WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.140 Picture this, it's 1851 down in the American 00:00:03.140 --> 00:00:05.299 South, and there's this prominent physician, 00:00:06.099 --> 00:00:08.960 and he's looking at enslaved people who are risking 00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:12.900 their lives, braving dogs, armed patrols, I mean, 00:00:12.939 --> 00:00:16.500 everything just to escape captivity. And this 00:00:16.500 --> 00:00:18.899 doctor, using the full authority of his medical 00:00:18.899 --> 00:00:21.399 degree, publishes a paper declaring that these 00:00:21.399 --> 00:00:24.359 people are not reacting to horrific oppression. 00:00:25.019 --> 00:00:28.500 Instead, He diagnoses them with a psychiatric 00:00:28.500 --> 00:00:30.899 illness. He literally medicalizes the desire 00:00:30.899 --> 00:00:33.159 for freedom. Exactly. He calls it a biological 00:00:33.159 --> 00:00:35.899 disease that needs to be cured. It is honestly 00:00:35.899 --> 00:00:38.219 one of the most chilling examples in our source 00:00:38.219 --> 00:00:40.979 stack today. That doctor was Samuel Cartwright. 00:00:41.259 --> 00:00:45.359 Right. And he named his fabricated disease drapedomania. 00:00:45.659 --> 00:00:48.020 I mean, he basically took the raw brutality of 00:00:48.020 --> 00:00:50.399 human prejudice and dressed it up in a lab coat. 00:00:50.479 --> 00:00:52.840 He used the supposed objectivity of medicine 00:00:52.840 --> 00:00:56.200 to justify an atrocity. Yes. OK, let's unpack 00:00:56.200 --> 00:00:59.039 this because today our mission on this deep dive 00:00:59.039 --> 00:01:01.920 is to explore a massive, incredibly heavy stack 00:01:01.920 --> 00:01:05.079 of historical and modern sources covering what 00:01:05.079 --> 00:01:07.379 is known as scientific racism. And it is a heavy 00:01:07.379 --> 00:01:10.040 stack. It really is. We're going to look at how 00:01:10.040 --> 00:01:13.079 the objective veneer of science was historically 00:01:13.079 --> 00:01:16.920 hijacked to build artificial human hierarchies. 00:01:17.079 --> 00:01:20.120 And more importantly, how you the person listening 00:01:20.120 --> 00:01:23.099 to this right now, how you can still spot the 00:01:23.099 --> 00:01:26.280 echoes of this pseudoscience today. Because it's 00:01:26.280 --> 00:01:29.420 still out there. Exactly. Whether you are scrolling 00:01:29.420 --> 00:01:31.140 through a news feed, reading a medical journal, 00:01:31.219 --> 00:01:33.099 or just trying to make sense of modern data, 00:01:33.599 --> 00:01:35.760 understanding how statistics and biology can 00:01:35.760 --> 00:01:38.180 be manipulated is what's the ultimate tool for 00:01:38.180 --> 00:01:40.359 critical thinking. Think of science like a mirror. 00:01:40.659 --> 00:01:42.700 Okay, a mirror. Right. We think it reflects objective 00:01:42.700 --> 00:01:46.359 reality, but sometimes it only reflects the biases 00:01:46.359 --> 00:01:49.290 of the person holding it. That is a great way 00:01:49.290 --> 00:01:51.370 to look at it. To set our foundation from the 00:01:51.370 --> 00:01:53.790 sources and, you know, try to visualize this 00:01:53.790 --> 00:01:56.769 against a backdrop of shifting historical texts 00:01:56.769 --> 00:02:00.189 and modern DNA helixes, scientific racism is 00:02:00.189 --> 00:02:02.010 essentially the pseudoscientific belief that 00:02:02.010 --> 00:02:04.209 you can use hard empirical data to prove some 00:02:04.209 --> 00:02:06.569 groups of humans are biologically distinct. Distinct 00:02:06.569 --> 00:02:09.969 and hierarchical, like ranked. Exactly. Ranked 00:02:09.969 --> 00:02:14.349 into taxa. It is taking cultural biases and formalizing 00:02:14.349 --> 00:02:18.159 them into biological taxonomy. Now, Modern scientific 00:02:18.159 --> 00:02:20.759 consensus completely rejects this force like 00:02:20.759 --> 00:02:23.259 the 1950 UNESCO statement formally denounced 00:02:23.259 --> 00:02:26.039 it But we really have to understand from the 00:02:26.039 --> 00:02:28.159 1600s all the way through World War two. This 00:02:28.159 --> 00:02:30.900 wasn't some fringe theory It was the norm. It 00:02:30.900 --> 00:02:34.479 was mainstream heavily funded completely accepted 00:02:34.479 --> 00:02:37.520 science So to understand how data gets manipulated 00:02:37.520 --> 00:02:40.840 today in the 2020s We have to go back to how 00:02:40.840 --> 00:02:43.139 humans first started classifying each other We 00:02:43.139 --> 00:02:44.919 have to look at the Enlightenment right the age 00:02:44.919 --> 00:02:47.729 of reason. Yeah humanity's simply had this desperate 00:02:47.729 --> 00:02:50.849 need to categorize the expanding natural world. 