While emphasizing Victorian aspects of race and racism, Dr. Patrick Brantlinger of Indiana University outlines the history of these concepts from the Renaissance to the present. He examines supposedly scientific developments from the Enlightenment through Darwin, from early racial typologies through the emergence of archaeology and anthropology to the eugenics movement. He stresses that the most recent scientific findings, derived in part from the Genome Project, show that racial distinctions based in biology are either nonexistent or trivial. Yet racism has been a major ideological factor in the development of the modern European empires and their aftermath, down to the present.

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