race

the idea that the human species is divided into distinct groups on the basis of inherited physical and behavioral differences. Genetic studies in the late 20th century denied the existence of biogenetically distinct races, and scholars now argue that “races” are cultural interventions reflecting specific attitudes and beliefs that were imposed on different populations in the wake of western European conquests beginning in the 15th century.

The many meanings of race

The modern meaning of the term race with reference to humans began to emerge in the 17th century. Since then it has had a variety of meanings in the languages of the Western world. What most definitions have in common is an attempt to categorize peoples primarily by their physical differences. In the United States, for example, the term race generally refers to a group of people who have in common some visible physical traits, such as skin colour, hair texture, facial features, and eye formation. Such distinctive features are associated with large, geographically separated populations, and these continental aggregates are also designated as races, as the “African race,” the “European race,” and the “Asian race.” (Some experts suggest there are five or more geographic races.) Many people think of race as reflective of any visible physical (phenotypic) variations among human groups, regardless of the cultural context and even in the absence of fixed racial categories.

The term race has also been applied to linguistic groups (the “Arab race” or the “Latin race”), to religious groups (the “Jewish race”), and even to ethnic groups having few or no physical traits that distinguish them from their neighbours (the “Irish race,” the “Slavic race,” the “Chinese race”). Even political entities or nationalities are sometimes designated as races (the “French race,” the “Spanish race,” “the Polish race,” etc.).

Most scholarship in the 20th century reflected the popularly held view that races and race differences are based on biophysical characteristics. For much of the 20th century, scientists attempted to identify, describe, and classify human races and to document their differences and the relationships among them. Some scientists used the term race for subspecies, subdivisions of the human species which were presumed sufficiently different biologically that they might later evolve into separate species.

At no point, from the first rudimentary attempts at classifying human populations in the 17th and 18th centuries to the present day, have scientists agreed on the number of races of humankind, the features to be used in the identification of races, or the meaning of race itself. Experts have suggested a range of different races varying from 3 to more than 60, based on what they have considered distinctive differences in physical characteristics alone (these include hair type, head shape, skin colour, height, and so on). The lack of concurrence on the meaning and identification of races continued into the 21st century, and contemporary scientists are no closer to agreement than their forebears. Thus, race has never in the history of its use had a precise meaning.

Although most people continue to think of races as physically distinct populations, scientific advances in the 20th century demonstrated that human physical variations do not fit a “racial” model. There are no genes that can identify distinct groups that accord with the conventional race categories. DNA analyses have proved that all humans have much more in common, genetically, than they have differences. Geographically widely separated populations vary from one another in only about 6 to 8 percent of their genes. Because of the overlapping of traits that bear no relationship to one another (such as skin colour and hair texture) and the inability of scientists to cluster peoples into discrete racial packages, modern researchers argue that the concept of race has no biological validity.

Many scholars in other disciplines now accept this relatively new scientific understanding of biological diversity in the human species. Moreover, they have long understood that the concept of race as relating solely to phenotypic traits encompasses neither the social reality of race nor the phenomenon of “racism.” Prompted by advances in other fields, particularly anthropology and history, scholars began to examine race as a social and cultural, rather than biological, phenomenon and have determined that race is a social invention of relatively recent origin. It derives its most salient characteristics from the social consequences of its classificatory use. The idea of “race” began to evolve in the late 17th century, after the beginning of European exploration and colonization. As many scholars saw it at the turn of the 21st century, race was a folk ideology about human differences associated with the different populations—Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans—that came together in the New World. In the 19th century, after the abolishment of slavery, the ideology fully emerged as a new mechanism of social division and stratification.

“Race” as a mechanism of social division

North America

Racial classifications appeared in North America, and in many other parts of the world, as a form of social division predicated on what were thought to be natural differences among human groups. Analysis of the folk beliefs, social policies, and practices of North Americans about race from the 18th to the 20th century reveals a fundamental ideology about human differences that may be termed a “racial worldview,” a systematic, institutionalized set of beliefs and attitudes that include the following components:

1. All the world's peoples can be divided into biologically separate, discrete, and exclusive populations called races. A person can belong to only one race.
2. Phenotypic features, or visible physical differences, are markers or symbols of race identity and status. Because an individual may belong to a racial category and not have any or all of the associated physical features, racial scientists early in the 20th century invented an invisible internal element, “racial essence,” to explain such anomalies.
3. Each race has distinct qualities of temperament, morality, disposition, and intellectual ability. Consequently, races have different behaviours that are linked to their physical differences; i.e. each race has distinct behavioral traits.
4. Races are unequal. They can, and should, be ranked on a gradient of inferiority and superiority. As the 19th-century biologist Louis Agassiz observed, since races exist, we must “settle the relative rank among [them].”
5. The behavioral and physical attributes of each race are inherited and innate, therefore fixed, permanent, and unalterable.
6. Distinct races should be segregated and allowed to develop their own institutions, communities, and lifestyles, separate from those of other races.

These are the beliefs that wax and wane but never entirely disappear from the core of the American version of race differences. From its inception, racial ideology accorded inferior social status to people of African or Native American ancestry. This ideology was institutionalized in law and social practice, and social mechanisms were developed for enforcing the status differences.

South Africa

Although race categories and racial ideology are both arbitrary and subjective, race was a convenient way to organize people within structures of presumed permanent inequality. South Africa's policy of apartheid exhibited the same basic racial ideology as the North American system but differed in two respects: the systematic state classification of races and the creation of an intermediate “racial” category; the Coloured category, for historical reasons, was made distinct and defined as those who were neither blacks (called Bantus or natives), most of whom retained their own traditional cultures, nor whites (Europeans), who brought different cultural forms to South Africa. The relative exclusiveness of South Africa's race categories was compromised by an institutionalized mechanism for changing one's race, the Race Classification Board established by the Population Registration Act of 1950. This body, unique to South Africa, adjudicated questionable classifications and reassigned races.

The difference between racism and ethnocentrism

Although they are easily and often confused, race and racism must be distinguished from ethnicity and ethnocentrism. While extreme ethnocentrism may take the same offensive form and may have the same dire consequences as extreme racism, there are significant differences between the two concepts. Ethnicity, which relates to culturally contingent features, characterizes all human groups. It refers to a sense of identity and membership in a group that shares common language, cultural traits (values, beliefs, religion, customs, etc.), and a sense of a common history. All humans are members of some cultural (ethnic) group, sometimes more than one. Most such groups feel—to varying degrees of intensity—that their way of life, their foods, dress, habits, beliefs, values, and so forth, are superior to those of other groups.

The most significant quality of ethnicity is the fact that it is unrelated to biology and can be flexible and transformable. People everywhere can change or enhance their ethnicity by learning about or assimilating into another culture. American society well illustrates these facts, consisting as it does of groups of people from hundreds of different world cultures who have acquired some aspects of American culture and now participate in a common sense of ethnic identity with other Americans.

Ethnic identity is acquired, and ethnic features are learned forms of behaviour. Race, on the other hand, is a form of identity that is perceived as innate and unalterable. Ethnicity may be transient and even superficial. Race is thought to be profound and grounded in biological realities. Ethnocentrism is based in a belief in the superiority of one's own culture over others, and it too may be transient and superficial. Racism is the belief in and promotion of the racial worldview described above. Ethnocentrism holds skin colour and other physical features to be irrelevant as long as one is a member of the same culture, or becomes so. The racial worldview holds that, regardless of behaviour or cultural similarities, a member of an inferior race (who is usually perceived to be so by means of physical features) can never be accepted. Race is an invented, fictional form of identity; ethnicity is based on the reality of cultural similarities and differences and the interests that they represent. That race is a social invention can be demonstrated by an examination of the history of the idea of race as experienced in the English colonies.

