Over the course of centuries, "scientists" have attempted to use pseudoscientific methods to justify racial discrimination and subjugation, and these practices only became widely condemned after WW2. Therefore, what are the earliest PODs that would discredit or prevent the invention of "scientific" racism?
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WI: No Scientific Racism
- Thread starter Venocara
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Artaxerxes
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Eeesh this is a minefield.
The thing is it kicks in when science becomes more of its own thing, splits from natural philosophy and evolves into the disciplines. It happens at the perfect confluence of going out there and exploring The Other. It doesn't happen right away but it replaces religion as an excuse to be shitty to each other, it's no longer "we treat them like crap to get gold and that's ok because they aren't Christian" and becomes "we treat them like crap and that's ok because they aren't really people, look how different they are"
It's not always scientists that are driving this either, it's the equivalent of the 2% of scientists opposing climate change who then proceed to be the ones setting the narrative and driving funding because the market likes making money.
The only real counter to that is probably earlier and wider long distance travel, an awareness of humanity outside its own borders.
The thing is it kicks in when science becomes more of its own thing, splits from natural philosophy and evolves into the disciplines. It happens at the perfect confluence of going out there and exploring The Other. It doesn't happen right away but it replaces religion as an excuse to be shitty to each other, it's no longer "we treat them like crap to get gold and that's ok because they aren't Christian" and becomes "we treat them like crap and that's ok because they aren't really people, look how different they are"
It's not always scientists that are driving this either, it's the equivalent of the 2% of scientists opposing climate change who then proceed to be the ones setting the narrative and driving funding because the market likes making money.
The only real counter to that is probably earlier and wider long distance travel, an awareness of humanity outside its own borders.
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Even then, I'm not sure that helps: scientific racism grew massively with the boom in travel in the late nineteenth century through, obviously, the mid twentieth century.
I don't know where to start with this one, though I acknowledge that's a failure of my imagination. Scientific Racism is so closely bound to the Enlightenment that getting rid of it potentially means imagining a completely different philosophical framework for the past... oh, three and a half centuries?
I mean, @Thande did a very nice job using Voltaire's odious racial writings to show that you could convincingly get something disturbingly similar to the horrors of the 1930s straight out of Voltaire and Linnaeus, but honestly you could have flipped it around and had the French trying to hold off the ravening eugenicists of Britain with their writings of Hume and Locke.
And all of that is before things really take off in the nineteenth century.
I don't know where to start with this one, though I acknowledge that's a failure of my imagination. Scientific Racism is so closely bound to the Enlightenment that getting rid of it potentially means imagining a completely different philosophical framework for the past... oh, three and a half centuries?
I mean, @Thande did a very nice job using Voltaire's odious racial writings to show that you could convincingly get something disturbingly similar to the horrors of the 1930s straight out of Voltaire and Linnaeus, but honestly you could have flipped it around and had the French trying to hold off the ravening eugenicists of Britain with their writings of Hume and Locke.
And all of that is before things really take off in the nineteenth century.
Persephone
Mishima Themboy
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Timeline where there's racism with Lamarckian characteristics when.
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Scientific racism in certain areas also grew out of religious racism rather than replacing it. North Africa had huge theological debates from the 16th century onwards about whether slavery should be based on religion or race and the racist theories were justified by 'the Curse of Ham', the idea that black skin was a punishment from god and condemned it's owner into slavery.
That Curse of Ham is something you see reappear in scientific racism.
So it's not as simple even as maintaining religious supremacy (as in the old canard that the Portuguese of the 17th century viewed christian africans as less alien than iberian jews whereas the Germans of the 19th century did not) as the two things often coexisted and fed into each other.
That Curse of Ham is something you see reappear in scientific racism.
So it's not as simple even as maintaining religious supremacy (as in the old canard that the Portuguese of the 17th century viewed christian africans as less alien than iberian jews whereas the Germans of the 19th century did not) as the two things often coexisted and fed into each other.
napoleon IV
Sheer Animal Cunning of the Groundhog
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- Washington, Douglass Commonwealth
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People have been using natural factors (as opposed to religion) to explain racial ideas long before modern ideas of race existed. For instance Greek writers like Aristotle argued that the characteristics of a people were determined by their climate, and that Greeks were the best because the climate of Greece was just right. I think that even if we don't develop modern ideas of race or Enlightenment views of science you would still get people using natural factors to justify ethnocentric viewpoints. It wouldn't be as organized as scientific racism, and it would have to compete with religious ideas, but it would still exist.
