What is the relationship between the theory of evolution and racism?

[T_aquaticus]

@EricMH

It is at least not the chattel slavery practiced in America, which is essentially a Darwinian view that Africans were a form of animal lower than Europeans, and could be thus treated like animals for breeding.

That was never a Darwinian view.

[T_aquaticus]

@EricMH

I’m pointing out evolution at best tells us nothing about what promotes survival, and at worst promotes immorality on the pretext of survival.

There is no “you ought to act this way” in the theory of evolution.

[Thanh_C (Thanh Chung)]

@Christy

RIght. Usually this would entail having the societal power or status to act on them without the threat of reprisal.

I’m still trying to figure things out. I remember you helped me figure out the difference between ethnicity and race, but I found the distinction between ethnocentrism and racism harder to pinpoint when I discussed this with other people in the past.

Nevertheless, I still characterize the views of my father as racist despite him not being a member of a politically dominant ethnic or racial group in America. (Edit: actually, he does have more power and a higher status, not much, but he enjoys that as a citizen living near an ethnically homogeneous local community that exercise more power than many socially isolated black communities). He is a Christian and does not believe in evolution, but he thinks of black people as innately lazy.

@EricMH Although Social Darwinism and the theory of evolution made their way to the intelligentsia of my father’s home country through French colonial rule, the nationalist intellectuals did not understand evolution. They just shoehorned the theory into their nationalist ideology to help them imagine a nation free of foreign influence. In any case, individuals like my father do not use real science to inform his preconceived racist views. My father, of course, is not an intellectual from colonial times; he is just a layperson, but he shares a view widespread to his immigrant generation that his ethnic or racial group is innately better, more hardworking than other ethnic or racial groups and use whatever idea to justify this belief.