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Race (historical definitions)
Encyclopedia
Historical race concepts have varied across cultures and over time, and have been controversial for social, political and scientific reasons. Until the 19th century, race was thought by many to constitute an immutable and distinct type or species
which shared particular racial characteristics, such as body constitution, temperament and mental capacities.
One concept, that of Christian Western Europe, conceived of the races as constituting a hierarchical chain of life known as the Great Chain of Being
, which was believed to have been created by God, in which the people thought the Christian European races were closest to God in perfection.
, was introduced into English
in about 1580, from the Old French rasse (1512), from Italian razza, which may have been derived from the Arabic Word "ras" "رأس" meaning the head of someone or something. In this context, "ras" points to the root or the head of selected species. The etymology can be further traced back to Latin gens or Arabic "genat" "جينات" meaning clan, stock or people and genus meaning birth, descent, origin, race, stock, or family, and cognate
with Greek genos (γένος) "race, kind," and gonos "birth, offspring, stock [...]." This late origin for the English and French terms is consistent with the thesis that the concept of "race" as defining a small number of groups of human beings based on lineage dates from the time of Christopher Columbus
. Older concepts, which were also based at least partly on common descent, such as nation
and tribe
entail a much larger number of groupings.
During the Age of Enlightenment
, Europeans tried to define race as a biological concept, in keeping with their scientific ideas. In the centuries that followed, scholars made attempts to classify and define racial types, and to determine racial origins and correlates. As forensic anthropologists
, biomedical research
ers, and other scholars have collected and analyzed data on individuals and populations, some maintain that race denotes scientifically practical distinctions.
by growing up within that society or by adopting that society's cultural
norms
. (Snowden 1983; Lewis 1990).
When the lighter ancient Egyptians were in power, they called the darker group "the evil race of Ish". When the darker ancient Egyptians were in power, they called the lighter group "the pale, degraded race of Arvad". These differences also related to different cultural groups who competed for power. For example, the Ancient Egypt
ian sacred text called Book of Gates
identifies four ethnic categories that are now conventionally labeled "Egyptians", "Asiatics", "Libyans", and "Nubians" (see Ancient Egypt and race), but such distinctions tended to conflate
differences as defined by physical features such as skin tone, with tribal
and nation
al identity.
Classical civilizations from Rome
to China tended to invest the most importance in familial
or tribal affiliation than an individual's physical appearance (Dikötter 1992; Goldenberg 2003). Societies still tended to equate physical characteristics, such as hair and eye colour, with psychological and moral qualities, usually assigning the highest qualities to their own people and lower qualities to the "Other", either lower classes or outsiders to their society. For example, an historian of the 3rd century Han Dynasty
in the territory of present-day China describes barbarians of blond hair and green eyes as resembling "the monkeys from which they are descended." (Gossett, pp. 4).
Dominant in ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of human diversity was the thesis that physical differences between different populations could be attributed to environmental factors. Though ancient peoples likely had no knowledge of evolutionary theory or genetic variability, their concepts of race could be described as malleable. Chief among environmental causes for physical difference in the ancient period were climate and geography. Though thinkers in ancient civilizations recognized differences in physical characteristics between different populations, the general consensus was that all non-Greeks were barbarians. This barbarian status, however, was not thought to be fixed; rather, one could shed the ‘barbarian’ status simply by adopting Greek culture. (Graves 2001)
Hippocrates
believed, as many thinkers throughout early history did, that factors such as geography and climate played a significant role in the physical appearance of different peoples. He writes that, “ the forms and dispositions of mankind correspond with the nature of the country.” He attributed physical and temperamental differences among different peoples to environmental factors such as climate, water sources, elevation and terrain. He noted that temperate climates created peoples who were “sluggish” and “not apt for labor”, while extreme climates led to peoples who were “sharp”, “industrious” and vigilant”. He also noted that peoples of “mountainous, rugged, elevated, and well-watered” countries displayed “enterprising” and “warlike” characteristics, while peoples of “level, windy, and well-watered” countries were “unmanly” and “gentle”.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle
believed that climate played the most crucial factor in determining differences in physical characteristics, most notably the mixture of heat and cold. He is widely credited with devising the concept of the great chain of being, in De partibus animalium, in which animals of the earth exist on a fixed and unchanging ladder of perfection depending on the mixture of fundamental elements within the animal (Graves 2001). Though Aristotle did not explicitly delineate the variety of the human species on this scale, later scientists would re-invent the scale, using explicit divisions of human races.
, a Roman emperor in the 4th century, stereotyped characteristics of various ethnic groups, which he attributed to Divine Providence
:
, Ham and Japheth
, the three sons of Noah
, producing distinct Semitic
(Asia
tic), Hamitic
(Africa
n), and Japhetic
(Indo-European
) peoples. This theory dates back to the Judeo-Christian
tradition, as described in the Babylonian Talmud
, which states that "the descendants of Ham are cursed by being black
, and [it] depicts Ham as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates."
In the 9th century, Al-Jahiz
, an Afro-Arab
Islamic philosopher
attempted to explain the origins of different human skin color
s, particularly black skin
, which he believed to be the result of the environment. He cited a stony region of black basalt
in the northern Najd
as evidence for his theory:
In the 14th century, the Islamic sociologist Ibn Khaldun
, a proponent dispelled the Judeo-Christian account of peoples and their characteristics as a myth. He wrote that black skin was due to the hot climate of sub-Saharan Africa
and not due to the descendants of Ham being cursed. Such Arabic writings were generally not accessible to many Europeans at this time.
Later, during the European colonial
era, Ibn Khaldun's work was translated into French, especially for use in Algeria, but in the process, the work was transformed from local knowledge to colonial categories of knowledge. The historian
William Desborough Cooley's The Negro Land of the Arabs Examined and Explained (1841) has excerpts of translations of Khaldun's work that were not affected by French colonial ideas. For example, Cooley quotes Khaldun's describing the great African civilization of Ghana (in Cooley's translation):
Ibn Khaldun suggests a link between the rise of the Almoravids and the decline of Ghana. But, historians have found virtually no evidence for an Almoravid conquest of Ghana.
.
As the study of natural history grew, so did society’s effort to classify human groups. Some zoologists and scientists wondered what made humans different than animals in the primate family. Furthermore, they contemplated whether homo sapiens should be classified as one species with multiple varieties or separate species.
In the 16th and 17th century, scientists attempted to classify Homo sapiens based on a geographic arrangement of human populations based on skin color, others simply on geographic location, shape, stature, food habits, and other distinguishing characteristics.
Occasionally the term “race” was used but most of the early taxonomist used classificatory terms such as “peoples,” “nations,” “types,” “varieties,” and “species.”
(1548–1600) and Jean Bodin
(1530–1596), French scientist, attempted a rudimentary geographic arrangement of known human populations based on skin color. Bodin’s color classifications were purely descriptive, including neutral terms such as “duskish colour, like roasted quinze,” “black,” “chestnut,” and “farish white.”
(1627–1705) classified human populations into categories according to stature, shape, food habits, and skin color, along with any other distinguishing characteristics.
Ray was also the first person to produce a biological definition of species
.
(1625–1688) is believed to have developed the first comprehensive classification of humans into distinct races which was published in a French journal article in 1684, Nouvelle division de la terre par les différents espèces ou races qui l'habitant, New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it. (Gossett, 1997:32-33). Bernier advocated using the “four quarters” of the globe as the basis for providing labels for human differences. The four subgroups that Bernier used were Europeans, Far Easterners, Negroes (blacks), and Lapps.
The Great Chain of Being
, a medieval idea that there was a hierarchical structure of life from the most fundamental elements to the most perfect, began to encroach upon the idea of race. As taxonomy grew, scientists began to assume that the human species could be divided into distinct subgroups. One’s “race” necessarily implied that one group had certain character qualities and physical dispositions that differentiated it from other human populations. Society gave different values to those differentiations, which essentially created a gap between races by deeming one race superior or inferior to another race, thus a hierarchy of races. In this way, science was used as justification for unfair treatment of different human populations.
The Enlightenment
period saw the rise of both monogenism and polygenism
, these are both theories of racial origins, monogenism is the idea that all races have a single origin, while polygenism is the idea that all races have a separate origin.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
divided the human species
into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research (description of human skulls), and called them (1793/1795):
(See also color terminology for race.)
These five groupings together with two other additional groupings called the Australoid race (1940s) and the Capoid race (early 1960s), making a total of seven groupings in all, are today known as the traditional racial classifications or the historical definition of race. These groupings are still used today in historical anthropology
that describes human migration
and in forensics
.
His classification of the Mongolian race included all East Asians and some Central Asians. Blumenbach excluded peoples of Southeast Asian islands and Pacific Islanders from his definition in 1779, as he considered them to be part of the Malay race. He considered American Indians to be part of the American (Indigenous peoples) race. He did not think they were inferior to the Caucasian race, and were potentially good members of society. He included the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa in the Negro or black race.
Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., were depended on geography and nutrition and custom.
Blumenbach's work included his description of sixty human crania (skulls) published originally in fascicules as Decas craniorum (Göttingen, 1790–1828). This was a founding work for other scientists in the field of craniometry.
Further anatomical study led him to the conclusion that 'individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other individual Africans as Europeans differ from Europeans'. Furthermore he concluded that Africans were not inferior to the rest of mankind 'concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities'.
, James Cowles Pritchard, Louis Agassiz
, Charles Pickering (Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution, 1848). Cuvier enumerated three races, Pritchard seven, Agassiz twelve, and Pickering eleven.
The 19th century saw attempts to change race from a taxonomic to a biological concept. For example, using anthropometrics, invented by Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon
, they measured the shapes and sizes of skulls and related the results to group differences in intelligence or other attributes (Lieberman 2001).
These scientists made three claims about race: first, that races are objective, naturally occurring divisions of humanity; second, that there is a strong relationship between biological races and other human phenomena (such as forms of activity and interpersonal relations and culture, and by extension the relative material success
of cultures), thus biologizing the notion of "race", as Foucault demonstrated in his historical analysis; third, that race is therefore a valid scientific category that can be used to explain and predict individual and group behavior. Races were distinguished by skin color
, facial type, cranial profile and size, texture and color of hair. Moreover, races were almost universally considered to reflect group differences in moral character and intelligence.
The eugenics
movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, inspired by Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
(1853–1855) and Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology", asserted as self-evident the biological inferiority of particular groups (Kevles 1985). In many parts of the world, the idea of race became a way of rigidly dividing groups by culture as well as by physical appearances (Hannaford 1996). Campaigns of oppression and genocide
were often motivated by supposed racial differences (Horowitz 2001).
