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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 & Ethnicity—Definition and Differences [+48 Race Essay Topics]

Race and ethnicity are among the features that make people different. Unlike character traits, attitudes, and habits, race and ethnicity can’t be changed or chosen. It fully depends on the ancestry.

But why do we separate these two concepts and what are their core differences? How do people classify different races and types of ethnicity?

To find answers to these questions, keep reading the article.

Also, if you have a writing assignment on the same topic due soon and looking for inspiration, you’ll find plenty of race, racism, and ethnic group essay examples. At IvyPanda , we’ve gathered over 45 samples to help you with your writing, so you don’t have to torture yourself looking for awesome essay ideas.

Race and Ethnicity Definitions

It’s important to learn what race and ethnicity really are before trying to compare them and explore their classification.

Race is a group of people that belong to the same distinct category based on their physical and social qualities.

At the very beginning of the term usage, it only referred to people speaking a common language. Later, the term started to denote certain national affiliations. A reference to physical traits was added to the term race in the 17th century.

In a modern world, race is considered to be a social construct. In other words, it’s a distinguishable identity with a cultural meaning behind. Race is not usually seen as exclusively biological or physical quality, even though it’s partially based on common physical features among group members.

Ethnicity (also known as ethnic group) is a category of people who have similarities like common language, ancestry, history, culture, society, and nation.

Basically, people inherit ethnicity depending on the society they live in. Other factors that define a person’s ethnicity include symbolic systems like religion, cuisine, art, dressing style, and even physical appearance.

Sometimes, the term ethnicity is used as a synonym to people or nation. It’s also fair to mention that it’s sometimes possible for an individual to leave one ethnic group and shift to another. It’s usually done through acculturation, language shift, or religious conversion.

Though, most of the times, representatives of a certain ethnic group continue to speak their common language and share some other typical traits even if derived from their founder population.

Differences Between Race and Ethnicity

Now that we know what race and ethnicity are all about, let’s highlight some of the major differences between these two terms.

• It divides people into groups or populations based mainly on physical appearance
• The main accent is on genetic or biological traits
• Because of geographical isolation, racial categories were a result of a shared genealogy. In modern world, this isolation is practically nonexistent, which lead to mixing of races
• The distinguishing factors can include type of face or skin color. Other genetic differences are considered to be weak

• Members of an ethnic group identify themselves based on nationality, culture, and traditions
• The emphasis is on group history, culture, and sometimes on religion and language
• Definition of ethnicity is based on shared genealogy. It can be either actual or presumed
• Distinguishing factors of ethnic groups keep changing depending on time period. Sometimes, they get defined by stereotypes that dominant groups have

It’s also worth mentioning that the border between two terms is quite vague . As a result, the choice of using either of them can be very subjective.

In the majority of cases, race is considered to be unitary, which means that one person belongs to one race. However, ethnically, this same person can identify themselves as a member of multiple ethnic groups. And it won’t be wrong if a person have lived enough time within those groups.

Race and Ethnicity Classification

It’s time to look at possible ways to classify racial and ethnical groups.

One of the most common classifications for race into four categories: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Australoid. Three of them have subcategories.

Let’s look at them more closely.

– Caucasoid. White race with light skin color. Hair ranges from brown to black. They have medium to high structure. The subcategories are as follows:

• Alpine. Live in Central Asia
• Nordic . Baltic, British, and Scandinavian inhabitants
• Mediterranean. Hail from France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain

– Mongoloid. The race’s majority is found in Asia. Characterized by black hair, yellow skin tone, and medium height.

• Asian mongol. Found in japan, China, and East-India
• Micronesian. Inhabitants of Malenesia

– Negroid. A race found in Africa. They have black skin, wooly hair, and medium to high structure.

• Negro. African inhabitants
• Far Eastern Pygmy. Found in the south Pacific islands
• Bushman and Hottentot. Live in Kala-Hari desert of Africa

– Australoid. Found in Australia. They have wavy hair, light skin, and medium to tall height.

It’s fair to mention yet again that it’s practically impossible to find pure race representatives because of how mixed they all got.

Speaking of ethnicity classification, one of the most common ways to do that is by continent. And each of continent’s ethnic groups will have their own subcategory.

So, we can roughly divide ethnic groups into following categories:

• North American
• South American

Race Essay Ideas

If all the information above was not enough and you’re looking for race essay topics, or even straight up essay examples for your writing assignment—today’s your lucky day. Because experts at IvyPanda have gathered plenty of those.

Check out the list of race and ethnic group essay samples below. Use them for inspiration, or try to develop one of the suggested topics even further.

Whatever option you’ll choose, we’re sure that you’ll end up with great results!

