Race Research

Scientific Racism: Early Research and Writings

Race research began in Europe. Biological taxono-mist Carolus Linnaeus was among the first to classify human beings by race, claiming each exhibited different mental and moral traits. In 1781, physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach added aesthetic judgments to race writing that White people are as beautiful as Mount Caucasus. In 1799, British surgeon Charles White asserted that Blacks were a separate species, intermediate between Whites and apes.

French intellectual Arthur de Gobineau is called the “father of racism.” Christian doctrine had always linked virtue with faith. Gobineau began to associate virtue with blood. Gobineau developed a notion of racial determinism claiming scientific objectivity. His Essai surl'inégalité des Races Humaines (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) argued the inequality of races explained all destiny and human history. His hierarchy placed the Caucasian people at the top and the Hamites or Blacks at the bottom. Miscegenation, he believed, would be the undoing of advanced civilization.

The writings of German zoologist and physician Ernst Haeckel in the mid- to late 1800s situated Blacks on an evolutionary tree below gorillas and chimpanzees. He hypothesized that each individual, in the course of its development, relives its evolutionary history, that is, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

Profitable U.S. slavery and racism brought White supremacy and scientific racism across the [Page 722]Atlantic. Edward Jarvis, president of the American Statistical Association, wrote in 1840 that insanity for Blacks in the North was 10 times greater than for Blacks in the South. He concluded that slavery had a salutary affect on the Blacks, sparing them the problems that free self-acting individuals faced.

Physician John H. van Evrie offered, in 1853, a “scientific” justification of slavery, positing dark-skinned people were diseased, unnatural, and possessed impeded locomotion, weakened vocal organs, coarse hands, hypersensitive skin, narrow longitudinal heads, narrow foreheads, and underdeveloped brains and nervous systems. He argued that even the animal kingdom recognized Negro inferiority and said that a hungry tiger was more likely to prey on Blacks than Whites.

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