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103 Race Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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Race is a complex and sensitive topic that has been at the forefront of discussions for centuries. From systemic racism to cultural appropriation, race plays a significant role in shaping our society and the way we interact with one another. If you are looking for essay topic ideas on race, here are 103 examples to help you get started:

• The history of racism in America
• The impact of colonialism on race relations
• White privilege and its effects on society
• The role of race in the criminal justice system
• Racism in the workplace
• The intersectionality of race and gender
• The portrayal of race in the media
• The effects of racial profiling
• Colorism within communities of color
• The role of race in education
• Interracial relationships and their challenges
• The cultural appropriation of minority groups
• The impact of race on mental health
• The history of affirmative action
• Racial disparities in healthcare
• The stereotypes associated with different racial groups
• The role of race in politics
• The representation of race in literature
• The effects of gentrification on minority communities
• The role of race in sports
• The experience of being a person of color in a predominantly white community
• The impact of race on social mobility
• The role of race in shaping identity
• The effects of racism on mental health
• The history of racial segregation
• The portrayal of race in popular culture
• The impact of race on access to resources
• The representation of race in art
• The effects of racial microaggressions
• The role of race in shaping beauty standards
• The impact of race on voting rights
• The portrayal of race in advertising
• The effects of race-based trauma
• The role of race in shaping political ideologies
• The representation of race in video games
• The impact of race on environmental justice
• The effects of race on access to affordable housing
• The history of race-based discrimination in the legal system
• The portrayal of race in historical monuments
• The role of race in shaping immigration policies
• The impact of race on access to quality education
• The representation of race in fashion
• The effects of racial disparities in the criminal justice system
• The role of race in shaping reproductive rights
• The portrayal of race in social media
• The impact of race on access to healthcare
• The effects of race on access to clean water
• The history of race-based violence
• The role of race in shaping economic opportunities
• The representation of race in music
• The impact of race on access to technology
• The effects of racial disparities in the foster care system
• The role of race in shaping environmental policies
• The portrayal of race in reality TV shows
• The impact of race on access to transportation
• The effects of race on access to healthy food options
• The history of race-based hate crimes
• The role of race in shaping international relations
• The representation of race in comic books
• The impact of race on access to mental health services
• The effects of racial disparities in the juvenile justice system
• The role of race in shaping social movements
• The portrayal of race in online communities
• The impact of race on access to reproductive healthcare
• The effects of race on access to childcare services
• The history of race-based housing discrimination
• The role of race in shaping cultural norms
• The representation of race in theater
• The impact of race on access to legal services
• The effects of racial disparities in the education system
• The role of race in shaping family dynamics
• The portrayal of race in animated films
• The impact of race on access to public transportation
• The effects of race on access to affordable childcare
• The history of race-based employment discrimination
• The role of race in shaping religious beliefs
• The representation of race in documentaries
• The impact of race on access to affordable housing
• The effects of racial disparities in the healthcare system
• The role of race in shaping cultural traditions
• The portrayal of race in video games
• The impact of race on access to affordable childcare
• The effects of race on access to public transportation

When choosing a topic on race, it is important to consider your own perspective and experiences. By exploring these essay topic ideas, you can gain a deeper understanding of how race shapes our society and the ways in which we can work towards a more equitable and inclusive future.

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Race and Ethnicity

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Race is a concept of human classification scheme based on visible features including eye color, skin color, the texture of the hair and other facial and bodily characteristics. Through these features, humans are ten categorized into distinct groups of population and this is enhanced by the fact that the characteristics are fully inherited.

Across the globe, debate on the topic of race has dominated for centuries. This is especially due to the resultant discrimination meted on the basis of these differences. Consequently, a lot of controversy surrounds the issue of race socially, politically but also in the scientific world.

According to many sociologists, race is more of a modern idea rather than a historical. This is based on overwhelming evidence that in ancient days physical differences mattered least. Most divisions were as a result of status, religion, language and even class.

Most controversy originates from the need to understand whether the beliefs associated with racial differences have any genetic or biological basis. Classification of races is mainly done in reference to the geographical origin of the people. The African are indigenous to the African continent: Caucasian are natives of Europe, the greater Asian represents the Mongols, Micronesians and Polynesians: Amerindian are from the American continent while the Australoid are from Australia. However, the common definition of race regroups these categories in accordance to skin color as black, white and brown. The groups described above can then fall into either of these skin color groupings (Origin of the Races, 2010, par6).

It is possible to believe that since the concept of race was a social description of genetic and biological differences then the biologists would agree with these assertions. However, this is not true due to several facts which biologists considered. First, race when defined in line with who resides in what continent is highly discontinuous as it was clear that there were different races sharing a continent. Secondly, there is continuity in genetic variations even in the socially defined race groupings.

This implies that even in people within the same race, there were distinct racial differences hence begging the question whether the socially defined race was actually a biologically unifying factor. Biologists estimate that 85% of total biological variations exist within a unitary local population. This means that the differences among a racial group such as Caucasians are much more compared to those obtained from the difference between the Caucasians and Africans (Sternberg, Elena & Kidd, 2005, p49).

In addition, biologists found out that the various races were not distinct but rather shared a single lineage as well as a single evolutionary path. Therefore there is no proven genetic value derived from the concept of race. Other scientists have declared that there is absolutely no scientific foundation linking race, intelligence and genetics.

Still, a trait such as skin color is completely independent of other traits such as eye shape, blood type, hair texture and other such differences. This means that it cannot be correct to group people using a group of features (Race the power of an illusion, 2010, par3).

What is clear to all is that all human beings in the modern day belong to the same biological sub-species referred to biologically as Homo sapiens sapiens. It has been proven that humans of different races are at least four times more biologically similar in comparison to the different types of chimpanzees which would ordinarily be seen as being looking alike.

It is clear that the original definition of race in terms of the external features of the facial formation and skin color did not capture the scientific fact which show that the genetic differences which result to these changes account to an insignificant proportion of the gene controlling the human genome.

Despite the fact that it is clear that race is not biological, it remains very real. It is still considered an important factor which gives people different levels of access to opportunities. The most visible aspect is the enormous advantages available to white people. This cuts across many sectors of human life and affects all humanity regardless of knowledge of existence.

This being the case, I find it difficult to understand the source of great social tensions across the globe based on race and ethnicity. There is enormous evidence of people being discriminated against on the basis of race. In fact countries such as the US have legislation guarding against discrimination on basis of race in different areas.

The findings define a stack reality which must be respected by all human beings. The idea of view persons of a different race as being inferior or superior is totally unfounded and goes against scientific findings.

Consequently these facts offer a source of unity for the entire humanity. Humanity should understand the need to scrap the racial boundaries not only for the sake of peace but also for fairness. Just because someone is white does not imply that he/she is closer to you than the black one. This is because it could even be true that you have more in common with the black one than the white one.

Reference List

Origin of the Races, 2010. Race Facts. Web.

Race the power of an illusion, 2010. What is race? . Web.

Sternberg, J., Elena L. & Kidd, K. 2005. Intelligence, Race, and Genetics. The American Psychological Association Vol. 60(1), 46–59 . Web.

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IvyPanda. (2018, May 18). Race and Ethnicity. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-ethnicity/

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IvyPanda . 2018. "Race and Ethnicity." May 18, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-ethnicity/.

1. IvyPanda . "Race and Ethnicity." May 18, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/race-and-ethnicity/.

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The Concept of Race

Published: March 13, 2018

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At a Glance

• Social Studies
• The Holocaust

About This Lesson

In the previous lesson, students began the “We and They” stage of the Facing History scope and sequence by examining the human behavior of creating and considering the concept of universe of obligation . This lesson continues the study of “We and They,” as students turn their attention to an idea—the concept of race —that has been used for more than 400 years by many societies to define their universes of obligation. Contrary to the beliefs of many people, past and present, race has never been scientifically proven to be a significant genetic or biological difference in humans. The concept of race was in fact invented by society to fulfill its need to justify disparities in power and status among different groups. The lack of scientific evidence about race undermines the very concept of the superiority of some “races” and the inferiority of other “races.”

Race is an especially crucial concept in any study of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, because it was central to Nazi ideology. However, the Nazis weren’t the only ones who had notions about race. This lesson also examines the history and development of the idea of “race” in England and the United States.

Essential Questions

Unit Essential Question: What does learning about the choices people made during the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Nazi Party, and the Holocaust teach us about the power and impact of our choices today?

Guiding Questions

• What is race? What is racism? How do ideas about race affect how we see others and ourselves?
• How have race and racism been used by societies to define their universes of obligation?

Learning Objectives

Students will define and analyze the socially constructed meaning of race, examining how that concept has been used to justify exclusion, inequality, and violence throughout history.

What's Included

This lesson is designed to fit into one 50-min class period and includes:

• 6 activities
• 1 teaching strategy
• 2 assessments
• 2 extension activities

Additional Context & Background

For at least 400 years, a theory of “race” has been a lens through which many individuals, leaders, and nations have determined who belongs and who does not. Theories about “race” include the notion that human beings can be classified into different races according to certain physical characteristics, such as skin color, eye shape, and hair form. The theory has led to the common, but false, belief that some “races” have intellectual and physical abilities that are superior to those of other “races.” Biologists and geneticists today have not only disproved this claim, they have also declared that there is no genetic or biological basis for categorizing people by race. According to microbiologist Pilar Ossorio:

Are the people who we call Black more like each other than they are like people who we call white, genetically speaking? The answer is no. There’s as much or more diversity and genetic difference within any racial group as there is between people of different racial groups. 1

As professor Evelynn Hammonds states in the film Race: The Power of an Illusion : “Race is a human invention. We created it, and we have used it in ways that have been in many, many respects quite negative and quite harmful.” 2

When the scientific and intellectual ideals of the Enlightenment came to dominate the thinking of most Europeans in the 1700s, they exposed a basic contradiction between principle and practice: the enslavement of human beings. Despite the fact that Enlightenment ideals of human freedom and equality inspired revolutions in the United States and France, the practice of slavery persisted throughout the United States and European empires. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, American and European scientists tried to explain this contradiction through the study of “race science,” which advanced the idea that humankind is divided into separate and unequal races. If it could be scientifically proven that Europeans were biologically superior to those from other places, especially Africa, then Europeans could justify slavery and other imperialistic practices.

Prominent scientists from many countries, including Sweden, the Netherlands, England, Germany, and the United States, used “race science” to give legitimacy to the race-based divisions in their societies. Journalists, teachers, and preachers popularized their ideas. Historian Reginald Horsman, who studied the leading publications of the time, describes the false messages about race that were pervasive throughout the nineteenth century:

One did not have to read obscure books to know that the Caucasians were innately superior, and that they were responsible for civilization in the world, or to know that inferior races were destined to be overwhelmed or even to disappear. 3

Some scientists and public figures challenged race science. In an 1854 speech, Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved American political activist, argued:

The whole argument in defense of slavery becomes utterly worthless the moment the African is proved to be equally a man with the Anglo-Saxon. The temptation, therefore, to read the Negro out of the human family is exceedingly strong. 4

Douglass and others who spoke out against race science were generally ignored or marginalized.

By the late 1800s, the practice of eugenics emerged out of race science in England, the United States, and Germany. Eugenics is the use of so-called science to improve the human race, both by breeding “society’s best with the best” and by preventing “society’s worst” from breeding at all. Eugenicists believed that a nation is a biological community that must be protected from “threat,” which they often defined as mixing with allegedly inferior “races.”

In the early twentieth century, influential German biologist Ernst Haeckel divided humankind into races and ranked them. In his view, “Aryans”—a mythical race from whom many northern Europeans believed they had descended—were at the top of the rankings and Jews and Africans were at the bottom. Ideas of race and eugenics would become central to Nazi ideology in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

Despite the fact that one’s race predicts almost nothing else about an individual’s physical or intellectual capacities, people still commonly believe in a connection between race and certain biological abilities or deficiencies. The belief in this connection leads to racism. As scholar George Fredrickson explains, racism has two components: difference and power.

It originates from a mindset that regards “them” as different from “us” in ways that are permanent and unbridgeable. This sense of difference provides a motive or rationale for using our power advantage to treat the...Other in ways that we would regard as cruel or unjust if applied to members of our own group. 5

The idea that there is an underlying biological link between race and intellectual or physical abilities (or deficiencies) has persisted for hundreds of years. Learning that race is a social concept, not a scientific fact, may be challenging for students. They may need time to absorb the reality behind the history of race because it conflicts with the way many in our society understand it.

• 1 Pilar Ossorio, Race: The Power of an Illusion , Episode 1: “The Difference Between Us” (California Newsreel, 2003), transcript accessed May 2, 2016.
• 2 Evelynn Hammonds, interview, Race: The Power of an Illusion, Episode 1: “The Difference Between Us (California Newsreel, 2003), transcript accessed April 12, 2017.
• 3 Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 157.
• 4 Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered: An Address Before the Literary Societies of Western Reserve College, at Commencement, July 12, 1854 (Rochester, NY: Lee, Mann & Co., 1854), 8–9.
• 5 George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 9.

Preparing to Teach

A note to teachers.

Before teaching this text set, please review the following information to help guide your preparation process.

Navigating Race

Race and racism are often difficult subjects for teachers and students to navigate. For this reason, you may want to briefly return to the class contract and to the agreed-upon norms of classroom discussion at the beginning of this lesson. You may also want to explore the lesson Preparing Students for Difficult Conversations (specifically Activities 2 and 3) for additional strategies and guidance.

That the meaning of race is socially, rather than scientifically, constructed is a new and complex idea for many students and adults that can challenge long-held assumptions. Therefore, we recommend providing opportunities for students to process, reflect, and ask questions about what they’ve learned in this lesson. The exit tickets teaching strategy used in the Assessment section is one way to achieve this, but you could also use the 3-2-1 strategy to elicit reflections and feedback from students.

Related Materials

• Lesson Preparing Students for Difficult Conversations
• Teaching Strategy Exit Tickets
• Teaching Strategy 3-2-1

Previewing Vocabulary

The following are key vocabulary terms used in this lesson:

Add these words to your Word Wall , if you are using one for this unit, and provide necessary support to help students learn these words as you teach the lesson.

• Teaching Strategy Word Wall

Save this resource for easy access later.

Lesson plans.

Opener: One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

• Race is one of the concepts that societies have created to sort and categorize their members. Before discussing race, this brief opening activity introduces students to the idea that when we sort and categorize the things and people around us, we make judgments about which characteristics are more meaningful than others. Students will be asked to look at four shapes and decide which is not like the others, but in doing so they must also choose the category on which they will base their decision.
• Share with students the handout Which of These Things Is Not Like the Others? If possible, you might simply project the image in the classroom.
• Ask students to answer the question by identifying the object in the image that is not like the others.
• Prompt students to share their answers and explain their thinking behind the answer to a classmate, using the Think, Pair, Share strategy. What criterion did they use to identify one item as different? Why? Did their partner use the same criterion?
• Explain that while students’ choices in this exercise are relatively inconsequential, we make similar choices with great consequence in the ways that we define and categorize people in society. While there are many categories we might use to describe differences between people, society has given more meaning to some types of difference (such as skin color and gender) and less meaning to others (such as eye and hair color). You might ask students to brainstorm some of the categories of difference that are meaningful in our society.
• Teaching Strategy Think-Pair-Share
• Handout Which One of These Things Is Not Like the Others?

Reflect on the Meaning of Race

• Tell students that in this lesson, they will look more closely at a concept that has been used throughout history by groups and countries to shape their universes of obligation: the concept of race. Race is a concept that continues to significantly influence the way that society is structured and the way that individuals think about and act toward one another.
• Before asking students to examine the concept closely in this lesson, it is worth giving them a few minutes to write down their own thoughts and assumptions about what race is and what it means. Share the following questions with students, and give them a few minutes to privately record their responses in their journals. Let them know that they will not be asked to share their responses. What is race? What, if anything, can one’s race tell you about a person? How might this concept impact how you think about others or how others think about you?

Learn about the History of “Race”

• Show students a short clip from the film Race: The Power of an Illusion (“The Difference Between Us,” from 07:55 to 13:10). Before you start the clip, pass out the Race: The Power of an Illusion Viewing Guide and preview the questions with students.
• Instruct students to take notes in response to the viewing guide questions as they watch the clip. If time permits, consider showing the clip a second time to help students gather additional details and answer the questions more thoroughly.
• Race is not meaningful in a biological sense.
• It was created rather than discovered by scientists and has been used to justify existing divisions in society.
• Video Race: The Power of an Illusion (The Difference Between Us)

Explore the Meaning of Racism

• Pass out the Race and Racism handout. Alternatively, you might project the handout in the classroom and instruct students to copy down Frederickson’s definition of racism into their journals.
• Circle any words that you do not understand in the definition.
• Underline three to four words that you think are crucial to understanding the meaning of racism .
• Below the definition, rewrite it in your own words.
• At the bottom of the page, write at least one synonym (or other word closely related to racism ) and one antonym.
• Allow a few minutes after this activity to discuss students’ answers and clear up any words they did not understand.

Consider the Impact of Racism

• What has been the impact of racism on Delpit? How has racism influenced the ways that people think and act toward her?
• How has racism affected how Delpit thinks about herself? According to her observations, how has racism affected how other African Americans think about themselves?
• How does racism affect how a society defines its universe of obligation?
• Reading Growing Up with Racism

Reflect on the Impact of Categorizing People

Finish the lesson by asking students to respond to the following prompt:

When is it harmful to point out the differences between people? When is it natural or necessary? Is it possible to divide people into groups without privileging one group over another?

If you would like to use this response as an assessment, consider asking students to complete it on a separate sheet of paper for you to collect. You might also ask students to complete the reflection for homework.

Check for Understanding

• Use the handouts in this lesson to help you gauge students’ understanding of the concept of race. The viewing guide to Race: The Power of an Illusion provides a window into the evolution of students’ understanding in the middle of the lesson, while the student-annotated Race and Racism handout can help you see their ability to articulate their understanding of these concepts.
• Read students’ written reflection from the end of the lesson to help you see how they are thinking about the broader patterns of human behavior—categorizing ourselves and collecting ourselves into groups—discussed in this lesson.

Extension Activities

View A Class Divided

The streaming video A Class Divided (53:53) provides a powerful example of how dividing people by seemingly arbitrary characteristics can affect how they think about and act toward themselves and others. It tells the story of teacher Jane Elliott’s second-grade classroom experiment in which she temporarily separated her students by eye color. Consider showing this compelling video to deepen your class discussion of why people create groups and why that behavior matters.

• Video A Class Divided

Go Deeper in Holocaust and Human Behavior

Another way to deepen the discussion of groups and belonging in this lesson is to introduce additional readings from Chapter 2 of Holocaust and Human Behavior for student discussion and reflection. The reading What Do We Do with a Difference? includes a poem that raises important questions about the ways we respond to differences. Other readings in the chapter trace the evolution of the concept of race during the Enlightenment and the emergence of “race science” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

• Reading What Do We Do with a Difference?

Materials and Downloads

Quick downloads, download the files, get files via google, explore the materials, race: the power of an illusion (the difference between us).

Growing Up with Racism

Introducing the writing prompt.

The Roots and Impact of Antisemitism

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Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are, but rather sets of actions that people do. Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

A collection of new essays by an interdisciplinary team of authors that gives a comprehensive introduction to race and ethnicity. Doing Race focuses on race and ethnicity in everyday life: what they are, how they work, and why they matter. Going to school and work, renting an apartment or buying a house, watching television, voting, listening to music, reading books and newspapers, attending religious services, and going to the doctor are all everyday activities that are influenced by assumptions about who counts, whom to trust, whom to care about, whom to include, and why. Race and ethnicity are powerful precisely because they organize modern society and play a large role in fueling violence around the globe. Doing Race is targeted to undergraduates; it begins with an introductory essay and includes original essays by well-known scholars. Drawing on the latest science and scholarship, the collected essays emphasize that race and ethnicity are not things that people or groups have or are , but rather sets of actions that people do . Doing Race provides compelling evidence that we are not yet in a “post-race” world and that race and ethnicity matter for everyone. Since race and ethnicity are the products of human actions, we can do them differently. Like studying the human genome or the laws of economics, understanding race and ethnicity is a necessary part of a twenty first century education.

America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences: Volume I (2001)

Chapter: 8. the changing meaning of race, 8 the changing meaning of race.

Michael A.Omi

T he 1997 President’s Initiative on Race elicited numerous comments regarding its intent and focus. One such comment was made by Jefferson Fish, a psychologist at St. John’s University in New York, who said: “This dialogue on race is driving me up the wall. Nobody is asking the question, ‘What is race?’ It is a biologically meaningless category” (quoted in Petit, 1998:A1).

Biologists, geneticists, and physical anthropologists, among others, long ago reached a common understanding that race is not a “scientific” concept rooted in discernible biological differences. Nevertheless, race is commonly and popularly defined in terms of biological traits—phenotypic differences in skin color, hair texture, and other physical attributes, often perceived as surface manifestations of deeper, underlying differences in intelligence, temperament, physical prowess, and sexuality. Thus, although race may have no biological meaning, as used in reference to human differences, it has an extremely important and highly contested social one.

Clearly, there is an enormous gap between the scientific rejection of race as a concept, and the popular acceptance of it as an important organizing principle of individual identity and collective consciousness. But merely asserting that race is socially constructed does not get at how specific racial concepts come into existence, what the fundamental determinants of racialization are, and how race articulates with other major axes of stratification and “difference,” such as gender and class. Each of these topics would require an extensive treatise on possible variables

shaping our collective notions of race. The following discussion is much more modest.

I attempt to survey ways of thinking about, bringing into context, and interrogating the changing meaning of race in the United States. My intent is to raise a series of points to be used as frames of reference, to facilitate and deepen the conversation about race.

My general point is that the meaning of race in the United States has been and probably always will be fluid and subject to multiple determinations. Race cannot be seen simply as an objective fact, nor treated as an independent variable. Attempting to do so only serves, ultimately, to emphasize the importance of critically examining how specific concepts of race are conceived of and deployed in areas such as social-science research, public-policy initiatives, cultural representations, and political discourse. Real issues and debates about race—from the Federal Standards for Racial and Ethnic Classification to studies of economic inequality—need to be approached from a perspective that makes the concept of race problematic.

A second point is the importance of discerning the relationship between race and racism, and being attentive to transformations in the nature of “racialized power.” The distribution of power—and its expression in structures, ideologies, and practices at various institutional and individual levels—is significantly racialized in our society. Shifts in what “race” means are indicative of reconfigurations in the nature of “racialized power” and emphasize the need to interrogate specific concepts of racism.

GLOBAL AND NATIONAL RACIAL CHANGE

The present historical moment is unique, with respect to racial meanings. Since the end of World War II, there has been an epochal shift in the global racial order that had persisted for centuries (Winant and Seidman, 1998). The horrors of fascism and a wave of anticolonialism facilitated a rupture with biologic and eugenic concepts of race, and challenged the ideology(ies) of White supremacy on a number of important fronts. Scholarly projects in genetics, cultural anthropology, and history, among others, were fundamentally rethought, and antiracist initiatives became a crucial part of democratic political projects throughout the world.

In the United States, the Civil Rights Movement was instrumental in challenging and subsequently dismantling patterns of Jim Crow 1 segrega-

tion in the South. The strategic push of the Movement in its initial phase was toward racial integration in various institutional arenas—e.g., schools, public transportation, and public accommodations—and the extension of legal equality for all regardless of “color.” This took place in a national context of economic growth and the expansion of the role and scope of the federal government.

Times have changed and ironies abound. Domestic economic restructuring and the transnational flow of capital and labor have created a new economic context for situating race and racism. The federal government’s ability to expand social programs, redistribute resources, and ensure social justice has been dramatically curtailed by fiscal constraints and the rejection of liberal social reforms of the 1960s. Demographically, the nation is becoming less White and the dominant Black-White paradigm of race relations is challenged by the dramatic growth and increasing visibility of Hispanics and Asians.

All these changes have had a tremendous impact on racial identity, consciousness, and politics. Racial discourse is now littered with confused and contradictory meanings. The notion of “color-blindness” is now more likely to be advanced by political groups seeking to dismantle policies, such as affirmative action, initially designed to mitigate racial inequality. Calls to get “beyond race” are popularly expressed, and any hint of race consciousness is viewed as racism.

In this transformed political landscape, traditional civil rights organizations have experienced a crisis of mission, political values, and strategic orientation. Integrationist versus “separate-but-equal” remedies for persistent racial disparities have been revisited in a new light. More often the calls are for “self-help” and for private support to tackle problems of crime, unemployment, and drug abuse. The civil rights establishment confronts a puzzling dilemma—formal, legal equality has been significantly achieved, but substantive racial inequality in employment, housing, and health care remains, and in many cases, has deepened.

All this provides an historical context in which to situate evolving racial meanings. Over the past 50 years, changes in the meaning of race have been shaped by, and in turn have shaped, broader global/epochal shifts in racial formation. The massive influx of new immigrant groups has destabilized specific concepts of race, led to a proliferation of identity positions, and challenged prevailing modes of political and cultural organization.

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE AND RACIAL TRANSFORMATION

In a discussion of Asian American cultural production and political formation, Lowe (1996) uses the concepts of heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity to disrupt popular notions of a singular, unified Asian Ameri-

can subject. Refashioning these concepts, I use them to assess the changes in, and issues relevant to, racial meaning created by demographic shifts.

Heterogeneity

Lowe defines heterogeneity as “the existence of differences and differential relationships within a bounded category” (1996:67). Over the past several decades, there has been increasing diversity among so-called racial groups. Our collective understanding of who Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are has undergone a fundamental revision as new groups entered the country. The liberalization of immigration laws beginning in 1965, political instability in various areas of the world, and labor migration set in motion by global economic restructuring all contributed to an influx of new groups—Laotians, Guatemalans, Haitians, and Sudanese, among others.

In the United States, many of these immigrants encounter an interesting dilemma. Although they may stress their national origins and ethnic identities, they are continually racialized as part of a broader group. Many first-generation Black immigrants from, for example, Jamaica, Ethiopia, or Trinidad, distance themselves from, subscribe to negative stereotypes of, and believe that, as ethnic immigrants, they are accorded a higher status than, Black Americans (Kasinitz, 1992). Children of Black immigrants, who lack their parents’ distinctive accents, have more choice in assuming different identities (Waters, 1994). Some try to defy racial classification as “Black Americans” by strategically asserting their ethnic identity in specific encounters with Whites. Others simply see themselves as “Americans.”

Panethnic organization and identity constitute one distinct political/ cultural response to increasing heterogeneity. Lopez and Espiritu define panethnicity as “the development of bridging organizations and solidarities among subgroups of ethnic collectivities that are often seen as homogeneous by outsiders” (1990:198); such a development, they claim, is a crucial feature of ethnic change, “supplanting both assimilation and ethnic particularism as the direction of change for racial/ethnic minorities” (1990:198).

Omi and Winant (1996) describe the rise of panethnicity as a response to racialization, driven by a dynamic relationship between the group being racialized and the state. Elites representing panethnic groups find it advantageous to make political demands backed by the numbers and resources panethnic formations can mobilize. The state, in turn, can more easily manage claims by recognizing and responding to large blocs, as opposed to dealing with specific claims from a plethora of ethnically defined interest groups. Different dynamics of inclusion and exclusion

are continually expressed. Conflicts often occur over the precise definition and boundaries of various racially defined groups and their adequate representation in census counts, reapportionment debates, and minority set-aside programs. The increasing heterogeneity of racial categories raises several questions for research to answer.

How do new immigrant groups negotiate the existing terrain of racial meanings? What transformations in racial self-identity take place as immigrants move from a society organized around one concept of race, to a new society with a different mode of conceptualization? Oboler (1995), for example, explores how Latin Americans “discover” the salience of race and ethnicity as a form of social classification in the United States.

Under what conditions can we imagine panethnic formations developing, and when are ethnic-specific identities maintained or evoked? Conflicts over resources within presumed homogeneous racial groups can be quite sharp and lead to distinctive forms of political consciousness and organization.

Under what conditions does it make sense to talk about groups such as Asians and Pacific Islanders, American Indians and Alaska Natives, Hispanics, Blacks, etc., and when is it important to disaggregate the various national-origin groups, ethnic groups, and tribes that make up these panethnic formations?

Researchers and policy makers need to be attentive to the increasing heterogeneity of racial/ethnic groups and assess how an examination of “differences” might help us rethink the nature and types of questions asked about life chances, forms of inequality, and policy initiatives.

Crouch, in his essay “Race Is Over” (1996), speculates that in the future, race will cease to be the basis of identity and “special-interest power” because of the growth in mixed-race people. It has been a longstanding liberal dream, most recently expressed by Warren Beatty in the film Bulworth, that increased “race mixing” would solve our racial problems. Multiraciality disrupts our fixed notions about race and opens up new possibilities with respect to dialogue and engagement across the color line. It does not, however, mean that “race is over.”

Although the number of people of “mixed-racial descent” is unclear, and contingent on self-definition, the 1990 census counted two million children (under the age of 18) whose parents were of different races (Marriott, 1996). The demographic growth and increased visibility of

“mixed-race” or “multiracial” individuals has resulted in a growing literature on multiracial identity and its meaning for a racially stratified society (Root, 1992; Zack, 1994).

In response to these demographic changes, there was a concerted effort from school boards and organizations such as Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) to add a “multiracial” category to the 2000 Census form (Mathews, 1996). This was opposed by many civil rights organizations (e.g., Urban League, National Council of La Raza) who feared a reduction in their numbers and worried that such a multiracial category would spur debates regarding the “protected status” of groups and individuals. According to various estimates, 75 to 90 percent of those who now check the “Black” box could check a multiracial one (Wright, 1994). In pretests by the Census Bureau in 1996, however, only 1 percent of the sample claimed to be multiracial (U.S Bureau of the Census, 1996).

In October 1997, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) decided to allow Americans the option of multiple checkoffs on the census with respect to the newly modified racial and ethnic classifications (Holmes, 1997). Initial debate centered on how to count people who assigned themselves to more than one racial/ethnic category. At issue is not only census enumeration, but also its impact on federal policies relevant to voting rights and civil rights.

It remains to be seen how many people will actually identify themselves as members of more than one race. Much depends on the prevailing consciousness of multiracial identity, the visibility of multiracial people, and representational practices. As Reynolds Farley notes, “At the time of the 2000 census, if we have another Tiger Woods…those figures could up to 5 percent—who knows?” (quoted in Holmes, 1997:A19).

The debate over a multiracial category reveals an intriguing aspect about our conceptualizations of race. The terms “mixed race” or “multiracial” in themselves imply the existence of “pure” and discrete races. By drawing attention to the socially constructed nature of “race,” and the meanings attached to it, multiraciality reveals the inherent fluidity and slipperiness of our concepts of race. Restructuring concepts of race has a number of political implications. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (1997), for example, used the issue of multiraciality to illustrate the indeterminacy of racial categories and to vigorously advocate for their abolition in government data collection, much as advocates of color-blindness do.

In her definition of hybridity, Lowe refers to the formation of material culture and practices “produced by the histories of uneven and unsynthetic power relations” (Lowe, 1996:67). Indeed, the question of power cannot be elided in the discussion of multiraciality because power is deeply implicated in racial trends and in construction of racial mean-

ings. The rigidity of the “one-drop rule,” 2 long-standing fears of racial “pollution,” and the persistence (until the Loving decision in 1967) of antimiscegenation laws demonstrate the ways in which the color line has been policed in the United States. This legacy continues to affect trends in interracial marriage. Lind (1998) suggests that both multiculturalists and nativists have misread trends, and that a new dichotomy between Black and non-Blacks is emerging. In the 21st century, he envisions “a White-Asian-Hispanic melting-pot majority—a hard-to-differentiate group of beige Americans—offset by a minority consisting of Blacks who have been left out of the melting pot once again” (p. 39). Such a dire racial landscape raises a number of troubling political questions regarding group interests, the distribution of resources, and the organization of power.

Simultaneously, racial hybridity reveals the fundamental instability of all racial categories, helps us discern particular dimensions of racialized power, and raises a host of political issues.

How, when, and under what conditions, do people choose to identify as “mixed race”? According to the Bureau of the Census the American Indian population increased 255 percent between 1960 and 1990 as a result of changes in self-identification. What factors contributed to this shift?

What effects do multiracial identity and classification have on existing “race-based” public policies? Although most forms of race-based policies are under attack, a vast structure of bureaucracies, policies, and practices exists within government, academic, and private sectors that relies on discrete racial categories. Who, for example, would be considered an “underrepresented minority” and under what circumstances?

Although there has been a significant growth in the literature on multiraciality, much of it has not deeply examined the racial meanings that pervade distinctive “combinations” of multiracial identity. The experience of being White-Asian in most college/university settings is significantly different from being Black-Asian. Some groups, such as Black Cubans in Miami, encounter marginalization from both Black and Hispanic American communities (Navarro, 1997). We need to deconstruct multiraciality and understand the racial meanings that correspond to specific types of multiracial identities and classifications.

The repeal of antimiscegenation laws, the marked lessening of social distance between racial groups, and interracial marriage among specific

groups have contributed to the growth and increased visibility of a multiracial population. Studies thus far have focused on “cultural conflict” and psychological issues of individual adjustment. We need to assess more deeply how multiraciality affects the logic and organization of data on racial classification, and the political and policy issues that emanate from this.

Multiplicity

It is, by now, obvious that the racial composition of the nation has been radically changing. In seven years, Hispanics will surpass Blacks as the largest “minority group” in the United States (Holmes, 1998). Trends in particular states and regions are even more dramatic. In 1970, Whites constituted 77 percent of the San Francisco Bay Area’s population. Hispanics and Asians constituted 11 and 4 percent, respectively, of the population (McLeod, 1998). In 1997, Whites constituted 54 percent, and Hispanics and Asians each comprised nearly 20 percent of the population.

Much has been made in the popular literature about the “changing face of America,” but little has been said about how the increasing multiplicity of groups shapes our collective understanding about race. Specifically, how are the dominant paradigms of race relations affected by these demographic realities?

At the first Advisory Board meeting of the President’s Initiative on Race (July 14, 1997), a brief debate ensued among the panelists. Linda Chavez-Thompson argued that the “American dilemma” had become a proliferation of racial and ethnic dilemmas. Angela Oh argued that the national conversation needed to move beyond discussions of racism as solely directed at Blacks. Advisory Board chairman John Hope Franklin, by contrast, affirmed the historical importance of Black-White relations and stressed the need to focus on unfinished business. Although the Board members subsequently downplayed their differences, their distinct perspectives continued to provoke debate within academic, policy, and community activist settings regarding the Black-White race paradigm.

How we think about, engage, and politically mobilize around racial issues have been fundamentally shaped by a prevailing “Black-White” paradigm of race relations. Historical accounts of other people of color in the United States are cast in the shadows of the Black-White encounter. Contemporary conflicts between a number of different racial/ethnic groups are understood in relationship to Black-White conflict, and the media uses the bipolar model as a master frame to present such conflicts.

