Rethinking Race: Part 3, ‘Scientific’ Racism

Critical race theory … Whoopi Goldberg suspended for comments about Jews and race … once again we are arguing about racism … welcome to the second in an eight-part series on how we understand America’s original sin.The series will be published on eight successive days. The line between science and pseudoscience is a thin one and it is easily crossesd. In Part 3, we will see how the new, emerging science of taxonomy seemed to render the non-white ‘races’ less than fully human. The above drawing is a fanciful sketch of the double helix by Francis Crick, who played an essential role in advancing our knowledge of DNA.

In 1583, Italian physician Andreas Cesalpino, sometimes referred to as the ‘first taxonomist,’ published his magnum opus De Plantis, which described more than 1,500 species of plants. Taxonomy may be defined as the science of describing new species of living organisms, determining their relationship to other organisms, classifying them in a manner that reflects those relationships and giving them a unique, binomial Latin identifier that, unlike common names, is universally recongnized. The basic taxonomic unit is the species, a group of similar organisms that freely breed with one another. (All horses, for example, belong to the species, Equus caballus.)

Species that are closely related to each other, but have some important…