Racial essentialism proffers that there is an unchanging essence to any given race , and , as with gender essentialism , this core is often reduced to biology . The origin of racial essentialism , while traceable to the Aristotelian concept of biological essences , is found in the early modern period of European philosophy , anthropology , ethnology , and the practice of racial classification . Its heyday coincided with the pseudo-science of phrenology , the eugenics movement , and a resulting ideology of Social Darwinism . Racial essentialism can be defined as follows :
There are human races ; each race is distinct from all other races in important ways ; members of each distinct race have either a general trait that causes all of their other racial characteristics or a set of racial traits that is the “ essence ” of their racial identities . Racial essences may be limited to physical traits , or , as prevalent over much of modern western intellectual history , include cultural , moral , and aesthetic traits . Furthermore , racial essentialism can be understood as a type of thinking about human difference that labels people in ways that apply to whole persons . For instance , while shortness or thinness are traits understood to co-exist alongside other traits , an essentialist view of a white , black , or Asian person categorizes the entire human being .
The culmination of the early modern expression of racial essentialism comes from Immanuel Kant , who wrote , “ The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling . Mr . Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents […] So fundamental is the difference [ between Negroes and Whites ] and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color .”
Social Darwinism built on essentialist notions by proposing a biological explanation of fitness for the social and economic success of some races and the unfitness of others . Social Darwinism dismissed governmental intervention into the economy in the form of wealth redistribution and economic regulation as unjustified meddling with the laws of nature . The eugenics movement promoted the advancement of racial purity and the active elimination of heritable unfit traits among unfit races . Gregor Mendel ’ s work on genetics found renewed interest in the early twentieth century , and inferences were made by scientists that psychological traits , such as imbecility , feeblemindedness , or criminality , were heritable . Sterilization laws , including a Virginia statute for the sterilization of inmates of state institutions deemed to have heritable insanity or imbecility , made manifest this program , wherein Oliver Wendell Holmes , Jr . cast his infamous Supreme Court dictum , “ three generations of imbeciles are enough .” Eugenics made its most devastating mark in the Nazi Final Solution and the Holocaust .
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