Scientific racism

Scientific racism uses purported scientific methods or findings to justify racial hierarchies, discrimination, or claims that racial groups have innate differences.

Race: A socially and historically variable system for classifying people, often by perceived ancestry and physical traits. Scientific racism treated racial categories as fixed biological divisions rather than historically constructed classifications.
Atlantic slave trade: The transatlantic system that forcibly transported millions of Africans into enslavement from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. The system created political demand for accounts that naturalized African enslavement and racial subordination.
Samuel George Morton: An American physician who collected human skulls and argued that cranial capacity differed among racial groups. His influential measurements became a prominent nineteenth-century case of ranking races through purportedly objective data.
Racial segregation: The enforced separation of people by racial classification in public life, housing, education, or other institutions. Claims of innate group differences were used to defend segregation as natural or necessary.
Social Darwinism: A set of doctrines applying ideas of biological struggle and selection to human societies and political life. It overlaps with scientific racism but more broadly naturalizes competition and inequality within and between societies.
Phrenology: A discredited theory that inferred mental traits from the size and shape of the skull. Its measurements lent physical authority to claims that intelligence and character differed by race.
Carl Linnaeus: A Swedish naturalist who developed a widely used system for classifying organisms and described human varieties. His human classifications attached temperamental judgments to geographic groups, blending taxonomy with hierarchy.
Josiah C. Nott: An American physician who promoted polygenism and racial hierarchy in the nineteenth century. His writing connected separate human origins with arguments for slavery and racial inequality.
Immigration Act of 1924: A United States law that sharply restricted immigration through national-origins quotas and excluded Asian immigrants. Eugenic arguments about heredity and national fitness helped legitimize its restrictive quotas.
Biological determinism: The view that biological factors determine complex human behavior or social outcomes. Scientific racism is one historically influential form of determinism applied to racial groups.

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