Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 8: The Invention of Race

I also want to say where I stand here.

You know, the hierarchy that this man built around race did not place my people somewhere in the comfortable middle.

It placed Africans and Black people at the very bottom by design.

And that is not a historical curiosity to me.

It is the water I have swum in my entire life.

and it is also the most uncomfortable destination of this episode which i will get to by the end but first i want to talk about the invention race feels like one of the oldest facts in the world like something humanity has always known and that feeling is the thing this episode has to take from you because it's not true The idea that humanity divides into a small number of biological races, ranked from highest to lowest, is not ancient.

Older hatreds existed and older suspicions of the stranger, but the claim that the ranking was biology, fixed in the blood and the skull and passed down like a height, is about 300 years old.

It has an author, or rather, a succession of them, and they worked in the most respectable institutions of their day and they called what they were doing science it began as taxonomy the harmless looking work of sorting the natural world into categories in 1735 the swedish botanist carly nails the man who gave the system for naming species that we still use placed human beings into his great catalogue of nature and divided us into four kinds by continent and by color.

And he did not stop at describing our bodies.

In the expanded 10th edition of 1758, he assigned each kind a character.

European he called governed by laws, the African governed by caprice.

And in that small move from describing a body to ranking a soul, the machinery was born.

By the end of that century, the German anatomist Johann Blumeberg had refined the scheme into five races and given the one he placed at the top a name he coined for the purpose, Caucasian.

After a mountain range whose people he considered the most beautiful, arranging the others as a descent away from that ideal, the hierarchy now had its shape, whites at the summit, Everyone else ranged below.

What he did not have yet was data, the appearance of hard measurements that turns an opinion into a fact.

And in the 19th century, an American physician named Samuel Merton set out to supply it.

He collected human skulls from across the world, more than a thousand of them, and filled them with seeds and then with lead shots to measure the space inside.

And he announced that the races ranked exactly as the hierarchy had always said.

Europeans with the largest brains, Africans with the smallest, the rest arranged more or less in between.

his was considered exemplary science in its day careful quantitative objective it was also built backwards we know from his own letters that he chaired the case for white supremacy before his calls had finished telling him anything and whatever the truth of his individual measurements which scholars still argue over the enterprise was never a search it was a confirmation it He had the conclusion and he went looking for the bones to essentially carry the conclusion that he'd made.

And the proving was done on the living, not only on the dead.

In 1810, a young QQ woman from the Eastern Cape, remembered now as Sarah Bartman, was taken to Europe and exhibited in London and then Paris as the Houghton Toad Venus.

Showed half-naked to paying crowds, as a specimen of a lower order of human.

And when she died in 1815, the celebrated French anatomist Georges Cuvier dissected her and used her body to argue the African's place near the bottom of his scale.

Her preserved remains were kept on show in Paris Museum into the 1970s and were not returned to South Africa for burial.