00:02:51.509 --> 00:02:53.569 But they brought all their cultural baggage with 00:02:53.569 --> 00:02:55.310 them right to the microscope. They really did. 00:02:55.409 --> 00:02:57.409 The Enlightenment brought this massive weight 00:02:57.409 --> 00:02:59.810 of scientific classification, but you cannot 00:02:59.810 --> 00:03:02.069 separate the science from the society that's 00:03:02.069 --> 00:03:03.889 funding it. Take François Bernier, for example. 00:03:03.969 --> 00:03:06.729 The French physician. Right. In 1684, he published 00:03:06.729 --> 00:03:08.650 an essay attempting to divide all of humanity 00:03:08.650 --> 00:03:11.550 into four distinct races. Wait, so a French physician 00:03:11.550 --> 00:03:16.889 in the 1600s is just looking at a globe and Deciding 00:03:16.889 --> 00:03:18.969 where the biological lines are drawn? Basically, 00:03:19.150 --> 00:03:20.969 yes. What was he actually basing this on? Did 00:03:20.969 --> 00:03:23.050 he have any sort of empirical metric at all? 00:03:23.370 --> 00:03:25.650 Not really. He was basing it almost entirely 00:03:25.650 --> 00:03:28.849 on geography and his own highly subjective ideas 00:03:28.849 --> 00:03:32.629 of female beauty. Wow. Seriously? Yes. He put 00:03:32.629 --> 00:03:34.849 Europeans in the first race, which he clearly 00:03:34.849 --> 00:03:38.120 viewed as the baseline, you know, the norm. And 00:03:38.120 --> 00:03:41.139 by contrast, he notoriously described the Sami 00:03:41.139 --> 00:03:43.939 people of northern Europe as awful and, quote, 00:03:44.460 --> 00:03:47.120 reminiscent of a bear's face. Reminiscent of 00:03:47.120 --> 00:03:49.479 a bear's face. That is, that's just wild. It 00:03:49.479 --> 00:03:52.060 was purely observational prejudice disguised 00:03:52.060 --> 00:03:54.719 as early taxonomy. He was observing cultural 00:03:54.719 --> 00:03:56.680 and aesthetic differences and just declaring 00:03:56.680 --> 00:03:59.139 them to be deep biological divides. Which brings 00:03:59.139 --> 00:04:01.400 a much bigger name into our source stack, Carl 00:04:01.400 --> 00:04:04.340 Linnaeus. Oh yes, the father of modern taxonomy. 00:04:04.439 --> 00:04:06.300 Right, the guy who gave us the system of naming 00:04:06.300 --> 00:04:09.479 species. that we still use today. Kingdom, phylum, 00:04:09.800 --> 00:04:13.960 class, order. That's the one. In his 1767 edition 00:04:13.960 --> 00:04:17.040 of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus didn't just classify 00:04:17.040 --> 00:04:19.819 plants and animals. He turned his gaze to humans. 00:04:20.279 --> 00:04:24.019 Uh -oh. Yeah. But he didn't stop at categorizing 00:04:24.019 --> 00:04:26.500 physical traits like skin color or geography. 00:04:26.910 --> 00:04:29.629 He assigned highly subjective moral behaviors 00:04:29.629 --> 00:04:32.350 to his categories. Like personality traits? Exactly. 00:04:32.930 --> 00:04:35.970 He claimed Europeaness was gentle, acute, inventive, 00:04:36.149 --> 00:04:39.350 and governed by customs. Meanwhile, Africanus 00:04:39.350 --> 00:04:44.209 was described as sly, lazy, negligent, and governed 00:04:44.209 --> 00:04:47.889 by caprice. That is just... blatant stereotyping. 00:04:48.110 --> 00:04:50.810 He even threw in a category called homomonstrosis 00:04:50.810 --> 00:04:54.149 for mythical creatures and like feral men. Wait, 00:04:54.230 --> 00:04:57.209 so the father of modern taxonomy was just baking 00:04:57.209 --> 00:04:59.949 flat -out behavioral stereotypes into the permanent 00:04:59.949 --> 00:05:02.509 scientific record. Did anyone in the scientific 00:05:02.509 --> 00:05:04.569 community push back on this at the time? I mean, 00:05:04.610 --> 00:05:06.949 someone had to say something. Well, this raises 00:05:06.949 --> 00:05:09.029 an important question, and it's heavily debated 00:05:09.029 --> 00:05:11.829 in our modern sources. OK. Some critics, like 00:05:11.829 --> 00:05:14.769 the scholar Marie Christine Sinca, argue Linnaeus 00:05:14.769 --> 00:05:17.709 was merely Eurocentric. Nearly Eurocentric. Right. 00:05:17.850 --> 00:05:20.170 She suggests his focus was on culture rather 00:05:20.170 --> 00:05:22.629 than inherent biology, noting he didn't even 00:05:22.629 --> 00:05:25.329 use the word race himself. But other historians, 00:05:25.649 --> 00:05:28.470 like Renato Masolini, argue that regardless of 00:05:28.470 --> 00:05:31.810 his exact conscious intent, this white -black 00:05:31.810 --> 00:05:34.810 polarity that Linnaeus codified, it became the 00:05:34.810 --> 00:05:37.689 absolute paradigm for later racist beliefs. Because 00:05:37.689 --> 00:05:40.050 it set the standard. Exactly. He essentially 00:05:40.050 --> 00:05:43.050 built the scaffolding for a biological hierarchy. 