Another indicator of the central role beliefs in racial difference play in racism is the historical connection between the extremity of racist ideology and the severity of discrimination. In what Omi and Winant (1994) identify as the scientific racial formation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, renowned intellectuals provided a litany of statements on essential difference between racial groups, especially blacks and whites. For example, “the negro race is a species of men as different from ours . . . as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds” (Voltaire, quoted in Gossett 1965:45) and “there is nothing remotely humanized in the Negro’s character” (Hegel, quoted in Fanon 1967:116). These ideas were expressed at a time when slavery was common and slaves’ well-being, indeed, their very lives, counted for little in the eyes of whites. More recently, data show that declines in overt racism from the 1970s to the 1990s were accompanied by declines in attribution of racial socioeconomic status differences to innate factors (Kluegel 1990; Schuman et al. 1997).
