#lombroso radicalised me fr

[bigsnorp]

More about phrenology because im in the last year of my criminology degree and it needs to get used somehow!

phrenology is absolutely a major tool in the antisemite’s armoury. but i think it’s important to understand how it is applied to other forms of bigotry, and how it is used as a way to scientifically legitimise bigotry

one of the so-called “fathers of criminology” is this asshole called cesare lombroso. he wrote a little bitch book called The Criminal Man (but in italian) detailing his experiments in prison populations in the 1800s, and he found certain physical traits which he claimed constituted a biological criminal profile. it includes:

“thick lips”

“protruding ears”

“hawk-like nose”

“small, wandering eyes”

and for the elusive but terrifying criminal woman

“dark hair”

“wrinkles”

“smaller skulls than normal women” (source)

he called these traits “atavistic”, meaning they’re like a throwback from way earlier in our evolution. literally, he believed people who commit crime do so because they are less evolved than civil, law abiding folks. and because this is the piss on the poor website, just to be clear, this is a list of traits collected from a population that were overwhelmingly racial or ethnic minorities, disabled, or marked by the physical effects of poverty.

eventually the book goes on to suggest that people with these traits can be identified before they commit a crime, and they can be removed from society for the betterment of everyone else. this is called biological positivist criminology, and it is a major tool in crime prevention to this day. for more on this, i suggest Katy Sian’s 2017 article about how lombroso’s work relates to modern uk counter-terrorism policy. genuinely a banger piece.

but back to the list. we know there are no physical indicators of crime, because crime is something we made up. so what did lombroso actually measure then? he measured the physical profile of people who are criminalised. i cannot stress enough that prisons have always, from their inception, been a tool of the state to contain, subjugate, and remove minority populations from wider society. i don’t know what a society without prisons would look like, but i know what a society WITH them looks like. and it sucks.

This is the purpose of phrenology. Once the phrenologist gets you to accept that certain physical traits mean someone is bad for society and should be locked up, they have won. 

tldr phrenology is a rhetorical tool of white supremacy in every possible way it’s every been used. please pick something else for your tiktok insecurity bait, at least.

not the coquettes literally reinventing nazi phrenology on tiktok