On the intellectual front, she corrected the erroneous notions that Africans did not have recordable history, projected by a chain of European generations who even manipulated scientific evidence to substantiate their racist claim. by Toyin Falola.

While it is true that the white race exhibits some qualities of superiority over any other, we are to remember that there are wide differences in the same Caucasian (Semitic and Aryan) family; and also we should remember that some of the qualities which have given this branch of the human family its preeminence in the world are not such as can be pointed to as in all respects admirable...</br>The secret of the greater intelligence and aptitude of the Caucasian undoubtedly in great measure is to be attributed to the commingling of blood amongst its various branches; and this was evidently forced in large measure by circumstances under divine control.

...Luiz Gama was keen to demonstrate, through his example, the fallacy of the pseudoscientific beliefs in vogue in a slaveholding society convinced of the intellectual incapacity and moral inferiority of Africans and their descendants, the basis of the racist ideology that still persists among us.”

Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have meaning only to a numbskull.

It is in their ambience that racialism really emerged both as an ideology and a sociological theory. Scholars from Sir William Jones by way of the brothers Grimm and Max Muller produced not merely the genealogy of the Indo-European languages but the atmosphere in which Aryan language could be identified with an Aryan culture and even an Aryan race in whose names crimes could be committed ... much mid-nineteenth century philological speculation is already tinged with racial ideology.

It was the White Race who produced men like Columbus who crossed the unknown Atlantic; men like Magellan who first circumnavigated the globe; men like Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Bernini, Rubens, Raphael and thousands of other geniuses who created beautiful and exquisite productions in the fields of sculpture and painting; geniuses like Beethoven, Bach, Wagner and Verdi who created beautiful music; men like James Watt who invented the steam engine; men like Daimler who invented and built the reciprocating internal combustion engine; production geniuses like Henry Ford, inventors like Thomas Edison; such a prodigal genius as Nikola Tesla in the field of physics and electricity; literary geniuses like Shakespeare, Goethe and thousands of others, untold geniuses in the fields of mathematics, in the fields of chemistry and physics.

Darwin’s transcendantly democratic insight that all humans are descended from the same non-human ancestors, that we are all members of one family, is inevitably distorted when viewed with the impaired vision of a civilization permeated by racism. White supremacists seized on the notion that people with high abundances of melanin in their skin must be closer to our primate relatives than bleached people. Opponents of bigotry, perhaps fearing that there might be a grain of truth in this nonsense, were just as happy not to dwell on our relatedness to the apes. But both points of view are located on the same continuum: the selective application of the primate connection to the veldt and the ghetto, but never, ever, perish the thought, to the boardroom or the military academy or, God forbid, to the Senate chamber or the House of Lords, to Buckingham Palace or Pennsylvania Avenue. This is where the racism comes in, not in the inescapable recognition that, for better or worse, we humans are just a small twig on the vast and many-branched tree of life.

The old-style contemptuous attitude towards 'natives' has been much weakened in England, and various pseudo-scientific theories emphasising the superiority of the white race have been abandoned. Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalised by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the belief that their sex lives are superior, and there is a large underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes.

I am a racist and a colonialist.

First, African historians have the uphill task of eradicating the prejudices and misconceptions about the African past which have been perpetuated by many western writers, such as G. W. H. Hegel, Reginald Coupland, C. G. Seligman, Hugh Trevor Roper, and others who have claimed that Africa and Africans had no past to speak of, and that the only viable African history is the history of the invaders of Africa, notably, the Europeans.

The world's most prominent human population geneticists have publicly criticized the people who claim genetic research supports the notion of biological races, and the unfounded inferences derived from that notion.

If in these essays I criticise the Afro-European (or Euroafrican) choice of our linguistic praxis, it is not to take away from the talent and the genius of those who have written in English, French or Portuguese. On the contrary I am lamenting a neo-colonial situation which has meant the European bourgeoisie once again stealing our talents and geniuses as they have stolen our economies. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europe stole art treasures from Africa to decorate their houses and museums; in the twentieth century Europe is stealing the treasures of the mind to enrich their languages and cultures. Africa needs back its economy, its politics, its culture, its languages and all its patriotic writers.”

It is important to recognize that racism was in origin a scientific doctrine. Whenever a scientific doctrine is discarded, as witness the idea of the acquired inheritance of environmental influences, the old scientific doctrine, as it lingers on in popular thought, is blamed on religion or popular superstition!

Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote of the "racial trash" - the groups who would necessarily be supplanted as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism.