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Newswise When it comes to race, too many people still mistake bigotry for science, argues Washington University in St. Louis anthropologist Robert W. Sussman, PhD, in his new book, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea.

The book offers readers an opportunity to better understand where modern prejudices come from, said Sussman, professor of physical anthropology in Arts & Sciences. It shows where racist ideas first originated and how they developed through the ages. It illustrates how these racist myths of the past are just as old and outdated as those about the earth being flat.

A noted authority on the eugenics movement, Sussman has written extensively on anthropologys role in building the scientific consensus that perceived racial distinctions among humans have no biological basis.

His latest book, published recently by Harvard University Press, traces the early origins of racist theories, moving systematically through the Bible-based arguments that fueled the Spanish Inquisition, the teachings of botanist Carl Linnaeus and philosophies of Immanuel Kant. It reveals how 16th-century theories of racial degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism and slavery.

These theories, Sussman writes, later fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified certain races, especially fair-skinned Aryans, as superior to others.

These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding and human sterilization policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide.

Sussman, who has taught courses about race and racism for many years, describes the book as an attempt to bring together in one place all the most important developments in the history of racism.

It includes all the aspects of the history of race, including where it started, where it is today and the people who fought against it and why they fought against it, especially right after the eugenics movement and the Nazi movement in Germany, he said.

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Book Traces History of Racism, Race-Based Psuedo-Science