6

“Race”: A Brief History, with Moral Implications

“Race” is not a primordial category of human diversity. Racial prejudice is not an inevitable noxious response to phenotypic or cultural diversity. We have come to see the world in the racial way we do now, with its deleterious moral consequences, because we inherit a conception of race that developed from the sixteenth century until its zenith in the late nineteenth century. Tracing that history will reveal why we now see human diversity in terms of a false sense of immutable intraracial similarity and interracial difference and hierarchy. A historical perspective, which allows us to pinpoint the entry of distinct aspects of racial thinking and to see how our notion of race changed over time, can dislodge the sense of naturalness and inescapability of our present racial way of viewing people. History shows, moreover, how the U.S. conception of race is virtually unique among conceptions of cultural and somatic diversity.

Finally, the history of race will enable us to do justice both to the falsity of our idea of race and yet to the reality that being treated as a distinct race has profoundly shaped the social and historical experience of the groups we call “blacks,” “whites,” “Asians,” “Native Americans,” and “Latinos” or “Hispanics.”

Skin Color Difference without Race: The Ancient Greeks

Human beings have seldom been “color blind” in the sense often touted today as ideal—not actually noticing differences in skin color.1 In the ancient Greco-Roman world, Africans were identified primarily by skin color, nose shape and hair texture. (The Greek word for an African, “Aethiops,” literally means “burnt-faced person.”) The Greeks were quite interested in the dark skin color of Ethiopians, which they attributed to climatic conditions; but they did not homogenize all darker-skinned persons into a single social grouping. They were clearly aware of distinct shades of dark skin.

The Greeks were respectful of dark-skinned Africans, whom they encountered in war, as both allies and adversaries, and in commerce. Nubia, an African civilization south of Egypt inhabited by persons of “Negroid” features, was respected as a military power. Dark-skinned Africans were identified generally as “human beings with the capacity for freedom and justice, piety and wisdom.”2

The Greeks sometimes (but not uniformly) identified light skin as more beautiful than dark, but this was an aesthetic preference, not a judgment of deeper human deficiency or inferiority. Moreover, culturally and aesthetically both the Greeks and the Romans, who were often quite ethnocentric, were no more so toward Aethiopees than toward northern Europeans, with their blond hair and blue eyes. Skin color was just that; it was not seen as linked to characteristics such as honesty, intelligence, or courage in battle—a striking difference from the racialized way that we now view skin color.3 Sexual relations between Aethiopees and Greeks were generally accepted. The Greeks did note distinct cultural characteristics accompanying bodily characteristics, but saw no intrinsic connection between them. An Aethiops brought up in Greek society—for example, the offspring of a war captive, or even the captive himself—although ineligible for citizenship, would be able to take part in much of the economic, social, and cultural life of the polis.

The absence of any conception of races, hence of racial prejudice, hardly renders ancient Greece an ideal society, though its early practice of a form of democracy in some city-states was a vital contribution to the Western democratic tradition. Greeks did, after all, practice slavery. Slaves were generally conquered peoples, but were not identified with any particular somatically defined or cultural group, even though they were often of a different ethnicity than the Greeks. Indeed, most slaves were of light complexion.

The Greeks seldom attempted to produce a general justification for slavery. An exception was Aristotle, who said that some individuals were “slaves by nature.” He admitted that one could not discern this nature by outward appearance, though he felt it an unfortunate deficiency on the part of nature not to have provided such external markers.4 In any case, even for Aristotle what made someone a slave had nothing to do with race, color, or ethnicity.5

The value of considering the Greeks’ nonracial understanding of human somatic and cultural diversity is to illustrate that “race” is not a primordial category of human beings, as our current understanding tends to suggest. While we can not simply will away a concept that so deeply structures our own consciousness and social reality, outlooks such as the ancient Greeks’ can spur a search for alternatives suitable to our own time and place.

Origins and Development of the Concept of “Race”

The modern U.S. idea of race had its origins in sixteenth-through eighteenth-century Europe. The word surfaced in all European Romance languages at approximately the same time. “Race” was originally a folk, or popular, mode of categorizing animal, plant, and human groups; it did not carry the aura of scientific legitimacy attached to our current concept of race.6 As the term came to be applied more and more exclusively to human groups, it referred to a “people,” or population group, of common lineage or “stock,” and a supposedly common origin or history. Such groups as Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Basques, and Teutons were referred to as “races.” Originally the term “race” did not carry an implication that racial groups were biologically distinct from one another, nor did it carry the implication that they possessed distinct sets of personality, temperamental, characterological, mental, or aesthetic characteristics. Neither did it imply a distinct hierarchical relation among the groups.7

Ideas of superiority and inferiority of entire peoples were largely a product of the encounter of Europeans with Africans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas, through conquest, colonization, and, later, the Atlantic slave trade. Contact with these groups prior to a full commitment to colonization and expansion by no means resulted in primarily negative images of them. Columbus, for example, landing on the island of Hispaniola, spoke of the native Arawak as “a loving people without covetousness.”8 In 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh led an expedition to Roanoke Island (to establish a colony for England) and described the inhabitants thus: “We found the people most gentle, loving, and faithful, void of all guile and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden rule.”9

