The Victorians: Empire and Race - Professor Richard Evans

[@arrystophanes7909]

Nice & balanced. Well done.

[@MuSiC1879]

Brilliant!

[@RonJohn63]

Intelligence *is* hereditary. We just can't tease out how much of a person's ability comes from native intelligence and how much from social factors.

[@jimmyjohnston8287]

BUT RACE IS A MYTH.

[@johnries5593]

@@jimmyjohnston8287 Maybe. Maybe not. But what evidence is there that one race is "inherently inferior" to another; or even if such is the case, that the vast majority of individuals of one race are less intelligent or moral than the vast majority of individuals of another? It seems to me that the primary fallacy of racism is that generalizations necessarily apply to all members of the groups concerned; and the most important and least utilized weapon against it is the treatment of people as individuals instead of as members of groups. The latter is, of course, much easier if one regularly associates with persons not of one's own "tribe", which is why racists are usually eager to impose and maintain segregation ("fraternization with the enemy" being the most effective known means of turning enemies into friends).

[@JC-ip7vx]

Yurigan

[@jimmyjohnston8287]

THE 'MISSIONARIES' WERE SPIES.

[@johnries5593]

Really? Spies for whom? The governments of the countries from which they came? What evidence is there for that? In reality, missionaries on the ground were the people most likely to associate with the locals, which made then the very Europeans most likely to see them as individual human beings instead of as abstractions.

[@jimmyjohnston8287]

Nonsense.