Of course Darwinism can’t be distanced from racism. You just have to read what Darwin actually said, as Michael Flannery quotes, while dealing with a typical attempt to sanitize Darwin’s record:
Historically, Darwin and his cohorts were just as racist and gender biased as Cope or anyone else of their era. As I have pointed out, Darwin was certainly as racist as the notorious species fixist Louis Agassiz. And Darwin’s Bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), was no better, arguing shortly after the American Civil War that blacks were doomed now that they were cut free from the purported protective influences of their owners. Huxley stated boldly that “no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.” In fact, one man did, the Darwinists’ arch enemy Richard Owen (1804-1892). A fascinating examination of this important point is presented in Christopher E. Cosans’ Owen’s Ape & Darwin’s Bulldog…
Writing to the Rev. Charles Kingsley (1819-1879) on February 6, 1862, he stated, “It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.” He voiced the same sentiment years later in a letter to Irish philosopher and political economist William Graham (1839-1911) on July 3, 1881, “Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.”
Michael Flannery, “Distancing Darwin from Racism Is a Fool’s Errand” at Evolution News and Science Today
Next question?
Some of us have pointed this out before: As a theory of human origins, Darwinism requires that someone must be the subhuman and, whaddayaknow, it’s the outsider.
Of course creationists can be racists and often have been. But if you believe that all human beings are descended from a single ancestral couple, that theory does not, in and of itself, provide a basis for racism. If, of course, you believe that humanity in its present form is the outcome of a constant struggle for survival of the fittest (Darwinism) among various protohuman/human groups, then… racism would be an easier temptation.