https://www.jstor.org/stable/20098724Many dismiss scientific racism as blatant lies, and while I can under that point since more often than not such faulty science is used to reify and justify inequality, I do think there’s a place for racialism (i.e., the acknowledgment that humanity is sub-divided into different biological taxa known as races) in communist thought as opposed to racism (the notion that biological racial differences justifies oppression).
Indeed, in Soviet history “scientific racism” as a discipline was widely adopted in the USSR, with Craniometry being widely used as a way to measure differences between races, and the Linnean system of racial classification was en vogue across Soviet history even long after Sweden abandoned it.
And this legacy remains in the form of Russian and Chinese anthropologists being more likely to believe in the concept of races as being rooted in biology compared to their western counterparts:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15666627?dopt=AbstractNow: Yes, race is a social construct, but only insofar that “subspecies” is as shown by how taxonomists in the field of zoology can’t agree on which subspecies should be counted as a separate species or not (e.g., the Dingo), considering how both race and subspecies are ultimately based on genetics, which is a material reality.
One of the first and most important who tried to deny the existence of human races on a genetic level is certainly Richard Lewontin.
In 1972, following his studies, Lewontin stated that "about 85% of human genetic variability is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% is due to differences between different populations or ethnic groups". With this he comes to the following conclusions:
Racial classification has no genetic or taxonomic significance
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