The concept of race as a rough division of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) has a long and complicated history. The word race itself is modern and was used in the sense of "nation, ethnic group" during the 16th to 19th centuries and acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology only from the mid-19th century. The politicization of the field under the concept of racism in the 20th century led to a decline in racial studies during the 1930s to 1980s, culminating in a poststructuralist deconstruction of race as a social construct.
Etymology
The word "race", interpreted to mean an identifiable group of people who share a common descent, was introduced into English in about 1580, from the Old French rasse (1512), from Italian razza. An earlier but etymologically distinct word for a similar concept was the Latin word genus meaning a group sharing qualities related to birth, descent, origin, race, stock, or family; this Latin word is cognate with the Greek words "genos", (γένος) meaning "race or kind", and "gonos", which has meanings related to "birth, offspring, stock ...".
Early history
In many ancient civilizations, individuals with widely varying physical appearances became full members of a society by growing up within that society or by adopting that society's cultural norms. (Snowden 1983; Lewis 1990)
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, a 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)
Classical antiquity
Hippocrates of Kos
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, "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 Roman emperor Julian factored in the constitutions, laws, capacities, and character of peoples:
"Come, tell me why it is that the Celts and the Germans are fierce, while the Hellenes and Romans are, generally speaking, inclined to political life and humane, though at the same time unyielding and warlike? Why the Egyptians are more intelligent and more given to crafts, and the Syrians unwarlike and effeminate, but at the same time intelligent, hot-tempered, vain and quick to learn? For if there is anyone who does not discern a reason for these differences among the nations, but rather declaims that all this so befell spontaneously, how, I ask, can he still believe that the universe is administered by a providence?"
Middle Ages
European medieval models of race generally mixed Classical ideas with the notion that humanity as a whole was descended from Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three sons of Noah, producing distinct Semitic (Asiatic), Hamitic (African), and Japhetic (Indo-European) peoples. This theory dates back to the Babylonian Talmud, which states, "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 colors, 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, dispelled the Babylonian Talmud's 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.
Independently of Ibn Kaldun's work, the question of whether skin
colour is heritable or a product of the environment is raised in 17th to
18th century European anthropology.
Georgius Hornius (1666) inherits the rabbinical view of heritability, while François Bernier (1684) argues for at least partial influence of the environment.
Ibn Khaldun's work was later
translated into French, especially for use in Algeria, but in the
process, the work was "transformed from local knowledge to colonial
categories of knowledge" 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 Berber country, attacked them, and, taking possession of their territory, compelled them to embrace the Mohammedan 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
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 taxonomy.
As the study of natural history grew, so did scientists' effort
to classify human groups. Some zoologists and scientists wondered what
made humans different from 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 taxonomists used classificatory terms, such
as "peoples", "nations", "types", "varieties", and "species".
Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) and Jean Bodin
(1530–1596), French philosopher, 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".
17th century
German and English scientists, Bernhard Varen (1622–1650) and John Ray
(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.
François Bernier
(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 différentes espèces ou races 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.
18th century
As noted earlier, scientists attempted to classify Homo sapiens
based on a geographic arrangement of human populations. Some based
their hypothetical divisions of race on the most obvious physical
differences, like skin color, while others used geographic location,
shape, stature, food habits, and other distinguishing characteristics to
delineate between races. However, cultural notions
of racial and gender superiority tainted early scientific discovery. In
the 18th century, scientists began to include behavioral or
psychological traits in their reported observations—which traits often
had derogatory or demeaning implications—and researchers often assumed
that those 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,
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
assigned different values to those differentiations, as well as other,
more trivial traits (a man with a strong chin was assumed to possess a
stronger character than men with weaker chins). This essentially created
a gap between races by deeming one race superior or inferior to another
race, thus creating a hierarchy of races. In this way, science was used
as justification for unfair treatment of different human populations.
The systematization of race concepts during the Enlightenment period brought with it the conflict between monogenism (a single origin for all human races) and polygenism (the hypothesis that races had separate origins). This debate was originally cast in creationist terms as a question of one versus many creations of humanity, but continued after evolution
was widely accepted, at which point the question was given in terms of
whether humans had split from their ancestral species one or many times.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
Blumenbach's five races.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) divided the human species into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research (description of human skulls), and called them (1793/1795):
- the Caucasian race (Europe, the Caucasus, Asia Minor, North Africa and West Asia)
- the Mongolian race (East Asia, Central Asia and South Asia)
- the Aethiopian race (West Africa, Central Africa, South Africa, East Africa (including the Horn of Africa) and Australia)
- the American race (North America and South America)
- the Malayan race (Southeast Asia)
Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like skin the
collective characteristic types of facial structure and hair
characteristics, skin color, cranial profile, etc., 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."
These five groups saw some continuity in the various classification
schemes of the 19th century, in some cases augmented, e.g. by the Australoid race and the Capoid race in some cases the Mongolian (East Asian) and American collapsed into a single group.
Racial anthropology (1850–1930)
Among the 19th century naturalists who defined the field were Georges Cuvier, 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.
Stefan Kuhl wrote that the eugenics movement rejected the racial and national hypotheses of Arthur Gobineau and his writing An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.