Such biracial theorizing misses the complex nature of race relations in post-Civil Rights Movement America. Complex patterns of conflict and accommodation have developed among multiple racial/ethnic groups.

In many major U.S. cities, Whites have fled to suburbia, leaving the inner city to the turf battles among different racial minorities for housing, public services, and economic development.

The dominant mode of biracial theorizing ignores the fact that a range of specific conditions and trends—such as labor-market stratification and residential segregation—cannot be adequately studied by narrowly assessing the relative situations of Whites and Blacks. Working within a “two-nations” framework of Black and White, Hacker (1992) needs to consider Asians in higher education at some length in order to address the issue of race-based affirmative action.

In suggesting that we get beyond the Black-White paradigm, I’m conscious of the consequences of such a move. On the one hand, I do not mean to displace or decenter the Black experience, which continues to define the fundamental contours of race and racism in our society. On the other hand, I do want to suggest that the prevailing Black-White model tends to marginalize, if not ignore, the experiences, needs, and political claims of other racialized groups. The challenge is to frame an appropriate language and analysis to help us understand the shifting dynamic of race that all groups are implicated in.

We would profit from more historical and contemporary studies that look at the patterns of interaction between, and among, a multiplicity of groups. Almaguer (1994), in his study of race in nineteenth-century California, breaks from the dominant mode of biracial theorizing to illustrate how American Indians, Mexicans, Chinese, and Japanese were racialized and positioned in relation to one another by the dominant Anglo elite. Horton (1995) takes a look at distinct sites of political and cultural engagement between different groups in Monterey Park, California—a city where Asians constitute the majority population. Such studies emphasize how different groups shape the conditions of each other’s existence.

Research needs to consider how specific social policies (e.g., affirmative action, community economic development proposals) have different consequences for different groups. The meaning and impact of immigration reforms for Hispanics, for example, may be quite distinct from its meaning and impact for Asians. In line with an eye toward heterogeneity, different ethnic groups (e.g., Cubans and Salvadorans) within a single racial category (Hispanic) may be differentially affected by particular policy initiatives and reforms. All this is important because politics, policies, and practices framed in dichotomous Black-White terms miss the ways in which specific initiatives structure the possibilities for conflict or accommodation among different racial minority groups.

The multiplicity of groups has transformed the nation’s political and cultural terrain, and provoked a contentious debate regarding multiculturalism. New demographic realities have also provided a distinctive

context in which to examine the changing dynamics of White racial identity. Both the debate over multiculturalism and the increasing salience of White racial identity are tied to changes in the meaning of race as a result of challenges to the logic and organization of White supremacy.

MULTICULTURALISM AND WHITENESS

Controversies over the multiculturalism have been bitter and divisive. Proponents claim that a multicultural curriculum, for example, can facilitate an appreciation for diversity, increase tolerance, and improve relations between and among racial and ethnic groups. Opponents claim that multiculturalists devalue or relativize core national values and beliefs, shamelessly promote “identity politics,” and unwittingly increase racial tensions.

One of problems of the multicultural debate is the conflation of “race” and “culture.” I take seriously Hollinger’s (1995) claim that we have reified what he calls the American “ethno-racial pentagon.” Blacks, Hispanics, American Indians/Alaska Natives, Asians/Pacific Islanders, and Whites are now seen as the five basic demographic blocs we treat as the subjects of multiculturalism. The problem is that these groups do not represent distinct and mutually exclusive “cultures.” American multiculturalism, Hollinger claims, has accomplished, in short order, a task that centuries of British imperial power could not complete: the making of the Irish as indistinguishable from English. Such a perspective argues for the need to rethink what we mean by the terms “race” and “culture,” and to critically interrogate the manner in which we articulate the connection between the two in research and policy studies.

Another issue is how forms of multiculturalist discourse elide the organization and distribution of power. Multiculturalism is often posed as the celebration of “differences” and unique forms of material culture expressed, for example, in music, food, dance, and holidays. Such an approach tends to level the important differences and contradictions within and among racial and ethnic groups. Different groups possess different forms of power—the power to control resources, the power to push a political agenda, and the power to culturally represent themselves and other groups. In a recent study of perceived group competition in Los Angeles, Bobo and Hutchings (1996) found, among other things, that Whites felt least threatened by Blacks and most threatened by Asians, while Asians felt a greater threat from Blacks than Hispanics. Such distinct perceptions of “group position” are related to, and implicated in, the organization of power.

Some scholars and activists have defined racism as “prejudice plus power.” Using this formula, they argue that people of color can’t be racist

because they don’t have power. But things aren’t that simple. In the post-Civil Rights era, some racial minority groups have carved out a degree of power in select urban areas—particularly with respect to administering social services and distributing economic resources. This has led, in cities like Oakland and Miami, to conflicts between Blacks and Hispanics over educational programs, minority business opportunities, and political power. We need to acknowledge and examine the historical and contemporary differences in power that different groups possess.

Dramatic challenges to ideologies and structures of White supremacy in the past 50 years, have caused some Whites to perceive a loss of power and influence. In 25 years, non-Hispanic Whites will constitute a minority in four states, including two of the most populous ones, and in 50 years, they will make up barely half of the U.S. population (Booth, 1998:A18). Whiteness has lost its transparency and self-evident meaning in a period of demographic transformation and racial reforms. White racial identity has recently been the subject of interrogation by scholars (Roediger, 1991; Lott, 1995; Ignatiev, 1995), who have explored how the social category of “White” has evolved and been implicated with racism and the labor movement. Contemporary works look at how White racial identities are constructed, negotiated, and transformed in institutional and everyday life (Hill, 1997).

Research on White Americans suggests that they do not experience their ethnicity as a definitive aspect of their social identity (Alba, 1990; Waters 1990). Rather, they perceive it dimly and irregularly, picking and choosing among its varied strands that allow them to exercise an “ethnic option” (Waters, 1990). Waters found that ethnicity was flexible, symbolic, and voluntary for her White respondents in ways that it was not for non-Whites.

The loose affiliation with specific European ethnicities does not necessarily suggest the demise of any coherent group consciousness and identity. In the “twilight of ethnicity,” White racial identity may increase in salience. Indeed, in an increasingly diverse workplace and society, Whites experience a profound racialization.

The racialization process for Whites is evident on many college/university campuses as White students encounter a heightened awareness of race, which calls their own identity into question. Focus group interviews with White students at the University of California, Berkeley, reveals many of the themes and dilemmas of White identity in the current period: the “absence” of a clear culture and identity, the perceived “disadvantages” of being White with respect to the distribution of resources, and the stigma of being perceived as the “oppressors of the nation” (Institute for the Study of Social Change, 1991:37). Such comments underscore the new problematic meanings attached to “White,” and debates about the

meanings will continue, and perhaps deepen, in the years to come, fueled by such social issues as affirmative action, English-only initiatives, and immigration policies.

Racial meanings are profoundly influenced by state definitions and discursive practices. They are also shaped by interaction with prevailing forms of gender and class formation. An examination of both these topics reveals the fundamental instability of racial categories, their historically contingent character, and the ways they articulate with other axes of stratification and “difference.” Extending this understanding, it is crucial to relate racial categories and meanings to concepts of racism. The idea of “race” and its persistence as a social category is only given meaning in a social order structured by forms of inequality—economic, political, and cultural—that are organized, to a significant degree, along racial lines.

FEDERAL STANDARDS FOR RACIAL AND ETHNIC CLASSIFICATION

State definitions of race and ethnicity have inordinately shaped the discourse of race in the United States. OMB Statistical Directive 15 (Office of Management and Budget, 1977) was initially issued to create “compatible, nonduplicated, exchangeable racial and ethnic data by Federal agencies” for three reporting purposes—statistical, administrative, and civil rights compliance. The directive has become the de facto standard for state and local agencies, the private and nonprofit sectors, and the research community. Social scientists use Directive 15 categories because data are organized and available under these rubrics.

Since its inception, the Directive has been the subject of debate regarding its conceptual vagueness and the logical flaws in its categorization (Edmonston and Tamayo-Lott, 1996). Some of the categories are racial, some are cultural, and some are geographic. Some groups cannot neatly be assigned to any category. In addition, little attention is given to the gap between state definitions and popular consciousness. Given the social construction of race and its shifting meaning, administrative definitions may not be meaningful to the very individuals and groups they purport to represent (Omi, 1997).

Some politicians and political commentators have seized on the difficulty of establishing coherent racial categories as a reason to call for the abolition of all racial classification and record keeping. Such a move, they argue, would save federal dollars and minimize racial/ethnic distinctions, consciousness, and divisive politics. In 1997, the American Anthropological Association counseled the federal government to phase out use of the term “race” in the collection of data because the concept has no scientific justification in human biology (Overbey, 1997). The problem is,

social concepts of race are still linked to forms of discrimination. Abolishing data-collection efforts that use racial categories would make it more difficult for us to track specific forms of discrimination with respect to financial loan practices, health-care delivery, and prison-sentencing patterns among other issues (Berry et al., 1998). The current debate about police “profiling” of Black motorists illustrates the issues involved in racial record keeping (Wilgoren, 1999).

Wishing to preserve racial and ethnic data, some demographers and social scientists argue for categories that are more precise, conceptually valid, exclusive, exhaustive, measurable, and reliable over time. I believe this is an impossible task because it negates the fluidity and transformation of race and racial meanings, and definitions, over time.

The strange and twisted history of the classification of Asian Indians in the United States is instructive. During and after the peak years of immigration, Asian Indians were referred to and classified as “Hindu,” though the clear majority of them were Sikh. In United States v. B.S.Thind (1923), the U.S. Supreme Court held that Thind, as a native of India, was indeed “Caucasian,” but he wasn’t “White” and therefore was ineligible to become a naturalized citizen (p. 213). “It may be true,” the court declared, “that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today” (p. 209). Their status as non-White was reversed after World War II when they became “White” in part as reward for their participation in the Pacific war and as a consequence of the postwar climate of anticolonial politics. In the post-Civil Rights era, Asian Indian leaders sought to change their classification in order to seek “minority” group status. In 1977, OMB agreed to reclassify immigrants from India and their descendants from “White/Caucasian” to “Asian Indian.” Currently, many Asian Indians self-identify as “South Asian” to foster panethnic identification with those from Pakistan and Bangladesh, among other countries.

The point of all this is that racial and ethnic categories are often the effects of political interpretation and struggle, and that the categories in turn have political effects. Such an understanding is crucial in the ongoing debates around the federal standards for racial and ethnic classification.

INTERSECTIONALITY

In a critique of racial essentialism, Hall (1996:444) states that “the central issues of race always appear historically in articulation, in a formation, with other categories and divisions and are constantly crossed

and recrossed by categories of class, of gender and ethnicity.” Although this may seem obvious, most social-science research tends to neglect an examination of the connections between distinct, yet overlapping, forms of stratification and “difference.” The result is a compartmentalization of inquiry and analysis. Higginbotham (1993:14) notes that, “Race only comes up when we talk about African Americans and other people of color, gender only comes up when we talk about women, and class only comes up when we talk about the poor and working class.”

Analyses that do grapple with more than one variable frequently reveal a crisis of imagination. Much of the race-class debate, for example, inspired by the work of Wilson (1978), suffers from the imposition of rigid categories and analyses that degenerate into dogmatic assertions of the primacy of one category over the other. In fairness, more recent work has examined the interactive effects of race and class on residential segregation (Massey and Denton, 1993) and inequalities in wealth accumulation (Oliver and Shapiro, 1995). Still, most work treats race and class as discrete and analytically distinct categories.

A new direction is reflected in scholarship that emphasizes the “intersectionality” of race, gender, and class (Collins, 1990). Such work does not simply employ an additive model of examining inequalities (e.g., assessing the relative and combined effects of race and gender “penalties” in wage differentials), but examines how different categories are constituted, transformed, and given meaning in dynamic engagement with each other. Glenn’s (1992, 1999) work on the history of domestic and service work, for example, reveals how race is gendered and gender is raced. Frankenberg (1993) explores the ways in which White women experience, reproduce, and/or challenge the prevailing racial order. In so doing, she reveals how the very notion of racial privilege is experienced and articulated differently by women and men.

In institutional and everyday life, any clear demarcation of specific forms of “difference” is constantly being disrupted. This suggests the importance of understanding how changes in racial meaning are affected by transformations in gender and class relations. New research promises a break with the conception of race, class, and gender as relatively static categories, and emphasizes an approach that looks at the multiple and mutually determining ways that they shape each other. Such a framework of analysis is, however, still tentative, incomplete, and in need of further elaboration and refinement.

RACE AND RACISM

Blauner (1994) notes that in classroom discussions of racism, White and Black students tend to talk past one another. Whites tend to locate

racism in color consciousness and find its absence in color-blindness. In so doing, they see the affirmation of difference and racial identity among racially defined minority students as racist. Black students, by contrast, see racism as a system of power, and correspondingly argue that they cannot be racist because they lack power. Blauner concludes that there are two “languages” of race, one in which members of racial minorities, especially Blacks, see the centrality of race in history and everyday experience, and another in which Whites see race as a peripheral, nonessential reality.

Such discussions remind us of the crucial importance of discerning and articulating the connections between the changing meaning of race and concepts of racism. Increasingly, some scholars argue that the term “racism” has suffered from conceptual inflation, and been subject to so many different meanings as to render the concept useless (Miles, 1989). Recently, John Bunzel, a former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and current senior research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, argued that the President’s Advisory Board on Race should call for a halt to the use of the term “racism” because it breeds “bitterness and polarization, not a spirit of pragmatic reasonableness in confronting our difficult problems” (Bunzel, 1998:D-7).

In academic and policy circles, the question of what racism is continues to haunt discussions. Prior to World War II, the term “racism” was not commonly used in public discourse or in the social-science literature. The term was originally used to characterize the ideology of White supremacy that was buttressed by biologically based theories of superiority/inferiority. In the 1950s and 1960s, the emphasis shifted to notions of individual expressions of prejudice and discrimination. The rise of the Black power movement in the 1960s and 1970s fostered a redefinition of racism that focused on its institutional nature. Current work in cultural studies looks at the often implicit and unconscious structures of racial privilege and racial representation in daily life and popular culture.

All this suggests that more precise terms are needed to examine racial consciousness, institutional bias, inequality, patterns of segregation, and the distribution of power. Racism is expressed differently at different levels and sites of social activity, and we need to be attentive to its shifting meaning in different contexts. As Goldberg (1990:xiii) states, “the presumption of a single monolithic racism is being displaced by a mapping of the multifarious historical formulations of racisms .”

This intellectual task is wrapped up with, indeed, intrinsically connected to, surveying the changing meaning(s) of race. In a period when major social policies with respect to race are being challenged and rethought, it is crucial to consider how different meanings of race are shaped by, and in turn help shape, different concepts of racism. Being clear about

what we do and do not mean by racism is essential to future dialogues on race—dialogues that need to interrogate the nature of past and present forms of inequality, and the meaning of social justice.

LOOKING BACK, THINKING AHEAD

It is important to consider how unique the current racial context is, and its meaning for theorizing about race. Alba (1998) argues that many commentators and social scientists seize on the increasing complexity of race to reject, in blanket fashion, prior and existing understandings of racial transformation. He urges critical restraint, and states that “the conceptual models we have from the past should not be so quickly eclipsed by the seeming novelty of the present” (p. 7). To buttress his remarks, Alba suggests that we consider a “more refined conception of assimilation” to understand the trajectory of immigrant group incorporation over succeeding generations. Processes of assimilation render demographic projections, and the significance we impute to them, problematic because they rest on the assumption that racial and ethnic categories are stable enclosures. Rather than speak of the decreasing White population, Alba suggests that our collective notion of “majority group” might undergo a profound redefinition as “some Asians and Hispanics join what has been viewed as a ‘White,’ European population” (p. 10).

There is much here to consider. First, clearly there are historical continuities in patterns of relevance to race in the United States. The color line was rigidly enforced throughout much of America’s history, and racial inequalities have been stubbornly persistent in the face of political reforms. But I believe the current historical moment is a relatively unique one with respect to racial meanings. Over the past 50 years, White supremacy has been significantly challenged, not only in the United States but on a global scale. Since the end of World War II, there has been an epochal shift in the logic, organization, and practices of the centuries-old global racial order. Opposition to fascism, anticolonial struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States facilitated the rupture with biologic and eugenic concepts of race. In the United States and South Africa, particularly, antiracist initiatives have become crucial elements of an overall project to extend political democracy. These developments provide a unique historical context for understanding the meaning we impart to race.

Second, while older paradigms of race can help us understand what’s going on today, it is important to historically situate various models of race and ethnicity, and see them as reflective of historically specific concerns. The vast influx of different groups of European immigrants at the turn of the century stimulated sociological thinking regarding assimila-

tion and group incorporation into the mainstream of American life. In a similar manner, the current influx of immigrant groups from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere, provides an opportunity to rethink the nature of immigration, identity, and community formation; but the jury is still out on whether older models need to be modified to capture new realities, or if new and radically different models are called for.

Old theories, of course, are often revisited and remodeled. Traditional theories of assimilation, for example, have been substantially revised. No longer is assimilation posed and envisioned as a zero-sum game; the more “assimilated” one is, does mean that one is less “ethnic.” Assimilation is also no longer read as “Anglo conformity”; there is no clearly discernible social and cultural “core” that immigrant groups gravitate toward. Forms of what Portes and Zhou (1993) label “segmented assimilation” are occurring, and they involve complex patterns of accommodation and conflict between increasingly diverse racial and ethnic groups.

That said, it is important to critically examine racial trends and their interpretation through a conceptual framework such as assimilation. What is missing is sufficient attentiveness to the processes of racialization — the ways racial meanings are constructed and imparted to social groups and processes. From an assimilationist vantage point, one could examine the intermarriage patterns among Asians to support the idea of their incorporation into the White mainstream. Indeed some social scientists (Hacker, 1992) believe that increasing Asian-White marriage rates, along with positive trends in income, education, and residential patterns, suggest that Asian Americans are becoming “White” as the very category of “Whiteness” is being expanded.

Such a conclusion draws on a troublesome aspect of the traditional assimilationist paradigm, namely, its lack of attention to differences in group power . Interracial marriage has been seen as a crucial subprocess of assimilation (Gordon, 1964). Increasing rates of marriage between minority and majority groups were read as an important indicator of narrowing of social distance, a reduction in group prejudice and discrimination, and the lessening of strict group boundaries. But increasing intermarriage could also illustrate inequalities in racial power and the complex articulation of race, gender, and sexuality (Shinagawa and Pang, 1996). Asian women, for example, are construed as desirable spouses/partners drawing on specific racial and gender representations (Marchetti, 1993). These ideas and images circulate in a variety of settings—in popular films, pornography, and “mail-order bride” services. Given the pervasiveness of these representations, can increased rates of intermarriage between Asian women and White men simply be read as an indicator of assimilation? I think not.

What it does suggest is the need to look at the cultural representations and discursive practices that shape racial meanings. This has crucial implications for the examination and interpretation of racial trends. By looking at levels of educational attainment, residential patterns, median family incomes, and poverty rates, Asians, as one group, do not appear to be structurally disadvantaged by race. But there lurks beneath these glowing social indicators a repertoire of ideologies and practices that can be evoked in particular moments to render Asians foreign, subversive, and suspect. The Asian campaign finance controversy (Wang, 1998; Nakanishi, 1998) and the recent Chinese spy scandal provide illustrations of this. Popular interpretations of these events have had a chilling effect on both Asian American political participation and employment in scientific research settings.

The point of all this is to underscore the necessity of an interdisciplinary, multidimensional approach to the study of race and its changing meaning. Social scientists often treat the category of race in an unproblematic fashion. Seeing it as an independent variable, correlations are established between a host of other variables, and trends are discerned with respect to life chances. But we need to problematize race in our work; to look more closely and critically at the connections between structures and discursive practices—linking, for example, labor-market stratification with cultural representations. In focusing on such dynamic relationships, we can more fully appreciate how racial meanings change, and what those changes mean to our collective identity as a people.

Alba, R. 1990 Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America . New Haven: Yale University Press.

1998 On the possibility of continuities between the American past and future. Unpublished comments prepared for the National Research Council Conference on Racial Trends in the United States. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., October 15–16.

Almaguer, T. 1994 Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Berry, M., Y.Lee, C.Reynoso, and L.Higginbotham 1998 Closing our eyes to discrimination. San Francisco Chronicle (September 8):A21.

Blauner, B. 1994 Talking past each other: Black and White languages of race. In Race and Ethnic Conflict: Contending Views on Prejudice, Discrimination, and Ethnoviolence , F.Pincus and H.Ehrlich, eds. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Bobo, L., and V.Hutchings 1996 Perceptions of racial group competition: Extending Blumer’s theory of group position to a multiracial social context. American Sociological Review 61(6):951–972.

Booth, W. 1998 One nation, indivisible: Is it history? The Washington Post (February 22):A1.

Bunzel, J. 1998 Words that smear, like “racism,” provoke polarization. San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle (July 26):D-7.

Collins, P. 1990 Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment . New York: Routledge.

Crouch, S. 1996 Race is over: Black, White, Red, Yellow—same difference. New York Times Magazine (Sept. 29):170.

Edmonston, B., J.Goldstein, and J.Tamayo-Lott, eds. 1996 Spotlight on Heterogeneity: The Federal Standards for Racial and Ethnic Classification . Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

Frankenberg, R. 1993 White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gingrich, N. 1997 Testimony of speaker Newt Gingrich. Pp. 661–662 in House of Representatives, Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology Hearings, Federal Measures of Race and Ethnicity and the Implications for the 2000 Census , 105th Congress, First Session, 25 July.

Glenn, E. 1992 From servitude to service work: Historical continuities in the racial division of paid reproductive labor. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 18:1–43.

1999 Social construction and institutionalization of gender and race: An integrative framework. In Revisioning Gender , M.Ferree, J.Lorber, and B.Hess, eds. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Goldberg, D., ed. 1990 Anatomy of Racism . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gordon, M. 1964 Assimilation in American Life . New York: Oxford University Press.

Hacker, A. 1992 Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Hall, S. 1996 [1986] Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity. In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies , D.Morley and K.Chen, eds. New York: Routledge.

Higginbotham, E. 1993 Sociology and the multicultural curriculum: The challenges of the 1990s and beyond. Race, Sex, and Class 1:13–24.

Hill, M., ed. 1997 Whiteness: A Critical Reader . New York: New York University Press.

Hollinger, D. 1995 Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism . New York: Basic Books.

Holmes, S. 1997 People can claim more than one race on federal forms. New York Times (October 30):A1.

1998 Figuring out Hispanic influence. New York Times: Week 3 (August 16).

Horton, J. 1995 The Politics of Diversity: Immigration, Resistance, and Change in Monterey Park, California . Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Ignatiev, N. 1995 How the Irish Became White . New York: Routledge.

Institute for the Study of Social Change 1991 The Diversity Project: The Final Report . Berkeley: University of California.

Kasinitz, P. 1992 Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Lind, M. 1998 The beige and the Black. The New York Times Magazine (August 18):38–39.

Lopez, D., and Y.Espiritu 1990 Panethnicity in the United States: A theoretical framework. Ethnic and Racial Studies 13:198–224.

Lott, E. 1995 Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class . New York: Oxford University Press.

Lowe, L. 1996 Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics . Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Marchetti, G. 1993 Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Marriott, M. 1996 Multiracial Americans ready to claim their own identity. New York Times (July 20):A1.

Massey, D., and N.Denton 1993 American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Mathews, L. 1996 More than identity rides on a new racial category. New York Times (July 6):Y7.

McLeod, R. 1998 “Minority majority” well on way in state. San Francisco Chronicle (Sept. 4):A22.

Miles, R. 1989 Racism . New York: Routledge.

Nakanishi, D. 1998 Beyond the campaign finance controversy: Trends and issues of the new Asian Pacific American population. Paper prepared for the National Research Council Conference on Racial Trends. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., October 15–16.

Navarro, M. 1997 Black and Cuban-American: Bias in 2 worlds. New York Times (September 13):Y7.

Oboler, S. 1995 Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives: Identity and the Politics of (Re)presentation in the United States . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Office of Management and Budget 1977 Statistical Directive No. 15: Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting (May 12). Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Oliver, M., and T.Shapiro 1995 Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality . New York: Routledge.

Omi, M. 1997 Racial identity and the State: The dilemmas of classification. Law & Inequality XV(1):7–23.

Omi, M., and H.Winant 1996 Contesting the meaning of race in the post-civil rights movement era. In Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America , S.Pedraza and R. Rumbaut, eds. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing.

Overbey, M. 1997 AAA tells feds to eliminate ‘race’. Anthropology Newsletter (American Anthropological Association) 38(7) :1.

Petit, C. 1998 No biological basis for race, scientists say. San Francisco Chronicle (February 23):A1.

Portes, A., and M.Zhou 1993 The new second generation: Segmented assimilation and its variants. The Annals 530:74–96.

Roediger, D. 1991 The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class . New York: Verso.

Root, M., ed. 1992 Racially Mixed People . Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications.

Shinagawa, L., and G.Pang 1996 Asian American panethnicity and intermarriage. Amerasia Journal 22(2):127–152.

U.S. Bureau of the Census 1996 Results of the 1996 race and ethnic targeted test. Population Division Working Paper No. 18.

United States v. B.S.Thind 1923 261 U.S. 204.

Wang, L. 1998 Race, class, citizenship, and extraterritoriality: Asian Americans and the 1996 campaign finance scandal. Amerasia Journal 24(1):1–22.

Waters, M. 1990 Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

1994 Ethnic and racial identities of second-generation Black immigrants in New York City. International Migration Review 28:795–820.

Wilgoren, J. 1999 Police profiling debate: Acting on experience, or on bias. New York Times (April 9) :A21.

Wilson, W. 1978 The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Winant, H., and G.Seidman 1998 The modern world racial system in transition. Paper presented at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 21–25.

Wright, L. 1994 One drop of blood. The New Yorker (July 25):47.

Zack, N. 1994 Race and Mixed Race . Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

The 20th Century has been marked by enormous change in terms of how we define race. In large part, we have thrown out the antiquated notions of the 1800s, giving way to a more realistic, sociocultural view of the world. The United States is, perhaps more than any other industrialized country, distinguished by the size and diversity of its racial and ethnic minority populations. Current trends promise that these features will endure. Fifty years from now, there will most likely be no single majority group in the United States. How will we fare as a nation when race-based issues such as immigration, job opportunities, and affirmative action are already so contentious today?

In America Becoming , leading scholars and commentators explore past and current trends among African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in the context of a white majority. This volume presents the most up-to-date findings and analysis on racial and social dynamics, with recommendations for ongoing research. It examines compelling issues in the field of race relations, including:

• Race and ethnicity in criminal justice.
• Demographic and social trends for Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans.
• Trends in minority-owned businesses.
• Wealth, welfare, and racial stratification.
• Residential segregation and the meaning of "neighborhood."
• Disparities in educational test scores among races and ethnicities.
• Health and development for minority children, adolescents, and adults.
• Race and ethnicity in the labor market, including the role of minorities in America's military.
• Immigration and the dynamics of race and ethnicity.
• The changing meaning of race.
• Changing racial attitudes.

This collection of papers, compiled and edited by distinguished leaders in the behavioral and social sciences, represents the most current literature in the field. Volume 1 covers demographic trends, immigration, racial attitudes, and the geography of opportunity. Volume 2 deals with the criminal justice system, the labor market, welfare, and health trends. Both books will be of great interest to educators, scholars, researchers, students, social scientists, and policymakers.

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The dictionary's definition of race

Each of the major groupings into which humankind is considered (in various theories or contexts) to be divided on the basis of physical characteristics or shared ancestry.

The notion of race is a social construct designed to divide people into groups ranked as superior and inferior. The scientific consensus is that race, in this sense, has no biological basis – we are all one race, the human race. Racial identity , however, is very real. And, in a racialized society like the United States, everyone is assigned a racial identity whether they are aware of it or not.

Race as Social Construction

​The dictionary’s definition of race is incomplete and misses the complexity of impact on lived experiences. It is important to acknowledge race is a social fabrication, created to classify people on the arbitrary basis of skin color and other physical features. Although race has no genetic or scientific basis, the concept of race is important and consequential. Societies use race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression.

American Anthropological Association  states that "the 'racial' worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent." To understand more about race as a social construct in the United States, read the AAPA  statement on race and racism .

Learn more about race as it relates to human genetics In the Teaching Tolerance report, “Race Does Not Equal DNA” 

What is Racial identity?

• Racial identity is externally imposed: “ How do others perceive me? ”
• Racial identity is also internally constructed: “ How do I identify myself? ”

Understanding how our identities and experiences have been shaped by race is vital. We are all awarded certain privileges and or disadvantages because of our race whether or not we are conscious of it.

Race matters. Race matters … because of persistent racial inequality in society - inequality that cannot be ignored. Justice Sonya Sotomayor United States Supreme Court

Developmental models of racial identity

Many sociologists and psychologists have identified that there are similar patterns every individual goes through when recognizing their racial identity. While these patterns help us understand the link between race and identity, creating one’s racial identity is a fluid and nonlinear process that varies for every person and group.

Think of these categories of Racial Identity Development [PDF] as stations along a journey of the continual evolution of your racial identity. Your personal experiences, family, community, workplaces, the aging process, and political and social events – all play a role in understanding our own racial identity. During this process, people move between a desire to "fit in" to dominant norms, to a questioning of one's own identity and that of others. It includes feelings of confusion and often introspection, as well as moments of celebration of self and others. You may begin at any point on this chart and move in any direction – sometimes on the same day! Recognizing the station you are in helps you understand who you are.

What is ideology?

Ideology is a system of ideas, ideals, and manner of thinking that form the basis for decision making, often regarding economic or political theory and policy

No One is Colorblind to Race

The concept of race is intimately connected to our lives and has serious implications. It operates in real and definitive ways that confer benefits and privileges to some and withholds them from others.  Ignoring race means ignoring the establishment of racial hierarchies in society and the injustices these hierarchies have created and continue to reinforce.

• READ: “ Children Are Not Colorblind: How Young Children Learn Race ,” by Erin N. Winkler, Ph.D.

Understand More About the Dangers of Ignoring Race

Read this article, “ When you say you 'don't see race,' you’re ignoring racism, not helping to solve it. ”

Reflection:

• What are some experiences or identities that are central to who you are? How do you feel when they are ignored or “not seen”?

• The author in this article points out how people often use nonvisual cues to determine race. What does this reveal to us about the validity of pretending not to see race?

Either America will destroy ignorance, or ignorance will destroy the United States W.E.B. DuBois

RACISM = Racial Prejudice (Unfounded Beliefs + Irrational Fear) + Institutional Power 

Racism, like smog, swirls around us and permeates American society. It can be intentional, clear and direct or it can be expressed in more subtle ways that the perpetrator might not even be aware of.

Racism is a system of advantage based on race that involves systems and institutions, not just individual mindsets and actions. The critical variable in racism is the impact (outcomes) not the intent and operates at multiple levels including individual racism, interpersonal racism, institutional racism, and structural racism. 

• Interpersonal racism ​ occurs between individuals and includes public expressions of racism, often involving slurs, biases, hateful words or actions, or exclusion.

Source: Adapted from Terry Keleher, Applied Research Center, and Racial Equity Tools by OneTILT

Breaking the Silence Silence on issues of race hurts everyone. Reluctance to directly address the impact of race can result in a lack of connection between people, a loss of our society’s potential and progress, and an escalation of fear and violence. Silence around other issues of identity can also have the same negative impact on society. Silence on race keeps us all from understanding and learning. We can break the silence by being proactive - by learning, reflecting and having courageous conversations with ourselves and others.

VIDEO: Watch below as Franchesca Ramsey discusses racism on MTV’s Decoded (warning: adult language):

Take a moment to reflect

Let's Think

• How are you thinking about your own racialized identity after learning more about race?

• Ask a friend who has a different racial identity than yours to discuss how cultivating a positive sense of racial identity about yourself and others can interrupt racism at every level (personally, socially, and institutionally)?

For concerned citizens:

• Try this exercise to recognize the everyday opportunities you may have that can promote racial equity: Exercise on Choice Points .
• Activity: Try this group activity for talking about race effectively

For Families and Educators: Here are some ways to address race and racism in your classroom:

• Teaching young children about race: a guide for families and teachers
• Tipsfor talking to children about race

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Essay Samples on Race and Ethnicity

How does race affect social class.

How does race affect social class? Race and social class are intricate aspects of identity that intersect and influence one another in complex ways. While social class refers to the economic and societal position an individual holds, race encompasses a person's racial or ethnic background....

• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Class

How Does Race Affect Everyday Life

How does race affect everyday life? Race is an integral yet often invisible aspect of our identities, influencing the dynamics of our everyday experiences. The impact of race reaches beyond individual interactions, touching various aspects of life, including relationships, opportunities, perceptions, and systemic structures. This...

Race and Ethnicity's Impact on US Employment and Criminal Justice

Since the beginning of colonialism, raced based hindrances have soiled the satisfaction of the shared and common principles in society. While racial and ethnic prejudice has diminished over the past half-century, it is still prevalent in society today. In my opinion, racial and ethnic inequity...

• American Criminal Justice System
• Criminal Justice

Why Race and Ethnicity Matter in the Social World

Not everyone is interested in educating themselves about their own roots. There are people who lack the curiosity to know the huge background that encompasses their ancestry. But if you are one of those who would like to know the diverse colors of your race...

• Ethnic Identity

The Correlation Between Race and Ethnicity and Education in the US

In-between the years 1997 and 2017, the population of the United States of America has changed a lot; especially in terms of ethnic and educational background. It grew by over 50 million people, most of which were persons of colour. Although white European Americans still make...

• Inequality in Education

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Damaging Effects of Social World on People of Color

Even though many are unsure or aware of what it really means to have a culture, we make claims about it everyday. The fact that culture is learned through daily experience and also learned through interactions with others, people never seem to think about it,...

• Racial Profiling
• Racial Segregation

An Eternal Conflict of Race and Ethnicity: a History of Mankind

Ethnicity is a modern concept. However, its roots go back to a long time ago. This concept took on a political aspect from the early modern period with the Peace of Westphalia law and the growth of the Protestant movement in Western Europe and the...

• Social Conflicts

Complicated Connection Between Identity, Race and Ethnicity

Different groups of people are classified based on their race and ethnicity. Race is concerned with physical characteristics, whereas ethnicity is concerned with cultural recognition. Race, on the other hand, is something you inherit, whereas ethnicity is something you learn. The connection of race, ethnicity,...

