Scientific Racism Essay

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Scientific racism is the act of justifying differences between various groups of people with the pretense that the methods being used have a scientific backing. This was used against different types of people. Scientific racism uses various methods to support the taxonomy of human populations into separate human races that are declared to be superior or inferior. Though scientific racism is now considered obsolete, it can be argued that there are still methods of scientific racism present today, such as in the form of intelligence testing (IQ). For example, it has been noted that Hispanic immigrants achieve lower IQ test scores than white Americans. It is argued that this is due to genetics, when in actuality it is a result of dissimilar educational opportunities.
One notable example of scientific racism is the Eugenics movement in 1972 in the United States. Eugenics is the belief and practice of bettering the genetic quality of the human population through supporting higher reproduction of those with favorable traits, or decreasing reproduction of people with less-desired traits. Eugenicists advocated racial supremacy. Racial minorities were deemed to be inferior, and so Eugenicists wanted to contain such races through separation, birth control, abortion, and sterilization. At the time, blacks underwent tremendous prejudice and bigotry and this added greatly to their troubles, which seemed to further rationalize limiting their numbers. Many believed the answer lay in decreasing reproduction. Racial movement forced African American people to undergo involuntary sterilization, without their knowledge or consent. White Americans were afraid of an "infertility crisis" occurring, and in 1903 President Roosevelt cautioned that immig...

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...tive American human skulls. He did not have any advanced analytical tools, but yet was still able to create a scientific and anatomical backing behind the supposed lowliness of the Native Americans – the low quality (due to the smaller size) of their brains. Morton collected and measured hundreds of human skulls to authenticate this difference amongst races. His methodical comprehensive tests made him an innovator of American race science.
After Morton passed away, the skulls were sent to and displayed in the museum of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. In 1892, Europeans packed the forty Native American skulls to be exhibited in Madrid, and this exhibit was met with success. However, when the skulls returned back to Pennsylvania, the response was different. They felt these skulls should no longer be displayed and were put away under the terms of NAGPRA.

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