The Retreat of Scientific Racism
Title | The Retreat of Scientific Racism PDF eBook |
Author | Elazar Barkan |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 400 |
Release | 1992 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780521458757 |
This fascinating study in the sociology of knowledge documents the refutation of scientific foundations for racism in Britain and the United States between the two World Wars, when racial differences were no longer attributed to cultural factors. Professor Barkan considers the social significance of this transformation, particularly its effect on race relations in the modern world. Discussing the work of the leading biologists and anthropologists who wrote between the wars, he argues that the impetus for the shift in ideologies came from the inclusion of outsiders (women, Jews, and leftists) who infused greater egalitarianism into scientific discourse. But even though the emerging view of race was constrained by a scientific language, he shows that modern theorists were as much influenced by social and political events as were their predecessors.
Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa
Title | Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa PDF eBook |
Author | Saul Dubow |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 340 |
Release | 1995-06-30 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780521479073 |
A study of the history of intellectual and scientific racism in modern South Africa.
Superior
Title | Superior PDF eBook |
Author | Angela Saini |
Publisher | Beacon Press |
Pages | 258 |
Release | 2019-05-21 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0807076910 |
2019 Best-Of Lists: 10 Best Science Books of the Year (Smithsonian Magazine) · Best Science Books of the Year (NPR's Science Friday) · Best Science and Technology Books from 2019” (Library Journal) An astute and timely examination of the re-emergence of scientific research into racial differences. Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races. If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real. As our understanding of complex traits like intelligence, and the effects of environmental and cultural influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between “races”—to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions—stubbornly persists. At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.
SCIENTIFIC RACISM AND THE INVENTION ...
Title | SCIENTIFIC RACISM AND THE INVENTION ... PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | |
Pages | |
Release | 2003 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
The Myth of Race
Title | The Myth of Race PDF eBook |
Author | Robert Wald Sussman |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 385 |
Release | 2014-10-06 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0674745302 |
Biological races do not exist—and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today. The Myth of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theories of racial degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified certain races, especially fair-skinned “Aryans,” as superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human sterilization—policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide. Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas’s new, scientifically supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking. Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains why—when it comes to race—too many people still mistake bigotry for science.
Mixing Races
Title | Mixing Races PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Lawrence Farber |
Publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM |
Pages | 136 |
Release | 2011-02-01 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1421402580 |
“Traces both historically and sociologically the changing attitudes on race-mixing (miscegenation) in western culture . . . clear, well written and useful.” —Journal of the History of Biology This book explores changing American views of race mixing in the twentieth century, showing how new scientific ideas transformed accepted notions of race and how those ideas played out on college campuses in the 1960s. In the 1930s it was not unusual for medical experts to caution against miscegenation, or race mixing, espousing the common opinion that it would produce biologically dysfunctional offspring. By the 1960s the scientific community roundly refuted this theory. Paul Lawrence Farber traces this revolutionary shift in scientific thought, explaining how developments in modern population biology, genetics, and anthropology proved that opposition to race mixing was a social prejudice with no justification in scientific knowledge. In the 1960s, this new knowledge helped to change attitudes toward race and discrimination, especially among college students. Their embrace of social integration caused tension on campuses across the country. Students rebelled against administrative interference in their private lives, and university regulations against interracial dating became a flashpoint in the campus revolts that revolutionized American educational institutions. Farber’s provocative study is a personal one, featuring interviews with mixed-race couples and stories from the author’s student years at the University of Pittsburgh. As such, Mixing Races offers a unique perspective on how contentious debates taking place on college campuses reflected radical shifts in race relations in the larger society. “A fascinating look at how evolutionary science has changed alongside social beliefs.” —Midwest Book Review “Will open the dialogue about social barriers and group identities . . . Essential.” —Choice
Racism
Title | Racism PDF eBook |
Author | Ellis Cashmore |
Publisher | SAGE |
Pages | 442 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9780761971979 |
Chronological anthology of 38 essays that demonstrate the long and complex intellectual history of racism as an idea and show how powerful groups have utilized racism to advance social, economic, or cultural interests.