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News and Views: The Victorian View of Blacks as Savages.
Most readers are familiar with the racial insults contained in the current writings of Dinesh D'Souza, Charles Murray, and Richard Herrnstein. Black people are said to threaten America's culture, civilization, and genes. But there is nothing new here. Let's look at the racial indignities that were heaped on black people by scholars in the nineteenth century.
Human beings for the most part find purpose in what they do. Many times we despise our purposes and try to remove them from our brains, but most often they return. One of the most uneradicable of human purposes is the need to find some group to despise. In the United Kingdom and in the United States, for reasons we don't fully understand, the despised group tends to be black people.
Recently published books such as Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve and Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism did not break new ground in their "scientific" slanders of blacks. Every generation or so it becomes fashionable to mount a new campaign to defame black people. The standard charge has always had its origins in scientific racism; a theory that held that black people are essentially subhuman and biologically inferior to whites in talent and intelligence. During the slave and Reconstruction periods, the purpose of the attacks was often to justify slavery, Jim Crow, and political disenfranchisement. If the black man could be viewed as savage, bestial, subhuman, or chattel, or simply as a playful and ignorant Sambo, slavery or rigid segregation could appear just or at least not unjust.
In recent years the scientific racists encountered difficulty in backing up their biological charges....