Although Darwin’s discoveries revolutionized science, the belief in black inferiority stood firm. Forced to view all races as members of the same species, scientists and public intellectuals could no longer consider blacks a lowly derivative of those white people whom God created first and in his likeness. Instead, whites became the latest, most complex, most intelligent, most evolved humans in this great chain of advancement. Darwin’s radical ideas were quickly accommodated to a racial narrative about blacks that refused to die. And that is precisely what made that monstrous bias so scary to
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