Scientific racism spread bogus theories to rationalize slavery, and it has mutated for 400 years right up to the present day
By Michael E. Ruane Michael E. Ruane Reporter covering local news, Washington institutions and historical topics Email Bio Follow April 30 at 11:38 AM The mysterious and chronic sickness had been afflicting slaves for years, working its way into their minds and causing them to flee from their plantations.
“What black inferiority meant has changed in every generation . . . but ultimately Americans have been making the same case,” said historian Ibram X. Kendi. Consider comedian Roseanne Barr’s use of an ape analogy in a tweet about Valerie Jarrett, an African American adviser to President Barack Obama, which led to the cancellation of Barr’s ABC television show.
Yet, in addition to his keen eyesight, he had other animal-like senses, smelling better and hearing better than the white man. On June 17, 2015, Roof went into an African American church in Charleston, S.C., and shot nine black worshipers to death. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. On Feb. 27, 1787, more than a decade after he helped write the Declaration of Independence, future president Jefferson published his book “Notes on the State of Virginia,” an extensive study of subjects including his state’s geography, climate, religion and its enslaved black population.
“Deep rooted prejudices . . . real distinctions which nature has made . . . and many other circumstances will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race,” he wrote. He seemed well qualified. The 57-year-old native of Fairfax County, Va., had practiced in Natchez, Miss., for 25 years, and his patients included his friend Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy. The same year the report was issued, he was appointed professor of “diseases of the Negro” at what is now Tulane University.
“There is a great convulsion before us,” Josiah C. Nott, a South Carolina physician, anthropologist and a future medical director in the Confederate army, told a Southern Rights Association meeting in 1851.Nott offered his pseudoscientific rationale: “Look around you . . . at the Negro races,” Nott said. “Their physical type is peculiar; their grade of intellect is greatly inferior; they are utterly wanting in moral and physical energy.
The images were made at the behest of Louis Agassiz, the famous Swiss American scientist and Harvard professor, who was studying what was called “polygenism.”
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