The history of the idea of race

Race as a categorizing term referring to human beings was first used in the English language in the late 16th century. Until the 18th century, it had a generalized meaning similar to other classifying terms such as type, sort, or kind. Occasional literature of Shakespeare's time referred to a “race of saints,” or “a race of bishops.” Some historians have speculated that the English learned the use of the term from the Spanish, with whom they had had trading relationships and, often, major conflicts. The Spanish term raza derives from the breeding of animals but began to include humans during the 17th century and reflected social divisions both in Spain and in their New World colonies. By the late 18th century, race was widely used for sorting and ranking the peoples in the English colonies—Europeans who saw themselves as free people, Amerindians who had been conquered, and Africans who were being brought in as slave labour—and this usage continues today.

The peoples conquered and enslaved were physically different from western and northern Europeans, but such differences were not the sole cause for the construction of racial categories. The English had had a long history of separating themselves from others and treating foreigners, such as the Irish, as alien “others.” By the 17th century, their policies and practices in Ireland had led to an image of the Irish as “savages” who were incapable of being civilized. Proposals to conquer the Irish, take over their lands, and use the native peoples as forced labour failed largely because of Irish resistance. It was then that many Englishmen turned to the idea of colonizing the New World. Their attitudes toward the Irish set precedents for how they were to treat the New World Indians and, later, Africans.

The problem of labour in the New World

One of the greatest problems faced by settlers in the New World, particularly in the southern colonies, was the shortage of labour. Within a few decades after the settlement of Jamestown, planters had established indentured servitude as the main form of labour. Under this system, young men (and some women) worked for masters, to whom they were indebted for their transportation, normally for a period of four to seven years. They were paid no wages, received only minimal upkeep, and often were treated brutally.

By the mid-17th century, a wealthy few had encumbered virtually all lands not under Indian control and were attempting to work these lands using indentured servants. The working poor and those eventually freed from servitude had little on which to survive, and their dissatisfaction with the inequities of colonial society led to riots and numerous threats of revolt. After 1619, this group of poor servants included many Africans and their descendants, some of whom had had experience in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, where slave labour was widely used.

The social position of Africans in the early colonies has been a source of considerable debate. Some scholars have argued that they were separated from European servants and treated differently from the beginning. Later historians, however, have shown that there was no such uniformity in the treatment of Africans. Records indicate that many Africans and their descendants were set free after their periods of servitude. They were able to purchase land and even bought servants and slaves of their own. Some African men became wealthy tradesmen, craftsmen, or farmers, and their skills were widely recognized. They voted, appeared in courts, engaged in business and commercial dealings, and exercised all the civil rights of other free men. Some free Africans intermarried, and their children suffered little or no special discrimination. Other Africans were poor and lived with other poor men and women; blacks and whites worked together, drank together, ate together, played together, and frequently ran away together. Moreover, the poor of all colours protested together against the policies of the government (at least 25 percent of the rebels in Bacon's Rebellion were blacks, both servants and freedmen). The social position of Africans and their descendants for the first six or seven decades of American history seems to have been open and fluid and not initially overcast with an ideology of inequality or inferiority.

Toward the end of the 17th century, labour from England began to diminish and the colonies were faced with two major dilemmas. One was how to maintain control over the restless poor and the freedmen who seemed intent on the violent overthrow of the colony's leaders. There had been several incidents that had threatened the leadership of the fragile colonies. Nathaniel Bacon's rebellion in Virginia in 1676 was a high point in the caustic relations between the planters and leaders of the colony and the impoverished workers. Although that rebellion failed, discontent continued to be expressed in riots, destruction of property, and other forms of social violence.

The second dilemma was how to obtain a controllable labour force as cheaply as possible. Tobacco was the chief source of wealth, and its production was labour-intensive. The colonial leaders found a solution to both problems—they would divide the restless poor into categories reflecting their origins and institute a system of permanent slavery for Africans, the most vulnerable of the groups.

The enslavement of Africans

Between 1660 and 1690, leaders of the Virginia colony began to establish practices that provided or sanctioned differential treatment for freed servants whose origins were in Europe. They conscripted poor whites, with whom they had never had interests in common, into the category of free men and made land, tools, animals, and other resources available to them. African Americans and Africans, mulattoes, and American Indians, regardless of their cultural similarities or differences, were homogenized into a category separate from whites. Historical records show that the Virginia Assembly went to great extremes not only to purposely divide Europeans from Indians and Africans but to promote contempt on the part of whites against Negroes. Recognizing the vulnerability of African labour, colonial leaders passed laws that increasingly bound Africans and their children permanently as servants and, eventually, as slaves. White servants had the protection of English laws, and their mistreatment was criticized abroad. Africans, however, had no such recourse. By 1723 even free African Americans, descendants of several generations then of free people, were prohibited from voting. Colonial leaders thus began using the physical differences among the population to structure an inegalitarian society. In the island colonies of Barbados and Jamaica, the numbers of Irish and Indian slaves also declined, and planters turned increasingly to Africans. Southern planters, who were in regular communication with these island communities, brought in large numbers of Africans during the 18th century and developed their slave practices and laws rapidly. Christianity provided an early rationalization for permanent enslavement: Africans were heathens and slaves in their own lands; under English slavery, their souls would be saved.

The underlying reality was that their labour was needed to produce wealth for the colonies and for England's upper classes. During these early decades, many Englishmen considered the Africans to be civilized. Unlike the Indians, whom they called “savages” and who were largely nomadic hunter-gatherers, the English knew the Africans in the colonies as sophisticated cultivators who understood how to grow foods and other crops in tropical soils. In this they surpassed the Irish who had been enslaved on plantations in the Caribbean; with no tradition of agriculture in tropical habitats, the Irish failed as producers of necessary goods. Some Africans were skilled metalworkers, knowledgeable about smelting, blacksmithing, and toolmaking. Many others were skilled in woodworking, weaving, pottery and rope making, leatherwork, brick making, thatching, and other crafts.

Two additional factors made Africans more desirable as slaves: Africans were immune to Old World diseases, which caused Indians to sicken and die; and, most important, Africans had nowhere to run, unlike the Indians—who could escape from slavery into their own familiar territory. The Irish, who were also in an alien land, were perceived as unruly and violent. When they escaped, they often joined their fellow Catholics, the Spanish and the French, in conspiracies against the English.

Thus Africans became the preferred slaves, not because of their physical differences, although such differences became increasingly important, but because they had the knowledge and skills that made it possible to put them to work immediately. They were not Christian, they were vulnerable, with no legal or moral opposition to their enslavement, and, once transported to the New World, they had few options. Moreover, the supply of Africans increased as the costs of transporting them fell, and English merchants became directly involved in the slave trade.

Human rights versus property rights

Chattel slavery was not established without its critics. From the beginning, many Englishmen condemned the presence of slavery in English territories. They argued that theirs was a society of free men and of democratic institutions and that it was committed to the preservation of human rights, justice, and equality. For several hundred years, trends in English culture had been toward the expansion of human rights and the recognition of individual liberty. Slavery, many argued, was antithetical to a free society and subversive of Christian values.