During the late 19th century and early 20th century, the tension between the social conservatives, who believed in hierarchy and innate superiority, and the social liberals, who believed in social change and human equality, was at a paramount. The social conservatives continued to exacerbate the belief that certain races were innately inferior by examining their shortcomings, namely by examining and testing intelligence between groups. Some scientists claimed that there was a biological determinant of race by evaluating one’s genes
and DNA
. Different methods of eugenics, the study and practice of human selective breeding often with a race as a primary concentration, was still widely accepted in Britain, Germany, and the United States. On the other hand, many scientists understood race as a social construct. They believed that the phenotypical expression of an individual were determined by one’s genes that are inherited through reproduction but there were certain social constructs, such as culture
, environment
, and language
that were primary in shaping behavioral characteristics. Some advocated that race ‘should centre not on what race explains about society, but rather on the questions of who, why and with what effect social significance is attached to racial attributes that are constructed in particular political and socio-economic contexts,’ and thus, addressing the “folk” or “mythological representations” of race.
Although there was a strong notion of race as cultural instead of biological, there were still scientists such as Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt
, Stanley Marion Garn
, and Jan Czekanowski
who continued in their taxonomic endeavor to count the number of races and to name them.
came to the United States he became a prolific writer in what has been later termed the genre of scientific racism. Agassiz was specifically a believer and advocate in polygenism
, that races came from separate origins (specifically separate creations), were endowed with unequal attributes, and could be classified into specific climatic zones, in the same way he felt other animals and plants could be classified.
These included Western American Temperate (the indigenous peoples west of the Rockies); Eastern American Temperate (east of the Rockies); Tropical Asiatic (south of the Himalayas); Temperate Asiatic (east of the Urals and north of the Himalayas); South American Temperate (South America); New Holland (Australia); Arctic (Alaska and Arctic Canada); Cape of Good Hope (South Africa); and American Tropical (Central America and the West Indies).
Agassiz denied that species originated in single pairs, whether at a single location or at many. He argued instead multiple individuals in each species were created at the same time and then distributed throughout the continents where God meant for them to dwell. His lectures on polygenism were popular among the slaveholders in the South, for many this opinion legitimized the belief in a lower standard of the Negro.
Interestingly, his stance in this case was considered to be quite radical in its time, because it went against the more orthodox and standard reading of the Bible in his time which implied all human stock descended from a single couple (Adam and Eve), and in his defense Agassiz often used what now sounds like a very "modern" argument about the need for independence between science and religion; though Agassiz, unlike many polygeneticists, maintained his religious beliefs and was not anti-Biblical in general.
In the context of ethnology and anthropology of the mid-19th century, Agassiz's polygenetic views became explicitly seen as opposing Darwin's views on race, which sought to show the common origin of all human races and the superficiality of racial differences. Darwin's second book on evolution, The Descent of Man, features extensive argumentation addressing the single origin of the races, at times explicitly opposing Agassiz's theories.
was a successful diplomat for the French Second Empire. Initially he was posted to Persia, before working in Brazil and other countries. He came to believe that race created culture, arguing that distinctions between the three "black", "white", and "yellow" races were natural barriers, and that "race-mixing" breaks those barriers and leads to chaos. He classified the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, North Africa and southern France as racially mixed.
Gobineau believed the white race was superior to the others. He thought it corresponded to the ancient Indo-European culture, also known as "Aryan
". Gobineau originally wrote that white race miscegenation was inevitable. He attributed much of the economic turmoils in France to pollution of races. Later on in his life, he altered his opinion to believe that the white race could be saved.
To Gobineau, the development of empires was ultimately destructive to the "superior races" that created them, since they led to the mixing of distinct races. This he saw as a degenerative process.
According to his definitions, the people of Spain, most of France, most of Germany, southern and western Iran as well as Switzerland, Austria, northern Italy and a large part of Britain, consisted of a degenerative race arising from miscegenation. Also according to him, the whole of north India consisted of a yellow race.
Thomas Huxley
wrote one paper, "On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind" (1870), in which he proposed a distinction within the human species, 'races', and their distribution across the earth.
Huxley's paper was rejected by the Royal Society
and this became one of the many theories to be advanced and dropped by the early exponents of evolution
.
Despite rejection by Huxley and the science community, the paper is sometimes cited in support of racialism. Along with Darwin, Huxley was a monogenist, the belief that all humans are part of the same species, with morphological variations emerging out of an initial uniforminity. (Stepan, p. 44). This view contrasts polygenism, the theory that each race is actually a separate species with separate sites of origin.
Despite Huxley's monogenism and his abolitionism on ethical grounds, Huxley assumed a hierarchy of innate abilities, a stance evinced in papers such as "Emancipation Black and White" and his most famous paper, "Evolution and Ethics."
In the former, he writes that the "highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest." (Stepan, p. 79-80).
(see also:)
’s evolutionary theory was set forth in 1859 upon publication of On the Origin of Species, this work was largely absent of explicit reference to Darwin’s theory applied to man. This application by Darwin would not become explicit until the publication of his second great book on evolution, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
, in 1871.
Darwin’s publication of this book occurred within the heated debates between advocates of monogeny, who held that all races came from a common ancestor, and advocates of polygeny, who held that the races were separately created. Darwin, who had come from a family with strong abolitionist ties, had experienced and was disturbed by cultures of slavery during his voyage on the Beagle years earlier. Noted Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore argue that Darwin’s writings on evolution were not only influenced by his abolitionist tendencies, but also his belief that non-white races were equal in regard to their intellectual capacity as white races, a belief which had been strongly disputed by scientists such as Morton, Agassiz and Broca, all noted polygenists.
By the late 1860s, however, Darwin’s theory of evolution had been thought to be compatible with the polygenist thesis (Stepan 1982). Darwin thus used Descent of Man to disprove the polygenist thesis and end the debate between polygeny and monogeny once and for all. Darwin also used it to disprove other hypotheses about racial difference that had persisted since the time of ancient Greece, for example, that differences in skin color and body constitution occurred because of differences of geography and climate.
Darwin concluded, for example, that the biological similarities between the different races were “too great” for the polygenist thesis to be plausible. He also used the idea of races to argue for the continuity between humans and animals, noting that it would be highly implausible that man should, by mere accident acquire characteristics shared by many apes.
Darwin sought to demonstrate that the physical characteristics that were being used to define race for centuries (i.e. skin color and facial features) were superficial and had no utility for survival. Because, according to Darwin, any characteristic that did not have survival value could not have been naturally selected, he devised another hypothesis for the development and persistence of these characteristics. The mechanism Darwin developed is known as sexual selection
.
Though the idea of sexual selection had appeared in earlier works by Darwin, it was not until the late 1860s when it received full consideration (Stepan 1982). Furthermore, it was not until 1914 that sexual selection received serious consideration as a racial theory by naturalist thinkers.
Darwin defined sexual selection as the “struggle between individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex”. Sexual selection consisted of two types for Darwin: 1.) The physical struggle for a mate, and 2.) The preference for some color or another, typically by females of a given species. Darwin asserted that the differing human races (insofar as race was conceived phenotypically) had arbitrary standards of ideal beauty, and that these standards reflected important physical characteristics sought in mates.
Broadly speaking, Darwin’s attitudes of what race was and how it developed in the human species are attributable to two assertions, 1.)That all human beings, regardless of race share a single, common ancestor and 2.) Phenotypic racial differences are superficially selected, and have no survival value. Given these two beliefs, some believe Darwin to have established monogenism as the dominant paradigm for racial ancestry, and to have defeated the scientific racism practiced by Morton, Knott, Agassiz et. Al, as well as notions that there existed a natural racial hierarchy that reflected inborn differences and measures of value between the different human races.
Nevertheless he stated: : “The various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other - as in the texture of hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotion, but partly in their intellectual faculties” (The Descent of Man, chapter VII).
In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted the great difficulty naturalists had in trying to decide how many "races" there actually were:
, the age of imperialist expansion
, and the impact of Nazism
. More than any other, the violence of Nazi rule, the Holocaust, and World War II
transformed the whole discussion of race. Nazism made an argument for racial superiority based on a biological basis. This led to the idea that people could be divided into discrete groups and based on the divisions, there would be severe, tortuous, and often fatal consequence. The exposition of racial theory beginning in the Third Reich, up to the Final Solution
, created a popular moral revolution against racism.
Consequently, studies of human variation focused more on actual patterns of variation and evolutionary patterns among populations and less about classification. Some scientists point to three discoveries. Firstly, African populations exhibit greater genetic diversity and less linkage disequilibrium because of their long history. Secondly, genetic similarity is directly correlated with geographic proximity. Lastly, some loci reflect selection in response to environmental gradients. Therefore, some argue, human racial groups do not appear to be distinct ethnic groups. Other scientists instead argue that new findings from research on race and genetics, such as "Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy", validate the significance of racial groups.
(1858–1942) was a German American anthropologist and has been called the “Father of American Anthropology.” Boas made significant contributions within anthropology
, more specifically, physical anthropology
, linguistics
, archaeology
, and cultural anthropology
. His work put an emphasis on cultural and environmental effects on people to explain their development into adulthood and evaluated them in concert with human biology and evolution. This led encouraged academics to break away from static taxonomical classifications of race. It is said that before Boas, anthropology was the study of race, and after Boas, anthropology was the study of culture.
By 1930, Huxley’s ideas on race and inherited intellectual capacity of human groups became more liberal. By the mid 1930s, Huxley was considered one of the leading antiracist
and committed much of his time and efforts into publicizing the fight against Nazism.
Alfred Cort Haddon
(1855–1940) was a British anthropologist and ethnologist.
In 1935, Huxley and A.C. Haddon wrote, We Europeans, which greatly popularized the struggle against racial science and attacked the Nazis’ abuse of science to promote their racial theories. Although they argued that ‘any biological arrangement of the types of European man is still largely a subjective process,’ they proposed that humankind could be divided up into “major” and “minor subspecies.” They believed that races were a classification based on hereditary traits but should not by nature be used to condemn or deem inferior to another group. Like most of their peers, they continued to maintain a distinction between the social meaning of race and the scientific study of race. From a scientific stand point, they were willing to accept that concepts of superiority and inferiority did not exist, but from a social stand point, they continued to believe that racial differences were significant. For example, they argued that genetic differences between groups were functionally important for certain jobs or tasks.
(1905–1999) was a British-American anthropologist.
In 1942, Montague made a strong effort to have the word “race” replaced with “ethnic group
” by publishing his book, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Montagu was also selected to draft the initial 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race.
