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How researchers debunked ‘race science’: ‘a triumph of scientific self-correction’
David Silverberg is a journalist based in Toronto, Canada.
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Civil-rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois.Credit: Bettmann/Getty
The Ends of Race: The Rise and Fall of a Scientific Myth Geoffrey Galt Harpham Princeton University Press (2026)
Two stories about the history of science around race emerge from the nineteenth century. Each tugs at our attention in a different way. Humanities scholar Geoffrey Galt Harpham chronicles them in a book with enthralling detail.
The Ends of Race tracks the decades spent by scientists and scholars intending to prove that human races were distinct, using methods such as measuring skulls and facial forms to set them in biologically fixed categories and develop taxonomies to rank humanity.
Why Africans should be telling the story of human origins
The first set of protagonists, including US anthropologist Josiah Nott and French anthropologist Julien-Joseph Virey, likened Black people’s skulls to ape skulls with evidence as threadbare as a spiderweb, intentionally pushing Black people down the ladder of desirable cultures. It was a myth born to provide cover for racism, Harpham writes.
The second story starts in 1900, during a tide-turning moment for science. Scholars began publishing studies countering the oppressive theories of race scientists. Ultimately, the discrediting of the concept of biological race emerged as a triumph of scientific self-correction.
These stories serve as a potent reminder of not just how science can get it so wrong, but how flawed research can eventually be quashed by sensible approaches. In the case of race, inaccuracies were sustained solely by political and social ends.