Chapter 2 examines how white people justified their reluctance to extend civil rights to Black people by using racial science, political rhetoric, journalism, fiction, and folklore. Enslavement legally ended after the Civil War, but opponents of racial equality used varied means to deny formerly enslaved people equal rights.

Racial Science and Scientific Racism

This section focuses on racial science as a justification for enslavement. Before the Civil War, white scientists grappled with the origins of the races and what caused Africans to be dark skinned. Some held that the races shared a common origin (monogenesis), while others believed that distinct races existed from the start (polygenesis). Religious adherents of monogenesis argued that all humans descended from a white Adam and Eve, and that Black people were degenerations of the original archetype. Some believed that Black people descended from Cain, while others held that they descended from Canaan, both of whom had been cursed. The theory of monogenesis coexisted with polygenesis, which turned to science to answer long-standing questions about race. The scientific explanations for the different races were both explicitly and implicitly racist.