Africans and people of mixed African and European descent had been part of Spanish and Portuguese society for several centuries prior to these nations’ colonial expeditions to the New World. The English, in contrast, had less exposure to dark-skinned persons, but in their few encounters with Africans through trade or adventure, impressions were far from uniformly negative. Africans were certainly not seen as less than human. Sir Francis Drake, who pirated Spanish ships in the Caribbean, made alliances with cimarrons, groups of slaves who had escaped from the Spanish and established their own communities. “The alliance seems to have been untroubled by racial prejudice,” according to historian Edmund Morgan.10 Although emphasizing that the negative connotations of “blackness” in the English language and religious worldview of the time contributed to a negative view of Africans, the historian Winthrop Jordan nevertheless notes that the English were aware of the relative sophistication of political organization of West African societies.11

Basil Davidson, a historian of Africa, summarizes European attitudes toward Africans in the period of initial encounter:

In short, and again with the exceptions that so vast a subject must allow, the Europeans of the sixteenth century believed that they had found forms of civilization which were often comparable with their own, however differently and variously dressed and mannered. A later age would prefer to forget this, and would roundly state that Africa knew nothing but a savage and indeed hopeless barbarism.12

It was only when the European powers turned definitively to conquest, subjugation, displacement of native peoples, and slavery that they began to develop rationalizations in which the latter were viewed as inferior and subhuman. Cultural and religious differences aided in the quest for such rationalization. Both Native Americans and Africans were viewed as “heathens” (that is, non-Christians), and in that regard inferior to Europeans. Heathenism is nonracial, referring to peoples’ religious practices and beliefs, and the modes of life based on them, and it carries no necessary implication that the peoples are inferior in other ways, or that the inferiority of heathen ways of life is part of the heathen’s very nature.

Eventually both Native Americans and Africans came also to be viewed as “savages,” a step further on the way toward racialization. “Savagery” implies a more pervasive deficiency than does heathenism, yet it was still regarded as remediable through a process of cultural change, which the Europeans thought of as “civilizing.” The image of Native Americans and Africans as savages became much more pervasive as a result of conquest and enslavement.

So Europeans were not primordially racist in their view or treatment of Africans and Native Americans. The seventeenth-century English colonists referred to themselves primarily as Christians or Englishmen when contrasting themselves with these other two groups; the racialized language of “white,” “black,” and “red” was not yet widely used.13 In a very real sense, Europeans were not yet “white,” nor Africans “black.”14

Certainly many Europeans showed few qualms in subjugating African and Native American peoples in the name of expansion, power, acquisitiveness or general economic gain, and their fellows at home readily accepted the benefits of such subjugation. This greed helped to produce, or to greatly intensify the salience of, negative views of Africans and Native Americans. Such greed-based willingness to subjugate may seem little better than being racist, yet distinguishing greed and racism is essential for both historical and moral understanding. Greed is obviously a motivation found in most human groups, not only Europeans (although some cultures and social circumstances may provide it with greater outlet and legitimation). Many civilizations have engaged in conquest in which subject people were treated appallingly. Myriad factors—level of technological development, development of armed forces, nature of resistance, forms of religion—having little to do with the intrinsic motives of the conquerors determined the form of damage done to subject populations. A willingness, in the name of conquest, to overlook the humanity of peoples seen as strangers or “other” can be found within most societies or cultures. Now that racism has been invented, however, it is fair to say that no groups have nearly matched Europeans in carrying out large-scale race-based forms of oppression.

There were marked differences among the European colonizing powers in their treatment of Africans and indigenous American peoples, and in the social systems of race emerging therefrom. The English (and northern Europeans more generally) were much less tolerant of cultural and somatic differences than the Spanish and Portuguese, a difference due in part to the Iberians’ much greater exposure to such differences. But perhaps a more historically significant factor in the differing systems of slavery and conceptions of race was the difference in the purposes and patterns of colonization. The Spanish and Portuguese initially saw their colonies as a source of wealth rather than settlement, and the colonizers were therefore mostly males. They intermarried and mated with indigenous women and later (to a lesser extent) with African slave women. The English, by contrast, always intended to settle in the New World, and so came over in families. Thus there were greater numbers of “mixed” persons (mulattos and mestizos) in the Spanish than the English colonies; the comparative absence of such mixed persons was one important factor that enabled the English colonies to enforce, by law and custom, a rigid sense of racial difference and separation, which never emerged in Iberian America. The English developed customs and eventually laws that forbade interracial marriage and mating (though a good deal of it took place anyway).15 For these and other reasons, Latin American countries and Brazil never developed the notion of races as discrete groups marked by somatic differences taken to correspond to humanly significant characteristics of mind and character.16

Only with a full commitment to conquest did the Spanish, Portuguese, and English colonists come to view Africans and Native Americans as savages and heathens, providing a seeming rationale that rendered the cultures and interests of these groups unworthy of the colonists’ respect. Even then, however, these groups were not seen in a fully racial manner; they were not yet regarded as inherently and immutably inferior.