Throughout the 18th century, however, another powerful value in English culture, the sanctity of property and property rights, came to dominate colonial concerns. When faced with growing antislavery arguments, planters in the southern colonies and Caribbean islands, where slavery was bringing great wealth, turned to the argument that slaves were property and that the rights of slave owners to their property were by law unquestionable and inviolable. The laws and court decisions reflected the belief that the property rights of slave owners should take precedence over the human rights of slaves.

Historians concur that the emphasis on the slave as property was a requisite for dehumanizing the Africans. Says the historian Philip D. Morgan, “The only effective way to justify slavery was to exclude its victims from the community of man.” Attitudes and beliefs about all Africans began to harden as slavery became more deeply entrenched in the colonies. A focus on the physical differences of Africans expanded as new justifications for slavery were needed, especially during the Revolutionary War period, when the rallying cry of freedom from oppression seemed particularly hypocritical. Many learned men on both sides of the Atlantic disputed the moral rightness of slavery. Opponents argued that a society of free men working for wages would be better producers of goods and services. But pro-slavery forces, which included some of the wealthiest men in America and England, soon posed what they came to believe was an unassailable argument for keeping blacks enslaved: the idea of black inferiority.

Building the myth of black inferiority

A number of 18th-century political and intellectual leaders publicly asserted that Africans were naturally inferior and that they were indeed best suited for slavery. A few intellectuals revived an older image of all living things, the scala naturae (Latin: “scale of nature”), or Great Chain of Being, to demonstrate that nature or God had made men unequal. This ancient hierarchical paradigm—encompassing all living creatures, starting with the simplest organisms and reaching to humans, angels, and ultimately to God—became for the advocates of slavery a perfect reflection of the realities of inequality that they had created. The physical differences of blacks and Indians became the symbols or markers of their status. It was during these times that the term race became widely used to denote the ranking and inequality of these peoples—in other words, their placement on the Chain of Being.

Beginning in the late 18th century, differences among the races became magnified and exaggerated in the public mind. Hundreds of battles with Indians had pushed these populations westward to the frontiers or relegated them increasingly to reservation lands. A widely accepted stereotype had grown that the Indian race was weak and would succumb to the advances of white civilization so that these native peoples were no longer much of a problem. Their deaths from disease and warfare were seen as a testament to the inevitable demise of the Indian.

Racial stereotyping of Africans was magnified by the Haitian rebellion of 1791. This heightened the American fear of slave revolts and retaliation, causing greater restrictions and ever harsher and more degrading treatment. Grotesque descriptions of the low-status races, blacks and Indians, were widely publicized, and they helped foster fear and loathing. This negative stereotyping of low-status racial populations was ever present in the public consciousness, and it affected relations among all people.

By the mid-19th century, race in the popular mind had taken on a meaning equivalent to species-level distinctions, at least for differences between blacks and whites. The ideology of separateness that this proclaimed difference implied was soon transformed into social policy. Although legal slavery in the United States ended in 1865 with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the ideology of race continued as a new and major form of social differentiation in both American and British society. The black codes of the 1860s and the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s were passed in the United States to legitimate the social philosophy of racism. More laws were enacted to prevent intermarriage and intermating, and the segregation of public facilities was established by law, especially in the South. The country's low-paying, dirty, and demeaning jobs were relegated to “the Negro” as he was seen fit for only such tasks. Supreme Court decisions, such as the Dred Scott case of 1857, made clear that Negroes were not and could not be citizens of the United States. They were to be excluded from the social community of whites, but not from the production of their wealth. The Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which permitted “separate but equal” facilities, guaranteed that the racial worldview, with its elements of separateness and exaggerated difference, would continue to flourish.

Immigration and the racial worldview

In the 1860s, when Chinese labourers immigrated to the United States to build the Central Pacific Railroad, a new population with both physical and cultural differences had to be accommodated within the racial worldview. While industrial employers were eager to get this new and cheap labour, the ordinary white public was stirred to anger by the presence of this “yellow peril.” Political party caucuses, labour unions, and other organizations railed against the immigration of yet another “inferior race.” Newspapers condemned the policies of employers, and even church leaders decried the entrance of these aliens into what was seen as a land for whites only. So hostile was the opposition that in 1882 Congress finally passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The large migrations from southern and eastern Europe that started in the 1880s required the reassessments of other new people and their incorporation into the racial ranking system. Old-stock Americans (English, Dutch, German, Scandinavian) were horrified at the onslaught of large numbers of people speaking Italian, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, and other “foreign” languages. They held that such “races” could not be assimilated into “Anglo-Saxon” culture, and policies and practices had to be put into place to separate them from the mainstream.

Despite much opposition, these European groups soon lost their inferior race status, and within a few generations their descendants not only assimilated into the “white” category, they also incorporated the racial worldview. More than half the ancestors of late 20th-century American whites immigrated to the United States during the period 1880–1930. The “white” racial category was constructed flexibly enough to enclose even those who could not claim an Anglo-Saxon background.

During the 19th century, the idea of race was diffused throughout the European colonial systems, reinforced by the fact that the peoples conquered and colonized by western European powers were also physically different. Such conquests buttressed the idea of European racial superiority. The racial worldview with its tenets regarding the limited capacities of inferior races was employed to justify the extermination of peoples, including the Tasmanians, most of the Maori, and many indigenous Australians. It was an essential ingredient in the colonial policies and practices of the British in India and Southeast Asia and, later, in Africa. Numerous British writers of the 19th century, such as Rudyard Kipling, openly declared that the British were a superior race destined to rule the world.

Legitimating the racial worldview

Enlightenment philosophers and taxonomists

The development of the idea and ideology of race coincided with the rise of science in American and European cultures. Much of the inspiration for the growth of science has been credited to the period known as the Enlightenment that spanned most of the 18th century. Many early Enlightenment writers believed in the power of education and fostered very liberal ideals about the potentiality of all peoples, even “savages,” for human progress. Yet, later in the century, some of the earliest assertions about the natural inferiority of Africans were published. Major proponents of the ideology of race inequality were the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the French philosopher Voltaire, the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, and the influential American political philosopher Thomas Jefferson. These writers expressed negative opinions about Africans and other “primitives” based on purely subjective impressions or materials gained from secondary sources, such as travelers, missionaries, and explorers. Thus the philosophers expressed the common attitudes of this period.

During the same period, influenced by taxonomic activities of botanists and biologists that had begun in the 17th century, other European scholars and scientists were involved in the serious work of identifying the different kinds of human groups increasingly discovered around the world. The work of the naturalists and systematists brought attention to the significance of classifying all peoples into “natural” groupings, as had been done with other flora and fauna. Eighteenth-century naturalists had greater information and knowledge about the world's peoples than their predecessors, and a great number of scholars attempted to organize all this material into some logical scheme. Although many learned men were involved in this enterprise, it was the classifications developed by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus and the German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach that provided the models for modern racial classifications.

Scientific classifications of race

In publications issued from 1735 to 1759, Linnaeus classified all of the then-known animal forms. He included humans with the primates and established the use of both genus and species terms for identification of all animals. For the human species, he introduced the still-current scientific name Homo sapiens. He listed four major subdivisions of this species, H. americanus, H. africanus, H. europaeus, and H. asiaticus. Such was the nature of knowledge at the time that Linnaeus also included the categories H. monstrosus (which included many exotic peoples) and H. ferus (“wild man”), an indication that some of his categories were based on tall tales and travelers' myths.

