[ #NeuroRacism | Phrenology ]

Phrenology was the study of head shapes and sizes. It was a pseudoscience wildly popular between 1820-1850.

Surprisingly, its beginnings did not completely overlap with race. Instead, it started by looking at criminality

The work that Franz Gall, founder of phrenology, did was more related to the origins of what we now call criminology - as in finding biological explanations for crime and criminality.

Gall believed that changes in the brain manifested as bumps on the skull that can be measured.

What Gall created, George Combe helped spread, even reading the heads of Queen Victoria's kids. At his height, Combe's books were outselling Darwin's.

Cheap and colorful pamphlets also popularized this new science, making it approachable to everyone - including slave owners.

One of the people influenced by Combe was Charles Caldwell, an American slave-owner and physician.

In a time when the debates between slavery and abolitionism were blooming, Caldwell used phrenology to argue that, in his words: "the Africans must have a master."

The racism surrounding phrenology was pervasive however, being used both to justify and argue against slavery.

Caldwell's argument was "based" on Africans having "enlarged organs of Veneration and Cautiousness".

The popular abolitionist argument didn't refute those premises.

The abolitionist movement in the US at the time was complex, to say the least.

Advocates for it included... slave-owners, like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, but also formerly enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass.

It shows that racism has always been contradictory.

Abolitionists also argued that because of those phrenological aspects, the "mild, docile, and tamable Africans", in the word of Combe: "if emancipated and justly dealt with, would not shed blood".

#NeuroRacism was and is present independent of your moral or personal beliefs.

While short-lived, phrenology was highly influential to the young field of neuroscience.

Most of it was disproven, but the notion of the brain being responsible for our behaviors, and the idea of different brain regions being responsible for different functions remains.

Lastly, much of why phrenology became so popular (namely its charm) was the idea of the ability to predict someone's behavior and attitudes based on an "unbiased" piece of evidence.

What are some other examples of “unbiased” reasoning for racist practices in your field?