Scientific racism

Scientific racism (sometimes race biology or racial biology or pseudoscientific racism) is the pseudoscientific study of techniques and hypotheses to support or justify the belief in racism, racial inferiority, or racial superiority; alternatively, it is the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races. Historically it received credence in the scientific community, but is no longer considered scientific.

As a category of theory, scientific racism employs anthropology (notably physical anthropology), anthropometry, craniometry, and other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines, in proposing anthropological typologies supporting the classification of human populations into physically discrete human races, that might be asserted to be superior or inferior. Scientific racism was common during the New Imperialism period (c. 1880s – 1914) where it was used in justifying white European imperialism, and it culminated in the period from 1920 to the end of World War II. Since the later 20th century, scientific racism has been criticized as obsolete and has historically been used to support or validate racist world-views, based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.

After the end of the Second World War, scientific racism in theory and action was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO's early antiracist statement "The Race Question" (1950): "The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering." Such "biological fact" is no longer considered to exist as developments in human evolutionary genetics showed that human genetic differences are nearly totally gradual.

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