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The myth of race : the troubling persistence of an unscientific idea

By: Sussman, Robert Wald
Publisher: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, c2014.Description: ix, 374 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.ISBN: 9780674660038Subject(s): Race | RacismDDC classification: 305.8 SU MY Online resources: Location Map
Summary:
Biological races do not exist -- and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his compelling examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today. The Myth of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theories of racial degeneration became a compelling justification for Western imperialism and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified individual races, especially fair-skinned "Aryans," as superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human sterilization -- policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide. Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas's new, scientifically supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking. Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains why -- when it comes to race -- too many people still mistake bigotry for science.
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Item type Home library Call number Status Notes Date due Barcode Item holds
REGULAR University of Wollongong in Dubai
Main Collection 		305.8 SU MY (Browse shelf) Available June2019 T0062454
Total holds: 0

Early racism in western Europe --
The birth of eugenics --
The merging of polygenic and eugenics --
Eugenics and the Nazis --
The antidote: Boas and the anthropological concept of culture --
Physical anthropology in the early twentieth century --
The downfall of eugenics --
The beginnings of modern scientific racism --
The Pioneer Fund, 1970s-1990s --
The Pioneer Fund in the twenty-first century --
Modern racism and anti-immigration policies.

Biological races do not exist -- and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his compelling examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today. The Myth of Race traces the origins of modern racist ideology to the Spanish Inquisition, revealing how sixteenth-century theories of racial degeneration became a compelling justification for Western imperialism and slavery. In the nineteenth century, these theories fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified individual races, especially fair-skinned "Aryans," as superior to others. These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding, and human sterilization -- policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide. Sussman examines how opponents of eugenics, guided by the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas's new, scientifically supported concept of culture, exposed fallacies in racist thinking. Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals today claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Sussman explains why -- when it comes to race -- too many people still mistake bigotry for science.

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