This chapter is about the origins of anti-Black racism in the United States. It describes two separate but related processes. The first process involves historical events, of which slavery is the most important. In addition to systemic exploitation and degradation of enslaved people, slavery produced beliefs that enslaved people were inferior human beings. Reinforcing these beliefs was scientific racism – supposedly scientific theories that purported to prove the innate inferiority of Black people. Even after slavery ended, economic competition, racist laws, and social norms created social and economic disadvantages for Black people. The second process involves the ways humans think about the people they encounter. Humans place themselves and other people in social groups largely based on physical characteristics, particularly those that society considers to be important. Perceived race is a major determinant of how people socially categorize others, which forms the psychological foundation for racial biases at both the conscious and nonconscious levels. Thus, even in the absence of malevolent intent, it is likely that people will develop negative racial beliefs and feelings. These biases lead to the tendency of White Americans to justify the disadvantages experienced by Black Americans by attributing them to inherent defects in Black people.

In the following chapters, I analyse several attempts to interrupt the abyssal nature of the modern state emerging from my previous research on sociology of law. I try to identify the reasons why most of such attempts failed. In this chapter, I analyse some of the most salient features of the state and the legal system in Mozambique proposing the concept of heterogeneous state to highlight the breakdown of the modern equation between the unity of the state and the unity of its legal and administrative operation. The centrality of legal pluralism is analysed in light of an empirical research focused on community courts and traditional authorities. I use the concept of legal hybridisation with the purpose of showing the porosity of the boundaries of the different legal orders and cultures in Mozambique and the deep cross-fertilisations or cross-contaminations among them. Special attention is given to the multicultural plurality resulting from the interaction between modern law and traditional law, the latter conceived of as an alternative modernity.

Writers in Latin America’s Black press frequently publicized and denounced particularly egregious examples of discrimination or racism, including many that involved painful accusations having to do with pernicious stereotypes about Black sexuality. In so doing, they responded to claims by Latin American politicians and intellectuals that racism was mild or non-existent in their countries, and that to speak about racism was itself racist, and would have the effect of dividing the national community. The rhetorical strategies writers in the Black press adopted included barely contained expressions of outrage, skillful deployment of irony, careful efforts at debunking, and, quite frequently, with expressions of agreement with the premise that racism was inconsistent with the local political culture. Authors who wrote about racism consistently presented the United States as a yardstick against which the existence or severity of racism could be measured, or as a source for the importation and imposition of racism that was at odds with local values and tradition. Finally, writers discussed and debated the mechanisms that should be employed to combat racism.

During President Barack Obama’s second term, White medical students and residents at a prestigious public university participated in a research study exploring beliefs associated with racial bias in pain management, an area with well-documented racial disparities in clinical care. These highly educated doctors in training completed a questionnaire asking the extent to which they thought that fifteen factual assertions about biological differences between Blacks and Whites were true or untrue. They also read two mock medical cases about patients (one Black and one White) with a painful condition (kidney stone or ankle fracture), rated how much pain they believed the patients were in, and made recommendations for treating that pain.1

The antebellum era saw an epochal shift in politics: nature transformed into a key site of the political. No longer seen as a refuge from human concerns, biological existence itself became a key new resource for conceptualizing human difference and an administrative target of political power. This essay reveals sentimental literature to march in step with this shift. This mode overwhelmingly associated with the domestic realm and even the trite and saccharine nonetheless reveals an emergent biopolitics attuned to disciplining the individual’s nature and conceiving of humanity as a population whose biological quality could be optimized. An ideology that sutured literature and science together in an era in which divisions between them were just beginning to form, sentimentalism helped move politics into the flesh.

Visions of landownership in America were a key pull factor, associated with equality and social mobility, for Scandinavians who arrived in the United States with ideas of nonwhites shaped by scientific racism.

This chapter analyzes the representation of emotional difference in scientific racism during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. It examines the conceptualization of the “passions” in biological, geographical, and historical determinism, while also paying close attention to the implications of emotional discourse in eugenics.

This essay explores Frederick Douglass’s lifelong engagement with science and technology. In line with other historians, it argues that while Douglass mounted a decades-long critique of scientific racism, he often reified negative racial stereotypes when repurposing racial science for integrationist ends. The essay also highlights Douglass’s emphasis on the liberatory potential of new technologies like steamboats, the telegraph, and photography. In an age enthralled with science and technology, Douglass framed technology’s emancipatory potential as an antidote to antiblack scientific racism. In doing so, he refused to allow scientific knowledge, vis-à-vis scientific racism, to be viewed primarily as a tool for black oppression and instead cast science as a source of black liberation.

Chapter 3 investigates the fundamental role that ideas about racial and cultural difference play in the development episteme. The emerging discipline of physical anthropology in the nineteenth century challenged the notion in Darwin’s evolutionary theory that all human beings are part of the same species. Combined with social Darwinist ideas of the time, this set the stage for racialist discourses that linger in the development discourse. Social Darwinism also fed into the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century, creating new theories of race that pathologized blackness. This racialist thinking viewed Africans and people of African descent as biologically different from whites and in need of evolutionary intervention. Positive eugenicists advocated social welfare to “improve” Africans because they believed environmental factors affected their ability to “evolve” – or in twentieth-first-century terms, “modernize.” Evolutionary humanist theories based in ideas of cultural inequality emerged in the post–World War II era, but these also drew on social Darwinist ideas of race that viewed people of European descent as the evolutionary standard to which all races should strive. This eugenic history of early development policies has largely been forgotten but the rhetoric on racial difference, now masked as “culture,” has stubbornly endured.