• Cultural Identity

Best topics on Race and Ethnicity

1. How Does Race Affect Social Class

2. How Does Race Affect Everyday Life

3. Race and Ethnicity’s Impact on US Employment and Criminal Justice

4. Why Race and Ethnicity Matter in the Social World

5. The Correlation Between Race and Ethnicity and Education in the US

6. Damaging Effects of Social World on People of Color

7. An Eternal Conflict of Race and Ethnicity: a History of Mankind

8. Complicated Connection Between Identity, Race and Ethnicity

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History Grade 11 - Topic 3 Essay Questions

Essay Question

To what extent did Australian government policies and legislation succeed in perpetuating racism and the dehumanization of the Aborigines in the 19th and 20th centuries? Present an argument in support of your answer using relevant historical evidence. [1]

Introduction :

A number of scholars agree that race was part of the Enlightenment project that resulted from the desire to classify people into distinct categories. [2] Racial classification certainly existed before this period, but the ‘modern’ application of race has much to do with Europe’s interaction with the ‘rest of the world’. [3] Thus, central to the project of European colonialism was the crystallization of Eugenics policies and an array of social Darwinist theories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These theories which later transformed government policy and law rendered non-European peoples as subhuman and biologically inferior and thus should be dispossessed of their land and other vital resources and ultimately exterminated in society. Therefore, and relevant to this essay, we will focus on the implementation of Eugenics policies and Social Darwinism in Australia in order to evaluate the extent to which these policies impacted on the Aboriginal people of Australia.

British colonisation and occupation of Australia

After the British colonised Australia in the 18th century, the first one hundred and forty years of Australian colonial history was marked by conflict and dispossession. [4] The arrival of Lieutenant James Cook and then Arthur Philip in 1788 marked the beginning of ‘white settlement’. [5] From 1788, Australia was treated by the British as a colony of settlement, not of conquest. Aboriginal land was expropriated by the British colonists on the premise that the land was empty (the terra nullius theory) and that the British colonists discovered it. This myth was applied across the colonial world to perpetuate and justify indigenous dispossession and genocide. [6]

Colonists viewed the indigenous Australians as inferior and scarcely human. Their way of life was seen as ‘primitive and uncivilised’, and colonialists believed that their culture would eventually die out. [7] This view justified colonial conquest of the Aboriginal people. Social anthropologists from universities who ‘studied’ the way of life of the Aborigines reinforced this view. [8] Firstly, this view added some ‘scientific’ credibility to observations about this ‘primitive’ society with the lowest level of kinship and the most ‘primitive’ form of religion. Secondly, it also added to the views of Australian eugenicists without deeply analysing the complexities of Aboriginal life. [9]

Application of eugenics policies on the Aborigines

Eugenics associations were established in many states, e.g., New South Wales and Victoria. In 1960 the Racial Hygiene Association, based in Sydney, became the Family Planning Association. [10] A prominent eugenicist in Melbourne was Prof Richard Berry who believed the Aborigines to be the most primitive form of humans. Berry studied and measured people’s heads to prove his theory that white, educated people were the smartest, while the poor, criminals and Aboriginal Australian were the least so. Berry proposed a euthanasia chamber for so-called mental defectives. [11] Ideas of racial decay and racial suicide were aimed at strengthening the number of whites in society, especially in the north where Asian populations were expanding. [12] In 1901 the Immigration Restriction Act was passed (known as the White Australia Policy). White racial unity was promoted as a form of racial purity.

Immigration was encouraged from the UK in 1922 to swell European numbers and thousands of children were sent to keep Australia white. 1912: white mothers offered £5 childbirth bounty in order to grow the size of wealthy middle -class families, which tended to have fewer children than poorer, pauper families in society. [13] This was partly in response to the debate around ‘racial suicide’. It was thought that the middle class would die out because they were not having enough children. [14] Decrease in the number of middle-class whites led to notions of ‘racial decay’. It was assumed that ‘racial poisons’ (e.g., TB, venereal disease, prostitution, alcoholism and criminality) would decimate whites with good stock (middle class). Plans were made to deal with ‘racially contaminated’ and misfits to keep middle class ‘pure’. [15]

Australia Immigration Policies

The White Australian policy of 1901 aimed at cohesion among the white population in the country. [16] It enshrined discrimination and white superiority. Between 1920 and 1967 thousands of British children between the ages of 3 and 14 were sent to Australia and Canada to boost the size of the white population. These children came from poor backgrounds and were mostly in social care. Many of these children were cut off from their families and were often told they were orphans. [17] In addition, a number of these children stayed in orphanages in Australia or became unpaid cheap labour on farms and in some instances were physically and sexually abused. The children who were forcibly migrated under the system became known as the Lost Generation. Catholic Church established homes to accommodate and assist migrant children. In 1987 the Child Migrant Trust under the leadership of Margaret Humphreys began to publicise the abuse of child migrants. [18]

The lost generation?

Children of mixed race were either viewed as inferior by some or as slightly more superior than other Aborigines. [19] However, at the beginning of the 20th century, these ‘half-caste’ children were viewed as a threat to the future of the white race in Australia. In 1913, W. Baldwin Spencer set up 13 proposals to manage the half-caste populations in and around the towns, mining housing and other sites of contact between ‘races’. These included: segregated living areas in certain towns, limits set on the employment of indigenous population by white Australians, the removal of Aboriginal people to a compound, the construction of a half-caste home in one area, a ban on interracial contact and authority given to protectors in some areas to remove ‘half-caste’ children from their families and place them in homes.

By 1930s the number of part-Aboriginal population increased. Dr Cecil Cook and A.O. Neville believed that the white race was headed for extinction. They were responsible for assimilation programmes for ‘breeding blackness out.’ About 100 000 ‘mixed-race’ children were taken from their parents between 1910 and 1970 to breed out Aboriginal blood. Cook encouraged lighter-skinned women to marry white men and in this way ‘breed out their colour’. In 1951, the new Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, claimed that assimilation would be the new policy to deal with the indigenous people and motivated this on the grounds of looking after the child’s welfare. Policemen or government officials often took children from their sobbing mothers, they were raised as orphans. Many of these children experienced abuse and neglect. Labels were used, e.g., quadroon, octaroon, to indicate how much ‘white’ blood they had. This policy only ended in 1971. These children are known today as the Stolen Generation. [20]

Reparations?

The practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families was not spoken about until 1997. An official enquiry revealed consistent abuse, exploitation in the labour market, social dislocation that led to alcoholism, violence, and early death. [21] In 2009 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament for the laws and policies that inflicted grief, suffering and loss on them. He particularly mentioned the ‘Stolen Generation’ who had been removed from their families. In 2010 Rudd apologised to the ‘Lost Generation’ of children who were held in orphanages and other institutions between 1930 and 1970. [22]

Racial ideologies were not simply advanced by a conglomeration of nationalism, imperialism, Darwinism and Eugenics. In the early Twentieth Century, there became evidence strands of simply cultural racism that can be seen as running alongside the biological determinism that was largely prevalent. From this perspective, individuals were suspicious or negative towards to other races not solely on the basis on racial differences, but because those differences represented a divergence in cultural values. This can be seen in the number of miscegenation laws that prevailed in Australia and elsewhere in the colonial world in this context, which have been interpreted as founded on notions of biological mixing. This therefore was an attempt to assert the supremacy of the white race over all other races. Therefore, the development of the sciences of evolutionary Darwinism and Eugenics provided further scientific validity to these views, justifying unequal power relationships either by pinpointing the inability of certain races to develop, or by suggesting the more advanced races had a personal benevolence to the others.

Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

Hitlers consolidation of power from 1933 to 1934 :

The Great Depression had severe economic effects which increased support for political parties that were extremists such as the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which is popularly known as the Nazi party in English) on the right and the Communist Party on the left. [23] In 1993, Hitler was appointed as Chancellor by the then President Von Hindenburg. [24] This was a significant appointment as Hitler used his position as head of government to consolidate Nazi control. In power, the Nazis dominated the police force by utilizing them to break up meetings that opposition parties had and outlawed all forms of public meetings by justifying that these posed a ‘threat’ to public safety. on the 27th of February 1993, an arson attack occurred which burned the building which housed the German parliament, and this attack became known as the Reichstag Fire. After the Reichstag fire, Hitler got Von Hindenburg to pass a decree which suspended all articles in the constitution that guaranteed peoples key freedoms and liberty. [25] This meant that political opposition were arrested and subsequently sent to concentration camps. The Nazis did not win a clear majority in the elections despite rigorous intimidation and propaganda. As a result, Hitler banned the Communists from the Reichstag party which was supported by the Centre Party- a lay Catholic Party in Germany. [26] Hitler then arranged to get the Reichstag to agree to pass the Enabling Act which allowed him to make laws by decree. This made it possible for Hitler to centralise the government by taking away powers of the state governments. In addition, Hitler destroyed the free trade union movements and banned the Social Democrats and the Communist Party. [27] However, in 1934, an increasing number of left-wing elements within the Nazi Party were opposing Hitlers authority. [28] The Sturmabteilung- Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, which was led by Ernst Rohm was interested in the socialistic elements of Nazism. [29] In short, they wanted Germany to be a full socialistic state. However, the German Wehrmacht- unified armed forces of Nazi Germany opposed the Sturmabteilung’s stance. On the 30th of June 1934, Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (SS)- a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler got rid of the Sturmabteilung in which 400 of their murders were murdered including Rohm their leader. [30] The SS was now the new elite force which aligned itself with the Hitlers Nazi Party. Following the death of Von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler merged the positions of president and chancellor and became known as the Führer- leader. Within this new leadership structure, total loyalty was demanded from all Germans. This also led to Germany becoming police state- a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens' activities. The SS were led by Heinrich Himmler who was a ruthless and brutal leader who ran the labour and concentration camps, including the Gestapo- secrete state police. [31] Most Germans understood that to resist the rule of the Nazis would be futile.

The creation of a racial state in Germany: defining the German nation in relation to the ‘other’:

In Germany, the ‘perfect German race’ came to be known as the Aryan race which was perceived as the master race by the Nazi Party. [32] The ‘other’ was other races which were perceived to be unproductive, asocial and undesirables such as the gypsies and the Jews which were viewed as coming from impure blood. These groups of people were thought to be inferior and therefore marginalised, treated as sub-human by segregating them and thus dehumanising them. [33] The Aryan race were considered superior because of their ancestry, survival instinct, ‘pure blood’, intellect and perception that they had the capacity to work hard. In Hitlers Nazi state, antisemitism was blamed on race. Hitler hated Jewish people and thus, this hatred shaped his political philosophy. As a result, Jews became a scapegoat for Germanies problems and were thus hunted down in order to eradicate them. To identify ‘others’, stereotyping was used to judge and isolate them. [34] This led to prejudice and gross discrimination which sometimes even meant death. The Nazi Parties promotion of the idea to cleanse Germany of all its ‘enemies’ and because Hitler hated Jews, this led to the mass killing of Millions of Jews.

Applying racial and eugenic laws and policies- Purifying the nation:

Positive eugenics- Refers to efforts which are directed and expanding desirable traits. Positive eugenic Nazi programmes thus encouraged the breeding of pure Aryans since they were viewed as the master race. [35] In these programmes, women were central in creating this perceived pure nation. What this meant practically was that breeding between ‘Aryan’ women and genetically suitable ‘Aryan’ men such as those who were part of the SS were heavily encouraged. In 1936, the Lebensborn programme was established in which SS couples who were deemed to be biologically, racially and hereditarily valuable families were selected to adopt suitable Aryan children. [36]

Negative eugenics- refers to effort which are directed to eliminate through sterilisation, segregation or other means those who are perceived or deemed to be physically, mentally or morally ‘undesirable’.  Negative eugenics programmes and laws were passed to eliminate ‘contaminating’ elements of German society. These took many different forms such as sterilisation programmes. [37] In July 1933, the Sterilisation law was passed which gave Nazis the power to sterilise any person who suffered from diseases or hereditary conditions such as schizophrenia or feeblemindedness. Approximately 350 000 people were sterilised as a result of this programme including teenagers of mixed race. In 1933, the Department of Gene and Race Care was establish and Genetic health courts helped enforce these laws. Concentration camps were established and by 1936, these camps were filled with prostitutes, alcoholics, beggars, homosexuals and juvenile delinquents. [38] By 1938, around 11 000 were sent to these camps. Euthanasia (intentionally ending life to relieve pain and suffering) programmes were established. At the beginning of WWII, Hitler signed a decree which allowed for the systematic killing (euthanasia) in institutions of handicapped patients who were considered incurable. [39] The name of the programme was called Operation T4. These killings were secretly carried out in order to prevent a negative reaction from the Catholic Church. These killings were ordered by doctors in special committees who decided who was going to be killed. Initially, these killings were done by lethal injection, however, carbon monoxide was later used. [40] Nazi records show that 70 273 deaths were carried out by gassing at six different euthanasia centres. These euthanasia programmes were just the testing for Jewish extermination later on.

Groups targeted by the Nazis:

Under Hitler, policies in Germany were based on anti-Semitism as he regarded Jews as a separate race who were un-Godly and evil. At first, discrimination made life very uncomfortable for Jews in Germany. However, as the Nazi Party grew in power by having less and less opposition in Germany, Hitlers Party introduced stricter laws against Jews. [41] Most German people chose to be bystanders when these atrocities were being committed. As a result of these laws, Jewish people were Segregated from political, economic, social and educational life in Germany.     Between the years 1933 to 1934, Jewish professions and buisinesses were being targeted which resulted in them being excluded from civil services. In 1935, the Nuremburg Laws (antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Germany by the Nazi Party) were passed. [42] The Nuremburg Laws meant that Jewish people were not considered German citizens and they forbade marriages between German citizens and Jewish Germans. However, these anti-Semitic laws were relaxed in 1936 because Germany hosted the Olympic games, and thus had many visitors. [43] The following year in 1937 ‘Aryanisation’ began again. When the Nazi Party annexed (The concept in international law in which one state forcibly acquires another states territory) Austria in 1938, anti-Semitism spread there as well. On November 1938, a German diplomat was murdered in Paris, and as retaliation, Jewish shops, buisineses, homes and places of worship were targeted throughout Germany. 20 000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, majority of whom were killed. [44] This event came to be known as Kristallnacht (Violent, state-mandated actions against Jews). This led to Jewish pupils being expelled from schools, Jewish businessmen forced to close their shops, Jewish valuables to be confiscated and in 1939 a curfew was introduced for Jews.

Sinti and Roma:

Gypsies in Germany, like the Jews were targeted for extermination. At first, many were deported as the ‘undesirables.’ However, later there were sterilisation laws against the gypsies.  A new law termed “Fight against the Gypsy Menace” required that all gypsies register with the police. [45] They were then forced into concentration camps and ghettos. In Europe, thousands of gypsy women and children were killed in various campaigns. A separate ‘Gypsy family camp’ was set up at Auschwitz-Birkenau which saw many inmates die of exhaustion from hard labour, disease, malnutrition and gassing of children which were done by a Dr called Mengele. [46] Alex Bandy, a Hungarian journalist termed this campaign the ‘forgotten holocaust’.

Other groups targeted by the Nazis:

Political opponents such as Social Democrats, Communists and Trade union leaders were targeted by the Nazis. [47] In addition, Religious opponents such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Dissident priests (Catholic resistance to Nazi Germany) were also targeted by the Nazis. Those accused of ‘asocial’ crimes such as criminals or homosexuals were also targeted by the Nazi Party. [48]

Choices that people made:

Perpetrators:

Some of the perpetrators of the Nazi regime were secretaries, train drivers, bureaucrats while others actively took part in the killings. [49] Others perpetrators were in the Einsatzgruppen (Extermination squads) while others ran the concentration camps. However, many Nazi Party official denied complicity and said that they were merely following orders. Some perpetrators even claimed that they were negatively affected by their violent actions. [50]

 Bystanders:

The vast majority of people not just in Germany but were the world were bystanders. By choosing this stance of being a bystander and be different and passive witnesses, bystanders affirmed the perpetrators. Within the group of bystanders, others chose to become the perpetrators, while others chose to be resisters or rescuers. [51]

Rescuers under the Nazi regime chose to courageously speak out against the regime or actively rescue victims. Many of these rescuers attributed their actions to their convictions and morality to resist evil. Many of them acted courageously based on their faith. Many hid Jews or smuggled them out of occupied areas. [52]

Responses of the persecuted: exile, accommodation, defiance:

Responses from being persecuted by the Nazi Party took many forms such as partisan activities such as smuggling of secret messages, exchanging of food and weapons which sabotaged the Nazis attempt to persecute those they deemed undesirable. In addition, those persecuted responded by military engagement with the Nazi Party despite being heavily suppressed by Nazi troops. Victims continued with their way of life such as cultural traditions, religious practices, creating music and art such as poetry inside the concentration camps and ghettos. In addition, some of the victims managed to escape or go into exile. This caused underground resistance movements aimed at countering Nazi propaganda with anti-Nazi propaganda. The determination for survival was also a form of resistance by victims.

From persecution to mass murder: The Final solution:

The Holocaust (Was the genocide of European Jews during WWII) was carried out as the ‘Final Solution’ under the guise of war. The Einsatzgruppen followed German soldiers into invading other territories. They arrested everyone who resisted and killed those they thought could resist. The Nazis carried out forced removals of those they deemed sub-human or undesirables and carried out mass murders. [53] In Poland, thousand of Polish citizens were sent to labour and concentration camps. Jews were forcibly put in overcrowded ghettos were many would die of inhumane conditions and starvation.

Labour and extermination camps:

In 1941, the Einsatzgruppen followed invading troops into Russia where thousands of Jews were rounded up in preparation to send them to concentration camps. 700 Jews were gassed in vans in Chelmo. This reinforced Hitler’s desire for a ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish question. The death camps under the SS were established for this reason. [54] In addition, extermination centre sites were purposely located near railway lines so that there was efficient transportation. In 1942, there were mass deportations of Jews from the ghettos. A lot of them died along the way due to the unhygienic conditions, lack of food and heat in transportation. Gas chambers were created for the purposes of mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B pellets. Jewish bodies were cremated, and their ashes and bones were intended for fertilisers. Approximately 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. [55]

Forms of justice: The Nuremburg Trials:

Allied forces decided that the main perpetrators of the Holocaust should be put on trial. [56] An international military tribunal was set up at Nuremburg where 22 Nazi leaders were put on trial for crimes against humanity in addition to their other war crimes. [57] Nazi records provided a much of the evidence and details of the crimes the leaders and committed. The accused did not deny having committed these crimes but were claiming that these crimes were not against humanity. Others argued that they were simply following orders. 13 different trials were set up in Nuremburg between the years 1945 and 1950 and 12 defendants were sentenced to dead. In total 199 Nazis were put on trial. This type of justice is called punitive justice where the perpetrators get punished for their crimes. [58]

Shortcomings of the process:

These trials did not come without their shortcomings, some of which included small perpertrators not being called and held accountable for their actions as they could deny their complicity for what had happened. In addition, victorious allies carried out the trials and as a result, Germany and German people never faced what they had done. For many years there was a culture of silence and this could be regarded as a denial of responsibility. [59]

Positive outcomes of these trials:

These trials did come with some positives such as giving people new ways of thinking about how to tackle gross human rights violations. Restorative justice and mechanism such as truth and reconciliation commissions could be formed in the future. Examples of such truth and reconciliation commissions around the world are the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. [60]

This content was originally produced for the SAHO classroom by Ayabulela Ntwakumba and Thandile Xesi

[1] National Senior Certificate. “Grade 11 November History Paper 1 Exam,” National Senior Certificate, November 2018.

[2] Cohen, William B. "Literature and Race: Nineteenth Century French Fiction, Blacks and Africa 1800-1880." Race 16, no. 2 (1974): 181-205.

[3] Macdonald, Ian. "The Capitalist Way to Curb Discrimination." Race Today (1973): 241.

[4] http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/History_3_Colo…

[7] https://australianstogether.org.au/discover/indigenous culture/kinship.

[8] Moses, A. Dirk. "An antipodean genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia." Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 89-106.

[9] Genger, Peter. "The British Colonization of Australia: An Exposé of the Models, Impacts and Pertinent Questions." Peace and Conflict Studies 25, no. 1 (2018): 4.

[10] Barta, Tony. "Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Australia." Genocide and the modern age: etiology and case studies of mass death 2 (1987): 237-253.

[11] Foley, Gary. "Eugenics, Melbourne University and me." Tracker: be informed, be involved, be inspired (2012).

[12] Ibid.,

[13] Banner, Stuart. "Why Terra Nullius-Anthropology and Property Law in Early Australia." Law & Hist. Rev. 23 (2005): 95.

[14] Ibid.,

[15] Lester, Alan, and Nikita Vanderbyl. "The Restructuring of the British Empire and the Colonization of Australia, 1832–8." In History Workshop Journal, vol. 90, pp. 165-188. Oxford Academic, 2021.

[16] Hunter, Ernest, and Desley Harvey. "Indigenous suicide in australia, new zealand, canada and the united states." Emergency Medicine 14, no. 1 (2002): 14-23.

[17] Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. A view of the art of colonization, with present reference to the British Empire. JW Parker, 1849.

[18] Hollinsworth, David. Race and racism in Australia. Thomson Learning Australia, 2006.

[19] Ibid.,

[20] Hume, Lynne. "The dreaming in contemporary aboriginal Australia." Indigenous religions: a companion. London: Cassell (2000): 125-138.

[21] Read, Peter. Belonging: Australians, place and Aboriginal ownership. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[22] Ibid.,

[23] King, Gary, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, and Alexander F. Wagner. "Ordinary economic voting behavior in the extraordinary election of Adolf Hitler." The Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (2008): 951-996.

[24] Caldwell, Peter. "National Socialism and Constitutional Law: Carl Schmitt, Otto Koellreutter, and the Debate over the Nature of the Nazi State, 1993-1937." Cardozo L. Rev. 16 (1994): 399

[25] Bessel, Richard. "The Nazi capture of power." journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2 (2004): 169-188.

[26] Evans, Richard. "Hitler's Dictatorship." History Review 51 (2005): 20.

[27] Ibid.,

[28] Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "SA." Encyclopedia Britannica, November 11, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/SA-Nazi-organization .

[29] Ibid.,

[30] Ibid.,

[31] Power, Jonathan. "Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Deputy–From Boyhood to Chief Murderer of the Jews." In Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals, pp. 13-18. Brill Nijhoff, 2017.

[32] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aryan-1

[33] Ibid.,

[34] Ibid.,

[35] Grodin, Michael A., Erin L. Miller, and Johnathan I. Kelly. "The Nazi physicians as leaders in eugenics and “euthanasia”: Lessons for today." American journal of public health 108, no. 1 (2018): 53-57.

[36] Ibid.,

[37] Kevles, Daniel J. "Eugenics and human rights." Bmj 319, no. 7207 (1999): 435-438.

[38] Ibid.,

[39] Benedict, Susan, and Jochen Kuhla. "Nurses’ participation in the euthanasia programs of Nazi Germany." Western Journal of Nursing Research 21, no. 2 (1999): 246-263.

[40] ibid.,

[41] Johnson, Mary, and Carol Rittner. "Circles of Hell: Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Nazis." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548, no. 1 (1996): 123-137.

[42] Kroslak, Daniel. "Nuremberg Laws." The Lawyer Quarterly.-ISSN 8396 (1805): 184-194.

[43] Rippon, Anton. Hitler's Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games. Pen and Sword, 2006.

[44] Fitzgerald, Stephanie. Kristallnacht. Capstone, 2017.

[45] Lutz, Brenda Davis. "Gypsies as Victims of the Holocaust." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 3 (1995): 346-359.

[46] Ibid.,

[47] Evans, Richard. "Hitler's Dictatorship." History Review 51 (2005): 20.

[48] Ibid.,

[49] O’Byrne, Darren. "Perpetrators? Political civil servants in the Third Reich." In Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence, pp. 83-98. Routledge, 2018.

[50] Ibid.,

[51] Monroe, Kristen Renwick. "Cracking the code of genocide: The moral psychology of rescuers, bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust." Political Psychology 29, no. 5 (2008): 699-736.

[52] Ibid.,

[53] Breitman, Richard. "Plans for the final solution in early 1941." German Studies Review 17, no. 3 (1994): 483-493.

[54] Pohl, Dieter. "The Holocaust and the concentration camps." In Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, pp. 161-178. Routledge, 2009.

[55] Ibid.,

[56] Steinacher, Gerald J. "The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence Kim Christian Priemel." (2018): 123-124.

[57] https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nuremberg-trials

[58] Ibid.,

[59] Ibid.,

[60] Adam, Heribert, and Kanya Adam. "Merits and shortcomings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission." In Remembrance and Forgiveness, pp. 34-46. Routledge, 2020.

• Adam, Heribert, and Kanya Adam. "Merits and shortcomings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission." In Remembrance and Forgiveness, pp. 34-46. Routledge, 2020.
• Bessel, Richard. "The Nazi capture of power." journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2 (2004): 169-188.
• Benedict, Susan, and Jochen Kuhla. "Nurses’ participation in the euthanasia programs of Nazi Germany." Western Journal of Nursing Research 21, no. 2 (1999): 246-263.
• Breitman, Richard. "Plans for the final solution in early 1941." German Studies Review 17, no. 3 (1994): 483-493.
• Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "SA." Encyclopedia Britannica, November 11, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/topic/SA-Nazi-organization.
• Bunker, Raymond. "Systematic colonization and town planning in Australia and New Zealand." Planning Perspectives 3, no. 1 (1988): 59-80.
• Caldwell, Peter. "National Socialism and Constitutional Law: Carl Schmitt, Otto Koellreutter, and the Debate over the Nature of the Nazi State, 1993-1937." Cardozo L. Rev. 16 (1994): 399
• Dunn, Kevin M., James Forrest, Ian Burnley, and Amy McDonald. "Constructing racism in Australia." Australian journal of social issues 39, no. 4 (2004): 409-430.
• Docker, John. "A plethora of intentions: genocide, settler colonialism and historical consciousness in Australia and Britain." The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 1 (2015): 74-89.
• Fitzgerald, Stephanie. Kristallnacht. Capstone, 2017.
• Grodin, Michael A., Erin L. Miller, and Johnathan I. Kelly. "The Nazi physicians as leaders in eugenics and “euthanasia”: Lessons for today." American journal of public health 108, no. 1 (2018): 53-57.
• Hollinsworth, David. Race and racism in Australia. Thomson Learning Australia, 2006.
• Howard-Wagner, Deirdre. "Colonialism and the science of race difference." In TASA and SAANZ 2007 Joint Conference Refereed Conference Proceedings–Public Sociologies: Lessons and Trans-Tasman Comparisons, The Australian Sociological Association. 2007.
• Jalata, Asafa. "The impacts of English colonial terrorism and genocide on Indigenous/Black Australians." Sage Open 3, no. 3 (2013): 2158244013499143.
• Johnson, Mary, and Carol Rittner. "Circles of Hell: Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Nazis." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 548, no. 1 (1996): 123-137.
• Kevles, Daniel J. "Eugenics and human rights." Bmj 319, no. 7207 (1999): 435-438.
• King, Gary, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, and Alexander F. Wagner. "Ordinary economic voting behavior in the extraordinary election of Adolf Hitler." The Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4 (2008): 951-996.
• Kroslak, Daniel. "Nuremberg Laws." The Lawyer Quarterly.-ISSN 8396 (1805): 184-194.
• Lutz, Brenda Davis. "Gypsies as Victims of the Holocaust." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 3 (1995): 346-359.
• Monroe, Kristen Renwick. "Cracking the code of genocide: The moral psychology of rescuers, bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust." Political Psychology 29, no. 5 (2008): 699-736.
• Moses, A. Dirk. "An antipodean genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia." Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 1 (2000): 89-106.
• Moses, D., & Stone, D. (Eds.). (2013). Colonialism and genocide. Routledge.
• O’Byrne, Darren. "Perpetrators? Political civil servants in the Third Reich." In Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence, pp. 83-98. Routledge, 2018.
• Pohl, Dieter. "The Holocaust and the concentration camps." In Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany, pp. 161-178. Routledge, 2009.
• Power, Jonathan. "Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s Deputy–From Boyhood to Chief Murderer of the Jews." In Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals, pp. 13-18. Brill Nijhoff, 2017.
• Rippon, Anton. Hitler's Olympics: The Story of the 1936 Nazi Games. Pen and Sword, 2006.
• Robinson, Shirleene, and Jessica Paten. "The question of genocide and Indigenous child removal: the colonial Australian context." Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 4 (2008): 501-518.
• Rogers, Thomas James, and Stephen Bain. "Genocide and frontier violence in Australia." Journal of Genocide Research 18, no. 1 (2016): 83-100.
• Short, Doctor Damien. Redefining genocide: Settler colonialism, social death and ecocide. Zed Books Ltd., 2016.
• Steinacher, Gerald J. "The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence Kim Christian Priemel." (2018): 123-124.
• Torrens, Robert. Colonization of south Australia. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1836.
• Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. A view of the art of colonization, with present reference to the British Empire. JW Parker, 1849.

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The concept of race has historically signified the division of humanity into a small number of groups based upon five criteria: (1) Races reflect some type of biological foundation, be it Aristotelian essences or modern genes; (2) This biological foundation generates discrete racial groupings, such that all and only all members of one race share a set of biological characteristics that are not shared by members of other races; (3) This biological foundation is inherited from generation to generation, allowing observers to identify an individual’s race through her ancestry or genealogy; (4) Genealogical investigation should identify each race’s geographic origin, typically in Africa, Europe, Asia, or North and South America; and (5) This inherited racial biological foundation manifests itself primarily in physical phenotypes, such as skin color, eye shape, hair texture, and bone structure, and perhaps also behavioral phenotypes, such as intelligence or delinquency.

This historical concept of race has faced substantial scientific and philosophical challenge, with some important thinkers denying both the logical coherence of the concept and the very existence of races. Others defend the concept of race, albeit with substantial changes to the foundations of racial identity, which they depict as either socially constructed or, if biologically grounded, neither discrete nor essentialist, as the historical concept would have it.

Both in the past and today, determining the boundaries of discrete races has proven to be most vexing and has led to great variations in the number of human races believed to be in existence. Thus, some thinkers categorized humans into only four distinct races (typically white or Caucasian, Black or African, yellow or Asian, and red or Native American), and downplayed any biological or phenotypical distinctions within racial groups (such as those between Scandinavians and Spaniards within the white or Caucasian race). Other thinkers classified humans into many more racial categories, for instance arguing that those humans “indigenous” to Europe could be distinguished into discrete Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean races.

The ambiguities and confusion associated with determining the boundaries of racial categories have led to the widespread position that discrete or essentialist races are socially constructed, not biologically real. However, significant scholarly debate persists regarding whether reproductive isolation, either during human evolution or through modern practices barring miscegenation, may have generated sufficient genetic isolation as to justify using the term race to signify the existence of non-discrete human groups that share not only physical phenotypes but also clusters of genetic material. In addition, scholarly debate exists concerning the formation and character of socially constructed, discrete racial categories. For instance, some scholars suggest that race is inconceivable without racialized social hierarchies, while others argue that egalitarian race relations are possible. Finally, substantial controversy surrounds the moral status of racial identity and solidarity and the justice and legitimacy of policies or institutions aimed at undermining racial inequality.

This entry focuses primarily on contemporary scholarship regarding the conceptual, ontological, epistemological, and normative questions pertaining to race, with an introductory section on the history of the concept of race in the West and in Western philosophy. Aside from some discussion in Section 5, it does not focus in depth on authors such as Frederick Douglass , W.E.B. Du Bois , or Frantz Fanon , or movements, such as Négritude , Critical Philosophy of Race , or Philosophy of Liberation . Interested readers should consult these relevant entries for insight into these and other topics important to the study of race in philosophy.

In Section 1, we trace the historical origins and development of the concept of race. Section 2 covers contemporary philosophical debates over whether races actually exist. Thereafter, in Section 3 we examine the differences between race and ethnicity. Section 4 surveys debates among moral, political and legal philosophers over the validity of racial identity, racial solidarity, and race-specific policies such as affirmative action and race-based representation. Section 5 outlines engagement with the concept of race within Continental philosophy.

1. History of the Concept of Race

2. do races exist contemporary philosophical debates, 3. race versus ethnicity, 4. race in moral, political and legal philosophy, 5. race in continental philosophy, other internet resources, related entries.

The dominant scholarly position is that the concept of race is a modern phenomenon, at least in Europe and the Americas. However, there is less agreement regarding whether racism , even absent a developed race concept, may have existed in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The influential work of classicist Frank Snowden (1970; 1983), who emphasized the lack of antiblack prejudice in the ancient world, led many scholars of race to conclude that racism did not exist in that epoch. However, later classicists have responded that Snowden’s work unnecessarily reduced all forms of racism to its peculiarly American version based on skin color and other markers of non-white identity. Benjamin Isaac (2004) and Denise McCoskey (2012) contend that the ancient Greeks and Romans did hold proto-racist views that applied to other groups which today might be considered white. Isaac persuasively argues that these views must be considered proto-racist : although they were formed without the aid of a modern race concept grounded in ideas of deterministic biology (2004, 5), they nevertheless resembled modern racism by attributing “to groups of people common characteristics considered to be unalterable because they are determined by external factors or heredity” (2004, 38). More importantly, both Isaac and McCoskey contend that ancient proto-racism influenced the development of modern racism.

Perhaps the first, unconscious stirrings of the concept of race arose within the Iberian Peninsula. Following the Moorish conquest of Andalusia in the eighth century C.E., the Iberian Peninsula became the site of the greatest intermingling between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim believers. During and after their reconquista (reconquest) of the Muslim principalities in the peninsula, the Catholic Monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand sought to establish a uniformly Christian state by expelling first the Jews (in 1492) and then the Muslims (in 1502). But because large numbers of both groups converted to Christianity to avoid expulsion (and before this to avoid persecution), the monarchs distrusted the authenticity of these Jewish and Muslim conversos (converts). To ensure that only truly faithful Christians remained within the realm, the grand inquisitor Torquemada reformulated the Inquisition to inquire not just into defendants’ religious faith and practices but into their lineage. Only those who could demonstrate their ancestry to those Christians who resisted the Moorish invasion were secure in their status in the realm. Thus, the idea of purity of blood was born ( limpieza de sangre ), not fully the biological concept of race but perhaps the first occidental use of blood heritage as a category of religio-political membership (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, vii; Hannaford 1996, 122–126; Frederickson 2002, 31–35).

The Iberian Peninsula may also have witnessed the first stirrings of antiblack and anti-Native-American racism. Since this region was the first in Europe to utilize African slavery while gradually rejecting the enslavement of fellow European Christians, Iberian Christians may have come to associate Black people as physically and mentally suitable only for menial labor. In this they were influenced by Arab slave merchants, who assigned the worst tasks to their dark-skinned slaves while assigning more complex labor to light or tawny-skinned slaves (Frederickson 2002, 29). The “discovery” of the New World by Iberian explorers also brought European Christians into contact with indigenous Americans for the first time. This resulted in the heated debate in Valladolid in 1550 between Bartolomé Las Casas and Gines de Sepúlveda over whether the Indians were by nature inferior and thus worthy of enslavement and conquest. Whether due to Las Casas’ victory over Sepúlveda, or due to the hierarchical character of Spanish Catholicism which did not require the dehumanization of other races in order to justify slavery, the Spanish empire did avoid the racialization of its conquered peoples and African slaves. Indeed, arguably it was the conflict between the Enlightenment ideals of universal freedom and equality versus the fact of the European enslavement of Africans and indigenous Americans that fostered the development of the idea of race (Blum 2002, 111–112; Hannaford 1996, 149–150).

