Scientific racism refers to the phenomenon of “collecting data from anthropology, biology, and psychology to support theories of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ races (Comas. 1961: 303).” One of the ways this was done was through phrenology. “Phrenology was a materialist account of mental processes that reduced psychological categories into physiological categories… [and] proposed that certain regions of the skull were correlated with certain characteristics, which could be discerned by a physical examination of the shape of the skull (Leaney. 2006: 27).”

Scientific racism begins to break down once studied from an objective point of view. Angela Saini, scholar and author of the book “Superior: The Return of Race Science” states that “Individual variation within population groups, overlapping with other population groups, turned out to be so large that the boundaries of race made less and less sense.”¹

The concept of “race as a social construct” has been heavily discussed in sociological and anthropological circles, and this is what that refers to. The lines between races are so blurry, the differences within races are more significant than between different races, and the way we as a society classify race is ever-changing and not backed up by biology. As Joel Z. Garrod states in “A Brave Old World: An Analysis of Scientific Racism and BiDil®“ “The genotypes of ‘White’, ‘Black’, ‘Asians’ are remarkably identical, and there are no more than 0.1% variations in 35000 genes that have been identified so far in the human genome.”²