00:05:43.370 --> 00:05:45.509 and the lengths people went to justify these 00:05:45.509 --> 00:05:48.189 new categories is just crazy. I mean, looking 00:05:48.189 --> 00:05:51.069 at the stack, our sources mention American founding 00:05:51.069 --> 00:05:53.810 father, Dr. Benjamin Rush. Oh, Dr. Rush, yes. 00:05:53.910 --> 00:05:56.810 He was a highly respected physician, but he genuinely 00:05:56.810 --> 00:05:59.589 believed that black skin was actually a form 00:05:59.589 --> 00:06:02.449 of hereditary leprosy. He called it negroidism. 00:06:02.649 --> 00:06:04.230 Negroidism. He thought it was a curable skin 00:06:04.230 --> 00:06:06.329 disease. And the bizarre thing is, because he 00:06:06.329 --> 00:06:08.930 viewed it as a disease, Rush thought he was actually 00:06:08.930 --> 00:06:12.019 being highly progressive. Wait, what? Progressive 00:06:12.019 --> 00:06:14.399 how? He argued that non -white people shouldn't 00:06:14.399 --> 00:06:16.759 be tyrannized or enslaved because they were simply, 00:06:16.759 --> 00:06:19.660 quote, diseased and could potentially be cured. 00:06:19.839 --> 00:06:22.360 Meaning turned white. Meaning turned white underneath. 00:06:22.699 --> 00:06:25.120 It perfectly illustrates how desperate early 00:06:25.120 --> 00:06:28.240 scientists were to maintain a European biological 00:06:28.240 --> 00:06:31.199 default. That is fascinating. They were trying 00:06:31.199 --> 00:06:34.379 to cram the vast complex reality of human diversity 00:06:34.379 --> 00:06:37.639 into an incredibly narrow biased worldview. So 00:06:37.639 --> 00:06:40.180 once Linnaeus and others built these categorical 00:06:40.180 --> 00:06:44.800 boxes, society needed a way to prove who belonged 00:06:44.800 --> 00:06:47.819 in which box, and more importantly, who was at 00:06:47.819 --> 00:06:49.980 the top. Right, because you can't rank things 00:06:49.980 --> 00:06:53.300 objectively without data. Exactly. That demand 00:06:53.300 --> 00:06:56.439 for proof birthed physical anthropology, and 00:06:56.439 --> 00:06:59.860 specifically, the absolute obsession with measuring 00:06:59.860 --> 00:07:03.220 the unmeasurable. Subjective observation morphed 00:07:03.220 --> 00:07:05.959 into the illusion of hard data through craniometry. 00:07:06.170 --> 00:07:08.370 Measuring skulls. Measuring skulls to determine 00:07:08.370 --> 00:07:11.110 intelligence. We see Peter Kamper's facial angle 00:07:11.110 --> 00:07:13.569 theories, and then in the 19th century, Dr. Samuel 00:07:13.569 --> 00:07:16.620 George Morton He collected skulls from all over 00:07:16.620 --> 00:07:19.259 the world to measure the brain size. Yes. He 00:07:19.259 --> 00:07:21.319 started measuring their interior volume by filling 00:07:21.319 --> 00:07:23.860 them with lead shot or mustard seed, assuming 00:07:23.860 --> 00:07:26.379 that a bigger skull meant a bigger brain, which 00:07:26.379 --> 00:07:28.300 automatically equated to higher intelligence. 00:07:28.600 --> 00:07:30.620 I think we can all see where this is going. It's 00:07:30.620 --> 00:07:32.560 like grading a test where you already decided 00:07:32.560 --> 00:07:34.259 who's going to get an A and who's going to get 00:07:34.259 --> 00:07:36.980 an F before you even look at the answers. That 00:07:36.980 --> 00:07:39.879 is exactly what he did. Morton claimed Caucasian 00:07:39.879 --> 00:07:43.100 brains had the largest volume, averaging 87 cubic 00:07:43.100 --> 00:07:47.139 inches. Native Americans were at 82, and Negroes 00:07:47.139 --> 00:07:50.120 had the smallest at 78 cubic inches. Just assigning 00:07:50.120 --> 00:07:52.600 neat little numbers to it. He used this specific 00:07:52.600 --> 00:07:55.420 numerical data to argue that the races had been 00:07:55.420 --> 00:07:58.000 separate and unequal since the very beginning 00:07:58.000 --> 00:08:00.350 of human history. What's really fascinating to 00:08:00.350 --> 00:08:02.970 me in this stack is how modern scientists look 00:08:02.970 --> 00:08:05.670 back at Morton's numbers today. Oh, the data 00:08:05.670 --> 00:08:08.509 debate. Yeah. Because for a long time, the famous 00:08:08.509 --> 00:08:11.629 evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued 00:08:11.629 --> 00:08:13.910 that Morton deliberately falsified his data. 00:08:14.149 --> 00:08:16.509 Right. Gould claimed Morton subconsciously packed 00:08:16.509 --> 00:08:19.050 the Caucasian skulls tighter with seed to make 00:08:19.050 --> 00:08:21.089 the measure larger. But later, anthropologists 00:08:21.089 --> 00:08:23.649 completely upended that theory. What's fascinating 00:08:23.649 --> 00:08:25.889 here is that anthropologists like Jason Lewis 00:08:25.889 --> 00:08:29.050 and John Michael physically re -measured Morton's 00:08:29.050 --> 00:08:31.509 smell collection. And they found that Morton's 00:08:31.509 --> 00:08:34.649 physical data was actually quite accurate. Really? 