Slavery and Race

Forms of slavery have been practiced since Greek times in virtually every part of the world. Some Muslim nations and groups owned slaves and engaged in extensive overland slave trading. Many African peoples (Muslim and non-Muslim) practiced slavery.17 Prior to the eighteenth century, slavery was not generally thought to require justification in terms of qualities possessed by or absent in those enslaved. As in ancient Greece, slaves were often captives of war, or debtors, both considered sufficient rationale for their enslavement, though perhaps only against a background in which the institution of slavery itself was seen as acceptable. Bernard Williams, in his insightful discussion of the justification of slavery in ancient Greece, argues that the Greeks were quite aware that it was a terrible misfortune to be a slave, and saw that there was a certain arbitrariness about who fell into this unfortunate state. Yet they could not conceive of a form of social existence that “preserved what was worthwhile to them” without slavery.18 So though they saw slavery as a misfortune for the slave, they did not see it as an injustice perpetrated on the slave. Seeing no alternative to slavery, the ancient Greeks did not develop a broadly shared popular justification for it, although as we saw earlier, Aristotle did claim that some people were “slaves by nature.”19

Some Africans first brought to the English colonies in the early 1600s were, like many English and Irish, indentured servants. After completing their term of service some gained their freedom, acquired property, and were able to vote in some colonies.20 In the early form of slavery in the colonies, slaves were restricted and regarded as property, but they were not fully deprived of all human status, as they would come to be later with the advent of racialized, hereditary chattel slavery. In the seventeenth century, Africans were by no means seen as the racial group “blacks,” nor (integral to that racialization) were they viewed as virtually subhuman, as, with the rise of the plantation system, they would later come to be.21

As mentioned earlier, the English sense of superiority to many other groups was initially expressed in the counterposition of “Christian” and “heathen,” used to justify driving Indians from their lands, as well as attempting to enslave them. Gradually religion gave way to race in the conception of superiority. A seventeenth-century slave owner in Barbados bluntly articulated the disadvantages of a religion-based view of the differences between slaves and masters; responding to a slave who asked to become a Christian, the master replied, “We could not make a Christian a Slave…[nor] a Slave a Christian…, [for] being once a Christian, he [i.e., a slave master] could no more account him a Slave, and so lose the hold they had on them as Slaves, by making them Christians.”22

This slave owner had not yet adopted a racial way of viewing his slaves. But he implicitly saw the advantage of a justification of slavery that does not allow slaves to opt into a category (for example, by converting to Christianity) that protected them from the rationale given for slavery. Race provided such a justification.

One might think that Christians and Muslims could see that slavery was inconsistent with their shared teaching that humans are all equally creatures of God. But both Christianity and Islam contained scriptural and other justifications that seemed consistent with slavery, or with regarding some humans as lower than others.23 (Significantly, neither Christians nor Muslims would enslave their own coreligionists.) More important, however, the economic attractions of the slave trade, which made harvesting of tobacco, sugar, cotton, and rice so lucrative, gave slave-owning societies a compelling reason to reconcile themselves to behavior inconsistent with their religion. Racist ideologies arose to accomplish this rationalizing function.24

The selection of Africans to be the sole slave population of the United States was dictated almost entirely by the economic aim of finding a stable, captive, productive, reliable labor force rather than by prejudice against Africans, hostility toward persons of darker skin, or a belief that Africans were a people in whose unique nature it was to be slaves. In the seventeenth century, three groups other than Africans—pauperized English persons, Irish, and Native Americans—were at various times used as slave or slave-like labor in the English colonies, in the Caribbean as well as North America. But none of these groups proved viable in the long run, especially given the increased demand for slave labor beginning in the late seventeenth century.25 Impoverished Englishmen were too small a group, could readily blend in with the general population if they escaped their masters, and diminished in number as economic conditions in England improved in that period. The Irish too were better able to elude captivity and blend in with the nonslave population; in addition (in contrast to Africans), they were not accustomed to agricultural work or the climate of the southern colonies. Native Americans too could escape into their tribal groups, and they resisted customary labor discipline. Moreover, their ranks were decimated by European diseases. In addition, they knew the terrain better than the colonists and were often able to evade their would-be captors.

None of these drawbacks applied to Africans. They were readily identifiable and could not, therefore, easily escape. They were not familiar with the territory. They were of many different linguistic and cultural groups, and slave owners purposely mixed them together to inhibit communication that might enable escape or rebellion.26 Most important, the Atlantic slave trade, already put in place by the Portuguese and Spanish, promised an endless supply of bound labor for the economic needs of the colonial economies.

A striking event in the degrading of the status of Africans, and more generally in the construction of “race” in the English colonies, was Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 in Virginia. Originally directed against Native American tribes whose land was coveted, the rebellion eventually brought together disgruntled former indentured servants unable to find land, African slaves, and white and black indentured servants chafing under bonded labor—all to fight the oppressive power of the planter elite. The willingness of Europeans and Africans in similar economic and social circumstances to make common cause reveals that the divisions we have come to think of as “racial” did not yet exist. But the threat to planter social control led the planters to seek in such divisions a means to securing their hegemony. “In quick order [planters in the Virginia colony] elaborated a slave code that singled out people of African descent as slaves and made their status hereditary.”27

So slavery was not originally a “racial” institution in the United States. Somatic characteristics played a role only in relation to relative ease of escape (and perhaps a form of mild prejudice), not as a badge of inherent inferiority. Africans were not yet seen as a grouping of people created by God or nature as an inferior breed of human destined to no better life than to be the property of others. Such a racial rationalization was not fully and unequivocally employed in the dominant culture until the nineteenth century. Until that time, then, dark-skinned persons of African descent were not fully regarded as (and inferiorized as) “blacks” in the true racial sense of that word familiar to us today.