Carleton Stevens Coon (1904–1981) was an American physical anthropologist. One of Coon’s most important books is The Origin of Races, which was published in 1962, and was highly controversial. In it, Coon offered a definitive statement of the polygenist view. He also argued that human fossils could be assigned a date, a race, and an evolutionary grade. Coon divided humanity into five races and believed that each race had ascended the ladder of human evolution at different rates.
) was established November 16, 1945, in the wake of the genocide of Nazism. The UNESCO 1945 constitution declared that, “The great and terrible war which now has ended was made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine
of the inequality of men and races.” Between 1950 and 1978 the UNESCO issued five statements on the issue of race.
The first of the UNESCO statements on race was titled "The Race Question
" and was issued on July 18, 1950. The statement included both a rejection of a scientific basis for theories of racial hierarchies and a moral condemnation of racism
. It's first statement suggested in particular to "drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of "ethnic groups", which proved to be controversial. The 1950 statement was most concerned with dispelling the notion of race as species, and it did not reject the idea of a biological basis to racial categories. Instead it defined the concept of race in terms as a population defined by certain anatomical and physiological characteristics as being divergent from other populations, it gives the examples of the Caucasian
, Negroid
and Mongoloid race
. The statements maintain that there are no "pure races" and that biological variability was as great within any race as between races. It argued that there is no scientific basis for believing that there are any innate differences in intellectual, psychological or emotional potential among races.
The statement was drafted by Ashley Montagu
and endorsed by some of the leading researchers of the time, in the fields of psychology
, biology
, cultural anthropology
and ethnology
. The statement was endorsed by Ernest Beaglehole, Juan Comas
, L. A. Costa Pinto, Franklin Frazier, sociologist specialised in race relations studies, Morris Ginsberg
, founding chairperson of the British Sociological Association
, Humayun Kabir
, writer, philosopher and Education Minister of India twice, Claude Lévi-Strauss
, one of the founders of ethnology
and leading theorist of cultural relativism
, and Ashley Montagu
, anthropologist and author of The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity
, who was the rapporteur.
As a result of a lack of representation of physical anthropologists
in the drafing committee the 1950 publication was criticized by biologicists and physical anthropologists for confusing the biological and social senses of race, and for going beyond the scientific facts, although there was a general agreement about the statements conclusions. UNESCO assembled a new committee with better representation of the physical sciences and drafted a new statement released in 1951. The 1951 statement, published as "The Race Concept", focused on race as a biological heuristic that could serve as the basis for evolutionary studies of human populations. It considered the existing races to be the result of such evolutionary processes throughout human history. It also maintained that "equality of opportunity and equality in law in no way depend, as ethical principles, upon the assertion that human beings are in fact equal in endowment."
As the 1950 and 1951 statements generated considerable attention and in 1964 a new commission was formed to draft a third statement titled "Proposals on the Biological Aspects of Race". According to Michael Banton
(2008), this statement broke more clearly with the notion of race-as-species than the previous two statements, declaring that almost any genetically differentiated population could be defined as a race. The statement stated that "Different classifications of mankind into major stocks, and of those into more restricted categories (races, which are groups of populations, or single populations) have been proposed on the basis of hereditary physical traits. Nearly all classifications recognise at least three major stocks." and "There is no national, religious, geographic, linguistic or cultural group which constitutes a race ipso facto; the concept of race is purely biological." It concluded by: "The biological data given above stand in open contradiction to the tenets of racism. Racist theories can in no way pretend to have any scientific foundation."
The 1950, '51 and '64 statements focused on the dispelling the scientific foundations for racism, but didn't consider other factors contributing to racism. For this reason in 1967 a new committee was assembled, including representatives of the social sciences (sociologists, lawyers, ethnographers and geneticists), to draft a statement "covering the social, ethical and philosophical aspects of the problem". This statement was the first to provide a definition of racism
: "antisocial beliefs and acts which are based upon the fallacy that discriminatory intergroup relations are justifiable on biological grounds". The statement continued to denounce the many negative social affects of racism.
In 1978 the general assembly of the UNESCO considered the four previous statements and published a collective "Declaration
on Race and Racial Prejudice". This declaration included Apartheid as one of the examples of racism, an inclusion which caused South Africa
to step out of the assembly. It declared that a number of public policies and laws needed to be implemented. It stated that:
, and physiognomy
. Certain racial groups are more susceptible to certain diseases, such as sickle-cell anemia, hypertension, and high blood pressure. Only recently have scientists been able to use molecular methods of autosomal DNA, mitochondrial DNA
, and Y-chromosome DNA to prove the origin of races as a monogenist viewpoint. Learning about animal and human ancestry can be done by analyzing and comparing nucleic acid patterns in a sample of DNA through electrophoresis
. The idea was, that based on the genetic markers of race in one’s DNA, medical practitioners and researchers could more efficiently engineer certain drugs to treat disease within a given racial group. Despite the UNESCO statement and other claims that argue that there is no biological determinant of race, scientists today argue that they can reliably classify a person using genetic markers to groups that correspond almost exactly with self-reported race.
argued that, from a historical and political discourse of "race struggle", the notion of "race" was discussed in scientific terms in the 19th century by racist biologists and eugenicists. Psychoanalysis
, he argues, was instrumental in opposing this dangerous form of essentialism
, which would lead eventually to the Nazi
"state racism
".
Many significant criticisms also came from the school of Franz Boas
beginning in the 1920s. During the mid-1930s, with the rise of Nazi Germany
and its prominent espousing of racist ideologies, there was an outpouring of popular works by scientists criticizing the use of race to justify the politics of "superiority" and "inferiority".
An influential work in this regard was the publication of" We Europeans: A Survey of "Racial" Problems by Julian Huxley
and A. C. Haddon in 1935, which sought to show that population genetics
allowed for only a highly limited definition of race at best. Another popular work during this period, "The Races of Mankind" by Ruth Benedict
and Gene Weltfish, argued that though there were some extreme racial differences, they were primarily superficial, and in any case did not justify political action.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
' Race and History (UNESCO
, 1952) was another critique of the biological "race" notion, arguing in favor of cultural relativism
through a metaphor of cultures as different trains crossing each others in various directions and speed, thus each one seeming to progress to himself while others supposedly kept immobile. This, in his view, clearly showed that "race" was no longer a useful indicator of cultural superiority.
In his 1984 article in Essence magazine, "On Being ‘White’…and Other Lies," James Baldwin reads the history of racialization
in America as both figuratively and literally violent, remarking that "race" only exists as a social construction within a network of force relations: "America became white—the people who, as they claim, "settled" the country became white—because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie. White men from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians—became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the well, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women. . . Because they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers."
Apart from its function as a vernacular term, the term "race"—as Nancy Stepan notes in her 1982 book, The Idea of Race in Science, Great Britain 1800-1960—varied widely in its usage, even in science, from the 18th century through the 20th; the term referred "at one time or another" to "cultural, religious, national, linguistic, ethnic and geographical groups of human beings"—everything from "Celts" to "Spanish Americans" to "Hottentots" to "Europeans" (p. xvii).
In the 1979 preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes the elusive element of "blackness" in Afro-American literature as lacking an "essence
," defined instead "by a network of relations that form a particular aesthetic unity" (p. 162). Continuing his poststructuralist-inflected negation of blackness as an essence, in his 1985 introduction to a special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry, Gates goes even further, calling race itself a "dangerous trope" (p. 5). He argues that "race has become a trope of the ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific believe systems which…also have fundamentally opposed economic interests" (p. 5).
Linda Gottfredson
, on the other hand, has argued that denying or trying to conceal real biological differences between groups on average IQ instead cause people to seek something to blame for the differing average group achievements, causing resentment and hostility. She argues that "virtually all the victim groups of genocide
in the Twentieth Century had relatively high average levels of achievement (e.g., German Jews
, educated Cambodians
, Russian Kulak
s, Armenians in Turkey
, Ibos in Nigeria
; Gordon, 1980)."
has stated that it is "a conventional wisdom among left-leaning academics that genes imply genocide." He has responded to this "conventional wisdom" by comparing the history of Marxism
, which had the opposite position on genes to that of Nazism:
Jensen and Rushton point out that research has shown that also in a group with a lower average some individuals will be above the average of other groups. They also argue that when society is blamed for disparities in average group achievements that instead result from biological differences, the result is demands for compensation from the less successful group which the more successful group feel is unjustified, causing mutual resentment. Linda Gottfredson
similarly argues that denying real biological differences instead cause people to seek something to blame causing hostility between groups. In the US, examples being the views that whites are racist or blacks are lazy. She furthermore argues that "virtually all the victim groups of genocide in the Twentieth Century had relatively high average levels of achievement (e.g., German Jews
, educated Cambodians
, Russian Kulak
s, Armenians in Turkey
, Ibos in Nigeria
; Gordon, 1980)." Gottfredson has also disputed that a lower achieving group gains from denying or concealing real biological differences. An increasingly complex society built on the assumption than everyone can do equally well means that they who do not have this ability have increasing trouble functioning in most areas of life. They need various forms of special assistance which is not possible as long as the need is denied to exist.
Species
In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...
which shared particular racial characteristics, such as body constitution, temperament and mental capacities.
One concept, that of Christian Western Europe, conceived of the races as constituting a hierarchical chain of life known as the Great Chain of Being
Great chain of being
The great chain of being , is a Christian concept detailing a strict, religious hierarchical structure of all matter and life, believed to have been decreed by the Christian God.-Divisions:...
, which was believed to have been created by God, in which the people thought the Christian European races were closest to God in perfection.
Etymology
The word "race", interpreted to mean common descentCommon descent
In evolutionary biology, a group of organisms share common descent if they have a common ancestor. There is strong quantitative support for the theory that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor....
, was introduced into English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
in about 1580, from the Old French rasse (1512), from Italian razza, which may have been derived from the Arabic Word "ras" "رأس" meaning the head of someone or something. In this context, "ras" points to the root or the head of selected species. The etymology can be further traced back to Latin gens or Arabic "genat" "جينات" meaning clan, stock or people and genus meaning birth, descent, origin, race, stock, or family, and cognate
Cognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
with Greek genos (γένος) "race, kind," and gonos "birth, offspring, stock [...]." This late origin for the English and French terms is consistent with the thesis that the concept of "race" as defining a small number of groups of human beings based on lineage dates from the time of Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...