• The Anatomy of Scientific Racism: Racialist Responses to Black Athletic Achievement
• Race, Ethnicity and Crime
• Representation of Race in Disney Films
• What is the relationship between Race, Poverty and Prison?
• Race in a Southern Community
• African American Women and the Struggle for Racial Equality
• American Ethnic Studies
• Institutionalized Racism from John Brown Raid to Jim Crow Laws
• The Veil and Muslim
• Race and the Body: How Culture Both Shapes and Mirrors Broader Societal Attitudes Towards Race and the Body
• Latinos and African Americans: Friends or Foes?
• Historical US Relationships with Native American
• The experiences of the Aborigines
• Contemporary Racism in Australia: the Experience of Aborigines
• No Reparations for Blacks for the Injustice of Slavery
• Racism (another variant)
• Hispanic Americans
• Racism in the Penitentiary
• How the development of my racial/ethnic identity has been impacted
• My father’s black pride
• African American Ethnic Group
• Ethnic Group Conflicts
• How the Movie Crash Presents the African Americans
• Ethnic Groups and discrimination
• Race and Ethnicity
• Racial and ethnic inequality
• Ethnic Groups and Conflicts
• Ethnics Studies
• Ethnic studies and emigration
• Ethnicity Influence
• Immigration and Ethnic Relations
• A comparison Between Asian Americans and Latinos
• Analysis of the Chinese Experience in “A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America” by Ronald Takaki
• Wedding in the UAE
• Social and Cultural Diversity
• The White Dilemma in South Africa
• Ethnocentrism and its Effects on Individuals, Societies, and Multinationals
• Reduction of ethnocentrism and promotion of cultural relativism
• Racial and Ethnic Groups
• Gender and Race
• Child Marriages in Modern India
• Race and Ethnicity (another variant)
• Racial Relations and Color Blindness
• Multiculturalism and “White Anxiety”
• Cultural and racial inequality in Health Care
• The impact of colonialism on cultural transformations in North and South America
• African American Studies
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Home — Blog — Topic Ideas — Essay Topics on Racism: 150 Ideas for Analysis and Discussion

Essay Topics on Racism: 150 Ideas for Analysis and Discussion

Here’s a list of 150 essay ideas on racism to help you ace a perfect paper. The subjects are divided based on what you require!

Before we continue with the list of essay topics on racism, let's remember the definition of racism. In brief, it's a complex prejudice and a form of discrimination based on race. It can be done by an individual, a group, or an institution. If you belong to a racial or ethnic group, you are facing being in the minority. As it's usually caused by the group in power, there are many types of racism, including socio-cultural racism, internal racism, legal racism, systematic racism, interpersonal racism, institutional racism, and historical racism. You can also find educational or economic racism as there are many sub-sections that one can encounter.

150 Essay Topics on Racism to Help You Ace a Perfect Essay

General Recommendations

The subject of racism is one of the most popular among college students today because you can discuss it regardless of your academic discipline. Even though we are dealing with technical progress and the Internet, the problem of racism is still there. The world may go further and talk about philosophical matters, yet we still have to face them and explore the challenges. It makes it even more difficult to find a good topic that would be unique and inspiring. As a way to help you out, we have collected 150 racism essay topics that have been chosen by our experts. We recommend you choose something that motivates you and narrow things down a little bit to make your writing easier.

Why Choose a Topic on Racial Issues? 

When we explore racial issues, we are not only seeking the most efficient solutions but also reminding ourselves about the past and the mistakes that we should never make again. It is an inspirational type of work as we all can change the world. If you cannot choose a topic that inspires you, think about recent events, talk about your friend, or discuss something that has happened in your local area. Just take your time and think about how you can make the world a safer and better place.

The Secrets of a Good Essay About Racism 

The secret to writing a good essay on racism is not only stating that racism is bad but by exploring the origins and finding a solution. You can choose a discipline and start from there. For example, if you are a nursing student, talk about the medical principles and responsibilities where every person is the same. Talk about how it has not always been this way and discuss the methods and the famous theorists who have done their best to bring equality to our society. Keep your tone inspiring, explore, and tell a story with a moral lesson in the end. Now let’s explore the topic ideas on racism!

General Essay Topics On Racism 

As we know, no person is born a racist since we are not born this way and it cannot be considered a biological phenomenon. Since it is a practice that is learned and a social issue, the general topics related to racism may include socio-cultural, philosophical, and political aspects as you can see below. Here are the ideas that you should consider as you plan to write an essay on racial issues:

• Are we born with racial prejudice? 
• Can racism be unlearned? 
• The political constituent of the racial prejudice and the colonial past? 
• The humiliation of the African continent and the control of power. 
• The heritage of the Black Lives Matter movement and its historical origins. 
• The skin color issue and the cultural perceptions of the African Americans vs Mexican Americans. 
• The role of social media in the prevention of racial conflicts in 2022 . 
• Martin Luther King Jr. and his role in modern education. 
• Konrad Lorenz and the biological perception of the human race. 
• The relation of racial issues to nazism and chauvinism.

The Best Racism Essay Topics 

School and college learners often ask about what can be considered the best essay subject when asked to write on racial issues. Essentially, you have to talk about the origins of racism and provide a moral lesson with a solution as every person can be a solid contribution to the prevention of hatred and racial discrimination.

