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

Science does not only describe reality. There is a risk that it can be used as a form of power.

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

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 take place in which 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 each other.

In this article we will a brief review of the concept of scientific racismunderstood 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 traversed 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.

• Related article, "Stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination: why should we avoid prejudging?"

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 South Africa, and we forget or even deny racial processes in other places, for example, in Latin America, in some parts of Europe or in ourselves. Not only are such processes denied, but also the historical and socio-cultural elements that have caused them to emerge are also concealed..

Consequently, the causes that have really 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 historical look at the different social, political and social transformations that have the different social, political and economic transformationsIf we take a look at the history of racism, 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 way to delimit the function and the parts of a whole; and that has been established on the basis of concrete trajectories.

In the social structure and in interpersonal relations

As a structural phenomenon, racism translates into forms of social and cultural relations, mediated by discrimination and subordination of some over others, based on a supposedly fixed difference in possibilities and opportunities for Biological or sociocultural reasons of the subordinated group itself. Differences that also articulate and reproduce stereotypes, not only of race, but also 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 those who we have been taught 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 certain framework of identification and relationships.

Where does it come from? Alteration and colonialism

Racialized groups are often instrumentalized for the benefit of those who defend differences from the point of view of supposed inferiority-superiority, and in this sense, they are stripped of their condition of "person" and understood in terms of alienation.

Underlying all this is a fundamental belief and practice: the existence of a unity (in short, the adult-white-Western man) from which "other" ways of life are valued and even "channeled".

This process is known as "alterization" and consists of 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". For this very 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 particular modes of production.

Thus, in the background of racism we can find the expansion of the cosmovision and the "western ways of life", where forms of production are established and legitimized.where fundamentally racist forms of contact are established and legitimized. This being so, racism is something that has been part, not only of the history of our societies, but also 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 been gradually placed in the background of many theories, as well as in the background of different forms of identification and relationship.

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

In this context, the research that emerged in the 19th century was especially important and marked the scientific production in biology and history as scientific disciplines. The latter was the result of the rise of evolutionary theories, in which 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 others. This also validates the principle of natural selection applied to human beings, together with the idea that there is a permanent competition for survival among them. a permanent competition for survival.

A series of supposed demonstrations of the existence of racial hierarchies within the human species is then deployed; demonstrations that soon become established in the social imaginary, both at the micro and macro-political levels. That is to say that not only does it have an impact on how we think of "ourselves" on a daily basis, how we see "others" and what ways of life are "desirable", but also on how we think of ourselves, how we see "others" and what ways of life are "desirable". but they have also become visible in the wars of colonial expansion, where the extermination of the "other" is justified.where the extermination of the lowest links in the hierarchy is justified.

Not only that, but the scientific confirmation of inferiority by race ended up having a direct impact on the ways of constructing and imparting 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 IQ construct, understood as a number capable of linearly classifying people, whose basis is mainly genetic and immutable.

Among other things, this had repercussions in the reduction of possibilities of social participation and in inequality of opportunities for those who are located outside the average. Class and gender biases were also made invisible.

This was so because the Western white subject was taken as a model under arguments of heritability. Many studies showed that, for example, the black population supposedly had a 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 specific socio-political context were omitted, and therefore, the differences are not addressed as a structural problem, 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 a practice of "knowledge", but also of "power", which means that it has direct effects on that which it studies and validates..

This 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 in everyday life, 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 extermination occurred from one geopolitically European group to another geopolitically European group, on the basis of biological superiority-inferiority justifications..

However, even though many scientists made it known that the theories were strongly marked by racial bias, in many cases there was no possibility of stopping the relations of violence that were being legitimized. This is because everyday life often escapes science, and the political value of research results that question racist postulates has fallen short.and the political value of the results of research questioning 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 planning and techniques in which scientific activity has not had a minor participation.

Bibliographical references

• Grosfoguel, R. (2013). Racism/epistemic sexism, westernized universities and the four genocides/epistemicides of the long sixteenth century.
• Sánchez-Arteaga, J.M., Sepúlveda, C. and El-Hani, C. (2013). Scientific racism, alterization processes and science education. International Journal of Educational Research. 6(12): 55-67. Tabula Rasa. 19: 31-58.
• Sánchez-Arteaga, J.M (2007). Delusional rationality: scientific racism in the second half of the nineteenth 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. 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. Retrieved June 25, 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.