Scientists weren’t the first to divide humanity along racial – and and racist – lines. But for hundreds of years, racial scientists claimed to provide proof for those racist hierarchies – and some still do.
Resources for this episode:
Fatal Invention, by Dorothy Roberts
The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter
The power of science to push ideas and ideals that aren't rooted in it are terrifying, but again an important piece of this supremacy puzzle we have to unpack and look at. The reality is, the ideas of these scientist have prevailed in many ways in how white people talk about people of color still. Regardless of the human genome project, there are people who still need to convince themselves that skin color runs deeper to enable them to get the benefits.