00:08:34.889 --> 00:08:36.870 Yes. He didn't physically fudge the numbers. 00:08:37.029 --> 00:08:39.769 The cubic inches were correct. But his conclusions 00:08:39.769 --> 00:08:43.190 were entirely racist and scientifically invalid. 00:08:43.629 --> 00:08:45.789 Wait, how does that work? If the measurements 00:08:45.789 --> 00:08:48.230 were physically accurate, How is the science 00:08:48.230 --> 00:08:51.129 completely wrong? Because modern science demonstrates 00:08:51.129 --> 00:08:54.070 that human variation is continuous, not discrete, 00:08:54.990 --> 00:08:57.389 Morton forced continuous human diversity into 00:08:57.389 --> 00:09:00.090 rigid, artificial categories. Oh, I see. Think 00:09:00.090 --> 00:09:02.610 of human variation like a rainbow. OK. It's a 00:09:02.610 --> 00:09:06.549 continuous fluid spectrum of color. Morton essentially 00:09:06.549 --> 00:09:08.889 walked up to that beautiful, continuous rainbow 00:09:08.889 --> 00:09:12.070 with three buckets of paint, red, blue, and yellow. 00:09:12.659 --> 00:09:15.480 and forced every single subtle shade into one 00:09:15.480 --> 00:09:17.539 of those three buckets. Completely ignoring the 00:09:17.539 --> 00:09:19.940 blending in between. Exactly. His math on how 00:09:19.940 --> 00:09:21.820 much paint was in the bucket was right, but the 00:09:21.820 --> 00:09:23.679 buckets themselves were a total fiction. That 00:09:23.679 --> 00:09:26.039 is the perfect way to visualize it. He decided 00:09:26.039 --> 00:09:28.659 the boxes existed, sorted the skulls into them 00:09:28.659 --> 00:09:31.539 based on his own cultural biases, and then used 00:09:31.539 --> 00:09:33.539 the mathematical averages of those artificial 00:09:33.539 --> 00:09:38.039 boxes to, quote, prove a hierarchy. So the arithmetic 00:09:38.039 --> 00:09:40.809 was flawless. But the biological premise was 00:09:40.809 --> 00:09:43.610 a complete fabrication. And once you have scientific 00:09:43.610 --> 00:09:45.909 proof of a hierarchy from people like Morton, 00:09:46.230 --> 00:09:48.809 you can start medicalizing anything that threatens 00:09:48.809 --> 00:09:52.230 that hierarchy. Which brings us right back to 00:09:52.230 --> 00:09:56.570 our intro. Dr. Cartwright in 1851, diagnosing 00:09:56.570 --> 00:09:59.490 fleeing enslaved people with drapedomania. Cartwright 00:09:59.490 --> 00:10:01.429 used the prevailing science of the day to argue 00:10:01.429 --> 00:10:04.090 that specific groups were biologically designed 00:10:04.090 --> 00:10:07.149 for subservience. Therefore, any resistance to 00:10:07.149 --> 00:10:09.710 that subservience couldn't be a rational human 00:10:09.710 --> 00:10:12.169 desire for freedom. It had to be diagnosed as 00:10:12.169 --> 00:10:14.970 a pathology. Exactly. And his prescribed medical 00:10:14.970 --> 00:10:17.350 treatment for this illness was, quote, proper 00:10:17.350 --> 00:10:20.210 medical advice. Which meant what, exactly? In 00:10:20.210 --> 00:10:22.549 practice, it meant physical abuse, whipping, 00:10:23.009 --> 00:10:25.649 and forced submission. God. So... What does this 00:10:25.649 --> 00:10:28.070 all mean? If science can prove hierarchy through 00:10:28.070 --> 00:10:30.610 skull measurements and diagnose resistance as 00:10:30.610 --> 00:10:33.250 a mental illness, it inevitably becomes a tool 00:10:33.250 --> 00:10:35.970 for state power. It absolutely scales up from 00:10:35.970 --> 00:10:38.590 the plantation to global policy. And we see this 00:10:38.590 --> 00:10:41.429 shift explicitly in the 1920s in the United States 00:10:41.429 --> 00:10:44.870 with the dawn of IQ testing. It becomes a literal 00:10:44.870 --> 00:10:47.659 mechanism for social engineering. Henry Goddard 00:10:47.659 --> 00:10:50.059 started applying early intelligence tests to 00:10:50.059 --> 00:10:52.399 immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. Claiming 00:10:52.399 --> 00:10:55.399 to objectively measure their innate cognitive 00:10:55.399 --> 00:10:57.980 ability. Right. But think about the mechanics 00:10:57.980 --> 00:11:00.899 of this. You have immigrants arriving after a 00:11:00.899 --> 00:11:03.419 grueling multi -week boat ride. They likely don't 00:11:03.419 --> 00:11:06.639 speak English. They are exhausted, scared and 00:11:06.639 --> 00:11:09.840 in a completely foreign environment. Yeah. And 00:11:09.840 --> 00:11:12.740 Goddard hands them a puzzle or a test that relies 00:11:12.740 --> 00:11:16.139 heavily on American cultural context. It wasn't 00:11:16.139 --> 00:11:18.799 testing innate intelligence. It was testing their 00:11:18.799 --> 00:11:21.659 proximity to American culture. Yet based on these 00:11:21.659 --> 00:11:24.379 heavily biased tests, Goddard published data 00:11:24.379 --> 00:11:27.019 claiming that vast majorities of Jewish, Italian 00:11:27.019 --> 00:11:29.899 and Russian immigrants were, quote, feeble minded. 