One of those anti-Cultural Marxism
folks who are always claiming that their racism is justified by science just sent me a Darwin quote to shut me down. This one:
There are a few problems here, though.
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Darwin is not our god-king. We recognize that he got quite a few things wrong, and also that his attitudes towards other races were a bit on the patronizing side. Perhaps an authoritarian thinks that citing an authority is persuasive, but we expect a little more.
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Anyone who is at all familiar with Darwin’s writings would immediately recognize that there’s no way Darwin would have written that. Something’s fishy. This is the Darwin who wrote “I was told before leaving England, that after living in slave countries: all my options would be altered; the only alteration I am aware of is forming a much higher estimate of the Negros character”? He could be accused of condescension, fair enough, but not that kind of ignorance of African history.
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Most definitively, Glenn Branch reports on the actual source of that quote. It’s not from Darwin at all. It’s from a notorious racist novel and play, The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a maliciously misattributed by a guy named John Huppenthal, who was a Republican politician who was in the habit of spreading lies under various pseudonyms. I expect he’ll be joining the Trump administration any day now.
The bottom line: anyone who promotes that bogus quote is ignorant of how science works, hasn’t read a lick of Darwin, and is spreading a lie.