• The schoolchildren's example and the attitude to the racial conflicts. 
• Perception of racism in the United States versus Germany. 
• The role of the scouting movement as a way to promote equality in our society. 
•  Social justice and the range of opportunities that African American individuals could receive during the 1960s.
•  The workplace equality and the negative perception of the race when the documents are being filed. 
•  The institutional racism and the sources of the legislation that has paved the way for injustice. 
•  Why should we talk to the children about racial prejudice and set good examples ? 
•  The role of anthropology in racial research during the 1990s in the USA. 
•  The Black Poverty phenomenon and the origins of the Black Culture across the globe. 
•  The controversy of Malcolm X’s personality and his transition from anger to peacemaking.

Shocking Racism Essay Ideas 

Unfortunately, there are many subjects that are not easy to deal with when you are talking about the most horrible sides of racism. Since these subjects are sensitive, dealing with the shocking aspects of this problem should be approached with a warning in your introduction part so your readers know what to expect. As a rule, many medical and forensic students will dive into the issue, so these topic ideas are still relevant:

• The prejudice against wearing a hoodie. 
•  The racial violence in Western Africa and the crimes by the Belgian government. 
•  The comparison of homophobic beliefs and the link to racial prejudice. 
•  Domestic violence and the bias towards the cases based on race. 
•  Racial discrimination in the field of the sex industry. 
•  Slavery in the Middle East and the modern cultural perceptions. 
•  Internal racism in the United States: why the black communities keep silent. 
•  Racism in the American schools: the bias among the teachers. 
•  Cyberbullying and the distorted image of the typical racists . 
•  The prisons of Apartheid in South Africa.

Light and Simple Ideas Regarding Racism

If you are a high-school learner or a first-year college student, your essay on racism may not have to represent complex research with a dozen of sources. Here are some good ideas that are light and simple enough to provide you with inspiration and the basic points to follow:

• My first encounter with racial prejudice. 
•  Why do college students are always in the vanguard of social campaigns? 
•  How are the racial issues addressed by my school? 
•  The promotion of the African-American culture is a method to challenge prejudice and stereotypes. 
• The history of blues music and the Black culture of the blues in the United States.
• The role of slavery in the Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. 
•  School segregation in the United States during the 1960s. 
•  The negative effect of racism on the mental health of a person. 
•  The advocacy of racism in modern society . 
•  The heritage of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the modern perception of the historical issues.

Interesting Topics on Racism For an Essay 

Contrary to the popular belief, when you have to talk about the cases of racial prejudice, you will also encounter many interesting essay topic ideas. As long as these are related to your main academic course, you can explore them. Here are some great ideas to consider:

• Has the perception of Michael Jackson changed because of his skin transition? 
•  The perception of racial problems by the British Broadcasting Corporation. 
•  The role of the African American influencers on Instagram. 
•  The comparison between the Asian students and the Mexican learners in the USA. 
•  Latin culture and the similarities when compared to the Black culture with its peculiarities. 
•  The racial impact in the “Boy In The Stripped Pajamas”. 
•  Can we eliminate racism completely and how exactly, considering the answer is “Yes”? 
•  Scientific research of modern racism and social media campaigns. 
•  Why do some people believe that the Black Lives Matter movement is controversial? 
• Male vs female challenges in relation to racial attitudes.

Argumentative Essay Topics About Race 

An argumentative type of writing requires making a clear statement or posing an assumption that will deal with a particular question. As we are dealing with racial prejudice or theories, it is essential to support your writing with at least one piece of evidence to make sure that you can support your opinion and stand for it as you write. Here are some good African American argumentative essay examples of topics and other ideas to consider:

•  Racism is a mental disorder and cannot be treated with words alone. 
•  Analysis of the traumatic experiences based on racial prejudice. 
•  African-American communities and the sense of being inferior are caused by poverty. 
•  Reading the memoirs of famous people that describe racial issues often provides a distorted image through the lens of a single person. 
•  There is no academic explanation of racism since every case is different and is often based on personal perceptions. 
•  The negatives of the post-racial perception as the latent system that advocates racism. 
•  The link of racial origins to the concept of feminism and gender inequality. 
•  The military bias and the merits that are earned by the African-American soldiers. 
•  The media causes a negative image of the Latin and Mexican youth in the United States. 
•  Does racism exist in kindergarten and why the youngsters do not think about racial prejudice?

Racism Research Paper Topics 

Dealing with The Black Lives Matter essay , you should focus on those aspects of racism that are not often discussed or researched by the media. You can take a particular case study or talk about the reasons why the BLM social campaign has started and whether the timing has been right. Here are some interesting racism topics for research paper that you should consider:

• The link of criminal offenses to race is an example of the primary injustice .  
• The socio-emotional burdens of slavery that one can trace among the representatives of the African-American population. 
• Study of the cardio-vascular diseases among the American youth: a comparison of the Caucasian and Latin representatives. 
• The race and the politics: dealing with the racial issues and the Trump administration analysis. 
• The best methods to achieve medical equality for all people: where race has no place to be. 
• The perception of racism by the young children: the negative side of trying to educate the youngsters. 
• Racial prejudice in the UK vs the United States: analysis of the core differences. 
• The prisons in the United States: why do the Blacks constitute the majority? 
• The culture of Voodoo and the slavery: the link between the occult practices.
• The native American people and the African Americans: the common woes they share.

