Frederick Douglass et le racisme scientifique

Les revues et journaux américains nous offrent beaux portraits de ce géant de l'histoire américaine qu'est Frederick Douglass. Pour ce deux centième anniversaire du grand penseur et activistem le New York Times pointe vers volet trop peu souvent abordé, ses pensées sur l'évolution scientifique de son époque et les retombées potentielles sur la question raciale.

 "Ethnology was not embraced by only proslavery Southerners. Its most important theorists lived in the North: one, Louis Agassiz, taught at Harvard; the other, Samuel George Morton, was president of one of the nation’s leading scientific societies, in Philadelphia. Agassiz and Morton rejected the 18th-century view of race, which held that all human beings descended from a single pair and that physical differences emerged because of changes in the natural environment. Instead, they contended that black and white people were created separately and that black people were inferior, a theory called polygenism. As Northerners, Agassiz and Morton went out of their way to say that polygenism in no way justified slavery. But they did not have to: Southern scientists eagerly used it to condone slavery, and even white Northerners opposed to slavery found it helpful. Some used it to promote Northern segregation, others to argue for emancipation coupled with colonization — removing black Americans once they were free."

  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/opinion/frederick-douglasss-scientific-racism.html