. Older concepts, which were also based at least partly on common descent, such as nation
Nation
A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and/or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government irrespective of their ethnic make-up...
and tribe
Tribe
A tribe, viewed historically or developmentally, consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states.Many anthropologists use the term tribal society to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship, especially corporate descent groups .Some theorists...
entail a much larger number of groupings.
During the Age of Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
, Europeans tried to define race as a biological concept, in keeping with their scientific ideas. In the centuries that followed, scholars made attempts to classify and define racial types, and to determine racial origins and correlates. As forensic anthropologists
Forensic anthropology
Forensic anthropology is the application of the science of physical anthropology and human osteology in a legal setting, most often in criminal cases where the victim's remains are in the advanced stages of decomposition. A forensic anthropologist can assist in the identification of deceased...
, biomedical research
Biomedical research
Biomedical research , in general simply known as medical research, is the basic research, applied research, or translational research conducted to aid and support the body of knowledge in the field of medicine...
ers, and other scholars have collected and analyzed data on individuals and populations, some maintain that race denotes scientifically practical distinctions.
Earliest views on ethnic differences
In many ancient civilizations, individuals with widely varying physical appearances became full members of a societySociety
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
by growing up within that society or by adopting that society's cultural
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
norms
Norm (sociology)
Social norms are the accepted behaviors within a society or group. This sociological and social psychological term has been defined as "the rules that a group uses for appropriate and inappropriate values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. These rules may be explicit or implicit...
. (Snowden 1983; Lewis 1990).
When the lighter ancient Egyptians were in power, they called the darker group "the evil race of Ish". When the darker ancient Egyptians were in power, they called the lighter group "the pale, degraded race of Arvad". These differences also related to different cultural groups who competed for power. For example, the Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
ian sacred text called Book of Gates
Book of Gates
The Book of Gates is an Ancient Egyptian funerary text dating from the New Kingdom. It narrates the passage of a newly deceased soul into the next world, corresponding to the journey of the sun though the underworld during the hours of the night. The soul is required to pass though a series of...
identifies four ethnic categories that are now conventionally labeled "Egyptians", "Asiatics", "Libyans", and "Nubians" (see Ancient Egypt and race), but such distinctions tended to conflate
Conflation
Conflation occurs when the identities of two or more individuals, concepts, or places, sharing some characteristics of one another, become confused until there seems to be only a single identity — the differences appear to become lost...
differences as defined by physical features such as skin tone, with tribal
Tribe
A tribe, viewed historically or developmentally, consists of a social group existing before the development of, or outside of, states.Many anthropologists use the term tribal society to refer to societies organized largely on the basis of kinship, especially corporate descent groups .Some theorists...
and nation
Nation
A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and/or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government irrespective of their ethnic make-up...
al identity.
Classical civilizations from Rome
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
to China tended to invest the most importance in familial
Family
In human context, a family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children...
or tribal affiliation than an individual's physical appearance (Dikötter 1992; Goldenberg 2003). Societies still tended to equate physical characteristics, such as hair and eye colour, with psychological and moral qualities, usually assigning the highest qualities to their own people and lower qualities to the "Other", either lower classes or outsiders to their society. For example, an historian of the 3rd century Han Dynasty
Han Dynasty
The Han Dynasty was the second imperial dynasty of China, preceded by the Qin Dynasty and succeeded by the Three Kingdoms . It was founded by the rebel leader Liu Bang, known posthumously as Emperor Gaozu of Han. It was briefly interrupted by the Xin Dynasty of the former regent Wang Mang...
in the territory of present-day China describes barbarians of blond hair and green eyes as resembling "the monkeys from which they are descended." (Gossett, pp. 4).
Dominant in ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of human diversity was the thesis that physical differences between different populations could be attributed to environmental factors. Though ancient peoples likely had no knowledge of evolutionary theory or genetic variability, their concepts of race could be described as malleable. Chief among environmental causes for physical difference in the ancient period were climate and geography. Though thinkers in ancient civilizations recognized differences in physical characteristics between different populations, the general consensus was that all non-Greeks were barbarians. This barbarian status, however, was not thought to be fixed; rather, one could shed the ‘barbarian’ status simply by adopting Greek culture. (Graves 2001)
Ancient Greek theories
Hippocrates
Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos was an ancient Greek physician of the Age of Pericles , and is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine...
believed, as many thinkers throughout early history did, that factors such as geography and climate played a significant role in the physical appearance of different peoples. He writes that, “ the forms and dispositions of mankind correspond with the nature of the country.” He attributed physical and temperamental differences among different peoples to environmental factors such as climate, water sources, elevation and terrain. He noted that temperate climates created peoples who were “sluggish” and “not apt for labor”, while extreme climates led to peoples who were “sharp”, “industrious” and vigilant”. He also noted that peoples of “mountainous, rugged, elevated, and well-watered” countries displayed “enterprising” and “warlike” characteristics, while peoples of “level, windy, and well-watered” countries were “unmanly” and “gentle”.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
believed that climate played the most crucial factor in determining differences in physical characteristics, most notably the mixture of heat and cold. He is widely credited with devising the concept of the great chain of being, in De partibus animalium, in which animals of the earth exist on a fixed and unchanging ladder of perfection depending on the mixture of fundamental elements within the animal (Graves 2001). Though Aristotle did not explicitly delineate the variety of the human species on this scale, later scientists would re-invent the scale, using explicit divisions of human races.
Ancient Roman theories
Julian the ApostateJulian the Apostate
Julian "the Apostate" , commonly known as Julian, or also Julian the Philosopher, was Roman Emperor from 361 to 363 and a noted philosopher and Greek writer....
, a Roman emperor in the 4th century, stereotyped characteristics of various ethnic groups, which he attributed to Divine Providence
Divine Providence
In Christian theology, divine providence, or simply providence, is God's activity in the world. " Providence" is also used as a title of God exercising His providence, and then the word are usually capitalized...
:
Medieval theories
European medieval models of race generally mixed Classical ideas with the notion that humanity as a whole was descended from ShemShem
Shem was one of the sons of Noah in the Hebrew Bible as well as in Islamic literature. He is most popularly regarded as the eldest son, though some traditions regard him as the second son. Genesis 10:21 refers to relative ages of Shem and his brother Japheth, but with sufficient ambiguity in each...
, Ham and Japheth
Japheth
Japheth is one of the sons of Noah in the Abrahamic tradition...
, the three sons of Noah
Sons of Noah
The Seventy Nations or Sons of Noah is an extensive list of descendants of Noah appearing in of the Hebrew Bible, representing an ethnology from an Iron Age Levantine perspective...
, producing distinct Semitic
Semitic
In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages...
(Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
tic), Hamitic
Hamitic
Hamitic is an historical term for the peoples supposedly descended from Noah's son Ham, paralleling Semitic and Japhetic.It was formerly used for grouping the non-Semitic Afroasiatic languages , but since, unlike the Semitic branch, these have not been shown to form a phylogenetic unity, the term...
(Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
n), and Japhetic
Japhetic
Japhetic is a term that refers to the supposed descendants of Japheth, one of the three sons of Noah in the Bible. It corresponds to Semitic and Hamitic...
(Indo-European
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
) peoples. This theory dates back to the Judeo-Christian
Judeo-Christian
Judeo-Christian is a term used in the United States since the 1940s to refer to standards of ethics said to be held in common by Judaism and Christianity, for example the Ten Commandments...
tradition, as described in the Babylonian Talmud
Talmud
The Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....
, which states that "the descendants of Ham are cursed by being black
Black people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...
, and [it] depicts Ham as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates."
In the 9th century, Al-Jahiz
Al-Jahiz
Al-Jāḥiẓ was an Arabic prose writer and author of works of literature, Mu'tazili theology, and politico-religious polemics.In biology, Al-Jahiz introduced the concept of food chains and also proposed a scheme of animal evolution that entailed...
, an Afro-Arab
Afro-Arab
Afro-Arab refers to people of mixed Black African and genealogical Arab ancestral heritage and/or linguistically and culturally Arabized Black Africans...
Islamic philosopher
Early Islamic philosophy
Early Islamic philosophy or classical Islamic philosophy is a period of intense philosophical development beginning in the 2nd century AH of the Islamic calendar and lasting until the 6th century AH...
attempted to explain the origins of different human skin color
Human skin color
Human skin color is primarily due to the presence of melanin in the skin. Skin color ranges from almost black to white with a pinkish tinge due to blood vessels underneath. Variation in natural skin color is mainly due to genetics, although the evolutionary causes are not completely certain...
s, particularly black skin
Black people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...
, which he believed to be the result of the environment. He cited a stony region of black basalt
Basalt
Basalt is a common extrusive volcanic rock. It is usually grey to black and fine-grained due to rapid cooling of lava at the surface of a planet. It may be porphyritic containing larger crystals in a fine matrix, or vesicular, or frothy scoria. Unweathered basalt is black or grey...
in the northern Najd
Najd
Najd or Nejd , literally Highland, is the central region of the Arabian Peninsula.-Boundaries :The Arabic word nejd literally means "upland" and was once applied to a variety of regions within the Arabian Peninsula...
as evidence for his theory:
In the 14th century, the Islamic sociologist Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Khaldun
Ibn Khaldūn or Ibn Khaldoun was an Arab Tunisian historiographer and historian who is often viewed as one of the forerunners of modern historiography, sociology and economics...
, a proponent dispelled the Judeo-Christian account of peoples and their characteristics as a myth. He wrote that black skin was due to the hot climate of sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa as a geographical term refers to the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara. A political definition of Sub-Saharan Africa, instead, covers all African countries which are fully or partially located south of the Sahara...
and not due to the descendants of Ham being cursed. Such Arabic writings were generally not accessible to many Europeans at this time.
Later, during the European colonial
Colonial
Colonial or The Colonial may refer to:* Colonial, of, relating to, or characteristic of a colony* Colonial history of the United States, the period of American history from the 17th century to 1776, under the rule of Great Britain, France and Spain...
era, Ibn Khaldun's work was translated into French, especially for use in Algeria, but in the process, the work was transformed from local knowledge to colonial categories of knowledge. The historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
William Desborough Cooley's The Negro Land of the Arabs Examined and Explained (1841) has excerpts of translations of Khaldun's work that were not affected by French colonial ideas. For example, Cooley quotes Khaldun's describing the great African civilization of Ghana (in Cooley's translation):
- "When the conquest of the West (by the Arabs) was completed, and merchants began to penetrate into the interior, they saw no nation of the Blacks so mighty as Ghánah, the dominions of which extended westward as far as the Ocean. The King's court was kept in the city of Ghánah, which, according to the author of the 'Book of Roger' (El Idrisi), and the author of the 'Book of Roads and Realms' (El Bekri), is divided into two parts, standing on both banks of the Nile, and ranks among the largest and most populous cities of the world.