Racism in Culture Topics 

Racism topics for essay in culture are always upon the surface because we can encounter them in books, popular political shows, movies, social media, and more. The majority of college students often ignore this aspect because things easily become confusing since one has to take a stand and explain the point. As a way to help you a little bit, we have collected several cultural racism topic ideas to help you start:

• The perception of wealth by the Black community: why it differs when researched through the lens of past poverty?  
• The rap music and the cultural constituent of the African-American community. 
• The moral constituent of the political shows where racial jargon is being used. 
• Why the racial jokes on television are against the freedom of speech?  
• The ways how the modern media promotes racism by stirring up the conflict and actually doing harm. 
• The isolated cases of racism and police violence in the United States as portrayed by the movies. 
• Playing with the Black musicians: the history of jazz in the United States. 
• The social distancing and the perception of isolation by the different races. 
• The cultural multitude in the cartoons by the Disney Corporations: the pros and cons.
• From assimilation to genocide: can the African American child make it big without living through the cultural bias?

Racism Essay Ideas in Literature 

One of the best ways to study racism is by reading the books by those who have been through it on their own or by studying the explorations by those who can write emotionally and fight for racial equality where racism has no place to be. Keeping all of these challenges in mind, our experts suggest turning to the books as you can explore racism in the literature by focusing on those who are against it and discussing the cases in the classic literature that are quite controversial.

• The racial controversy of Ernest Hemingway's writing.  
• The personal attitude of Mark Twain towards slavery and the cultural peculiarities of the times. 
• The reasons why "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee book has been banned in libraries. 
• The "Hate You Give" by Angie Thomas and the analysis of the justified and "legit" racism. 
• Is the poetry by the gangsta rap an example of hidden racism? 
• Maya Angelou and her timeless poetry. 
• The portrayal of xenophobia in modern English language literature. 
• What can we learn from the "Schilder's List" screenplay as we discuss the subject of genocide? 
• Are there racial elements in "Othello" or Shakespeare's creation is beyond the subject?
• Kate Chopin's perception of inequality in "Desiree's Baby".

Racism in Science Essay Ideas 

Racism is often studied by scientists because it's not only a cultural point or a social agenda that is driven by personal inferiority and similar factors of mental distortion. Since we can talk about police violence and social campaigns, it is also possible to discuss things through different disciplines. Think over these racism thesis statement ideas by taking a scientific approach and getting a common idea explained:

• Can physical trauma become a cause for a different perception of race? 
• Do we inherit racial intolerance from our family members and friends? 
• Can a white person assimilate and become a part of the primarily Black community? 
• The people behind the concept of Apartheid: analysis of the critical factors. 
• Can one prove the fact of the physical damage of the racial injustice that lasted through the years? 
• The bond between mental diseases and the slavery heritage among the Black people. 
• Should people carry the blame for the years of social injustice? 
• How can we explain the metaphysics of race? 
• What do the different religions tell us about race and the best ways to deal with it? 
• Ethnic prejudices based on age, gender, and social status vs general racism.

Cinema and Race Topics to Write About 

As a rule, the movies are also a great source for writing an essay on racial issues. Remember to provide the basic information about the movie or include examples with the quotations to help your readers understand all the major points that you make. Here are some ideas that are worth your attention:

• The negative aspect of the portrayal of racial issues by Hollywood.  
• Should the disturbing facts and the graphic violence be included in the movies about slavery? 
• Analysis of the "Green Mile" movie and the perception of equality in our society.  
• The role of music and culture in the "Django Unchained" movie. 
• The "Ghosts of Mississippi" and the social aspect of the American South compared to how we perceive it today. 
• What can we learn from the "Malcolm X" movie created by Spike Lee? 
• "I am Not Your Negro" movie and the role of education through the movies. 
• "And the Children Shall Lead" the movie as an example that we are not born racist. 
• Do we really have the "Black Hollywood" concept in reality? 
• Do the movies about racial issues only cause even more racial prejudice?

Race and Ethnic Relations 

Another challenging problem is the internal racism and race and ethnicity essay topics that we can observe not only in the United States but all over the world as well. For example, the Black people in the United States and the representatives of the rap music culture will divide themselves between the East Coast and the West Coast where far more than cultural differences exist. The same can be encountered in Afghanistan or in Belgium. Here are some essay topics on race and ethnicity idea samples to consider:

• The racial or the ethnic conflict? What can we learn from Afghan society? 
• Religious beliefs divide us based on ethnicity . 
• What are the major differences between ethnic and racial conflicts? 
• Why we are able to identify the European Black person and the Black coming from the United States? 
• Racism and ethnicity's role in sports. 
• How can an ethnic conflict be resolved with the help of anti-racial methods? 
• The medical aspect of being an Asian in the United States. 
• The challenges of learning as an African American person during the 1950s. 
• The role of the African American people in the Vietnam war and their perception by the locals. 
• Ethnicity's role in South Africa as the concept of Apartheid has been formed.

