Scientific Racism - Racial Theories in Physical Anthropology, 1850-1918

Racial Theories in Physical Anthropology, 1850-1918

Further information: Historical definitions of race

The scientific classification established by Carl Linnaeus is requisite to any human racial classification scheme. In the 19th century, unilineal evolution (aka classical social evolution) was a conflation of competing sociologic and anthropologic theories proposing that Western European culture was the acme of human socio-cultural evolution. The ideologic proposal that social status is unilinear — from primitive to civilized, from agronomic to industrial — became popular among philosophers, including Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and Auguste Comte. In said context, the Christian Bible was interpreted to sanction slavery, and, from the 1820s to the 1850s, was an oft-cited, pro-slavery legalism used in the antebellum Southern United States, by writers such as the Rev. Richard Furman and Thomas R. Cobb, for the de jure and de facto enforcement of the racialist idea that negroes had been created unequal, and thus suited to slavery.

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