Chapter 9 – The Rise of Science and Scientific Racism

Chapter 9 discusses the emergence of science as an intellectual endeavor and its role in defining races and racial interactions.  Smedley reminds us that the major source of knowledge and explanation of the world up until the late nineteenth century came from biblical interpretations made mostly by the male sector of the church. It was the Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century that prompted scholars to question these dogmatic interpretations, advancing modern science into empirical research and experimentation. Smedley also points out that both naturalistic and super-naturalistic knowledge play a part in our worldview perceptions and both are found in all human societies. In support of sound knowledge and understanding, today’s modern science theoretically excludes the supernatural in support of empirical knowledge, independently and objectively acquired by following a systematically set of standard procedures and methodologies.

The exclusion of the supernatural raises the question on the idea of a single creation, or is there more than one creation in play? The debate over empirical knowledge and the deep rooted spiritual concepts on the origins of human existence places all people, including those newly discovered people resulting from exploration and trade expansion, into the great human family. It is the scientists who attempt to identify and classify the newly discovered human beings.

Sub-chapter Early Classifications of Humankind describes the process of classification and the people most influential in creating the classifications. Carolus Linnaeus established four groups: Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europeaeus. Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon is credited with introducing the term “race” into the natural sciences. Buffon was more interested in explaining human variety and not so much in their classification. He saw humankind as one species. Buffon reasoned that climate was the “chief cause of the different colors of men.” Johann Blumenbach, a professor of medicine, working within the single-origin framework was responsible for the theory of monogeneses, the argument that degeneration, caused by climate, food, and living habits, accounts for the external differences among human groups. Blumenbach’s division of humankind was based on the major regions of the world: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. Blumenbach, Buffon and Linnaeus also imposed aesthetic judgment on the physical features of different people. This was also a time of increased African-Atlantic slave trade and the conquest of the Native American. Do the conditions of the African slave and the Native American during this time promote the idea of a superior civilization, setting up the later concept of racial ranking?

Sub-chapter The Impact of Eighteenth – Century Classifications discusses the consequences of the classifications.  Smedley suggests that the fundamental error in the classifications was the assumption that human species was divided into clearly demarcated subgroups, or subspecies, that the scholars who produced the classifications were Europeans who had never seen a savage, and that much of the information came from untrained ordinary people preoccupied with other interests and purposes. Scholars in the American colonies were also aware of the debate over human classification, and were already engaged in the hard currency of racial ideology, something that Europeans had yet to experience, and polygenesis, the theory of multiple creations, resurfaces in the debates on philosophical theories.

It was French philosopher Voltaire who suggested that the major variants of humankind were separate species, created at different times. He believed that Africans and Indians physical characteristics and their social behaviors were sufficient evidence to classify them as species distinct from Europeans. Voltaire’s commercial interests infer that Voltaire had a vested interest in maintaining the colonial system of slavery, and the slave trade. He was supported in his view of separate origins of the races by Henry Home (Lord Kames).

Chapter 9 concludes with several questions for debate. I suggest the latter question goes to the heart of the chapter: Was classification merely a product, or by-product, of the growth of science, or were there deeper, hidden meanings in the desperate attempt to ascertain the different places in nature of various peoples?