Race, Concept of

Race, Concept of. The term “race” with reference to human beings first appeared in English literature in the sixteenth century as a classifactory term with a meaning similar to “kind” or “type,” as in “a race of bishops” or “a race of saints. ” In the eighteenth century the term was more frequently applied to the diverse populations in England's American colonies: the Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans. Here race evolved as a ranking system reflecting the dominant English attitudes toward these populations. Conquered Indians were kept separate and apart from Europeans, often exploited, or moved off their lands for new settlers. Slavery for Africans and their descendants was gradually institutionalized over the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and most Africans were identified primarily as property and sources of wealth.

In that same century, European scientists were collecting and organizing materials on the newly discovered indigenous peoples of the New World, Asia, and Africa. Carolus Linnaeus, Johann Blumenbach, and other systematists perceived physically differing groups as representing variants within a single human species. They established categories based on skin color and other physical traits, but they often included customs and habits as reported by travelers, missionaries, sailors, and merchants. These data were often not objective, but the rudimentary classifications helped to make sense of increasingly complex world realities. As these descriptions and classifications spread to learned people in Europe and America, they were readily assimilated to existing folk ideas about human differences.

During the late eighteenth century, a growing antislavery movement, promoting the Revolutionary Era ideology of liberty, justice, equality, and democracy, threatened the deeply entrenched system of American slavery. Defenders of the institution developed new, stronger rationalizations for slavery, focusing on the nature of the slaves themselves and exaggerating the differences between Africans and Europeans. Linking certain behaviors with “negro” biology, they concocted an image of Africans as innately wild and uncivilized and an inferior human type whose natural state was slavery.

The earliest sustained arguments on black inferiority thus emerged during this period. Scholarly publications on race differences by such men as Edward Long, a Jamaican jurist and plantation owner, and Charles White, an English physician, drew upon an ancient model, the hierarchical “Great Chain of Being,” to argue for the natural inferiority of Africans. Thomas Jefferson and other slaveowners speculated on, and most accepted, this rationalization. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784–1785), Jefferson advanced “as a suspicion only” the view that blacks were “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

As abolitionism strengthened during the early nineteenth century, folk images of blacks and Indians (and later Chinese) as inherently lesser forms of human beings were magnified and widely publicized. Scientific writings mirrored and legitimated evolving folk beliefs. By mid‐century, Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton, who collected and measured skulls; Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz; Alabama physician Josiah Nott; and others were identifying “the negro” as a separate human species. A major scientific debate at mid‐century centered on “the negro's place in nature.” On one side were polygenists who, using cranial measurements and archeological evidence, asserted that blacks had been created separately and were a distinct species; on the other were the monogenists who, for equally scientific reasons, supported the notion of a single creation, but claimed that “the negro” had degenerated. Both camps and the general public accepted an image of “the negro” that was tantamount to a species distinction. The assumption of the biological, intellectual, moral, and social inequality of races continued long after the Civil War, shaping laws, customs, social policies, and popular beliefs.

Thus, race in the nineteenth century was institutionalized as a form of social stratification predicated on beliefs about the innate inequality of human groups. Visible physical differences once attributed to geography and climate (or to a divine curse visited upon Noah's son Ham in the biblical account of the flood) had become markers of social status. Popular pejorative beliefs about low‐status races served to justify exploitation and discrimination. As the ideology evolved, race became the premier explanation for the morals, character, and cultural achievement of all peoples. More important, racial characteristics were perceived as inherited and relatively immutable.

Race was soon reified as a category with important socio‐political implications. Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer in England buttressed the notion of hereditary inequality, and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution provided a “natural” explanation for whatever human differences were assumed to exist. Europeans began to segment their own populations into superior (Nordic) and inferior (Alpine and Mediterranean) races—views reflected in the influential publications of French writer Arthur de Gobineau (1853–1855) and Englishman Houston S. Chamberlain (1899). In Germany, Jews and other ethnic minorities were consciously transformed into inferior “racial” populations. As the Nazi party won power in Germany in the 1930s, the racial worldview reached its zenith with sterilization policies and genocide as the end products.

In the United States, some twentieth‐century psychologists promoted IQ tests to determine intellectual differences among races. Such tests, however, have been shown to reflect levels of education and cultural experience. Numerous popular writers, such as Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race (1916), reiterated the ideology of race differences and the need for segregation and differential treatment. This continued (absent the argument for segregation) with publications like Richard Herrnstein's and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve (1994).

Throughout this history, some scholars and others have opposed the idea of race and its stereotypes, especially the notion of inequality. Frederick Douglass and John Brown in the nineteenth century and anthropologists Franz Boas and Ashley Montagu (and many others) in the twentieth strongly combated popular race beliefs. While most Americans of the late twentieth century disavowed racism, belief in the objective reality of race as identity persisted, linked to observable physical differences. Because races are significant social constructs, race remained a category in the 2000 U.S. Census and continued to constitute an important topic in public discourse.

With advances in the science of genetics, scientists have found greater genetic differences within purported “racial” groups than between them. Some scientists deny that “races” are exclusive and distinct biogenetic groups and increasingly argue that race has no meaning in the biological world. It is a cultural invention about human differences.
See also African Americans; Anthropology; Anti‐Semitism; Cultural Pluralism; Eugenics; Indian History and Culture: The Indian in Popular Culture; Nativist Movement; Psychology; Race and Ethnicity.

Bibliography

Alexander Alland Jr. , Human Diversity, 1971.
George M. Fredrickson , The Black Image in the White Mind, 1971, reprint 1987.
John S. Haller , Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900, 1971.
Edmund S. Morgan , American Slavery, American Freedom, 1975.
Elazar Barkan , The Retreat of Scientific Racism, 1992.
Audrey Smedley , Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 2d ed., 1998.

Audrey Smedley