Biology and Racial Issues 

If you are majoring in Biology or would like to research this side of the general issue of race, it is essential to think about how we can fight racism in practice by turning to healthcare or the concepts that are historical in their nature. Although we cannot explain slavery per se other than by turning to economics and the rule of power that has no justification, biologists believe that racial challenges can be approached by their core beliefs as well.

• Can we create an isolated non-racist society in 2022? 
• If we assume that a social group has never heard of racism, can it occur? 
• The physical versus cultural differences in the racial inequality cases? 
• The biological peculiarities of the different races? 
• Do we carry the cultural heritage of our race? 
• Interracial marriage through the lens of Biology. 
• The origins of the racial concept and its evolution. 
• The core ways how slavery has changed the African-American population. 
• The linguistic peculiarities of the Latin people. 
• The resistance of the different races towards vaccination.

Modern Racism Topics to Consider 

In case you would like to deal with a modern subject that deals with racism, you can go beyond the famous Black Lives Matter movement by focusing on the cases of racism in sports or talking about the peacemakers or the famous celebrities who have made a solid difference in the elimination of racism.

• The Global Citizen campaign is a way to eliminate racial differences. 
• The heritage of Aretha Franklin and her take on the racial challenges. 
• The role of the Black Stars in modern society: the pros and cons. 
• Martin Luther King Day in the modern schools. 
• How can Instagram help to eliminate racism? 
• The personality of Michelle Obama as a fighter for peace. 
• Is a society without racism a utopian idea? 
• How can comic books help youngsters understand equality? 
• The controversy in the death of George Floyd. 
• How can we break down the stereotypes about Mexicans in the United States?

Racial Discrimination Essay Ideas 

If your essay should focus on racial discrimination, you should think about the environment and the type of prejudice that you are facing. For example, it can be in school or at the workplace, at the hospital, or in a movie that you have attended. Here are some discrimination topics research paper ideas that will help you to get started:

• How can a schoolchild report the case of racism while being a minor?  
• The discrimination against women's rights during the 1960s. 
• The employment problem and the chances of the Latin, Asian, and African American applicants. 
• Do colleges implement a certain selection process against different races? 
• How can discrimination be eliminated via education? 
• African-American challenges in sports. 
• The perception of discrimination, based on racial principles and the laws in the United States. 
• How can one report racial comments on social media? 
• Is there discrimination against white people in our society? 
• Covid-19 and racial discrimination: the lessons we have learned.

Find Even More Essay Topics On Racism by Visiting Our Site 

If you are unsure about what to write about, you can always find an essay on racism by visiting our website. Offering over 150 topic ideas, you can always get in touch with our experts and find another one!

5 Tips to Make Your Essay Perfect

• Start your essay on racial issues by narrowing things down after you choose the general topic. 
• Get your facts straight by checking the dates, the names, opinions from both sides of an issue, etc. 
• Provide examples if you are talking about the general aspects of racism. 
• Do not use profanity and show due respect even if you are talking about shocking things. The same relates to race and ethnic relations essay topics that are based on religious conflicts. Stay respectful! 
• Provide references and citations to avoid plagiarism and to keep your ideas supported by at least one piece of evidence.

Recommendations to Help You Get Inspired

Speaking of recommended books and articles to help you start with this subject, you should check " The Ideology of Racism: Misusing Science to Justify Racial Discrimination " by William H. Tucker who is a professor of social sciences at Rutgers University. Once you read this great article, think about the poetry by Maya Angelou as one of the best examples to see the practical side of things.

The other recommendations worth checking include:

- How to be Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi . - White Fragility by Robin Diangelo . - So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo .

The Final Word 

We sincerely believe that our article has helped you to choose the perfect essay subject to stir your writing skills. If you are still feeling stuck and need additional help, our team of writers can assist you in the creation of any essay based on what you would like to explore. You can get in touch with our skilled experts anytime by contacting our essay service for any race and ethnicity topics. Always confidential and plagiarism-free, we can assist you and help you get over the stress!

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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

• National Honor Society
• Social Media
• Gender Roles
• Gender Stereotypes
• Community Violence
• Communication Skills
• American Dream

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Civil CONVERSATION CHALLENGE

What Students Are Saying About Race and Racism in America

We invited teenagers to join a moderated discussion about racial equity and justice. Here is a summary of the 2,000-plus thoughtful, passionate comments.

By Nicole Daniels

Note: We have a lesson plan for teaching with this collection of student comments.

This past fall, we held a Civil Conversation Challenge for students, inviting young people to engage in respectful, productive discussions about some of the most divisive issues of the 2020 presidential election. In a series of online forums hosted by The Learning Network, they reflected on their experiences of the coronavirus pandemic and debated education, voting and other issues they cared about. Across forums, they told us that “ 2020 has been a wake-up call .”

