In his exceptionally insightful book, Racism: A Short History, Stanford University historian George M. Fredrickson notes the paradox that notions of human equality were the necessary precondition to the emergence of racism. If a society is premised on an assumption of inequality, producing an accustomed hierarchy -- one unquestioned fifty-fifty past those relegated to its nadir -- so there is no need to locate the cause of the underlings' position in some specific characteristic on their role that makes them less worthy than others.

Yet, as societies accept go increasingly committed to the conventionalities in liberty and equality -- equally once revolutionary ideas about equal rights for all have become more widespread, peculiarly in the Westward -- and so those groups that are systematically denied these entitlements are claimed to possess what Fredrickson calls "some extraordinary deficiency that makes them less than fully man". That is, racism arose as a result of the contradiction between egalitarian principles coupled with the exclusionary treatment of specific indigenous groups: the rejection of organically hierarchical societies brought with it the implied necessity to account for the fact that some groups were subjected to servitude, enforced separation from the rest of lodge, or ghettoization.

First effectually the finish of the eighteenth century, as Enlightenment rationalism replaced faith and superstition as the source of authority, the pronouncements of scientific discipline became the preferred method for reconciling the departure betwixt principle and practice. In societies in which there has been systematic discrimination confronting specific racial groups, inevitably information technology has been accompanied by attempts to justify such policies on scientific grounds.

Broadly speaking, at that place have been three types of scientific explanations offered in putative support for racial discrimination, each of them having a lengthy history. I approach has been to claim that there are biological dangers involved in racial interbreeding. Indeed, it was precisely on the basis of this belief that in the United States and South Africa for many years there were statutory prohibitions against intermarriage. The first supposed testify for this conclusion was provided in the mid-nineteenth century primarily past physicians, who claimed that, every bit a result of their mixed blood, "mulattoes" were considerably more than susceptible to disease than either of their parents and thus uncommonly curt-lived. In addition, were persons of mixed race to intermarry, according to leading anthropologists at the time, they became progressively less fertile, somewhen becoming completely sterile.

In the early on twentieth century, before long after the scientific community's discovery of Gregor Mendel's work led to a new, exciting branch of biological science, geneticists warned that the intermarriage of "far apart" races could produce what they called genetic "disharmonies". Charles Benedict Davenport, a world renowned researcher at the time, observed, for example, that if a member of a tall race, such as the Scots, should mate with a member of a modest race, such as the Southern Italians, their offspring could inherit the genes for large internal organs from 1 parent and for small stature from the other, resulting in viscera that would be as well large for the frame. Naturally these claims were non tenable for long, but they were presently replaced past assertions less easily disprovable, as some social scientists insisted that the children of mixed race parentage were morally and intellectually inferior to either of the parents.

Although belief in such genetic mismatches was once fairly widespread within the scientific community and cited specifically to rationalize various racially oppressive policies, this notion now enjoys far less credibility. However, while there has been absolutely no prove that racial interbreeding can produce a disharmony of any kind, warnings of some kind of genetic discord are still far from entirely extinct. Only a few years ago, Glayde Whitney, a prominent geneticist and one-time President of the Behavior Genetics Association, claimed that the intermarriage of "distant races" could produce a harmful genetic mixture in offspring, citing the broad range of wellness problems afflicting African Americans and their loftier infant death rate as examples of the effects of "hybrid incompatibilities" caused by white genes that were undetected due to the "one drib" convention defining all "hybrids" equally blacks. Unsurprisingly, he was also a regular speaker before neo-Nazi groups and, in an address to a convention of holocaust deniers, blamed Jews for a conspiracy to weaken whites past persuading them to extend political equality to blacks.Another trend in the scientific justification of racial discrimination has been the merits that prejudice is a natural and indeed an essential phenomenon necessary for the evolutionary process to exist effective by ensuring the integrity of gene pools. In this view, evolution exerts its selective result not on individuals only on groups, which makes it necessary for races to be kept separate from each other and relatively homogeneous if there is to be evolutionary progress. One anthropologist who adheres to this belief refers to the tendency to "distrust and repel" members of other races as a natural part of the man personality and one of the basic pillars of civilisation.

Finally, the most mutual fashion in which scientific discipline has been used to support racial discrimination is through pronouncements that some groups are systematically less well endowed than others in important cognitive or behavioural traits. This is not to say that there may exist no group differences in these traits, but rather that at this betoken there are no clear conclusions, which in any effect would be irrelevant to problems of social and political equality. All the same, in that location is again a long history of the utilise of such claims for oppressive purposes. For the first quarter of the twentieth century, there was item business organisation over the results of early intelligence tests, which supposedly demonstrated that Southern and Eastern Europeans were not but intellectually junior to their Northern counterparts, only were also unfit for self-rule. Some of the virtually important scientists of the time explained that Nordics, characterized as they were by greater self-assertiveness and determination, equally well as intelligence, were destined by their genetic nature to rule over other races. In the last half century, the controversy over intellectual and moral traits has focused primarily on the differences betwixt blacks and other races, which were often cited by those seeking to preserve white minority rule in South Africa and legal segregation in the United States.

Now, the almost well known researcher to emphasize the importance of racial differences is Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton, the writer of Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, which was distributed unsolicited in an abridged version to tens of thousands of social scientists in an unsubtle endeavor to influence both fellow scientists and public opinion. In the preface to the abridged paperback, Rushton promised to explicate why races differ in crime rates, learning ability and AIDS prevalence. In the ensuing business relationship, he asserted that the behaviour of blacks, whether in Africa or the diaspora, reflected what he called a "bones law of evolution", in which reproductive strategy was linked to intellectual development, such that the more advanced the latter, the fewer the number of offspring and the greater the investment of time and effort in the care of each of them. Thus, he declared, in comparison to Caucasians and Asians, blacks tended to be more sexually active and aggressive, while less intelligent and less capable of self-control, circuitous social organization and family stability. Like Glayde Whitney, Rushton as well has been a favourite speaker at conventions of organizations dedicated to political policies that would encode white supremacy officially into law.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, 2 conferences of internationally recognized scientists, held by the United nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Arrangement (UNESCO), issued statements about race. Although there were some slight differences in their observations about the possibility of innate differences, both groups agreed that equality every bit an ethical principle concerning the rights to be enjoyed by all members of a social club was not predicated on any scientific conclusion nigh racial characteristics. This position should still inform our thinking about race and science. Although the strains of idea discussed in this commodity practice non have widespread support amongst gimmicky scientists, whether they are appropriate issues for scientific pursuit is abreast the betoken. Such claims, scientifically artificial or valid, should be utterly irrelevant to the entitlements enshrined in the United nations Universal Proclamation of Human Rights.