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nowhere, and racism existed everywhere. Dubow writes about the scientific history of South African racial theories: |
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The typological method is at the heart of physical anthropology. It was based on empiricist principles of classification taxonomy originally developed in the natural sciences. The conception of race as ''type "encouraged a belief in the existence of ideal categories and stressed diversity and difference over similarity and convergence. This was overlaid by binary-based notions of superiority and inferiority, progress and degeneration. One of the many problems associated with the typological method was its fissiparous character. The search for pure racial types could not easily be reconciled with the evident fact that, in practice, only hybrids existed. New fossil discoveries led to a proliferation of variant racial types and ever more theories were developed to explain their affinities. (Dubow 1995, 114115) |
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Such difficulties are always present when trying to place people in racial categories (see López 1996, Robbin 1998, Harding 1993). As Donna Haraway says of racial taxonomy in the United States: |
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In these taxonomies, which are, after all, little machines for classifying and separating categories, the entity that always eluded the classifier was simple: race itself. The pure Type, which animated dreams, sciences, and terrors, kept slipping through, and endlessly multiplying, all the typological taxonomies. The rational classifying activity masked a wrenching and denied history. As racial anxieties ran riot through the sober prose of categorical bioscience, the taxonomies could neither pinpoint nor contain their terrible discursive product. (1997, 234) |
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Although a vague conception of eugenics and other forms of scientific racism are woven throughout the debates about apartheid, this lack of a scientific definition of race appears repeatedly. Dr. M. Shapiro, at a meeting of the Medico-legal Society in Johannesburg in 1952, wryly noted that: |
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Where for purposes of legal classification, the question arises whether a person is White, Coloured, Negroid or Asiatic, the policeman and the tram conductor, unencumbered by biological lore, can make an assessment with greater conviction, and certainly with fewer reservations, than can the geneticist or anthropologist. Indeed, the law being traditionally intolerant of uncertainty in matters of definition, the evidence of the scientist on the subject of race can only prove an embarrassment to the Courts if not to himself. (quoted in Suzman 1960, 353) |
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In a legal article reviewing race classification in 1960, Suzman concludes, "As the present study has revealed, the absence of uniformity of definition flows primarily from the absence of any uniform or |
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