But the discussion that perhaps challenged students the most was our forum on the fight for racial justice , in which we asked them to share their opinions on protests, policing, systemic racism and more.

By the end, the conversation had generated over 2,000 comments, and if you read even a few of the highlights we feature below, we think you’ll see why we thought it merited its own roundup. Though we were impressed by student posts on all of the topics in our challenge, this forum was special.

Some students shared heartbreaking stories of discrimination. Several told us what it’s like to have a family member who is a police officer. And many wrote about becoming deeply aware of racism for the first time after the death of George Floyd and the protests that followed. Throughout, the teenage participants showed a willingness to write candidly about their own experiences as well as to stretch to understand the experiences of others.

But this discussion is also a microcosm of a conversation happening across American society, and it mirrored its sharp divisions, too. Students engaged passionately on core issues like the existence of white privilege, the extent of systemic racism, the legacy of slavery, the effectiveness of protests and the role of the police.

Though the roundup below doesn’t feature conversations so much as individual posts, it is still easy to see how students handled these difficult topics thoughtfully and respectfully. We have published responses in thematic groups so that you can easily navigate the various points of view, but clicking on each student’s name will take you back to the original conversation so you can read it in that context if you like.

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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.

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.

Baffled by human diversity

Confused 17th-century europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today.

by Jacob Zellmer   + BIO

Imagine for a moment that tomorrow we find humans on another planet. It’s an unlikely scenario to be sure, but you can imagine the theories that people might venture to explain their existence. They might propose that humans on this other planet descended from ancient earthlings who in prehistoric times had the technology to travel there. Or that humans on both planets were planted there by aliens. Or that conditions on the other planet are so similar to those found on Earth that humans evolved on both planets simultaneously. Then again, perhaps God created humans on both planets.

A very similar problem confronted the European mind in the modern period (though the analogy is not perfect). As Europeans embarked on great voyages of discovery from the 15th through to the 19th centuries, they were at a loss to explain how the native peoples they encountered in distant lands actually got there. Europeans generally assumed that all people descended from Adam and Eve – a view called monogenism – and so it was unclear how native humans came to exist in ‘New Worlds’ oceans apart from the original Garden of Eden. What is more, non-Europeans looked and acted differently. Before Charles Darwin, and for some time after him, there was no generally accepted explanation of these physical and cultural differences.

The challenge for early moderns, then, was to find a plausible explanation for how physical differences between humans arose if all humans on Earth descended from Adam and Eve. Some thinkers, such as the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), thought that human diversity arose through ‘degeneration’ from the original humans, where degeneration is caused by environmental features such as what your ancestors ate or the climate they inhabited.

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden ( c 1640) by Jan Brueghel the Younger. Courtesy the Ambrosiana Library , Milan

A more radical way to explain human diversity involved accepting polygenism – the view that God originally created multiple first human mating pairs besides Adam and Eve. In the hypothetical scenario above, polygenism is akin to thinking that God created humans on both planets. As it happens, many influential 19th-century scientists in the United States were polygenists, turning to the theory as a means of explaining human racial differences – differences that were front and centre in American life. Proponents of polygenism argued that racial differences were fixed, some of them recruiting the theory to justify enslaving peoples whom God had made ‘lesser’.

Scientists like Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), who has been called the father of American anthropology, and the Swiss-born biologist and geologist Louis Agassiz (1807-73), a professor at Harvard, used polygenism as a purportedly scientific tool to help explain racial difference. Agassiz claimed that ‘the differences existing between the races of men are of the same kind as the differences observed between the different families, genera, and species of monkeys or other animals …’ On this view, different races have different physical attributes that correspond to intellectual and moral characteristics (that is, normative properties). Hence, for Agassiz there is a hierarchy of races, with whites superior to all others. Agassiz’s view that racial differences were built into the fabric of nature by God carried weight with the scientific establishment, and convinced many Harvard graduates that intelligence and moral goodness were racially determined.

Agassiz and others used polygenism to boost scientific support for slavery, to the extent that, as the anthropologist Charles Loring Brace points out in ‘Race’ is a Four-Letter Word (2004), their advocacy became a contributing factor to the American Civil War. Since polygenists understood races as different species , many, like Josiah Nott, a follower of Morton, believed inter-racial reproduction would yield less fertile offspring, just as breeding between horses and donkeys leads to mostly infertile mules. Nott’s article in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal bore the telling title: ‘The Mulatto a Hybrid – Probable Extermination of the Two Races if Whites and Blacks are Allowed to Intermarry’ (1843). Such belief in a fundamental distinction between the races underscored anti-miscegenation laws that were widespread in the US. In 1869, the Georgia Supreme Court wrote:

The amalgamation of the races is not only unnatural, but is always productive of deplorable results. Our daily observation shows us, that the off-spring of these unnatural connections are generally sickly and effeminate, and that they are inferior in physical development and strength, to the full-blood of either race.

