Quote:
Originally Posted by pendragginp
You can't blame slavery on Darwin's work - slavery existed waaay before that. So did persecution of any group who might be somehow 'different' from the dominant group; Jews, gypsies, seventh grade kids who don't follow the herd....
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I expect the book will point out that such nastiness was given justification by 'scientific' theories on how the whites were somehow more evolved and thus worthy of being in charge. There was a lot of claptrap devoted to proving 'scientifically' that 'we' were superior to 'they' (the we being WASP men the they being everyone else.
Poke around the history of eugenics for a bit and you'll find plenty of evidence of people attempting to give evolution a push by eliminating the 'unfit' from the gene pool (and giving 'scientific' reasons why such is desirable). Of course nothing made a person more 'unfit' then by being in a group the eugenicist didn't like ('undeserving' poor, 'mentally ill', gypsy, ......).
Nature was all, nurture nothing for such minds and anything that could be seized and manipulated to 'scientifically' prove their views and justify mistreatment t was so used (see I.Q. test history of) but I should stop ranting.