How did social darwinism cause racist ideas?
At the historical moment when social darwinism comes around, there is concurrently a movement in western europe and the united states to recognize the primacy of importance and merit of science in general (even if some of the methods were rather shoddy science). Likewise at the same time there were numerous incidents occuring in areas of the colonized world that were in some cases frightening and in other cases forced the colonizers to justify why they were doing what they were doing. As people started to try to apply portions of darwins theory to social life in general (as social sciences tried to model the natural sciences very closely at their inception) people saw a “natural link” between the success of some groups of people and their race. It was a case of right time right theory to develop social darwinism as a justification of racist practices and ideals, along with the heavy influence it had in the eugenics movement.