The absence of racial thinking in the early Colonial period should not, however, be equated with an egalitarian world outlook. Landowners and ruling elites saw the world in hierarchical terms. They regarded those who worked the land for them, or provided personal service, as lower than themselves. The difference between slave and servant was a matter of degree. This inferiorizing was based on class rather than race, although it could take an ethnic or proto-racial form when the laboring class was primarily a specific ethnic or national group, such as Native Americans, Irish, or Africans. Even when ethnicized, this viewpoint lacked the imputation, present in “race,” of inherent and inescapable inferiority grounded in a group’s biological nature.

Because race and slavery later came to be so intimately linked in American history and consciousness, blacks have been burdened by a deep association between blackness and slavery. For this reason it is important to keep clearly in mind that the historic foundation and function of slavery was economic rather than racial, though eventually whites, whether slave owners or not, did become psychically invested in white supremacy and a racial outlook that ranged far beyond their attachment to slavery itself.28

Slavery and Racial Ideology

What pressed slave owners and others toward a distinctly racial rationalization of slavery was the increasing salience of ideals of Christianity and the Enlightenment, especially the moral equality of all human beings as creatures of God or as possessors of secularly grounded natural rights. In the U.S. the constant invocations of the injustice of tyranny leveled against English rule in the pre-Revolutionary period rendered slavery a troubling contradiction, which slaves themselves recognized. In 1777, for example, a group of slaves petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for freedom, with the following statement as part of their argument: “Every principle from which America has acted in the course of their unhappy difficulties with Great Britain pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of your petitioners.”29 The slave trade to the United States was abolished in 1808 (a compromise forged at the Constitutional Congress in 1789), and slavery itself abolished in the various northern states, where it was of marginal economic significance, by the early 19th century.

But the moral and philosophic contradiction between slavery and freedom and equality did not translate into a widespread public challenge to slavery in the northern or southern states for several decades after the Revolution.30 Indeed, the slave system became stronger than ever, with smuggling and natural reproduction increasing the number of slaves even after the trade itself was abolished. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made cotton production and the plantation system of slave labor especially profitable, and gave the South an even stronger stake in slavery. As George Frederickson notes,

Although gradual emancipation had been instituted in the North, slavery in the South had survived the Revolutionary era and the rest of the natural-rights philosophy without an elaborated racial defense—without, indeed, much of an intellectual defense of any kind; for the institution had never actually been seriously threatened.31

Northern industry had many ties to southern slavery. Moreover, even the increasing numbers of white Northerners, and Southerners such as Thomas Jefferson, who were uncomfortable about slavery on both moral and practical grounds did not believe that freed slaves could be integrated into the national polity.32 In the early 19th century, though the seeds of racial thought had taken root in the widespread view of slaves as an inferior people, a full-fledged racial ideology that came to grips with the Revolutionary-era natural rights challenge had barely been articulated. That development had to await the public visibility, beginning in the 1830s, of the Abolitionist movement in the United States (with assistance from its earlier manifestation in England).33 So it was the combination of the official egalitarian beliefs that made up an important component in American political culture, combined with the South’s (and to some extent the North’s) economic and social stake in slavery, that set the stage for the full articulation of a racial ideology.

If all human beings had an equal right to freedom, those of African descent had to be construed as not human for slavery to be justified. To justify permanent and hereditary slavery, as practiced in the slave states, the supposedly subhuman qualities had to be seen as permanent and heritable. The rights in property that played such a strong part in the English natural rights tradition could take precedence over any claim that blacks could stake as human creatures. And these ideas were legitimized and solidified by the contributions of 19th century natural science (see below). Only with the moral advance of the idea of human equality as a norm to be expressed in social and political institutions would slaveholding require a denial of the slave’s humanity.

While the goal of racist ideology was to shore up the moral foundations of slavery, its logic required it to encompass all black persons, including free blacks in the North (and a lesser number in the South). The presence of free blacks had always been a source of anxiety to slave owners, for it reminded slaves that people of African ancestry were not predestined to their lot. As racial ideology solidified, free blacks’ situation became increasingly anomalous, and they were more and more restricted in their civil rights.34 Thus the ideology of racial inequality penetrated all sectors of the society. Among whites, only a small group of Abolitionists were full racial egalitarians; most white Abolitionists condemned slavery for a variety of moral reasons but did not regard blacks as full human equals.

The developing logic of “race” attained its most striking public legitimation in the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case. The case concerned the status of fugitive slaves only, but the Court’s decision, written by Chief Justice Roger Taney, proclaimed of all blacks that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

The same processes that re-created persons of African ancestry as “blacks” created “whites” out of persons of European ancestry; as Africans and their ancestors were regarded as possessing immutable characteristics signifying their inferiority, so Europeans came to possess a guarantee of intrinsic superiority. The idea of “whiteness” was never a neutral characterization of skin color, nor an innocuous way of referring to persons of European origin. It was a racialized way of conferring the moral right to hold power over and regard themselves as superior to other groups of persons.

The role of slavery in generating racist ideology reminds us that race is not an inevitable system for classifying human biological diversity. Its U.S. form is virtually unique in the world and is intimately connected with its particular form of slavery. Yet if we link slavery and racism too closely we might be led into the moral error discussed earlier of thinking that slavery stands as an appropriate metaphor for racism more generally. As a result we would either overstate the horrors of lesser but still very objectionable forms of racism (such as job discrimination or racial harassment) by analogizing them too closely to slavery; or be led to the opposite error of seeing as insignificant many such forms of racism because they are not sufficiently akin to slavery. We must, then, keep firmly in mind that slavery has existed without racism, and racism has existed without slavery.

