Scientific racism: what it is and how it transforms science to legitimize itself

Racism is a multidimensional phenomenon which results in exclusion and restriction of access to different spheres of life public of a person or a group of people, for reasons based on color or national origin or ethnic.

José Martín (2003) tells us that, although races do not exist biogenetically, 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.

In this article we will 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, it has to do with scientific practices that are traversed by biases racial. In other words, we mean both how science has generated racism, and the process by which racism has generated science.

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Where is 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 take place in North America or in South Africa, and we forget or even deny racial processes in other places, for example, in Latin America, in some places in Europe or in us themselves. Not only are these processes denied, but the historical and sociocultural elements that have made them emerge are also hidden.

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

If we take a tour with a historical perspective, that puts in relation the different social, political and economic transformations, we can think that racism is a structural and historical phenomenon. That is, it is a system of elements that are distributed in a certain way to delimit the function and parts of a whole; and that it has been established based on specific trajectories.

In social structure and interpersonal relationships

Being a structural phenomenon, racism is translated into forms of social and cultural relations, mediated by discrimination and the subordination of some on others, based on a supposedly fixed difference of possibilities and opportunities for biological or sociocultural reasons of the group itself subordinate. Differences that also articulate and reproduce stereotypes, not only of race, but of class and gender.

That is, they allow us to evoke certain images in connection with certain words, and not with others, in relation to who They have taught us that they are "inferior", "primitive", "weak" beings, or those who are "strong", "civilized", "Superior". In other words, we associate certain acts with certain people or groups of people, and not with others; which also offers us a specific identification and relationship framework.

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Where does it come from? Alterization and colonialism

Racialized groups are frequently instrumentalized for the benefit of those who defend differences from the supposed inferiority-superiority, and in this sense, they are stripped of their status as "person" and understood in terms of distancing.

At the base of all this is a fundamental belief and practice: the existence of a unit (in short accounts, the adult-white-western man) from which the forms of life are valued and even "channeled" "Other".

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

The problem is that when presented in terms of antagonistic difference from the hegemonic group, the "other" groups are also easily "reified", and their ways of life easily dismissed or replaced by those that are considered "top". For this reason, racism is directly related to violence. Violence that has also been one of the constants in the historical process of expansion of Western ways of life and their specific modes of production.

Thus, in the background of racism is the expansion of the worldview and the "western ways of life", where fundamentally racist forms of contact are established and legitimized. This being the case, 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 knowledge creation.

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Scientific racism: between knowledge and ideology

Since the scientific discourse was positioned as the one that offers us the true and valid answers about the world, and about us. Their knowledge has gradually been located 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 supposed findings that legitimized views marked by racial biases invisible. Segos that were made invisible, among other things, because the people who have mostly recognized themselves as competent subjects to do science, they have been precisely white and western adult men.

In this context, the investigations that emerged in the 19th century were especially important. and that marked the scientific production in biology and in history as disciplines scientific. The latter from the rise of evolutionary theories, where it was argued that the human species has changed after a complex genetic and biological process, where it is possible that some people have evolved "more" or "less" than other Which also validates the principle of natural selection applied to human beings, along with the idea that there are a permanent competition for survival.

A series of supposed demonstrations about the existence of racial hierarchies within the human species then unfolds; demonstrations that soon settle in the social imaginary, both at the micro and macro-political level. In other words, it not only impacts how we think of "ourselves" on a daily basis, how we see "others" and what ways of life are "desirable"; but what they have also become visible in the wars of colonial expansion, where the extermination of the lowest links of said hierarchy is justified.

Not only that, but the scientific confirmation of inferiority by race ended up directly impacting the ways of constructing and imparting the formal education, to politically and legally organize social participation, economic management and opportunities for each group, etc.

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 IQ construct, understood as a number capable of linearly classifying people, whose base is mainly genetic and immutable.

Among other things, this had an impact on the reduction of possibilities for social participation and inequality of opportunities for those who are located outside the average. Issue in which class and gender biases were also made invisible.

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

In these studies and under the arguments of biological determinism, issues such as the difference in opportunities that exist for each population in a given context were omitted. sociopolitical concrete, and for the same reason, the differences are not treated as a problem that is structural, but as if it were a characteristic and immutable characteristic of a certain group of people.

Science: a practice of knowledge and power

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

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

After recognizing this paradox, racial biases in the production of knowledge, and its consequences, have been especially assumed and criticized after the Second World War. 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 though there were many scientists who made it known that the theories were strongly marked Due to racial biases, in many cases there was no possibility of stopping the violent relationships that were legitimizing. It is so because everyday life often escapes science, and the political value of research results challenging racist postulates has fallen short.

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

Bibliographic references

• Grosfoguel, R. (2013). Epistemic racism / sexism, westernized universities and the four genocides / epistemicides of the long 16th century.
• Sánchez-Arteaga, J.M., Sepúlveda, C. and El-Hani, C. (2013). Scientific racism, processes of alterization and science teaching. International Journal of Research in Education. 6(12): 55-67. Tabula Rasa. 19: 31-58.
• Sánchez-Arteaga, J.M (2007). Delusional rationality: scientific racism in the second half of the 19th century. Journal of the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry. 27: 112-126.
• Martín, J. (2003). Biogenetically "races" do not exist, but racism does, as an ideology. Educational Dialogue Magazine, 4 (9): 1-7.
• Jay, S. (1984). The fake measure of man. Grijalbo: Barcelona.
• Menéndez, E. (1972). Racism, colonialism and scientific violence. Retrieved June 25, 2018. Available in 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_cientify_violencia ._cientify_violencia ._cientify_violencia.