Race

III

History of the Concept of Race

Race is a social and cultural creation whose definition has varied over time. Until a few hundred years ago, most people had very little exposure to individuals who differed markedly from themselves in physical appearance or culture. Thus, the concept of race was absent in most early societies. In the 15th and 16th centuries, European explorers traveled to distant lands and encountered peoples who looked and behaved differently. The concept of race emerged as a way to categorize people on the basis of physical and cultural differences. Later, colonialists used the concept of race to justify unequal treatment, exploitation, and enslavement of supposedly inferior peoples.

A

Ancient Times

Since ancient times, explorers have traveled to foreign lands and written about the differences that exist among human populations. In these written accounts of their journeys, travelers often described the appearance and ways of life of the people they met in distant lands. In many cases, these accounts attempted to demonstrate the inferiority of other peoples.

The people of ancient Egypt had contacts with seafarers (often pirates) from other parts of the Mediterranean. Egyptian kings also financed expeditions to explore unknown lands. One expedition, sent by King Pepi II in about 2250 bc, encountered a group of Pygmies in southern central Africa. In contrast with Egyptians, who were tall and had light-brown skin, Pygmies were very short and dark-skinned. The Egyptians were fascinated by the diminutive Pygmies and by their performance of a variety of exuberant dances. Several carvings of dancing Pygmy figures found in the ruins of ancient Egyptian civilization provide evidence of the Egyptians’ early fascination with physical and cultural differences between themselves and other peoples.

The Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the 5th century bc, described many peoples of Eurasia and Africa, including Pygmies and a people thought to be Mongols. He also described the customs of some of them—for example, the Scythians. Herodotus traveled widely, but never far south in Africa or to Mongolia, where the people he described lived. Instead, he heard reports about these peoples from other travelers. The accounts of Herodotus showed his fascination with differences among people in physical appearance, culture, and behavior.

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The descriptions recorded by Herodotus and other ancient writers indicate the attitudes they had toward differences in other peoples. The Greeks referred to anybody who could not speak Greek as a barbarian (meaning “stammerer,” as when trying to speak Greek), an early historical example of racism. Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer and natural historian of the 1st century ad, described Africans as black-skinned with bristled hair. He decided they must have been burned by living too close to the sun.

In the 2nd century ad the Roman Empire reached its height, encompassing large territories in the Middle East, North Africa, and eastern Europe. The Romans established trade routes with India, while the empire of the Chinese Han dynasty established the Silk Road, which ran from eastern China to India, the Middle East, and Roman ports on the Mediterranean Sea. These trade routes established links among urban centers throughout Eurasia and North Africa, exposing people in many cultures to other peoples and cultures.

B

The Age of European Exploration

In the 15th and 16th centuries, several western European countries—Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, England, and France—began sponsoring expeditions to explore regions of the world that were then largely unknown to Europeans. Rulers financed these voyages with the hopes of establishing control over foreign lands for economic and political benefit—a practice known as imperialism. From the reports of voyagers, Europeans learned of cultures quite different from their own as well as of the physical appearance of non-European peoples. Europeans generally came to believe that what they saw as bizarre and exotic customs were somehow directly related to differences in skin color, hair color and texture, and body and face shape. Thus, the concept of race developed to include both physical and cultural differences among people.

In the 1200s Europeans had little exposure to the cultures of East Asia. Many found reports by Venetian explorer Marco Polo of his travels to China and the countries of South and Southeast Asia difficult to believe. Polo described urban populations in China of over a million people, much larger than any in Europe, and unfamiliar customs, such as the use of paper money for commerce, coal and oil for fuel, and engraved wooden blocks to print documents. He noted in many instances the dietary customs of Asians, such as the eating of dog and other animals not eaten in Europe. Although Polo recorded the skin color and appearance of the peoples he encountered, the concept of race is absent from his writings.

Regular contact between Europe and the Americas began in the late 15th century with the voyages of Italian-Spanish navigator Christopher Columbus. The first Native Americans Columbus encountered were the Arawak-speaking Taíno people of the islands of the Caribbean. In his descriptions of these people, Columbus recorded details of their olive- to copper-colored skin; thick, straight, and long black hair; and short, muscular bodies. He commented on their habits of going largely unclothed and bathing frequently. He also described their types of body adornment, including paints, gold piercings, and tattoos.

