Race (historical definitions)
The definition of
race, before the development of evolutionary biology, was that of common lineage—a
vague concept interchangeable with
cline,
breed, cultural origin, or national character ("The whole race of mankind." –
Shakespeare; "From whence the race of Alban fathers come" –
Dryden).
The word
race, interpreted to mean
common descent, was introduced into
English in about 1580, from the Old French "rasse" (1512), from Italian
razza, which may have been derived from the Latin word
generatio (a begetting). The etymology can be further traced back to Latin
gens (clan, stock, people) and
genus (birth, descent, origin, race, stock, family) which in turn comes from the Greek γένος (race, stock, or family).
This late origin for the English and French terms is consistent with the thesis that the concept of "race" as defining a very small number of groups of human beings based on lineage dates from the time of
Columbus. Older concepts that were also at least partly based on common descent, such as
nation and
tribe, entail a much larger number of groupings.
While the 17th century did not have systematic notions of racial difference,
colonialism led to the development of social and political institutions, such as
slavery in the
New World, that were later justified through racial theories (cf. Gossett 1997:17).
Society Must Be Defended: the "race struggle" discourse
In
Society Must be Defended (1978-79),
Michel Foucault traced the "historical and political discourse" of "
race struggle" to the "
Glorious Revolution" and
Louis XIV's end of reign. According to him, it was the first example of a popular history, opposed to the classical juridical and philosophical discourse of
sovereignty. In Great Britain, it was used by
Edward Coke or
John Lilburn against the
monarchy. In France,
Boulainvilliers,
Nicolas Fréret, and then
Sieyès,
Augustin Thierry and
Cournot reappropriated this discourse.
François Bernier's New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it" (1684)
The first comprehensive classification of humans into distinct races is believed to be
François Bernier's Nouvelle division de la terre par les différents espèces ou races qui l'habitent'' ("New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it"), published in
1684 (Gossett, 1997:32-33). Bernier distinguished four "races":
Bernier's race classification had a political message. At the time, races were distinguished by
skin color, facial type, cranial profile and amount, texture and color of hair (see
scientific racism). Though many experts declare these to have little relationship with any other heritable characteristics, they remain persuasive due to the ease of distinction based on physical appearance. One term for this now-discredited form of classification is the
typological model.
Because of interracial breeding, such classification is weak in that it is difficult to classify some borderline individuals. (Contrast the difficulty of determining to which group a child of mixed parentage belongs with the much more clear-cut decisions involved in determining membership in
species). In other words,
racial purity has no clear biological meaning. It is clear, though, that for an extended period of time after
Homo sapiens' first migrations from
Africa (probably around 80,000 BCE) and before the rise of wheeled and seagoing transportation (around 3,000 BCE), geographically isolated groups of people underwent some degree of divergent evolution. Whether that degree was high enough to merit strict taxa beneath the species level is a question discussed by human biologists since the 1800s. It is a complicated issue full of semantic and emotional pitfalls, with much at stake on the consensus for all who look upon science as the bedrock authority for decisions in their daily lives.
Carolus Linnaeus
Edward Long
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), and
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Cuvier enumerated three races, Pritchard seven, Agassiz twelve, and Pickering eleven. Blumenbach's classification was widely adopted:
Louis Agassiz's Racial Definitions
Thomas Huxley's Racial Definitions
Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau
Stanley M. Garn's Racial Definitions
William Henry Boyd's Racial Definitions
Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt's Racial Definitions for Europe
Researchers in the decades following Blumenbach classified the Malay and American races as branches of the Mongolian, leaving only the Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian races. Further explication in the early and mid twentieth century, arrived at three primary races:
*
Negroid*
Caucasoid*
Mongoloid or
Sinoidwith a small number of less widespread races.
The most widely referenced 20th century racial classification, by American anthropologist
Carleton S. Coon, divided humanity into five races:
Coon assigned even some populations on sub-Saharan Africa to a broadly defined Caucasoid race, leading to charges that peoples with recorded ancient civilizations were being defined out of the black race, in order to depict the remaining "Congoid" race as lacking in culture.
Coon and his work were widely accused, even at the time, of obsolete thinking or outright
racism, but some of his terminology continues in use to a lesser degree even today, even though the "-oid" terms now have offensive connotations [
1], perhaps because his liberal opponents who de-emphasized the significance and definability of race, naturally did not introduce any superseding classification to drive them out of use. In addition to references in legitimate scientific discussion, Coon's macro-racial classification, as well as his detailed list of European "subraces", is popular with racist groups who agree with the existence of distinct racial types, and is widely reproduced on "
white nationalist" websites.
In Blumenbach's day, physical characteristics like skin color,
cranial profile, etc., went hand in hand with declarations of group moral character, intellectual capacity, and other aptitudes. The "fairness" and relatively high brows of "Caucasians" were held to be apt physical expressions of a loftier mentality and a more generous spirit. The
epicanthic folds around the eyes of "Mongolians" and their slightly sallow outer epidermal layer supposedly bespoke a crafty, literal-minded nature. The dark skin, relatively sloping craniums and other common traits among "Ethiopians" were taken as wholesale proof of a closer genetic proximity to the other
great apes, even though the skin of
chimpanzees and
gorillas beneath the hair is whiter than the average "Caucasian" skin, that the thin lips characteristic of "Caucasians" are actually closer in form to the lips of lower primates, that "high foreheads" can be seen in orangutans and some monkey species, and that the straight and relatively profuse body hair of Europeans is considerably more "ape-like" than the sparse, tightly curled body hair of "Ethiopians". By Coon's day, group physical characteristics were, for the most part, unhitched from assessments of group character and aptitude, and, since then, those maintaining the mere reality of physical group traits are often suspected of carrying the old malign racism.
Charles Darwin, in his book dealing with the origins of race from 1871,
The Descent of Man, noted the great difficulty naturalists had in trying to decide how many "races" there actually were (Darwin was himself a monogenist on the question of race, believing that all humans were of the same species and finding "race" to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction between groups):
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.Criticism of the new biological significance of race often accompanied the development of racial theories. In
Society Must Be Defended (1978-79),
Michel Foucault showed how, 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 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 milestone in the
critique of the biological "race" notion, arguing in favor of
cultural relativism through the famous 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. The question of whether "race" was at all a useful scientific concept has been in continuous debate since that time, becoming especially politicized during and after the
Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
*
Ancestry-informative marker*
Claude Lévi-Strauss*
Craniometry*
Physical anthropology*
Race*
Racialism*
Scientific racism*Augstein, Hannah Franziska, ed.
Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760-1850. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1996. ISBN 1855064545
*Dain, Bruce R.
A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. ISBN 0674009460
*Banton, Michael P.
Racial Theories. 2nd ed. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 052133456X
*Foucault, Michel.
Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76. Trans. David Macey. Eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. City: Picador, 2003. ISBN 0312203187
*Gossett, Thomas F..
Race: The History of an Idea in America. 1963. Ed. and with a foreword by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Arnold Rampersad. Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 1997. ISBN 0-19-509778-5
*Gould, Stephen Jay.
The Mismeasure of Man. Rev. and expand ed. New York: Norton, 1996. ISBN 0393039722
*Hannaford, Ivan.
Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996. ISBN 0801852226
*Shipman, Pat.
The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science. 1994. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-67400-862-6
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 WiktionaryWeb 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 Toronto 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.
