Thread by @thiagoarzua

"You should stick to the science"

Aight, here's a thread about the ways neuroscience was used to justify blatant racism.

References at the end.
#BlackLivesMatter

Scientific racism is basically as old as what we now call science.

From the Enlightenment on, there was a big push to understand what race was. Somehow, almost all those early scientists agreed that a "white race" was "superior".

Here's some of them, see if you notice anything.

As the role of the brain in human behavior became clear, scientific racism spilled into the newborn area of neuroscience.

That likely started with craniometry, measurements of the skull, which quickly turned to phrenology, the idea that head shapes can predict mental traits.

Their main idea was that you could gauge the racial intellectual ability by measuring the volume of their skull.

Most famously, Samuel Morton claimed that Caucasians had the largest skull capacities (shockingly). His research was highly biased, but unfortunately influential.

Alongside, phrenology was gaining popularity. Like most pseudoscience, phrenology was built around
oversimplifications and misinterpretations of science.

While it did help move some aspects of neuroscience forward, it was also used extensively to justify slavery and misogyny.

Those early examples of scientific racism paved the way for much of the eugenics movement in the 20th century.

Eugenics itself was broader than neuroscience, but intelligence tests and an obsession with mentally "strong" played a huge part in racist policies enacted before WW2.

Intelligence tests and their biases deserve a whole other discussion, but keep in mind the notion that one number could describe something as complex as human intelligence was already contested at the time (~ 1910s).

But that didn't stop racism.

Lead by Henry Goddard and Lewis Terman, two prominent eugenicists, the US adapted and adopted the first versions of IQ tests, firstly created in France.

Based on those tests, and combating what they called "feeble-mindedness", eugenicists pushed laws for forced sterilization.

It is estimated that over 60,000 people, most of them minority women, in the US alone went through state-sponsored forced sterilization.

The SCOTUS ruling that allowed this (Buck v. Bell) has never been expressly overturned.

Even after WW2, there's still a whole lot of racism that goes into certain neuroscience topics, especially when discussing intelligence.

Pseudoscientific books like A Troublesome Inheritance (2014) and The Bell Curve (1994) still reflect racist and eugenic views to this day.

As we get better at examining the brain in detail, there will likely be more misinterpretations and misuses of research for racist reasons.

That's why it is so vital to fight for inclusion, in an actual meaningful way.

Science is not apolitical, and it'll never be.

References: docs.google.com/document/d/1VH…