Soon after these first encounters, the Spaniards began to clash with and assert their authority over Native Americans. By the early 1500s, the Spaniards had enslaved and killed a great number of indigenous people, a pattern that would be followed for centuries by other Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British colonists of the Americas. White settlers and their financial backers in Europe justified the domination of Native Americans based in large part on notions of European racial superiority.

Europeans first came to know of most Pacific Ocean islands and their inhabitants in the 18th and 19th centuries. Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests close connections among the many peoples of the Pacific Islands—known today as Micronesians, Melanesians, and Polynesians—although they can appear physically quite distinct. During the 1700s British navy officer Captain James Cook traveled widely in the South Pacific, meeting peoples such as the Maori of New Zealand, Tahitians, and Hawaiians. He treated these peoples with a respect uncharacteristic of other European explorers in the region.

The British established their first settlements in Australia in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The settlers soon met the Aboriginal hunter-gatherers indigenous to that continent (see Aboriginal Australians). In a manner very similar to that of European settlers in the Americas, the British colonists of Australia generally regarded Aborigines as an inferior race. Clashes on the frontiers of white settlement led to a massive number of Aboriginal deaths and the enslavement and displacement of most surviving indigenous Australians.

C

The Rise of Racial Classification

The science of biological classification uses a taxonomic hierarchy to indicate how any one type of organism is related to other types. Swedish botanist and physician Carolus Linnaeus developed the precursor to the modern classification system in the mid-1700s. In the first edition of Systema Naturae (1735), he set out a system for classifying plants, animals, and minerals. To any particular type of organism, Linnaeus gave two Latin names, the first of which identified its genus and the second its species. Linnaeus classified humans as animals, an unpopular idea at the time. He recognized that people belonged with monkeys and apes in the taxonomic order (a broader level of classification) Anthropomorpha, which he later renamed Primates. Linnaeus also recognized all humans as belonging to a common genus, Homo, and species, sapiens.

In later editions of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus subdivided humans into four main subspecies (he did not refer to them as races): Homo sapiens americanus, for peoples of the Americas; Homo sapiens europaeus, for Europeans; Homo sapiens asiaticus, for Asians; and Homo sapiens afer, for Africans. He provided no systematic method for determining these divisions. Linnaeus also identified two other subspecies: Homo sapiens monstrosus, which included people with deformities, mythological giants, and the Hottentots (see Khoikhoi) people of southern Africa; and Homo sapiens ferus, which described wild children found abandoned in forests. The taxonomic divisions of the human species developed by Linnaeus resembled later racial characterizations in that he associated different temperaments and cultural traits with each subspecies. For example, he identified the Asian subspecies as melancholy, stiff, and greedy, whereas the European subspecies was described as gentle, optimistic, and inventive. Linnaeus’s classification of humans was not based on scientific evidence and reflected his own European social prejudices.

Central to Linnaeus’s scheme was the idea of the Great Chain of Being, referred to as the scala naturae. During the 18th century, Christian scholars assumed that all aspects of the world could be arranged in a hierarchy of worth consisting of a series of discrete levels. At the top of the hierarchy was God, representing perfection. Below God were living things, with humans at the top and other animals ranked lower. At the bottom of the Chain of Being were inorganic materials, such as metals. Although Linnaeus did not explicitly rank humans, his attribution of temperaments to subspecies implied a ranking of Europeans first, followed by Asians and Americans, with Africans at the bottom.

Linnaeus’s contemporary, French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, took a different approach to describing human diversity. Buffon rejected racial classification and instead sought merely to describe the variety of forms and behaviors among human populations. In 1749 he was the first to use the term race to refer to a local population. He remarked that as diverse as humans might appear physically, any man and woman could successfully reproduce. Thus, he believed all people belonged to one biological group. Like others of his time, Buffon believed differences in human populations resulted directly from prevailing environmental conditions and circumstances, mainly diet, climatic temperature, and the evils of enslavement. These factors could make a person change form or, in his words, degenerate. According to this thinking, changes in conditions could change people physically over a few generations.

In the late 1700s German physician Johann Blumenbach developed one of the most influential and enduring racial classification systems. He proposed five human races, which he called varieties: Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American. These races corresponded approximately to the geographic regions of Europe, Asia, Australia and Oceania, Africa, and the Americas, respectively. Later, Blumenbach’s divisions were popularized as the white, yellow, brown, black, and red races, terms that continued to be used into the 20th century. Blumenbach rejected Linnaeus’s grouping of humans with the apes and instead placed them in separate orders, reflecting his belief that humans were dramatically different from all other animals.