Eighteenth-Century Classifications of Human Diversity: Linnaeus and Buffon

Slavery alone demanded the racializing only of Europeans (“whites”) and Africans (“blacks”), though the earlier subjugation and displacement of Native Americans also embodied an inferiorizing, hence proto-racial strand. Developments in eighteenth-century natural science provided a way of thinking about human groups that dovetailed with elements of the evolving slavery-inspired folk view in the United States, while providing it with much greater scope and the authority increasingly attached to scientific thought. The Swedish naturalist Linnaeus (1707–78), considered the founder of scientific taxonomy, played a key role in this development, establishing a paradigm in the mid-1700’s that remained influential in physical anthropology until the 1960’s.35

Linnaeus attempted to understand human diversity by drawing on zoological classification. He was the first scientist to clearly situate human beings as a species within an encompassing system of nature that included animal and plant species. He saw the naturalist’s task as a search for basic and unchangeable biological divisions among humankind, analogous to differences within classificatory groups of animals such as rodents and carnivores. Although he affirmed the religiously-grounded and widely accepted principle of the unity of the human species, Linnaeus thought that human diversity could be adequately captured in a system of a small number of such groups, seen as radically distinct from one another in something like the way species differed, and created as such by God. In particular, he postulated four such groups—Asiaticus, Europaeus, Africanus, and Americanus—the latter three of which matched the evolving racialized groups in the English colonists’ outlook in North America.

Linnaeus did not regard this classification as a mere mental convenience for bringing provisional order to the complexity of human difference. He regarded the four groups as real entities within nature—“natural kinds.” Although he recognized the theoretical possibility of interbreeding, Linnaeus nevertheless conveyed the impression of species-like differences among these four “variations.” Biologist and anthropologist Jonathan Marks usefully designates Linnaeus’s scheme as “Platonic,” as it ignored actual diversity within each category of human in favor of seeking out the ideal form to which all this variety could be assimilated.36

The implications for racial thought are obvious. Linnaeus’s classificatory schema implies permanent, natural, and fundamental differences of character among, and commonalities within, races. Naturalists and physical anthropologists do not ordinarily take themselves to be engaged in an explicitly moral enterprise, but classifying humans, in contrast to classifying plants and animals, into distinct “types of beings” has moral consequences. It implies that some persons “belong together” (in not only a classificatory but a social and moral sense) and that some groups share very little with other groups, thus suggesting that moral and social distance among them is appropriate.

Linnaeus’s typological descriptions also combined physical with behavioral and temperamental characteristics. He described “Homo Sapiens Asiaticus” (East Asians) as “sallow, melancholy, stiff; hair black dark eyes…covered with loose garments; ruled by opinions.” “Europaeus” was “white, serious, strong. Hair blond, flowing. Eyes blue. Active, very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by laws.”37 His fourfold scheme was deeply value-laden, with the European group (“ruled by laws”) accorded the most favorable characterization, and the African group (“ruled by caprice”) the least, with the other two somewhere in between. Linnaeus thereby contributed to the hierarchical dimension of “race,” though he himself avoided an explicit value ranking.38

It was not merely fortuitous, of course, that Linnaeus’s groupings corresponded so closely to the dominating and subordinated proto-racial groups involved in the European encounter with Africans and indigenous peoples of the New World. He drew his descriptions of these groups from the writings of travelers, explorers, plantations owners, traders, and missionaries, and he shared the Eurocentric prejudices and outlook of his times. Linnaeus’s “scientific” approach supplied a refined and solidified framing of proto-racial thought for this Eurocentrism.

That Linnaeus’s approach was not an inevitable mode of comprehending human diversity is evidenced by his intellectual rival of the same period, Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88). Buffon also sought to understand and bring order to human variety. In contrast to Linnaeus, however, Buffon was not interested in searching for permanent types of human being but rather in explaining human variety given a basic assumption of the unity of the human species. Without claiming comprehensiveness, Buffon eschewed a small number of race-like groupings in favor of an account of peoples of the world in their manifold cultural variety—Eskimos, Lapps, Tartars, Chinese, Japanese, Persians, Arabian, Egyptians, Filipinos, Swedes, Russians, Congolese, Hottentots, Madagascarans, Caribbeans, and the like. Of the variations of humanity, Buffon said, “Those marks which distinguish men who inhabit different regions of the earth are not original, but purely superficial.”39

Linnaeus’s proto-racial approach prevailed, however, among natural scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries. Its racial legacy comprised: (1) describing human biological and cultural variety in terms of a small number of allegedly somatically and characterologically similar human groups; (2) implying vast and immutable differences between such groups; (3) confusing cultural and innate factors in human difference; (4) providing the underpinnings of a hierarchy of human worth; and (5) undermining a sense of the moral unity of humankind (while officially adhering to a doctrine of common ancestry).40

The emphasis on common humanity was nominally retained in Linnaeus and others, such as Johann Blumenbach, the inventor of the term “Caucasian” to refer to people of European ancestry, who believed that God created all humans as a single species. But even this compromised sense of human unity was abandoned by a 19th century development known as “polygenism,” the view that different races arose separate from one another in different regions of the globe as essentially distinct species. The Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, of the Linnaean school of taxonomy, was converted to the polygenist cause upon coming to the United States in the 1840s and encountering black people for the first time. Agassiz was an influential voice in the United States, and polygenism came to be known as “the American school” on matters of race and origin. Agassiz’ views were appropriated and widely disseminated by southern defenders of slavery,41 and they also influenced respectable thought in the academy and in the North more generally.42

Polygenism was opposed by “monogenists,” who affirmed the unity of the human species. In sharing the widely-held views of black inferiority, white superiority, and permanence of the groups coming to be thought of as “races,” however, monogenists were hardly racial egalitarians. But polygenism contributed most strongly to the American idea of species-like, fundamental differences between “races.” Laws against miscegenation both reflected and reinforced the idea of racial differences as akin to species-like differences.

