Talk:Scientific racism

This isn't related to scientific theories - advocacy issues

The Christian Bible was interpreted to sanction slavery and from the 1820s to the 1850s was often used in the antebellum Southern United States, by writers such as the Rev. Richard Furman and Thomas R. Cobb, to enforce the idea that Negroes had been created inferior, and thus suited to slavery.[61]

1. This isn't related to science. The source backs it up. But the source doesn't speak of science here. But if you read the source further, it does actually deal with "christianity+science" here instead

There was a growing movement in America shortly before the Civil War, as pressure against slavery was increasing, to justify slavery not just with scripture [edit: this refers to 1820-1850], but also with so-called "science". At this time, however, most biologists, known then as naturalists, were theologically trained. Biology was still considered to be a Biblically based study of "the creation" before Darwin came along.

This doesn't say 1820-1850 (it explicitly says that was only with regards to scripture!). I believe this should be understood as 1850-1860. By the way, this is just my insight, literal reading among intellectuals of the Bible was dropped long ago at this point in time - so far as science was produced by interpretting the bible at this point in time, it would have been considered fringe (due to standards that arose in the Enlightment Age). If you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_biology there is no mention of the bible. 2. The source is also questionable and fails WP:RSSELF anyway, appears to be advocacy material. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.237.80.141 (talk • contribs) 04:52, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

Yo, I'm the same person, by the way, back in days the paragraph looked like this: [...] Unilinealism depicting a progression from primitive human societies to industrialised civilisation became popular amongst philosophers including Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant and Auguste Comte, and fitted well with the Christian belief of a divine Creation following which all of humanity descended from the same Adam and Eve. In contrast, polygenist theory alleged that there were different origins of mankind, thus making it possible to conceive of different, biological, human races, or to classify other humans as akin to animals without rights. Early scientific racist theories such as Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855) were mostly decadent in that they did not believe in the possibility of "improvement of the race." The text marked with fat was removed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scientific_racism&diff=prev&oldid=180954538 . Later a year after and fitted well with the Christian belief of a divine Creation following which all of humanity descended from the same Adam and Eve. was removed as well here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/98.214.100.36 . So the entire paragraph was kinda washed from any information that could put christianity in a positive light and replaced with information that could put christianity in a negative light. So it clearly appears like there is some anti-christianity advocacy going on here, especially because the new passage at the end of the paragraph has no ground (nor relevance). I have no idea whether it's worth to insert the christianity-friendly information back. My opinion is that we should have in mind that this is about scientific racism, not religious (anti)racism (otherwise we could go on talking about the christian abolitionism in the Roman Empire, etc.). The paragraph should definitely be fixed.130.225.188.131 (talk) 19:23, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

dave souza, hey, I'm a bit confused 130.225.188.131 (talk) 00:41, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Sorry to hear that you're a bit confused, but your comments lack clear proposals for article improvement. The statement you're commenting on seems to me to be entirely appropriate as context. . . dave souza, talk 20:13, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Change article title. Use of the term "scientific" in the title is misleading

Imagine that you are a young child reading this article. It is the first time you read about racism, and you click on this article. There is nothing scientific about scientific racism. The better title would be pseudoscientific racism. The use of "scientific" in the article's title is not only wrong, but perpetuates the idea that somehow the illegal practice of racism can be scientific, and thus it takes on the prestige and validity that stems from scientific knowledge and inquiry. DTMGO (talk) 19:44, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

It's a scholarly term, and a child is unlikely to accidentally click here looking for 'racism'. Iskandar323 (talk) 19:48, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

It is widely known that children look at Wikipedia when doing homework.

Furthermore, this idea is as ridiculous as saying:

scientific sexism

scientific holocaust denial

scientific astrology

scientific flat earth theory

Can we at least add some chapter discussing about naming issues, what has been said by reputable sources about this issue of naming scientific (adverb) something that is not scientific.

