disciplines, in proposing anthropologic typologies supporting the classification of human populations into physically discrete human races that are asserted to be superior or inferior. Scientific racism was common during the New Imperialism period (c. 1880s – 1914) where it was used in justifying White European imperialism, and in it culminated in the period from 1920 to the end of World War 2 when it was finally considered discredited. Since the later 20th century, scientific racism has been criticized as obsolete and as historically used to support or validate racist world-views, based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.[5]
After the end of the Second World War (1939–45) and the occurrence of the Holocaust, scientific racism in theory and action was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO‘s antiracist statement “The Race Question” (1950): “The biological fact of race and the myth of ‘race’ should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of ‘race’ has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering.”[6] Today, scientific racism is often characterized as a pseudoscience.[2][3]
The term scientific racism is pejorative as applied to modern theories, as in The Bell Curve (1994), which investigated racial differences in IQ, concluding that genetics explained at least part of the IQ differences between races. Critics argue that such works are motivated by racist presumptions unsupported by available evidence. Publications such as the Mankind Quarterly, founded as an explicitly “race-conscious” publication, have been accused of scientific racism for publishing articles on controversial interpretations of human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, language, mythology, archaeology, and race subjects.[7] The pejorative label, “scientific racism”, criticizes studies claiming to establish a connection between, for example, race and intelligence, and argues that this promotes the idea of “superior” and “inferior” human races…[8]
Today, the term “scientific racism” is used to refer to research seeming to scientifically justify racist ideology. The accusation of scientific racism often is cast upon researchers claiming the existence of quantifiable differences in intelligence among the human races, especially if said differences are partly genetic in origin. Contemporary researchers include Arthur Jensen (The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability); J. Philippe Rushton, president of the Pioneer Fund (Race, Evolution, and Behavior); Chris Brand (The g Factor: General Intelligence and Its Implications); Richard Lynn (IQ and the Wealth of Nations); Charles Murray; and Richard Herrnstein (The Bell Curve), among others.[98] These authors themselves, while seeing their work as scientific, may dispute the term “racism” and may prefer terms such as “race realism” or “racialism“.