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Gosh, the more I think about this the more it depresses me.
I don't actually like to come into threads to just say 'I don't see it,' but the sheer scale of the problem here...
One thing I need to pick the OP up on, because believe me it is absolutely vital to understanding the edifice of scientific racism.
These people weren't 'scientists,' they were just scientists. There's a tendency to think of scientific racism as a product of cranks. To think of the horrible, slightly comic stuff like physiognomy. The fact is, scientific racism was supported by the vast majority of scientists, including the very best thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It's like the patriarchy: you don't need to be stupid or irrational to be a misogynist, you just need to be unwilling to examine the hateful premise that underlies your entire way of thinking.
This is important because scientific racism could not be 'disproved' and we know this because it wasn't. If the evidence didn't fit, it was ignored.
The scientific method is not a noble path that, adhered to rigorously, leads to truth. It is walked by people, and their unexamined preconceptions shape the outcome.
This means that to overcome structural and ideological racism, the answer will not be purely scientific, philosophical or religious. It will require massive economic and political change- an Atlantic world whose entire economy and geopolitical structure isn't intimately bound up with the exploitation of brown bodies, for example.
Nor can that be accomplished simply by strengthening a few non-white states: as Gary notes, North Africa and the Middle East had its own entrenched racial systems, as did, for example, the Han world.
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No, I really don't know where you'd start.
I don't actually like to come into threads to just say 'I don't see it,' but the sheer scale of the problem here...
One thing I need to pick the OP up on, because believe me it is absolutely vital to understanding the edifice of scientific racism.
These people weren't 'scientists,' they were just scientists. There's a tendency to think of scientific racism as a product of cranks. To think of the horrible, slightly comic stuff like physiognomy. The fact is, scientific racism was supported by the vast majority of scientists, including the very best thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It's like the patriarchy: you don't need to be stupid or irrational to be a misogynist, you just need to be unwilling to examine the hateful premise that underlies your entire way of thinking.
This is important because scientific racism could not be 'disproved' and we know this because it wasn't. If the evidence didn't fit, it was ignored.
The scientific method is not a noble path that, adhered to rigorously, leads to truth. It is walked by people, and their unexamined preconceptions shape the outcome.
This means that to overcome structural and ideological racism, the answer will not be purely scientific, philosophical or religious. It will require massive economic and political change- an Atlantic world whose entire economy and geopolitical structure isn't intimately bound up with the exploitation of brown bodies, for example.
Nor can that be accomplished simply by strengthening a few non-white states: as Gary notes, North Africa and the Middle East had its own entrenched racial systems, as did, for example, the Han world.
...
No, I really don't know where you'd start.
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As you pointed out @Thande managed to do it by the early 1800s by combining these ideas with a much more violent, destructive French Revolution. Could a similar thing happen earlier or during the 19th-century instead, maybe even with a different country? Alternatively, is it possible to have religious racism maintain its supremacy over scientific racism?
What do you mean by this?
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Diop could be a crank about Ancient Egyptians and the afrocentrism he created is something I have mixed feelings about. But he was reacting to the way in which mainstream historians had tied themselves in knots to discount black history. He was born in 1923 and in 1930 'The Races of Africa' was published which went into great detail about how none of the civilisations of Africa where actually African.
The idea that of course blacks couldn't build cities was so entrenched that people went to massive lengths to find reasons to believe that every single African city was actually created by someone else. Like Great Zimbabwe built in an area with no evidence of non black inhabitants ever, clearly the builders have just died off and would be racially different.
Like you say, the thought structure has to change. As long as that's still in place, the evidence is irrelevant.
I honestly think the only way to do it is to avoid large scale colonisation and keep relatively equal trading terms between continents, which makes a basically unrecognisable world anyway.
Elektronaut
Effectively Stood Down
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- The Legendarium of Gentleman Julius
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Don't really think 'scientific'-couched racism ever did supplant racism couched in religious terms. The 'Children of Ham' argument was ubiquitous amongst American southern slavers and at least, and probably more, popular than 'scientific' or philosophical arguments. It was standard to argue that slavery was divinely-ordained - and it's frankly not difficult to find support for that notion in literalist readings of the Bible.
