The concept of race, specifically blackness, did not always exist as we understand it today. In the 18th century, the idea of race as a biological and scientific truth began taking hold, but it looked very different than modern conceptions of race. This evolution was complex, with many competing theories and gradual shifts in thinking. Examining the origins of racial ideology reveals the constructed and contextual nature of race. This hidden history challenges naturalized assumptions about racial difference that persist today.
Slavery and Proto-Racial Ideas Before the 18th Century
Prior to the 18th century Enlightenment, most Europeans did not think of humanity as divided into distinct biological races. However, proto-racial prejudices did exist. Greeks and Romans often held biases against foreigners they deemed “barbarians.” Religious antipathies between Christians, Jews and Muslims featured notions of inherent difference. With the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century, English colonists classified African slaves as “other” and inferior. But this was justified in terms of religion, culture and legal status rather than race per se. Early Virginia law classified servants, slaves and freedmen primarily by their status as Christians or non-Christians, without reference to skin color or continental origin.
Some colonies did enact laws to police the boundaries between servitude and slavery based on African ancestry. For example, a 1662 Virginia statute asserted that the status of children would be determined by the condition of the mother. Thus the children of enslaved African women were doomed to inherit slavery. Such laws suggest an incipient notion that those of African descent might have an inherent, hereditary status that white servants did not. However, because the laws only concerned slavery, not free blacks, this represents only a proto-racial sensibility. Moreover, ethnic Irish and Native people occupied similarly marginalized positions at the time, complicating any straightforward black/white dichotomy.
Early Enlightenment Thinking on Human Difference
In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, intellectuals of the early Enlightenment grappled with questions of human variety amid global exploration and trade. Most framed human difference as religious, cultural and environmental rather than innate or biological. However, troubling theories positing primordial, inherited racial types persisted.
Isaac La Peyrère’s 1655 book Prae-Adamitae proposed a radical polygenism – the premise that different human races had separate origins and were not all descended from Adam and Eve. Voltaire’s essay “On the Different Races of Men” (1734) accepted the reality of distinct races with characteristic strengths and weaknesses rooted in environmental and cultural factors. Scottish philosopher Henry Home embraced a form of polygenism in his 1760 treatise “Sketches on the History of Man.” Both Hume and Voltaire espoused disturbing proto-racist ideas, including the premise that black Africans might constitute a permanently inferior race. However, they rooted difference in climate and history rather than biology.
Carl Linnaeus and the Project of Classification
Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus brought the Enlightenment passion for taxonomy and scientific categorization to the human species. His seminal Systema Naturae (1735) classified humans, apes and monkeys together in the order Primates, suggesting continuity between humans and animals – a controversial stance at the time.
Linnaeus divided Homo sapiens into four subcategories associated with different continents:
Continent | Linnaean Category | Alleged Characteristics |
---|---|---|
Europe | Homo sapiens europaeus | White, sanguine, muscular. Gentle, acute, inventive. Covered with vestments. |
Asia | Homo sapiens asiaticus | Yellow, melancholic, stiff. Severe, haughty, greedy. Covered with loose garments. |
Africa | Homo sapiens afer | Black, phlegmatic, relaxed. Crafty, lazy, careless. Anoints himself with grease. |
Americas | Homo sapiens americanus | Copper-colored, choleric, erect. Obstinate, contented, free. Paints himself with red lines. |
Linnaeus’ categories reveal the limits of Enlightenment rationality, clouded by prejudice. Yet his classifications were tentative and speculative, based on climatic theories about difference, not innate racial destiny. Linnaeus was deeply embroiled in debates with monogenists like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who believed in a single human origin.
Immanuel Kant and the Idea of Race as Destiny
The work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant marked a major turning point, transitioning racial thinking from the environmental to the hereditary. In essays like “Of the Different Human Races” (1775), Kant proposed fixed, immutable racial categories determined by unchangeable natural causality. He rejected environmental explanations as unable to account for what he saw as major natural differences between races, including “the race of the whites contains all incentives and talents in itself.”
Kant stridently proclaimed that black Africans and Native Americans constituted inferior races, writing: “Humanity reaches its greatest perfection with the white race. The yellow Indians already have a smaller talent. The Negroes are much inferior and some of the peoples of the Americas stand even lower.” On this basis, Kant rejected assimilation or equal standing for non-white races. His racial theory defined non-Europeans as essentially and permanently other.
Kant’s rigid racial hierarchy justified European colonialism as the natural order. His ideas formed the basis of much 19th century scientific racialism. Kant thus marks a pivot from tentative Enlightenment speculation on race to modern, biologized conceptions of racial difference as innate and determining.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Racial Science
The works of German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach founded racial science and gave race its modern meaning as essential, biological difference. In treatises like On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1775), Blumenbach named and defined five principal human races:
- Caucasian – pale, handsome, gifted.
