“Racism, the attribution of inferiority to large natural groups of people, is a relatively recent idea. To the extent that ancient peoples held various groups in different degrees of regard, this was predicated on nonracial features—such as the ability to speak Greek, dignified behavior, or valor— and to the extent that they recognized differences of physical appearance, these carried no codes of social rank (Isaac 2004; Snowden 1948) and each was considered to be a local variation, not a continental quintessence. The concept of race was a product of the rise of scientific biological taxonomy, which is the formal clustering of animals analytically into groups, along with a parallel dissolution of large groups of animals into their constituent smaller groups. Scientific racism, then, being predicated on newly emerging concepts of science and of race, must be regarded as a Euro–American product of the last three centuries. This obviously does not mean that group hatreds have not existed elsewhere and at other times, but only that they have usually not been based upon a theory of race and were not considered to be validated by science; they thus fall outside the scope of scientific racism.” Social sciences, Encyclopedias almanacs transcripts and maps, Scientific Racism, History of (Fair Use License) – Read More…
