Racism is a multidimensional phenomenon that results in the exclusion and restriction of access to different spheres of public life of a person or a group of persons, on grounds of colour or national or ethnic origin.

José Martín (2003) tells us that although biogenetic races do not exist, racism as an ideology does. And for this, a long process has had to occur where history and the production of scientific knowledge have mixed and impacted the different forms of social organization. Hence, racism has also been installed as a way of knowing the world and of relating to it.

In this article we will make a brief review of the concept of scientific racism , understood as a process that has to do, on the one hand, with how science has participated in the production and reproduction of racism, and on the other, with scientific practices that are crossed by racial biases. In other words, we refer both to how science has generated racism, and to the process by which racism has generated science.

Where’s the racism?

When we talk about racism we tend to fall into a racist bias, and we immediately think that it is a problem whose existence and definition takes place in North America or South Africa, and we forget or even deny racial processes from other places, for example, in Latin America, in some places in Europe or in ourselves. Not only are such processes denied, but the historical and socio-cultural elements that have made them emerge are also hidden .

As a result, the causes that have actually produced the phenomena associated with inequality (such as economic, political or social) are annulled or misinterpreted, to the benefit of an interpretation made directly or indirectly by the dominant classes.

If we take a look at it from a historical perspective, which relates the different social, political and economic transformations , we can think that racism is a structural and historical phenomenon. That is to say, it is a system of elements that are distributed in a determined manner in order to delimit the function and the parts of a whole; and that has been established on the basis of concrete trajectories.

In social structure and interpersonal relations

As a structural phenomenon, racism translates into forms of social and cultural relations, mediated by discrimination and subordination of one over the other, based on a supposedly fixed difference in possibilities and opportunities on biological or socio-cultural grounds of the subordinate group itself. Differences that are also articulated and reproduced stereotypes, not only of race, but of class and gender .

In other words, they allow us to evoke certain images in connection with certain words, and not with others, in relation to those who have been taught to be “inferior”, “primitive”, “weak”, or who are “strong”, “civilized”, “superior”. In other words, we associate certain acts with certain persons or groups of persons, and not with others; this also provides us with a certain framework of identification and relations.

Where does it come from? Alteration and colonialism

Racialized groups are often instrumentalized for the benefit of those who defend differences from alleged inferiority-superiority, and in this sense, are stripped of their “personhood” and understood in terms of alienation.

At the base of all this there is a fundamental belief and practice: the existence of a unity (in short, the adult white-western man) from which the “other” forms of life are valued and even “channelled”.

This process is known as “alteration” and consists of naming some people in terms of antagonistic differentiation from a hegemonic point of view, based on a certain idea of “us”.

The problem is that by presenting themselves in terms of antagonistic difference from the hegemonic group, the “other” groups are also easily “objectified”, and their ways of life easily dismissed or replaced by those considered “better”. That is why racism is directly related to violence. Violence that has also been one of the constants in the historical process of expansion of Western lifestyles and their certain modes of production.

Thus, in the background of racism we find the expansion of the cosmovision and the “western ways of life” , where fundamentally racist forms of contact are established and legitimated. This being so, racism is something that has been part, not only of the history of our societies, but of their forms of economic production and also of the creation of knowledge.

Scientific racism: between knowledge and ideology

Since scientific discourse has positioned itself as the one that offers us the true and valid answers about the world, and about ourselves, its knowledge has gradually been placed at the bottom of many theories, as well as at the bottom of different forms of identification and relationship.

Specifically in the reproduction of racism, science has participated directly and indirectly through alleged findings that legitimized views marked by invisible racial biases. These were made invisible, among other things, because the people who have been recognized as competent to do science have been precisely white and Western adult men .

In this context, the research that emerged in the 19th century and that marked scientific production in biology and history as scientific disciplines was particularly important. The latter began with the rise of evolutionary theories, where it was argued that the human species has changed after a complex genetic and biological process, where some people may have evolved “more” or “less” than others. This also validates the principle of natural selection applied to human beings, together with the idea that between them there is a permanent competition for survival .

