The West was awash in racism by the time enlightenment thinkers came along. Dorothy Roberts is a leading scholar on racial science. She thinks their belief in the superiority of white people was conscious, but their misuse of science was not. Their work was distorted by their racist assumptions.
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