While events in the Iberian Peninsula may have provided the initial stirrings of modern racial sentiments, the concept of race, with its close links to ideas of deterministic biology, emerged with the rise of modern natural philosophy and its concern with taxonomy (Smith 2015). The first important articulation of the race concept came with the 1684 publication of “A New Division of the Earth” by Francois Bernier (1625–1688) (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, viii; Hannaford 1996, 191, 203). Based on his travels through Egypt, India, and Persia, this essay presented a division of humanity into “four or five species or races of men in particular whose difference is so remarkable that it may be properly made use of as the foundation for a new division of the earth” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 1–2). First were the peoples inhabiting most of Europe and North Africa, extending eastward through Persia, northern and central India, and right up to parts of contemporary Indonesia. Despite their differing skin tones, these peoples nevertheless shared common physical characteristics, such as hair texture and bone structure. The second race was constituted by the people of Africa south of the Sahara Desert, who notably possessed smooth Black skin, thick noses and lips, thin beards, and wooly hair. The peoples inhabiting lands from east Asia, through China, today’s central Asian states such as Uzbekistan, and westward into Siberia and eastern Russia represented the third race, marked by their “truly white” skin, broad shoulders, flat faces, flat noses, thin beards, and long, thin eyes, while the short and squat Lapps of northern Scandinavia constituted the fourth race. Bernier considered whether the indigenous peoples of the Americas were a fifth race, but he ultimately assigned them to the first (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 2–3).

But while Bernier initiated the use of the term “race” to distinguish different groups of humans based on physical traits, his failure to reflect on the relationship between racial division and the human race in general mitigated the scientific rigor of his definition (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, viii). Central to a scientific concept of race would be a resolution of the question of monogenesis versus polygenesis. Monogenesis adhered to the Biblical creation story in asserting that all humans descended from a common ancestor, perhaps Adam of the Book of Genesis; polygenesis, on the other hand, asserted that different human races descended from different ancestral roots. Thus, the former position contended that all races are nevertheless members of a common human species, whereas the latter saw races as distinct species.

David Hume’s position on the debate between polygenesis versus monogenesis is the subject of some scholarly debate. The bone of contention is his essay “Of National Characters,” where he contends that differences among European nations are attributable not to natural differences but to cultural and political influences. Amidst this argument against crude naturalism, Hume inserts a footnote in the 1754 edition, wherein he writes: “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation” (Zack 2002, 15; emphasis added). Whereas even the most barbarous white nations such as the Germans “have something eminent about them,” the “uniform and constant difference” in accomplishment between whites and non-whites could not occur “if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men” (Zack 2002, 15). Responding to criticism, he softens this position in the 1776 edition, restricting his claims to natural inferiority only to “negroes,” stating that “ scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, not even of individual eminent in action or speculation” (Zack 2002, 17; Hume 1776 [1987], 208; emphasis added). Richard Popkin (1977) and Naomi Zack (2002, 13–18) contend that the 1754 version of the essay assumes, without demonstration, an original, polygenetic difference between white and non-white races. Andrew Valls (2005, 132) denies that either version of the footnote espouses polygenesis.

A strong and clear defense of monogenesis was provided by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in his essay “Of the Different Human Races,” first published in 1775 and revised in 1777. Kant argued that all humans descend from a common human “lineal root genus” in Europe, which contained the biological “seeds” and “dispositions” that can generate the distinct physical traits of race when triggered by divergent environmental factors, especially combinations of heat and humidity. This, combined with patterns of migration, geographic isolation, and in-breeding, led to the differentiation of four distinct, pure races: the “noble blond” of northern Europe; the “copper red” of America (and east Asia); the “black” of Senegambia in Africa; and the “olive-yellow” of Asian-India. Once these discrete racial groups were developed over many generations, further climatic changes will not alter racial phenotypes (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 8–22).

Yet despite the distinction generated between different races, Kant’s monogenetic account led him to maintain that the different races were part of a common human species. As evidence, he adduced the fact that individuals from different races were able to breed together, and their offspring tended to exhibit blended physical traits inherited from both parents. Not only did blending indicate that the parents were part of a common species; it also indicated that they are of distinct races. For the physical traits of parents of the same race are not blended but often passed on exclusively: a blond white man and a brunette white woman may have four blond children, without any blending of this physical trait; whereas a Black man and a white woman will bear children who blend white and Black traits (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 9–10). Such inter-racial mixtures accounted for the existence of liminal individuals, whose physical traits seem to lie between the discrete boundaries of one of the four races; peoples who do not fit neatly into one or another race are explained away as groups whose seeds have not been fully triggered by the appropriate environmental stimuli (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 11).

The “science” of race was furthered by the man sometimes considered to be the father of modern anthropology, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). In his doctoral dissertation, “On the Natural Variety of Mankind,” first published in 1775, Blumenbach identified four “varieties” of mankind: the peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. His essay was revised and republished both in 1781, wherein he introduced a fifth variety of mankind, that inhabiting the South Pacific islands, and in 1795, wherein he first coined the term “Caucasian” to describe the variety of people inhabiting Europe, West Asia, and Northern India. This term reflected his claim that this variety originated in the Caucuses mountains, in Georgia, justifying this etiology through reference to the superior beauty of the Georgians. The 1795 version also included the terms Mongolian to describe the non-Caucasian peoples of Asia, Ethiopian to signify Black Africans, American to denote the indigenous peoples of the New World, and Malay to identify the South Pacific Islanders (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 27–33; Hannaford 1996, 207).

While noting differences in skin tone, he based his varieties upon the structures of the cranium, which supposedly gave his distinctions a stronger scientific foundation than the more superficial characteristic of color (Hannaford 1996, 206). In addition, he strongly denied polygenetic accounts of racial difference, noting the ability of members of different varieties to breed with each other, something that humans were incapable of doing with other species. Indeed, he took great pains to dismiss as spurious accounts of Africans mating with apes or of monstrous creatures formed through the union of humans with other animals (Hannaford 1996, 208–209). In final support of his more scientific, monogenist approach, Blumenbach posited the internal, biological force which generated racial difference, the “nisus formativus,” which when triggered by specific environmental stimuli generated the variations found within the varieties of humans (Hannaford 1996, 212).

Despite the strong monogenist arguments provided by Kant and Blumenbach, polygenesis remained a viable intellectual strain within race theory, particularly in the “American School of Anthropology,” embodied by Louis Agassiz, Robins Gliddon, and Josiah Clark Nott. Agassiz was born in Switzerland, received an M.D. in Munich and later studied zoology, geology, and paleontology in various German universities under the influence of Romantic scientific theories. His orthodox Christian background initially imbued him with a strong monogenist commitment, but upon visiting America and seeing an African American for the first time, Agassiz experienced a type of conversion experience, which led him to question whether these remarkably different people could share the same blood as Europeans. Eventually staying on and making his career in America, and continually struck by the physical character of African Americans, Agassiz officially announced his turn to polygenesis at the 1850 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Charleston, South Carolina. Nott, a South Carolina physician, attended the same AAAS meeting and, along with Gliddon, joined Agassiz in the promulgation of the American School’s defense of polygenesis (Brace 2005, 93–103).

Along with Agassiz, Nott was also influenced by the French romantic race theorist Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), whose “Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races” (1853–1855) Nott partially translated into English and published for the American audience. Although the Catholic Gobineau initially espoused monogenesis, he later leaned towards polygenesis and ended up ambivalent on this issue (Hannaford 1996, 268–269). Nevertheless, Gobineau lent credence to the white racial supremacy that Nott supported (Brace 2005, 120–121). Gobineau posited two impulses among humans, that of attraction and repulsion. Civilization emerges when humans obey the law of attraction and intermingle with peoples of different racial stocks. According the Gobineau, the white race was created through such intermingling, which allowed it alone to generate civilization, unlike the other races, which were governed only by the law of repulsion. Once civilization is established, however, further race mixing leads to the degeneration of the race through a decline in the quality of its blood. Consequently, when the white race conquers other Black or yellow races, any further intermingling will lead it to decline. Thus, Gobineau claimed that the white race would never die so long as its blood remains composed of its initial mixture of peoples. Notably, Nott strategically excised those sections discussing the law of attraction when translating Gobineau’s essay for an American audience (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 45–51).

Eventually, polygenesis declined through the intellectual success of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (Brace 2005, 124). Darwin himself weighed in on this debate in the chapter “On the Races of Man” in his book The Descent of Man (1871), arguing that as the theory of evolution gains wider acceptance, “the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 68), with the former winning out. The rest of the essay entertained both sides of the debate regarding whether or not different races constitute different species or sub-species of humans. Although Darwin did not explicitly take sides in this debate, the preponderance of his argument gives little support to the idea of races being different species. For instance, he noted that couples from different races produce fertile offspring, and that individuals from different races seem to share many mental similarities. That said, while Darwinian evolution may have killed off polygenesis and the related idea that the races constituted distinct species, it hardly killed off race itself. Darwin himself did not think natural selection would by itself generate racial distinctions, since the physical traits associated with racial differences did not seem sufficiently beneficial to favor their retention; he did, however, leave open a role for sexual selection in the creation of races, through repeated mating among individuals with similar traits (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 77–78). Consequently, later race thinkers would replace polygenesis with natural selection and sexual selection as scientific mechanisms whereby racial differentiation could slowly, unintentionally, but nevertheless inevitably proceed (Hannaford 1996, 273).

Sexual selection became a central focus for race-thinking with the introduction of the term “eugenics” in 1883 by Francis Galton (1822–1911) in his essay “Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development” (Hannaford 1996, 290). Focusing on physical as opposed to “moral” qualities, Galton advocated selective breeding to improve the “health, energy, ability, manliness, and courteous disposition” of the human species in his later essay “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 80). Following the same currents of “Social Darwinism” that advocated the evolutionary improvement of the human condition through active human intervention, Galton proposed making eugenics not only an element in popular culture or “a new religion” (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 82) but even a policy enforced by the American government. While positive eugenics, or the enforced breeding of higher types, never became law, negative eugenics, or the sterilization of the feebleminded or infirm, did become public policy enforced by a number of American states and upheld by the United States Supreme Court in an eight-to-one decision in Buck v. Bell (274 U.S. 200, 1927). The widespread acceptance of negative eugenics can be inferred by the fact that the Court Opinion justifying the decision was authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a figure usually associated with progressive and civil libertarian positions, and whose doctrine of “clear and present danger” sought to expand the protection of free speech.

The apogee of post-Darwinian race-thinking was arguably reached in the book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), the son-in-law of German opera composer Richard Wagner. Chamberlain argued in the evolutionary terms of sexual selection that distinct races emerged through geographical and historical conditions which create inbreeding among certain individuals with similar traits (Hannaford 1996, 351). Moving from this initial specification, Chamberlain then argued that the key strands of western civilization—Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy and art—emerged from the Aryan race. Jesus, for instance, was held to be of Aryan stock, despite his Jewish religion, since the territory of Galilee was populated by peoples descended from Aryan Phonecians as well as by Semitic Jews. Similarly, Aristotle’s distinction between Greeks and Barbarians was reinterpreted as a racial distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans. These Greek and Christian strands became united in Europe, particularly during the Reformation, which allowed the highest, Teutonic strain of the Aryan race to be freed from constraining Roman Catholic cultural fetters. But while Roman institutions and practices may have constrained the Teutonic Germans, their diametric opposite was the Jew, the highest manifestation of the Semitic Race. The European religious tensions between Christian and Jew were thus transformed into racial conflicts, for which conversion or ecumenical tolerance would have no healing effect. Chamberlain’s writings, not surprisingly, have come to be seen as some of the key intellectual foundations for twentieth century German anti-Semitism, of which Adolf Hitler was simply its most extreme manifestation.

If Chamberlain’s writings served as intellectual fodder for German racial prejudice, Madison Grant (1865–1937) provided similar foundations for American race prejudice against Black people and Native Americans in his popular book The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Rejecting political or educational means of ameliorating the destitution of the subordinate racial groups in America, Grant instead advocated strict segregation and the prohibition of miscegenation, or the interbreeding of members of different races (Hannaford 1996, 358). Like Galton, Grant had similar success in influencing American public policy, both through the imposition of racist restrictions on immigration at the federal level and through the enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws in thirty states, until such prohibitions were finally overturned by the United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia (388 U.S. 1 [1967]).

If the apogee of biological race was reached in the early twentieth century, its decline began at about the same time. While writers such as Chamberlain and Grant popularized and politicized biological conceptions of race hierarchy, academic anthropologists since Blumenbach gave the concept of race its scientific validity. But academic anthropology also provided the first challenge to biological race in the person of Columbia University professor Franz Boas (1858–1942), a German-born Jewish immigrant to the United States. Boas challenged the fixed character of racial groups by taking on one of the key fundaments to racial typology, cranium size. Boas showed that this characteristic was profoundly affected by environmental factors, noting that American-born members of various “racial” types, such as Semitic Jews, tended to have larger crania than their European-born parents, a result of differences in nourishment. From this he concluded that claims about racially differential mental capacities could similarly be reduced to such environmental factors. In so doing, Boas undermined one measure of racial distinction, and although he did not go so far as to reject entirely the concept of biological race itself, he strongly influenced anthropologists to shift their focus from putatively fixed biological characteristics to apparently mutable cultural factors in order to understand differences among human groups (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 84–88; Brace 2005, 167–169; Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 42–43).

A stronger anthropological rejection of the biological conception of race was leveled by Ashley Montagu (1905–1999). Drawing on insights from modern, experimental genetics, Montagu forcefully argued that the anthropological conception of race relied on grouping together various perceptible physical characteristics, whereas the real building blocks of evolution were genes, which dictated biological changes among populations at a much finer level. The morphological traits associated with race, thus, were gross aggregates of a variety of genetic changes, some of which resulted in physically perceptible characteristics, many others of which resulted in imperceptible changes. Moreover, since genetic evolution can occur through both the mixture of different genes and the mutation of the same gene over generations, the traits associated with races cannot be attributed to discrete lines of genetic descent, since the dark skin and curly hair of one individual may result from genetic mixture while the same traits in another individual may result from genetic mutation (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 100–107). Montagu’s efforts eventually resulted in the publication of an official statement denying the biological foundations of race by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1950, although it would take until 1996 for the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) to publish a similar document (Brace 2005, 239).

Ron Mallon (2004, 2006, 2007) provides a nice sketch of the contemporary philosophical terrain regarding the status of the concept of race, dividing it into three valid competing schools of thought regarding the ontological status of race, along with the discarded biological conception. Racial naturalism signifies the old, biological conception of race, which depicts races as bearing “biobehavioral essences: underlying natural (and perhaps genetic) properties that (1) are heritable, biological features, (2) are shared by all and only the members of a race, and (3) explain behavioral, characterological, and cultural predispositions of individual persons and racial groups” (2006, 528–529). While philosophers and scientists have reached the consensus against racial naturalism, philosophers nevertheless disagree on the possible ontological status of a different conception of race. Mallon divides such disagreements into three metaphysical camps ( racial skepticism , racial constructivism , and racial population naturalism ) and two normative camps ( eliminativism and conservationism ). We have used ‘constructivism’ throughout for the sake of consistency but it should be read as interchangeable with ‘constructionism.’

Racial skepticism holds that because racial naturalism is false, races of any type do not exist. Racial skeptics, such as Anthony Appiah (1995, 1996) and Naomi Zack (1993, 2002) contend that the term race cannot refer to anything real in the world, since the one thing in the world to which the term could uniquely refer—discrete, essentialist, biological races—have been proven not to exist. Zack (2002, 87–88) provides an accessible summary of the racial skeptic’s argument against the biological foundations for race, sequentially summarizing the scientific rejection of essences, geography, phenotypes, post-Mendelian transmission genetics, and genealogies as possible foundations for races. Aristotelian essences , thought to ground the common characteristics of distinct species, were correctly rejected by early modern philosophers. If essences cannot even ground differences among species, then they clearly cannot ground the differences among races, which even nineteenth century racial science still understood as members of the same species. Whereas folk theories rely on geography to divide humanity into African, European, Asian, and Amerindian races, contemporary population genetics reveal the vacuity of this foundation for two reasons. First, geographically based environmental stimuli lead to continuous physical adaptations in skin, hair and bone rather than the discrete differences associated with race; and second, although mitochondrial DNA mutations provide evidence of the geographical origins of populations, these mutations do not correlate with the physical traits associated with racial groups. Similarly, phenotypes cannot ground folk theories of race: for instance, differences in skin tone are gradual, not discrete; and blood-type variations occur independently of the more visible phenotypes associated with race, such as skin color and hair texture. Race cannot be founded upon transmission genetics , since the genes transmitted from one generation to the next lead to very specific physical traits, not general racial characteristics shared by all members of a putatively racial group. And finally, genealogy cannot ground race, since clades (populations descended from a common ancestor) may have common genetic characteristics, but these need not correlate with the visible traits associated with races. Zack concludes: “Essences, geography, phenotypes, genotypes, and genealogy are the only known candidates for physical scientific bases of race. Each fails. Therefore, there is no physical scientific basis for the social racial taxonomy” (Zack 2002, 88).

Racial skeptics like Appiah and Zack adopt normative racial eliminativism , which recommends discarding the concept of race entirely, according to the following argument. Because of its historical genealogy, the term race can only refer to one or more discrete groups of people who alone share biologically significant genetic features. Such a monopoly on certain genetic features could only emerge within a group that practices such a high level of inbreeding that it is effectively genetically isolated. Such genetic isolation might refer to the Amish in America (Appiah 1996, 73) or to Irish Protestants (Zack 2002, 69), but they clearly cannot refer to those groupings of people presently subsumed under American racial census categories. Because the concept “race” can only apply to groups not typically deemed races (Amish, Irish Protestants), and because this concept cannot apply to groups typically deemed races (African Americans, Whites, Asians, Native Americans), a mismatch occurs between the concept and its typical referent. Thus, the concept of race must be eliminated due to its logical incoherence (Mallon 2006, 526, 533).

Appiah has since modified his skepticism in such a way that softens the eliminitivist element of his position. Appiah has come to argue for racial nominalism by admitting the importance of “human folk races,” namely, that they are forms of social identity that do in fact exist (2006, 367). The way in which they are social identities, however, is a problem because we treat them as if there were some biological underpinning to them (2006, 367). The folk theory of race, then, is false because it is based on mistaken beliefs, yet it is nonetheless true that we continue to categorize people along its lines. Appiah’s nominalist view of race aims to reveal how these social identities work by analyzing the labels we use for them. According to Appiah there are three ways that we categorize using folk racial labels: ascription, identification, and treatment, and it takes all three for a given label to be a functioning social identity (2006, 368–370). As a result, we come to live as these identities and look to them as a central resource for constructing our lives. Furthermore, norms of identification and authenticity arise around them (2006, 372). Since there is no biological story that can be told to ground these labels then race is not real (2006, 372). For a critique of Appiah’s modified view that focuses on Appiah (1996) see Ronald R. Sundstrom (2002).

Racial constructivism refers to the argument that, even if biological race is false, races have come into existence and continue to exist through “human culture and human decisions” (Mallon 2007, 94). Race constructivists accept the skeptics’ dismissal of biological race but argue that the term still meaningfully refers to the widespread grouping of individuals into certain categories by society, indeed often by the very members of such racial ascriptions. Normatively, race constructivists argue that since society labels people according to racial categories, and since such labeling often leads to race-based differences in resources, opportunities, and well-being, the concept of race must be conserved, in order to facilitate race-based social movements or policies, such as affirmative action, that compensate for socially constructed but socially relevant racial differences. While sharing this normative commitment to race conservationism , racial constructivists can be subdivided into three groups with slightly different accounts of the ontology of race. As we will see below, however, Sally Haslanger’s eliminitivist constructivism illustrates how these commitments can come apart.

Thin constructivism depicts race as a grouping of humans according to ancestry and genetically insignificant, “superficial properties that are prototypically linked with race,” such as skin tone, hair color and hair texture (Mallon 2006, 534). In this way, thin constructivists such as Robert Gooding-Williams (1998), Lucius Outlaw (1990, 1996) and Charles Mills (1998) rely on the widespread folk theory of race while rejecting its scientific foundation upon racial naturalism. Interactive kind constructivism goes further, in arguing that being ascribed to a certain racial category causes the individuals so labeled to have certain common experiences (Mallon 2006, 535; Piper 1992). For instance, if society ascribes you as black, you are likely to experience difficulty hailing cabs in New York or are more likely to be apprehended without cause by the police (James 2004, 17). Finally, institutional constructivism emphasizes race as a social institution, whose character is specific to the society in which it is embedded and thus cannot be applied across cultures or historical epochs (Mallon 2006, 536). Michael Root (2000, 632) notes that a person ascribed as Black in the United States would likely not be considered Black in Brazil, since each country has very different social institutions regarding the division of humanity into distinct races. Similarly, Paul Taylor (2000) responds to Appiah’s racial skepticism by holding that races, even if biologically unreal, remain real social objects (Mallon 2006, 536–537). Indeed, in a later work Taylor (2004) argues that the term “race” has a perfectly clear referent, that being those people socially ascribed to certain racial categories within the United States, regardless of the widespread social rejection of biological racial naturalism.

Sally Haslanger’s constructivism (2000, 2010, 2019) is not, however, conservationist. She understands races as racialized groups, whose membership requires three criteria. One, members are those who are “observed or imagined” to have certain bodily features that are evidence of certain ancestry from certain geographical locations; two, “having (or being imagined to have)” those features marks members as occupying either a subordinate or privileged social position, thereby justifying that position; and three, the satisfaction of the first two criteria plays a role in members’ systemic subordination or privilege (2019, 25–26). Racial identity in such contexts need not focus exclusively on subordination or privilege, as “many forms of racial identity are important, valuable, and in some cases even inevitable responses to racial hierarchy” (2019, 29–30). She worries, however, that even though we should embrace “cultural groups marked by ancestry and appearance” in the short term to fight for justice, she worries about embracing them for the long term (2019, 30).

Constructivism also cleaves along political and cultural dimensions, a distinction owed to Chike Jeffers (Jeffers, 2013, 2019). Haslanger’s view is paradigmatic of political constructivism by understanding the meaning of race as determined by hierarchical relations of power by definition : “race is made real wholly or most importantly by hierarchical relations of power” (Jeffers 2019, 48). Jeffers’ cultural constructivism corrects for political constructivism’s inability to account for race existing after racism, including the idea of racial equality (2013, 421; 2019, 71). Cultural constructivism rejects “the idea that cultural difference is less important than differences in power relations for understanding racial phenomena in the present” (2019, 65). At the extreme, political constructivism argues for, one, differential power relations bring racial difference into existence; two, differential power relations are fundamental for understanding the present reality of race; and three, differential power relations are essential to race, so race will cease to exist in an egalitarian society where appearance and ancestry do not correlate to certain hierarchical positions (2019, 56–57). Jeffers concedes race’s political origin while rejecting the two other ways that power relations define race (2013, 419; 2019, 57–58). The cultural significance of race can be seen in three ways. First, even the emergence of racial categories counts as a cultural shift, insofar as new social contexts are created in which those viewed as being of different races are also viewed as having different cultures. Second, there are “novel forms of cultural difference” that emerge in the wake of racial difference. And third, racial groups are shaped culturally by happenings prior to racial formation (2019, 62–63). Jeffers thus writes of Blackness, “What it means to be a Black person, for many of us, including myself, can never be exhausted through reference to problems of stigmatization, discrimination, marginalization, and disadvantage, as real and as large-looming as these factors are in the racial landscape as we know it. There is also joy in blackness, a joy shaped by culturally distinctive situations” (2013, 422).

There are also views that challenge the broad strokes of constructivism while avoiding racial skepticism: Lionel K. McPherson’s deflationary pluralism (2015), Joshua Glasgow’s basic racial realism (2015, with Jonathan M. Woodward, 2019), and Michael O. Hardimon’s deflationary realism (2003, 2014, 2017). McPherson argues that “race” should be replaced with his concept of socioancestry, since “‘race’ talk overall is too ambiguous and contested to be salvaged in the search for a dominant understanding” (2015, 676). He aims to sidestep Appiah’s eliminativism by claiming that deflationary pluralism “does not maintain that ‘race’ talk is necessarily an error and does not take a hard line about whether races exist” (2015, 675). Socioancestry retains the possibility of “color-conscious social identity” without the burdens of assumptions or confusions about race and racial nature (2015, 686). This is because it is “visible continental ancestry,” rather than race, which is the root of color-consciousness (2015, 690). Socioancestry, then, focuses on visible continental ancestry alone to explain social group formation. Accordingly, socioancestral identities develop “when persons accept (or are ascribed) a social identity because they share a component of continental ancestry that distinctively shapes color-conscious social reality” (2015, 690).

Glasgow’s basic racial realism aims to capture our operative meaning of race: “the meaning that governs our use of the term, even when we are unaware of it” (2019, 115). Glasgow defines his position in the following way: “Races, by definition, are relatively large groups of people who are distinguished from other groups of people by having certain visible biological traits (such as skin color) to a disproportionate extent.” The position is therefore anti-realist, since it claims that races are neither biologically nor socially real (2019, 117). Glasgow’s position is grounded in judgments about our commitments, believing that we are more willing to give up on the biological basis for race than we are to give up on the idea that there are certain “core features and identities” connected to the idea of race” (2019, 127). In other words, disbelieving in the biological reality of race doesn’t lead to eliminativism. Glasgow holds, however, that it also doesn’t lead to social constructivism. Race is not socially made because, “no matter which social facts we attend to, we can always imagine them disappearing while race stays. And if race is conceptually able to persist across all social practices, then by definition it is not a social phenomenon” (2019, 133). This intuition is based in his focus on our ordinary usage of the term “race,” which is fully captured by visible traits.

Hardimon’s deflationary realism argues that we need four interrelated race concepts to coherently answer the question of what race is to human beings: the racialist concept of race, the minimalist concept of race, the populationist concept of race, and the concept of socialrace (2017, 2–3, 7). The racialist concept of race is the view that there are fixed patterns of race-based moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics that are heritable, based in an underlying biological essence, correlate to physical characteristics, and form a distinct racial hierarchy (2017, 15–16). Minimalist race “says that people differ in shape and color in ways that correspond to differences in their geographical ancestry. Essentially that is all it says” (2017, 6; see also 2003). It aims to capture in “a nonmalefic way” what the racialist concept of race says that it captures. In other words, it admits of the nonsocial and biological reality of race but in a value-neutral way (2017, 7). Populationist race aims to do the same thing in a more robust and specific way by giving a genetic underpinning to the minimalist conception based on a “geographically separated and reproductively isolated founding population” (2017, 99). This concept is distinguished from cladistic race because it does not require monophyly (2017, 110). Finally, socialrace captures race in terms of its social relations and practices. It refers to “the social groups in racist societies that appear to be racialist races as social groups that falsely appear to be biological groups” (2017, 10; see also 2014). Hardimon argues that it is only through using all four concepts, with the rejection of the first being the basis for the construction of the latter three, that we can actually understand our concept of race.

The third school of thought regarding the ontology of race is racial population naturalism . This camp suggests that, although racial naturalism falsely attributed cultural, mental, and physical characters to discrete racial groups, it is possible that genetically significant biological groupings could exist that would merit the term races. Importantly, these biological racial groupings would not be essentialist or discrete: there is no set of genetic or other biological traits that all and only all members of a racial group share that would then provide a natural biological boundary between racial groups. Thus, these thinkers confirm the strong scientific consensus that discrete, essentialist races do not exist. However, the criteria of discreteness and essentialism would also invalidate distinctions between non-human species, such as lions and tigers. As Philip Kitcher puts it, “there is no…genetic feature…that separates one species of mosquito or mushroom from another” (Kitcher 2007, 294–296; Cf. Mallon 2007, 146–168). Rather, biological species are differentiated by reproductive isolation, which is relative, not absolute (since hybrids sometimes appear in nature); which may have non-genetic causes (e.g., geographic separation and incompatible reproduction periods or rituals); which may generate statistically significant if not uniform genetic differences; and which may express distinct phenotypes. In effect, if the failure to satisfy the condition of discreteness and essentialism requires jettisoning the concept of race, then it also requires jettisoning the concept of biological species. But because the biological species concept remains epistemologically useful, some biologists and philosophers use it to defend a racial ontology that is “biologically informed but non-essentialist,” one that is vague, non-discrete, and related to genetics, genealogy, geography, and phenotype (Sesardic 2010, 146).

There are three versions of racial population naturalism: cladistic race; socially isolated race; and genetically clustered race. Cladistic races are “ancestor-descendant sequences of breeding populations that share a common origin” (Andreasen 2004, 425). They emerged during human evolution, as different groups of humans became geographically isolated from each other, and may be dying out, if they have not already, due to more recent human reproductive intermingling (Andreasen 1998, 214–216; Cf. Andreasen 2000, S653–S666). Socially isolated race refers to the fact that legal sanctions against miscegenation might have created a genetically isolated African American race in the USA (Kitcher 1999). Finally, defenders of genetically clustered race argue that although only 7% of the differences between any two individuals regarding any one specific gene can be attributed to their membership in one of the commonly recognized racial categories, the aggregation of several genes is statistically related to a small number of racial categories associated with major geographic regions and phenotypes (Sesardic 2010; Kitcher 2007, 304).

The question is whether these new biological ontologies of race avoid the conceptual mismatches that ground eliminativism. The short answer is that they can, but only through human intervention. Socially isolated race faces no mismatch when applied to African Americans, defined as the descendants of African slaves brought to the United States. However, this racial category would not encompass Black Africans. Moreover, because African American race originated in legally enforced sexual segregation, it is “both biologically real and socially constructed” (Kitcher 2007, 298). Genetic clustering would seem to provide an objective, biological foundation for a broader racial taxonomy, but differences in clustered genes are continuous, not discrete, and thus scientists must decide where to draw the line between one genetically clustered race and another. If they program their computers to distinguish four genetic clusters, then European, Asian, Amerindian, and African groups will emerge; if only two clusters are sought, then only the African and Amerindian “races” remain (Kitcher 2007, 304). Thus, genetic clustering avoids racial mismatch only through the decisions of the scientist analyzing the data. The same problem also confronts cladistic race, since the number of races will vary from nine, at the most recent period of evolutionary reproductive isolation, to just one, if we go back to the very beginning, since all humans were originally Africans. But in addition, cladistic race faces a stronger mismatch by “cross-classifying” groups that we typically think of as part of the same race, for example by linking northeast Asians more closely with Europeans than with more phenotypically similar southeast Asians. Robin Andreasen defends the cladistic race concept by correctly arguing that folk theories of race have themselves generated counter-intuitive cross-classifications, particularly with respect to the Census’ Asian category, which previously excluded Asian Indians and now excludes native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. (Andreasen 2005, 100–101; Andreasen 2004, 430–431; Cf. Glasgow 2003, 456–474; Glasgow 2009, 91–108). But this hardly saves her argument, since the US Census’s history of shifting racial categories and past use of ethnic and religious terms (e.g., Filipino, Hindu, and Korean) to signify races is typically taken as evidence of the social , rather than biological, foundations of race (Espiritu 1992, Chapter 5).

Quayshawn Spencer (2012, 2014, 2019) is resistant to arguments that cladistic subspecies are a viable biological candidate for race (2012, 203). Instead, he defends a version of biological racial realism that understands “biologically real” as capturing “all of the entities that are used in empirically successful biology…and that adequately rules out all of the entities that are not” (2019, 77; see also 95). Spencer argues that such an entity exists and can be found in the US government’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and its racial classifications. The basis for this claim is that population genetics has identified five distinctive “human continental populations” that satisfy the criteria for biological reality (2019, 98; 95). The OMB classifications map onto these continental populations. The importance of the OMB is that its ubiquity in our lives means that one of the primary ways that we talk about race is through its categories. Spencer highlights this centrality when he points out the ways that Americans self-report their races correspond to the parameters of the OMB classifications (2019, 83–85). Spencer is pluralist about race talk, however, meaning that OMB race is just one dominant meaning of race, while there is no single dominant meaning among users of the term (2019, 213).

In each case, racial population naturalism encounters problems in trying to demarcate discrete boundaries between different biological populations. If discreteness is indispensable to a human racial taxonomy, then mismatches can only be avoided, if at all, through human intervention. But as noted above, biological species are also not genetically discrete, and thus boundaries between non-human species must also be imposed through human intervention. And just as the demarcation of non-human species is justified through its scientific usefulness, so too are human racial categories justified. For instance, Andreason contends that a cladistic race concept that divides northeastern from southeastern Asians is scientifically useful for evolutionary research, even if it conflicts with the folk concept of a unified Asian race. In turn, the concepts of genetically clustered and socially isolated race may remain useful for detecting and treating some health problems. Ian Hacking provides a careful argument in favor of the provisional use of American racial categories in medicine. Noting that racial categories do not reflect essentialist, uniform differences, he reiterates the finding that there are statistically significant genetic differences among different racial groups. As a result, an African American is more likely to find a bone marrow match from a pool of African American donors than from a pool of white donors. Thus, he defends the practice of soliciting African American bone marrow donors, even though this may provide fodder to racist groups who defend an essentialist and hierarchical conception of biological race (Hacking 2005, 102–116; Cf. Kitcher 2007, 312–316). Conversely, Dorothy Roberts emphasizes the dangers of using racial categories within medicine, suggesting that it not only validates egregious ideas of biological racial hierarchy but also contributes to conservative justifications for limiting race-based affirmative action and even social welfare funding, which supposedly would be wasted on genetically inferior minority populations. In effect, race-based medicine raises the specter of a new political synthesis of colorblind conservatism with biological racialism (Roberts 2008, 537–545). However, Roberts’ critique fails to engage the literature on the statistical significance of racial categories for genetic differences. Moreover, she herself acknowledges that many versions of colorblind conservatism do not rely at all on biological justifications.

Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann (1998) provide a helpful discussion of the differences between the concepts of race and ethnicity. Relying on social constructivism, they define race as “a human group defined by itself or others as distinct by virtue of perceived common physical characteristics that are held to be inherent…Determining which characteristics constitute the race…is a choice human beings make. Neither markers nor categories are predetermined by any biological factors” (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 24). Ethnicity, conversely, is defined as a sense of common ancestry based on cultural attachments, past linguistic heritage, religious affiliations, claimed kinship, or some physical traits (1998, 19). Racial identities are typically thought of as encompassing multiple ethnic identities (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 26). Thus, people who are racially categorized as black may possess a variety of ethnic identities based either on African national or cultural markers (e.g., Kenyan, Igbo, Zulu) or the newer national, sub-national, or trans-national identities created through the mixing of enslaved populations in the Americas (e.g., African American, Haitian, West Indian).

