What is "scientific racism"

n. propaganda with the veneer of science which was fabricated to support a racist paradigm.

Scientific racism is the use of ostensibly scientific or pseudoscientific techniques and hypotheses to support or justify the belief in racism, racial inferiority, racialism, or racial superiority; alternatively, it is the practice of classifying individuals of different phenotypes into discrete races. This practice is now generally considered pseudoscientific, yet historically it received much credence in the scientific community.

As a category of theory, scientific racism employs anthropology (notably physical anthropology), anthropometry, craniometry, and other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines, in proposing anthropological typologies supporting the classification of human populations into physically discrete human races, that might be asserted to be superior or inferior. Scientific racism was common during the New Imperialism period ( – 1914) where it was used in justifying White European imperialism, and it culminated in the period from 1920 to the end of World War II. Since the later 20th century, scientific racism has been criticized as obsolete and has historically been used to support or validate racist world-views, based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.

After the end of the Second World War, scientific racism in theory and action was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO's early antiracist statement " The Race Question" (1950): "The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering." Such "biological fact" is no longer considered to exist as developments in human evolutionary genetics showed that human genetic differences are nearly totally gradual.

There is considerable debate whether the term "scientific racism" is pejorative as applied to more modern theories, as in The Bell Curve (1994), which investigated racial differences in IQ, concluding that genetics explained at least part of the IQ differences between races. Critics argue that such works are motivated by racist presumptions unsupported by available evidence. Publications such as the Mankind Quarterly, founded as an explicitly race-conscious publication, have been accused of scientific racism for publishing articles on controversial interpretations of human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, language, mythology, archaeology, and race subjects. The label "scientific racism" is used to criticize studies claiming to establish a connection between, for example, race and intelligence, and is used to argue that this promotes the idea of "superior" and "inferior" human races.