2.1.3

Scientific Racism

Test yourself

Scientific Racism

White Americans used pseudo-science to justify racism and segregation.

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The 'good, old-time negro’

  • These laws represented the social racism that existed in America.
  • American society created a label for black people to make their racist behaviour more acceptable.
  • The ‘good, old-time negro’ was a stereotype created to serve white people.
    • This stereotype suggested that black people were happy to act as servants for white people.
    • The stereotype suggested that black was an inferior race, one that was created to serve white men (i.e. cook, clean, mind children and chauffer) and that they should be kept at arm’s length.
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The Negro Beast, Charles Carroll

  • Charles Carroll wrote his racial theory The Negro Beast, in 1900.
  • This was a pseudo-scientific race theory based on complete racism.
  • He suggested that black people were evolutionarily closer to apes than they were to white Americans.
  • Harvard University showed a monkey, a black man and then a white man in a display about the theory of evolution during the 20th Century.
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Evaluation

  • The restrictions and barriers placed on the black voters by racist white people were very successful for the white Southern politicians.
  • By 1900 only 3% of Southern African Americans could vote.

Jump to other topics

1‘Free at Last’ 1865-77

2The Triumph of ‘Jim Crow’ 1883-c1890

3The New Deal and Race Relations, 1933–41

4‘I have a dream’, 1954–68

5Obama's Campaign for the Presidency, 2004–09

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