00:11:30.220 --> 00:11:32.919 And this wasn't just an academic exercise filed 00:11:32.919 --> 00:11:35.500 away in a library somewhere. No, this data directly 00:11:35.500 --> 00:11:37.840 influenced lawmakers. It provided the supposedly 00:11:37.840 --> 00:11:39.980 objective foundation for the Immigration Act 00:11:39.980 --> 00:11:43.200 of 1924, which imposed strict racial and national 00:11:43.200 --> 00:11:45.539 quotas to block undesirable people from entering 00:11:45.539 --> 00:11:48.960 the country. The science gave lawmakers the perfect 00:11:48.960 --> 00:11:52.330 cover. It allowed them to say, hey, This isn't 00:11:52.330 --> 00:11:54.929 prejudice. This is public health. We are just 00:11:54.929 --> 00:11:56.970 protecting the nation's intelligence. Exactly. 00:11:57.169 --> 00:12:00.250 And our sources show this exact same weaponization 00:12:00.250 --> 00:12:02.889 happening globally. Look at the origins of apartheid 00:12:02.889 --> 00:12:05.029 in South Africa. Oh, absolutely. The Carnegie 00:12:05.029 --> 00:12:07.429 Commission on the Poor White Problem in South 00:12:07.429 --> 00:12:11.009 Africa published a massive five volume report 00:12:11.009 --> 00:12:14.809 in the early 1930s. And the context here is vital. 00:12:14.960 --> 00:12:17.899 It's extremely vital. The global economic depression 00:12:17.899 --> 00:12:20.960 was hitting South Africa hard, and poor white 00:12:20.960 --> 00:12:23.460 populations were suffering right alongside Black 00:12:23.460 --> 00:12:26.940 Native populations. Which completely broke the 00:12:26.940 --> 00:12:30.100 visual hierarchy. of white supremacy. Yes. If 00:12:30.100 --> 00:12:32.019 white people were intrinsically biologically 00:12:32.019 --> 00:12:34.259 superior, they shouldn't be starving in the same 00:12:34.259 --> 00:12:36.320 slums as the people they were oppressing. It 00:12:36.320 --> 00:12:38.460 caused a massive panic among the ruling class. 00:12:38.679 --> 00:12:41.340 The Carnegie Report explicitly expressed fear 00:12:41.340 --> 00:12:43.399 that poor whites would not be able to resist 00:12:43.399 --> 00:12:45.539 the process of what they called Africanization. 00:12:45.620 --> 00:12:47.740 So they needed a structural way to separate the 00:12:47.740 --> 00:12:50.940 populations. To protect the myth of white superiority. 00:12:51.360 --> 00:12:54.759 This fear -driven pseudoscientific report played 00:12:54.759 --> 00:12:57.320 a key role in providing the intellectual and 00:12:57.320 --> 00:12:59.639 sociological groundwork for establishing the 00:12:59.639 --> 00:13:02.919 brutal legal segregation system of apartheid. 00:13:03.039 --> 00:13:05.539 Which all culminates in eugenics, the incredibly 00:13:05.539 --> 00:13:08.080 dangerous idea that you can selectively breed 00:13:08.080 --> 00:13:11.590 humanity to preserve the superior traits. and 00:13:11.590 --> 00:13:14.269 physically eliminate the inferior ones. You see 00:13:14.269 --> 00:13:16.929 this momentum building with Madison Grant, an 00:13:16.929 --> 00:13:18.909 American eugenicist who wrote The Passing of 00:13:18.909 --> 00:13:22.289 the Great Race in 1916. He championed the preservation 00:13:22.289 --> 00:13:24.809 of the Nordic race. You see in Sweden, too. Yes. 00:13:25.090 --> 00:13:27.889 Sweden opened the world's first government funded 00:13:27.889 --> 00:13:31.529 state institute for racial biology in 1922, aiming 00:13:31.529 --> 00:13:34.070 to cure criminality and alcoholism through racial 00:13:34.070 --> 00:13:36.049 hygiene. And we all know where this ideology 00:13:36.049 --> 00:13:38.830 ultimately leads. Nazi Germany weaponized these 00:13:38.830 --> 00:13:42.009 exact American and European They took the theories 00:13:42.009 --> 00:13:44.230 of eugenics and pushed them to their absolute, 00:13:44.450 --> 00:13:47.409 horrific, logical conclusion. They used these 00:13:47.409 --> 00:13:50.190 models to legally justify compulsory sterilization 00:13:50.190 --> 00:13:52.629 and, ultimately, the Holocaust. Targeting Jewish 00:13:52.629 --> 00:13:55.529 people, the disabled, homosexuals. Anyone the 00:13:55.529 --> 00:13:58.529 state deemed Levinson -Verte's laban life unworthy 00:13:58.529 --> 00:14:01.629 of life. There is a deeply dark irony in the 00:14:01.629 --> 00:14:04.549 sources regarding the Nazis and this supposedly 00:14:04.549 --> 00:14:08.169 objective data. Hitler actually banned IQ testing 00:14:08.169 --> 00:14:11.340 in Germany. He did. He deemed IQ testing to be 00:14:11.340 --> 00:14:13.840 Jewish because the results didn't always align 00:14:13.840 --> 00:14:16.279 with his preconceived racial hierarchies. It 00:14:16.279 --> 00:14:18.620 just proves that the science was always subservient 00:14:18.620 --> 00:14:21.639 to the ideology. The moment the tool didn't perfectly 00:14:21.639 --> 00:14:23.960 validate the prejudice, the tool was discarded. 