Scientific Racism

Scientific Racism

Scientific racism is the use of scientific authority to justify racial prejudice, racial discrimination, and the notion or racial superiority and inferiority. Charles Darwin thought that civilized society was harming humanity by helping the poor and saving those that nature would have killed off. In his book “The Descent of Man”, he quotes that “At some future period, not very distant measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminated replace throughout the world the savage races”. Darwin conducted experiments on people to determine if they were fit for reproduction, by the way they looked, how they carried themselves and by their status. In 1859, he brought the idea of natural selection to the attention of the world in his best-selling book, On the Origin of Species. He compared this new theory to how farmers where breeding their livestock to get great stock out of their animals. This gave him the thought that this can be done with humans also.

In Germany, Darwin’s ideas were seen as a justification for world domination. Scientist Francis Galton, the cousin of Darwin, also took on Darwin’s theory and believed that a superior race could be produced through the breeding of certain people. This began the creation of Eugenics. The eugenics movement consisted of a select group of elitist, who determined who could and who couldn’t reproduce. The poor, the non-whites and the disabled were the main targets of this ideology. This brought along the medical practice of genocide through sterilization among the people they felt were feeble-minded, in which they considered people of color. Over 160,000 people of color without their knowledge.

In 1916, Margret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States. She pushed birth control towards people of color tricking them into thinking that it was for safety precautions, in which it was really to stop the production of blacks. Margret also had the mindset of the eugenics theory. In 1915, Margret Sanger visited a Dutch birth control center and learned about diaphragms and was convinced there were more effective means of contraception. In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League. This league was heavily funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. She traveled to other places across the world promoting birth control. In 1928, conflict within the birth control movement leadership led Sanger to resign as the president of the American Birth Control League.