Blumenbach divided humankind into five “varieties” and noted that clear lines of distinction could not be drawn between them, as they tended to blend “insensibly” into one another. His five categories included American, Malay, Ethiopian, Mongolian, and Caucasian. (He had chosen term Caucasian to represent the Europeans because a skull from the Caucasus Mountains of Russia was in his opinion the most beautiful.) These terms were still commonly used by many scientists of the early 20th century, and most continue today as major designations of the world's peoples.

These classifications not only rendered human groups as part of nature but also gave them concreteness, rigidity, and permanence. Moreover, some descriptions, especially those of Linnaeus, included statements about the temperament and customs of various peoples that had nothing to do with biophysical features but were forms of learned behaviour that are now known as “culture.” That cultural behaviour and physical characteristics were conflated by these 18th-century writers reflects both their ethnocentrism and the limited scientific knowledge of the time.

The institutionalizing of race

Slavery by nature creates social distance between masters and slaves, and intellectuals are commonly called upon to affirm and justify such distinctions. As learned men began to write a great deal about the “racial” populations of the New World, Indians and Negroes were increasingly projected as alien. In this way did the Enlightenment thinkers help pro-slavery interests place responsibility for slavery in the “inferior” victims themselves.

Would-be “scientific” writings about the distinctiveness of blacks and Indians commenced late in the 18th century in tandem with exaggerated popular beliefs, and writings of this type continued on into the 20th century. The European world sought to justify not only the institution of slavery but also its increasingly brutal marginalization of all non-European peoples, slave or free. Science became the vehicle through which the delineation of races was confirmed, and scientists in Europe and America provided the arguments and evidence to document the inequality of non-Europeans.

About the turn of the 19th century, some scholars advanced the idea that the Negro (and perhaps the Indian) was a separate species from “normal” men (white and Christian), an idea that had been introduced and occasionally expressed in the 18th century but that had drawn little attention. This revived notion held that the “inferior races” had been created at a different time than Adam and Eve, who were the progenitors of the white race. Although multiple creations contradicted both the well-known definition of species in terms of reproductively isolated populations and the biblical description of creation, it is clear that in the public mind the transformation from race to species-level difference had already evolved. In the courts, statehouses, assemblies, churches, and throughout American institutions, race became institutionalized as the premier source, and the causal agent, of all human differences.

Transforming “race” into “species”

One of those whose direct experience of African slaves and assessment of them was given great weight was Edward Long (1734–1813), a former plantation owner and jurist in Jamaica. In a book entitled The History of Jamaica (1774), Long asserted that “the Negro” was “void of genius” and “incapable” of civilization; indeed, he was so far inferior as to constitute a separate species of mankind. Long's work was published as a defense of slavery during a period of rising antislavery sentiment. Its greatest influence came during and after the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), when some southern Americans started freeing their slaves and moving north. Long's writings, published in popular magazines, were widely read in the United States during the last decade of the 18th century.

In 1799 Charles White, a Manchester physician, published the earliest proper “scientific” study of human races. He described each racial category in physical terms, identifying what he thought were differences in the head, feet, arms, complexion, skin colour, hair texture, and susceptibility to disease. White actually measured the body parts of a group of Negroes and whites, lending the semblance of “hard” science to his conclusions. He not only advocated a gradation of the races, but he provided support for the speculation that the Negro, the American Indian, some Asiatic tribes, and Europeans were of different species. His explanation for the presumed savagery of Africans was that they had degenerated from the pure and idyllic circumstances provided in the Garden of Eden, while Europeans had made advances toward civilization.

Such works as those of Long and White initiated a debate among scholars and scientists that had long-range implications for European attitudes toward human differences. The issue, as expressed by mid-19th-century scientists, was “the Negro's place in nature”—that is, whether “the Negro” was human like Europeans or a separate species nearer to the ape.

Samuel Morton, a Philadelphia physician and founder of the field of craniometry, collected skulls from around the world and developed techniques for measuring them. He thought he could identify racial differences among these skulls. After developing means of measuring the internal capacity of the skull, he concluded that Negroes had smaller brains than whites, with Indian brains intermediate between the two. Because brain size had long been correlated with intelligence in both the popular mind and science, Morton's findings seemed to confirm that Negroes were also less intelligent than whites. In publications of 1839 and 1844, he produced his results, identifying the Native Americans as a separate race from Asians and arguing from his Egyptian materials that these ancient peoples were not Negroes. His findings magnified and exaggerated the differences among racial populations, imposing meaning on the differences that led to the conclusion that they were separate species.

Morton soon became the centre of a network of scholars and scientists who advocated multiple creations (polygeny) and thus contradicted the long-established biblical view of one single creation from which all humans descended (monogeny). The most influential of the scientists involved in this debate was Louis Agassiz, who accepted a position at Harvard University and revolutionized the field of natural science. Agassiz converted from monogenism to polygenism after moving to the United States from Switzerland in 1846. It was then that he saw Negroes for the first time. He was also impressed with Morton's work with skulls, and eventually he became the most important advocate of polygenism, conveying it in public lectures and to generations of students, many of whom took leading intellectual roles in American society.

One result of the mid-19th-century concern with documenting racial distinctions by means of body measurements was the establishment of the “scientific” enterprise of anthropometry. During the Civil War, the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the provost marshall general's office collected data on the physical condition of military conscripts and volunteers in the army, navy, and marines. Using anthropometric techniques, they produced massive tables of quantitative measurements of the body dimensions of tens of thousands of whites, Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians. Scientists interpreted the data in a way that strengthened the argument that races were fundamentally distinct and that confirmed that blacks, Indians, and mulattoes were inferior to whites. Anthropometry flourished as a major scientific method for demonstrating race differences well into the 20th century.

The false assumptions of anthropometry

For the first half of the 20th century, scholars continued to debate “the Negro's place in nature.” But the debate over multiple or single origins receded after 1859, when the publication of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution led to a more dynamic perspective on species. Evolution produced a new perspective on the causes of the Negro's innate condition; the central problem became whether Negroes evolved before or after whites. By the 1860s, the Negro's primitiveness was putative and unquestioned. “The Negro,” in fact, had become the new savage, displacing Indians and Irishmen, and the ideology proclaimed that his savagery was intrinsic and immutable.

The use of metrical descriptions, while they seemed objective and scientific, fostered typological conceptions of human group differences. From massive quantitative measurements, experts computed averages, means, and standard deviations from which they developed statistical profiles of each racial population. These profiles were thought to represent the type characteristics of each race expressed in what seemed to be impeccable scientific language. When statistical profiles of one group were compared with those of others, one could theoretically determine the degree of their racial differences.

The activities of typologists carried a number of false assumptions about the physical characteristics of races. One was that racial characteristics did not change from one generation to another, meaning that averages of measurements such as body height would remain the same in the next generations. Another false assumption was that statistical averages could accurately represent huge populations, when the averaging itself obliterated all the variability within those populations.

Expressed alongside existing myths and popular racial stereotypes, these measurements inevitably strengthened the assumption that some races were “pure” and some not so “pure.” Scholars argued that all the major races were originally pure and that some races represented the historical mixing of two or more races in the past. “Racial types” were conceived as representing populations with certain inherited morphological features that were originally characteristic of the race; every member of a race thus retained such traits. These beliefs attempted to validate the image of races as internally homogeneous and biologically discrete, having no overlapping features with other races.

