Here is found a historical treatment of the specious science that ultimately, along with the “Curse of Ham,” justified the racist caste system in the United States. Linnæus proposed that human diversity could be arranged along a scale of increasing humanity, and as evolution came to be recognized as having taken place, Linnæus’s scale of humanity was contextualized broadly within the scientific community into an evolutionary model in which the most highly evolved humans were whites. Various “scientific” measures, such as skull size (whites were supposed to have larger skulls) were used to support this. Because other varieties (“races”) were determined to be not as highly evolved, it was recognized in the late 1800s that humanity could improve itself by culling inferior members from its ranks. This was scientifically sanctified by eugenics where the maintenance of racial “purity” was the subject of legislation against interaction and intermarriage, and “inferior” races have been, until quite recently, the subjects of government-funded biological experimentation. During the Trump Presidency, white supremacy—heretofore a politically marginal community—moved into mainstream discourse.