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They were the natural winners, they thought,
Many still imagine that white Europeans have some innate edge, some superior set of genetic qualities that has propelled them to economic domination.
the Egyptians at that time believed themselves to be a superior people with the most advanced culture,
knowledge is not just an honest account of what we know, but has to be seen as something manipulated by those who happen to hold power when it is written.
The more powerful we become, the more our power begins to be framed as not only cultural but natural.
No region or people has a claim on superiority.
Race is at its heart the belief that we are born different, deep inside our bodies, perhaps even in character and intellect, as well as in outward appearance.
Because this is how power works. It takes, it claims and it keeps. It makes you believe that this is where they belong. It’s designed to put you in your place.
European thinkers told us that their cultures were better, that they were the proprietors of thought and reason, and they married this with the notion that they belonged to a superior race. These became our realities. The truth is something else.
modern humans had been present here for around 60,000 years
For those raised in and around cities, industrialisation is still what represents civilisation.
‘The idea of ranking,
industrial society higher than a hunter-gatherer so...
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higher standards of living in many ways, even though they don’t have all of the technological sophistication.’
In 1869 the Australian government passed legislation allowing children to be forcibly taken away from their parents, particularly if they were of mixed heritage
In universalising humanity, Enlightenment thinkers had inadvertently laid the foundations for dividing it.
The more we are superior to nature, the more we are superior as humans. It is a way of thinking that forces a ranking of people from closer to nature to more distant, from less developed to more, from worse to better. And history shows us that it’s only a small leap from believing in cultural superiority to believing in biological superiority, that a group’s achievements are due to their innate capacities.
just by having darker skin – could now be lumped together with a West African, for instance, despite being continents apart, with entirely different cultures and histories. Both were black, and this was all that mattered.
Whiteness became the visible measure of human modernity.
For more than a century the word ‘Neanderthal’ had been synonymous with low intelligence.
To exotic plants and flowers it added people,
Escaping the bother of long sea voyages to the tropics, anatomists and anthropologists could conveniently pop down to their local colonial exhibition and sample from a selection of cultures in one place.
Saartjie Baartman
It was only in 2002, after a request from Nelson Mandela, that her remains were removed from Paris and finally returned to South Africa for burial.
By grouping people and dividing these groups, it was easier to control them.
if the natural state of the negro is to be a slave, then running away is going against their natural state. And therefore it’s a disease.’
His work was a naked attempt to justify why those like him deserved the power and wealth they already had. This was the natural order of things, he argued.
Freedom was framed as a gift bestowed on unfortunate black slaves by morally superior white leaders, rather than a reflection of a hope that everyone would one day live alongside each other as friends, colleagues and partners.
We are too alike in our basic responses, our smiles and tears, our blushes.
human difference were always tainted by power and money.
even in a cold climate they would choose to walk around in as few clothes as they wore in a hot one, that their behaviour couldn’t change no matter where they lived.
‘When there was a birth, it meant a new show,’
They were already treated as subhuman before race was invoked. But once it was invoked, the subjugation took on a new force.
Ota Benga,
he borrowed a revolver and shot himself through the heart.
Race science had sat, always, at the intersection of science and politics, of science and economics. Race wasn’t just a tool for classifying physical difference, it was a way of measuring human progress, of placing judgement on the capacities and rights of others.
(Einstein abandoned Germany that same year, leaving for a conference and wisely never returning),
science is always shaped by the time and the place in which it is carried out. It ultimately sits at the mercy of the personal political beliefs of those carrying it out.
there was one question that went unanswered after the investigations into the bloodstained history of the Max Planck Society: Were scientists in the rest of the world so blameless?
used to collect heads from around the world to shore up his ideas of racial superiority and inferiority.
choosing to overlook that being notable might also be a product of connections, privilege and wealth,
travel failed to broaden his mind.
a queen bee isn’t born a queen; she is just another worker bee until she eats enough royal jelly.
involuntary sterilisation law
argued that criminality, mental problems and poverty were hereditary.
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a bestseller in Indian bookshops.
1908, Germany killed tens of thousands of Namibians as they rebelled against colonial rule.
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had continued the practice, sterilising as many as 150 women inmates between 2006 and 2010,
between 1982 and 2000 the fund handed almost $1.5 million to lobbying groups in favour of immigration reform in the United States.
Roger Pearson.
