RACE

Race, at a most basic level, is a system for classifying people by various forms of similarity and difference. Race is a culturally, socially, and scientifically defined concept whose meaning—depending on the period in history, geographic location, and the scientific or technological context—has changed over time. Race is a fluid concept. The meaning of race has evolved from a term describing livestock lineage to a tool used in medical diagnoses. The ethical implications of race in relation to science and technology depend on the ways in which it is deployed and by whom. In this regard, race can be used to make informed scientific and technological decisions, or it can be used to reinforce cultural stereotypes and regimes of discrimination.

Origins of Race

Prior to the sixteenth century, the current connotations of race did not exist. The most common use of the term race was in reference to the domestication of livestock. A "racial stock" was a group of animals bred for a specific purpose. In the sixteenth century, this animal husbandry term migrated and began to be used to describe peoples. Race became a way to explain differentiations within "human stock." Europeans were the first to use the terms race and stock to delineate between different human groups. Customs and regional origins, as well as religious values and beliefs, determined the degree of difference. The characteristics attributed to races and stocks were similar to those now attributed to culture. Race did not carry powerful biological overtones. Soon, however, it became a way of evaluating and differentiating between those considered to be civilized and those deemed to be uncivilized.

Indeed, for the Enlightenment philosophes and scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what was most important was the human race as a whole and the prospects for its progressive advancement. Enlightenment science advocated at least two propositions that severely limited the use of race as a justification for social discrimination. First, Enlightenment anthropologists were monogenists rather than polygenists; that is, they believed that human beings were created only once. As confirmed by the ability of all human beings to interbreed, all human beings were one species, and variations were the results of varieties within the species, not differences between species. Second, for the Enlightenment, environment and education were considered much more important than heredity. When the Baron de Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws (1748) argued that human differentiation was caused by environmental and historical factors, the corollary was that such differentiations were of secondary importance and could be overcome by means of education. On the basis of such views, France's Constituent Assembly abolished slavery in 1791 shortly after the beginning of the French Revolution, and the British abolished the slave trade in 1821.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, the understanding of race changed from a difference based on geographic boundaries and cultural heritage to one based on physical differences that could be easily categorized into human "types." This perception of race had its roots in the tenth edition of Carolus Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (1758). In this volume Linnaeus brought together perceptions of cultural and physical characteristics to describe race, a formulation that marked the emergence of a racialized discourse within Western science. Linnaeus argued that four "races" existed with specific physical features, emotional temperaments, and intellectual abilities: Homo americanus—reddish, choleric, erect, tenacious, content, free, and ruled by custom; Homo europaeus—white, ruddy, muscular, stern, haughty, stingy, and ruled by opinion; Home asiaticus—yellow, melancholic, inflexible, light, inventive, and ruled by rites; Homo afer—black, phlegmatic, indulgent, cunning, slow, negligent, and ruled by caprice. In differentiating species into subspecies based on elements that are common to the entire species, Linnaeus linked elements such as skin color directly to perceived behavioral propensities and eventually to biological variation.

Such a system of classification became increasingly used to distinguish not human variation but different species. Distinctions made at the subspecies level enabled value judgments to be made about superiority, inferiority, domination, and subserviency, based on physical attributes. As the Enlightenment commitment to the primacy of environment over heredity faded, this solidified perceptions that the characteristics displayed by each subspecies were immutable. Based on common characteristics, race evolved, from an indicator of similarity and difference, to a system of classification, and finally to a concept that imbedded cultural and physical characteristics into individual biological makeup. By the nineteenth century race as a biological and scientific concept had been firmly instantiated within scientific studies undertaken by natural philosophers Georges Cuvier (1812) and Charles Darwin (1859).

Racialization of Science

The nineteenth century also saw the racialization of science. Racialization is a social process by which beliefs about race become instruments of social categorization, cultural classification, political judgments, and economic decisions. New scientific work emerged to validate the underlying implications within Linnaeus's system of classification. Louis Agassiz (1850), Pierre Paul Broca (1861), and Samuel George Morton (1839), as well as others, endeavored to produce scientific evidence confirming their beliefs that white Europeans were at the top of the racial hierarchy. Researchers used the now discredited sciences of polygeny, that racial groups had different origins and were different species; phrenology, the study of the shape and protuberances of the skull to reveal character and mental capacity; and craniometry, the measurement of the skull to determine its characteristics as related to sex, race, or body type, to separate and differentiate races. According to Audrey Smedley, author of the 1993 book Race in North America, the reconceptualization of race in the nineteenth century created "a social mechanism for concretizing and rigidifying a universal ranking system that gave Europeans what they thought was a perpetual dominance over indigenous people of the New World, Africa, and Asia" (pp. 303–304). The hierarchy soon became understood as the natural order of things.