- The people of Ghánah had for neighbours, on the east, a nation, which, according to historians, was called Súsú; after which came another named Máli; and after that another known by the name of Kaǘkaǘ; although some people prefer a different orthography, and write this name Kághó. The last-named nation was followed by a people called Tekrúr. The people of Ghánah declined in course of time, being overwhelmed or absorbed by the Molaththemún (or muffled people; that is, the Morabites), who, adjoining them on the north towards the BerberBerber peopleBerbers are the indigenous peoples of North Africa west of the Nile Valley. They are continuously distributed from the Atlantic to the Siwa oasis, in Egypt, and from the Mediterranean to the Niger River. Historically they spoke the Berber language or varieties of it, which together form a branch...
country, attacked them, and, taking possession of their territory, compelled them to embrace the MohammedanMohammedanMohammedan is a Western term for a follower of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. As an archaic English language term, it is used as both a noun and an adjective, meaning belonging or relating to, either Muhammad or the religion, doctrines, institutions and practices that he established...
religion. The people of Ghánah, being invaded at a later period by the Súsú, a nation of Blacks in their neighbourhood, were exterminated, or mixed with other Black nations."
Ibn Khaldun suggests a link between the rise of the Almoravids and the decline of Ghana. But, historians have found virtually no evidence for an Almoravid conquest of Ghana.
Early Modern period
The word "race," along with many of the ideas now associated with the term were products of European imperialism and colonization during the age of exploration. (Smedley 1999) As Europeans encountered people from different parts of the world, they speculated about the physical, social, and cultural differences among various human groups, which marked the early stages of the development of science. Scientists who were interested in natural history, including biological and geological scientists, were known as “naturalists”. They would collect, examine, describe, and arrange data from their explorations into categories according to certain criteria. People who were particularly skilled at organizing specific sets of data in a logically and comprehensive fashion were known as classifiers and systematists. This process was a new trend in science that served to help answer fundamental questions by collecting and organizing materials for systematic study, also known as taxonomyTaxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
.
As the study of natural history grew, so did society’s effort to classify human groups. Some zoologists and scientists wondered what made humans different than animals in the primate family. Furthermore, they contemplated whether homo sapiens should be classified as one species with multiple varieties or separate species.
In the 16th and 17th century, scientists attempted to classify Homo sapiens based on a geographic arrangement of human populations based on skin color, others simply on geographic location, shape, stature, food habits, and other distinguishing characteristics.
Occasionally the term “race” was used but most of the early taxonomist used classificatory terms such as “peoples,” “nations,” “types,” “varieties,” and “species.”
Giordano Bruno and Jean Bodin
Italian scientist Giordano BrunoGiordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
(1548–1600) and Jean Bodin
Jean Bodin
Jean Bodin was a French jurist and political philosopher, member of the Parlement of Paris and professor of law in Toulouse. He is best known for his theory of sovereignty; he was also an influential writer on demonology....
(1530–1596), French scientist, attempted a rudimentary geographic arrangement of known human populations based on skin color. Bodin’s color classifications were purely descriptive, including neutral terms such as “duskish colour, like roasted quinze,” “black,” “chestnut,” and “farish white.”
Bernhard Varen and John Ray
German and English scientists, Bernhard Varen (1622–1650) and John RayJohn Ray
John Ray was an English naturalist, sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', after "having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him".He published important works on botany,...
(1627–1705) classified human populations into categories according to stature, shape, food habits, and skin color, along with any other distinguishing characteristics.
Ray was also the first person to produce a biological definition of species
Species
In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...
.
François Bernier
François BernierFrançois Bernier
François Bernier was a French physician and traveller. He was born at Joué-Etiau in Anjou. He was the personal physician of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb for around 12 years during his stay in India....
(1625–1688) is believed to have developed the first comprehensive classification of humans into distinct races which was published in a French journal article in 1684, Nouvelle division de la terre par les différents espèces ou races qui l'habitant, New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it. (Gossett, 1997:32-33). Bernier advocated using the “four quarters” of the globe as the basis for providing labels for human differences. The four subgroups that Bernier used were Europeans, Far Easterners, Negroes (blacks), and Lapps.
Age of Enlightenment
As noted earlier, scientists attempted to classify Homo sapiens based on a geographic arrangement of human populations based on skin color, others simply on geographic location, shape, stature, food habits, and other distinguishing characteristics. In the 18th century, scientists began to include behavioral or psychological traits in their reported observations- which often had derogatory or demeaning implications – and often assumed that those behavioral or psychological traits were related to their race, and therefore, innate and unchangeable. Other areas of interest were to determine the exact number of races, categorize and name them, and examine the primary and secondary causes of variation between groups.The Great Chain of Being
Great chain of being
The great chain of being , is a Christian concept detailing a strict, religious hierarchical structure of all matter and life, believed to have been decreed by the Christian God.-Divisions:...
, a medieval idea that there was a hierarchical structure of life from the most fundamental elements to the most perfect, began to encroach upon the idea of race. As taxonomy grew, scientists began to assume that the human species could be divided into distinct subgroups. One’s “race” necessarily implied that one group had certain character qualities and physical dispositions that differentiated it from other human populations. Society gave different values to those differentiations, which essentially created a gap between races by deeming one race superior or inferior to another race, thus a hierarchy of races. In this way, science was used as justification for unfair treatment of different human populations.
The Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
period saw the rise of both monogenism and polygenism
Polygenism
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...
, these are both theories of racial origins, monogenism is the idea that all races have a single origin, while polygenism is the idea that all races have a separate origin.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was a German physician, physiologist and anthropologist, one of the first to explore the study of mankind as an aspect of natural history, whose teachings in comparative anatomy were applied to classification of what he called human races, of which he determined...
divided the human species
Species
In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...
into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research (description of human skulls), and called them (1793/1795):
- the Caucasian raceCaucasian raceThe term Caucasian race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia , Central Asia and South Asia...
or white race - the MongolianMongoloid raceMongoloid is a term sometimes used by forensic anthropologists and physical anthropologists to refer to populations that share certain phenotypic traits such as epicanthic fold and shovel-shaped incisors and other physical traits common in East Asia, the Americas and the Arctic...
or yellow race - the MalayanMalay raceThe concept of a Malay race was proposed by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach , and classified as the brown race. Since Blumenbach, many anthropologists have rejected his theory of five races, citing the enormous complexity of classifying races...
or brown race - the EthiopianNegroid raceNegroid is a term sometimes used by forensic anthropologists and physical anthropologists to refer to populations that share certain phenotypic traits such as high Melanin levels and skeletal features associated with ancestry from Sub-saharan Africa.It was introduced by early Racial science used...
, or black race - the AmericanIndigenous peoples of the AmericasThe indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
or red race.
(See also color terminology for race.)
These five groupings together with two other additional groupings called the Australoid race (1940s) and the Capoid race (early 1960s), making a total of seven groupings in all, are today known as the traditional racial classifications or the historical definition of race. These groupings are still used today in historical anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
that describes human migration
Human migration
Human migration is physical movement by humans from one area to another, sometimes over long distances or in large groups. Historically this movement was nomadic, often causing significant conflict with the indigenous population and their displacement or cultural assimilation. Only a few nomadic...
and in forensics
Forensics
Forensic science is the application of a broad spectrum of sciences to answer questions of interest to a legal system. This may be in relation to a crime or a civil action...
.
His classification of the Mongolian race included all East Asians and some Central Asians. Blumenbach excluded peoples of Southeast Asian islands and Pacific Islanders from his definition in 1779, as he considered them to be part of the Malay race. He considered American Indians to be part of the American (Indigenous peoples) race. He did not think they were inferior to the Caucasian race, and were potentially good members of society. He included the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa in the Negro or black race.
Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., were depended on geography and nutrition and custom.
Blumenbach's work included his description of sixty human crania (skulls) published originally in fascicules as Decas craniorum (Göttingen, 1790–1828). This was a founding work for other scientists in the field of craniometry.
Further anatomical study led him to the conclusion that 'individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other individual Africans as Europeans differ from Europeans'. Furthermore he concluded that Africans were not inferior to the rest of mankind 'concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities'.
"Finally, I am of opinion that after all these numerous instances I have brought together of negroes of capacity, it would not be difficult to mention entire well-known provinces of Europe, from out of which you would not easily expect to obtain off-hand such good authors, poets, philosophers, and correspondents of the Paris Academy; and on the other hand, there is no so-called savage nation known under the sun which has so much distinguished itself by such examples of perfectibility and original capacity for scientific culture, and thereby attached itself so closely to the most civilized nations of the earth, as the Negro."
Racial anthropology (1850-1930)
Among the 19th century naturalists who defined the field were Georges CuvierGeorges Cuvier
Georges Chrétien Léopold Dagobert Cuvier or Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist...
, James Cowles Pritchard, Louis Agassiz
Louis Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel...
, Charles Pickering (Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution, 1848). Cuvier enumerated three races, Pritchard seven, Agassiz twelve, and Pickering eleven.
The 19th century saw attempts to change race from a taxonomic to a biological concept. For example, using anthropometrics, invented by Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon
Alphonse Bertillon
Alphonse Bertillon was a French police officer and biometrics researcher who created anthropometry, an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals. Before that time, criminals could only be identified...
, they measured the shapes and sizes of skulls and related the results to group differences in intelligence or other attributes (Lieberman 2001).
These scientists made three claims about race: first, that races are objective, naturally occurring divisions of humanity; second, that there is a strong relationship between biological races and other human phenomena (such as forms of activity and interpersonal relations and culture, and by extension the relative material success
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
of cultures), thus biologizing the notion of "race", as Foucault demonstrated in his historical analysis; third, that race is therefore a valid scientific category that can be used to explain and predict individual and group behavior. Races were distinguished by skin color
Human skin color
Human skin color is primarily due to the presence of melanin in the skin. Skin color ranges from almost black to white with a pinkish tinge due to blood vessels underneath. Variation in natural skin color is mainly due to genetics, although the evolutionary causes are not completely certain...
, facial type, cranial profile and size, texture and color of hair. Moreover, races were almost universally considered to reflect group differences in moral character and intelligence.
The eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, inspired by Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races
Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines by Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau was intended as a work of philosophical enquiry into decline and degeneration...
(1853–1855) and Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology", asserted as self-evident the biological inferiority of particular groups (Kevles 1985). In many parts of the world, the idea of race became a way of rigidly dividing groups by culture as well as by physical appearances (Hannaford 1996). Campaigns of oppression and genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
were often motivated by supposed racial differences (Horowitz 2001).