Cornell and Hartmann outline five additional characteristics that distinguish race from ethnicity: racial identity is typically externally imposed by outsiders, as when whites created the Negro race to homogenize the multiple ethnic groups they conquered in Africa or brought as slaves to America; race is a result of early globalization, when European explorers “discovered” and then conquered peoples with radically different phenotypical traits; race typically involves power relations, from the basic power to define the race of others to the more expansive power to deprive certain racial groups of social, economic, or political benefits; racial identities are typically hierarchical, with certain races being perceived as superior to others; and racial identity is perceived as inherent, something individuals are born with (1998, 27–29).

Race and ethnicity differ strongly in the level of agency that individuals exercise in choosing their identity. Individuals rarely have any choice over their racial identity, due to the immediate visual impact of the physical traits associated with race. Individuals are thought to exercise more choice over ethnic identification, since the physical differences between ethnic groups are typically less striking, and since individuals can choose whether or not to express the cultural practices associated with ethnicity. So an individual who phenotypically appears white with ancestors from Ireland can more readily choose whether to assert their Irish identity (by celebrating St. Patrick’s Day) than whether to choose their white identity (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 29–30). Moreover, Mary Waters (1990) argues that the high level of intermarriage among white Americans from various national ancestries grants their children significant “ethnic options” in choosing with which of their multiple heritages to identify. Waters (1999) and Philip Kasinitz (1992) document how phenotypically black West Indian immigrants exercise agency in asserting their ethnic identity in order to differentiate themselves from native-born African Americans, but discrimination and violence aimed at all Black people, regardless of ethnicity, strongly constrains such agency.The greater constraints on racial identity stem from the role of informal perceptions, discriminatory social action, and formal laws imposing racial identity, such as Census categorization (Nobles 2000), the infamous “hypodescent” laws, which defined people as black if they had one drop of African blood (Davis 1991), and judicial decisions such as the “prerequisite cases,” which determined whether specific immigrants could be classified as white and thus eligible for naturalized citizenship (Lopez 1996).

The line between race and ethnicity gets blurred in the case of Asians and Latinos in the United States. Yen Le Espiritu (1992) notes that Asian American racial identity, which of course encompasses a remarkable level of ethnic diversity, results from a combination of external assignment and agency, as when Asians actively respond to anti-Asian discrimination or violence through political action and a sense of shared fate. Consequently, Espiritu uses the term “panethnicity” to describe Asian American identity, a concept which has racial connotations, given the role of “racial lumping” together of members of diverse Asian ethnicities into a single racial group defined by phenotypical traits. Thus, she declares that “African Americans [are] the earliest and most developed pan-ethnic group in the United States” (1992, 174). Hispanic or Latino identity exhibits traits similar to pan-ethnicity. Indeed, unlike Asian identity, Hispanic identity is not even a formal racial identity under the Census. However, informal perceptions, formal laws, and discrimination based on physical appearance nevertheless tend to lump together various nationalities and ethnicities that share some connection to Latin America (Rodriquez 2000). Moreover, scholars have noted that Jews (Brodkin 1998) and the Irish (Ignatiev 1995) were once were considered distinct, non-white races but are now considered to be racially white ethnic groups, partly by exercising agency in distancing themselves from African Americans exercising political power. Thus, it is conceivable that groups today considered to be sociological racial groups could transform into something more like an ethnic group. For this reason, Blum describes Hispanics and Asians as incompletely racialized groups (Blum 2002, 149–155).

A robust philosophical debate has emerged regarding the status of Hispanic or Latino identity. Jorge Gracia (2000) defends the utility of Hispanic ethnic identity as grounded primarily in the shared, linguistic culture that can be traced to the Iberian Peninsula. Jorge Garcia (2001, 2006) challenges this approach, arguing that the diversity of individual experiences undermines the use of Hispanic ethnicity as a meaningful form of collective identity. Linda Martin Alcoff (2006) develops a “realist” defense of Latino identity against charges of essentialism and views it as a category of solidarity that develops in reaction to white privilege. Christina Beltran (2010), on the other hand, does not try to paper over the diversity within Latinidad , which she instead portrays as a pluralistic, fragmented, and agonistic form of political action.

Two strands in moral, political, and legal philosophy are pertinent to the concept of race. One strand examines the broader conceptual and methodological questions regarding the moral status of race and how to theorize racial justice; the other strand normatively assesses specific policies or institutional forms that seek to redress racial inequality, such as affirmative action, racially descriptive representation, the general question of colorblindness in law and policy, residential racial segregation, and racism in the criminal justice system and policing.

Lawrence Blum, Anthony Appiah, and Tommie Shelby articulate indispensable positions in addressing the moral status of the concept of race. Blum (2002) examines both the concept of race and the problem of racism. He argues that “racism” be restricted to two referents: inferiorization , or the denigration of a group due to its putative biological inferiority; and antipathy , or the “bigotry, hostility, and hatred” towards another group defined by its putatively inherited physical traits (2002, 8). These two moral sins deserve this heightened level of condemnation associated with the term racism, because they violate moral norms of “respect, equality, and dignity” and because they are historically connected to extreme and overt forms of racial oppression (2002, 27). But because these connections make “racism” so morally loaded a term, it should not be applied to “lesser racial ills and infractions” that suggest mere ignorance, insensitivity or discomfort regarding members of different groups (28), since doing so will apply a disproportionate judgment against the person so named, closing off possible avenues for fruitful moral dialogue.

Due to the historical connection between racism and extreme oppression, Blum argues against using the term race, since he rejects its biological foundation. Instead, he advocates using the term “racialized group” to denote those socially constructed identities whose supposedly inherited common physical traits are used to impose social, political, and economic costs. To Blum, “racialized group” creates distance from the biological conception of race and it admits of degrees, as in the case of Latinos, whom Blum describes as an “incompletely racialized group” (2002, 151). This terminological shift, and its supposed revelation of the socially constructed character of physiognomically defined identities, need not require the rejection of group-specific policies such as affirmative action. Members of sociologically constructed racialized identities suffer real harms, and laws might have to distinguish individuals according to their racialized identities in order to compensate for such harms. Nevertheless, Blum remains ambivalent about such measures, arguing that even when necessary they remain morally suspect (2002, 97).

Similar ambivalence is also expressed by Anthony Appiah, earlier discussed regarding the metaphysics of race. While his metaphysical racial skepticism was cited as grounding his normative position of eliminativism , Appiah is “against races” but “for racial identities” (1996). Because of a wide social consensus that races exist, individuals are ascribed to races regardless of their individual choices or desires. Moreover, racial identity remains far more salient and costly than ethnic identity (1996, 80–81). As a result, mobilization along racial lines is justifiable, in order to combat racism. But even at this point, Appiah still fears that racial identification may constrain individual autonomy by requiring members of racial groups to behave according to certain cultural norms or “scripts” that have become dominant within a specific racial group. Appiah thus concludes, “Racial identity can be the basis of resistance to racism; but even as we struggle against racism…let us not let our racial identities subject us to new tyrannies” (1996, 104). This residual ambivalence, to recall the metaphysical discussions of the last section, perhaps ground Mallon’s contention that Appiah remains an eliminativist rather than a racial constructivist , since ideally Appiah would prefer to be free of all residual constraints entailed by even socially constructed races.

Tommie Shelby responds to the ambivalence of Appiah and Blum by distinguishing classical black nationalism , which rested upon an organic black identity, with pragmatic black nationalism , based on an instrumental concern with combating antiblack racism (2005, 38–52; 2003, 666–668). Pragmatic nationalism allows Black people to generate solidarity across class or cultural lines, not just through the modus vivendi of shared interests but upon a principled commitment to racial equality and justice (2005, 150–154). As a result, black solidarity is grounded upon a principled response to common oppression, rather than some putative shared identity (2002), thus mitigating the dangers of biological essentialism and tyrannical cultural conformity that Appiah associates with race and racial identities. Anna Stubblefield (2005) provides an alternative defense of Black solidarity by comparing it to familial commitments.

Shelby (2005, 7) briefly mentions that his pragmatic, political version of black solidarity is compatible with John Rawls’s Political Liberalism , but his more detailed defense of the ideal social contract method of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice for theorizing racial justice has drawn substantial controversy (Shelby 2004). Elizabeth Anderson eschews ideal theory for analyzing racial justice because it assumes motivational and cognitive capacities beyond those of ordinary humans; it risks promoting ideal norms (like colorblindness) under unjust conditions that require race-specific policies; and its idealizing assumptions, like an original position in which parties do not know relevant personal and social racial facts, precludes recognition of historical and present racial injustice. She instead uses a normative framework of democratic equality to ground her moral imperative of integration.

Charles Mills, extending his critique of how early modern social contract thinking obfuscates racial injustice (1997), fears that Rawls’s ideal theory can similarly serve as an ideology that whitewashes non-white oppression (Mills 2013). But rather than jettisoning a contractarian approach entirely, Mills instead develops a model of a non-ideal contract, in which the parties do not know their own racial identities but are aware of their society’s history of racial exploitation and its effects. Because the parties know of racial hierarchy but do not know if they will be its beneficiaries or victims, Mills hypothesizes that they will rationally agree to racial reparations as a form of corrective or rectificatory justice (Pateman and Mills 2007, Chapters 3, 4, 8).

Shelby responds that, while Rawls’s ideal theory of justice excludes a theory of rectification because it is not comprehensive, rectificatory justice is not only complementary but in fact presupposes an ideal theory that can clarify when injustices have occurred and need to be rectified. More importantly, Shelby suggests that complying with rectificatory justice through racial reparations could well leave Black people living in a society that nevertheless remains racially unjust in other ways. For this reason, Shelby concludes that ideal theory remains indispensable (2013).

Christopher Lebron (2013, 28–42) also suggests that the approaches of Rawls and Mills are complementary, but in a very different way. He argues that Rawls’s focus on the basic structure of society provides explanatory mechanisms through which white supremacy persists, something unspecified in earlier work by Mills (2003). And in sharp contrast to Shelby (2013), Lebron criticizes Mills for rehabilitating Rawlsian contract thinking, since even a non-ideal form eliminates the epistemological advantage of a non-white perspective on white supremacy. Instead of reformulating contractarian thinking to fit the needs of racial justice, Lebron instead focuses on analyzing how “historically evolved power” and “socially embedded power” perpetuate racial injustice.

Turning to the second strand of practical philosophy devoted to race, various scholars have addressed policies such as affirmative action, race-conscious electoral districting, and colorblindness in policy and law. The literature on affirmative action is immense, and may be divided into approaches that focus on compensatory justice, distributive justice, critiques of the concept of merit, and diversity of perspective. Alan Goldman (1979) generally argues against affirmative action, since jobs or educational opportunities as a rule should go to those most qualified. Only when a specific individual has been victimized by racial or other discrimination can the otherwise irrelevant factor of race be used as a compensatory measure to award a position or a seat at a university. Ronald Fiscus (1992) rejects the compensatory scheme in favor of a distributive justice argument. He claims that absent the insidious and invidious effects of a racist society, success in achieving admissions to selective universities or attractive jobs would be randomly distributed across racial lines. Thus, he concludes that distributive justice requires the racially proportional distribution of jobs and university seats. Of course, Fiscus’s argument displaces the role of merit in the awarding of jobs or university admissions, but this point is addressed by Iris Young (1990, Chapter 7), who argues that contemporary criteria of merit, such as standardized testing and educational achievement, are biased against disadvantaged racial and other groups, and rarely are functionally related to job performance or academic potential. Finally, Michel Rosenfeld (1991) turns away from substantive theories of justice in favor of a conception of justice as reversibility, a position influenced by the “Discourse Ethics” of Jürgen Habermas (1990), which defines justice not by the proper substantive awarding of goods but as the result of a fair discursive procedure that includes all relevant viewpoints and is free of coercive power relations. Thus, affirmative action is justified as an attempt to include racially diverse viewpoints. All of these positions are summarily discussed in a useful debate format in Cohen and Sterba (2003).

The issues of race-conscious electoral districting and descriptive racial representation have also garnered substantial attention. Race-conscious districting is the practice of drawing geographically based electoral districts in which the majority of voters are Black. Descriptive racial representation holds that Black populations are best represented by Black politicians. Iris Marion Young (1990, 183–191) provides a spirited defense of descriptive representation for racial minorities, grounded in their experiences of “oppression, the institutional constraint on self-determination”, and domination “the institutional constraint on self-determination” (1990, 37). Anne Phillips (1995) furthers this position, arguing that representatives who are members of minority racial groups can enhance legislative deliberation. Melissa Williams (1998) also defends the deliberative contribution of descriptive racial representation, but adds that minority constituents are more likely to trust minority representatives, since both will be affected by laws that overtly or covertly discriminate against minority racial groups. Finally, Jane Mansbridge (1999) carefully demonstrates why a critical mass of minority representatives is needed, in order to adequately advocate for common minority interests as well as to convey the internal diversity within the group. In a later work, Young (2000) addresses critics who argue that descriptive representation relies upon group essentialism, since members of a racial group need not all share the same interests or opinions. In response, Young suggests that members of the same racial group do share the same “social perspective” grounded in common experiences, similar to the interactive kind variant of racial constructivism discussed earlier. But because it is unclear that Black individuals are more likely to share common experiences than common interests or opinions, Michael James prioritizes using race-conscious districting to create Black racial constituencies which can hold Black or non-Black representatives accountable to Black interests (James 2011). Abigail Thernstrom (1987) condemns race-conscious districting for violating the original principles behind the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 15 th Amendment, by promoting the election of black representatives rather than simply guaranteeing black voters the right to cast ballots. J. Morgan Kousser (1999) responds that race-conscious districting simply reflects the right to cast a “meaningful” vote, as implied by the 15 th Amendment protection against not only the denial but also the “abridgment” of the right to vote. Lani Guinier (1994) compellingly suggests that instead of drawing majority black districts, we should adopt more proportional electoral system that facilitate the electoral strength of racial and other minorities. Michael James (2004) suggests that alternative electoral systems facilitate not only descriptive racial representation but also democratic deliberation across racial lines.

A general advantage of using alternative electoral systems to enhance minority racial representation is that they are technically colorblind, not requiring lawmakers or judges to group citizens according to their racial identities. The general value of colorblindness is an ongoing topic of debate within legal philosophy. Drawing on Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson , and a not-uncontroversial interpretation of the origins of the equal protection clause, Andrew Kull (1992) argues that contemporary American statutory and constitutional law should strive to be colorblind and combat racial inequality without dividing citizens into different racial groups. Ian Haney Lopez (2006, 143–162), on the other hand, fears “colorblind white dominance,” whereby facially race-neutral laws leave untouched the race-based inequality that operates within American political, legal, and economic structures. Elizabeth Anderson (2010) provides a trenchant critique of colorblindness as a normative standard for law, policy, or ethics. Racial segregation and the potential for integration have garnered much less philosophical attention than affirmative action and racially descriptive representation. Bernard Boxill (1992) offers a treatment of busing and self-segregation, while Howard McGary (1999) offers a clarification of integration and separation. Iris Young (2002, chapter 6) treats residential segregation in the context of regional democracy, while Owen Fiss (2003) analyzes it in the context of the legacy of racism. Anderson herself (2010) argues for the moral imperative of integration, with Tommie Shelby (2014) and Ronald Sundstrom (2013) offering critical responses to Anderson’s argument. More recently, Andrew Valls (2018, chapter 6) has written on the subject.

In recent years, the problem of racism within policing and criminal justice in the United States has attracted intense popular and scholarly attention. Mathias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser (2004) offer a qualified defense of racial profiling that engages both utilitarian and non-consequentialist reasoning. Annabelle Lever’s (2005) objection and response prompted a subsequent round of debate (Risse 2007, Lever 2007). Michelle Alexander (2010) famously depicted the contemporary American criminal justice system as the “New Jim Crow,” for its intense racial disparities. Naomi Zack (2015) provides a trenchant critique of racial profiling and police homicide. David Boonin (2011), on the other hand, reluctantly defends racial profiling on pragmatic grounds. Finally, Adam Hosein (2018) argues against it for reasons of political equality. Shelby (2016) offers a justification of Black resistance based in the unjust legacy of racial segregation while deepening his earlier critique of Anderson’s view.

While the debates in contemporary philosophy of race within the analytic tradition have largely revolved around whether or not races exist along with criteria for determining realness or existence, philosophers working in the Continental traditions have taken up the concept of race along other dimensions (see Bernasconi and Cook 2003 for an overview). First, those working within the traditions of Existentialism and Phenomenology have called on Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, among others, to understand how race and functions within our lived, bodily experiences of everyday life. This strand of scholarship focuses on the materiality of race. As Emily S. Lee puts it, “both the social structural and the individual subconscious levels of analysis rely on perceiving the embodiment of race” (2014, 1). Second, philosophers building on the work of Michel Foucault have articulated genealogical understandings of race that focus on its historical emergence as a concept and the ways that it has functioned within discourses of knowledge and power.

Frantz Fanon has been the primary influence for those understanding race and racism within Existentialism and Phenomenology. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon writes, “I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects” (2008/1952, 89). Furthermore, this “inferiority is determined by the Other,” by the “white gaze” (2008/1952, 90). Such a position is understood through the schema of the body: “In a white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one’s body is solely negating. It’s an image in the third person” (2008/1952, 90). Rather than being at home in his own body, and moving “out of habit,” Fanon understands his body as existing primarily as an object for others, requiring him to move “by implicit knowledge” of the rules and norms of that white world (2008/1952, 91).

Fanon critiques Sartre’s understanding of race and racism by pointing out that Sartre understands antiracism as a negative movement that will be overcome (2008/1952, 111–112). Sartre treats antiracism as the transition toward something else and not as an end in itself. Against this view Fanon writes, “ Sartre forgets that the Black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (2008/1952, 117). He is trapped by his body schema, “a toy in the hands of the white man” (2008/1952, 119).

Lewis Gordon draws on both Fanon and Sartre in articulating his Africana existentialism. He distinguishes between Existentialism as a specific historical European movement and philosophies of existence, or existential philosophies, which are preoccupied with “freedom, anguish, responsibility, embodied agency, sociality, and liberation.” These concerns yield a focus on the “lived context of concern” (2000, 10). For Gordon, due to the history of racial oppression of Black peoples, an Africana existential philosophy revolves around the questions, “what does it mean to be a problem, and what is to be understood by Black suffering?” (2000, 8).

According to Gordon, what is sometimes referred to as the “race question” is really a question about the status of Blackness, for “race has emerged, throughout its history, as the question fundamentally of ‘the blacks’ as it has for no other group” (2000, 12). Rather than a denial that other groups have been racialized, the claim instead is that such other racializations have been conditioned on a scale of European personhood to Black subpersonhood (see also Mills 1998, 6–10). Blackness itself has been characterized as “the breakdown of reason” and “an existential enigma” in such a way that to ask after race and racialization is to ask after Blackness in the first instance.

Both Gordon and Zack use Sartre’s notion of bad faith to understand race. We can understand bad faith as the evasion of responsibility and fidelity to human freedom, and an understanding of the human being as a for-itself. Bad faith falsely turns the human being into an object without agency, into an in-itself. For Gordon, antiblack racism conceives of Blackness itself as a problem so as to avoid having to understand Black problems. As a result, actual Black people disappear along with any responsibility to them (1997, 74). Gordon gives the example of The Philadelphia Negro , Du Bois’ sociological study of the residents of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. Gordon recounts how those commissioning the study set Du Bois up to fail so that he would only perpetuate the pathologizing of the Black population, presenting Blackness itself as a problem rather than attempt to understand the problems of Black people and communities (2000, 69).

Whereas Gordon uses bad faith to understand antiblack racism, Zack does so to deepen her eliminativism. For Sartre, authenticity is the antidote to bad faith – to live authentically is to understand and embrace human freedom rather than evade it. Zack’s eliminativism attributes bad faith to those who affirm that racial designations describe human beings when in fact they do not (1993, 3–4). If racial identifications lack adequate support because races do not exist, then identification as mixed race is also done in bad faith. Instead, Zack understands her position of “anti-race” as true authenticity that looks to the future in the name of freedom and resistance to oppression in the name of racelessness (1993, 164).

Embodiment and visibility are central to these views. Gordon understands the body as “our perspective in the world,” which occurs along (at least) three matrices: seeing, being seen, and being conscious of being seen (1997, 71). In an antiblack world this means that the Black body is a form of absence, going unseen in the same manner as Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man (1997, 72–3). George Yancy tells us that he writes from his “lived embodied experience,” which is a “site of exposure” (2008, 65). Black embodiment here is the lens used to critique whiteness and its normative gaze. For Yancy, Black resistance itself decodes and recodes Black embodied existence, affirming the value of the Black body in the face of centuries of white denial (2008, 112–3).

Linda Martín Alcoff offers a phenomenological account of race that highlights a “visual registry,” which is socially and historically constructed and that is “determinant over individual experience” (2006, 194). Like Yancy, Alcoff locates race in embodied lived experience. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, Alcoff notes how the way that our perceptual practices are organized affects the way we come to know the world (2006, 188). When race operates through visibility, these ways of normalized perceptual knowing become racialized. As she notes, “racial consciousness works through learned practices and habits of visual discrimination and visual marks on the body…race exists there on the body itself” (2006, 196).

Lee argues that racial meaning fits squarely within the space that a phenomenological framework seeks to explore, namely, the space between the natural and the cultural, the objective and the subjective, and thinking and nonthinking (Lee 2014, 8). Furthermore, a phenomenological approach can illuminate how, even when race is understood as a social construction, it can nonetheless become naturalized through “the sedimentation of racial meaning into the very structures and practices of society” (Lee 2019, xi).

A second line of thought runs through the work of Michel Foucault. In his 1975–1976 lectures at the Collège de France , published as Society Must Be Defended , Foucault details the emergence of a discourse on race beginning in early 17th Century England. According to Foucault, race war discourse emerges through claims of illegitimacy against the Stuart monarchy. These claims were couched in the language of injustice as well as foreign invasion, in which an indigenous race is pitted against in invading outsider (2003, 60). Race, at this point, is not a biological concept, instead referring to lineage, custom, and tradition (2003, 77). Only later does this cultural notion of race transform into the scientific notion of race.

Cornel West employs a Foucaultian methodology to produce a genealogy of modern racism (1982). West analyzes how the discourse of modernity came into being to show how central white supremacy is to its practices of knowledge and meaning making (47). By modern discourse he means, “The controlling metaphors, notions, categories, and norms that shape the predominant conception of truth and knowledge in the modern West,” which are driven by the scientific revolution, the Cartesian transformation of philosophy, and the classical revival (50). It is a discourse comprising certain forms of rationality, scientificity, objectivity, and aesthetic and cultural ideals, the parameters of which exclude Black equality from the outset, marking it as unintelligible and illegitimate within the prevailing norms of discourse and knowledge (47–48). Notions of truth and knowledge produced by these three forces are governed by a value-free subject that observes, compares, orders, and measures in order to obtain evidence and make inferences that verify the true representations of reality.

Ladelle McWhorter uses Foucault’s lectures to conduct a genealogy of racism and sexual oppression of a more proximate time and place. According to McWhorter, “racism in twentieth-century Anglo-America [has] to be understood in light of Foucault’s work on normalization,” where racism exists as a crusade against deviance, abnormality, and pathology (2009, 12). Building on Foucault’s analysis of race war discourse McWhorter carries out a genealogy of race, ultimately arguing that race and sexuality “are historically codependent and mutually determinative” (2009, 14). Anglo-American discourse on race is therefore linked to discourses on eugenics, the family, sexual predation, normality, and population management, all of which function within the networks of power that Foucault referred to biopower (2009, 15). Ann Laura Stoler (1995) offers an extended reconstruction and critique of Foucault’s treatment of race in light of colonialism and empire. Joy James goes even further, arguing that Foucault is not useful for thinking about race at all (1996, chapter 1).

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Gobineau ’s Essay on the Inequality of Human Races

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The most important promoter of racial ideology in Europe during the mid-19th century was Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau , who had an almost incalculable effect on late 19th-century social theory. Published in 1853–55, his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races was widely read, embellished, and publicized by many different kinds of writers. He imported some of his arguments from the polygenists, especially the American Samuel Morton. Gobineau claimed that the civilizations established by the three major races of the world (white, Black, and yellow) were all products of the white races and that no civilization could emerge without their cooperation. The purest of the white races were the Aryans. When Aryans diluted their blood by intermarriage with lower races, they helped to bring about the decline of their civilization.

Following Boulainvilliers, Gobineau advanced the notion that France was composed of three separate races—the Nordics, the Alpines, and the Mediterraneans—that corresponded to France’s class structure. Each race had distinct mental and physical characteristics; they differed in character and natural abilities, such as leadership, economic resourcefulness, creativity, and inventiveness, and in morality and aesthetic sensibilities. The tall, blond Nordics, who were descendants of the ancient Germanic tribes, were the intellectuals and leaders. Alpines, who were brunet and intermediate in size between Nordics and Mediterraneans, were the peasants and workers; they required the leadership of Nordics. The shorter, darker Mediterraneans he considered a decadent and degenerate product of the mixture of unlike races; to Gobineau they were “nigridized” and “ semitized .”

Americans of this period were among Gobineau’s greatest admirers. So were many Germans. The latter saw in his works a formula for unifying the German peoples and ultimately proclaiming their superiority. Many proponents of German nationalism became activists and organized political societies to advance their goals. They developed a new dogma of “ Aryanism ” that was to expand and become the foundation for Nazi race theories in the 20th century.

Gobineau was befriended by the great composer Richard Wagner , who was a major advocate of racial ideology during the late 19th century. It was Wagner’s future son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain , writing at the end of the 19th century, who glorified the virtues of the Germans as the superrace. In a long book titled The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century , Chamberlain explained the history of the entire 19th century—with its European conquests, dominance, colonialism, and exploitation—as a product of the great accomplishments of the German people. Though English-born, Chamberlain had a fanatical attraction to all things German and an equally fanatic hatred of Jews . He believed Jesus was a Teuton, not a Jew, and argued that all Jews had as part of their racial character a moral defect. Fueled by rising anti-Semitism in Europe, race ideology facilitated the manufacture of an image of Jews as a distinct and inferior population . Chamberlain’s publications were widely disseminated in Germany during the turn of the 20th century. His speculations about the greatness of the Germans and their destiny were avidly consumed by many, especially young men such as Adolf Hitler and his companions in the National Socialist Party .

As this history shows, European intellectual leaders took the constituent components of the ideology of race and molded them to the exigencies of their particular political and economic circumstances, applying them to their own ethnic and class conflicts. Race thus emerged as a powerful denoter of unbridgeable differences that could be applied to any circumstances, particularly of ethnic conflict . The German interpretation of race eventually took the ideology to its logical extreme, the belief that a “superior race” has the right to eliminate “inferior races.”

Hereditarian ideology also flourished in late 19th-century England . Two major writers and proselytizers of the idea of the innate racial superiority of the upper classes were Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer . Galton wrote books with titles such as Hereditary Genius (1869), in which he showed that a disproportionate number of the great men of England—the military leaders, philosophers, scientists, and artists—came from the small upper-class stratum. Spencer incorporated the themes of biological evolution and social progress into a grand universal scheme. Antedating Darwin, he introduced the ideas of competition, the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest . His “fittest” were the socially and economically most successful not only among groups but within societies. The “savage” or inferior races of men were clearly the unfit and would soon die out. For this reason, Spencer advocated that governments eschew policies that helped the poor; he was against all charities, child labour laws, women’s rights, and education for the poor and uncivilized. Such actions, he claimed, interfered with the laws of natural evolution; these beliefs became known as social Darwinism .

The hereditarian ideologies of European writers in general found a ready market for such ideas among all those nations involved in empire building. In the United States these ideas paralleled and strengthened the racial ideology then deeply embedded in American values and thought. They had a synergistic effect on ideas of hereditary determinism in many aspects of American life and furthered the acceptance and implementation of IQ tests as an accurate measure of innate human ability.

“Race” ideologies in Asia, Australia, Africa, and Latin America

As they were constructing their own racial identities internally, western European nations were also colonizing most of what has been called, in recent times, the Third World , in Asia and Africa. Since all the colonized and subordinated peoples differed physically from Europeans, the colonizers automatically applied racial categories to them and initiated a long history of discussions about how such populations should be classified. There is a very wide range of physical characteristics among Third World peoples, and subjective impressions generated much scientific debate, particularly about which features were most useful for racial classification. Experts never reached agreement on such classifications, and some questions, such as how to classify indigenous Australians, were subjects of endless debate and were never resolved.

Race and race ideology had become so deeply entrenched in American and European thought by the end of the 19th century that scholars and other learned people came to believe that the idea of race was universal. They searched for examples of race ideology among indigenous populations and reinterpreted the histories of these peoples in terms of Western conceptions of racial causation for all human achievements or lack thereof. Thus, the so-called Aryan invasions of the Indian subcontinent that began about 2000 bce were seen, and lauded by some, as an example of a racial conquest by a light-skinned race over darker peoples. The Aryans of ancient India (not to be confused with the Aryans of 20th-century Nazi and white supremacist ideology) were pastoralists who spread south into the Indian subcontinent and intermingled with sedentary peoples, such as the Dravidians, many of whom happened to be very dark-skinned as a result of their long adaptation to a hot, sunny tropical environment . Out of this fusion of cultures and peoples, modern Indian culture arose. Such conquests and syntheses of new cultural forms have taken place numerous times in human history, even in areas where there was little or no difference in skin colour (as, for example, with the westward movements of Mongols and Turkish peoples).

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Ideas of race in early america.

• Sean P. Harvey Sean P. Harvey Department of History, Seton Hall University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.262
• Published online: 05 April 2016

“Race,” as a concept denoting a fundamental division of humanity and usually encompassing cultural as well as physical traits, was crucial in early America. It provided the foundation for the colonization of Native land, the enslavement of American Indians and Africans, and a common identity among socially unequal and ethnically diverse Europeans. Longstanding ideas and prejudices merged with aims to control land and labor, a dynamic reinforced by ongoing observation and theorization of non-European peoples. Although before colonization, neither American Indians, nor Africans, nor Europeans considered themselves unified “races,” Europeans endowed racial distinctions with legal force and philosophical and scientific legitimacy, while Natives appropriated categories of “red” and “Indian,” and slaves and freed people embraced those of “African” and “colored,” to imagine more expansive identities and mobilize more successful resistance to Euro-American societies. The origin, scope, and significance of “racial” difference were questions of considerable transatlantic debate in the age of Enlightenment and they acquired particular political importance in the newly independent United States.

Since the beginning of European exploration in the 15th century, voyagers called attention to the peoples they encountered, but European, American Indian, and African “races” did not exist before colonization of the so-called New World. Categories of “Christian” and “heathen” were initially most prominent, though observations also encompassed appearance, gender roles, strength, material culture, subsistence, and language. As economic interests deepened and colonies grew more powerful, classifications distinguished Europeans from “Negroes” or “Indians,” but at no point in the history of early America was there a consensus that “race” denoted bodily traits only. Rather, it was a heterogeneous compound of physical, intellectual, and moral characteristics passed on from one generation to another. While Europeans assigned blackness and African descent priority in codifying slavery, skin color was secondary to broad dismissals of the value of “savage” societies, beliefs, and behaviors in providing a legal foundation for dispossession.

“Race” originally denoted a lineage, such as a noble family or a domesticated breed, and concerns over purity of blood persisted as 18th-century Europeans applied the term—which dodged the controversial issue of whether different human groups constituted “varieties” or “species”—to describe a roughly continental distribution of peoples. Drawing upon the frameworks of scripture, natural and moral philosophy, and natural history, scholars endlessly debated whether different races shared a common ancestry, whether traits were fixed or susceptible to environmentally produced change, and whether languages or the body provided the best means to trace descent. Racial theorization boomed in the U.S. early republic, as some citizens found dispossession and slavery incompatible with natural-rights ideals, while others reconciled any potential contradictions through assurances that “race” was rooted in nature.