The beginning decline of “race” in science

The influence of Franz Boas

Typological thinking about race, however, was soon contradicted by the works of some early 20th-century anthropologists. Franz Boas, for example, published studies that showed that morphological characteristics varied from generation to generation in the same population, that skeletal material such as the cranium was malleable and subject to external influences, and that metrical averages in a given population changed in succeeding generations.

Boas and the early anthropologists trained in the United States recognized that the popular conception of race linked, and thus confused, biology with language and culture. They began to advocate the separation of “race,” as purely a biological phenomenon, from behaviour and language, denying a relationship between physical traits and the languages and cultures that people carry.

Though their arguments had little impact on the public at the time, these scholars initiated a new way of thinking about human differences. The separation of culture and language, which are learned behaviours, from biological traits that are physically inherited became a major tenet of anthropology. As the discipline grew and spread by means of scholarship and academic training, public understanding and recognition of this fundamental truth increased. Yet the idea of a hereditary basis for human behaviour remained a stubborn element of both popular and scientific thought.

Mendelian heredity and the development of blood group systems

In 1900, after the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's experiments dealing with heredity, scientists began to focus greater attention on genes and chromosomes. Their objective was to ascertain the hereditary basis for numerous physical traits. Once the ABO blood group system was discovered and was shown to follow the pattern of Mendelian heredity, other systems—the MN system, the Rhesus system, and many others—soon followed. Experts thought that at last they had found genetic features that, because they are inherited and not susceptible to environmental influences, could be used to identify races. By the 1960s and '70s, scientists were writing about racial groups as populations that differed from one another not in absolute features but in the frequencies of expression of genes that all populations share. It was expected that each race, and each population within each race, would have frequencies of certain ascertainable genes that would mark them off from other races.

Information on blood groups was taken from large numbers of populations, but when scientists tried to show a correlation of blood group patterns with the conventional races, they found none. While populations differed in their blood group patterns, in such features as the frequencies of A, B, and O types, no evidence was found to document race distinctions. As knowledge of human heredity expanded, other genetic markers of difference were sought, but these also failed to neatly separate humanity into races. Most differences are expressed in subtle gradations over wide geographic space, not in abrupt changes from one “race” to another. Moreover, not all groups within a large “geographic race” share the same patterns of genetic features. The internal variations within races have proved to be greater than those between races. Most importantly, physical, or phenotypic, features determined by DNA are inherited independently of one another, further frustrating attempts to describe race differences in genetic terms.

“Race” and intelligence

Anthropometric measurements did not provide any data to prove group superiority or inferiority. As various fields of study emerged in the late 19th century, some scholars began to focus on mental traits as a means to examine and describe human differences. Psychology as a growing field began developing its own programmatic interests in discovering race differences.

In the 1890s the psychologist Alfred Binet began testing the mental abilities of French schoolchildren to ascertain how children learned and to help those who had trouble learning. Binet did not call his test an intelligence test, and its purpose was not to divide French schoolchildren into hierarchical groups. But with these tests, a new mechanism was born that would provide powerful support to those who held beliefs in racial differences in intelligence.

Psychologists in the United States very quickly adopted Binet's tests and modified them for American use. More than that, they reinterpreted the results to be clear evidence of innate intelligence. Lewis Terman and his colleagues at Stanford University developed the Stanford-Binet IQ (intelligence quotient) test, which set the standard for similar tests produced by other American psychologists.

IQ tests began to be administered in great number during the second decade of the 20th century. The influences of hereditarian beliefs and the power of the racial worldview had conditioned Americans to believe that intelligence was inherited and permanent and that no external influences could affect it. Indeed, heredity was thought to determine a person's or a people's place in life and success or failure. Americans came to employ IQ tests more than any other nation. A major reason for this was that the tests tended to confirm the expectations of white Americans; on average, Negroes did less well than whites on IQ tests. But the tests also revealed that the disadvantaged of all races do worse on IQ tests than do the privileged. Such findings were compatible with the beliefs of large numbers of Americans who had come to accept unqualified biological determinism.

Opponents of IQ tests and their interpretations argued that intelligence had not been clearly defined, that experts did not agree on its definition, and that there were many different types of intelligence that cannot be measured. They also called attention to the many discrepancies and contradictions of the tests. One of the first examples of empirical evidence against the “innate intelligence” arguments was the revelation by psychologist Otto Klineberg in the 1930s that Negroes in four northern states did better on average than whites in the four southern states where expenditures on education were lowest. Klineberg's analysis pointed to a direct correlation between income and social class and performance on IQ tests. Further evidence indicated that students with the best primary education and greater cultural experiences always did better on such tests. Experts thus argued that such tests are culture-bound—that is, they reflect and measure the cultural experiences and knowledge of those who take the tests and their levels of education and training. Few would deny that African Americans and Native Americans have long had a much more restricted experience of American culture, and a far inferior education.

Hereditarian ideology and European constructions of race

Hereditary statuses versus the rise of individualism

Inheritance as the basis of individual social position is an ancient tenet of human history, extending to some point after the beginnings of agriculture (about 8000–10,000 BCE). Expressions of it are found throughout the world in kinship-based societies where genealogical links determine an individual's status, rights, and obligations. Wills and testaments capture this principle, and caste systems, such as that of India, reflect the expression of another form of this principle, buttressed by religious beliefs. Arguments for the divine right of kings and succession laws in European societies mirrored deep values of hereditary status.

But many trends in European culture history over the 18th and 19th centuries contradicted the idea of social placement by kinship fiat. Ever since the enclosure movement in England in the 15th century, the transformation to wage labour, the rise of merchant capitalism, and the entry into public consciousness of the significance of private property, Europeans have been conditioned to the values of individualism and of progress through prosperity. Wage labour strengthened ideas of individual freedom and advancement. The philosophy of autonomous individualism took root in western European societies, beginning first in England, and became the engine of social mobility in these rapidly changing areas. For their descendants in America, the limitations of hereditary status were antithetical to the values of individual freedom, at least freedom for those of European descent.

Reflecting and promoting these values were the works of some of the Enlightenment writers and philosophers, including Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and Montesquieu. Their writings had a greater impact on Americans than on their compatriots. Their advocacy of human freedom and the minimal intrusion of government was uniquely interpreted by Americans.

European societies had long been structured into class divisions that had a strong hereditary basis, but the gulf between those who benefited from overseas trade and the impoverished masses who competed for low-paying jobs or survived without work in the gutters of towns and cities widened dramatically during the age of empire building. In France the dissatisfaction of the masses erupted periodically, reaching a peak in the French Revolution of 1789, which overthrew the Bourbon monarch and brought Napoleon I to power.

As early as the turn of the 18th century, some intellectuals were concerned with these seething class conflicts that occasionally burst forth into violence in France. Henri de Boulainvilliers, a French count whose works were published in the 1720s and '30s, put forth an argument designed to justify the dominance of the aristocratic classes in France. He maintained that the noble classes were originally Germanic Franks who conquered the inferior Gauls, Romans, and others and established themselves as the ruling class. The Franks derived their superiority from German forebears, who were a proud, freedom-loving people with democratic institutions, pure laws, and monogamous marriage. They were great warriors, disciplined and courageous, and they ruled by the right of might. According to Boulain Boulainviliiers>villiers, they carried and preserved their superiority in their blood. With this argument, hereditarian ideology intruded into the consciousness of France's elite class and synthesized with a growing belief in “race” as the causal explanation for historical events.