During the late 19th century and early 20th century, the tension between the social conservatives, who believed in hierarchy and innate superiority, and the social liberals, who believed in social change and human equality, was at a paramount. The social conservatives continued to exacerbate the belief that certain races were innately inferior by examining their shortcomings, namely by examining and testing intelligence between groups. Some scientists claimed that there was a biological determinant of race by evaluating one’s genes
Gênes
Gênes is the name of a département of the First French Empire in present Italy, named after the city of Genoa. It was formed in 1805, when Napoleon Bonaparte occupied the Republic of Genoa. Its capital was Genoa, and it was divided in the arrondissements of Genoa, Bobbio, Novi Ligure, Tortona and...
and DNA
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms . The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in...
. Different methods of eugenics, the study and practice of human selective breeding often with a race as a primary concentration, was still widely accepted in Britain, Germany, and the United States. On the other hand, many scientists understood race as a social construct. They believed that the phenotypical expression of an individual were determined by one’s genes that are inherited through reproduction but there were certain social constructs, such as culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
, environment
Environment (biophysical)
The biophysical environment is the combined modeling of the physical environment and the biological life forms within the environment, and includes all variables, parameters as well as conditions and modes inside the Earth's biosphere. The biophysical environment can be divided into two categories:...
, and language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
that were primary in shaping behavioral characteristics. Some advocated that race ‘should centre not on what race explains about society, but rather on the questions of who, why and with what effect social significance is attached to racial attributes that are constructed in particular political and socio-economic contexts,’ and thus, addressing the “folk” or “mythological representations” of race.
Although there was a strong notion of race as cultural instead of biological, there were still scientists such as Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt
Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt
Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt was a German physical anthropologist who classified humanity into races.-Racial typology:...
, Stanley Marion Garn
Stanley Marion Garn
Stanley Marion Garn Ph.D. was a professor of physical anthropology. He was a professor of anthropology at the College for Literature, Science and Arts and a Professor of Nutrition at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan...
, and Jan Czekanowski
Jan Czekanowski
Jan Czekanowski was a Polish anthropologist, statistician and linguist. Czekanowski is known for having played an important role in saving the Polish-Lithuanian branch of the Karaim people from Holocaust extermination...
who continued in their taxonomic endeavor to count the number of races and to name them.
Louis Agassiz's racial definitions
After Louis AgassizLouis Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel...
came to the United States he became a prolific writer in what has been later termed the genre of scientific racism. Agassiz was specifically a believer and advocate in polygenism
Polygenism
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...
, that races came from separate origins (specifically separate creations), were endowed with unequal attributes, and could be classified into specific climatic zones, in the same way he felt other animals and plants could be classified.
These included Western American Temperate (the indigenous peoples west of the Rockies); Eastern American Temperate (east of the Rockies); Tropical Asiatic (south of the Himalayas); Temperate Asiatic (east of the Urals and north of the Himalayas); South American Temperate (South America); New Holland (Australia); Arctic (Alaska and Arctic Canada); Cape of Good Hope (South Africa); and American Tropical (Central America and the West Indies).
Agassiz denied that species originated in single pairs, whether at a single location or at many. He argued instead multiple individuals in each species were created at the same time and then distributed throughout the continents where God meant for them to dwell. His lectures on polygenism were popular among the slaveholders in the South, for many this opinion legitimized the belief in a lower standard of the Negro.
Interestingly, his stance in this case was considered to be quite radical in its time, because it went against the more orthodox and standard reading of the Bible in his time which implied all human stock descended from a single couple (Adam and Eve), and in his defense Agassiz often used what now sounds like a very "modern" argument about the need for independence between science and religion; though Agassiz, unlike many polygeneticists, maintained his religious beliefs and was not anti-Biblical in general.
In the context of ethnology and anthropology of the mid-19th century, Agassiz's polygenetic views became explicitly seen as opposing Darwin's views on race, which sought to show the common origin of all human races and the superficiality of racial differences. Darwin's second book on evolution, The Descent of Man, features extensive argumentation addressing the single origin of the races, at times explicitly opposing Agassiz's theories.
Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau
Arthur de GobineauArthur de Gobineau
Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau was a French aristocrat, novelist and man of letters who became famous for developing the theory of the Aryan master race in his book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races...
was a successful diplomat for the French Second Empire. Initially he was posted to Persia, before working in Brazil and other countries. He came to believe that race created culture, arguing that distinctions between the three "black", "white", and "yellow" races were natural barriers, and that "race-mixing" breaks those barriers and leads to chaos. He classified the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, North Africa and southern France as racially mixed.
Gobineau believed the white race was superior to the others. He thought it corresponded to the ancient Indo-European culture, also known as "Aryan
Aryan
Aryan is an English language loanword derived from Sanskrit ārya and denoting variously*In scholarly usage:**Indo-Iranian languages *in dated usage:**the Indo-European languages more generally and their speakers...
". Gobineau originally wrote that white race miscegenation was inevitable. He attributed much of the economic turmoils in France to pollution of races. Later on in his life, he altered his opinion to believe that the white race could be saved.
To Gobineau, the development of empires was ultimately destructive to the "superior races" that created them, since they led to the mixing of distinct races. This he saw as a degenerative process.
According to his definitions, the people of Spain, most of France, most of Germany, southern and western Iran as well as Switzerland, Austria, northern Italy and a large part of Britain, consisted of a degenerative race arising from miscegenation. Also according to him, the whole of north India consisted of a yellow race.
Thomas Huxley's racial definitions
Thomas Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS was an English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution....
wrote one paper, "On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind" (1870), in which he proposed a distinction within the human species, 'races', and their distribution across the earth.
Huxley's paper was rejected by the Royal Society
Royal Society
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
and this became one of the many theories to be advanced and dropped by the early exponents of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
.
Despite rejection by Huxley and the science community, the paper is sometimes cited in support of racialism. Along with Darwin, Huxley was a monogenist, the belief that all humans are part of the same species, with morphological variations emerging out of an initial uniforminity. (Stepan, p. 44). This view contrasts polygenism, the theory that each race is actually a separate species with separate sites of origin.
Despite Huxley's monogenism and his abolitionism on ethical grounds, Huxley assumed a hierarchy of innate abilities, a stance evinced in papers such as "Emancipation Black and White" and his most famous paper, "Evolution and Ethics."
In the former, he writes that the "highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest." (Stepan, p. 79-80).
(see also:)
Charles Darwin and Race
Though Charles DarwinCharles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
’s evolutionary theory was set forth in 1859 upon publication of On the Origin of Species, this work was largely absent of explicit reference to Darwin’s theory applied to man. This application by Darwin would not become explicit until the publication of his second great book on evolution, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex is a book on evolutionary theory by English naturalist Charles Darwin, first published in 1871. It was Darwin's second great book on evolutionary theory, following his 1859 work, On The Origin of Species. In The Descent of Man, Darwin applies...
, in 1871.
Darwin’s publication of this book occurred within the heated debates between advocates of monogeny, who held that all races came from a common ancestor, and advocates of polygeny, who held that the races were separately created. Darwin, who had come from a family with strong abolitionist ties, had experienced and was disturbed by cultures of slavery during his voyage on the Beagle years earlier. Noted Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore argue that Darwin’s writings on evolution were not only influenced by his abolitionist tendencies, but also his belief that non-white races were equal in regard to their intellectual capacity as white races, a belief which had been strongly disputed by scientists such as Morton, Agassiz and Broca, all noted polygenists.
By the late 1860s, however, Darwin’s theory of evolution had been thought to be compatible with the polygenist thesis (Stepan 1982). Darwin thus used Descent of Man to disprove the polygenist thesis and end the debate between polygeny and monogeny once and for all. Darwin also used it to disprove other hypotheses about racial difference that had persisted since the time of ancient Greece, for example, that differences in skin color and body constitution occurred because of differences of geography and climate.
Darwin concluded, for example, that the biological similarities between the different races were “too great” for the polygenist thesis to be plausible. He also used the idea of races to argue for the continuity between humans and animals, noting that it would be highly implausible that man should, by mere accident acquire characteristics shared by many apes.
Darwin sought to demonstrate that the physical characteristics that were being used to define race for centuries (i.e. skin color and facial features) were superficial and had no utility for survival. Because, according to Darwin, any characteristic that did not have survival value could not have been naturally selected, he devised another hypothesis for the development and persistence of these characteristics. The mechanism Darwin developed is known as sexual selection
Sexual selection
Sexual selection, a concept introduced by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, is a significant element of his theory of natural selection...
.
Though the idea of sexual selection had appeared in earlier works by Darwin, it was not until the late 1860s when it received full consideration (Stepan 1982). Furthermore, it was not until 1914 that sexual selection received serious consideration as a racial theory by naturalist thinkers.
Darwin defined sexual selection as the “struggle between individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex”. Sexual selection consisted of two types for Darwin: 1.) The physical struggle for a mate, and 2.) The preference for some color or another, typically by females of a given species. Darwin asserted that the differing human races (insofar as race was conceived phenotypically) had arbitrary standards of ideal beauty, and that these standards reflected important physical characteristics sought in mates.
Broadly speaking, Darwin’s attitudes of what race was and how it developed in the human species are attributable to two assertions, 1.)That all human beings, regardless of race share a single, common ancestor and 2.) Phenotypic racial differences are superficially selected, and have no survival value. Given these two beliefs, some believe Darwin to have established monogenism as the dominant paradigm for racial ancestry, and to have defeated the scientific racism practiced by Morton, Knott, Agassiz et. Al, as well as notions that there existed a natural racial hierarchy that reflected inborn differences and measures of value between the different human races.
Nevertheless he stated: : “The various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other - as in the texture of hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotion, but partly in their intellectual faculties” (The Descent of Man, chapter VII).
In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted the great difficulty naturalists had in trying to decide how many "races" there actually were:
Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them.
Decline of racial studies after 1930
Several social and political developments that occurred at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century led to the transformation in the discourse of race. Three movements that historians have considered are: the coming of mass democracyDemocracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
, the age of imperialist expansion
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
, and the impact of Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
. More than any other, the violence of Nazi rule, the Holocaust, and World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
transformed the whole discussion of race. Nazism made an argument for racial superiority based on a biological basis. This led to the idea that people could be divided into discrete groups and based on the divisions, there would be severe, tortuous, and often fatal consequence. The exposition of racial theory beginning in the Third Reich, up to the Final Solution
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
, created a popular moral revolution against racism.
