January 27, 2026

DARWIN JUST ASSUAGED IMPERIAL GUILT:

A Prehistory of Scientific Racism: The author of “Whiteness” traces the evolution of race as a social and political instrument, from its beginnings in ancient hierarchies through European colonial expansion and into contemporary times (Martin Lund, MIT Press Reader)

By the dawn of the 19th century, race was being turned into biology and classified as something ostensibly “natural.” Supposedly innate differences between whites and “inferior” peoples were increasingly used as a justification for the unequal distribution of rights and resources, even as doctrines of “natural rights” were widely touted. While other thinkers were more influential at the time, ethnologist Arthur de Gobineau’s (1816–1882) posthumous influence would be immense. In his 1853–1855 “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races,” Gobineau claimed among other things that France’s population consisted of three races — Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans — that corresponded to the country’s class structure. The scientification of race and whiteness continued through uses of naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859), particularly racialized in so-called social Darwinism, which applied ideas of “natural selection” to humans, and argued that racial and class inequalities were rooted in biological differences rather than social inequities. This worldview was used to oppose social policies meant to help the poor, children, or women, among others, further manufacturing and enshrining differences between not only white and nonwhite people but different classes of white people too. Darwinian assertions were also used to legitimize genocide: the “higher” races were naturally bound to overtake the “lower.”