Section outline

  • The Race Theoryford

    of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was based on bad science and ideas that are discredited by people who study genetics today. It is worth exploring them nevertheless, not only to better understand the history of racism but also because these ideas continue to reverberate in the way some people talk about racial differences today. Twenty-first-century view race primarily as a social category that plays a role in how people interact with each other (often negatively). While there are minuscule genetic differences between groups, those have no effect on the moral, intellectual, or dispositional differences between them.

    In the second half of the nineteenth century, scientists and anthropologists began to talk about the differences between Europeans and the indigenous population in terms of race. During that time, many scientists had begun to promote the idea that different races had different hereditary makeups and, as a result, had different physical and mental capacities. They decided that some races—usually theirs—were superior to others. Soon scholars, politicians, clergymen, artists, and others began to use pejorative terms such as redskin to mark the differences between the indigenous people and the Europeans.


    Among the first supporters of racial science was the American anthropologist Samuel George Morton. Building on the common observation that human beings have bigger brains and more skills than any other animal species, Morton falsely speculated (with very little evidence) that the same is true within the human species; a person’s intelligence, personality, and morality, he assumed, were linked to skull size.


     Smarter groups or races have larger brains and are therefore more advanced than others, Morton theorized, and he claimed that this was an “objective” way to rank the different races he identified. Morton also believed that the larger a group’s skull capacity, the more “civilized” the group could be. Scientists have long since discredited these ideas.


    Drawing from his pseudo-scientific research, Morton grouped people based on their physical features and compiled characterizations of each “race” into an 1839 volume called Crania Americana. In the excerpts below, Morton contrasts descriptions of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans.

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