THE HISTORY OF A PERNICIOUS MYTH

Abstract

The paper represents a brief review of the history of key pseudoscientific ideas of race which emerged as a result of observing indigenous peoples of the non-European world from a European point of view. By relying on some of the most significant recent studies on the subject, mainly on Robert Wald Sussman’s The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea, the paper focuses exclusively on the history of “scientific” racism and not on the history of racism per se. As stressed by a great number of authors, far from an immutable scientific definition, race was an ideological construct which went through various metamorphoses, hence the modern notion of race (viewed from a long-term historical perspective) is relatively a recent one. In addition, the paper shows that the categorization of humans into distinct races was crucial in legitimising colonialism, exploitation, and genocide over indigenous peoples. The basis of this notion had begun to crumble when certain social scientists started to express doubt in the plausibility of received ideas on innate superiority of white man and innate inferiority of other races, until eventually the international scientific community reached a consensus that race does not represent a scientific category but a social myth.