What is scientific racism really?

A little history

I said it was the last reminder, but I was inspired to write this post first, so if you haven't yet, you can still participate in the 2025 reader survey.

The word racism has been discussed many times (e.g. Bo Winegard in Aporia), but here I want to talk a little about history. In his book, The End of Racism: Finding Values in an Age of Technoaffluence (1995), Dinesh D'Souza discusses the history of the term itself and the study of human races (he was born in India to Indian parents but migrated to the US). Concerning the origins of racism, he notes that (in chapter 2):

An examination of the historical record reveals that racism did have a beginning. Although it can be found in embryonic form among the Chinese and the Arabs in the late Middle Ages, racism is a modern and Western ideology. Racism developed prior to slavery although it was later reinforced by slavery. Far from being the product of irrationality, fear and hatred, racism developed in Europe as a product of Enlightenment, part of a rational and scientific project to understand the world. Racism was inspired by the European voyages abroad, which produced an unprecedented project to classify and rank the diversity of the world's plants, animals, and peoples. For European travelers, missionaries, and ethnologists, racism provided a coherent account of large civilizational differences that could not be attributed to climate and were thus considered intrinsic. Racism originated as a theory of Western civilizational superiority. What Is Racism? It is hard to disagree with Andrew Hacker's claim that "something called racism obviously exists,"7 but what exactly does racism mean? It is not unusual to see the term used in various ways, but the basic definition remains clear: racism is an ideology of intellectual or moral superiority based upon the biological characteristics of race.

Racism was thus originally an intellectual matter, and not merely a description of people who didn't treat people from different races 'the same'. George Fredrickson gives a similar definition:

Racism is a mode of thought that offers a particular explanation for the fact that population groups that can be distinguished by ancestry are likely to differ in culture, status and power. Racists make the claim that such differences are due mainly to immutable genetic factors and not to environmental or historical circumstance.11

So we have a number of definitions:

1. Racism as antipathy to members of other races (now called negative ethnocentrism).

2. Racism as love of members of one's own race (positive ethnocentrism).

3. Racism as belief that members of different races don't have equal average worth (non-moral egalitarianism?).

4. Racism as the study of race differences and their consequences (race science).

Of course, in practice, these will probably correlate (Ed Dutton has a book on the first two). Their positive correlations is what drives critics to conflate them as being one coherent system. Taken to its extreme, you can then label your favorite examples of political regimes built on these ideas as being very bad, and then connect this blame to those of us who are interested in the science (definition 4 above). From this historical perspective, then, we could say that (4) is the same as scientific racism, raceology (Shockley's term), racialism, and race science, just that race science is a more neutral term, not involving racism which has strong negative connotations. Somewhat paradoxically, scientific racism is usually used to denigrate the field as being unscientific. To some extent, this is a language game played by the critics. Richard Lynn once said in an interview in Mail and Guardian (1996), a South African newspaper that:

Then comes the emeritus professor of psychology, Richard Lynn, who recently retired from the University of Ulster, in Northern Ireland. Like Brand, Lynn describes himself as scientific racist. “If we are talking about people who believe there are genetic differences between the races, then I am definitely a scientific racist.” He has collated evidence from IQ tests conducted in Africa which suggests half the black population of the continent is mentally retarded.

Lynn was clearly talking about (4) above. No one cared or knew about this obscure interview until recently when journalists and other haters found it and started to spread it around using the summary "self-described "scientific racist"". This is what you can find on Wikipedia now. None of the sources cited actually lead you to the primary source, so one cannot find the context. In fact, the only reason I know the primary source is that some journalist (Frauke Giebner) wrote a hit piece on me in a Danish newspaper (gated and in Danish) and she somehow found the primary source. It looks like it might have been The Guardian writer Gavin Evans, a journalist and long-time hater who resurrected this quote in recent years (2017). Though it was also quoted in The Guardian in 2005 by Sam Jones.

There are many people who are interested in (4) but who are also cultural and racial egalitarians or relativists. The correlations among (1-4) above are far from perfect. Additionally, we may note that certain atypical forms of emotional racism fail to qualify under (1-2). Most obviously, there are those who dislike their own race, either because they have given up identification with it (e.g. Chinese who identify with Western culture and dislike their own), or because they have so-called reverse racism, that is, they dislike their own group specifically. The latter variant is not too uncommon among the left in Western countries ('oikophobia'). I think it is historically unique. Clearly, a civilization with a culture that dislikes itself and their own ethnic group cannot last very long. Judging from the political decisions made by Western powers in the last 50 years or so, they are keen to show this claim to be true.

In any case, this stuff doesn't matter for the science, so I don't want to spend much time on these language games. I am writing this post so that the history will be clear to those who are interested, it also provides another example of journalistic malpractice.