Race as a concept

SIGNIFICANCE: Eighteenth-century racial concepts, with little if any scientific basis, molded modern racial classification and gave rise to stereotypes of superior and inferior peoples. Distortions of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution were used to justify imperialism as well as genocide. Today, ethnicity, not race, is used in understanding the complex phenomenon of human variation.

Although human societies from earliest times were aware of differences between themselves and other societies, the concept of race is a relatively modern construct, first developed in the late eighteenth century. The ancient Greeks had no word even remotely resembling race. Aristotle’s classification system of Genus, Species, Difference, Property, Accident (which helped earn him the title of father of biology) contributed to the founding of racial classification systems. Aristotle himself believed that climate caused physical differences in humans. Like other ancient Greeks, he also believed in slavery. However, for Aristotle, slavery was a matter of virtue, not race. The most virtuous had leisure time for active involvement in politics.

Medieval and Early Modern Concepts

The Middle Ages in Europe was a land-locked age, with little reason to speculate on race. Yet, much ethnocentrism existed. Prussians, Irish, Lombards, and a host of others were portrayed in unflattering ways. By 1100 and the era of the Crusades, particularly venomous language was used to describe the followers of Islam. Jews also were subject to verbal and physical attacks, increasing with a vengeance after the bubonic plague epidemic in 1348. Yet when the word “race” was used in the Middle Ages, it was to refer to the pure lineage of some noble family. Racial theory itself did not emerge in the Middle Ages.

The age of exploration opened Europeans to a world of other human types, causing a debate about whether American Native Americans and Black Africans were men or beasts. The famous chemist and physician, Paracelsus, described Europeans as children of Adam, and found Black people and other races to have separate origins. Such separate origin theories were cut short when the papacy, in the mid-sixteenth century, condemned the separate origin of humanity theory as heretical. In 1565, French historian and political theorist Jean Bodin divided the world into Scythian, German, African, and Middler, according to skin color and basic body features. Bodin’s primitive classification scheme was still far more advanced than that of Cambridge historian Raphael Holinshed, who wrote in 1578 about races of giants as well as races devoted to sorcery and witchcraft. During the age of the Counter-Reformation and witch hunting (1550–1650), references to evil races grew, and at least in popular literature, black became viewed as a sign of the devil. With the beginning of the scientific revolution, classification became more in line with Bodin’s schema. In 1684, François Bernier described four human races: European, Asian, African, and Lapp.

Racial Taxonomies

The term “race” was first used to classify humanity in 1775, when Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German professor of medicine, created a taxonomy dividing humanity into five separate races: Caucasian, Mongolian, American, African, and Malay. Each was described in terms of skin color, cranial size and shape, and other physical characteristics. Blumenbach used the term Caucasian for European, and he believed that the most beautiful people in the world lived in the Caucasus region. Devoting much attention to skull size, Blumenbach founded what would later be the pseudoscience of craniology and phrenology. In his classification system, Blumenbach built on the earlier work of Swedish botanist Linnaeus (Carl von Linné). In his Systema Naturae (1758), Linnaeus divided humans into four groups defined by skin color, personality, and moral traits. Hence Europeans were “fair, gentle, acute, and inventive,” while Asiatics were “haughty and covetous.” Although Blumenbach and Linnaeus were early scientists, writing long before evolution or genetics were concepts, their classification systems became firmly embedded in scientific taxonomies and accepted as gospel in the public mind—despite the fact that Blumenbach used “race” as a convenient label and nothing more.

Blumenbach and Linnaeus were writing during the Enlightenment, when philosophers, historians, and political scientists were also toying with human classification themes. In 1749, the Count de Buffon defined six separate groupings of men, viewing all other races as variations of what he termed the “White Race.” In 1775, the famous philosopher Immanuel Kant defined four races—Hunnic, White, Negro, Hindu—but viewed all races as having a common origin. Yet ten years later, Kant was further speculating about special powers of each race that could be evoked or suppressed as new conditions demanded.

Romantic Pseudoscientific Concept

Enlightenment thought tended to deal with universals. As a whole, the eighteenth-century racial theorists viewed humanity as one distinct species. Their taxonomies were subdivisions of related peoples. It was the nineteenth-century Romantics, with their stress on the unique and particular, who transformed taxonomies of race into vitriolic concepts of racism.

Johann Fichte (1762–1814), a student of Kant, argued that Germans inherited superior biological qualities through their blood. Fichte believed that these blood characteristics destined Germany to produce a nation unsurpassed in moral and social order. Similarly Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) pointed to different races having different inner qualities, and historian Barthold Niebuhr in his History of Rome (1828) viewed the German tribes as being powerful enough to conquer Rome because they, unlike the Romans, had maintained their racial purity. German racial concepts also influenced contemporaneous English and American thought. In 1850, English historian Robert Knox published a series of lectures entitled The Races of Man, in which he attempted to show that all scientific and cultural advances, and even civilization itself, were a manifestation of race. Similarly, American historian William H. Prescott extolled the Anglo-Saxon virtues that shaped the American character, and Francis Parkman praised the German race for its masculine qualities.

