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You may know what race you are, but how would you prove it
if someone disagreed with you? The fact is, race is a social and political
construct that has evolved in often confusing ways over the centuries.
With the 1776 edition of his book, On the Natural Variety of
Mankind, German scientist Johan Friedrich Blumenbach is credited with creating
one of the first race-based classifications. He decided on five categories:
"Caucasian, the white race; Mongolian, the yellow race; Malayan, the brown
race, Ethiopian, the black race, and American, the red race." Each race
was ranked, and he put "Caucasian" at the top. This seemingly
arbitrary ranking was the impetus for centuries of discrimination and inequality.
The evolution of race in the US Census illustrates just how hard it is to
categorize people in a way that is inclusive and accurate. For example, in
1929, people who were of Mexican birth or ancestry in the United States were
considered white. In 1930, they were considered non-white. In 1942, they were
switched back to white. These dates are interesting because they align directly
with the shifting political and economic agendas of the time.
Ashley Montagu argued against the use of the term
"race" in science, a growing number of scholars in many disciplines
have declared that the real meaning of race in American society has to do with
social realities, quite distinct from physical variations in the human species.
Dorothy Roberts, the author of Fatal Invention: How Science,
Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century explains
that when the medical community links race to health outcomes, it's really just
using race as a proxy for other factors such as where your ancestors came from,
access to healthcare, and socioeconomic status. Sickle-cell anemia is a prime
example of this. Commonly linked to race, this adaption is actually a product
of environments where Malaria is prevalent, including some parts of Europe and
Asia, in addition to Africa.
The racial categories to which we're assigned, based on how
we look to others or how we identify ourselves, can determine real-life
experiences, inspire hate, drive political outcomes, and make the difference
between life and death. But these important consequences are a result of a
relatively new idea that was based on shaky reasoning and shady motivations.
Race and its ideology about human differences arose out of
the context of African slavery. But many peoples throughout history have been
enslaved without the imposition of racial ideology. When we look at 17th
century colonial America before the enactment of laws legitimizing slavery only
for Africans and their descendants (after 1660), several facts become clear.
1). The first people that the English tried to enslave and
place on plantations were the Irish with whom they had had hostile relations
since the 13th century.
2) Some Englishmen had proposed laws enslaving the poor in
England and in the colonies to force them to work indefinitely.
3) Most of the slaves on English plantations in Barbados and
Jamaica were Irish and Indians.
4) Many historians point out that African servants and
bonded indentured white servants were treated much the same way. They often joined
together, as in the case of Bacon's Rebellion (1676) to oppose the strict and
oppressive laws of the colonial government.
In the latter part of the 17th century the demand for labor
grew enormously. It had become clear that neither Irishmen nor Indians made
good slaves. More than that, the real threats to social order were the poor
freed whites who demanded lands and privileges that the upper class colonial
governments refused. Some colonial leaders argued that turning to African labor
provided a buffer against the masses of poor whites.
Until the 18th century the image of Africans was generally
positive. They were farmers and cattle-breeders; they had industries, arts and
crafts, governments and commerce. In addition, Africans had immunities to Old World
diseases. They were better laborers and they had nowhere to escape to once
transplanted to the New World. The colonists themselves came to believe that
they could not survive without Africans.
When some Englishmen entered slave trading directly, it became
clear that many of the English public had misgivings about slave-trading and
re-creating slavery on English soil. It was an era when the ideals of equality,
justice, democracy, and human rights were becoming dominant features of Western
political philosophy. Those involved in the trade rationalized their actions by
arguing that the Africans were heathens after all, and it was a Christian duty
to save their souls. By the early part of the 18th century, the institution was
fully established for Africans and their descendants. Large numbers of slaves
flooded the southern colonies and even some northern ones. Sometimes they
outnumbered whites, and the laws governing slavery became increasingly harsher.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the image of Africans
began to change dramatically. The major catalyst for this transformation was
the rise of a powerful antislavery movement that expanded and strengthened
during the Revolutionary Era both in Europe and in the United States. As a
consequence proslavery forces found it necessary to develop new arguments for
defending the institution. Focusing on physical differences, they turned to the
notion of the natural inferiority of Africans and thus their God-given
suitability for slavery. Such arguments became more frequent and strident from
the end of the eighteenth century on, and the characterizations of Africans
became more negative.
From here we see the structuring of the ideological
components of "race." The term "race," which had been a
classificatory term like "type," or "kind," but with
ambiguous meaning, became more widely used in the eighteenth century, and
crystallized into a distinct reference for Africans, Indians and Europeans. By
focusing on the physical and status differences between the conquered and
enslaved peoples, and Europeans, the emerging ideology linked the
socio-political status and physical traits together and created a new form of
social identity. Proslavery leaders among the colonists formulated a new
ideology that merged all Europeans together, rich and poor, and fashioned a
social system of ranked physically distinct groups. The model for
"race" and "races" was the Great Chain of Being or Scale of
Nature (Scala Naturae), a semi-scientific theory of a natural hierarchy of all
living things, derived from classical Greek writings. The physical features of
different groups became markers or symbols of their status on this scale, and
thus justified their positions within the social system. Race ideology
proclaimed that the social, spiritual, moral, and intellectual inequality of
different groups was, like their physical traits, natural, innate, inherited,
and unalterable.