Consequently, studies of human variation focused more on actual patterns of variation and evolutionary patterns among populations and less about classification. Some scientists point to three discoveries. Firstly, African populations exhibit greater genetic diversity and less linkage disequilibrium because of their long history. Secondly, genetic similarity is directly correlated with geographic proximity. Lastly, some loci reflect selection in response to environmental gradients. Therefore, some argue, human racial groups do not appear to be distinct ethnic groups. Other scientists instead argue that new findings from research on race and genetics, such as "Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy", validate the significance of racial groups.
Franz Boas
Franz BoasFranz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...
(1858–1942) was a German American anthropologist and has been called the “Father of American Anthropology.” Boas made significant contributions within anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
, more specifically, physical anthropology
Physical anthropology
Biological anthropology is that branch of anthropology that studies the physical development of the human species. It plays an important part in paleoanthropology and in forensic anthropology...
, linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, archaeology
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
, and cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
. His work put an emphasis on cultural and environmental effects on people to explain their development into adulthood and evaluated them in concert with human biology and evolution. This led encouraged academics to break away from static taxonomical classifications of race. It is said that before Boas, anthropology was the study of race, and after Boas, anthropology was the study of culture.
Julian Huxley and A.C. Haddon
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887–1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. After returning to England from a tour of the United States in 1924, Huxley wrote a series of articles for the Spectator which he expressed his belief in the drastic differences between “negros” and “whites.” He believed that the color of “blood” – percentage of ‘white’ and ‘black’ blood - that a person had would determine a person’s mental capacity, moral probity, and social behavior. “Blood” also determined how individuals should be treated by society. He was a proponent of racial inequality and segregation.By 1930, Huxley’s ideas on race and inherited intellectual capacity of human groups became more liberal. By the mid 1930s, Huxley was considered one of the leading antiracist
Anti-racism
Anti-racism includes beliefs, actions, movements, and policies adopted or developed to oppose racism. In general, anti-racism is intended to promote an egalitarian society in which people do not face discrimination on the basis of their race, however defined...
and committed much of his time and efforts into publicizing the fight against Nazism.
Alfred Cort Haddon
Alfred Cort Haddon
Alfred Cort Haddon, Sc.D., FRS, FRGS was an influential British anthropologist and ethnologist.Initially a biologist, who achieved his most notable fieldwork, with W.H.R. Rivers, C.G. Seligman, Sidney Ray, Anthony Wilkin on the Torres Strait Islands...
(1855–1940) was a British anthropologist and ethnologist.
In 1935, Huxley and A.C. Haddon wrote, We Europeans, which greatly popularized the struggle against racial science and attacked the Nazis’ abuse of science to promote their racial theories. Although they argued that ‘any biological arrangement of the types of European man is still largely a subjective process,’ they proposed that humankind could be divided up into “major” and “minor subspecies.” They believed that races were a classification based on hereditary traits but should not by nature be used to condemn or deem inferior to another group. Like most of their peers, they continued to maintain a distinction between the social meaning of race and the scientific study of race. From a scientific stand point, they were willing to accept that concepts of superiority and inferiority did not exist, but from a social stand point, they continued to believe that racial differences were significant. For example, they argued that genetic differences between groups were functionally important for certain jobs or tasks.
Ashley Montagu vs. Carleton Coon
Montague Francis Ashley MontaguAshley Montagu
Montague Francis Ashley Montagu was a British-American anthropologist and humanist, of Jewish ancestry, who popularized topics such as race and gender and their relation to politics and development...
(1905–1999) was a British-American anthropologist.
In 1942, Montague made a strong effort to have the word “race” replaced with “ethnic group
Ethnic group
An ethnic group is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, often consisting of a common language, a common culture and/or an ideology that stresses common ancestry or endogamy...
” by publishing his book, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Montagu was also selected to draft the initial 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race.
Carleton Stevens Coon (1904–1981) was an American physical anthropologist. One of Coon’s most important books is The Origin of Races, which was published in 1962, and was highly controversial. In it, Coon offered a definitive statement of the polygenist view. He also argued that human fossils could be assigned a date, a race, and an evolutionary grade. Coon divided humanity into five races and believed that each race had ascended the ladder of human evolution at different rates.
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCOUNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
) was established November 16, 1945, in the wake of the genocide of Nazism. The UNESCO 1945 constitution declared that, “The great and terrible war which now has ended was made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine
of the inequality of men and races.” Between 1950 and 1978 the UNESCO issued five statements on the issue of race.
The first of the UNESCO statements on race was titled "The Race Question
The Race Question
The Race Question is the first of four UNESCO statements about issues of race. It was issued on 18 July 1950 following World War II and Nazi racism. The statement was an attempt to clarify what was scientifically known about race and a moral condemnation of racism...
" and was issued on July 18, 1950. The statement included both a rejection of a scientific basis for theories of racial hierarchies and a moral condemnation of racism
Anti-racism
Anti-racism includes beliefs, actions, movements, and policies adopted or developed to oppose racism. In general, anti-racism is intended to promote an egalitarian society in which people do not face discrimination on the basis of their race, however defined...
. It's first statement suggested in particular to "drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of "ethnic groups", which proved to be controversial. The 1950 statement was most concerned with dispelling the notion of race as species, and it did not reject the idea of a biological basis to racial categories. Instead it defined the concept of race in terms as a population defined by certain anatomical and physiological characteristics as being divergent from other populations, it gives the examples of the Caucasian
Caucasian race
The term Caucasian race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia , Central Asia and South Asia...
, Negroid
Negroid race
Negroid is a term sometimes used by forensic anthropologists and physical anthropologists to refer to populations that share certain phenotypic traits such as high Melanin levels and skeletal features associated with ancestry from Sub-saharan Africa.It was introduced by early Racial science used...
and Mongoloid race
Mongoloid race
Mongoloid is a term sometimes used by forensic anthropologists and physical anthropologists to refer to populations that share certain phenotypic traits such as epicanthic fold and shovel-shaped incisors and other physical traits common in East Asia, the Americas and the Arctic...
. The statements maintain that there are no "pure races" and that biological variability was as great within any race as between races. It argued that there is no scientific basis for believing that there are any innate differences in intellectual, psychological or emotional potential among races.
The statement was drafted by Ashley Montagu
Ashley Montagu
Montague Francis Ashley Montagu was a British-American anthropologist and humanist, of Jewish ancestry, who popularized topics such as race and gender and their relation to politics and development...
and endorsed by some of the leading researchers of the time, in the fields of psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
, cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
and ethnology
Ethnology
Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
. The statement was endorsed by Ernest Beaglehole, Juan Comas
Juan Comas
Juan Comas was born in the small town of Alayor, Spain, located in the center of the Menorca Island in the Mediterranean Sea, 150 miles southeast of Barcelona. He was born on January 23, 1900....
, L. A. Costa Pinto, Franklin Frazier, sociologist specialised in race relations studies, Morris Ginsberg
Morris Ginsberg
Morris Ginsberg was a UK sociologist. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1942 to 1943. Ginsberg helped draft the UNESCO 1950 statement titled The Race Question...
, founding chairperson of the British Sociological Association
British Sociological Association
The British Sociological Association is a scholarly and professional society for sociologists in the United Kingdom, and was founded in 1951. They publish the academic journals Sociology, Work, Employment and Society and Cultural Sociology as well as their membership newsletter...
, Humayun Kabir
Humayun Kabir
Humayun Zahiruddin Amir-i Kabir or Humayun Kabir was an Indian educationist, politician, writer and philosopher.-Ancestry and early life:...
, writer, philosopher and Education Minister of India twice, Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
, one of the founders of ethnology
Ethnology
Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
and leading theorist of cultural relativism
Cultural relativism
Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and...
, and Ashley Montagu
Ashley Montagu
Montague Francis Ashley Montagu was a British-American anthropologist and humanist, of Jewish ancestry, who popularized topics such as race and gender and their relation to politics and development...
, anthropologist and author of The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity
Joseph Merrick
Joseph Carey Merrick , sometimes incorrectly referred to as John Merrick, was an English man with severe deformities who was exhibited as a human curiosity named the Elephant Man. He became well known in London society after he went to live at the London Hospital...
, who was the rapporteur.
As a result of a lack of representation of physical anthropologists
Physical anthropology
Biological anthropology is that branch of anthropology that studies the physical development of the human species. It plays an important part in paleoanthropology and in forensic anthropology...
in the drafing committee the 1950 publication was criticized by biologicists and physical anthropologists for confusing the biological and social senses of race, and for going beyond the scientific facts, although there was a general agreement about the statements conclusions. UNESCO assembled a new committee with better representation of the physical sciences and drafted a new statement released in 1951. The 1951 statement, published as "The Race Concept", focused on race as a biological heuristic that could serve as the basis for evolutionary studies of human populations. It considered the existing races to be the result of such evolutionary processes throughout human history. It also maintained that "equality of opportunity and equality in law in no way depend, as ethical principles, upon the assertion that human beings are in fact equal in endowment."
As the 1950 and 1951 statements generated considerable attention and in 1964 a new commission was formed to draft a third statement titled "Proposals on the Biological Aspects of Race". According to Michael Banton
Michael Banton
Michael Banton is a British social scientist known primarily for his publications on racial and ethnic relations.-Academic contribution:...
(2008), this statement broke more clearly with the notion of race-as-species than the previous two statements, declaring that almost any genetically differentiated population could be defined as a race. The statement stated that "Different classifications of mankind into major stocks, and of those into more restricted categories (races, which are groups of populations, or single populations) have been proposed on the basis of hereditary physical traits. Nearly all classifications recognise at least three major stocks." and "There is no national, religious, geographic, linguistic or cultural group which constitutes a race ipso facto; the concept of race is purely biological." It concluded by: "The biological data given above stand in open contradiction to the tenets of racism. Racist theories can in no way pretend to have any scientific foundation."
The 1950, '51 and '64 statements focused on the dispelling the scientific foundations for racism, but didn't consider other factors contributing to racism. For this reason in 1967 a new committee was assembled, including representatives of the social sciences (sociologists, lawyers, ethnographers and geneticists), to draft a statement "covering the social, ethical and philosophical aspects of the problem". This statement was the first to provide a definition of racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
: "antisocial beliefs and acts which are based upon the fallacy that discriminatory intergroup relations are justifiable on biological grounds". The statement continued to denounce the many negative social affects of racism.
In 1978 the general assembly of the UNESCO considered the four previous statements and published a collective "Declaration
on Race and Racial Prejudice". This declaration included Apartheid as one of the examples of racism, an inclusion which caused South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
to step out of the assembly. It declared that a number of public policies and laws needed to be implemented. It stated that:
- "All human beings belong to a single species."
