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Biological races do not exist-and never have. This view is shared
by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet
racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain
deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of
a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores
how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical
justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today. The Myth
of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish
Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theories of racial
degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism
and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with
Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics
movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw
intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that
classified certain races, especially fair-skinned "Aryans," as
superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of
intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human
sterilization-policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide.
Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the
German-American anthropologist Franz Boas's new, scientifically
supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking.
Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and
individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist
assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research
and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains
why-when it comes to race-too many people still mistake bigotry for
science.
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