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The Nazi ‘science’ making an mainstream comeback
Bones, bodies, your feelings and your facts
NOTE: This article discusses racism, eugenics, white supremacy and genocide.
Why are black people inferior, a bunch of very racist white men asked each other in the 1850s. There must be a scientific reason for it, right? There has to be something inferior about them. They live in mud huts and we live in cities. We develop telegrams and steam engines and they make spears and sharp rocks. We colonised the world and they haven’t even discovered metal. It’s just science, right? Science? Facts. Sorry about your feelings, liberals. Right? Right?
Uncomfortable? Good. Because we do need to talk about this. Again.
This ignorant ‘science’, that is, the concept that human races diverge so much that people with different phenotypes (appearances) have different levels of intelligence, ability, and value, has never really gone away. Politicians from the Nazis to the Confederacy have always used poverty, famine, drought, persecution, and violence as opportunism to make out that an ethnicity is actually struggling because they are inherently lesser. It’s in the genes! It’s just their nature. After all, can you deny that there aren’t any black engineers in your hometown of 1850s Lincoln? Of course, an even slight analysis of the situation might explain why: black people were widely excluded from higher education and only given the most menial of salaries, perpetuating an inability to finance further study and educational advancement for their children. But no. White supremacists felt around on skulls and drew diagrams of facial features to try and ‘prove’ what made blackness bad. Later, they’d attempt to replace this same bigotry with IQ tests and genetics. Tropes die hard: if I tell you that people with blue sneakers are violent, you’re going to remember the one time you did see someone with blue sneakers in a fight, even if there is no reason to statistically believe that is true.
The ‘facts not feelings’ brigade of modern eugenics and ‘race realism’ (good grief), argues that black people have never ‘achieved’ anything, and that all black majority and black-led countries are poor, corrupt, uneducated, violent, and unsophisticated. To them, this ‘proves’ that racism isn’t just…