• colonialism
• African Americans
• immigration

Colonization and “Savagery”

On the eve of colonization, naturalistic explanations and biblical stories gave meaning to human difference for Europeans. The Renaissance increased circulation of classical theories. Those of Galen stressed the influence of geography upon peoples. Climate and individual bodily humors possessed corresponding properties (black bile was cold, yellow bile hot, blood dry, and phlegm wet). Because humors counterbalanced the surrounding environment, preponderant humors animated individuals and nations with characters either melancholic, choleric, sanguine, or phlegmatic. Ancient Greeks and later Romans also distinguished between themselves—possessed of reasoned speech, well-ordered political communities, and the technological ability to transform nature—and “barbarians” deficient in these markers of civility. For Christians and Jews, scripture provided testimony that God “made of one blood all nations of men.” All human beings shared descent from Adam through Noah, with the Deluge and the Tower of Babel explaining human dispersion and linguistic diversity with the authority of revelation, which came into the hands of ever more people beginning with the Protestant Reformation of the early 16th century. 1

Over centuries of evangelization and expanding trade with unfamiliar peoples in Asia, and conflict with Muslim kingdoms in the Holy Land and Iberia, medieval writers transferred the classical dichotomy of civilized and barbarous to “Christian” and “heathen.” Even before the European discovery of the Americas, Portuguese and Spanish colonizers applied such ideas to the Guanche of the Canary Islands, who had been unknown until Iberian colonization in the mid-15th century. By the late 16th century, when Queen Elizabeth intensified colonization of Ireland, English Protestants insisted that Irish Catholicism was little better than paganism. With respect to the Guanche and the Irish, religious denigration fused with criticism of these peoples’ land use, material culture, gender roles, and militant resistance to conquest in portrayals of barbarism that justified colonization and provided a model for future efforts. 2

From the earliest encounters, explorers and colonists observed and described the appearance, traits, and ways of life of indigenous Americans. Rather than monsters at the edge of the known world, Christopher Columbus found “handsome” people, whose skin resembled that of the “Canarians, neither black nor white.” The Tainos (Arawaks) were “naked,” possessed neither cities nor metal weapons nor idols. While these people were “timid,” the Caribs, a more “audacious race,” resembled the Tainos in appearance and material culture, but spoke a different language, made war on their neighbors, and “eat the people they can capture.” Columbus’s descriptions of weak innocents and fierce cannibals established a dichotomy that framed most European characterizations of the Native people of the Americas for the next five centuries and more. Despite depictions that distinguished sharply between Europeans and misnamed “Indians” at the outset of colonization, many Europeans believed the latter could be transformed. Three “sauage men” from northeastern North America arrived in England in the 1490s “in their demeanour like to bruite beastes,” Robert Fabian related, but after two years he “coulde not discerne [them] from Englishmen.” 3

Such characterizations of indigenous people and societies justified enslavement and colonization. Initially, the Spanish employed the theory of natural slavery, a concept devised by Aristotle and reworked for Christians by Thomas Aquinas. Dominion was just because these people were uncivil, supposedly lacking cities and mastery of nature. The empires of Mesoamerica and the Andes, however, undermined this view. The Mexica (Aztecs) and Incas possessed hierarchical societies, courteous speech, impressive cities, flourishing commerce, and stone pyramids. While such attainments seemed to fulfill classical understandings of civility, theorists such as Francisco de Vitoria insisted that they did not live according to the law of nature. Charges of human sacrifice and cannibalism, which Catholic and Protestant invaders leveled against numerous inhabitants of the Americas, were especially damning. Indians were fully human, but only conversion would allow them to fulfill their human potential. Numerous writers elaborated the view of Indians as fundamentally deficient, but capable of being raised to Christianity and civility. Bartolomé de Las Casas defended this view in famous debates in 1550–1551 , and Jose de Acosta elaborated it in Historia natural y moral de las indias ( 1590 ), which outlined different stages in the development of barbarous people, stressing growth of knowledge (as measured by language and literacy) and changes in the complexity of social organization. Other Europeans also embraced this view. According to Thomas Harriot in 1590 , the “Inhabitants of the great Brettanie haue bin in times past as sauuage as those of Virginia.” A series of engravings by Theodor de Bry (based on watercolors by John White) of Carolina Algonquians, included an ancient Briton, painted for war, holding a severed head. The Roman empire and the gospel had brought civilization to Britain, which, in turn, would bring it to North America. 4

Ethnographic descriptions of indigenous peoples proliferated in the 16th and 17th centuries, as the Protestant Reformation deepened imperial rivalries in the Americas. Some accounts asserted that the surrounding climate or celestial bodies, with the former influenced by the latter, explained human diversity. In the southern hemisphere especially, where sailors found constellations different from those known in northern skies, astronomy offered a window into human diversity. The “miraculous mouinges of ye Planetes, Starres, and heauens,” according to Richard Eden, who translated the earliest Spanish accounts for an English audience, produced “the varietie of diuers complexions, forms, and dispositions of all creatures vnder the face of heaven.” Finding differing natural environments (and differing responses to colonization), throughout the Americas, observers described Indians as melancholic or choleric or phlegmatic. Climate was thought to affect complexion—Indians were variously labeled tawny, swarthy, purple, olive, and chestnut, among others—but so too might customs. The use of bear grease and paint darkened the skin of infants allegedly born white over time, binding infants in cradle boards flattened their skulls, and raising children to ignore pain ostensibly produced adult women who could give birth painlessly and men able to withhold cries even as they endured torture. Alternately, some reports offered shared ancestry as an explanation for the similarity of widely separated peoples. John Pory concluded that the Natives surrounding Plymouth in 1622 were “of one race with those in Virginia, both in respect of their qualities and language … and are of the same hair, eyes and skin.” 5

Initially, some observers spoke favorably of Native technology (such as canoes and bows) and drew parallels between European and Native political organization (paramount chiefs as kings); but varied disparagements of Native dress, gender roles, land use, religion, and language increasingly produced a discourse of Native “savagery.” Scanty garments and tattooing were thought to indicate female immodesty and moral depravity. Native men enjoying the supposed leisure of the hunt while their women toiled in fields, suggested women’s drudgery. Beyond missing matrilineal clans’ ownership of fields, such views denied the importance of Native agriculture, which Indians in eastern North America supplemented with hunting. Summing up an expansive view of savagery, one colonist described, “so good a Countrey, so bad people, having little of Humanitie but shape, ignorant of Civilitie, of Arts, of Religion; more brutish than the beasts they hunt, more wild and unmanly than the unmanned wild Countrey, which they range rather than inhabite; captivated also to Satans tyranny in foolish pieties, mad impieties, wicked idlenesse, busie and bloudy wickednesse.” The uneven success of missionaries, which many blamed on Native tongues and minds, reinforced such views. Beyond casting Indians’ linguistic diversity as a mark of social disorder, colonizers found deeper significance in sounds and syntax. The Puritan Cotton Mather linked Indians’ languages to their “Salvage Inclinations,” while the Jesuit Joseph François Lafitau argued that Native grammatical structures represented a “way of thinking” that diverged from that of Europeans. 6

As early as the 17th century, some colonists came to postulate inherent traits in Indians and their societies. Native–settler conflict, such as the Anglo-Powhatan wars and the Pequot War in the 1620s–1630s, often catalyzed such views. Especially virulent characterizations of Indians emerged in the 1670s, when New Englanders faced an alliance of Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and others in King Philip’s War, and Chesapeake farmers and servants rose up against Doegs and Susquehannocks and the colonial ruling clique that profited from control of land, labor, and Indian trade in Bacon’s Rebellion. Amid violence, English colonists tended to dismiss distinctions between hostile and allied Indians, accused Indians of being by nature more beastly or cruel, and some called, as did Virginia rebels, “to ruin and extirpate all Indians in general.” 7 Even those who advocated missionary efforts could hold essentialist views. Describing the Montagnais, the French Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard believed it was “certain that these miserable people, continually weakened by hardships … will always remain in a perpetual infancy as to language and reason.” Despite conviction that Indians were human beings capable of salvation, those who met disappointing results in evangelization often blamed some obstacle intrinsic to Indians themselves. Colonists were ignorant of microbes, but they also noted that Native people suffered disproportionately from smallpox, influenza, and other diseases even as their own population grew rapidly in the New World. Some also suspected that constitutional differences between Europeans and Indians explained perpetual charges of Indian drunkenness. Theories of Native inferiority in mind and body provided Europeans, simultaneously, a compelling claim to the land and reassurance that colonists would not degenerate in an alien environment. 8

By the early 18th century, however, ascendant philosophical frameworks encouraged the learned to view minds, bodies, and societies as mutable. Comparisons of contemporary Indians to ancient peoples in the work of Acosta, Lafitau, and others converged with political theorization on the historical development of property and the interrelationship of environment, laws, and customs in the work of scholars such as Samuel Pufendorf and Montesquieu, as well as the psychology of John Locke, which held that the mind possessed no innate ideas and that words were merely conventional labels for things and concepts, to provide the foundation for theories of the progress of civilization. One view, best represented by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, held that human advancement came from linguistic and mental refinement. “Savages” supposedly possessed few words and relied on metaphor, which explained stereotypes of Indians’ linguistic poverty and eloquence. Over time, the invention of new and more precise signs allowed for more analytical thinking and, thus, advancement in the arts and sciences, though precision came at the price of imagery in speech and writing. Another view, best represented by Adam Smith, stressed the appetites and passions over reason. Distinct modes of subsistence (hunting, shepherding, agriculture, and commerce) led to distinct forms of social organization. Progress came from increasing production and mastery over nature, which, in turn, increased specialization within societies and the transfer of knowledge among societies. Innumerable and occasionally contradictory ethnographic accounts from throughout the Americas, in turn, provided evidence for these theories. 9

The construction of Native “savagery” provided a foil for Europeans’ conceptions of themselves as “civilized” and the justification for dispossession. Convergence of ideas of “savagery” with those of lineage, in turn, provided crucial foundations for the emergence of “race” in the 18th century.

“Negro” Slavery

Slavery was ubiquitous in the early modern world and, emerging from Muslim and Iberian Christian precedents, Africans were commonly assumed to be slaves. While enslavement of Indians, considered vassals of the Spanish crown, was illegal by the mid-16th century, Africans were legally enslaved in the colonies, just as they had been in Spain and Portugal in the centuries preceding colonization of the Americas. Iberians and other Europeans found justification in religion. Christians could enslave heathens and infidels in “just war,” and slaves could be Christianized while in bondage. Missionaries frequently compared African slaves willing to accept Christianity favorably to Natives who spurned the gospel. Because heathenism was crucial to the initial enslavement of Africans, however, planters often resisted evangelization. Morgan Godwyn, an Anglican minister in Barbados, deplored those who “openly maintained … That Negro’s were Beasts, and had no more Souls than Beasts.” Over the course of the 17th century, “ Negro and Slave ” became interchangeable terms, “even as Negro and Christian , Englishman and Heathen , are by the like corrupt Custom and Partiality made Opposites ; thereby as it were implying, that the one could not be Christians , nor the other Infidels .” 10

Colonial laws endowed shifting lines of difference with legal force. Unlike in the Iberian kingdoms, slavery no longer existed as an institution in early modern England. The first slaves held in the English colonies were stolen as slaves or bought as slaves. Initially, English colonial slavery followed Spanish and Portuguese models, which included hard, forced labor, but also significant degrees of manumission, incorporation into church and society, and intermixture. The blurring of the line between Christian and heathen, and growing numbers of freed people and children with mixed ancestry, however, prodded Englishmen to codify the lines of slavery and freedom. This process began in the Caribbean, with Barbadians making the bondage of Africans perpetual by 1636 , but the way in which slavery became racialized may be clearest in the Chesapeake. Between 1640 and 1705 , Virginia passed a series of laws that originally distinguished between Christian and heathen, freeman and servant, but which came to distinguish between whites and negroes and mulattoes. Laws required masters to arm every man in a household except for African men; made African women in addition to all of a household’s men taxable under the assumption that they, unlike English women, worked in the fields; defined a child’s status as following that of the mother only, thereby ensuring that a master’s progeny could be property; established that baptism did not alter the status of a slave; prohibited Africans, mulattoes, and Indians from intermarrying with white women; and barred masters from whipping white servants naked. The French created an analogous Code noir in the Caribbean in 1685 and Louisiana in 1724 . 11

African difference was defined through print culture as well. Prevailing medical views held Negroes to be more resistant to tropical diseases than Europeans, who were perhaps unsuited to the torrid zone. The success of smallpox inoculation—the subject of public controversy early in the 18th century—which underlined the shared bodily constitutions of Africans and Europeans, did nothing to alter notions of African fitness for labor in torrid climes. In advertisements for runaway slaves, colonists found continuous commentary on the traits of slaves, which described individuals with distinct bodies, skills, and styles, yet which painted a near-uniform picture of slaves as unfaithful and rebellious. Other newspaper advertisements provide implicit evidence of the casual breaking apart of black families even without economic motivation. Jeremy Belknap recalled at the end of the 18th century, “negro children … when weaned, were given away like puppies.” Even attacks on the legitimacy of slavery circulated ideas of African difference. The Massachusetts minister Samuel Sewall, who published The Selling of Joseph ( 1700 ), insisted that Negroes were “sons of Adam,” but he could not imagine them as free members of the community since “there is such a disparity in their Conditions, Colour & Hair, that they can never embody with us.” 12

In contrast to Indians, whose physical appearance was of lesser importance than their putative, encompassing “savagery,” Europeans fixated upon the bodies of Africans. The 17th-century English traveler Sir Thomas Herbert comprehensively described Africans as “cole black, have great heads, big lips, are flat nos’d, sharp chind, huge limbd, affecting Adams garb.” Physical descriptions often cited similarities between Africans and apes, sometimes suggesting sexual relationships between the two. While descriptions of African women often echoed those of American Indian women regarding ostensible promiscuity and painless childbirth, African women were more frequently cast in monstrous terms. In The True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados ( 1657 ), Richard Ligon, suggested that when older enslaved women stooped over while weeding fields, “at a distance, you would think they had six legs.” Other accounts hyper-sexualized African bodies in ways that undermined their humanity and suggested fitness for slavery, as in descriptions of African women suckling their children as they worked in fields. 13

Most Europeans focused their attention on complexion. Theories about Africans’ outward appearance were ancient, though discovery of the Americas reshaped older notions. Where the poet Ovid blamed Phaëton’s reckless driving of the sun chariot for scorching the lands and people of Africa, Ptolemy and other ancient sources attributed the putatively burned skin and crisped hair of sub-Saharan Africans to the fact that they lived in the torrid zone, where the force of the sun’s heat upon the human body was most intense. European discovery of the Americas, however, undermined this theory. Those who inhabited its equatorial regions did not resemble those living in the corresponding regions of Africa, American Indian complexions did not vary by latitude, and Africans transported to other regions in the transatlantic slave trade did not change in appearance. Explanations of color were not necessarily invidious; but many found evidence for suspicions regarding Africans’ inherent difference in the Bible. As the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah asked, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” In addition, among Iberians and the English, “blackness” carried heavy moral weight, being associated with filth, ugliness, sin, malevolence, and treachery. 14

Complexion, however, seemed unstable. Crowds came out to view the corpses of two men convicted of conspiring to burn New York City in 1741 when word spread that the black man was turning white and the white man black. Among colonists curious about a spectacle and increasingly interested in questions of color and character, albino children born of black parents caused a sensation, as did those whose blackness seemed to disappear. In 1697 , the Virginia planter William Byrd II wrote a letter to the Royal Society of London, describing a young slave “dappel’d” with spots. Though born to “perfect Negroes,” Byrd suspected, “he may in time become all over White.” Such reports, which describe a pigment condition now known as vitiligo, fueled philosophical theories. While George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon argued that the case of the Cartagena slave Marie Sabine indicated the degenerative effects of an unhealthy American climate, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, suggested that if such a man and woman had children, they might produce a new race. 15

Apparent instability only increased the importance of determining the cause of the putative blackness of Africans’ skin and, perhaps, formulating a comprehensive theory of “Negro” difference. Early dissections had found a lower layer of white skin and an outer layer of black skin, which were interpreted as confirmation of the ancient association of blackness with tropical heat. In 1665 , however, Marcello Malpighi identified a distinct anatomical feature found only among those with dark skin. Blistering black skin with chemicals and examining specimens beneath a microscope, Malpighi identified an intermediate third layer of skin containing pigment, the rete muscosum . Learned colonists pursued natural philosophy that touched so closely upon their own societies, as demonstrated by responses to a prize offered by a French academy in 1739 on the physical causes of Africans’ color, hair, and their “degeneration.” The Virginia physician John Mitchell viewed the rete muscosum through the prism of Isaac Newton’s Opticks ( 1704 ), which had demonstrated that whiteness was a combination of all colors and that blackness was an absence of color. Africans and African Americans possessed a thicker epidermis, according to Mitchell, which “obstructs the Transmission of the Rays of Light.” Equatorial heat played a role, but so did the “very barbarous and rude manner, little better than beasts” of native Africans, which accounted for the disproportionate impact of the sun upon their bodies, while “luxurious Customs, and effeminate Lives” shielded Europeans. Indeed, Spaniards who allegedly led “the same rude and barbarous Lives with the Indians … would become as dark in Complexion” if they did not continually marry other Europeans. In contrast, the dissection of perished slaves in Guyana provided the basis of Pierre Barrère’s Dissertation sur la cause physique et la coleur des nègres ( 1741 ), which influentially argued that Africans’ darker bile stained not only skin but also the blood. Other anatomists focused their attention on even more interior portions of black bodies. In 1765 , French anatomist Claude-Nicolas Le Cat claimed to have found an inky fluid, dubbed ethiops , secreted in black brains, which stained nerves, skin, and even sperm (providing putative evidence for a notion about Africans’ seed that was as old as the ancient Greek writer Strabo). While anatomists formulated these theories as alternatives to humoral or environmentalist explanations, many simply drew upon a range of views syncretically to understand African difference. 16

Such theories were crucial as Europeans debated African capabilities. The Dutch geographer Corneille de Pauw insisted that the physiological discoveries of Le Cat and others explained Africans’ alleged inferiority of intellect. Colonials also played prominent roles in these debates, not only as scholars but also as examples of the abilities of people of African descent. The poetry, letters, and antislavery tracts of Phyllis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and Olaudah Equiano carried this significance. Francis Williams, the youngest son of free black Jamaicans, was made the subject of a social experiment to determine whether a black man might be cultivated as a gentleman. He studied mathematics at Cambridge and, after being denied a place on the governor’s council upon his return to Jamaica, he established a school for free black children. This experiment became the subject of lively conversation in the colonies, prompting speculation that one of Williams’s parents had been white, while the Scottish philosopher David Hume defended his view of inherent black inferiority by dismissing Williams as “a parrot.” 17

Europeans’ theories, prejudices, and aesthetic judgments merged with longstanding ideas about the fecundity of nature and the hierarchical status of the creatures within it. The Great Chain Being provided the foundation for Edward Long’s view, articulated in his History of Jamaica ( 1774 ), of Africans’ physical and moral status. After recounting accusations of sexual relations between African women and apes, and musing that the latter, physically similar, lacked the speech and abilities of the former, the planter stressed the existence of shades of physical and intellectual difference, from the “ oran-outang , that type of man, and the Guiney Negroe; and ascending from the varieties of this last class to the lighter casts, until we mark its utmost limit of perfection in the pure White … every member of the creation is wisely fitted and adapted to the certain uses, and confined within certain bounds … by the Divine Fabricator.” Such views may have prevailed among slaveholders, though they were not confined to them. The title of a book by the antislavery race theorist Charles White expressed similar views far more succinctly: An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man ( 1799 ). 18

Though explanations for blackness varied from the environmentalist to the essentialist, comprehensive understandings of “Negro” difference—articulated through the law, medicine, and popular print culture, as well as natural history and natural and moral philosophy—served to justify black slavery in the Americas.

Blood and Lineage

Ideas of cultural and physical difference frequently intertwined with ideas of descent and heredity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Nowhere, perhaps, is this clearer than in the puzzle of Indian origins, a pressing issue once it became clear that the Americas represented a “new world.” Geography, customs, beliefs, bodies, and languages were all pressed into service to answer a question of ancestry and migration. Theories were innumerable: the Indians were the inhabitants of Atlantis, or Phoenicians, or Welsh. Perhaps the most prominent view—first published in 1594 , but probably discussed long before, and reaching its fullest articulation in the southeastern trader James Adair’s History of the North American Indians ( 1775 )—was that the Indians descended from the ten Lost Tribes, Jews who continued to keep the covenant even after being deported to Assyria after the conquest of Israel centuries before Christ. Another theory, first introduced by José de Acosta and increasingly accepted in the 18th century, was that the Indians descended from people in eastern Asia, who likely traveled by land to the Americas via an unknown connection. These two theories were not incompatible since the Lost Tribes might have followed just such a path over many generations. By the 17th century, other writers theorized that diverse old world nations had populated the supposedly new world, a theory especially congenial as the tremendous ethnic diversity of the Americas became increasingly apparent. The most prominent 18th-century proponent of this view was the missionary-chronicler Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix, who concluded from the differences among Sioux “hisses,” the “throat[y]” speech of Hurons, and Algonquians’ “more natural” pronunciation that each possessed a distinct origin. Language provided the “Way of ascending to the Original of Nations, which is the least equivocal.” The philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz lent linguistic comparison tremendous authority by proposing a method that sought linguistic similarities that resulted only, supposedly, from shared ancestry. 19

The Bible provided a framework for understanding other questions as well. According to Genesis, all human beings descended from Noah and his sons Shem, Ham, and Japhet. For Ham’s refusal to cover his father’s drunken nakedness (or, as in some glosses, for some more significant social or sexual transgression), Noah cursed the descendants of Ham’s son Canaan: “a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” Following the Deluge, the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japhet multiplied and dispersed across the earth. Commentaries assigned each brother’s progeny to various landmasses or to a particular type or quality of land, though with no true consensus on the details. According to one New Englander, John White, some believed Indians “to be Chams posterity, and consequently shut out from grace by Noahs curse.” More frequently, however, apologists for slavery linked the Curse of Ham to Africans, beginning with the Portuguese in the mid-15th century and the Spanish and English by the late 16th century. George Best, for example, observed “an Ethiopian” in England who fathered a child “as blacke as the father” by a white woman, despite both the “clime” and the mother’s “good complexion.” Mindful of the Curse of Ham, Best suggested that “this blacknesse proceedeth of some naturall infection … so all the whole progenie of them descended are still poluted.” Notions of lineage—scriptural genealogy and empirical observations of inherited traits and statuses—became crucial to upholding slavery. 20

A focus on lineages became a crucial foundation for the invention of “race.” In the early modern era, the term referred to a noble family, a breed of domesticated animal, or another genealogically related group. Members were expected to share certain traits across generations if they maintained the lineage’s purity of blood ( limpieza de sangre ). Such ideas had been crucial in the Iberian Reconquista , when subjects with Muslim or Jewish forbears were considered to possess irrevocably tainted ancestries, and Spaniards embraced their ancestry in opposition to charges of degeneration in the American environment. Although the Spanish Crown initially considered Indian converts to possess potential purity of blood, a legal system of classification according to Spanish, Indian, or African descent, or degree of mixed descent, arose as intermarriage increased. Spanish policies encouraged the production of genealogies among those of European and Indian descent as a means to prove the possession of legal privileges. The Spanish imposed a similar system on New Orleans after 1769 , though substantial numbers of blancos continued to form families with free women of color. In the second half of the 18th century, a new genre of painting emerged that divided the population into categories (usually sixteen) by depicting a mother of one race or racial intermixture, a father of another race or racial intermixture, and the child they would produce. At a time when colonial mestizaje came under increasing fire from Spain and from creoles as a mark of social degeneration and political disorder, these casta paintings provided positive and negative representations of intermixture. Racial categories, however, despite attempts to fix them in nomenclature, remained porous. 21

In New France, as in New Spain, notions of purity of blood intertwined with religion and social rank. Intermarriage, or métissage , was a crucial component of francisation under Louis XIV, a strategy designed to strengthen the empire in North America, though fears of the degeneracy of fur traders who cohabited with Native women outside of imperial oversight intensified as well. By the late 17th century, imperial officials were divided over the propriety of intermarriage, and by the 18th century the failures of francisation gave rise to speculations about the inherent difference of Indians. Yet the lives of individuals such as Jean Saguingouara, son of a French officer and a Catholic Illinois woman, demonstrate a continued porousness of boundaries. His contract as a fur trader included a provision for the laundering of his shirts, which suggests his acceptance of European rather than Native notions of cleanliness (fresh linen as opposed to washing), and the degree to which racial conceptions rested in part upon uses of material culture. Interestingly, even as laws throughout the French Atlantic prohibited interracial marriage, examples from Haiti demonstrate a stunning attempt not to catalog intermixture, but to manufacture it. Some colonials built upon Buffon’s dynamic vision of nature, which stressed not only the transformative power of the environment and the degree to which active intervention in mating could direct the inheritance of desirable traits across generations. As early as 1776–1777 , Gabriel de Bory and Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, respectively a former governor-general of Haiti and a French colonial lawyer, proposed plans for the selective breeding of slaves to create a new caste of mulatto soldiers who would secure the French colony from European rivals and restive slaves. 22

Although some English colonists, such as the Jamaican planter Edward Long, advocated the precise nomenclature in use in New Spain, where distinguishing “casts” was a “kind of science,” smaller religious enterprises and larger settler populations led to different dynamics regarding intermarriage in the English colonies. Although English colonial laws did not prohibit Anglo-Indian intermarriage, unlike the earlier prohibition of intermarriage in Ireland, legitimate marriages were rare, mainly confined to those few instances in which Native women had converted to Christianity (such as the celebrated marriage between John Rolfe and Rebecca, the baptismal name of Pocahontas or Metoaka). Sexual relationships continued, of course, but these were illicit. Even in the early 19th century, elites such as Thomas Jefferson advocated Indian–white intermarriage as a means of uniting interests and of conveying “civilization.” Intermarriage, especially in the U.S. early republic, also provided a means of dispossession, as white representations of intermixture provided grounds for denying true Indianness to individuals and communities, for lamenting the disappearance of the race, and thus for eliminating indigenous claims to the land. This was especially true for Native–black unions, the progeny of which were often categorized as black or as people of color. English colonies and later U.S. states prohibited intermarriage between whites and blacks, though interracial sex, coercive and consensual, remained a regular feature of life on plantations and elsewhere. Racial categories in the English colonies and early United States were bounded more sharply, with fewer intermediate gradations, than in the French and Spanish colonies. Individuals in these colonies were white, Negro, or Indian, with terms like “mulatto” and “mustee” denoting intermixture but not its degree. When the United States assumed control of New Orleans following the Louisiana Purchase, it conceded to the city’s complex past and codified a tripartite racial system that recognized distinct privileges for free people of color, though inhabitants and visitors noted finer shades of difference. 23

The impulse to parse lineage proportionally existed in tension with 18th-century natural history, which applied “race” to larger and larger groups of people, delineating common physical as well as intellectual, moral, and social traits. François Bernier published the first of these in 1684 in a French learned journal, correlating geography with skin, facial features, and bodily form to categorize the world’s peoples into four “species or races” ( espècies ou races ). Carolus Linneaus provided more influential classifications that grouped human beings with other primates and divided them from one another in successive editions of Systema naturae , beginning in 1735 . Linnaeus established six distinct varieties of homo sapiens , grouped according to characteristics, complexion, and continent, adding unspeaking wild men and monstrous peoples (including pygmies in Africa, supposed giants in Patagonia, and Indians who flattened the heads of infants) to sanguine and inventive white Europeans; lazy, careless, and cunning black Africans; melancholy, haughty, and tradition-bound yellow Asians; and red warlike Indians who lived by habit. Other scholars practiced natural history while insisting on the gulf that separated humanity from beasts. Buffon counted six races (discarding monsters and wild men), while acknowledging individual diversity within races and stressing that environmental influences associated with human migration would produce degeneration over time and place. Other scholars worked to refine racial classifications. Anatomists such as Petrus Camper and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach focused attention on facial angle and skull shape, respectively, while the philologist Sir William Jones stressed the fundamental importance of languages’ grammatical organization. These classifications each presupposed humanity’s shared descent, but each flattened diversity and linked physical and cultural traits through ideas of ancestry. 24

The earliest categorizations of diverse nations into single races can be seen with respect to Africans and those descended from Africans; but similar taxonomic practices were applied to Indians, whose diversity colonizers had long emphasized, in the 18th century. Most of these were not essentialist. Buffon, for instance, believed that all American Indians were underdeveloped in body and mind, as were other species of American flora and fauna, because the American land was unhealthy. (Other figures, such as de Pauw and Thomas François Raynal, extended this theory to assert the putative degeneration of European settlers in the Americas.) Some writers fused theories of stages and theories of genealogy. De Pauw and William Robertson, for instance, applied savagery to the presumed shared ancestry of all the indigenous peoples of the Americas. A “tribe of savages on the banks of the Danube must nearly resemble one upon the plains washed by the Missisippi [ sic ]” because “the disposition and manners of men … arise from the state of society in which they live,” Robertson asserted, but certain “features” and “qualities” were “common to the whole race” of American Indians. 25

Although the view was heretical, some early-modern theorists insisted that the seeming cultural, linguistic, and physical difference of Africans and American Indians to other peoples indicated that they shared no common descent. The most famous 17th-century iteration of this polygenetic view was Isaac La Peyère’s Pre-Adamitae ( 1655 ), which postulated that human beings were created before Adam. By the middle of the 18th century, towering intellectual figures such as Hume and Voltaire spoke unambiguously of races being different species of humanity that possessed inferior characters and capacities. Among the most inflammatory, because the orthodox considered it so insidious, was that of Henry Home, Lord Kames. Sketches of the History of Man ( 1774 ) suggested that the story of the Tower of Babel, in which God confused human tongues and dispersed nations, should be interpreted as casting humanity into a savagery from which different peoples emerged at differing rates, just as they would have if different nations had descended from different original pairs. By the final quarter of the 18th century, views of separate creations and of distinct species of a human genus, had achieved unprecedented respectability, with some colonials, such as Edward Long and the surveyor Bernard Romans, offering more straightforward views of polygenesis. 26

Theories about European, American Indian, and African “races” emerged from preexisting ideas and prejudices about “savagery” and “blackness,” the scattered observations of travelers and colonists with first-hand knowledge, and a train of philosophers engaged in explaining non-European bodies and minds by categorizing humanity into broad swaths based upon the geographic origin and physical and cultural characteristics of lineages.

“Whites,” “Indians,” and “Africans” in a Revolutionary Era

Even for ordinary Americans who knew little of philosophical debates, notions that large swaths of population were separated from one another by traits, perhaps inherent, that included way of life and moral character as much as appearance grew increasingly common by the mid-18th century. In a time of considerable violence, political convulsion, and perceived opportunities for social reform, “race” acted as a form of shared identity, the bounds of which had to be policed.

As early as the mid-17th century, “white” became a significant social category in colonies based upon plantation slavery. In the English Caribbean and Chesapeake, “white” became an identity that was able to join planters and indentured servants, English and Irish, Protestants and Catholics, Anglicans and Quakers (and, later, Presbyterians and Baptists). In French Louisiana, too, “white” became a label that included diverse subjects and excluded slaves, free people of color, and Indians. The creation of race, in this sense, was closely tied to the patrolling of social boundaries, which made legal prohibitions on intermarriage and bastardy, and especially with controlling white women’s sexuality, particularly important means of preserving racial purity, even while upholding masters’ prerogatives (including sexual coercion) over their human property. In all of these places, “whiteness” was an abstract identity and a set of legal privileges (such as not being enslaved; being able to marry, own a gun, or give testimony in court) that were deliberately created and codified. 27 Outside of plantation colonies, however, a sense of “whiteness” remained elusive.

In the ethnically diverse mid-Atlantic, especially outside of the city of New York (where slaves were nearly a fifth of the population), immigrants and their descendants recognized little common ground with other Europeans before the mid-18th century. Benjamin Franklin believed the English and the Saxons provided “the principal body of white people” in the world. Franklin felt some white identity, but he excluded most non-English from its bounds, fearing that “swarthy” immigrants would “Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them” since they would “never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion.” Other writers spoke confidently of assimilation, though some, such as J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, imagined the “strange mixture of blood” among a “promiscuous breed” of Europeans creating “a new race of men.” 28

While diverse Indians in the region might lump all whites together, only violence in the backcountry in the era of the Seven Years’ War and War for Independence ( c . 1754–1795 ) brought motley Europeans—English, Scot-Irish, German; Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Pietist—to refer to one another and to themselves as “the white people.” Those whites, increasingly, despite material and spiritual exchange between Indians and settlers, insisted that Indians were inherently savage. Some settlers understood them to be analogous to “the Canaanites, who by God’s commandment were to be destroyed,” according to the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, while others “maintained, that to kill an Indian, was the same as killing a bear or a buffalo.” While many voices, primarily in the east, called for a sustained campaign to teach Indians the ways of “civilization” (Christianity, English, private property, plow agriculture for men and spinning and weaving for women) in the late colonial and early national eras, it met opposition among those who thought the effort either undeserved or futile. According to Hugh Henry Brackenridge, a Pittsburgh lawyer and man of letters, Indians had “the shapes of men and may be of the same species,” but they were “so degenerate” as to be “incapable of all civilization,” which justified “dispossess[ing] them of the goodly lands” and provided “sufficient order to exterminate the whole brood.” 29

A white racial identity also emerged from the narrowing of diverse early-modern forms of bonded labor to the stark binary of enslaved and free, and the gradual emancipation of slaves in states north of Maryland in the early years of the U.S. republic. In January 1784 , for example, a group of New York citizens declared the “traffick of White people ” to be “contrary … to the idea of liberty this country has so happily established.” The poverty of emancipated slaves, who toiled in menial labor and enjoyed few educational opportunities, was frequently blamed on some supposed unfitness for freedom. In the South, only elites’ acceptance of egalitarianism among whites, conjoined with white supremacy, mollified ordinary white farmers otherwise resentful of planters’ power. Racial ideologies took shape in expanding forms of print culture; on the nation’s stages, where minstrel shows depicted rural slaves and urban black dandies as objects of ridicule and as figures blissfully outside of ever more disciplined forms of market relations; and in rural posses and urban riots, in which white majorities used violence to enforce white privilege and black subordination. 30

Racial lines defined citizenship in the early republic. While revolutionary-era constitutions secured the franchise of any individuals meeting a certain property requirement, the insertion of “white” accompanied the elimination of property qualifications in revised constitutions in the early 19th century. All “free white persons” could become citizens through naturalization. Commenting on the torrent of Irish Catholics into New York after 1840 , the diarist George Templeton Strong observed that “nature” had formed their “prehensile paws” to wield the tools of manual labor, and he believed “Our Celtic fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese.” Yet, the fact remained that the Irish successfully seized citizenship while the Chinese, whose numbers grew suddenly after the California Gold Rush, met violent resistance. Mexicans, Catholic like the Irish and guaranteed citizenship under the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo ( 1848 ), were disfranchised on racial grounds. The widespread view that the United States was a white nation, and that whites possessed the right to claim the continent, undergirded calls for the colonization of emancipated slaves, Indian removal, and “manifest destiny.” By the time of Dred Scott v. Sanford ( 1857 ), the U.S. Supreme Court considered it a settled principle that citizenship had always been “confined to the white race; and that they alone constituted the sovereignty in the government.” 31

Racial categories also gained significance among people of Native and African descent. In “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” the poet Phyllis Wheatley, struck at those who “view our sable race with scornful eye,” reminding “ Christians , negroes, black as Cain , / May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train.” Though she chose “sable” rather than “black” to describe her appearance, she identified with others of her complexion even as she rejected associations of “blackness” and sin. Beginning in the 1760s, enslaved and free authors of African descent in England and British America such as Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho began to cast themselves as “African” to lend authority to their opposition to slavery. This new diasporic identity, rooted in a sense of pride, suffering, and racial difference from Europeans, was not limited to black intellectuals alone. In the wave of post-revolutionary emancipation, free blacks established churches (e.g., African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia and elsewhere), institutions dedicated to racial uplift (e.g., African Free School in New York City), and fraternal organizations (e.g., African Masonic Lodge in Boston). Each rested upon and deepened the shared history and identity among people of African descent. 32

Diasporic ties and a national identity, however, remained at odds. Black Americans and Britons, such as Olaudah Equiano and Paul Cuffe (who also possessed Wampanoag ancestry), believed that colonization of Sierra Leone and Liberia presented the opportunity to create a black nation that would bring Christianity, “civilization,” and commerce without the slave trade to Africa; but these projects fell short. Colonists did not identify with pagans, and the black public in the United States rejected colonization as demeaning of itself and as a slaveholder strategy to strengthen the institution by removing free blacks. These tensions were especially charged in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, which heightened race-based hopes and fears. In the explosive pages of An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World ( 1829 ), David Walker demanded an end not only to slavery but also to racial prejudice; yet his appeal to a global community of exploited nonwhite peoples demonstrated an expansive notion of race, which he believed to be very real (speculating, for instance, on whites’ inherent moral defect). In advocating a black uprising, Walker offered a jarring, and for many a terrifying, alternative to complacent calls for colonization or the gradual amelioration of slavery and prejudice. Around this time, free blacks began replacing “African” associations and institutions with “Colored” ones, as they more insistently claimed an “American” identity for themselves. 33

A racial identity also emerged among some Natives in the 18th century. Indians had long noticed physical distinctions, but did not consider them immutable. Caddos around the turn of the 18th century, for example, “often exposed … young Frenchmen to make them become tanned like themselves.” Yet, between the mid-17th and the mid-18th century accounts from the Great Lakes to the mid-Atlantic indicate that increasing numbers of Indians pointed to factors such as newcomers’ technologies and bodies to assert that the Europeans possessed an origin distinct from their own. Further, southeastern Indians referred to themselves as “red” by the mid-1720s, before any known European did so. While initially this likely referred to the traditional moiety division among Creeks (with red denoting war and white peace), in the succeeding decades the designation clearly came to refer to skin color. 34

From the 1730s–1750s, prophets emerged among the Iroquois and Delawares who urged diverse indigenous peoples to recognize a common identity among themselves that separated them from whites, and linked these ideas to calls for resisting settlers’ expansion. As the Cayuga orator Gachradodow told colonial officials at the Treaty of Lancaster ( 1744 ), the Atlantic Ocean separated distinct worlds, “as may be known from the different Colours of our Skin … you have your Laws and Customs, and so have we.” Only refusing to cede more land, purifying Native societies by rejecting elements of cultural exchange (such as alcohol and Christianity), and performing new rituals, would restore the physical and spiritual power once enjoyed by Indians’ ancestors. This message was most fully amplified at mid-century by Neolin (Delaware), whose message inspired Pontiac (Ottawa), and many others. In the first two decades of the 19th century, Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh (Shawnee), as well as Hillis Hadjo (Creek), offered similar messages to similar effect, inspiring numerous warriors to attempt to drive back whites. These radical racial messages sought to create a unified pan-Indian identity, but they also divided Indians precisely because they cut against older, more familiar identifications with village, clan, language, and tribe. 35

Racial ideas also flourished among those who very deliberately adapted Euro-American religion and political economy. Drawing, in part, on indigenous views of separate creations, many Catawbas, Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws adapted traditional notions of captivity to plantation slavery. Diverse southern New England and upper Hudson Valley Algonquians came together to form the communities of Stockbridge and Brothertown, but frustrated by white prejudice and pressure, they relocated to live among the Oneidas, ethnically distinct traditional rivals but fellow Christians. Many of these people came to believe that only a divine curse could explain the failure, despite their conversion and “civilization,” of harmonious relations with whites. Racial ideas also provided a means of social criticism. The Methodist preacher William Apess (Pequot), for instance, held up an “Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” and he asserted “Indian Nullification” of unjust laws in a series of pamphlets in the 1830s. Apess and others drew upon tribal and Indian identities in an era when whites not only forced Indian removal to the West but also denied the existence of Native people who remained in the East. 36

Folk articulations of “white” or “African” or “Indian” identities proliferated in the mid-18th century. These racial identities played a crucial role in the U.S. early republic, where they provided the means of unifying diverse peoples who sought to wield power and those who attempted to resist it.

