Darwin too
by Leslie Carr
02 June 2003 16:22 UTC
M. Weigand learned, as I did, that Social Darwnists corrupted Darwin's theory when they applied it to humans. I found out that that was not exactly true. Darwin wasn't a racist the way Weber was not a racist. The following is from my book "Color Blind" Racism (Sage, 1997)
Charles Darwin gave unprecedented credibility to the racist thesis. Darwin published the Origins of the Species in 1859. The prestige which his scientific accomplishments brought him, imparted enormous influence to the racist views that he held about the human race. Darwin repeated many of the popular racist views of his day, particularly in The Descent of Man published in 1871. He accepted the work of those who had found meaningful differences between "the skulls of savage and civilized races"(Banton and Harwood, 1975:36). He tacitly justified the English oppression of the Irish when he agreed that the Saxons were innately superior to the Celts. He saw natural selection at work in the genocide carried out by the British against the native people of Tasmania (Banton and Harwood 1975). He saw that Hottentots were intermediate between apes and humans and, in the Descent of Man, the Negro or Australian was seen as being intermediate between the Caucasian and the gorilla (Gould, 1981). He also wrote:
We civilized men...do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment... Thus the weak member of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. (Haller, 1963:4).
Here Darwin thought, in Lamarckinan fashion, that acquired traits like poverty, injury, and illness could be passed on. More importantly, when he implied that interference with the process of "elimination" weakened the human race, he was paving the way for the eugenics movement which would later promote the segregation and serialization of the "unfit".
http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/psn/2003/msg01877.htmlFirst of all, Leslie Carr is simply wrong. Second of all, on checking out your source, the
Progressive Sociology Network, it's not at all suprising why. Oh, Good Lord, do actually read any of the other messages here? These people are literally (well, figuratively, well
maybe literally) peeing all over themselves about the horrors of institutional WHITE racism, the fear that we might offend a muslim by looking in his carryon bag, etc.
I realize that I am engaging in circumstantial ad hominem, but, really, these folks are SOOOO over the top!