00:14:24.299 --> 00:14:26.779 Following the horrors of World War II and the 00:14:26.779 --> 00:14:29.320 revelations of the Nuremberg Trials, the global 00:14:29.320 --> 00:14:32.059 scientific community had a massive public reckoning. 00:14:32.299 --> 00:14:34.139 Mainstream science formally denounced scientific 00:14:34.139 --> 00:14:37.320 racism. Right. The 1950 UNESCO statement was 00:14:37.320 --> 00:14:39.980 a vital turning point. It brought together geneticists, 00:14:40.159 --> 00:14:42.879 anthropologists, sociologists to clearly separate 00:14:42.879 --> 00:14:45.919 the biological myth of race from the very real 00:14:45.919 --> 00:14:49.159 social reality of racism. And today, modern genetic 00:14:49.159 --> 00:14:51.879 consensus is crystal clear on this. The 2019 00:14:51.879 --> 00:14:53.929 JANA Declaration, published by the Jur... Armin 00:14:53.929 --> 00:14:56.629 Theological Society definitively states that 00:14:56.629 --> 00:14:58.909 the biological concept of distinct human races 00:14:58.909 --> 00:15:01.629 is simply invalid. They proved through modern 00:15:01.629 --> 00:15:04.529 sequencing that genetic variation is actually 00:15:04.529 --> 00:15:06.990 smaller between human populations than within 00:15:06.990 --> 00:15:09.450 them. Meaning there is more genetic difference 00:15:09.450 --> 00:15:11.809 between two random people living in the same 00:15:11.809 --> 00:15:13.990 town in Germany than there is between the average 00:15:13.990 --> 00:15:16.710 genetic makeup of Europe and Asia. Exactly. The 00:15:16.710 --> 00:15:19.509 categories Linnaeus and Bernier dreamed up simply 00:15:19.509 --> 00:15:24.340 do not exist at a genetic level. If the scientific 00:15:24.340 --> 00:15:28.220 consensus is so definitive, why does our source 00:15:28.220 --> 00:15:30.720 stack include events from the 2020s? Because 00:15:30.720 --> 00:15:33.580 the underlying human desire to justify inequality 00:15:33.580 --> 00:15:36.080 didn't disappear, it just adapted to the times. 00:15:36.240 --> 00:15:39.000 It put on a modern lab coat. Yes. We are seeing 00:15:39.000 --> 00:15:41.740 a modern fringe movement attempting to resurrect 00:15:41.740 --> 00:15:44.620 these hierarchical ideas using manipulated statistics 00:15:44.620 --> 00:15:47.639 and genomic vocabulary. Like Arthur Jensen or 00:15:47.639 --> 00:15:49.779 Richard Lin, who were heavily critiqued in our 00:15:49.779 --> 00:15:52.549 sources. Lin actually published papers trying 00:15:52.549 --> 00:15:55.409 to claim that a nation's GDP is biologically 00:15:55.409 --> 00:15:58.009 determined by its national average IQ. He even 00:15:58.009 --> 00:16:00.009 tried to tie intelligence to the proportion of 00:16:00.009 --> 00:16:03.370 Caucasian genes and African Americans. But mainstream 00:16:03.370 --> 00:16:06.230 scientists point out that Lin's methodology is 00:16:06.230 --> 00:16:08.950 deeply flawed. He routinely commits one of the 00:16:08.950 --> 00:16:12.149 cardinal sins of data analysis. Confusing correlation 00:16:12.149 --> 00:16:15.230 with causation. Exactly. He attributes complex 00:16:15.230 --> 00:16:18.970 societal outcomes solely to genetics, completely 00:16:18.970 --> 00:16:21.899 ignoring mass - of social, economic, historical, 00:16:22.100 --> 00:16:24.179 and environmental variables. Now, it's fascinating 00:16:24.179 --> 00:16:26.740 to see how this historical debate bleeds right 00:16:26.740 --> 00:16:29.879 into modern politics. Looking at the stack of 00:16:29.879 --> 00:16:32.639 sources provided to us, we see conflicting views 00:16:32.639 --> 00:16:35.240 playing out in real time. Very much so. And as 00:16:35.240 --> 00:16:37.419 a quick reminder to you listening, we explicitly 00:16:37.419 --> 00:16:40.960 do not take sides on this show. We strictly impartially 00:16:40.960 --> 00:16:43.639 report what is in the source material, even when 00:16:43.639 --> 00:16:45.440 it's politically charged. Right, just presenting 00:16:45.440 --> 00:16:48.279 the text. Exactly. So for example, the sources 00:16:48.279 --> 00:16:52.159 note a March 27, 2025 White House executive order. 