Ethnology: “An American Science”

The Enlightenment’s philosophical examination of different “races,” whether understood to be human varieties or human species, converged with revolutionary-era folk articulations of racial identity and the new nation’s professed commitment to equality and natural rights, to drive American interest in studies of the origins, migrations, kinship, and capabilities of different races (a set of studies which, by the mid-19th century, would be called ethnology), and to apply that knowledge to society and government in the U.S. early republic.

The most eloquent American writer on equality and natural rights, who famously ridiculed the idea that nature formed some men saddled and others spurred, expressed a “suspicion” that “blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Thomas Jefferson owned scores of men and women, fathering six children by Sally Hemings; yet he insisted that emancipation would result in race war unless accompanied by expatriation. In Notes on the State of Virginia ( 1787 ), he argued that black inferiority was “fixed,” but that Indians were capable of “cultivation.” The former view justified slavery and the necessity of colonization, while the latter allowed him to refute Buffon’s theory that the unhealthy Americas had only recently emerged from Deluge. So did Jefferson’s contention, based on the relative degree of linguistic diversity in the continents, that the Americas must have been settled longer than Asia, and that people from the former had actually colonized the latter. These conjectures, and his impulse to turn his countrymen’s efforts to collecting information about Indians—which he extended through the American Philosophical Society (est. 1743 ) and institutionalized as president through ventures such as the Lewis and Clark Expedition—were tremendously influential, though most initial commentators roundly rejected his theories. 37

The question of whether races could change received sustained attention in the context of revolutionary natural rights ideology and gradual emancipation in the North. From the 1790s to the 1850s, black intellectuals such as the mathematician and almanac maker Benjamin Banneker, the militant abolitionist David Walker, and the physician James McCune Smith, challenged Jefferson’s views on black inferiority and the need for racial separation. Figures whose race seemed to be in some way unstable, such as the black Virginian Henry Moss, sparked the curiosity of popular crowds and debates among the learned. Benjamin Smith Barton was convinced that Moss’s perspiration washed away blackness, but his student Charles Caldwell believed that the body had absorbed it. Benjamin Rush thought Moss confirmed his theory that blackness was a form of leprosy, demanding strict prohibitions on interracial sex, while Samuel Stanhope Smith accepted Moss as proof that a free American environment was gradually eliminating blackness, a process that intermixture with whites would accelerate. Moss himself believed his transformation to be the work of Providence, perhaps because exhibiting himself provided the means to purchase his freedom. 38

Medical discourses remained crucial to racial notions. In slave markets, blackness was a sign of health and strength for field hands, though lighter skin was preferred for domestics, despite its association with intelligence and the risk of slaves running away and passing as free. The New Orleans physician Samuel Cartwright diagnosed diseases peculiar to blacks, including “drapetomania” and “dysӕsthesia ӕthiopica,” which referred to supposed afflictions that caused slaves to run away and to act with “rascality” toward overseers. The Mobile physician Josiah Nott predicted the extermination of whites and blacks if intermixture proceeded, which the craniologist Samuel G. Morton refined into an elaborate polygenetic theory of hybridization that postulated the possibility, contra Buffon, of distinct species producing fertile offspring, but with fertility diminishing with biological distance. Such theories shaped the defense of slavery as a positive good as well as state laws, plantation management, and even international diplomacy. In a letter to his British counterpart, Secretary of State John C. Calhoun drew upon the results of the deeply flawed 1840 census, which recorded implausible levels of insanity and suicide among northern free blacks, in a proslavery defense of Texas annexation. 39

The malleability of physical differences was a hotly contested issue in these years, though theories of fixity steadily gained in prominence throughout the first half of the 19th century. Samuel Stanhope Smith argued that skin color resulted from the reciprocal effects of climate and social state. Most strikingly, in An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species ( 1787 ; rev. ed. 1810 ), he suggested that shared conditions and intermixture among Indians and lower-class whites was producing an “American complexion” from the convergence of lower-class white settlers and Indians. While some authorities, such as the eminent British ethnologist James Cowles Prichard, cited him in defense of their own environmentalist theories, American opponents such as Charles Caldwell and John Augustine Smith, ridiculed such explanations of difference. Work by John C. Warren and Samuel G. Morton, especially the latter’s Crania Americana ( 1839 ), shifted debate away from complexion and toward bones, particularly skulls. Adapting Blumenbach’s five-race classification, Morton rejected the anatomist’s interpretation by arguing that races were fixed and unequal. In subsequent publications he explicitly argued for polygenesis. In Crania Ægyptiaca ( 1844 ), Morton argued that the creators of Egyptian (i.e., western) civilization were white and that blacks had been an enslaved caste. His associate George Gliddon elaborated these views in public lectures and polemical, stridently anticlerical articles based upon physical ethnology and hieroglyphics. Descriptions of black civilization in Egypt became central to black abolitionists’ counterattack, as in The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered ( 1854 ), an address that Frederick Douglass delivered at Western Reserve College. 40

Indians also captured attention, frequently focused on Indian origins and broader debates about polygenesis. Language was a crucial field of investigation. Benjamin Smith Barton’s writings, especially New Views of the Origins of the Tribes and Nations of America ( 1797 ; rev. ed. 1798 ), compared words drawn from diverse Indian and Asian tongues in an attempt to prove, contra Jefferson, Indians’ origins in Asia. In 1819 the retired missionary John Heckewelder and the lawyer Peter S. Du Ponceau argued that Indians spoke copious and beautiful languages, but ones organized according to a fixed “plan of ideas” that all Indians and no old world peoples possessed. Du Ponceau’s work, extended by John Pickering and Albert Gallatin, inspired sustained evangelization and missionary philology, but frustrations at recording Native sounds with English letters and using Native words and grammatical forms to translate Christian concepts fueled new theories of Indians’ physical and mental difference. Such theories converged with similar work in Europe, such as that of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who formulated his views in conversation with American philologists. Even for those who publicly supported “civilization” efforts and who rejected polygenism, such as the Indian agent-ethnologist Henry R. Schoolcraft, philology could seem to undermine philanthropy. 41

Learned and popular interest in Indian antiquities and customs was also central to racial theories. While Benjamin Smith Barton pointed to Indians’ grammatical complexity and graphic systems to argue that Indians had degenerated from a previous civilization capable of building the large earthen mounds in the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys, Caleb Atwater argued in the first transactions of the American Antiquarian Society (est. 1812 ) that a distinct race of Mound Builders had been vanquished by savage invaders from whom Indians descended. Demonstrating the degree to which archaeological theories undermined Indians’ claims to their lands, President Andrew Jackson defended Indian removal in a message to Congress by calling attention to the “monuments and fortifications … the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes.” Innumerable popular tracts disseminated and elaborated such theories, and Ephraim G. Squier and Edwin Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley ( 1849 ), the inaugural publication of the Smithsonian Institution, lent them scientific legitimacy. Ethnographic descriptions of Indians’ ways of life also ranged from the serious (e.g., George Catlin’s remarkably illustrated account of the peoples of the Great Plains) to the sensationalistic. 42

U.S. citizens expanded their investigations of race while different ethnologies competed with one another. The three decades before the Civil War saw the seminal publications of the American School of Ethnology (Morton, Gliddon, Nott, Squier, and Louis Agassiz), which were remarkably influential, and controversial, for their insistence upon polygenism, racial inequality, and that the body alone (not language) revealed “race.” Ethnological debates grew more urgent when “Manifest Destiny” brought staggeringly diverse and little known western Indians, Mexicans, and Chinese into the nation. At the same time, scholars at the American Ethnological Society and American Oriental Society (each est. 1842 ), published accounts of the peoples, manners and customs, languages and monuments of the peoples of the Pacific Islands, Asia, and Africa, increasingly encountered through expanding U.S. commerce, missionary work, and exploration (e.g., Wilkes Expedition in 1838–1842 ). Most of these peoples were interpreted in light of a racial binary that associated dark skin with servility and native status with savagery; possessors of the former were disqualified from republican citizenship, while possessors of the latter were incapable of civilization. In addition, innumerable representations and misrepresentations of European and nonwhite peoples, societies, and histories appeared in the popular press. Describing “American Ethnology” to a popular audience in 1849 , Ephraim Squier stressed that since “Nowhere else can we find brought in so close proximity, the representatives of races and families of men, of origins and physical and mental constitutions so diverse,” ethnology was a truly “American science.” 43

Despite the importance of racial theories to proslavery, removal, and conquest, some ethnologists argued against the most pernicious forms of racism. At a time when whites lauded themselves as the only race capable of independent civilization, Albert Gallatin drew upon languages, agriculture, and astronomy to argue that “American civilization” in Mesoamerica was indigenous, even if Indians’ ancestors originated in Asia, and that Cherokees and Pueblos further confirmed the possibility of Indian cultivation. With denigration of Mexico’s mixed-race inhabitants commonplace—some advocating seizing all of Mexico; others prophesying the impossibility of assimilating so many ostensibly inferior peoples—Gallatin declared it incompatible “with the principle of Democracy, which rejects every hereditary claim of individuals, to admit an hereditary superiority of races,” in a passionate opposition to the Mexican War. Some nonwhites challenged race science even more deeply. William W. Warren, a Christian Ojibwe, for instance, targeted both the American School and Schoolcraft, equating polygenesis with pagan superstitions of spontaneous emergence and dismissing ethnologists’ insistence that all American Indians shared a common ancestry. Warren argued that his own “Algic race,” descended from the Lost Tribes, had always been distinct from his people’s traditional rivals, the Tartar-descended “Dakota race.” The black abolitionist James McCune Smith rejected “so-called ‘races’ of mankind” as a fantasy because peoples had intermingled throughout history. The fusion of diverse Europeans, Indians, and the “ever-despised negro” was forming a true “American People.” 44

Race emerged from Europeans’ preexisting prejudices, ongoing ethnographic observation and philosophical speculation, and justification of social primacy, though groups excluded from the category of whiteness formulated their own notions of race. Racial ideas were fiercely debated in early America. Did the races share a common ancestry? Were the races fixed, or capable of alteration or improvement? Was “race” best traced through the body or through language? What, ultimately, was “race”? For all this uncertainty, however, race acquired legal power and social significance—for whites circumscribing the boundaries of democracy; for Indians and blacks defending their lands and their freedom—in the U.S. early republic in the decades before the Civil War, with ideas of biological fixity ascendant, though not unchallenged.

Discussion of the Literature

The earliest histories of the emergence of modern, biological ideas about race in the mid-19th century appeared in the civil rights era. See William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59 ; Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America . Winthrop D. Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 , is the classic account of anti-black prejudice preceding racial slavery, and of the question of racial equality gaining new meaning from the American Revolution. George M. Fredrickson’s The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny extends the investigation through Reconstruction, stressing the difference of mid-19th-century racism from what preceded it. For an overview, see Alden T. Vaughan’s “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia.” 45

Studies of Indians have focused on the emergence of ideas of savagery. The pioneering work, Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind , recounted the ways that “savagism” provided a foil for whites’ sense of themselves. Anthony Pagden’s The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology ; Ronald Meek’s Social Science and the Ignoble Savage ; and Robert E. Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian: The Early Years of American Ethnology, 1820–1880 provide more detail. 46 In the Vietnam era, Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: Popular Attitudes and American Indian Policy in the Nineteenth Century ; Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian ; Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the Indian from Columbus to the Present ; and Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Anglo-American Racial Anglo-Saxonism , directly linked ideas to U.S. power. 47

In the last two decades, scholars have stressed ordinary people’s production of multifarious ideas of difference. Among the most important contributions have been made by those scholars who have centered questions of gender and sex to constructions of race, such as Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia ; Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America ; Jennifer Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans ; María Elena. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico ; and articles by Jennifer Morgan and Heather Miyano Kopelson in the William and Mary Quarterly . 48 On other ways of life in constructions of race, see Shoemaker; Joyce Chaplin’s Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 ; John Wood Sweet’s Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 . 49 Rebecca Anne Goetz’s The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race ; Sophie White’s Wild Frenchman and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana ; and Sean P. Harvey’s Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation , provide more focused attention, respectively, on religion, material culture, and language. 50

The centrality of lineage to ideas of race has been increasingly appreciated. See Nicholas Hudson’s “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies ( 1996 ), and María Elena Martínez and Guillaume Aubert in the forum “Purity of Blood and the Social Order” ( WMQ 2004 ). Spear, Goetz, and Harvey build on this insight. On notions of Native ancestry, Lee Eldridge Huddleston’s Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (1967) is unmatched. 51

Many titles have traced the emergence of racial ideas among diverse groups. On ideas of whiteness, see David R. Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class ; Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race ; and Peter Silver’s Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America . 52 James Sidbury’s Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic , compellingly traces early formulations of “African” and “Colored” identities, as does Sweet. Mia Bay’s The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People ; Bruce Dain’s A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic trace black writers’ theorization about race in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War. 53 For Indians’ ideas of race, besides Shoemaker, see foundational articles by James H. Merrell on “The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians,” and by William G. McLoughlin and Walter H. Cosner Jr., “‘The First Man was Red’: Cherokee Responses to the Debate over Indian Origins, 1760–1860 .” Gregory Evans Dowd’s A Spirited Resistance: The Native American Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 ; David J. Silverman’s Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America ; and Christina Snyder’s Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America do especially well to root new racial ideas in older Native beliefs and practices. 54

Importantly, these authors diverge on when a true understanding of “race” emerged. Some find essentialist understandings of difference present in classical sources and clearly articulated in the early modern era. See Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, eds., The Origins of Racism in the West . Jordan, Berkhofer, Chaplin, and Goetz each argued that racial ideas crystallized before the 18th century. The authors of a special issue of William and Mary Quarterly on “Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World” argue this point too. 55 In contrast, other scholars point to the Enlightenment as a crucial moment in the philosophical–scientific definition of “race” and its differentiation from “nation.” See, for example, Hudson; Ivan Hannaford’s Race: The History of an Idea in the West ; Roxann Wheeler’s The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (2000) ; and Andrew Curran’s Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (2013) . 56 Still other scholars point to the social–political context in North America, sometimes in tandem with philosophical currents. Dowd, Shoemaker, Silverman, Snyder, and Silver point to the intensification of white settlement, the expansion of slavery, and increasing territorial and cultural pressure on Indians in crystallizing ideas of race in the mid-to-late 18th century. To these, Sweet adds the effects of emancipation. 57 Fredrickson, Dain, Sweet, and Harvey stress the importance of the revolution, as well as the hardening of racial ideas in the mid-19th century. See also the “Special Issue on Racial Consciousness and Nation Building in the Early Republic” in Journal of the Early Republic . For a general overview that stresses race as a body of folk beliefs and social stratification, rather than a set of philosophical or scientific theories, see Audrey Smedley , Race in North America: The Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (1993) . 58

Despite these differences in approach and in chronology, scholars have come to recognize the hereditarian basis of many of the earliest pejorative characterizations of peoples as well as the persistence of non-bodily “cultural” understandings of race long after the ascendance of biology. Ideas of “race” in early America remain a fertile field of scholarly inquiry, with much more work remaining to be done.

Primary Sources

Innumerable sources contain material pertinent to ideas about race or its component parts, including ancestry and physical and cultural traits. Early travel narratives are invaluable, though they vary by richness as well as in the quality of indexes and editorial notes. Decades’ worth of publications by the Hakluyt Society and the Champlain Society contain scores of early English and French accounts, with the former including voyages to Africa as well as the Americas. For eastern Indians in the 17th and early 18th centuries, the seventy-two volumes of the Jesuit Relations are unparalleled, well-indexed in an edition by Reuben Gold Thwaites, and now available as searchable digital sources courtesy of Creighton University. Numerous translations of journals kept by German-speaking Moravian missionaries among the Iroquoians and Algonquians of the mid-Atlantic in the mid- to late 18th century are also tremendously valuable. The most important early-modern theorizations of Indians’ social state available in English include José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies , ed. Jane E. Mangan , trans. Frances López Morillas (2002) ; Joseph Francois Lafitau’s Customs of the American Indians Compared to the Customs of Primitive Times , ed. William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore , 2 vols. (1977) ; and William Robertson’s History of America , 3 vols. (1780) . 59 Other works, such as Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s Journal of a Voyage to North America (1761) ; and James Adair’s History of the North American Indians , ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund (2005) , contain significant ethnographic information, but privilege the question of lineage over that of social condition. 60 With respect to African slaves, Edward Long’s History of Jamaica , 3 vols. (1774) provides especially important descriptions, and John Mitchell’s “Essay upon the Causes of the different Colours of People in different Climates,” in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions ( 1744–1745 ), provides a detailed attempt by a colonial to theorize skin color within prevailing scientific frameworks. 61 See also Transactions of the American Philosophical Society .

Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia , ed. William Peden (1954) , and the two most detailed attempts to refute its heterodox views: Benjamin Smith Barton’s New Views of the Tribes and Nations of America , rev. ed. (1798) ; and Samuel Stanhope Smith’s Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species , rev. ed. (1810) demonstrate interest in questions of descent and development, understood mainly through the frameworks of natural history, moral philosophy, and scripture, proliferated in the U.S. early republic. 62 Voluntary associations were crucial for publishing racial theorization and other studies that became incorporated into philosophical or scientific studies of race, much of which was subsequently reviewed in the popular press, now accessible though subscription databases such as Proquest’s American Periodicals Series and Readex’s Early American Newspapers . The latter provides an especially important window into the racial views of ordinary people. Researchers will find scattered material in the publications of state historical societies and learned societies. See especially Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society ( 1819 , 1838 , 1843 ); Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society ( 1820 , 1836 ); and Transactions of the American Ethnological Society ( 1845 , 1848 , 1853 ), which include publications by John Heckewelder, Peter S. Du Ponceau, Caleb Atwater, Albert Gallatin, Samuel G. Morton, and Ephraim G. Squier.

A number of other titles provide a sense of expanding ethnographic knowledge. Missionary organizations extended their reach in this era, with the Papers of the America Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (est. 1810 ), held by Harvard University’s Houghton Library, providing unmatched breadth and depth. Some material was published in monthly issues of Missionary Herald . See also Reuben Gold Thwaites , ed., Early Western Travels, 1748–1846 , 32 vols. (1904–1907) ; George Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841) ; two reports of the United States Exploring Expedition’s journey across the Pacific, Horatio Hale’s Ethnography and Philology (1846) and Charles Pickering’s Races of Man, and their Geographic Distribution (1848) ; and Henry R. Schoolcraft’s Information respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States , 6 vols. (1851–1857) . 63 The titles by Hale, Pickering, and Schoolcraft illustrate the growing importance of federal collection and publication of racial knowledge, and mid-19th-century disputes on both the methods and conclusions of ethnology. The most influential works on polygenism, the fixity of races, and the primacy of the body over language in determining race and ancestry are those of the American School of Ethnology: Samuel G. Morton’s Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Ægyptiaca ( 1843 ), and Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s massive compilations Types of Mankind (1854) and Indigenous Races of the Earth ( 1857 ). Most of these, along with many missionary and learned society publications, are available on Project Gutenberg or Google Books .

The personal papers of these particular philologists and ethnologists are tremendous resources for reconstructing not only theories of race but also the networks that produced and disseminated those theories. Especially rich are the papers of Benjamin Smith Barton, Peter S. Du Ponceau, and Samuel G. Morton, with collections for each housed at the American Philosophical Society and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (though, for Morton, HSP only stores the collection on behalf of the Library Company of Philadelphia); the papers of Albert Gallatin at New-York Historical Society ; and the papers of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft at Library of Congress. The Gallatin and Schoolcraft papers are also available on microfilm.

Sensitive readings of nearly all of the above sources will yield indications of the roles that nonwhites played in the production of ideas about race. For especially rich theorizations about race by black intellectuals, which directly addressed prevailing debates in ethnology, see Hosea Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States; and the Prejudice Exercised towards Them (1837) ; Frederick Douglass’s Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered (1854) ; and the excellent collected edition of The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist , ed. John Stauffer (2006) . 64 The Afro-Native writer Robert Benjamin Lewis’s Light and Truth, From Ancient and Sacred History (1836) is also important. 65 For evidence of Native engagement with racial theories as authors in their own right, see Elias Boudinot , Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot , ed. Theda Perdue (1983) ; William Apess , On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot ed. Barry O’Connell (1992) ; Kah-ge-ga-gah-bouh [George Copway], The Traditional History of the Ojibaway Nation ( 1850 ); Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby), History of the Ojebway Indians; with Especial Reference to their Conversion to Christianity (1861) ; and William W. Warren , History of the Ojibway People (1984) . 66

Further Reading

• Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
• Chaplin, Joyce E. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.
• Curran, Andrew . Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
• Dain, Bruce . A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Davis, David Brion , Alden T. Vaughan , Virginia Mason Vaughan , Emily C. Bartels , Robin Blackburn , Benjamin Braude , James H. Sweet , Jennifer L. Morgan , Karen Ordahl Kupperman , and Joyce E. Chaplin . “Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World.” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser. 54.1 (January 1997): 7–252.
• Dowd, Gregory Evans . A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
• Harvey, Sean P. Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015.
• Horsman, Reginald . Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.
• Jordan, Winthrop D. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.
• Kidd, Colin . The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Martínez, María Elena . Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
• Morrison, Michael A. , James Brewer Stewart , David R. Roediger , Daniel K. Richter , Lois E. Horton , Joanne Pope Melish , Jon Gjerde , James Brewer Stewart , Lacy K. Ford , James P. Ronda , and David Brian Davis , “Special Issue on Racial Consciousness and Nation Building in the Early Republic.” Journal of the Early Republic 19.4 (Winter 1999): 576–775.
• Pagden, Anthony . The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
• Shoemaker, Nancy . A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America . New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Sidbury, James . Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic . New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Spear, Jennifer . Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
• Sweet, John Wood . Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

1. Acts of the Apostles, 17:26 (King James Version). See also Benjamin Braude , “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Period,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3d Ser., 54 (1997): 103–142 ; and Ivan Hannaford , Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 89–91.

2. James T. Sweet , “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3d Ser., 54 (1997): 143–166, esp. 158 ; Rebecca Anne Goetz , The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2012), 18–19 ; and Kathleen M. Brown , Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 58.

3. The Journal of Christopher Columbus (During His First Voyage), and Documents Relating to the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real , trans. and ed., Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893), 38 , 68, 160; and Richard Hakluyt , “A Note of Sebastian Gabote Voyage,” in Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America and the Islands Adjacent , ed. John Winter Jones (London: Hakluyt Society, 1850), 23–24. See also Robert F. Berkhofer , The White Man’s Indian: Images of the Indian from Columbus to the Present (1978; New York: Vintage, 1979), 4–7 ; and Anthony Pagden , The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 10–11, 78–82.

4. Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (London, 1590) , unnumbered page titled, “Som Pictvre of the Pictes which in the olde tyme dyd habite one part of the great Bretainne.” See also Pagden, Fall of Natural Man , 27–108, 119–197; and Karen Ordahl Kupperman , Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 27–30, 49–61.

5. Richard Eden , The First Three Books on America, [?1511]–1555 A.D ., ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham, UK, 1885), xlii, 338 ; Champlin Burrage , ed., John Pory’s Lost Description of Plymouth Colony in the Earliest Days of the Pilgrim Fathers, Together with Contemporary Accounts of English Colonization Elsewhere in New England and the Bermudas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 50 . See also Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra , “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,” American Historical Review 104.1 (February 1999): 33–68, esp. 37–47 ; Joyce Chaplin , Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 116–125, 243–279 ; Brown, Good Wives , 57, 63; and Roxann Wheeler , The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 17–21.

6. Samuel Purchas , “Virginias Verger: Or a Discourse shewing the benefits which may grow to this Kingdome from American English Plantations, and specially those of Virginia and Summer Ilands,” in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and Others , vol. 19 (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 231 ; “Letter-Book of Samuel Sewall,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society , 6th ser., 1 (1886), 401; and Joseph Francois Lafitau , Customs of the American Indians Compared to the Customs of Primitive Times , ed. William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore , 2 vols. (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1977), 2: 264. See also Bernard Sheehan , Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 65–88 ; Brown, Good Wives , 45–74; Kupperman, Indians and English , 48–50, 78–79, 107–114; and Sean P. Harvey , Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 20, 26–35.

7. “Nathaniel Bacon, his manifesto concerning the present troubles in Virginia,” in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1675–1676 , ed. W. Noel Salisbury (London, 1893), 448. See also Kupperman, Indians and English , 228–240; Chaplin, Subject Matter , 15–16, 244; Jill Lepore , The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999), 166–167 ; and James D. Rice , Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 44, 57, 67–68.

8. Reuben Gold Thwaites , ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France , 73 vols. (Cleveland, 1896–1901), 2:13. See also Carole Blackburn , Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632–1650 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 133–134 ; Chaplin, Subject Matter ,116–198, 270–279; and Cañizares-Esguerra, “New World, New Stars.”

9. Pagden, Fall of Natural Man , 146–209; Ronald L. Meek , Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1976) ; and Harvey, Native Tongues , 19–48.

10. Morgan Godwyn , The Negro’s and Indians Advocate, Suing for their Admission into the Church: or a Persuasive to the Instructing and Baptizing of the Negro’s and Indians in our Plantations (London, 1680), 39, 36. See also Winthrop D. Jordan , White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 4–11, 17–18 ; Sue Peabody , “‘A Nation Born to Slavery’: Missionaries and Racial Discourse in the Seventeenth-Century French Antilles,” Journal of Social History 38.1 (2004): 113–126 ; Sweet, “Iberian Roots”; and María Elena Martínez , “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., 61.3 (July 2004): 479–520, esp. 488–492.

11. Michael Guasco , Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 26–33, 195–226 ; Brown, Good Wives , 107–136; Goetz, Baptism , 86–111, 136–137; and Jennifer M. Spear , Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 52–78.

12. [ Samuel Sewall ], The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston, 1700), 1–2 ; and John Wood Sweet , Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 58–64, 83–97, 154, 256–257, 284 (Belknap quoted on 154). See also Margot Minardi , “The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721–1722: An Incident in the History of Race,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., 61.1 (January 2004): 47–76.

13. Sir Thomas Herbert , Some Yeares Travels into Divers Parts of Asia and Afrique (London, 1638), 27 . See also Jordan, White over Black , 20–43; Brown, Good Wives , 37–41, 111, esp. 111; and Richard Ligon , A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 51. See also Jennifer L. Morgan , “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., 54.1 (January 1997): 167–192.

14. Jeremiah 13:23 (King James Version). See also Jordan, White over Black , 4–11; and Sweet, “Iberian Roots.”

15. Will[iam] Byrd , “An Account of a Negro-Boy that is dappel’d in several Places of his Body with White Spots,” Philosophical Transactions 19 (1695–1697): 781–782 . See also Jordan, White over Black , 244–252; Jill Lepore , New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Vintage, 2005), 170–171 ; and Andrew Curran , Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 87–105.

16. John Mitchell, “An Essay upon the Causes of the different Colours of People in different Cimates,” Philosophical Transactions 43 (1744–1745): 102–150, at 126, 138, 140, 150; and Curran, Anatomy of Blackness , 1–4, 117–130 (“degeneration” quoted at 2). See also Jordan, White over Black , 245–250; Wheeler, Complexion of Race , 25–28; and James Delbourgo , “The Newtonian Slave Body: Racial Enlightenment in the Atlantic World,” Atlantic Studies 9.2 (June 2012): 185–207.

17. David Hume , “Of National Characters,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary , edited by Eugene F. MIller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 208. See also Curran, Anatomy of Blackness , 127–128; Vincent Carretta, “Who Was Francis Williams?” Early American Literature 38.2 (Spring 2003): 213–237; and James Sidbury , Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 17–65.

18. Edward Long , History of Jamaica , 3 vols. (1774), 2: 351–375, at 375. See also Wheeler, Complexion of Race , 209–233; and Jordan, White over Black , 482–502, esp. 499.

19. P. de Charlevoix , Journal of a Voyage to North-America. Undertaken by Order of the French King [1761] (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), 1: 52, 49–50, 299. See also Harvey, Native Tongues , 49–79; and Lee Huddleston , Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967).

20. Genesis 9:25 (King James Version); [John White], The Planters Plea, or the Grounds of Plantations Examined, and Usuall Objections Answered (London, 1630), 55; George Best , “Experiences and Reasons of the Sphere, to Prove Al Partes of the World Habitable, and thereby to Confute the Position of the Five Zones,” in The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, in Search of a Passage to Cathaia and India by the North-West, A.D. 1576–8 , edited by Richard Collinson (London: Hakluyt Society, 1867), 54–55. See also Braude, “Sons of Noah”; Colin Kidd , The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 19–53 ; Goetz, Baptism , 58–72; Jordan, White over Black , 11–18; and Martínez, “Black Blood of New Spain,” 488–492.

21. Nicholas Hudson , “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.3 (1996): 247–264 ; Cañizares-Esguerra, “New World, New Stars”; María Elena Martínez , Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 1–13, 25–60, 91–264 ; Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order , 129–154; and Evelina Guzauskyte , “Fragmented Borders, Fallen Men, Bestial Women: Violence in the Casta Paintings of Eighteenth-Century New Spain,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 2 (2009): 175–204.

22. Guillaume Aubert , “‘The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., 61.3 (July 2004): 439–478 ; Saliha Belmessous , “Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy,” American Historical Review 110.2 (April 2005): 322–349 ; Sophie White , Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 176–228 ; and William Max Nelson , “Making Men: Enlightenment Ideas of Racial Engineering,” American Historical Review 115.5 (December 2010): 1364–1394.

23. Long, History of Jamaica , 260–261. See also Chaplin, Subject Matter , 186–191; Goetz, Baptism , 61–71; Brown, Good Wives , 187–211; Sweet, Bodies Politic , 147–171, 286–295; Gary B. Nash , “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” Journal of American History 82.3 (December 1995): 941–964 , esp. 941–947; Wheeler, Complexion of Race , 210–211; and Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order , 178–214. On the denial of Indianness, see Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau , “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” Ethnohistory 44.4 (Fall 1997): 433–462 ; and Jean M. O’Brien , Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

24. Jordan, White over Black , 220–221; Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’”; Bruce Dain , A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 9–14 ; Hannaford, Race , 202–205; Sweet, Bodies Politic , 272–277; Kidd, Forging of Races , 56–87; and Harvey, Native Tongues , 92–93.

25. William Robertson , The History of America (1792; London: Routledge, 1996), 2: 30, 52, 48. See also Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’”; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra , How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001); and Harvey, Native Tongues , 43–47.

26. Long, History of Jamaica , 2: 352, 375. See also Lee Huddleston , Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967) ; David N. Livingstone , Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 26–60 ; Wheeler, Complexion of Race , 184–87; Curran, Anatomy of Blackness , 137–149; Kidd, Forging of Races , 61–73, 86–87, 95–100; and Harvey, Native Tongues , 55–56.

27. Jenny Shaw , Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013) ; Brown, Good Wives , 197–198; Goetz, Baptism , 112–137; Heather Miyano Kopelson , “Sinning Property and the Legal Transformation of Abominable Sex in Early Bermuda,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., 70.3 (July 2013): 459–496 ; and Aubert, “Blood of France”; Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order , 129–214.

28. Benjamin Franklin , “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind and Peopling of Countries” (1751), in Writings of Benjamin Franklin , edited by Jared Sparks , vol. 2 (London, 1882), 320–321 ; and J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur , Letters from an American Farmer, and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America , ed. Albert E. Stone (New York: Penguin, 1981), 68–70. See also Jordan, White over Black , 335–341; and Matthew Frye Jacobson , Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 39–43.

29. John Heckewelder , Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren among the Delaware and Mohegan Indians, from its Commencement, in the Year 1740, to the Close of the Year 1808 (Philadelphia, 1820), 68, 130 ; Freeman’s Journal, or the North American Intelligencer (Philadelphia), May 28, 1783, p. 1. See also Nancy Shoemaker , A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 129–130 ; and Peter Silver , Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton, 2008), 18–30, 110–123, 202–204, 261–301.

30. Independent Journal (New York), January 24, 1784, p. 3. See also Sweet, Bodies Politic , 106–110, 143–144; Joanne P. Melish , “The ‘Condition’ Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North,” Journal of the Early Republic 19.4 (Winter 1999): 651–672 ; and Lacy K. Ford Jr., “Making the ‘White Man’s Country’ White: Race, Slavery, and State-Building in the Jacksonian South,” ibid ., 713–737. On minstrelsy’s divergent but coexisting impulses, see Eric Lott , Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

31. Allan Nevins and Milton H. Thomas , eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong , 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 1: 318, 2: 348 ; Transcript of Dred Scott v. Sanford , (1857). See also Lois E. Horton , “From Class to Race in Early America: Northern Post-Emancipation Racial Reconstruction,” Journal of the Early Republic 19.4 (Winter 1999): 629–649 ; James Brewer Stewart, “Modernizing ‘Difference’: The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776–1840,” ibid ., 691–712; David R. Roediger , The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991) ; and Elliott West , “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 34.1 (Spring 2003): 6–26.

