Early American Race Summary

There is no doubt that early American race scientists had challenged prejudices of their time yet concurrently created rather racist facts about the human race. Horsman listed some of these prejudices in the reading. The first prejudices that the early race scientists challenged against was going against the Christian monogenetic view that all people came from the same people, Adam and Eve. Although Christians at the time didn’t understand why there were such “savages” in other lands who didn’t look or act like them, it was hard to go against the ingrained idea that humanity was created by the same pair of people. Later on, the idea that men had the ability to change and improve was another idea that race scientists had to battle against. Lastly, even the simple thought that men had the right for freedom and equality …show more content…
This creates hostility to the opposing view and the “science” behind it.
In every science, there are special and important debates within that certain branch of specialization. Racial science was no different. One the first important debates within racial science were at the origin of the races. Monogenists believed that all humans came from the same pair of people, Adam and Eve while polygenists disagreed, saying that humans of different races came from a different origin. Polygentists believed at heart that there was no possible way that the decent white people and the savages of other nations couldn’t be from the same ancestors, according to Horsman. Monogenists could agree that there were human differences but that was only because of environmental factors, not what we could call “biological” or “ancestral.” Another important debate came later on was when the question was posed that