kb/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-racism-1.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Anti-racism	2/5	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-racism	reference	science, encyclopedia	2026-05-05T14:56:21.521108+00:00	kb-cron

Karl Marx was supportive of the Union during the American Civil War and advocated more radical abolitionist measures with his Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Lincoln would in return commend the International Working Men's Association for their support and declared that the defeat of the South would be a victory for all of humanity. The Russian Revolution was perceived as a rupture with imperialism for various civil rights and decolonization struggles and providing a space for oppressed groups across the world. This was given further credence with the Soviet Union supporting many anti-colonial third world movements with financial funds against European colonial powers.

In his work, The Socialist Revolution and the Rights of Nation to Self-Determinism, Vladimir Lenin wrote that socialism would enforce the complete equality of all nations and "give effect to the right of oppressed nations to self-determination". Lenin would make anti-imperialism a tenet of Marxist ideology and coordinate revolutions through the Comintern. Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky had advocated for national self-determination for the black population in South Africa. In response to the programmatic document of the South African Left Opposition, he wrote in 1935:

"We must accept decisively and without any reservation the complete and unconditional right of the blacks to independence. Only on the basis of a mutual struggle against the domination of the white exploiters can the solidarity of black and white toilers be cultivated and strengthened". Through the 1930s, the first viable black trade unions in Transvaal, South Africa were established by Trotskyists. Modern left-wing commentators have argued that capitalism promotes racism alongside culture wars over issues such as immigration and representation of ethnic minorities whilst refusing to address economic inequalities. Socialist groups have also been closely aligned with a number of anti-racist organizations such as Love Music Hate Racism, Stand Up to Racism, Anti-Nazi League and Unite Against Fascism. A number of socialist activists and organisations have linked reparations for slavery and colonisation with a wider set of anti-capitalist demands to reconfigure the world economy. In this view, a transition to a world socialist economy would redress reparations and upskill the quality of education, healthcare and living standards of marginalised communities and working classes.

=== Science ===

Friedrich Tiedemann was one of the first people to scientifically contest racism. In 1836, using craniometric and brain measurements (taken by him from Europeans and black people from different parts of the world), he refuted the belief of many contemporary naturalists and anatomists that black people have smaller brains and are thus intellectually inferior to white people, saying it was scientifically unfounded and based merely on the prejudiced opinions of travelers and explorers. The evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin wrote in 1871 that ‘[i]t may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant’ and that ‘[a]lthough the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole structure be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points.’ German ethnographer Adolf Bastian promoted the idea known as "psychic unity of mankind", the belief in a universal mental framework present in all humans regardless of race. Rudolf Virchow, an early biological anthropologist criticized Ernst Haeckel's classification of humanity into "higher and lower races". The two authors influenced American anthropologist Franz Boas who promoted the idea that differences in behavior between human populations are purely cultural rather than determined by biological differences. Later anthropologists like Ashley Montague, Ruth Benedict, Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski, Pierre Clastres, and Claude Lévi-Strauss continued to focus on culture and reject racial models of differences in human behavior. The Jena Declaration, published in 2019 by the German Zoological Society, rejects the idea of human "races" and distances itself from the racial theories of Ernst Haeckel and other 20th century scientists. It claims that genetic variation between human populations is smaller than within them, demonstrating that the biological concept of "races" is invalid. The statement highlights that there are no specific genes or genetic markers that match with conventional racial categorizations. It also indicates that the idea of "races" is based on racism rather than any scientific factuality.

=== Interwar period: Racial Equality Proposal ===