32. Phyllis Wheatley, “On Being from Africa to America,” in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773; Denver, 1887), 17. See also Sidbury, Becoming African in America , 3–90, 119–123, 131–155; Sweet, Bodies Politic , 328–352; and Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind , 2–4, 70–72, 87–89.

33. Sidbury, Becoming African in America , 157–202; Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind , 81–83, 98–114, 139–148; and Mia Bay , The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 13–74.

34. “Voyage to the Mississippi through the Gulf of Mexico,” trans. Ann Linda Bell , annot. Robert S. Weddle , in La Salle, the Mississippi, and the Gulf , edited by Mary Christine Morkovsky and Patricia Galloway (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 231. See also Daniel K. Richter , Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 179–182, 193–201, 228–232, 289 n. 69 ; and Shoemaker, Strange Likeness , 80, 130–140.

35. Carl van Doren and Julian P. Boyd , eds., Indian Treaties Printed by Benjamin Franklin, 1736–1762 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1938), 63. See also Gregory Evans Dowd , A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) ; and Shoemaker, Strange Likeness , 133, 137–140.

36. James H. Merrell , “The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians,” Journal of Southern History 50.3 (August 1984): 363–384 ; Christina Snyder , Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Indian Country (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 182–248 ; Sweet, Bodies Politic , 312–328; David J. Silverman , Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010) ; and Richter, Facing East , 237–242.

37. Thomas Jefferson , Notes on the State of Virginia , ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 138–140, 143, 100–102. See also Jordan, White over Black , 429–481; Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind , 26–39; Peter S. Onuf , “‘To declare them a free and independent people’: Race, Slavery, and National Identity in Jefferson’s Thought,” Journal of the Early Republic 18.1 (Spring 1998): 1–46 ; Bernard W. Sheehan , Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 15–88 ; and Harvey, Native Tongues , 57–61.

38. Jordan, White over Black , 449–455, 509–517, 531–534, 544; Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind , 40–80, 140–145, 261–263; Sweet, Bodies Politic , 271–295; and Kariann Yokota , Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213–225.

39. [Samuel] Cartwright, “Negroes.—Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro,” in The Southern States, Embracing a Series of Papers Condensed from the Earlier Volumes of De Bow’s Review, upon Slavery and the Slave Institutions of the South, Internal Improvements, etc . (Washington, D.C., 1856), 315–329, at 322, 323. See also Dain, Hideous Monster , 197–235, 254–261; Walter Johnson , Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 135–161 ; and William Stanton , The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 66–67, 113–118, 126–128, 134–139, 189–191.

40. Samuel Stanhope Smith , An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (New-Brunswick: J. Simpson, 1810), 68. See also Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction , 20–23, 34–42; Robert E. Bieder , Science Encounters the Indian: The Early Years of American Ethnology, 1820 – 1880 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 55–103 ; and Ann Fabian , The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9–45.

41. Harvey, Native Tongues , 61–65, 85–88, 95–181; and Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian , 146–193.

42. Andrew Jackson, " Second Annual Message ," December 6, 1830. See also Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian , 104–145, 172–176; Robert Silverberg , The Moundbuilders of Ancient America: The Archaeology of a Myth (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 1–165 ; Harvey, Native Tongues , 82–95, 159–169; Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian ; Stanton, Leopard’s Spots ; Fabian, Skull Collectors , 79–119; and Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind , 197–237.

43. See also E. G. S., “American Ethnology,” American Review , A Whig Journal Devoted to Politics and Literature 3.4 (April 1849): 385–386. See also Harvey, Native Tongues , 182–184, 196–218; Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian ; Stanton, Leopard’s Spots ; Fabian, Skull Collectors , 47–162; Dain, Hideous Monster , 197–237; Sweet, Bodies Politic , 303; Jordan, White over Black , 89–91; Barry Allen Joyce , The Shaping of American Ethnography: The Wilkes Exploring Expedition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 2–3 ; and West, “Reconstructing Race.”

44. Albert Gallatin , Peace with Mexico (New York, 1847), 13 ; William W. Warren , History of the Ojibway People (1887; St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1984), 212, 61–62 ; and James McCune Smith , “‘Civilization’: Its Dependence on Physical Circumstances” [1859], in The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist , edited by John Stauffer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 260, 262. See also Reginald Horsman , Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 208–297 ; Harvey, Native Tongues , 194–196, 202–203; and Dain, Hideous Monster , 237–263.

45. Stanton, Leopard’s Spots ; Thomas F. Gossett , Race: The History of an Idea in America (1963; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) ; Jordan, White over Black ; George Frederickson , The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971; Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987) ; and Alden T. Vaughan , “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97.3 (July 1989): 311–354.

46. Roy Harvey Pearce , Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953) ; Pagden, Fall of Natural Man ; Ronald Meek , Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976) ; and Bieder, Science Encounters the Indian .

47. Brian W. Dippie , The Vanishing American: Popular Attitudes and American Indian Policy in the Nineteenth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press,1970) ; Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction ; Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian ; and Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny .

48. Brown, Good Wives ; Shoemaker, Strange Likeness ; Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order ; Morgan, “Some Could Suckle”; and Kopelson, “Sinning Property.”

49. Chaplin, Subject Matter ; Shoemaker, Strange Likeness ; and Sweet, Bodies Politic .

50. Goetz, Baptism of Early Virginia ; White, Wild Frenchman and Frenchified Indians ; and Harvey, Native Tongues .

51. Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’”; Martínez, “Black Blood of New Spain”; Aubert, “Blood of France”; Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order ; Goetz, Baptism of Early Virginia ; Harvey, Native Tongues ; and Lee Eldridge Huddleston , Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967).

52. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness ; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color ; and Silver, Our Savage Neighbors .

53. Sidbury, Becoming African in America ; Sweet, Bodies Politic ; Bay, White Image in the Black Mind ; and Dain, Hideous Monster of the Mind .

54. Shoemaker, Strange Likeness ; James H. Merrell , “The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians,” Journal of Southern History 50.3 (August 1984): 363–384 ; William G. McLoughlin and Walter H. Cosner Jr. , “‘The First Man was Red’: Cherokee Responses to the Debate over Indian Origins, 1760–1860,” American Quarterly 41.2 (June 1989): 243–264 ; Dowd, Spirited Resistance ; Silverman, Red Brethren ; and Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country .

55. Miriam Eliav-Feldon , Benjamin Isaac , and Joseph Ziegler , eds., The Origins of Racism in the West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) ; Jordan, White over Black ; Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian ; Chaplin, Subject Matter ; Goetz, Baptism of Early Virginia ; and David Brion Davis et al., “Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., 54.1 (January 1997): 7–252.

56. Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’”; Hannaford, Race ; Wheeler, Complexion of Race ; and Curran, Anatomy of Blackness .

57. Dowd, Spirited Resistance ; Shoemaker, Strange Likeness ; Silverman, Red Brethren ; Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country ; Silver, Our Savage Neighbors ; and Sweet, Bodies Politic .

58. Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind ; Dain, Hideous Monster ; Sweet, Bodies Politic ; Harvey, Native Tongues ; and Michael A. Morisson , et al., “Special Issue on Racial Consciousness and Nation Building in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 19.4 (Winter 1999): 576–775.

59. José de Acosta , Natural and Moral History of the Indies , ed. Jane E. Mangan , trans. Frances López Morillas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002) ; Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians ; and Robertson, History of America .

60. de Charlevoix, Journal of a Voyage to North America ; and James Adair , History of the North American Indians , ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).

61. Long, History of Jamaica ; and Mitchell’s “Essay.”

62. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia , ed. William Peden; Benjamin Smith Barton , New Views of the Tribes and Nations of America , rev. ed. (Philadelphia: John Bioren, 1798) ; and Smith, Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion .

63. Reuben Gold Thwaites , ed., Early Western Travels, 1748–1846 , 32 vols. (Cleveland, Ohio: A. H. Clark, 1904–1907) ; George Catlin , Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1841) ; Horatio Hale , Ethnography and Philology (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1846) ; Charles Pickering , The Races of Man, and their Geographic Distribution (Philadelphia: C. Sherman, 1848) ; and Henry R. Schoolcraft , Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States , 6 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1851–1857).

64. Hosea Easton , Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States and the Prejudice Exercised towards Them (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837) ; Frederick Douglass , “The Claims of the Negro, Ethnologically Considered, address delivered at Western Reserve College, July 12, 1854,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings , edited by Philip S. Foner and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999) ; and The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist , ed. John Stauffer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

65. Robert Benjamin Lewis , Light and Truth, From Ancient and Sacred History (1836; Boston: Benjamin F. Roberts, 1844).

66. Elias Boudinot , Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot , ed. Theda Perdue (Athens: University of George Press, 1983) ; William Apess , On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot , ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992) ; G. Copway (Kah-ge-ga-gah-bouh), The Traditional History of the Ojibway Nation (London: Charles Gilpin, 1850) ; Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby), History of the Ojebway Indians; with Especial Reference to their Conversion to Christianity (London: A. W. Bennett, 1861) ; and William W. Warren , History of the Ojibway People (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1984).

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The Impact of Pseudoscientific Ideas of Race on the Jewish Nation During the Period 1933 to 1946

In the turbulent years between 1933 and 1946, pseudoscientific ideas about race profoundly influenced societal attitudes, policies, and the lives of millions, particularly the Jewish community. This essay explores how these unfounded theories of racial superiority and inferiority underpinned the tragic events of the Holocaust and shaped the experiences of the Jewish people during this dark period in history.

Introduction

The period from 1933 to 1946 was marked by the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany , which championed pseudoscientific ideas of race to justify its ideologies and actions. These ideas were not just confined to Germany; they had a far-reaching impact on the Jewish nation, leading to unprecedented levels of persecution , discrimination, and the systematic attempt to eradicate an entire people . This article examines the influence of these racial theories and their devastating effects on the Jewish community.

• Pseudoscientific Foundations: The Nazis leveraged the guise of scientific research to claim the superiority of the “ Aryan ” race and the inferiority of others, especially Jews. These claims were based on flawed methodologies and racial prejudices rather than empirical evidence.
• Legislation and Discrimination: Inspired by these pseudoscientific beliefs, the Nazi regime implemented a series of laws, such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 , which institutionalized racial discrimination. Jews were stripped of their citizenship, banned from certain professions, and subjected to widespread social exclusion.
• Propaganda and Public Opinion: Nazi propaganda extensively used pseudoscientific rhetoric to dehumanize Jews and justify their persecution. This not only bolstered public support for anti-Semitic policies but also desensitized the populace to the regime’s escalating brutality.
• Impact on the Jewish Community: The Jewish nation suffered immensely under these policies. Beyond the catastrophic loss of life, the community faced profound cultural and psychological scars, many of which persist to this day.

Pseudoscientific Ideas of Race on the Jewish Nation During the Period 1933 to 1946

The influence of pseudoscientific ideas of race during the period 1933 to 1946 had a profound and devastating impact on the Jewish nation. These ideas, deeply rooted in Nazi ideology and eugenics, not only justified the persecution and extermination of Jews but also led to widespread legislative discrimination and the use of propaganda to manipulate public opinion. The consequences of these actions were catastrophic, culminating in the Holocaust and leaving lasting scars on the Jewish community.

Pseudoscientific Rationale

The Nazi regime’s pseudoscientific rationale for the persecution of Jews was grounded in a distorted interpretation of eugenics and racial purity. Eugenics , a theory that sought to improve the genetic quality of the human population, was perverted by the Nazis to assert the superiority of the “Aryan” race and the inferiority of others, particularly Jews. This misapplication of science falsely categorized Jews as a distinct and inferior race, purportedly justifying their exclusion from society and the need for their extermination. These claims were bolstered by manipulated data, flawed studies, and the outright dismissal of genuine scientific inquiry, creating a veneer of legitimacy for racial prejudices.

Examples include :

• Measurements and Classifications: The Nazis obsessively measured skull sizes , facial features, and other physical characteristics in an attempt to scientifically prove racial differences.
• Genetic Theories: They propagated the idea that Jews carried hereditary defects that could undermine the purity and health of the “Aryan” race.

Legislative Impact

The pseudoscientific justification of racial superiority led to the enactment of laws that systematically marginalized Jews and laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were particularly instrumental, stripping Jews of their citizenship and prohibiting marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. These laws facilitated the seizure of Jewish property, forced sterilizations, and were a key step towards the establishment of ghettos and concentration camps.

• Property Seizures: Laws enabled the confiscation of Jewish businesses and assets, often transferring ownership to non-Jewish Germans.
• Forced Sterilization: Individuals deemed “racially inferior” were subjected to forced sterilizations under the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring .

Role of Propaganda

Nazi propaganda was a powerful tool in dehumanizing Jews and painting them as the root of Germany’s problems. By continuously portraying Jews as subhuman and a threat to society, the regime fostered a climate of indifference and hostility that made it easier to carry out mass atrocities without significant public outcry. The use of media, including newspapers, films, and posters, ensured that these pseudoscientific ideas were embedded in the daily lives of Germans, normalizing the persecution and eventual extermination of Jews.

• Der Stürmer: A weekly newspaper that published virulently anti-Semitic content, including caricatures that depicted Jews as greedy, corrupt, and conspiratorial.
• Education System: School curricula and textbooks were revised to include racist ideologies, teaching children to view Jews as different and inferior.

Consequences for the Jewish Nation

The ultimate consequence of these pseudoscientific ideas was the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews . This genocide not only represented an unimaginable loss of life but also inflicted deep, enduring wounds on the Jewish community. Survivors and their descendants grapple with the loss of family, the destruction of their cultural heritage, and the trauma of the atrocities they witnessed or experienced.

• Cultural Loss: The destruction of synagogues, cemeteries, and cultural artifacts erased centuries of Jewish history and tradition.
• Psychological Impact: The survivors often suffered from psychological trauma, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) , depression, and survivor’s guilt.

The pseudoscientific ideas of race promoted by the Nazi regime had catastrophic effects on the Jewish nation, demonstrating the dangerous power of racial ideologies when combined with state power. The legacy of this period underscores the importance of countering pseudoscience and promoting a society based on genuine scientific understanding and mutual respect for all individuals.

The impact of pseudoscientific ideas of race on the Jewish nation during 1933 to 1946 is a stark reminder of the dangers of allowing unfounded and biased theories to guide societal values and policies. The lessons from this period continue to be relevant, as they underscore the need for vigilance against racism and the importance of basing societal decisions on sound scientific principles. The resilience of the Jewish community in the face of such adversity is a powerful testament to the human spirit’s capacity to overcome even the darkest chapters of history.

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Critical Race Theory and the Evolution of Modern Educational Practices

This essay discusses Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its application in modern education. It explains how CRT, developed in the 1970s, views racism as a systemic issue embedded in societal structures, including education. Key concepts such as “interest convergence” and “intersectionality” are explored, highlighting how they reveal the complexities of racial progress and the overlapping forms of discrimination individuals face. The essay also emphasizes the importance of narrative and storytelling in CRT, advocating for the inclusion of diverse perspectives in educational curricula. Despite facing criticism for potentially promoting division, CRT is presented as a crucial framework for understanding and addressing racial inequalities in both K-12 and higher education. The essay underscores the value of CRT in fostering more inclusive and equitable teaching practices and policies.

How it works

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been a lightning rod for debate in recent years, particularly within the educational sphere. Born in the mid-1970s, CRT offers a framework for analyzing how race and power intersect with law and societal structures. To better grasp CRT, we must delve into its core principles and their relevance to modern education, weaving these ideas into a broader discussion of contemporary pedagogical practices.

At its essence, CRT challenges the notion that racism is merely a series of individual acts.

Instead, it argues that racism is a systemic issue, embedded within the laws and institutions that shape our daily lives. This perspective has profound implications for education. For instance, traditional teaching methods often rely on standardized testing as an objective measure of student ability. CRT scholars argue that these tests can perpetuate racial inequalities by favoring the cultural and linguistic norms of the dominant group.

One of the pivotal concepts within CRT is “interest convergence,” introduced by Derrick Bell. This idea posits that racial progress occurs primarily when it aligns with the interests of the dominant group. Take the desegregation of schools post-Brown v. Board of Education, for example. While a landmark victory for civil rights, this decision also served to enhance America’s image during the Cold War. Interest convergence thus suggests that genuine racial progress is often conditional, aligning with broader socio-political goals.

Another cornerstone of CRT is “intersectionality,” a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Intersectionality examines how various forms of discrimination—based on race, gender, class, and more—intersect to create unique experiences of oppression. In the educational context, this means recognizing that a Black female student might face different challenges than her Black male or white female peers. Intersectionality urges educators to consider these multifaceted identities when addressing classroom inequalities.

CRT also underscores the power of narrative and storytelling. By centering the experiences of marginalized groups, CRT seeks to challenge dominant narratives that often marginalize these voices. In education, this approach might involve integrating diverse perspectives into the curriculum. For instance, history classes could explore the contributions of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, providing a richer, more inclusive account of the past.

Despite its insights, CRT has encountered substantial resistance, particularly from those who see it as divisive. Critics argue that CRT emphasizes differences at the expense of unity and promotes a sense of victimhood. They also contend that CRT’s critique of meritocracy and liberalism undermines the values of equality and individual achievement. However, proponents of CRT maintain that these critiques overlook the persistent, systemic nature of racial inequality.

The debate over CRT has been especially contentious in the realm of K-12 education. Discussions about whether to include CRT in school curricula have ignited fierce arguments about the role of education in either perpetuating or addressing racial disparities. Supporters argue that CRT equips students with critical tools for understanding the roots of racial inequality, fostering informed and empathetic citizens. Opponents, however, fear that CRT could lead to increased polarization and a sense of guilt or victimhood among students.

To navigate these debates, educators might consider integrating CRT principles into existing curricula rather than presenting them as a standalone subject. For example, history lessons can include discussions about how laws and policies have historically shaped racial dynamics in the United States. Literature classes can feature works by authors from diverse backgrounds, prompting students to examine how their experiences reflect broader social issues.

Moreover, CRT can inspire more equitable teaching practices. Adopting culturally responsive pedagogy, for instance, involves recognizing and valuing the cultural backgrounds of all students. This approach can help create a more inclusive classroom environment, ensuring that every student feels seen and valued. Teachers might also consider how their own biases and assumptions influence their interactions with students and strive to address these in their teaching practices.

In higher education, CRT provides a framework for examining and addressing systemic inequalities within universities and colleges. This might involve scrutinizing admission policies, faculty hiring practices, and resource allocation to promote diversity and inclusion. For instance, universities could reevaluate legacy admissions policies, which often favor certain racial groups, and consider alternatives that foster greater equity.

Ultimately, CRT’s value lies in its ability to illuminate the often hidden nature of systemic racism. By encouraging a critical examination of how race intersects with other social identities and power structures, CRT offers a lens through which we can better understand and address the root causes of inequality. Whether in education, law, or broader society, CRT provides essential insights and tools for promoting social justice and equity.

In conclusion, Critical Race Theory offers a vital framework for understanding the systemic nature of racial inequality, particularly within the field of education. By highlighting concepts such as interest convergence, intersectionality, and the power of narrative, CRT challenges us to think critically about how race and power shape our world. Despite the controversy it has sparked, CRT’s contributions to the discourse on race and justice are indispensable in the ongoing struggle for a more equitable society. By engaging with CRT, educators, scholars, and policymakers can develop more effective strategies for promoting social justice, ensuring that all students have the opportunity to succeed in an inclusive and equitable educational environment.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — To Kill a Mockingbird — The Cunninghams and Ewells: A Dichotomy of Poverty and Morality

The Cunninghams and Ewells: a Dichotomy of Poverty and Morality

• Categories: To Kill a Mockingbird

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Published: Jun 13, 2024

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The cunninghams: the virtuous poor, the impact of poverty on morality, bibliography.

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The Motivated Ignorance of Trump Supporters

They can’t claim they didn’t know.

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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

O n the morning of August 8, 2022 , 30 FBI agents and two federal prosecutors conducted a court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, estate. The reason for the search, according to a 38-count indictment , was that after leaving office Trump mishandled classified documents, including some involving sensitive nuclear programs, and then obstructed the government’s efforts to reclaim them.

On the day before the FBI obtained the search warrant, one of the agents on the case sent an email to his bosses, according to The New York Times . “The F.B.I. intends for the execution of the warrant to be handled in a professional, low key manner,” he wrote, “and to be mindful of the optics of the search.” It was, and they were.

Over the course of 10 hours, the Times reported, “there was little drama as [agents] hauled away a trove of boxes containing highly sensitive state secrets in three vans and a rented Ryder box truck.”

On the day of the search, Trump was out of the state. The club at Mar-a-Lago was closed. Agents alerted one of Trump’s lawyers in advance of the search. And before the search, the FBI communicated with the Secret Service “to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues,” according to the testimony of former Assistant FBI Director Steven D’Antuono. It wasn’t a “show of force,” he said. “I was adamant about that, and that was something we all agreed on.”

The search warrant itself included a standard statement from the Department of Justice’s policy on the use of deadly force. There was nothing exceptional about it. But that didn’t prevent Trump or his supporters from claiming that President Joe Biden and federal law-enforcement agents had been involved in a plot to assassinate the former president.

In a fundraising appeal, Trump wrote,

BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME! It’s just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid in Mar-a-Lago. You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.

On May 23, Trump publicly claimed that the Department of Justice “authorized the use of ‘deadly force’ in their Illegal, UnConstitutional, and Un-American RAID of Mar-a-Lago, and that would include against our Great Secret Service, who they thought might be ‘in the line of fire.’”

Read: The two-time Trump voters who have had enough

Trump supporters echoed those claims, as he knew they would. Steve Bannon, one of the architects of the MAGA movement, said , “This was an attempted assassination attempt on Donald John Trump or people associated with him. They wanted a gunfight.” Right-wing radio hosts stoked one another’s fury, claiming that there’s nothing Trump critics won’t do to stop him, up to and including attempting to assassinate him and putting the lives of his Secret Service detail in danger.

The statement by Trump went beyond inflaming his supporters; it created a mindset that moved them closer to violence, the very same mindset that led thousands of them to attack the Capitol on January 6 and threaten to hang Vice President Mike Pence. Which is why Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a motion asking the judge overseeing Trump’s classified-documents case to block him from making public statements that could put law enforcement in danger. “Those deceptive and inflammatory assertions irresponsibly put a target on the backs of the FBI agents involved in this case, as Trump well knows,” he wrote.

M otivated ignorance refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts. It’s choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity. Nescience is therefore incentivized; people actively decide to remain in a state of ignorance. If they are presented with strong arguments against a position they hold, or compelling evidence that disproves the narrative they embrace, they will reject them. Doing so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve been lying to themselves and to others.

Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one degree or another, employ it. What matters is the degree to which one embraces it, and the consequences of doing so. In the case of MAGA world, the lies that Trump supporters believe, or say they believe, are obviously untrue and obviously destructive. Since 2016 there’s been a ratchet effect, each conspiracy theory getting more preposterous and more malicious. Things that Trump supporters wouldn’t believe or accept in the past have since become loyalty tests. Election denialism is one example. The claim that Trump is the target of “lawfare,” victim to the weaponization of the justice system, is another.

I have struggled to understand how to view individuals who have not just voted for Trump but who celebrate him, who don’t merely tolerate him but who constantly defend his lawlessness and undisguised cruelty. How should I think about people who, in other domains of their lives, are admirable human beings and yet provide oxygen to his malicious movement? How complicit are people who live in an epistemic hall of mirrors and have sincerely—or half-sincerely—convinced themselves they are on the side of the angels?

Throughout my career I’ve tried to resist the temptation to make unwarranted judgments about the character of people based on their political views. For one thing, it’s quite possible my views on politics are misguided or distorted, so I exercise a degree of humility in assessing the views of others. For another, I know full well that politics forms only a part of our lives, and not the most important part. People can be personally upstanding and still be wrong on politics.

But something has changed for me in the Trump era. I struggle more than I once did to wall off a person’s character from their politics when their politics is binding them to an unusually—and I would say undeniably—destructive person. The lies that MAGA world parrots are so manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they are difficult to set aside.

If a person insists, despite the overwhelming evidence, that Trump was the target of an assassination plot hatched by Biden and carried out by the FBI, this is more than an intellectual failure; it is a moral failure, and a serious one at that. It’s only reasonable to conclude that such Trump supporters have not made a good-faith effort to understand what is really and truly happening. They are choosing to live within the lie, to invoke the words of the former Czech dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel.

One of the criteria that need to be taken into account in assessing the moral culpability of people is how absurd the lies are that they are espousing; a second is how intentionally they are avoiding evidence that exposes the lies because they are deeply invested in the lie; and a third is is how consequential the lie is.

It’s one thing to embrace a conspiracy theory that is relevant only to you and your tiny corner of the world. It’s an entirely different matter if the falsehood you’re embracing and promoting is venomous, harming others, and eroding cherished principles, promoting violence and subverting American democracy.

I n his book The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy , J. Russell Hawkins tells the story of a June 1963 gathering of more than 200 religious leaders in the White House. President John F. Kennedy was trying to rally their support for civil-rights legislation.

Among those in attendance was Albert Garner, a Baptist minister from Florida, who told Kennedy that many southern white Christians held “strong moral convictions” on racial integration. It was, according to Garner, “against the will of their Creator.”

“Segregation is a principle of the Old Testament,” Garner said, adding, “Prior to this century neither Christianity nor any denomination of it ever accepted the integration philosophy.”

Two months later, in Hanahan, South Carolina, members of a Southern Baptist church—they described themselves as “Christ centered” and “Bible believing”—voted to take a firm stand against civil-rights legislation.

“The Hanahan Baptists were not alone,” according to Hawkins. “Across the South, white Christians thought the president was flaunting Christian orthodoxy in pursuing his civil rights agenda.” Kennedy “simply could not comprehend the truth Garner was communicating: based on their religious beliefs, southern white Christians thought integration was evil.”

A decade earlier, the Reverend Carey Daniel, pastor of First Baptist Church in West Dallas, Texas, had delivered a sermon titled “ God the Original Segregationist ,” in response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education . It became influential within pro-segregationist southern states. Daniel later became president of the Central Texas Division of the Citizens Council of America for Segregation, which asked for a boycott of all businesses, lunch counters included, that served Black patrons. In 1960, Daniel attacked those “trying to destroy the white South by breaking the color line, thus giving aid and comfort to our Communist enemies.”

Now ask yourself this: Did the fierce advocacy on behalf of segregation, and the dehumanization of Black Americans, reflect in any meaningful way on the character of those who advanced such views, even if, say, they volunteered once a month at a homeless shelter and wrote a popular commentary on the Book of Romans? Readers can decide whether MAGA supporters are better or worse than Albert Garner and Carey Daniel. My point is that all of us believe there’s some place on the continuum in which the political choices we make reflect on our character. Some movements are overt and malignant enough that to willingly be a part of them becomes ethically problematic.

Read: The voters who don’t really know Trump

This doesn’t mean those in MAGA world can’t be impressive people in other domains of life, just like critics of Trump may act reprehensibly in their personal lives and at their jobs. I’ve never argued, and I wouldn’t argue today, that politics tells us the most important things about a person’s life. Trump supporters and Trump critics alike can brighten the lives of others, encourage those who are suffering, and demonstrate moments of kindness and grandeur.

I understand, too, if their moral convictions keep them from voting for Joe Biden.

But it would be an affectation for me, at least, to pretend that in this particular circumstance otherwise good people, in joining the MAGA movement, in actively advocating on its behalf, and in planning to cast a vote for Trump, haven’t—given all we know—done something grievously wrong.

Some of them are cynical and know better; others are blind to the cultlike world to which they belong. Still others have convinced themselves that Trump, although flawed, is the best of bad options. It’s a “binary choice,” they say, and so they have talked themselves into supporting arguably the most comprehensively corrupt man in the history of American politics, certainly in presidential politics.

Whichever justification applies, they are giving not just their vote but their allegiance to a man and movement that have done great harm to our country and its ideals, and which seek to inflict even deeper wounds in the years ahead. Many of them are self-proclaimed evangelicals and fundamentalists, and they are also doing inestimable damage to the Christian faith they claim is central to their lives. That collaboration needs to be named. A generation from now, and probably sooner, it will be obvious to everyone that Trump supporters can’t claim they didn’t know.

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Two recent papers by Stefanie Stantcheva explore Americans’ perceptions of inflation.

Photo courtesy of Stefanie Stantcheva

Americans hate inflation, full stop

No traction for more positive economic developments, research says

Harvard Correspondent

Say “inflation” these days and the minds of most Americans jump to steep grocery bills and high interest rates.

As highlighted by two recent papers by Stefanie Stantcheva , the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy, the majority are much less likely to focus on the more positive economic trends of the past few years, including wage growth and strong employment prospects. What’s more, Americans overwhelmingly oppose the tools that policymakers use to mitigate inflation’s worst effects. In fact, many see inflation as only getting worse when the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, as it did 11 times between spring 2022 and last summer.

“There hasn’t been enough work to see how people understand inflation, what policies they want to support in order to fight inflation, and also how inflation actually impacts them,” Stantcheva said.

For a paper titled “ People’s Understanding of Inflation ,” Stantcheva and graduate student co-authors Francesco Nuzzi (Harvard) and Alberto Binetti (Princeton) conducted a large-scale survey through which they found that most Americans believe inflation has been caused by government action, trailed by supply-chain disruptions and other COVID-related issues. Respondents expressed skepticism about rate hikes as an effective countermeasure.

75% Of Republican voters surveyed blamed inflation on the government vs. 60% of Democrats

Clear partisan differences surfaced in the findings. Republicans were more likely to blame inflation on the government (more than 75 percent of GOP voters vs. 60 percent of Democrats) and less likely to blame private companies. All respondents saw inflation as more harmful to lower-income people, but Republicans were less likely to support policies that might help these households, such as expanding access to food stamps (supported by 80 percent of Democrats vs. 50 percent of Republicans) or boosting the minimum wage (80 percent for Democrats vs. 50 percent of Republicans).

The most cited burden of inflation was the impact on family budgets, notably the way it raises the stakes on household purchases and standard of living.

Among the details that caught Nuzzi’s attention was the lack of ambiguity in survey responses. “People perceive inflation as unequivocally negative, rarely associating it with positive economic developments or with a good economy,” he said.

Discussing the second paper, “ Why Do We Dislike Inflation ?,” Stantcheva noted that inflation typically plays out in one of two ways. The first is a product of a booming economy: “There’s high demand, things are going well, and that can actually generate inflation.” The other possibility, “stagflation,” is associated with high unemployment and stagnant demand.

Most respondents viewed all inflationary episodes as “stagflation,” Stantcheva said. “There is a perception that inflation is unambiguously a bad thing.”

Views on the tools policymakers use in attempts to control inflation echoed findings from “People’s Understanding of Inflation.”

“People tend to think that policymakers do not face harsh trade-offs when it comes to fighting inflation,” she said.

This is important, she added, because “when you ask people what type of policies they support to fight inflation … contractionary monetary policies like increasing interest rates or reducing money supply have very low support.”

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. files papers to join Pennsylvania presidential race as independent candidate

While polls show kennedy has significant support, it’s unclear whether that hurts biden or trump, by: peter hall - june 21, 2024 5:35 pm.

CAPTION: Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. takes the stage at the Des Moines Register soapbox Aug. 12, 2023. On Friday, Feb. 9, 2024, national Democrats alleged Kennedy has illegally coordinated with a super PAC to gather signatures for his bid. (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Iowa Capital Dispatch)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed papers Thursday to run for president in Pennsylvania as a third-party candidate in a race where the front runners, President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, are in a dead heat.

While Kennedy has little chance of winning the election, his presence on the ballot in this highly competitive battleground state could be decisive. The question is, said one Pennsylvania political observer, for whom.

“When you look at his data it’s not always clear who he hurts more,” Berwood Yost, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll, told the Capital-Star on Friday.

Kennedy’s candidacy in Pennsylvania is not a sure thing yet, Yost said, noting that his nominating petitions can be challenged to ensure that every signature is that of a registered voter and that the information of those who signed is correct. 

“I would bet that neither campaign wants him on the ballot so they will challenge all those signatures,” Yost said.

Kennedy’s campaign said Friday that it has submitted 9,000 signatures, nearly twice the number required for independent candidates, and that volunteers plan to continue submitting signatures.

“We now have a candidate we can vote for who truly cares about us,” the campaign’s Northeast Regional Director Jon Raso said. “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will give Pennsylvanians the government accountability they deserve.”

Kennedy is officially on the ballot in eight states, including the battleground state of Michigan, and has collected signatures for ballot access in 15 others including North Carolina, which is also a must-win for the presidency.

Members of Kennedy’s family, one of the most prominent in American politics, stood on a Philadelphia stage with Biden in April to offer the president their full-throated endorsement.

Biden receives Kennedy family endorsement in Philadelphia

Neither the Biden nor the Trump campaign directly answered questions about possible challenges. And both parties have worked to associate Kennedy with the ideologies of the other, with the Trump campaign issuing a statement calling Kennedy a “radical leftist” and “ environmental whack job.” The Democratic National Committee highlighted what it called “MAGA ties” through conservative mega donor Timothy Mellon as Kennedy sought to secure ballot access through right-wing third parties. 

Kennedy, nonetheless, resonates with some voters, Yost said.

The most recent Franklin & Marshall poll, published June 6, which focused on Pennsylvania’s closely-watched 10th Congressional District, showed Biden and Trump neck and neck, each with 40% of voters polled in the district. Kennedy was favored by 13% of those asked in the poll.

It’s unclear, Yost said, whether those who vote for Kennedy are taking their votes away from Biden or Trump. 

“We know that there’s a lot of disaffection among voters,” Yost said, noting the poll showed those who responded feel the biggest problems facing Pennsylvania are the economy and government and politics. 

And in the last two elections, the share of the vote received by independent candidates has neared or surpassed the margin between the winner and the loser. In 2020, Biden won by 1.17% of the vote, while Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen took 1.15%. In 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost by an even narrower margin, the three independent candidates collectively received more than 3.5%.

“I think people do recognize that historically a vote for the third party will not be a vote for the winner,” Yost said. “But if you do want to vote for someone who reflects your views on the issues or even if you want to register your protest about the major party candidates that’s a rational choice to make, I suppose.”

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Peter Hall has been a journalist in Pennsylvania and New Jersey for more than 20 years, most recently covering criminal justice and legal affairs for The Morning Call in Allentown. His career at local newspapers and legal business publications has taken him from school board meetings to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and many points of interest between. He earned a degree in journalism from Susquehanna University.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom , the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

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