This is like saying I have a blue car, but in reality, my car is yellow. You should not call racism scientific. This is a public ongoing debate. Can we add content on that ? DTMGO (talk) 20:46, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

Are any of the examples you listed actually commonly used scholarly terms? If not then your analogy isn't valid. We already clearly define the term in the lead sentence of the article. This issue isn't uncommon and is covered by policy in WP:POVNAME. VQuakr (talk) 20:53, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

So do you agree that I can add content in this article covering the public debate of the name or naming of the concept "scientific racism"? DTMGO (talk) 21:01, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

You don't need anyone's permission per WP:BOLD. Since specific proposed changes or relevant sources haven't been provided, I don't have an opinion. From a WP:WEIGHT standpoint it's hard for me to imagine that we'd want to devote much space to it though. VQuakr (talk) 21:28, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

It's the WP:COMMON WP:ENGLISH name for this article's topic and has to be used for it.

On the other hand, your concerns aren't invalid and I'm completely in support of using snear quotes around "scientific" in this context in the title and all the way down the article. — LlywelynII 00:45, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Strongly disagree with marring the article with sarcastic quote marks. As the lead makes plain, scientific racism is based on real science; the pseudoscience comes in with the belief that empirical evidence can be interpreted as supporting sweeping, erroneous generalizations about race (the irony there, of course, being that race itself is notoriously poorly defined). Iskandar323 (talk) 03:42, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

"Scientific racism is based on real science; ... " If science is in its essence about finding new knowledge, then there is no real science in scientific racism. Because there is nothing to be found. Nothing has been found. DTMGO (talk) 10:11, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

User talk:LlywelynII I second this. Great idea. DTMGO (talk) 10:12, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

We are obviously not going to insert MOS:SCAREQUOTES into the article. VQuakr (talk) 10:40, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

So newtonian physics is not science according to you. There is no reason to deny the history. 130.225.188.130 (talk) 21:34, 13 February 2023 (UTC)

WP:BIAS

Obviously, as France's tilting against le wokisme likes to highlight, this field of study is—like English Wiki itself—dominated by Anglos prone to particularly intense sessions of naval gazing. That doesn't mean that we should allow the main articles—by WP:UNDUE focus or omission—to act like this was a US/UK joint project with French accompaniment that barely involved the rest of the world. Pseudoscientific racial essentialism is as old as civilization and has had proponents from the Greeks to the Indians to the Sinosphere. It didn't magically pop out of the British and French Enlightenment's head like a misbegotten Athena. It also wasn't principally (let alone solely) developed within French, English, and American sources.

People have put a lot of work into this but, when important figures like Oscar Peschel go entirely omitted but early modern Scottish jurists show up essentially just for repeating a belief in Genesis, there's still more work to be done. (More contentious, but I do think that a short paragraph is necessary ahead of the Enlightenment going through the general tendency of premodern religious cosmologies—which science initially tries to quantify and help prove—towards racial essentialism and hierarchies with links to the more important examples like the Brahmin caste and the 'division of the world' by the children of Noah in Genesis). — LlywelynII 00:45, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

WP:SOFIXIT. Readable prose length is currently 65kB; there's room to grow. This is currently a C-class article. It has been assessed as "substantial but is still missing important content or contains irrelevant material. The article should have some references to reliable sources, but may still have significant problems or require substantial cleanup." VQuakr (talk) 00:58, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Not touching a topic like this with a 10 ft pole. I get enough edit wars as it is trying to get random Spaniards to accept their own sources already in their own articles that the Tordesillas Meridian was never accurately defined, let alone measured, let alone implemented. Removing blocks of cited text in articles on "justified" racism is an entirely different level.