The Germanic myth and English constructions of an Anglo-Saxon past

In England, from the time that Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic church and Protestant sects emerged on the horizon, historians, politicians, and philosophers had been wrestling with the creation of a new English identity. Indeed, European powers were soon to be caught up in the ethnic rivalries, extreme chauvinism, and intolerance out of which all the nation-states of Europe would be created. The English sought their new identity in the myths and heroics of the past and strove to create an image of antiquity that would rival those of other great civilizations. They created a myth of an Anglo-Saxon people, distinguished from the Vikings, Picts, Celts, Romans, Normans, and others who had inhabited English territory. In their histories, the Anglo-Saxons were a freedom-loving people who had advanced political institutions, an early form of representative government, and a pure religion long before the Norman Conquest. Although in part the English were concerned about the identification and preservation of ancient institutions to justify the distinctiveness of their political and ecclesiastical structures, they also wanted to establish and glorify a distinguished ancestry. The English, too, turned toward the German tribes and a “racial” ideology on which to base their claims of superiority.

The English scholars and Boulainvilliers derived their depictions of the Germans and their arguments from a common source, the works of Tacitus, a Roman historian born in the middle of the 1st century CE. At the end of the 1st century, Tacitus had published the Germania, a study of the German tribes to the north of Rome. It is the first, and most comprehensive, ethnographic study compiled in the ancient world and remains today a good description of a people seen at that time as barbarians.

Tacitus idealized the simple, unadulterated lives of the German tribes and contrasted what he saw as their positive cultural features with the decadence and decline of the Romans. The German tribes were indeed the first noble savages of the Western world. Tacitus sought to provide a moral lesson about the corruption and decline of civilizations in contrast to the virtues and moral uprightness of simple societies. Little could he have anticipated that his descriptions of a simple tribal people, written for 2nd-century Romans, would form one of the bases for a powerful theory of racial superiority that dominated the Western world during the 19th and 20th centuries.

None of the writers harking back to the German tribes for a depiction of good government and pure institutions noted any of the negative or unsavory characterizations that Tacitus also detailed in the Germania. Among other things, he claimed that the Germans were intensely warlike; they hated peace and despised work; when not fighting—and they loved fighting, even among themselves—they idled away their time or slept. They had a passion for gambling and drinking, and they gave blind obedience to their chiefs.

The Germanic myth flourished and spread. Boulainvilliers was widely read in England and by segments of the intellectual classes in Germany and France. By the mid- to late 18th century, the English version of the Germanic myth—Anglo-Saxonism—had been transformed from an idea of superior institutions into a doctrine of English biological superiority. The French version remained a competing idea validating social class interests in that nation, and, with the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after 1815, it was revived by those political forces that believed in the permanence of the unequal social hierarchy. It would grow and penetrate into many other areas, notably the modern German nation itself.

Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of Human Races

The most important promoter of racial ideology in Europe during the mid-19th century was Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau, who had an almost incalculable effect on late 19th-century social theory. Published in 1853–55, his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races was widely read, embellished, and publicized by many different kinds of writers. He imported some of his arguments from the polygenists, especially the American Samuel Morton. Gobineau claimed that the civilizations established by the three major races of the world (white, black, and yellow) were all products of the white races and that no civilization could emerge without their cooperation. The purest of the white races were the Aryans. When Aryans diluted their blood by intermarriage with lower races, they helped to bring about the decline of their civilization.

Following Boulainvilliers, Gobineau advanced the notion that France was composed of three separate races—the Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans—that corresponded to France's class structure. Each race had distinct mental and physical characteristics; they differed in character and natural abilities, such as leadership, economic resourcefulness, and creativity and inventiveness and in morality and aesthetic sensibilities. The tall, blond Nordics, who were descendants of the ancient Germanic tribes, were the intellectuals and leaders. Alpines, who were brunet and intermediate in size between Nordics and Mediterraneans, were the peasants and workers anthropometry>; they required the leadership of Nordics. The shorter, darker Mediterraneans he considered a decadent and degenerate product of the mixture of unlike races; to Gobineau, they were “nigridized” and “semitized.”

Americans of this period were among Gobineau's greatest admirers; so were many Germans. The latter saw in his works a formula for unifying the German peoples and ultimately proclaiming their superiority. Many proponents of German nationalism became activists and organized political societies to advance their goals. They developed a new dogma of “Aryanism” that was to expand and become the foundation for Nazi race theories in the 20th century.

Gobineau was befriended by the great composer Richard Wagner, who was a major advocate of racial ideology during the late 19th century. It was Wagner's future son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, writing at the end of the 19th century, who glorified the virtues of the Germans as the superrace. In a long book entitled The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Chamberlain explained the history of the entire 19th century—with its European conquests, dominance, colonialism, and exploitation—as a product of the great accomplishments of the German people. Though English-born, Chamberlain had a fanatical attraction to all things German and an equally fanatic hatred of Jews. He believed Jesus was a Teuton, not a Jew, and argued that all Jews had as part of their racial character a moral defect. Fueled by rising anti-Semitism in Europe, race ideology facilitated the manufacture of an image of Jews as a distinct and inferior population. Chamberlain's publications were widely disseminated in Germany during the turn of the 20th century. His speculations about the greatness of the Germans and their destiny were avidly consumed by many, especially young men such as Adolf Hitler and his companions in the National Socialist Party.

As this history shows, European peoples took the constituent components of the ideology of race and molded them to the exigencies of their particular political and economic circumstances, applying them to their own ethnic and class conflicts. Race thus emerged as a powerful denoter of unbridgeable differences that could be applied to any circumstances, particularly of ethnic conflict. The German interpretation of race eventually took the ideology to its logical extreme, the belief that a “superior race” has the right to eliminate “inferior races.”

Galton and Spencer

Hereditarian ideology also flourished in late 19th-century England. Two major writers and proselytizers of the idea of the innate racial superiority of the upper classes were Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer. Galton wrote books with titles such as Hereditary Genius (1869), in which he showed that a disproportionate number of the great men of England—the military leaders, philosophers, scientists, and artists—came from the small upper-class stratum. Spencer incorporated the themes of biological evolution and social progress into a grand universal scheme. Antedating Darwin, he introduced the ideas of competition, the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest. His “fittest” were the socially and economically most successful not only among groups but within societies. The “savage” or inferior races of men were clearly the unfit and would soon die out. For this reason, Spencer advocated that governments eschew policies that helped the poor; he was against all charities, child-labour laws, women's rights, and education for the poor and uncivilized. Such actions, he claimed, interfered with the laws of natural evolution; these beliefs became known as social Darwinism.

The hereditarian ideologies of European writers in general found a ready market for such ideas among all those nations involved in empire-building. In the United States these ideas paralleled and strengthened the racial ideology then deeply embedded in American values and thought. They had a synergistic effect on ideas of hereditary determinism in many aspects of American life and furthered the acceptance and implementation of IQ tests as an accurate measure of innate human ability.

“Race” ideologies in the non-Western world

European conquest and the classification of the conquered

As they were constructing their own racial identities internally, western European nations were also colonizing most of what has been called, in recent times, the Third World, in Asia and Africa. Since all of the colonized and subordinated people differed physically from Europeans, the colonizers automatically applied racial categories to them and initiated a long history of discussions about how such populations should be classified. There are a very wide variety of physical variations among Third World people, and subjective impressions generated much scientific debate, particularly about which features were most useful for racial classification. Experts never reached agreement on such classifications, and some questions, such as how to classify indigenous Australians, were subjects of endless debate and never resolved.