Thus was created the only slave system in the world that
became exclusively "racial." By limiting perpetual servitude to
Africans and their descendants, colonists were proclaiming that blacks would
forever be at the bottom of the social hierarchy. By keeping blacks, Indians
and whites socially and spatially separated and enforcing endogamous mating,
they were making sure that visible physical differences would be preserved as
the premier insignia of unequal social statuses. From its inception
separateness and inequality was what "race" was all about. The
attributes of inferior race status came to be applied to free blacks as well as
slaves. In this way, "race" was configured as an autonomous new
mechanism of social differentiation that transcended the slave condition and
persisted as a form of social identity long after slavery ended.
American slavery was unique in another way; that is, how
North American slave-owners resolved the age-old dilemma of all slave systems.
Slaves are both persons and things----human beings and property. How do you
treat a human being as both person and property? And what should take
precedence, the human rights of the slave or the property rights of the master?
American laws made clear that property was more sacred than people, and the
property rights of masters overshadowed the human rights of slaves. Said Chief
Justice Roger B. Taney in the famous Dred Scott case of 1857, "Negroes
were seen only as property; they were never thought of or spoken of except as
property" and "(thus) were not intended by the framers of the
Constitution to be accorded citizenship rights."
In order to transform people solely into property, you must
minimize those qualities that make them human. Literature of the early
nineteenth century began to portray "the negro" as a savage in even
stronger terms than those that had been used for the Irish two centuries
earlier. This was a major transformation in thought about who Africans were.
Historian George Fredrickson states explicitly that "before 1830 open
assertions of permanent black inferiority were exceedingly rare" (The
Black Image in the White Mind, 1987). By mid-century, the ideology of
"negro inferiority" dominated both popular and scholarly thought.
Scholarly writers began attempting to prove scientifically
that "the Negro" was a different and lower kind of human being. The
first published materials arguing from a scientific perspective that
"negroes" were a separate species from white men appeared in the last
decade of the eighteenth century. They argued that Negroes were either a
product of degeneration from that first creation, or descendants of a separate
creation altogether.
American intellectuals appropriated, and rigidified, the
categories of human groups established by European scholars during the
eighteenth century, but ignored Blumenbach's caution that human groups blend
insensibly into one another, so that it is impossible to place precise
boundaries around them.
When Dr. Samuel Morton in the 1830s initiated the field of
craniometry, the first school of American anthropology, proponents of race
ideology received the most powerful scientific support yet. Measuring the
insides of crania collected from many populations, he offered
"evidence" that the Negro had a smaller brain than whites, with
Indians in-between. Morton is also famous for his involvement in a major
scientific controversy over creation.
The very existence of a scientific debate over whether
blacks and whites were products of a single creation, or of multiple creations,
especially in a society dominated by Biblical explanations, seems anomalous. It
indicates that the differences between "races" had been so magnified
and exaggerated that popular consciousness had already widely accepted the idea
of blacks being a different and inferior species of humans. Justice Taney's
decision reflected this, declaring, "the negro is a different order of being."
Thus slave-owners' rights to their "property" were upheld in law by
appeal to the newly invented identity of peoples from Africa.
Scientists collaborated in confirming popular beliefs, and
publications appeared on a regular basis providing the "proof" that
comforted the white public. That some social leaders were conscious of their
role in giving credibility to the invented myths is manifest in statements such
as that found in the Charleston Medical Journal after Dr. Morton's death. It
states, "We can only say that we of the South should consider him as our
benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position
as an inferior race" (emphasis added). George Gliddon, co-editor of a
famous scientific book Types of Mankind, (1854) which argued that Negroes were
closer to apes than to humans and ranked all other groups between whites and
Negroes, sent a copy of the book to a famous southern politician, saying that
he was sure the south would appreciate the powerful support that this book gave
for its "peculiar institution" (slavery). Like another famous tome
(The Bell Curve, 1995) this was an 800-page book whose first edition sold out
immediately; it went through nine other editions before the end of the century.
What it said about the inferiority of blacks became widely known, even by those
who could not read it.
During discussions in the U.S. Senate on the future of
"the negro" after slavery, James Henry Hammond proclaimed in 1858
"somebody has to be the mudsills of society, to do the menial duties, to
perform the drudgery of life." Negroes were destined to be the mudsills.
This was to be their place, one consciously created for them by a society whose
cultural values now made it impossible to assimilate them. In the many decades
since the Civil War, white society made giant strides to "keep the negro
in his place." Public policies and the customs and practices of millions
of Americans expressed this racial worldview throughout the twentieth century.
These are some of the circumstances surrounding the origin
of the racial worldview in North America. Race ideology was a mechanism
justifying what had already been established as unequal social groups; it was
from its inception, and is today, about who should have access to privilege, power,
status, and wealth, and who should not. As a useful political ideology for
conquerors, it spread into colonial situations around the world. It was
promulgated in the latter half of the 19th century by some Europeans against
other Europeans and reached its most extreme development in the twentieth
century Nazi holocaust.
All anthropologists should understand that "race"
has no intrinsic relationship to human biological diversity, that such
diversity is a natural product of primarily evolutionary forces while
"race" is a social invention.
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