The scientifically supported perceived difference in races produced a Western ideological position of global superiority. The racialization process created an environment in which nonwhite peoples were viewed as socially, culturally, and intellectually inferior. It produced a scientific rationality that sustained this belief structure. The ways in which political and racial ideologies influenced science is well illustrated in the work of the French scientist Paul Broca (1824–1880). When Broca's craniometric studies produced results suggesting that Germans possessed larger brains than the French, he adjusted his data for body size, in order to show that German brains constituted a smaller percentage of overall body mass than French brains did. In like manner, when Broca found that people of African heritage had larger cranial nerves than Europeans, this clearly meant that cranial nerves did not contribute to intellectual activity of the brain. It is these processes of racialization in science that justified beliefs in racial superiority and inferiority, which in turn enabled racism to flourish. The racism was masked by religious authorities, and the racialized scientific truths of eugenics and Social Darwinism further reinforced the misperception of racial difference that reverberates to the present day.

By the late nineteenth century, racial difference became the dominant lens through which the Western world perceived racial and ethnic otherness. This perspective directly influenced the scientific and technical opportunities for those who were not white. In the United States, science codified the social attitudes about black inferiority and became the dominant obstacle inhibiting blacks, as well as other nonwhite persons, from engaging in scientific and technical work. Those who were able to partially overcome the barriers created by a tradition of racialization and contribute to science and engineering were regularly dismissed as exceptions or marginalized for what was assumed to be substandard work by substandard humans. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was widely held in scientific and technical communities that people of African descent had contributed nothing worthwhile to the scientific and technical development of the modern world.

At the 1913 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, James McKeen Cattell, at the time the owner and editor of the journal Science, confirmed this opinion. In a speech titled "Science, Education, and Democracy," he argued that while there was a need for more educational opportunities for Negroes, it was clearly understood that "[t]here is not a single mulatto who has done creditable scientific work" (Cattell 1914, p. 154). This statement—which repeats equally negative judgments found in both David Hume's essay "Of National Characters" (1753) and Immanuel Kant's "On the Different Races of Man" (1775)—overlooks the highly regarded work by the agricultural chemist George Washington Carver (c. 1864–1943), the physician Rebecca Cole (1846–1922), the developmental biologist Ernest Everett Just (1883–1941), and the inventor Granville T. Woods (1856–1910). Nevertheless, their racial identification made their scientific and technical careers difficult at best.

Scientific Criticism of Race

During the early twentieth century scientists also began to challenge the conceptions of race developed in nineteenth-century science. For many it became an ethical issue when research began to reveal that many scientists altered their data to fit the valued racial hierarchy of the day. The foremost critic of scientific racism was the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas (1940). Boas applied a scientific rigor to counteract the social and racialized rigor of the nineteenth-century racial science. He recalculated data, exposed the inaccuracies, and provided evidence that would argue strongly against the racialization of science. His work indicated that many scientists molded their data to fit a worldview that aimed to maintain and strengthen a racial hierarchy that located Europeans at the top. By deploying the power of genetics and biology, he was able to begin breaking the hold that racialized assumptions about human variation had in science. But the perception had been so deeply imbedded in scientific practice that it would take decades to destabilize it. It is in this regard that the U.S. Public Health Service could conduct a forty-year experiment, known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932–1972), on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis (Jones 1993).

The rise of Nazism represented a new wrinkle in the tradition of racialized science. What distinguishes the Nazi agenda from other historical genocidal efforts was its reliance on science. For instance, in 1934 the Nazi deputy party leader, Rudolph Hess, spoke of National Socialism as applied biology. Nazi racial purification, based on a racialized biomedical vision, escalated from forced sterilization to holocaust (Lifton 1986).

The claims of inherent racial inferiority during the reign of Nazism and the subsequent Holocaust provided an important impetus for the United Nations to produce a public statement challenging the scientific basis of race. The United Nations contended that such wholesale disregard for human life was made possible by the continued propagation of racial inequality. To reconstitute the ways in which race had been constructed, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) convened a panel of social and natural scientists and charged them with producing a definitive statement on racial difference. The panel produced two statements: Statement on Race (1950) and Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences (1951). Primarily written by Ashley Montagu, a student of Boas, the statements declared that race had no scientific basis and called for an end to racial thinking in scientific and political thought. Within the next two decades UNESCO would release two more statements: Statement on the Biological Aspects of Race (1964) and Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice (1967). Although important, these statements did not immediately influence social policy and the public attitudes that had been ingrained about race.

