Still, ideology—enlisted by forms of domination from slavery to colonization—does help explain why, at a time when scientists were discarding notions like phlogiston, supposedly the substance of fire, they made extraordinary efforts to assert the reality of race. There were the physical anthropologists, with their craniometrical devices; there were the ethnologists and physiologists and the evolutionary theorists, who, discounting Darwin, propagated notions of race degeneration and separate, “polygenic” origins for the various races. One illustrious discipline after another was recruited to
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