- "All peoples of the world possess equal faculties for attaining the highest level in intellectual, technical, social, economic, cultural and political development."
- "The differences between the achievements of the different peoples are entirely attributable to geographical, historical, political, economic, social and cultural factors."
- "Any theory which involves the claim that racial or ethnic groups are inherently superior or inferior, thus implying that somewould be entitled to dominate and eliminate others, presumed to be inferior, or which bases value judgements on racial differentiation, has no scientific foundation and is contrary to the moral and ethical principles of humanity."
Genetics and medicine
Historically, scientists have tried to prove that there were distinct mental and physical differences between races through craniometry, phrenologyPhrenology
Phrenology is a pseudoscience primarily focused on measurements of the human skull, based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules...
, and physiognomy
Physiognomy
Physiognomy is the assessment of a person's character or personality from their outer appearance, especially the face...
. Certain racial groups are more susceptible to certain diseases, such as sickle-cell anemia, hypertension, and high blood pressure. Only recently have scientists been able to use molecular methods of autosomal DNA, mitochondrial DNA
Mitochondrial DNA
Mitochondrial DNA is the DNA located in organelles called mitochondria, structures within eukaryotic cells that convert the chemical energy from food into a form that cells can use, adenosine triphosphate...
, and Y-chromosome DNA to prove the origin of races as a monogenist viewpoint. Learning about animal and human ancestry can be done by analyzing and comparing nucleic acid patterns in a sample of DNA through electrophoresis
Electrophoresis
Electrophoresis, also called cataphoresis, is the motion of dispersed particles relative to a fluid under the influence of a spatially uniform electric field. This electrokinetic phenomenon was observed for the first time in 1807 by Reuss , who noticed that the application of a constant electric...
. The idea was, that based on the genetic markers of race in one’s DNA, medical practitioners and researchers could more efficiently engineer certain drugs to treat disease within a given racial group. Despite the UNESCO statement and other claims that argue that there is no biological determinant of race, scientists today argue that they can reliably classify a person using genetic markers to groups that correspond almost exactly with self-reported race.
Criticism racial studies (1930s-1980s)
Criticism of race often accompanied the development of racial theories. In Society Must Be Defended (1978–79), Michel FoucaultMichel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
argued that, from a historical and political discourse of "race struggle", the notion of "race" was discussed in scientific terms in the 19th century by racist biologists and eugenicists. Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
, he argues, was instrumental in opposing this dangerous form of essentialism
Essentialism
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...
, which would lead eventually to the Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
"state racism
State racism
State racism is a concept used by French philosopher Michel Foucault to designate the reappropriation of the historical and political discourse of "race struggle", in the late seventeenth century....
".
Many significant criticisms also came from the school of Franz Boas
Franz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...
beginning in the 1920s. During the mid-1930s, with the rise of Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
and its prominent espousing of racist ideologies, there was an outpouring of popular works by scientists criticizing the use of race to justify the politics of "superiority" and "inferiority".
An influential work in this regard was the publication of" We Europeans: A Survey of "Racial" Problems by Julian Huxley
Julian Huxley
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis...
and A. C. Haddon in 1935, which sought to show that population genetics
Population genetics
Population genetics is the study of allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four main evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes into account the factors of recombination, population subdivision and population...
allowed for only a highly limited definition of race at best. Another popular work during this period, "The Races of Mankind" by Ruth Benedict
Ruth Benedict
Ruth Benedict was an American anthropologist, cultural relativist, and folklorist....
and Gene Weltfish, argued that though there were some extreme racial differences, they were primarily superficial, and in any case did not justify political action.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
' Race and History (UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
, 1952) was another critique of the biological "race" notion, arguing in favor of cultural relativism
Cultural relativism
Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and...
through a metaphor of cultures as different trains crossing each others in various directions and speed, thus each one seeming to progress to himself while others supposedly kept immobile. This, in his view, clearly showed that "race" was no longer a useful indicator of cultural superiority.
In his 1984 article in Essence magazine, "On Being ‘White’…and Other Lies," James Baldwin reads the history of racialization
Racialization
Racialization refers to processes of the discursive production of racial identities. It signifies the extension of dehumanizing and racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group...
in America as both figuratively and literally violent, remarking that "race" only exists as a social construction within a network of force relations: "America became white—the people who, as they claim, "settled" the country became white—because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie. White men from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians—became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the well, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women. . . Because they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers."
Apart from its function as a vernacular term, the term "race"—as Nancy Stepan notes in her 1982 book, The Idea of Race in Science, Great Britain 1800-1960—varied widely in its usage, even in science, from the 18th century through the 20th; the term referred "at one time or another" to "cultural, religious, national, linguistic, ethnic and geographical groups of human beings"—everything from "Celts" to "Spanish Americans" to "Hottentots" to "Europeans" (p. xvii).
In the 1979 preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes the elusive element of "blackness" in Afro-American literature as lacking an "essence
Essentialism
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...
," defined instead "by a network of relations that form a particular aesthetic unity" (p. 162). Continuing his poststructuralist-inflected negation of blackness as an essence, in his 1985 introduction to a special issue of the journal Critical Inquiry, Gates goes even further, calling race itself a "dangerous trope" (p. 5). He argues that "race has become a trope of the ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific believe systems which…also have fundamentally opposed economic interests" (p. 5).
Linda Gottfredson
Linda Gottfredson
Linda Susanne Gottfredson is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. Gottfredson's work has been influential in shaping U.S...
, on the other hand, has argued that denying or trying to conceal real biological differences between groups on average IQ instead cause people to seek something to blame for the differing average group achievements, causing resentment and hostility. She argues that "virtually all the victim groups of genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
in the Twentieth Century had relatively high average levels of achievement (e.g., German Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
, educated Cambodians
The Killing Fields
The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War ....
, Russian Kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s, Armenians in Turkey
Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide—also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Crime—refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I...
, Ibos in Nigeria
Nigerian Civil War
The Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Nigerian-Biafran War, 6 July 1967–15 January 1970, was a political conflict caused by the attempted secession of the southeastern provinces of Nigeria as the self-proclaimed Republic of Biafra...
; Gordon, 1980)."
Views of hereditarian race researchers
Current researchers investing racial differences and arguing that they are biological are often accused of racism and that their research may harm society. Steven PinkerSteven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author...
has stated that it is "a conventional wisdom among left-leaning academics that genes imply genocide." He has responded to this "conventional wisdom" by comparing the history of Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
, which had the opposite position on genes to that of Nazism:
But the 20th century suffered "two" ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn't believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it's not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It's the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenicsEugenicsEugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
or social engineeringSocial engineering (political science)Social engineering is a discipline in political science that refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale, whether by governments or private groups. In the political arena, the counterpart of social engineering is political engineering.For various reasons,...
) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones.
Jensen and Rushton point out that research has shown that also in a group with a lower average some individuals will be above the average of other groups. They also argue that when society is blamed for disparities in average group achievements that instead result from biological differences, the result is demands for compensation from the less successful group which the more successful group feel is unjustified, causing mutual resentment. Linda Gottfredson
Linda Gottfredson
Linda Susanne Gottfredson is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. Gottfredson's work has been influential in shaping U.S...
similarly argues that denying real biological differences instead cause people to seek something to blame causing hostility between groups. In the US, examples being the views that whites are racist or blacks are lazy. She furthermore argues that "virtually all the victim groups of genocide in the Twentieth Century had relatively high average levels of achievement (e.g., German Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
, educated Cambodians
The Killing Fields
The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War ....
, Russian Kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s, Armenians in Turkey
Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide—also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Crime—refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I...
, Ibos in Nigeria
Nigerian Civil War
The Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Nigerian-Biafran War, 6 July 1967–15 January 1970, was a political conflict caused by the attempted secession of the southeastern provinces of Nigeria as the self-proclaimed Republic of Biafra...
; Gordon, 1980)." Gottfredson has also disputed that a lower achieving group gains from denying or concealing real biological differences. An increasingly complex society built on the assumption than everyone can do equally well means that they who do not have this ability have increasing trouble functioning in most areas of life. They need various forms of special assistance which is not possible as long as the need is denied to exist.
See also
- Ancestry-informative markerAncestry-informative markerAn ancestry-informative marker is a set of polymorphisms for a locus, generally from humans, which exhibits substantially different frequencies between populations from different geographical regions....
- Craniometry
- Physical anthropologyPhysical anthropologyBiological anthropology is that branch of anthropology that studies the physical development of the human species. It plays an important part in paleoanthropology and in forensic anthropology...
- RacialismRacialismRacialism is an emphasis on race or racial considerations. Currently, racialism entails a belief in the existence and significance of racial categories, but not necessarily that any absolute hierarchy between the races has been demonstrated by a rigorous and comprehensive scientific process...
- Scientific racismScientific racismScientific racism is the use of scientific techniques and hypotheses to sanction the belief in racial superiority or racism.This is not the same as using scientific findings and the scientific method to investigate differences among the humans and argue that there are races...
- PhrenologyPhrenologyPhrenology is a pseudoscience primarily focused on measurements of the human skull, based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules...
- Evolutionary synthesis
- AnthropologyAnthropologyAnthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
- EugenicsEugenicsEugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
- Racial HygieneRacial hygieneRacial hygiene was a set of early twentieth century state sanctioned policies by which certain groups of individuals were allowed to procreate and others not, with the expressed purpose of promoting certain characteristics deemed to be particularly desirable...
- HeritabilityHeritabilityThe Heritability of a population is the proportion of observable differences between individuals that is due to genetic differences. Factors including genetics, environment and random chance can all contribute to the variation between individuals in their observable characteristics...
- Biological determinismBiological determinismBiological determination is the interpretation of humans and human life from a strictly biological point of view, and it is closely related to genetic determinism...
- Race and intelligenceRace and intelligenceThe connection between race and intelligence has been a subject of debate in both popular science and academic research since the inception of intelligence testing in the early 20th century...
Dictionary definitions
- Definition of "race" in the 1913 Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary provided by the ARTFL Project, University of Chicago.
- Definition of "race" in the Wiktionary
Web sites devoted to the history of "race"
- History of Race in Science is a web site devoted to providing information for scholars and students of the history of "race" in science, medicine, and technology. This site is maintained at the Department of History at the University of TorontoUniversity of TorontoThe University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
and includes excellent subject bibliographies as well as an annotated link list. - PBS website for the three-part television documentary "Race-The Power of an Illusion" with background reading and teaching resources.