I'll still lay a marker and start the discussion about where things should be headed next, though. — LlywelynII 01:22, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

This isn't an article about racial theories or racial essentialism in general, past or present; it is about the misuse of science at the interpretive phase of the analysis (of empirical information) to produce pseudoscientific results, so no, not just any racist bunk from the past or present should be here, and it is post-enlightenment because that is when empirical science and racism intersect. Iskandar323 (talk) 03:37, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Between Renaissance/Chinese natural philosophy and early modern "science" (which they still called natural philosophy), that's just a game of moving goalposts to keep your Scotsmen (im)pure and at least needs to lay out its criteria and background more clearly than it presently does. Thanks for so clearly giving @VQuakr: an example of the strident my-opinion-as-pure-fact attitudes* that are common with the topic and why rebuilds require very slow consensus building to avoid pointless edit warring. (*I get that you very sincerely believe there's a clean line when people stop using ſ and talking about transmutation in print when this topic 'naturally' starts. Like I said, I disagree and think better context is called for. Alternatively, which I don't support, most of the current text in the article needs to be expunged because they were wearing wigs but not actually using carefully done studies or any form of what we consider modern science to meet the guideline you're advocating.) — LlywelynII 04:10, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

@LlywelynII: Unfortunately, you took a few leaps there. I don't care about any Scotsmen. I repeated the information that is already present, sourced, in the lead. It is the claim in this talk that the subject is missing vital aspects that is currently sitting out there naked and unsourced. I can cite literally any source I choose to make my point, but let's take this: The Origins of Scientific Racism - it starts with Darwinism and evolution. Quelle surprise. The point is that scientific racism is a defined thing that does not simply extend ad hoc and at whim to random aspects of pre-enlightenment bunk about the Bible or modern-day Brahmin fantasies, though I do agree that what is lacking here is a timely update of the ongoing outlets for scientific racism in the contemporary period. Iskandar323 (talk) 04:58, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Bernier and Boyle and various others from among the early enlightenment figures with a fondness for dabbling in racial theory seem like rather borderline examples. It is unclear how far their 'empiricism' went, and there may be some WP:SYNTH here with a range of garden variety European racists being introduced into the mix. I can certainly see a paucity of sources directly connecting many of these individuals with the term "Scientific Racism", which, given the literature, needn't be missing. Iskandar323 (talk) 05:17, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

The "antecedents" section generally seems rather overblown. All of this is essentially "background" and not the main 1800s topic itself, and might actually be better off in a separate article on Racial theory in the Enlightenment or something similar, although there are sources that can just about tie the two together and justify the inclusion for now, e.g. Revisiting Enlightenment racial classification: time and the question of human diversity: "The Enlightenment is commonly held accountable for the rise of both racial classification and modern scientific racism." But this is essentially the "History of X" equivalent stuff ready to be hived off later. Iskandar323 (talk) 05:32, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

Nice summation

Speaking of, this review of Peschel provides an excellent summary of the intellectual problems involved in this endeavor:

Language, myths, habits, clothing, ornaments, weapons, are described in detail, while we are left without any sufficient information as to the stature, bodily proportions, features, and broad mental characteristics of many important groups of men. The reason is obvious. The former class of facts can be readily obtained by passing travellers; while the latter require the systematic observation of an intelligent resident and more or less skilled anthropologist, and can only be arrived at by means of careful measurements and long-continued observations. It is not sufficiently considered that in almost every part of the world there is more or less intermixture of races, brought about by various causes--as slavery, war, trade, and accidental migrations. Hence in many cases the passing traveller is altogether deceived as to the characters of the race, and any observations he may make are of little value. It is only by a long residence among a people, by travelling through the whole district they inhabit, and by a more or less accurate knowledge of the surrounding tribes with whom they may be intermixed, that the observer is enabled to disentangle the complexities they present, and determine with some approach to accuracy the limits of variation of the pure or typical race. Unfortunately this has yet been done in comparatively few cases; but anthropologists are now becoming impressed with its importance, and we may soon hope to obtain a body of trustworthy materials, which may enable us to determine, with more confidence than is yet possible, the characters and the affinities of many of the best marked races of mankind.

the mistake of course being that he should've been more open to the possibilities of those long-term studies and careful measurements finding no meaningful differences after adjusting for childhood nutrition, stimulation during early development, &c. and the concept of a "pure or typical race" being either a null set or a game of no true Scotsman. In any case, it could be used for sourcing here and in other articles that some people at the time realized most of the problems that seem so clear to us while still not quite being able to get through to the other side, generally except in religious contexts. — LlywelynII 04:08, 11 February 2023 (UTC)