What is social darwinism and how was it used to justify racism?

The notions worked on by Darwin ended up not being restricted to the field of biological sciences. Social thinkers began to transfer the concepts of evolution and adaptation to the understanding of civilizations and other social practices. From then on, the so-called "social Darwinism" was born developing the idea that some societies and civilizations were endowed with values that placed them in a better condition than the others.

This statement ends up suggesting that the culture and technology of Europeans were living proof that their members occupied the top of civilization and human evolution. In contrast, people from other regions (such as Africa and Asia) did not share the same capabilities and, for this reason, would be in a situation inferior to or closer to primitive societies.

The dissemination of these theories served as a support base for the great capitalist powers to promote neocolonialism in the Afro-Asian space. In short, the occupation of these places was seen as an improvement, an opportunity to remove those societies from their "primitive" state. On the other hand, we observe that social Darwinism ended up inspiring nationalist movements, which elaborated a whole justification capable of conferring the superiority of a people or nation.

In fact, social Darwinism has created methods of understanding culture steeped in misunderstandings and prejudices. In fact, when talking about evolution, Darwin did not work with a theory linked to the binary clash between superiority and inferiority. Being a dynamic experience, Darwinian evolution believed that the characteristics that determined the "superiority" of a species could be of no use in other likely environments.

With that, we can conclude that African and Asian societies have never necessarily needed the values and inventions offered by the Western world. This, of course, does not mean to say that the contact between these cultures was disastrous or marked only by negative developments. However, the impositions of "superior" Europe to these "inferior" peoples ended up following a series of serious problems of order, political, social and economic.