Darwin and "The Darkness"

If all nineteenth century racists believed what Darwin believes, that we are all the same species, and all the races are equal, would they have hated themselves just as much as they hated black people back then?

So many questions come up when I read Heart of Darkness and Charles Darwin's "On the Races of Man" about race and if we all are the same, with such minor differences that it's pretty much only cosmetic, why all the hate? I guess it's because I'm alive in the 21st century and was brought up to view everyone equally. I am able to read articles such as Darwin's objectively and decide for myself whether I agree with the ideas. Other questions arise as to what house parties must have been like at the Darwin household, and what was discussed, or whether people wanted to punch Darwin because his views contradicted their racist ones.

Darwin specifically points out in his article the similarities between races across the world, and that ideas of evolution being based on geographical location are most likely false. He states examples of people living in two completely different climates looking exactly the same, giving the example of the Esquimaux people who "live exclusively on animal food; they are clothed in thick fur, and are exposed to intense cold and to prolonged darkness; yet they do not differ in any extreme degree from the inhabitants of southern China, who live entirely on vegetable food, and are exposed almost naked to a hot, glaring climate" (216).

Darwin also goes on to explain the similarities of races across the world, saying "the spreading of man to regions widely separated by the sea, no doubt, preceded any great amount of divergence of character in the several races; for otherwise we should sometimes meet with the same race in distinct continents; and this is never the case" (215). This theory states that we must have come from the same beginning race and split up around the world before becoming more diverse.

In Heart of Darkness, the opression and enslavement of blacks in Africa paints a graphic picture of how misled views of one race being superior, or viewing whites as a stronger species leads to unneeded violence. Many times in the short novel, African people were called savages or referred to as animals, as if they were completely different from the Europeans that ventured into their homelands. These ideas Darwin brings up about us all coming from the same race in early stages of human evolution makes you have to think about the past and wonder how people could believe these things, or if they ever tried thinking through these beliefs of racial superiority. If people believed that we were all the same except for a few cosmetic differences, would any of these past events have happened?