ABSTRACT
The history of ‘race science’ is, to a large extent, a history of a series of intellectual accommodations to the demands of deeply held convictions that the inequalities between races are ‘natural’. The political expediency of dividing human populations and legitimising the divisions in popular rhetoric and academic treatises continues. In both Britain and the United States people are already writing about the new racism. In Australia after the Second World War, the topic of racism was not a central theme in either historical or sociological writing until the 1970s. In legal usage, then, race currently refers to biological, ethnic, national or cultural distinctions. In Darwin’s scheme, not only did sexual selection seemingly account for the observed social inequality between races and between men and women, clearly evident to a Victorian Englishman, but his theory legitimated and made ‘natural’ both racial and sexual inequality.
