Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 8: The Invention of Race
Chapter 8 turns to science, the secular authority that manufactured race as an ancient hierarchy dressed up as objective fact—yet also the force that dismantled it, as the genome revealed nothing was ever there. It traces this arc from Linnaeus and Blumenbach through Morton's skulls, Galton's eugenics, and Tuskegee, to reckonings still owed, like the race correction only removed from kidney medicine in 2021. The episode closes by turning to the people this science ranked lowest, asking what is now theirs to refuse.
With Chisom Udeze, Solo
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Show Notes
In Chapter 8 of the series, Chisom turns to the secular machinery that took over the work, science, and the lie it was used to build, the invention of race. The claim is that power took the authority of science and manufactured race, to give an ancient hierarchy the one disguise almost impossible to argue with, the look of objective fact. And the proof that the crime was in the wielding and not the method is that science is also what destroyed the lie, the genome showing there was never anything there. It traces the invention from Linnaeus and Blumenbach to Morton’s skulls and Sarah Baartman, the apparatus from Galton’s eugenics and Buck v. Bell to the Scandinavian sterilisations, Sims, Tuskegee, and Henrietta Lacks. It holds it against the series definition of white terrorism as terror laundered into truth, and weighs the counterweight that keeps it honest, as well as the UNESCO statement and the Human Genome Project that took the lie apart. It names the reckoning still owed, the race correction stripped from kidney medicine only in 2021 and the maternal mortality gap across the United States and the United Kingdom, and closes by turning the Three Clarities on the people the science was built to rank lowest, the African placed at the very bottom, and what is now theirs to refuse.