has evolved and transformed throughout time. In the early 1830s, Britain invaded Tasmanian territory off the coast of Australia, for these people who were in isolation for 10,000 years. The British saw these dark people as “uncivilized” as they lacked religion, and then began to execute them by the masses. By the time Governor Arthur was pressured to stop these killings, George Robinson, a missionary, was hired to help relocate these people who were left, to a different island and assimilate them into British culture, after the original plan to capture these people alive, failed. In 1840, Thomas Carlyle claimed that there was a “necessity for inequality, which justified blaming black people for failing sugar plantations, who were rejecting
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In specific instances like the Tasmanian people who were murdered, scholars may wonder why they did not just “simply” revolt and fight back in order to claim their native territory, when in fact, they may have had no concept of what was actually happening to them as they had only ever lived among themselves. It was not the color of their skin that prompted this violence either, but merely because these people lacked the white peoples’ idea of “civilization” and “culture,” mostly because it differed so much from their own. They realized that in order to gain power, this meant to oppress others, especially those who were vulnerable and less able to defend themselves. The use of scientific racism was ultimately a way to somehow legitimize these skewed European ideals, even if this meant positing faulty science as legitimate science. The German eugenics movement and its ideals were ultimately inspired by what the Americans were doing to its people, as they shared the same goal to attain an Arian race. As also discussed in class, people took the ideas of Charles Darwin and problematically applied them directly to humans while at the same time radicalizing, and ultimately transforming his original ideas from The Origin of Species. However, one of the first most popular books that inspired the phenomenon of classifying people, came from Carl Linnaeus’s Systema
In specific instances like the Tasmanian people who were murdered, scholars may wonder why they did not just “simply” revolt and fight back in order to claim their native territory, when in fact, they may have had no concept of what was actually happening to them as they had only ever lived among themselves. It was not the color of their skin that prompted this violence either, but merely because these people lacked the white peoples’ idea of “civilization” and “culture,” mostly because it differed so much from their own. They realized that in order to gain power, this meant to oppress others, especially those who were vulnerable and less able to defend themselves. The use of scientific racism was ultimately a way to somehow legitimize these skewed European ideals, even if this meant positing faulty science as legitimate science. The German eugenics movement and its ideals were ultimately inspired by what the Americans were doing to its people, as they shared the same goal to attain an Arian race. As also discussed in class, people took the ideas of Charles Darwin and problematically applied them directly to humans while at the same time radicalizing, and ultimately transforming his original ideas from The Origin of Species. However, one of the first most popular books that inspired the phenomenon of classifying people, came from Carl Linnaeus’s Systema