A series of supposed demonstrations of the existence of racial hierarchies within the human species is then unfolded; demonstrations that soon settle in the social imaginary, at both the micro and macro-political levels. This means that not only does it impact how we think about “ourselves” on a daily basis, how we see “the others” and which ways of life are “desirable”; but that they have also become visible in the wars of colonial expansion , where the extermination of the lowest links of this hierarchy is justified.

Not only that, but the scientific confirmation of inferiority by race ended up having a direct impact on the ways of building and providing formal education, of politically and legally organizing social participation, economic management and opportunities for each group, and so on.

Biological Determinism and IQ

Biological determinism was thus positioned as a social philosophy. And one of the most contemporary processes where this becomes visible, is in the research on innate intellectual characteristics, based on the construct of the IQ, understood as a number capable of linearly classifying people, whose basis is mainly genetic and unchangeable.

Among other things, this had an impact on reducing the possibilities of social participation and on inequality of opportunity for those who are outside the average. In this regard, class and gender biases were also made invisible.

This was because the white western subject was taken as a model under heritability arguments. Many studies showed, for example, that the black population had a supposedly lower IQ than the white population.

In these studies and under the arguments of biological determinism, questions such as the difference of opportunities that exist for each population in a concrete socio-political context were omitted, and for the same reason, the differences are not dealt with as a problem that is structural, but as if it were an immutable characteristic of a certain group of people.

Science: a practice of knowledge and power

Menéndez (1972) speaks of scientific racism in terms of the falsified relations between science and racist ideology, where, in addition, if we follow Foucault, we can see that scientific practice has not only been a practice of “knowledge”, but of “power”, which means that has direct effects on what it studies and validates .

The above becomes even more complex if we add the following paradox: although its effects are concrete and visible, science has traditionally been divided between the production of knowledge in laboratories and specialized journals, and what happens on a daily basis, in social reality.

Recognizing this paradox, racial biases in the production of knowledge, and their consequences, have been especially assumed and criticized after World War II. It was specifically when the extermination occurred from one geopolitically European group to another geopolitically European group, based on justifications of biological superiority-inferiority .

However, even when many scientists made it known that the theories were strongly marked by racial biases, in many cases there was no possibility of stopping the relationships of violence that were being legitimized. This is because everyday life often escapes science , and the political value of the results of research that questions racist postulates has fallen short.

In sum, racism as a system, ideology and form of relationship offers a coherent vision for the mode of production (both economic and knowledge) on which our social system is based at a global level. It is part of the conception of the world where a rationality of violence is incorporated, and as such, it offers a series of plans and techniques where scientific activity has not had a minor participation.

Bibliographic references

  • Grosfoguel, R. (2013). Epistemic racism/sexism, westernized universities and the four genocides/epistemiccides of the long 16th century.
  • Sánchez-Arteaga, J.M., Sepúlveda, C. and El-Hani, C. (2013). Scientific racism, processes of change and science education. International Journal of Research in Education. 6(12): 55-67. Tabula Rasa. 19: 31-58.
  • Sánchez-Arteaga, J.M (2007). La rationalidad delirante: el racismo científico en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. Journal of the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry. 27: 112-126.
  • Martín, J. (2003). Biogenetic “races” do not exist, but racism does, as an ideology. Diálogo Educacional Journal, 4(9): 1-7.
  • Jay, S. (1984). The false measure of man. Grijalbo: Barcelona.
  • Menéndez, E. (1972). Racism, colonialism and scientific violence. Recovered 25 June 2018. Available at https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/46912407/Menendez__Eduardo_-_Racismo__colonialismo_y_violencia_cientifica.pdf.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1529925569&Signature=9NcK78LRRa0IhpfNNgRnC%2FPnXQ4%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DRacismo_colonialismo_y_violencia_cientif.pdf.