Persephone
Mishima Themboy
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This sums it up fairly well, in my opinion. The PBS doc The Eugenics Crusade (which I have yet to watch in full even though it's on Prime because I either squick out when they show a bunch of flies in a jar moving around or fall asleep early on)goes into detail about this as well, though it's specifically on the development of eugenics rather than scientific racism as a whole.
So this was a both a joking comment (in a black humor sort of way, I suppose) and a serious one because as far as I know, no one's really explored something like it in an alt history timeline. But anyway, Lamarckism (named after French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who inspired these ideas though he's incorrectly viewed as originating them), also called inheritance of acquired characteristics or soft inheritance, is essentially the belief that organisms can pass on physical characteristics that they acquired through use or disuse in their lifetime to their offspring. Mind you, this is a vast oversimplification of the theory because I'm not an expert and only have a vague understanding of the concept. Basically, if a parent is incredibly skilled in something, that will then be passed on to their child, and so on and so forth. Darwin took some of Lamarck's theory while developing his own theories while rejecting other aspects.
What I'm saying, in a slightly flippant manner, is that I'd be fascinated by a timeline in which scientific racism develops along Lamarckist lines. For example, in such a timeline, a belief might be that "Oh, [insert ethnic/racial/cultural group here] are viewed as lazy? Clearly, it's because their ancestors were lazy too and refused to be active! Therefore, they're inferior to our group as a whole for not taking the effort over generations to improve their group!" It's a concept that I think could lead to some very interesting scenarios and beliefs, not to mention the effects it would have on the 20th century.
Perhaps it's possible to push scientific racism into the background, and instead push cultural chauvinism into the forefront. Something like, "We need to rule these people in order to replace their barbaric culture with our civilized culture". But an issue is that scientific racism and cultural chauvinism aren't exactly mutually exclusive. And indeed, in OTL, they coexisted - for instance, the British Empire was perfectly happy employing Macaulay-style cultural supremacism alongside phrenology.
That's the largest issue of all of this - the treatment of all these things as fully separate. Religious-oriented racism, scientific racism, cultural supremacism, and other types of racism are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they interact and reinforce one another. that reason, people have simultaneously used religious texts, pseudoscience, and cultural supremacism to justify mass mistreatment of some sort of other-group.
That's the largest issue of all of this - the treatment of all these things as fully separate. Religious-oriented racism, scientific racism, cultural supremacism, and other types of racism are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they interact and reinforce one another. that reason, people have simultaneously used religious texts, pseudoscience, and cultural supremacism to justify mass mistreatment of some sort of other-group.
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Absolutely- to say nothing of the intersections with ideas about class, gender and sexuality. This is a topic that just involves so much of human society. It's far easier to picture a world without modern capitalism, or where the wars of religion led to a radically different Christendom than it is to try and disentangle all this stuff.
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God, that's a dark thought.
'Jews are naturally greedy, because their ancestors were naturally greedy. There's nothing to stop their children from being able to adapt and integrate into society, if we break the cycle by appropriating and re-distributing the wealth that the current generation has- it's for the benefit of their race.'
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Persephone
Mishima Themboy
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Okay, now I need this to be a thing in an alternate history story, either in a timeline or a vignette. If I ever end up writing a pre-1900 POD timeline/vignette, I'm going to include it and have it be pure black comedy.
Artaxerxes
Senshi sautés seashells by the seashore
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- #VALUE!
I wonder if keeping Roman style slavery longer bypasses it somehow, yes your a slave but your also still human with rights and freedom is possible (if unlikely for the majority, especially labourers).
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- Albany, NY
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Be very careful doing that. It's already intensely insensitive.
Persephone
Mishima Themboy
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Oh, absolutely. It's not something I take lightly, being a mixed-race/biracial person myself who would have undoubtedly been a subject of discrimination by the standards of the day. It's the sort of thing that I'm acutely aware is a serious and uncomfortable topic to explore in general, having experienced the difficulties of feeling estranged from both sides of my family and my culture (something that's far too common amongst mixed-race/biracial people).
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I apologise, I should have thought for five seconds before throwing up a statement like that with no warning- especially in a thread where I was holding forth about the complexities of the issue, I rather displayed my clueless whiteness by not considering the potential impact of the post.
I'll put it behind a spoiler for now, though if anyone thinks I should delete the remark entirely I'll do it.