Polygenic ideas with a distinctly racist cast persisted through the 20th century, with figures like Carleton Coon, a professor both at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard, arguing in his influential The Origin of Races (1962) that the races evolved into Homo sapiens at different times. He maintained that the white race was more advanced on account of having evolved into H sapiens first. All in all, polygenism has been hugely influential in American scientific racism and its fallout. Indeed, you cannot fully understand American racism without understanding polygenism and its history. So how did polygenism first gain traction? And how did it become a mainstream view among the American scientific establishment?

T he racial science of the 19th century had deeper origins in the 17th century that are mostly unknown today. In fact, polygenism was one of the more controversial ideas of the 17th century. It appealed to early modern European thinkers because it helped explain the existence of Indigenous peoples in far-flung lands, which monogenesis struggled to encompass. To help fend off polygenism, the Dutch humanist philosopher and monogenist Hugo Grotius proposed in 1642 that Native Americans were descendants of Norwegians who had moved to Iceland, then to Greenland, and then to North America. Later adherents of monogenism include Immanuel Kant, Blumenbach and Darwin.

The first intellectual to substantially defend polygenism was the French lawyer and theologian Isaac de La Peyrère (1596-1676). He published two works in 1655 – Men Before Adam and Theological Systeme upon the Presupposition, That Men Were Before Adam – that sparked immediate public fascination. La Peyrère recognised that Genesis contains two creation accounts in the first two chapters, and cited this as evidence that the Bible itself teaches that God created ‘pre-Adamites’ who were distributed throughout Earth (according to Genesis 1) before creating Adam and Eve. Through creative interpretation of Genesis 1, La Peyrère argued that all plants and wildlife were created for humans; and on this basis, he concluded that wherever plants and livestock were created, so humans were created as well. In La Peyrère’s scheme of prehistory, not only were pre-Adamite humans created before Adam, they were also distributed as mating pairs throughout the world. Looking elsewhere to support polygenism, La Peyrère noted that, after Cain is cast out of Eden for killing Abel, he says: ‘Whosoever finds me, shall slay me,’ which suggests that other people already existed. Cain is also said to have had a wife, despite Adam and Eve not having had a daughter. One of La Peyrère’s lasting contributions was his insistence that Adam and Eve are not the first human beings.

La Peyrère’s interpretation reduced Genesis from a global history of humanity to a history of the Jewish people

La Peyrère further drew on a passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans, which suggests that sin in the world predates Adam and Eve. La Peyrère takes this to mean there must have been sinners, and therefore people, before Adam. By way of dispatching the Biblical claim that ‘God made all mankind of one blood’ – some ancient variations say ‘from one ancestor’ – La Peyrère reads it as saying that all humans are children of God and not descendants of Adam.

As well as accounting for Indigenous peoples, La Peyrère was concerned to reconcile Christianity with those non-Biblical histories that appeared to conflict with the timeline of Genesis. The predominant view in the 17th century, based on a literal reading of Genesis, was that the creation of the world occurred at roughly 2348 BCE, making Earth only about 4,000 years old, while Chaldean and Egyptian creation accounts cite the creation of humans much farther back. Where most Europeans would have rejected non-Biblical creation stories, La Peyrère argued that they are in fact consistent with Genesis, because Genesis does not account for all human origins. La Peyrère’s interpretation thus reduced Genesis from a global history of humanity to a history of, primarily, the Jewish people. Genesis primarily concerns the creation of Adam and Eve, despite offering clues about the creation of other humans – its two creation accounts; the claims about Cain. For the beginnings of non-Jewish peoples, La Peyrère looked to Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese and American creation narratives.

To La Peyrère’s critics, his attempts to reconcile faith and reason looked revisionary and heretical. Dozens of books were quickly written to rebut him. According to the historian of philosophy Richard Popkin writing in 1987, polygenism was the most energetically refuted idea of the 17th century – indeed, under sustained assault, La Peyrère was eventually forced by the Catholic Church to recant his views.

Although polygenism offered a Biblical explanation of human diversity, it challenged the fundamental unity of humanity. La Peyrère went beyond explaining why Indigenous peoples existed in far-off lands to theorise ontological differences in ‘genus’ and ‘species’ between pre-Adamites, whom he also called the ‘Gentiles’, and Adamites, whom he called the ‘Jews’. As he put it: ‘not onely by kindred, and exposition of kindred did God distinguish the Jews from the Gentiles but would have them different in the species it self.’ In La Peyrère’s usage, a ‘genus’ distinction denotes a difference in family lineage. Pre-Adamites and Adamites are different in genus because they issue from different original ancestors. Given that pre-Adamites descend from ‘innumerable fathers’, there are also genus distinctions within the pre-Adamites.