The concept of race had become so deeply entrenched in American and European thought by the end of the 19th century that scholars and other learned people came to believe that the idea of race was universal. They searched for examples of race ideology among indigenous populations and reinterpreted the histories of these peoples in terms of Western conceptions of racial causation for all human achievements or lack thereof. Thus the so-called Aryan invasions of the Indian subcontinent between 1600 and about 600 BCE were seen, and lauded by some, as an example of a “racial” conquest by a light-skinned race over darker peoples. The Aryans of ancient India (not to be confused with the Aryans of 20th-century Nazi ideology) were pastoralists who spread south into the Indian subcontinent and intermingled with sedentary peoples, such as the Dravidians, many of whom happened to be very dark-skinned as a result of their long adaptation to a hot tropical environment. Out of this fusion of cultures and peoples, modern Indian, or Hindu, civilization arose. Such conquests and syntheses of new cultural forms have taken place numerous times in human history even in areas where there was little or no difference in skin colour (as, for example, the westward movements of Mongols and Turkish peoples).

India's caste system

India has a huge population encompassing many obvious physical variations, from light skins to some of the darkest in the world, from straight coarse hair to frizzled and crinkly hair, and a wide variety of facial features. In addition, the Hindu sociocultural system is divided into castes that are exclusive, hereditary, and endogamous. They are also ranked and unequal and thus appear to have many of the characteristics of “race.” But the complex caste system is not based primarily on colour, as castes include people of all physical variations, nor is it based on a “scientific” ideology of superiority or inferiority. Colour variations in India, as elsewhere, are a product of natural selection in tropical and semitropical environments, of genetic drift among small populations, and of historical migrations and contact among peoples.

Castes were, and are still, occupational groups as well as elements in a religious system that accords different values and different degrees of purity to different occupations. They also are the main regulators of marriage and inheritance rights. Some castes were originally small-scale tribal groups who were incorporated into the Hindu kingdoms. It has been noted that there are thousands of castes in India and many different ways of ranking them, including such cultural features as food taboos and sharing obligations, but none are based in skin colour or “race.” Although some early 20th-century European scholars tried to divide the Indian and other Asian peoples into “races,” their efforts were hindered not only by the complexity of physical variations in India, parts of Southeast Asia, and Melanesia but by the developing fields of science.

Caste discrimination has been outlawed in India today, although it remains deeply rooted in the cultures of ordinary people. Moreover, democratic values, individual rights, and the processes of industrialization have affected the more rigid social caste system of India and led in some areas to a blurring of caste boundaries and a decline in the importance of caste identity.

Japan's minority peoples

A few ethnographic studies have suggested to some that a form of racial ideology may also have developed independently of the West in some traditional societies such as that of Japan, where various minority peoples, notably the burakumin (pejoratively called Eta) and the Ainu, have been victimized and exploited by the dominant society. Discrimination against such groups incorporates myths about their biological inferiority. Japanese folk myths attribute many unusual physical characteristics to the burakumin, but biological anthropologists have been unable to distinguish them physically from other Japanese. Prejudice against them and their segregation in society stems from their history as a caste of people who performed “unclean” tasks (butchering animals, disposing of corpses, etc.), a characteristic found in some other societies.

The Ainu, on the other hand, have many physical features that are more similar to Europeans than to Asians, not only their skin colour but particularly their abundance of body hair and their Occidental eyes. Although they may have occupied much of Japan in the past, they are relegated today mainly to the northern island of Hokkaido. It is arguable whether the traditional ideology supporting Japanese attitudes toward these people reflects the features of the racial worldview described here. The same is true of Japanese attitudes toward other ethnic groups, such as Koreans. Extreme ethnocentrism has characterized many intergroup relations in the past.

Such intergroup hostilities always have a basis in cultural realities, in competition for land, for regionwide political power, or for the souls of people, as the history of most of the world's peoples in the past several thousand years has revealed. Mere variations in physical features have never been the sole cause of such enmity. And the belief systems have never been institutionalized by law or buttressed by religion and science.

“Race” and the reality of human physical variation

Scientists have known for many decades that there is little correlation between “race,” used in its popular sense, and actual physical variations in the human species. In the United States, for example, the people identified as African Americans do not share a common set of physical characteristics. There is a greater range of skin colours, hair colours and textures, facial features, body sizes, and other physical traits in this category than in any other human aggregate identified as a single race. Features of African Americans vary from light skins, blue or gray eyes, and blond hair to dark skins, black eyes, and crinkly hair and include every range and combination of characteristics in between. American custom has long classified any person with known African ancestry as black, a social mandate often called the “one-drop rule.” This principle not only attests to the arbitrary nature of black racial identity, but it was also presumed to keep those classified as racially “white” pure and untainted by the “blood” of low-status and inferior races. This rule has not applied to other “racial” mixtures, such as children born of white and Asian parents, although some of these children have suffered discrimination because of physical similarities to their lower-status parent. All of this gives clear evidence of the socially arbitrary nature of race categories in North America.

Other types of anomalies have frequently appeared in efforts to classify “racial” populations around the world. Whereas British scholars, for example, tend to separate East Indians into a separate racial category (during the colonial period, natives of India, Burma, Melanesia, and Australia were, and still are, called “blacks”), American scholars have usually included East Indians in the “Caucasian” category to differentiate them from American blacks. Light-skinned Indians usually from northern India have been accepted as “white,” but very dark Indians have sometimes experienced colour discrimination in the United States.

Since World War II, travel and immigration have greatly increased the contact of Western peoples with a wide variety of peoples throughout the world. Contact with peoples of the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, as well as with peoples from several areas of Africa and the Middle East, has shown that most of these people do not neatly fit into existing racial stereotypes. Some appear to have a mixture of Asian and African or European and African physical characteristics. Others, such as Melanesians, can easily be mistaken for Africans or black Americans. More anomalous are native Australians, some of whom have light or blond wavy hair combined with dark skins. Many Americans are recognizing that the social categories of race as evolved in the United States are inadequate for encompassing such peoples who, indeed, do not share the social history of racial minorities in the United States.

In the 1950s and '60s, the United States began experiencing an influx of new immigrants from Latin America. Spanish and Portuguese colonial societies exhibited very different attitudes toward physical differences. Even before Christopher Columbus set sail, the Mediterranean world had long been a world of heterogeneous peoples. Africans, southern Europeans, and peoples of the Middle East have interacted and interbred over thousands of years, as long as humans have occupied these regions. The Iberian peoples brought their customs and habits to the New World. There, as described above, intermating among Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans soon began to produce a population of “mixed” peoples. The descendants of these peoples who have entered the United States since the mid-20th century further confound “racial” categories for those who believe in them.

U.S. military personnel fighting in the Persian Gulf region were startled to see that many Saudi Arabians, Yemenis, Omanis, and other peoples in the Middle East resembled African Americans or Africans in their skin colour, hair texture, and facial features. Many Southeast Asians and Middle Easterners have found that they are frequently “mistaken” for blacks in America. Some American Indians are mistaken for Chinese, Japanese, or other Asian ethnic groups on the basis of their skin colour, eye structure, and hair colour and texture. Some Central and South Americans and many Puerto Ricans are perceived as Arabs. In like manner, many Arab Americans or Persians are thought to be Latinos. “Race” is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder.

Clearly, physical features are insufficient clues to a person's ethnic identity. They reveal nothing about a person's culture, language, religion, and values. Sixth-generation Chinese Americans have American ethnicity; many know little or nothing about traditional Chinese culture, just as European Americans and African Americans may know little or nothing about the cultures of their ancestors. Moreover, all cultures change, and they do so independently of the biogenetic features of their carriers.