Darwinism and Racial Thought

By the mid-nineteenth century the popular idea of “race,” developed to rationalize enslavement of imported Africans and displacement of native peoples, had acquired scientific character and respectability, embedded as it was in a more general scheme for comprehending all human and other natural variety. Science, politics, and morals were indissolubly bound in this racial thinking.

Darwin’s theory of evolution undermined the idea of permanent and unchangeable species and subspecies that undergirded nineteenth-century racial thought. Darwin’s 1859 work—whose full title is The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life43—held that life forms evolved and changed rather than becoming permanent and immutable in their differences. Differences between dogs and wolves, for instance, were not God-given but rather classificatory conveniences with somewhat arbitrary boundaries.44 In a later work that concerned the human species, Darwin (countering polygenism) emphasized the unity and common biological origin of all human beings.

As it is improbable that the numerous and unimportant points of resemblance between the several races of man in bodily structure and mental facilities (I do not here refer to similar customs) should all have been independently acquired, they must have been inherited from progenitors who had these same characters.45

But on the other hand, elements in Darwin’s thought bolstered, or were at least consistent with, key aspects of the reigning conception of race. By greatly extending the historical timescale in which populations developed, the theory of natural selection allowed that, despite remote common ancestry, populations differing in biologically significant characteristics could emerge, through natural selection among random variations and adaptation to different circumstances. Common evolutionary ancestry was compatible with evolved biological difference. In addition, Darwin accepted the idea that different human groups had attained quite distinct levels of “civilization”; employed the vocabulary of “savagery” to describe these differences; used the term “race” to refer to groups thus characterized;46 and had in mind the same groups commonly referred to as “races.”47 He rejected only the idea that the differences were species-like.

Herbert Spencer, a British philosopher and sociologist whose work was very influential in the United States, developed what came to be called “social Darwinism.”48 Although Spencer used biological analogies for society in a manner largely foreign to Darwin’s own thought, social Darwinism picked up on the racist strands in Darwin to develop a philosophy that explicitly provided support for the preservation of racial hierarchies as they had developed in the United States, rationalizing them as a product of natural processes of social evolution that separated groups into the more and less “fit.” In Spencer’s work the groups in question were defined explicitly by race, using the now-standard classifications, as well as by economic class. Though not racial thought in its purest 19th century form—since it avoided the explicit claim that each racial group’s characteristics were fully determined by its biological endowment—Social Darwinism came very close to it. In this way, partly within and partly against the spirit of Darwin himself, Darwinism came to serve a reinvigoration of racist thought in the last decades of the 19th century.

Race and Naturalized Citizenship

Certain factors besides slavery and science contributed to the general racialization of the American polity. Race, and the privileging of “whiteness” in particular, were built into the foundation of citizenship in the new republic from its origins. The first act of Congress in 1790 limited naturalized citizenship to “free white persons.” As A. Leon Higginbotham has pointed out, that restriction was a natural outgrowth of the pre-union colonists’ understanding of citizenship, which (as explicitly expressed in congressional debates) was inextricably bound up with the suppression of slave insurrections and the overcoming of Native American resistance to encroachments on their land.49

This racial restriction was first used outside the “white/black/red” framework with the immigration of Chinese to the West in 1849, and especially after their importation to work on the transcontinental railroad. In a series of federal policies beginning in 1880, the Chinese were excluded from immigration, with justification appealing frankly to racial notions of their inherent unfitness for self-government and unassimilability to American life.50

Naturalization was extended to blacks in 1870, but East Asians and Filipinos were not included until 1952, when the Congress, embarrassed that Germany was the only nation other than the United States that placed racial restrictions on citizenship, struck all racial language from naturalization laws.51

The most consistent cultural image in the racialization of East Asians was their “alienness”—the idea that they were perpetual outsiders, never really able to be fully assimilated to the American body politic. The most egregious manifestation of this racialization was the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. U.S. (1944). Nothing comparable befell American descendants of Germans and Italians.

In the nineteenth century a broadening pantheon of racial targets felt the bite of American domestic and overseas endeavors. Racial rationalizations permeated the Mexican-American War of 1846–48. At the century’s end, racial themes were an integral part of the debates about incursions against Hawaii and against the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines, and the inhabitants of those territories were viewed in racial terms. Native Americans were denied citizenship until 1924, although the reasons for this delay were only partly racial.

Post-Slavery Racial Thought

After Emancipation, racial thinking about blacks expanded beyond its specific function in rationalizing slavery. One might speculate that had Reconstruction been successful in its original promise of bringing freed slaves into full civic and political equality, and enabling a degree of economic self-sufficiency, the material foundations of race thinking might have been severely weakened.

