Believing that scientific knowledge is free from colonial conditioning is a great deception: the new book by Marco Boscolowith an evocative title “The white science”demonstrates this by investigating the relationship between the origins of modern science and the colonial thought that moved them, in an attempt to unmask those racist and patriarchal superstructures that still characterize the scientific world today.
“The white science”, Marco Boscolo’s book to investigate the colonial legacy in knowledge
Eris Editions adds an interesting title to the series Book Blockshort and radical nonfiction.“The white science. Ideas for addressing the colonial legacy of science” is: «a collection of notes that wants to tell the colonial aspects linked to the scientific enterprise» says Marco Boscolo, the author. «In over twenty years of working as a science journalist I have understood that among my colleagues but also among scientists themselves the contribution that colonialism and imperialism have had in scientific progress is often unclear» specifies Boscolo. An interesting example investigated in the book concerns the botanical gardenswhose collections of plants and flowers are the daughters of imperialism: over the centuries the colonial empires have stolen botanical resources which they then tried to exploit commercially and «they were born under the pressure of knowing the world and studying it but also with the aim of exploiting it commercially”.
In fact, on closer inspection, the racism linked to colonial legacies is well intertwined with the capitalist system, Boscolo continues by saying: «in Italy we forget that we too have had a colonial empire, started with the De Pretis government. As a country we have attempted to export our way of producing to Eritrea and Somalia, because the agricultural techniques of those countries were not considered advanced enough” specifies Boscolo, who continues by saying that: “there are many scientific studies that recognize the problem deriving from having exported a production system not designed for African territories and climates. In fact it meant putting thousands of people hungry.” The attempt was to impose the European production vision and therefore in the end the question that underlies everything is the imperialist one, linked to the market and capital.
The ideas that the book gives are many and draw heavily from philosophy of science, especially that criticism that aims to deconstruct knowledge as we know it. Among the authors who inspired him Marco Boscolo cites the work of Angela Saini who in one of his famous essays – “Superiors. The lies of science about the superiority of the white man” – investigates the historical relationship between scientific knowledge and the myth of race. Boscolo underlines how his work is fundamental to understanding how racism and patriarchy are historical phenomena which however have effects on our daily lives.
«For real social change there must be an active commitment, because implicitly the social structures in which we are immersed are steeped in capitalism, racism and discrimination which were at the basis of the processes that originally moved the disciplines. Seeing how modern science was born centuries ago leads us to understand how racism, patriarchy and capitalism still have effects on today’s science” concludes Boscolo.
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW WITH MARCO BOSCOLO:
 the connection between colonialism and science){kind=link}