History of Racism II of III
- 10 years ago
2. SCIENTIFIC RACISM
The 19th Century use of racial categories as credible scientific concepts is the main focus of this episode, which covers the French aristocrat Count Arthur de Gobineau’s considerable contribution to the history racist ideas.
Gobineau believed that miscegenation would lead ineluctably to the degeneracy of the Aryan race. He described race-mixing as ‘Semiticization’, since he believed that the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East were the product of the regrettable racial admixture between Europeans, ‘Negroes’ and ‘Asiatics’.
He was particularly troubled by this prospect because in his racial schema, Arabs and Jews occupied the very lowest rung of the human evolutionary ladder.
The 19th Century use of racial categories as credible scientific concepts is the main focus of this episode, which covers the French aristocrat Count Arthur de Gobineau’s considerable contribution to the history racist ideas.
Gobineau believed that miscegenation would lead ineluctably to the degeneracy of the Aryan race. He described race-mixing as ‘Semiticization’, since he believed that the peoples of North Africa and the Middle East were the product of the regrettable racial admixture between Europeans, ‘Negroes’ and ‘Asiatics’.
He was particularly troubled by this prospect because in his racial schema, Arabs and Jews occupied the very lowest rung of the human evolutionary ladder.