Continuing Issues

Scientifically the importance of race diminished over the latter part on the twentieth century. Race reemerged, however, with the organization of an international research project to determine the DNA sequence of the human genome. The Human Genome Project (HGP) began in 1990, and researchers produced a complete map in 2003. One of the major goals of the HGP was to find and elucidate the function of human genes. Some of the most promising and troubling outcomes of the HGP in the context of race have to do with genetic therapy. Genetic researchers contend that the human genome consists of chromosome units or haplotype blocks. Haplotype maps (HapMaps) can possibly provide a simple way for genetic researchers to quickly and efficiently search for genetic variations related to common diseases and drug responses.

The danger is that this research might re-ensconce the biological concept of race within scientific practice and knowledge production. It is already common practice for physicians to base clinical decisions on a patient's perceived race. The positive potential of Hap-Maps could be overshadowed by the manipulation of genetic data to support racialized stereotypes, renew claims of genetic differentiation between races, and add biological authority to ethnic stereotypes. These pitfalls arise when genetic data become the basis on which racially specific drugs or treatments are designed. In 2003 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed guidelines that would require all new drugs be evaluated for their effects on different racial groups. In the contemporary world, the genetic origins of race reappear much more quickly than they are eliminated.

The connections between biology and race are far from settled. In thinking about the future ethical implications of this relationship, it is necessary to consider what function the multiple manifestations of race will serve within social, cultural, scientific, medical, and technological practices, as well as the ways in which researchers will deploy race within the conflicting and overlapping realms. As a result, race will continue to be one of multiple issues and concepts that will determine on what terms we as a society will engage each other humanely.

RAYVON FOUCHÉ

SEE ALSO Class;Eugenics;Feminist Ethics;Genocide;Holocaust;Human Rights;IQ Debate;Nazi Medicine;Social Darwinism;Tuskegee Experiment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agassiz, Louis. (1850). "The Diversity of Origin of the Human Races." Christian Examiner 49: 110–145. A statement on polygeny and the disparate origins of human races.

Boaz, Franz. (1940). Race, Language, and Culture. New York: Macmillan. A collection of the most important essays written by Franz Boas on the science of anthropology.

Broca, Paul. (1861). "Sur le volume et la forme du cerveau suivant les individus et suivant les races" [On the volume and form of the brains of individuals and races]. Bulletin de la Société d'anthropologie de Paris 2: 139–207, 301–321, 441–446. Argues that intelligence can be related to anthropometic differences.

Cattell, J. McKeen. (1914). "Science, Education, and Democracy." Science 39(996): 154. Speech presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) stating minorities have not contributed to science.

Cuvier, Georges. (1812). Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes [Research on the fossil bones of quadrupeds], Vol. 1. Paris: Deterville. A collection of anatomical studies that is one of the early works of vertebrate paleontology.

Darwin, Charles. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: John Murray. Contends that species change though an evolutionary process of natural selection.

De Montesquieu, Baron. (2002 [1748]). Spirit of the Laws. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. A comparative study of three types of government: republic, monarchy, and despotism.

Dubow, Saul. (1995). Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Examines the relationship between science and colonial power in south Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Mauritius.

Duster, Troy. (2003). Backdoor to Eugenics, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Discusses the ethical struggles and social implications of new genetic technologies.

Fouché, Rayvon. (2003). Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reconeptualizes what it means to be an African American inventor.

Gould, Stephen J. (1996). The Mismeasure of Man, rev. edition. New York: Norton. Examines the history, politics, and power of science and the way biology has been deployed to construction racial difference.

Graves, Joseph L., Jr. (2001). The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Uses the scientific method to argue that races do not exist as a biological category.

Harding, Sandra, ed. (1993). The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. A series of essay that address the ways that aspects of science are racially constructed.

Jones, James H. (1993). Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, rev. edition. New York: Free Press. Details the history and affects of a government sponsored experiment on African American syphilitics.

King, James C. (1981). The Biology of Race, rev. edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Contends that race is a social, not biological, concept.

Kuttner, Robert E., ed. (1967). Race and Modern Science: A Collection of Essays by Biologists, Anthropologists, Sociologists, and Psychologists. New York: Social Science Press.

Lifton, Robert Jay. (1986). The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic. Describes the conflicting roles that German doctors played in Nazi genocide.

Linnaeus, Carolus. (1758). Systema Naturae [System of nature], 10th edition. Stockholm: Laurentii Salvii Homiae.

Manning, Kenneth R. (1983). Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just. New York: Oxford University Press.

McMurry, Linda O. (1981). George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol. New York: Oxford University Press.

Morton, Samuel George. (1839). Crania Americana; or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America. Philadelphia: Dobson. Claims to find different cranial capacities between races.

Smedley, Audrey. (1993). Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Traces the evolution of race over three centuries as it transitions from a folk category to a concept used to define superiority and inferiority.

Stepan, Nancy Leys. (1991). The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. A comparative study examining how eugenics was taken up by scientist and social reformers in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.