I know the two quotes seem a bit contradictory but as often is the case, you need to look at the full context:Key phrase: "as professor Schaafhausen has remarked". Darwin was describing the views his contemporaries held so using that quote to accuse him of being a racist would be like calling a historian a Nazi for describing how Hitler viewed Jews. Now Darwin also repeatedly talked about the "savage races of Africa" but you have to remember that this was written in a different time; and no I'm not talking about how what views are considered acceptable changed, the meaning of words can change over time. Savage didn't mean brutish it meant uncultivated and a race could mean any grouping of people (in the Civil War, people talked about the white and black races but they also talked about the northern and southern races). So when Darwin talks about the "savage races of Africa" he meant hunter-gatherer societies of Africa. But nonetheless, Eugenics and scientific racism was part of history (even though it wasn't an idea that Darwin endorsed). You may or may not have heard the story of Oto Benga and the Human zoos that portrayed black people as "less evolved" and more like apes. And there were many (faulty AF) skull measurements studies to reinforce this view. But here's the thing, as much as we may cringe at pictures of white, black and chimp skull/facial diagrams from the Victorian Era, "scientific racism" was only ever a Podunk justification given for racist policies. In the Colonial Period, slavery was justified with the notion that humans weren't created equally and now people try to explain away racial disparities by blaming it on "black culture", and instead of the eugenics chart they post pictures of hoodlums and use bogus studies to say black poverty/crime is the result of individual choices. But while the justification has changed with time, the motivation was always greed.
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While what happened to Oto Benga was deplorable, compared to what happened in his homeland of the Congo, his plight was a drop in an ocean of blood. King Leopold II wanted to get as much profit as he could from the rubber trees so he worked half the population of the Congo to death. What motivated this crime was greed, not a belief that Africans were "less evolved humans". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4TPwGfnpc4&t=622s
By today’s standards yes, back in his day no, he was even an abolitionist. People thought races were real things until 1936 when Huxley discovered that there is no genetic basis for them. Darwin couldn’t possibly have known
I don't think believing that races are genetically distinct from one another makes someone a "racist". I mean if some preliminary genetic screening showed a gene was more prevalent in African Americans than the rest of the population but a later analysis showed this wasn't the case, if before the re-analysis, someone thought that gene was more prevalent in African Americans, that wouldn't make them "racist".
believing they are real is in fact racist. Race as we know it was invented by Portuguese slave traders to justify slavery to fellow Europeans. Before that, race was more about where you were born than the skin color.
OK, if believing the races are genetically distinct makes one a racist then Darwin was racist but that wouldn't necessarily make him a "bigoted racist".