Modern scientific explanations of human biological variation

Contemporary scientists hold that human physical variations, especially in those traits that are normally used to classify people racially—skin colour, hair texture, facial features, and to some extent bodily structure—must be understood in terms of evolutionary processes and the long-range adaptation of human groups to differing environments. Other features may simply reflect accidental mutations or functionally neutral changes in the genetic code.

In any given habitat, natural forces operate on all of the living forms, including human groups. The necessary interaction with these forces will affect the survival and reproduction of the members of these societies. Such groups already have a wide and complex range of hereditary physical characteristics; indeed, human hereditary variability is a product of human sexual reproduction, whereby every individual receives half of his or her genetic endowment from each parent and no two individuals (except for identical twins) inherit the same combination of genetic features.

The distribution of skin colour variations of indigenous populations before colonization by …

The global distribution of skin colour (see map) is the best example of adaptation, and the consequences of this process have long been well-known. Skin colour clines (gradations) in indigenous populations worldwide correlate with latitude and amounts of sunlight. Indigenous populations within a broad band known as the tropics (the regions falling in latitude between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn) have darker skin colours than indigenous populations outside of these regions.

Within the tropics, skin colours vary from light tan to very dark brown or black, both among populations and among individuals within groups. The darkest skin colours are found in those populations long residing in regions where intense ultraviolet sunlight is greatest and there is little natural forest cover. The bluish black skins of some peoples—the Dravidians of South India, the peoples of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and peoples of the eastern Sudan zone, including Nubia, and the grasslands of Africa—are examples of the extremes of dark skin colour. Medium brown to dark brown peoples are found in the rest of tropical Africa and India and throughout Australia, Melanesia, and other parts of Southeast Asia.

Peoples with light skin colours evolved over thousands of years in northern temperate climates. Human groups intermittently migrating into Europe and the northern parts of the Eurasian landmass over the past 25,000–50,000 years experienced a gradual loss of skin pigmentation. The changes were both physiological and genetic; that is, there were systemic changes in individuals and long-range genetic changes as a result of natural selection and, possibly, mutations. Those individuals with the lightest skin colours, with lowest amounts of melanin, survived and reproduced in larger numbers and thus passed on their genes for lighter skin. Over time, entire populations living in northern climates evolved lighter skin tones than those individuals living in areas with higher levels of sunlight. Between populations with light skin and those with the darkest coloration are populations with various shades of light tan to brown. The cline in skin colours shows variation by infinite degrees; any attempts to place boundaries along this cline represent purely arbitrary decisions.

Scientists at the turn of the 21st century understood why these superficial visible differences developed. Melanin, a substance that makes the skin dark, has been shown to confer protection from sunburn and skin cancers in those very areas where ultraviolet sunlight is strongest. Dark skin, which tends to be thicker than light skin, may have other protective functions in tropical environments where biting insects and other vectors of disease are constant threats to human survival. But humans also need vitamin D, which is synthesized by sunlight from sterols (chemical compounds) present in the skin. Vitamin D affects bone growth, and, without a sufficient amount, the disease known as rickets would have been devastating to early human groups trying to survive in the cold, wintry weather of the north. As these groups adapted to northern climates with limited sunlight, natural selection brought about the gradual loss of melanin in favour of skin tones that enabled some individuals to better synthesize vitamin D.

Other physical characteristics indicate adaptations to cold or hot climates, to variations in elevation from sea level, to rainforests with high levels of rainfall, and to hot deserts. Body structure and the amount of body fat have also been explained by evolutionists in terms of human adaptation to differing environments. Long, linear body builds seems to be highly correlated with hot, dry climates. Such people inhabit the Sahara and the desiccated areas of the Sudan in Africa. Short, stocky body builds with stubby fingers and toes are correlated with cold, wet climates, such as are found in Arctic areas. People adapted to cold climates have acquired genetic traits that provide them extra layers of body fat, which accounts for the epicanthic fold over their eyes. People who live in areas of high elevation, as in the mountains of Peru, tend to have an adaptive feature not found among peoples who live at sea level; they have larger lungs and chest cavities. In an atmosphere where the oxygen supply is low, larger lungs are clearly adaptive.

Some adaptive variations are not obviously visible or measurable. Many peoples adapted to cold climates, for example, have protective physiological reactions in their blood supply. Their blood vessels either constrict the flow to extremities to keep the inner body warm while their surface skin may be very cold (vasoconstriction) or dilate to increase the blood flow to the hands, feet, and head to warm the outer surfaces (vasodilation).

The prevalence of diseases has been another major factor in the evolution of human diversity, and some of the most important of human genetic variations reflect differences in immunities to diseases. The sickle cell trait (hemoglobin S), for example, is found chiefly in those regions of the tropical world where malaria is endemic. Hemoglobin S in its heterozygous form (inherited from one parent only) confers some immunity to those people who carry it, although it brings a deadly disease (sickle cell anemia) in its homozygous form (inherited from both parents).

In the last decades of the 20th century, scientists began to understand human physical variability in clinal terms and to recognize that it reflects much more complex gradations and combinations than they had anticipated. To comprehend the full expression of a feature's genetic variability, it must be studied separately over geographic space and often in terms of its adaptive value. Many features are now known to relate to the environmental conditions of the populations that carry them.

The scientific debate over “race”

Although their numbers are dwindling, some scientists continue to believe that it is possible to divide Homo sapiens into discrete populations called races. They believe that the physical differences manifest in wide geographic regions are more than superficial; they reflect innate intellectual, moral, emotional, and other behavioral differences among human groups. They deny that social circumstances and the cultural realities of racism have any affect on behaviour or the performance of children and adults on IQ tests. Those scientists who advocate the continued acceptance of race and racial differences have been labeled “splitters.” Among the more recent and highly popularized reflections of this point of view was The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994) by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. This work is a modern representation of social Darwinism in that the authors argue not only that minority or low-status races have innate deficiencies, but they maintain that poor people of all races, including whites, are genetically inferior.

Those who deny the biological salience of race or argue against the use of the term have been labeled “lumpers.” The latter see their position as being buttressed and confirmed by ongoing genetic and other research. They point out the failure of science to establish exclusive boundaries around populations or lines of rigid distinctions that the term race conveys. They also point to the evidence demonstrating that all people regardless of their physical variations are capable of learning any kind of cultural behaviour. They argue that genes and cultural conditioning work in tandem and are inseparably fused together in the formation of individual personalities.

An increasing number of scholars and other educated people now believe that the concept of race has outlived its usefulness. The United States has become the world leader in denouncing racism and the practices of racialization around the world. New immigrants from remote areas of the world now cooperate in work situations with peoples of Western background. Social scientists, biologists, historians, and philosophers now point out that increasing migrations and changes in attitudes toward human differences have brought about extensive intermingling of peoples so that a growing number of people have ancestors originating in three or more continents. Such “mixed” people are not easily lumped into a single “racial” category. As a result, many scholars perceive that “race” is becoming more and more irrelevant and may eventually be eliminated as people increasingly are recognized in terms of their ethnic or cultural identities. A contradictory trend also seems to be occurring among some writers who find it difficult to relinquish some elements of race ideology. That is the "biologization" of ethnic identity, interpretations of peoples' cultures and behaviour as if such features stem from genetic heredity. Should this trend expand, society may continue to manifest the broad elements of "race" ideology, but in a different form.

Audrey Smedley

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