00:16:52.480 --> 00:16:55.019 It characterized the Smithsonian exhibit on African 00:16:55.019 --> 00:16:58.259 -American art as divisive, specifically objecting 00:16:58.259 --> 00:17:01.159 to the exhibit's presentation of race as a social 00:17:01.159 --> 00:17:04.549 construct rather than a biological reality. And 00:17:04.549 --> 00:17:06.529 on the other side of that debate, in our sources, 00:17:06.769 --> 00:17:09.210 we have scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr. He 00:17:09.210 --> 00:17:11.890 points out that human genetic diversity actually 00:17:11.890 --> 00:17:15.410 unifies us because, quote, we are all mixed. 00:17:16.089 --> 00:17:18.569 It really highlights how the definition of race 00:17:18.569 --> 00:17:21.829 remains a highly charged, active debate in the 00:17:21.829 --> 00:17:24.289 public sphere today, even with the genetic consensus 00:17:24.289 --> 00:17:26.980 settled. It illustrates that the tension between 00:17:26.980 --> 00:17:30.039 cultural identity and biological science is still 00:17:30.039 --> 00:17:32.880 incredibly potent. But the sources point to something 00:17:32.880 --> 00:17:34.980 even more concerning than political debates. 00:17:35.500 --> 00:17:38.640 The active modern manipulation of hard scientific 00:17:38.640 --> 00:17:41.460 data by fringe groups. Yes. Here's where it gets 00:17:41.460 --> 00:17:44.440 really interesting. We are looking at a major 00:17:44.440 --> 00:17:48.220 New York Times report from January 24th, 2026. 00:17:48.839 --> 00:17:51.599 This is an historical theory. This is a modern 00:17:51.599 --> 00:17:53.819 data breach. The report revealed that a group 00:17:53.819 --> 00:17:56.240 of fringe researchers, including Brian Pesta 00:17:56.240 --> 00:17:58.799 and Emile Kierkegaard, who, by the way, were 00:17:58.799 --> 00:18:00.839 funded in part by the Pioneer Fund. Which is 00:18:00.839 --> 00:18:03.079 an organization with a long history of supporting 00:18:03.079 --> 00:18:06.000 scientific racism. Right. They used outright 00:18:06.000 --> 00:18:08.759 deception to access protected data from the National 00:18:08.759 --> 00:18:11.019 Institutes of Health. They infiltrated the adolescent 00:18:11.019 --> 00:18:13.119 brain cognitive development study. How did they 00:18:13.119 --> 00:18:15.410 actually pull that off? They applied for access 00:18:15.410 --> 00:18:18.130 by claiming they were conducting standard, benign 00:18:18.130 --> 00:18:20.730 sociological research. But once they got their 00:18:20.730 --> 00:18:23.609 hands on that protected genetic and personal 00:18:23.609 --> 00:18:27.650 data, they ran deeply flawed statistical regressions. 00:18:27.930 --> 00:18:30.769 Flawed how? They deliberately isolated race as 00:18:30.769 --> 00:18:33.750 a variable while minimizing or stripping out 00:18:33.750 --> 00:18:36.769 socioeconomic status, school quality, and environmental 00:18:36.769 --> 00:18:39.690 factors. They used this manipulated analysis 00:18:39.690 --> 00:18:43.170 to publish at least 16 papers purporting to find 00:18:43.170 --> 00:18:45.799 biological evidence for differences in intelligence 00:18:45.799 --> 00:18:48.460 between races. So they were essentially suggesting 00:18:48.460 --> 00:18:51.220 that black people earn less because they are 00:18:51.220 --> 00:18:54.460 biologically less smart rather than acknowledging 00:18:54.460 --> 00:18:57.220 systemic economic barriers. Yes. It's like money 00:18:57.220 --> 00:18:58.960 laundering but for data. Oh that's a good way 00:18:58.960 --> 00:19:01.200 to put it. Yeah you take biased counterfeit science 00:19:01.200 --> 00:19:03.339 and you pass it through a clean highly respected 00:19:03.339 --> 00:19:06.019 institution like the NIH. Once it comes out the 00:19:06.019 --> 00:19:09.019 other side the public sees the NIH Association 00:19:09.019 --> 00:19:11.660 and accepts the counterfeit data as valid currency. 00:19:11.759 --> 00:19:14.009 Even though mainstream Geneticists immediately 00:19:14.009 --> 00:19:17.009 rejected their methodology as biased and unscientific. 00:19:17.170 --> 00:19:19.250 But the damage was already done. By laundering 00:19:19.250 --> 00:19:21.410 their racist theories through a prominent data 00:19:21.410 --> 00:19:24.170 set, they gave their work an air of analytical 00:19:24.170 --> 00:19:28.009 rigor. It sparked a massive wave of online disinformation. 