Emancipation and Reconstruction did improve the lot and standing of African Americans in substantial ways, and gave them a modicum of political power. The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 (collectively intended to nullify the Dred Scott decision), and of 1870, 1871, and 1875 were meant to guarantee suffrage and political participation to blacks, to guarantee certain civic rights (making and enforcing contracts, suing, buying and selling property), and to forbid various forms of discrimination. But support for these measures by the so-called Radical Republicans who controlled Congress during much of the Reconstruction period did not entail a full commitment to racial equality. Belief in the inferiority of blacks remained widespread,52 and these modest attempts to confer political power and civil rights on the black population were met with powerful resistance. By 1877 federal support of Reconstruction had ended, and “white supremacy” was the rallying cry for political campaigns to return the former elite to power and to disenfranchise new black voters. A series of Supreme Court decisions quickly eroded the legal underpinnings of Reconstruction progress.53

Eventually, by the mid-1890s, the southern elite was able to reimpose a form of state-sanctioned white supremacy in the “Jim Crow” form of segregation. Not until the 1950s was this structure subject to serious legal damage, and the legal props to segregation were not fully dismantled until the 1960s. Nor were blacks outside the South generally regarded as full equals before the law until the 1960s. Anti black forms of racial thought thus rationalized legally-enforced and socially and politically sanctioned subordination for at least one hundred years after the demise of slavery. The racializing of blacks (and, correlatively, of whites) has lingered as both cause and effect of the continuing economic, political, educational, and social inequality suffered by blacks.

No respectable scientist challenged the idea of race and its corollary, white supremacy, until the early decades of the 20th century. (And few did so even then.) Emblematic were the views of Daniel Brinton, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the individual credited with “changing anthropology from a romantic pastime to an academic discipline.”54 Brinton rightly took himself to be reflecting both popular and scientific opinion when he stated, in his 1890 book Races and Peoples: “We are accustomed familiarly to speak of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ races, and we are justified in this even from merely physical considerations. These indeed bear intimate relations to mental capacity…Measured by these criteria, the European or white race stands at the head of the list, the African or negro at its foot.”55 We still very much live with the legacy of this “classic” conception of race as if it were a natural and unavoidable way to comprehend human diversity.

European Variants of Racial Thought

Prior to the twentieth century, European and American racial thought, especially in their popular versions, developed in relative independence from one another, and in distinct historical circumstances. One distinctive element in European racial and proto-racial thought bears a brief mention here. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), J. G. von Herder (1744–1803), and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) developed a form of proto-racial thought involving “the spirit of a people” (Volksgeist), a set of characteristics alleged to inhere in a people’s nature viewed both spiritually and quasi-biologically.56 The European tradition linked inherent characteristics more closely to nations or peoples than did the American version, and became a forerunner of European racialized nationalism. The contrasts are most striking in Nazism, a culmination of a major form of European racial thought. Groups the Nazis thought of as distinct races—Jews, Slavs, Aryans, Teutons, French, Italians, Celts—were what Americans would more likely call ethnic or national groups (sometimes fictitious ones). This strand of racial thought gave somewhat less prominence to phenotypic difference than did its American counterpart; the groups involved were rather identified by ancestry, language, and nationality, although the tendency to ascribe phenotypic differences was still present.

American thought always contained elements of the intellectual strand I am noting in the European tradition, and the European always contained phenotypically based and biologistic forms.57 With the substantial movement in the latter half of the twentieth century of phenotypically distinct populations to European countries—either as former colonials, immigrants, or guest workers—the way Europeans have come to conceive of race has moved closer to the American model.58

The Elements of Classic Racial Ideology

Here, then, are the elements of the “classic,” nineteenth-century conception of race in the United States:59

1. Human beings fall into a small number of ancestral groupings called “races,” linked historically to certain geographical regions of the globe. These are natural, discrete, fixed subdivisions of humanity. These races are radically distinct in character from one another. Every human being is a member of one and only one race.
2. Races differ from one another in significant qualities of mind, character, personality, and temperament. Blacks are lazy; whites are industrious; yellows are cunning; and the like.
3. Every member of a given race possesses the characteristics distinctive to that race—what is sometimes called the race’s “essence.”60 Sometimes race thinking allows for aberrant or untypical members not to possess the characteristics constituting the racial essence.
4. The race’s essence of mind, character, and personality is grounded in biology.
5. The racial essence is passed from one generation to the next.61
6. Races are generally also distinct in certain aspects of physical appearance. These somatic or phenotypic features are, therefore, indicators of the group’s racial essence, its inner reality. For example, light skin and straight hair indicates initiative and inventiveness; dark skin and woolly hair indicates musicality and laziness.
7. Racial differences are fixed, innate, and unchangeable, because they are grounded in biology.62
8. Races can be ranked in terms of superiority and inferiority generally, or at least with regard to particular significant characteristics. This ranking should be and generally is reflected in the relations of power and status in society and civilizations.
9. The social order appropriately reflects, through its legal, institutional, and customary norms, the distinctness in nature between races by separating them as much as possible in occupational, social, personal, and public space. Segregation is “natural” and mixing is “unnatural,” especially in regard to sexual and marital relations. When individuals of different races do interact, their interactions are to reflect the hierarchical order, the inferior group members showing deference to the superior.