- Mongolian – sallow, broad face, dark almond eyes.
- Ethiopian (Black) – dark, frizzled hair, flat nose.
- American – copper-colored, hair black and thick; retroussé nose.
- Malay – brown, soft, curly hair; broader nose.
Blumenbach arranged these races in a hierarchy according to beauty and cranial capacity, with Caucasians at the apex as the original race closest to God’s ideal form. He coined the term ‘Caucasian’ because he believed the Caucasus region produced archetypally beautiful skulls. While not as stridently bigoted as Kant’s racial theory, Blumenbach’s work lent scientific legitimacy to ideas of white racial superiority and non-white inferiority. His taxonomy remains disturbingly familiar today.
Racial Theory in America
European racial science strongly influenced early American anthropology. Samuel Morton collected hundreds of skulls to compare cranial capacity across races, finding that Caucasians had the largest brains and Africans the smallest – allegedly demonstrating inborn intelligence differences. Louis Agassiz, founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, propagated polygenist race theories and belief in permanent racial inequality.
Proslavery advocates embraced such ideas to argue that racial hierarchy was the natural order, justifying slavery and segregation. Southern physician Josiah Nott relied on Blumenbach’s taxonomy to assert that blacks and whites constituted separate species altogether, making integration disastrous. The American School of Anthropology provided ostensibly scientific validation for systems of racial oppression and white supremacy in the nineteenth century United States and beyond.
Scientific Racism in the Nineteenth Century
With its origins among Enlightenment intellectuals and taxonomists, racial ideology crystallized into scientific racism in the 1800s. The assumption that races have innate and divergent characters, capacities and evolutionary destinies informed fields from anthropology and biology to linguistics and psychology. Social Darwinists applied concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to explain why they believed Caucasians stood at the apex of racial evolution, with other races lower in the hierarchy of civilizational advancement.
Scientific racism was not confined to marginal thinkers, but won acceptance among the era’s most prestigious academics. The leading scientists who accepted innately ordained racial hierarchy included Charles Darwin in Descent of Man, physiologist William Lawrence, Harvard professor Nathaniel Shaler, geologist & zoologist J.A. Lapham and many others. Such ideas also shaped politics and policy, providing academic cover for segregation, eugenics, immigration restrictions and colonial abuses.
Challenges to Racial Essentialism – Culture, Not Blood
Of course, not all scholars accepted essentialist racial thinking even at the height of scientific racism. Anthropologists Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski emphasized how culture, not biological destiny, shaped individuals and societies. Boas studied immigrant children, finding that differences between European ethnic groups faded after just one generation in the United States. His student Ruth Benedict summed up this outlook in the famous dictum that “race is a fiction, only culture is real.”
As early as 1852, abolitionist Frederick Douglass asserted: “The whole argument in defense of slavery becomes utterly worthless the moment the African is conceded to be equally a man with the Anglo-Saxon.” Challenging the concept of race itself, Thomas Huxley’s essay “On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind” (1870) concluded that clear racial demarcations do not exist within the human species.
The Social Construction of Race
By the mid-20th century, increasing numbers of scientists and scholars rejected racial essentialism as scientifically untenable and socially destructive. Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942) argued that race has no scientific foundation, but is rather a dangerous social construct. Similarly, The Race Concept (1950) by UNESCO scientists discredited racial taxonomy and doctrines of racial destiny as arbitrary and baseless.
Studies of human genetics demonstrated that over 90% of total human variation exists within localized populations, not between traditionally recognized races – undermining biological explanations for race. Evolutionary scientists like Richard Lewontin affirmed that racial groups have little taxonomic significance, and disputed any innate mental differences between races. By century’s close racial constructionism – the premise that race is socially and politically produced, not biologically given – dominated the social sciences.
Race Today – Conclusion
Modern genomics has continued to reveal the genetic diversity within races as greater than that between them. Yet despite the social constructionist consensus, race retains immense sociopolitical potency. From persistent discrimination, to DNA ancestry testing, to identity politics debates, race remains ubiquitous. The illusion of biological racial difference retains tremendous cultural currency and power, even as scientific consensus rejects it. Unearthing the forgotten history of race’s invention reveals its fabricated origins and the motives behind its making. This hidden heritage demonstrates that while race may be the most fatal delusion of the modern era, we invented it, which means we can dismantle it. We must see through the myth of race while acknowledging and remediating racism’s all-too-real legacy if true justice and equality are ever to be achieved.