According to Kuhl, the eugenicists believed that nations were political
and cultural constructs, not race constructs, because nations were the
result of race mixtures. 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 some who believed in hierarchy and innate superiority, and
others who believed in human equality, was at a paramount. The former
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.
Louis Agassiz's racial definitions
After Louis Agassiz
(1807–1873) traveled 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.
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.
Arthur de Gobineau
Gobineau in 1876
Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) was a successful diplomat for the Second French 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 down and leads to chaos. He classified the populations of the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, North Africa, and southern France as being racially mixed.
Gobineau also believed that the white race was superior to all
others. He thought it corresponded to the ancient Indo-European culture,
also known as "Aryan".
Gobineau originally wrote that the white race's miscegenation was
inevitable. He attributed much of the economic turmoils in France to the
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 that arose from miscegenation. Also according to him, the whole population of North India consisted of a yellow race.
Thomas Huxley's racial definitions
Huxley's map of racial categories from On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind (1870).
1: Bushmen
2: Negroes
3: Negritoes
5: Australoids
6: Xanthochroi
7: Polynesians
8: Mongoloids A
8: Mongoloids B
8: Mongoloids C
9: Esquimaux
Huxley states: 'It is to the Xanthochroi and Melanochroi, taken
together, that the absurd denomination of "Caucasian" is usually
applied'.
He also indicates that he has omitted certain areas with complex ethnic
compositions that do not fit into his racial paradigm, including much
of the Horn of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Huxley's Melanochroi eventually comprised various other dark Caucasoid populations, including the Hamites and Moors.
Thomas Huxley
(1825–1895) 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. He also acknowledged that certain geographical areas
with more complex ethnic compositions, including much of the Horn of
Africa and the India subcontinent, did not fit into his racial paradigm.
As such, he noted that: "I have purposely omitted such people as the
Abyssinians and the Hindoos, who there is every reason to believe result
from the intermixture of distinct stocks." By the late nineteenth century, Huxley's Xanthochroi group had been redefined as the Nordic race, whereas his Melanochroi became the Mediterranean race. His Melanochroi thus eventually also comprised various other dark Caucasoid populations, including the Hamites (e.g. Berbers, Somalis, northern Sudanese, ancient Egyptians) and Moors.
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 uniformity. (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).
Charles Darwin and race
Though Charles Darwin'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 1871 with the publication of his second great book on evolution, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.
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:
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 democracy, 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.
In 1950, and as a response to the genocide of Nazism, UNESCO was formed
and released a statement saying that there was no biological
determinant or basis for race.
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.
Franz Boas
Franz Boas
(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 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 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.
Carleton Coon
Distribution of the races after the Pleistocene according to Carleton Coon.
Carleton Stevens Coon (1904–1981) was an American physical anthropologist, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, lecturer and professor at Harvard, and president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
In 1939, Coon published The Races of Europe, in which he concluded:
- The Caucasian race is of dual origin consisting of Upper Paleolithic (mixture of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals) types and Mediterranean (purely Homo sapiens) types.
- The Upper Paleolithic peoples are the truly indigenous peoples of Europe.
- Mediterraneans invaded Europe in large numbers during the Neolithic period and settled there.
- The racial situation in Europe today may be explained as a mixture of Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans.
- When reduced Upper Paleolithic survivors and Mediterraneans mix, then occurs the process of dinarization, which produces a hybrid with non-intermediate features.
- The Caucasian race encompasses the regions of Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, the Near East, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.
- The Nordic race is part of the Mediterranean racial stock, being a mixture of Corded and Danubian Mediterraneans.
In 1962, Coon also published The Origin of Races, wherein he 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.
Ashley Montagu
Montague Francis Ashley Montagu (1905–1999) was a British-American anthropologist. In 1942, he 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. He was also selected to draft the initial 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race.
Montagu would later publish An Introduction to Physical Anthropology,
a comprehensive treatise on human diversity. In doing so, he sought to
provide a firmer scientific framework through which to discuss
biological variation among populations.
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 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 "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. Its 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. 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, Mongoloid and Negroid
races. 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 structural anthropology, 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 drafting committee the 1950 publication was criticized by
biologists 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,
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
with "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 did not 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
effects 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:
- "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 some would 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."
Criticism of racial studies (1930s–1980s)
The 20th-century criticism of racial anthropology were significantly based on the school of Franz Boas,
professor of anthropology at Columbia University from 1899, who
beginning in 1920 strongly favoured the influence of social environment
over heritability. As a reaction to the rise of Nazi Germany and its prominent espousing of racist ideologies
in the 1930s, 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.
Lévi-Strauss argued that when comparatively ranking cultures, the
culture of the person performing the ranking would naturally decide
which values and ideas are prioritized. Lévi-Strauss compared this to special relativity,
suggesting that each observer's frame of reference, their culture,
appeared to them to be stationary, while the others' cultures appeared
to be moving only in relation to an outside frame of reference.
Lévi-Strauss cautioned against focusing on specific differences, such
as which race was first to develop a specific technology in isolation,
as he believed this would create a simplistic and warped view of
humanity. Instead Lévi-Strauss instead advocated looking at why these
developments were made in context, and what problems they addressed.
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 belief systems which — more often than not — also have
fundamentally opposed economic interests" (p. 5).
