was common during the New Imperialism period (c. 1880s-1914) where it was used in justifying White European imperialism, and it culminated in the period of 1920 to the end of World War II when it was finally discredited. Since the later 20th century, scientific racism as been criticized as obsolete and has historically been used to support or validate racist world-views, based upon belief in the existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races.
After the end of the Second World War (1939-45) and the occurrence of the Holocaust, scientific racism in theory and action was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO’s antiracist statement “The Race Question” (1950): “The biological fact of race and the myth of ‘race should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of ‘race’ has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering.” Today, perceived scientific racism is sometimes labeled as a psuedoscience.
The term “scientific racism” is pejorative as applied to modern theories, as in The Bell Curve(1994), which investigated racial differences in IQ, concluding that genetics explained at least part of the IQ differences between races. Critics argue that such works motivated by racist presumptions unsupported by available evidence. Publications such as the Mankind Quarterly, founded by explicitly “race-conscious” publications, have been accused of scientific racism for publishing articles on controversial interpretations of human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, language, mythology, archaeology, and race subjects. The pejorative label, “scientific racism”, criticizes studies claiming to establish a connection between, for example, race and intelligence, and argues that it promotes the idea of “superior” and “inferior” human races.
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