00:19:28.490 --> 00:19:30.710 People shared these papers on social media claiming, 00:19:30.710 --> 00:19:33.390 look, the NIH data proves it. It is the exact 00:19:33.390 --> 00:19:36.289 same playbook. as Samuel Morton filling skulls 00:19:36.289 --> 00:19:38.569 with mustard seed just updated for the age of 00:19:38.569 --> 00:19:40.650 big data and algorithmic sequencing. It really 00:19:40.650 --> 00:19:42.710 is. Which brings us to the core of this deep 00:19:42.710 --> 00:19:45.509 dive. For you listening, we've traveled a massive 00:19:45.509 --> 00:19:48.309 distance today. We went from Francois Bernier 00:19:48.309 --> 00:19:50.529 looking at a map and deciding who was beautiful 00:19:50.529 --> 00:19:55.150 in the 1600s to Linnaeus inventing behavioral 00:19:55.150 --> 00:19:57.890 categories. We saw Dr. Cartwright diagnosing 00:19:57.890 --> 00:20:00.109 runaway enslaved people with a mental illness. 00:20:00.289 --> 00:20:02.869 And Henry Gadard designing puzzles to keep immigrants 00:20:02.869 --> 00:20:05.690 out of America. We've seen how this illusion 00:20:05.690 --> 00:20:08.329 of hard data fed state -sponsored eugenics all 00:20:08.329 --> 00:20:11.089 the way to modern fringe groups laundering manipulated 00:20:11.089 --> 00:20:15.130 statistics through the NIH in 2026. If we connect 00:20:15.130 --> 00:20:17.210 this to the bigger picture, the absolute key 00:20:17.210 --> 00:20:19.470 takeaway from our sources is that data never 00:20:19.470 --> 00:20:22.289 ever exists in a vacuum. As the scholar Jonathan 00:20:22.289 --> 00:20:24.930 Marks notes in the text, science doesn't become 00:20:24.930 --> 00:20:28.309 racist on its own. It is racist ideas propagated 00:20:28.309 --> 00:20:32.130 by scientists that make science racist. We have 00:20:32.130 --> 00:20:34.289 to relentlessly interrogate not just the numbers 00:20:34.289 --> 00:20:37.250 on the page, but the assumptions, the funding, 00:20:37.329 --> 00:20:39.869 and the cultural biases of the people designing 00:20:39.869 --> 00:20:42.190 the studies. Because the legacy of this isn't 00:20:42.190 --> 00:20:44.589 just an academic history lesson. I mean, Harriet 00:20:44.589 --> 00:20:47.069 Washington's phenomenal book, Medical Apartheid, 00:20:47.230 --> 00:20:49.990 which anchors much of the stack, shows how this 00:20:49.990 --> 00:20:52.650 history of medical racism directly impacts the 00:20:52.650 --> 00:20:55.230 massive lack of trust in the medical system today. 00:20:55.390 --> 00:20:58.009 Where marginalized people were viewed as biologically 00:20:58.009 --> 00:21:00.910 different and exploited for experiments. Exactly. 00:21:01.150 --> 00:21:03.289 When a community has historically been diagnosed 00:21:03.289 --> 00:21:06.430 with fake diseases to keep them enslaved or sterilized 00:21:06.430 --> 00:21:09.269 by state biology institutes, that generational 00:21:09.269 --> 00:21:11.809 memory doesn't just vanish. The past is still 00:21:11.809 --> 00:21:14.069 in the exam room with us today. The categories 00:21:14.069 --> 00:21:16.450 we create and the data we manipulate to justify 00:21:16.450 --> 00:21:19.450 them have very real generational and often lethal 00:21:19.450 --> 00:21:22.210 consequences. It demands constant vigilance. 00:21:22.470 --> 00:21:24.109 And that leads me to a final thought I want to 00:21:24.109 --> 00:21:26.589 leave you with today. Something to really mull 00:21:26.589 --> 00:21:30.490 over as you consume data this week. Today, we 00:21:30.490 --> 00:21:32.809 are outsourcing more and more of our decision 00:21:32.809 --> 00:21:35.970 making, our sorting, and our categorization to 00:21:35.970 --> 00:21:37.890 artificial intelligence and machine learning 00:21:37.890 --> 00:21:40.349 algorithms. We use them for everything. Hiring, 00:21:40.730 --> 00:21:43.910 medical diagnoses, loan approvals, criminal justice 00:21:43.910 --> 00:21:46.390 risk assessments. We are training machines to 00:21:46.390 --> 00:21:48.990 look at the massive chaotic world and categorize 00:21:48.990 --> 00:21:51.250 it for us. Assuming the machine will finally 00:21:51.250 --> 00:21:53.150 give us that perfectly clean objective mirror. 00:21:53.210 --> 00:21:56.329 Right. But if the greatest, most celebrated scientific 00:21:56.329 --> 00:21:59.589 minds of the past could unknowingly bake their 00:21:59.589 --> 00:22:02.529 deepest, most horrific prejudices into what they 00:22:02.529 --> 00:22:05.769 completely believed was objective data, what 00:22:05.769 --> 00:22:08.089 biases are we currently programming into the 00:22:08.089 --> 00:22:10.789 AI systems of our future, without even realizing 00:22:10.789 --> 00:22:13.690 it? We think we're building an impartial intelligence, 00:22:13.710 --> 00:22:15.750 but if we aren't careful about the data we feed 00:22:15.750 --> 00:22:18.369 it, we might just be automating the exact same 00:22:18.369 --> 00:22:20.109 distorted hierarchies we've been fighting for 00:22:20.109 --> 00:22:20.509 centuries.