Blumenbach, a pioneer in the field of comparative anatomy and a collector of human craniums, based his racial classification scheme primarily on observed differences in skull size and shape as well as in skin color. Blumenbach proposed that all people descended from an original human type, and that the people of Georgia, in the Caucasus Mountain region of eastern Europe (now considered part of western Asia), were the closest living representatives of this original type. Thus, Blumenbach used the term Caucasian to describe a race of white European peoples. He believed the other races had “degenerated” from Caucasians. According to some accounts, he developed this theory after deciding that a skull of a Georgian woman was the most beautiful he had ever seen. Implicit in Blumenbach’s classification scheme was that the original humans were created in God’s image, making Caucasians closer to divine perfection and superior to other races.

D

“Scientific” Racial Studies in the 19th Century

In the 1830s Belgian statistician Adolphe Quételet attempted to make racial classification into a mathematical science. He suggested that within human populations, many traits, when plotted on a graph, could be shown to fall into what is known as a bell curve or normal distribution. Using stature as an example, this means that a graph of the heights of many people would always contain very few extremely short and extremely tall people, more somewhat short and somewhat tall people, and many people near the average height. Quételet believed that by plotting curves of physical and intellectual traits, one could arrive at a profile of the so-called average person of each race. Based on this theory, scientists tried to establish how the average white European person looked and behaved as compared with the average person of any darker-skinned population. In these efforts, scientists were merely trying to confirm the existence of already established racial categories.

During the 19th century, many scholars turned away from what they considered subjective and anecdotal methods of describing races. They devised techniques to measure the physical attributes of people, a practice known as anthropometry. Scientists became especially interested in craniometry (the measurement of head shape and size), inspired partly by the popularity in the early 1800s of phrenology, the study of the link between head shape and mental abilities. One of the first people to systematically measure skulls was American physician Samuel G. Morton. In the 1830s and 1840s Morton conducted various measurements, including cranial capacity, of more than 1,000 skulls. Based on these studies, Morton concluded that the various human races did not share a common ancestor and were probably unrelated to one other. This view, known as polygenism, opposed the prevailing doctrine of monogenism, the belief that races are a single species with a common origin. The popularity of monogenism stemmed from its compatibility with the biblical idea that all people descended from Adam and Eve. After Morton’s death in 1851, some of his associates used his work to justify the institution of slavery in the American South, arguing that blacks were distinctly different from whites and biologically inferior. Morton also influenced French anthropologist Paul Broca, who elaborated on polygenic theory and developed new instruments to measure the skull. Modern critics of Morton’s work argue that his measurements contained errors that reflected an unconscious racial bias.

In the 1840s Swedish physician Anders Retzius developed one of the most influential craniometric techniques, the cephalic index—the ratio between the width and length of the head. Retzius used precision calipers to measure the heads of people from different backgrounds. He generally classified peoples as having one of two characteristic head shapes—brachycephalic (broad-headed) or dolichocephalic (long-headed). People with intermediate head shapes were assigned to a third type, mesocephalic. Soon after its development, the cephalic index gained popularity in Europe and the United States as a way to classify individuals into races based on similar measurements. As a measure of racial differences, however, the cephalic index proved problematic. For example, Germans were largely dolichocephalic, but so were many West African tribes.

In the 1850s British naturalist Charles Darwin developed the theory of natural selection and the modern concept of biological evolution. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Darwin thought that human variation did not lend itself to taxonomic organization because the differences among people do not fall into distinct categories. In his book The Descent of Man (1871) he wrote, “Every naturalist who has had the misfortune to undertake the description of a group of highly varying organisms, has encountered cases ... precisely like that of man; and if of a cautious disposition, he will end by uniting all the forms which graduate into each other, into a single species; for he will say to himself that he has no right to give names to objects that he cannot define.” Supporters of polygenism, meanwhile, rejected Darwin’s evolutionary theory and persisted in believing that races were fixed, unchanging entities.

In 1911 German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas mounted the most convincing challenge against the classification of races based on the cephalic index or any other anthropometric measurements. Boas demonstrated that the stature and head shapes of children born and raised in the United States differed from those of their parents from Europe. He thus showed that skull shape was significantly influenced by the environment (the basis for this influence remains unknown), undermining the use of the cephalic index as a racial marker. Nonetheless, scientists continued to use this and other anthropometric measurements as bases for racial classification well into the mid-20th century.

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