Evolutionary racists claimed that white people had bigger brains than darker-skinned people

Orin Starn, professor of cultural anthropology,
Duke University, North Carolina, USA

Brains were very much the preoccupation and obsession of many scientists and especially anthropologists in the 1800s, and you had back then this notion that—to put it crudely—that white people had bigger brains than people from the Third World, than brown people, and that bigger brains meant that they were more intelligent and that that could somehow explain and justify European colonialism and dominance over the rest of the world. So what you had back then in the 1800s was scientific racism.

Reference

1. “All in the mind”, ABC Radio National, 21 December 2008, <www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2008/2435743.htm#transcript>.