Many nineteenth-century scientists joined the Romantics in identifying culture with race. Georges Cuvier, a leading French zoologist, argued that Caucasians created the highest civilization and, by right, dominated all others. For him, Mongolian peoples could only create static empires, and Black people remained in a state of barbarism. Cuvier introduced the concept of “fixity of type” to explain why different races were predestined to follow different developmental paths. In Natural History of the Human Species (1848), Charles H. Smith, an anatomist and a friend of Cuvier, classified three racial types based on the size of the brain. In the United States, Samuel George Morton collected hundreds of skulls and poured mustard seeds into each skull to calculate the skull’s volume. He called this new science craniometry and published his conclusions in the influential Crania Americana (1839), which listed brain capacity from most (Caucasian people) to least (Black people), with American Native American people falling somewhere in between.

The most powerful pre-Darwinistic racial theorist was Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, called the father of racist ideology because of his stress on the inferiority and superiority of certain races. His Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, published between 1853 and 1855, stressed that the races were physically, mentally, and morally different. For him, the White race was unsurpassed in beauty, intelligence, and strength. It was a natural aristocracy. Of the peoples in the White race, he found the Aryan to be the most advanced, and the German to be the foremost developed of the Aryans. Gobineau, interested also in the decline of civilizations, found race mixing to be a major cause. It is not surprising that the young Adolf Hitler found Gobineau fascinating.

Darwinism and Race

The advent of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1859 shattered old racial concepts but opened the way for new ones. Darwin viewed all humans as belonging to the same species and had little to say about race except that all species change over time and that human subspecies had crossed repeatedly. If anything, he found that the similarities among humans far outweighed any differences.

However, the social and racial Darwinists who adapted Darwin’s ideas had a lot to say. Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, coined the term “eugenics.” He concluded that there are grades of races and grades of humans in each race. By 1883, Galton was popularizing the idea that social agencies were responsible for improving the racial qualities of future generations.

The Herculean mind of Herbert Spencer used evolution, natural selection, and survival of the fittest to explain practically everything in the universe, including race. In his travels he viewed Papuans, Australian aborigines, and African tribesmen, all of whom were classified as primitive, childlike, and of little intelligence. Spencer had a tremendous impact on other scholars and on the educated public. By the end of the century, Rudyard Kipling would write his famous poem “The White Man’s Burden,” classifying colonial peoples as “half-devil and half-child.”

Another famous Darwinist was Henrik Hackle, who traced life from an organic broth in the oceans to the emergence of humankind. In his Riddle of the Universe (1899), Hackle found racial differences to be of paramount importance. He found “lower” races such as the Hottentots destined for extinction, while Black people were labeled as incapable of higher mental thoughts. Hackle taught at the University of Jena. One of his students, Joseph Chamberlain, was destined to be British Secretary of State for Colonies.

A powerful writer, Chamberlain synthesized nineteenth-century trends in his works on race. He found race to be everything; the germ of the culture, art, and genius of a people ran in its blood. Therefore, any race that allowed its blood to be mixed with that of others was destined to fall. In his own time, Chamberlain saw a major battle taking place between Teutons and Jews. However, the awakening of the Teutonic spirit in this battle was a great turning point in history that would lead to a new Europe and a new future world order. Hitler honored Chamberlain as a great world thinker and acted on many of his conclusions. The carnage that resulted made overt racial concepts unfashionable in the post-1945 world.

Counterattack Against Racial Classification

Racial taxonomies should have been greeted with skepticism from the beginning. Scientist Chevalier Lamarck had shown that species change over time as their living environments change; however, the implications of his conclusions were ignored. The noted anthropologist Franz Boas challenged the rampant Darwinism of his time and demanded proof from his colleagues that race determines mentality and temperament. During the 1940s, Ashley Montagu claimed race was invented by anthropologists as an artificial concept and did not make sense in light of the hybridization of humanity over many millennia. Finally in 1964, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), using the worldwide work of anthropologists and scientists, concluded that there is no such thing as a pure race, making it difficult to place humanity into clear-cut categories. UNESCO stated that because of the great mobility of humanity over time, no national, religious, geographical, linguistic, or cultural group in the modern world constitutes a race.

The majority of anthropologists find “race” to be a mystical and imprecise term that does not come close to explaining the tremendous biodiversity in humanity. They prefer, instead, “ethnicity,” a term that encompasses people’s language, religion, and geography and recognizes the existence of several hundred ethnic groups. The old divisions of Asian, African, European, American (American Indigenous) have come to be viewed as mainly geographic terms. As populations continue to intersperse, even these geographic terms for humanity are becoming increasingly obsolete.

Bibliography

Banton, Michael. The Idea of Race. London: Tavistock, 1977.

Banton, Michael. Race Relations. New York: Basic, 1967.

Gossett, Thomas. Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

Mikkelsen, Jon M., trans. and ed. Kant and the Concept of Race: Late Eighteenth-Century Writings. Albany: State U of New York P, 2013.

Montagu, Ashley, ed. The Concept of Race. New York: Free, 1964.

Sussman, Robert Wald. The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea. Harvard University Press, 2014.