SOCA02H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Symbolic Ethnicity, Ethnic Group, Italian Canadians
Document Summary
150 years ago, dr. samuel morton collected and measured human skulls. He believed that the bigger your brain, the smarter you were. As expected, morton found that the races ranking highest in the social hierarchy had the biggest brains: the order was whites if europe, then asians, then native americans, and lastly blacks. This justified two of the forms of domination and injustice: colonization and slavery: he claimed to show that the system of social inequality had natural and biological roots. He said that differences in power, education, and wealth were due to differences in brain size. Today 3 main issues compromise his findings: morton claimed t be able to distinguish the skulls of white and black people by the shapes of the skull. Since this is not possible, morton"s sorting of skulls in invalid: morton"s skulls formed a small, unrepresentative sample of 72 skulls, morton"s racial samples were incomparable with respect to gender.
