While Christian assholes invoked their disgusting Bible to justify slavery, Charles Darwin spoke out strongly against slavery.

False controversies against Darwin

Darwin and racism

Many anti-evolutionists from Darwin’s lifetime to this day have done all they can to project Darwin in as bad a light as possible. One of the most prominent lies about Darwin is labeling him and his theory as “racist”.

Darwin was born to a wealthy family in England, surrounded by British imperialism and one of the most ethnocentric societies in world history. Almost all of the “scientific” authorities, anthropological colleagues, and religious figures around him trumpeted the dogma that whites were the superior race and blacks the most inferior, a racist ideology that goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Darwin was born into this environment, but he did not share those views. In fact, he was probably the most egalitarian and progressive man in the 19th century. He challenged the anthropological and social status quo and rejected the prevailing prejudices of his time. He also got into an argument with the Beagle’s captain, Robert FitzRoy, when the latter praised slavery while Darwin rejected it. Darwin often praised those he met from so-called primitive cultures, and said that the nicest man he had ever met was a free military man of color stationed in South Africa.^[4] He was not afraid to criticize people of his own ethnicity and frequently criticized his peers’ bigotry against subjugated people. He found every aspect of slavery abominable and wrote extensively against it.^[5] He opposed the genocide of indigenous peoples and opposed the societal favoritism and double standards of Caucasian invaders.^[6] He defined “savages” by their actions, not by their color or race.^[7] In fact, he feared that his theory would be used as an excuse for racialism. Unfortunately, it was.

The Descent of Man may start out sounding like typical English thinking towards different races, but Darwin is merely repeating what he was told by others about different races, and the further one reads into the book, the more obvious an evolution in his thinking can be seen, as Darwin constantly criticizes those racist tendencies and begins to question the idea of multiple races: he says that the label “race” is inadequately defined and not of any actual value regarding human beings, who are not sufficiently distinct to be considered separate species.^[8] While racists today try to claim that there is some kind of division between races (which there are none), Darwin said that our biased judgments against other people are superficial and erroneous, and that no matter how distinct other people may appear to European eyes, there is no consistent demarcation, because some Africans share traits in common with some Caucasians and the same is true of every other group.^[9] He said that every race blends into every other race so smoothly that it is impossible to determine any real division. He even pointed out that noted experts in could not agree how many “races” there were or how to categorize them. Before Darwin was born, the scientist Carl Linnæus (creator of Linnaean taxonomy) categorized humans into 6 different “races,” but Darwin criticized that too. He pointed out that not even the best authorities on the subject could agree on the number of races there were, and that some of his colleagues had proposed as many as 63 races!^[10] Darwin also discarded the idea of a “pure” or “superior” race, arguing that “racial purity” would lead to defects and “superiority” was a variable and determined by the environment (not by some act of will of purity), and since ecosystems frequently change it will therefore drive more variations with populations.

The bottom line is that Darwin was not a racist.