Classic late nineteenth-century race involved both a vertical and a horizontal dimension. Horizontally, races were radically distinct from one another, and social distance and separation were meant to reflect this. Vertically, races were superior and inferior to one another, and the hierarchical social order was to reflect this as well.

This conception is the culmination of several centuries’ development of the idea of race, a product of the interaction of economic, political, historical, social, and scientific factors. Yet it is not really coherent. No groups large enough to be “races” on this conception could possibly have the internal commonality, nor the comprehensive difference from other races, demanded by this view. Nor can somatic features plausibly be linked to the wide range of significant human characteristics involved in the view. Entire racial groups can not be inherently “inferior” to entire other ones in any intelligible sense, though of course they can be treated as if they were. That classic race is a false idea will be demonstrated in detail in the next chapter. But historian Barbara Fields is surely right when she says that many white people knew, or had a basis for knowing, from their own experience of blacks that this racial worldview was not correct; yet they believed it anyway, or at least pretended to, since it generally rationalized their privilege.63

Twentieth-Century Developments

Especially within the sciences, the twentieth century witnessed several revolutions in thought that bore on the validity of the idea of “race.” By the century’s end, little of classic racial thought still commanded the assent of the preponderance of scientists in any relevant discipline (genetics, psychology, anthropology, biology, and others). Yet popular thought, by and large, more responsive to continuing racial inequalities and the deep and extensive roots of racial thought in American social and political history than to developments in science, retained the core of classic race. In the next chapter I will delineate the differences between contemporary popular racial thinking and classic race. But first let us look briefly at some twentieth-century forms of scientific thought that themselves retained a strong continuity with classic race.

The rediscovery in 1900s of Mendel’s experiments on heredity in fruit flies promised to fill a significant lacuna in the classic theory of race by showing how racial characteristics were transmitted through successive generations. The idea of a single gene for intelligence (and for distinct temperamental features such as adventurousness) was embraced by racists and eugenicists who thought the influence of heredity could thereby be separated entirely from environment.64 Through the staggering advances in genetics as the century progressed, there remained and remains to this day a distinctly geneticist strand of racial thought—the idea that races differ significantly in genetic makeup and that the sources of important human characteristics (especially intelligence) are largely genetic.65

A related development of twentieth-century racial science was the IQ test, regarded by its American developers and proponents as measuring “intelligence,” which they took to be a single trait and assumed to be hereditary.66 The psychometricians utilized a concept of averages—the average possession of a given trait in a given population—that, considered by itself, seems very different from racial thinking. Average differences between groups still allows for substantial group overlap in possession of the characteristic in question (intelligence, industry, secretiveness), especially if the alleged difference is small; but racial thought inclines toward absolute differences between groups.

As used by racialists, however, the idea of averages as a summary of the attributes of individuals has turned into an assertion about the characteristics of groups as a whole, in a manner that preserves the nineteenth-century implication of whole-group differences. Moreover, as Smedley points out, racial thought has tended to latch onto virtually any differences between racially defined groups and magnify and distort them into a judgment of whole-group difference, in the nineteenth-century mold.67 Attaching the assumption of genetic underpinning to the assertion of group difference preserves the basic structure of classic race.

The geneticist, eugenicist, and psychometric turns in racial thought coincided with a racialized or semi-racialized understanding of the southern and eastern European immigrants who flowed in unprecedented numbers to American shores beginning in the 1880s. These groups had been permitted to immigrate and naturalize as “white” from the point of view of the 1790 naturalization law, but what constituted “whiteness” had never been clearly defined. The influx of new immigrants, coinciding with the deeper penetration of racial ways of thinking in the late nineteenth-century, precipitated a kind of crisis of “whiteness,” which is explored in Matthew Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Poles, Jews, Slavs, Greeks, Italians, and the many other immigrating groups came to be viewed as something like distinct races with distinctive inherent characteristics linked (although less decisively than in the case of “blacks,” “reds,” and “yellows,”) to distinctive physiognomies.68 They were seen as inferior to Anglo-Saxons and northern Europeans (“Nordics”) more generally.69 In 1917 psychometricians weighed in with a mass psychological testing of army recruits that allegedly found these groups to be inferior in intelligence to Nordics. The culmination of this particular racial development was the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, which drastically curtailed the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans.70

The rise of Nazi-tainted eugenicist ideas, and the curtailing of immigration (until restrictions were lifted in 1965), enabled southern and eastern Europeans to assimilate, and thereby removed from public concern the issue of their questionable “fitness” (what Jacobson calls their “probationary whiteness”). Then the revelation after the World War II of the Nazi horrors led to a widespread rejection of racial thought, and scientists from many disciplines began to develop critiques of classic race theory, including its hereditarian, geneticist, and inegalitarian components. The appellation “racism” was coined to express the moral revulsion at ideologies of racial supremacy, and even milder forms of nonsupremacist racialist thought were tainted by association with them.

Geneticist strands of racial thought held on within science, but as a decidedly marginal voice.71 That The Bell Curve (the most recent manifestation of this tradition, published in 1994) became a popular best-seller is testimony more to the continuing vitality of popular racial thinking—and to the continuing controversy and sensitivity concerning allegations of racial inferiority of African Americans—than to scientific influence.72 By and large twentieth-century science has distanced itself from classic race theory. Popular thought, by contrast, has, as I suggested in chapter 5, retained important elements of racial thinking, though these are frequently unacknowledged. To the precise differences between classic and contemporary racial thought we now turn.