A ‘species’ distinction is a bit more complicated. It is here that the notion of hierarchy comes into La Peyrère’s account, making it a progenitor of racialism in later polygenetic theories. According to La Peyrère, a species distinction amounts to a difference in the form or essence of a human, which arises in part from the mode of creation and material composition of each type of human. In a rather creative reading of Genesis, La Peyrère claims that the Adamites were made by God through a unique mode of creation – God used his hands to form Adam – whereas the early humans who preceded Adamites were made with God’s ‘word’ – God spoke them into existence – just as all other creation was made. In other words, the two species were made through different modes of creation, and the mode used to create the pre-Adamites was not unique to them. Adamites are not just uniquely made, according to La Peyrère, they are also made of a superior, more refined material than the primal matter from which pre-Adamites are composed. Though the material used to make both species is faulty, the primitive matter of pre-Adamites is more faulty. The mode of creation and material inferiority of pre-Adamites is evidence to La Peyrère that they have a form that ranks below Adamites but above nonhuman creatures.

La Peyrère did not have the broad conception of the human species that we have today, based on later archaeological findings that offer evidence of hominin species besides Homo sapiens , such as H erectus or H habilis. But he did have a concept of hierarchy. Pre-Adamites, he argued, are made in the internal image of God, while Adamites are made in the external image of God. As a result of this superiority, the Adamite people have ‘a lesse corrupt nature’ and are less prone to sin than pre-Adamites. In contrast, the essence of pre-Adamite people is less perfect, giving them a greater disposition for vice. From the essence of each species stems their normative properties.

Though hierarchical, La Peyrère’s understanding of a species doesn’t equate with our conception of race in the modern sense because his grouping of human species is not based on phenotypic features like skin colour. But should we view his account of human difference as racialist (that is, racist) nonetheless? Racialism is the view that human groups possess an underlying biological essence, expressed both in the distinctive physical features and normative properties of that group, such as their intelligence or moral goodness. Racialism also ranks races as inferior or superior based on their normative features. Most scholars would say that polygenism is racialist in its later 18th- and 19th-century forms, but not in La Peyrère’s system. In my view , however, the species distinction that La Peyrère elaborates is hierarchical and embodies many of racialism’s features: it is biological in its concern with the material of human bodies, and essentialist because it proposes unalterable underlying group essences, then assigns normative properties based on those underlying essences.

Blumenbach suggested degeneration from whiteness was caused by external factors such as climate

Because La Peyrère’s polygenism does not distinguish between human species on the basis of phenotypic features, his view is what I’d call ‘proto-racialist’. He adopts all the features of racialism except for this notion that biological human essences are expressed in phenotypical features, like skin colour. The French physician François Bernier is often credited with being the first thinker to categorise humans into modern races, leaning on features, such as skin colour, that correlate with geographical locations. But Bernier published his views in his essay ‘A New Division of the Earth’ (1684), 29 years after La Peyrère published his Theological Systeme .

Picking up on Bernier’s distinction, the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) classified human beings into four groups: Homo sapiens europaeus (Europeans), H sapiens asiaticus (Asians), H sapiens americanus (Americans), and H sapiens afer (Africans). Linnaeus began the tradition of classifying organisms by generic ( genus ) and specific ( species ) names. In the late 18th century, Blumenbach adopted Linnaeus’s classification, but split the Asian variety into Mongolian and Malay for a total of five groups. One of Blumenbach’s enduring contributions is his use of the term ‘Caucasian’ to refer to people of European descent. For him, races emerged via a process of ‘degeneration’ from the original humans, Adam and Eve, who were from the Caucasus region east of the Black Sea. Blumenbach suggested that degeneration from whiteness was caused by external factors such as climate or nutrition. On this account, human racial categories are changeable because they are prone to external influence and ‘differ from each other in degree’.

Contra Blumenbach, polygenists generally understood human types and their associated normative properties to be unalterable . This fixity of normative properties could be co-opted into supporting social institutions of subjugation. As early as 1680, the Anglican colonial writer Morgan Godwyn noted in his book The Negro’s and Indians Advocate that polygenism was being used to argue that some groups of people were inferior to others, and to justify slavery. From its birth in the 17th century, La Peyrère’s polygenism was gradually unmoored from a distinction between pre-Adamite and Adamite species, and reframed to support the separate origins of the five or so races that thinkers like Bernier and Blumenbach theorised. Though already essentialist in La Peyrère’s system – since it proposed unalterable group characteristics – polygenism became a way to essentialise phenotypic differences between human groups, as expressions of underlying human essences fixed since the creation of the world.

O ne of the most important figures in American anthropology in the 19th century was Samuel George Morton. He adopted Blumenbach’s five varieties of humans and explicitly labelled them ‘races’. However, as a young-Earth creationist who believed our planet to be roughly 4,000 years old, he did not adopt Blumenbach’s (and others’) ideas about degeneration. On such a short timescale, Morton thought, degeneration could not have produced the diversity among humans we see today. Instead, he drew on polygenism to claim that human races were ‘ primeval diversities among men’ that began at creation.

Morton went further than Blumenbach in ascribing essential natures to different races. He used skull measurements to argue for fundamental biological divergence. By filling skulls with gunpowder to measure their volume and using numerous other measurements, Morton argued that races can be empirically classified into 22 ‘families’ distributed across the five races. Morton’s followers, such as George Gliddon and Josiah Nott, took skull measurements as proof that Black and white people had different original ancestors, and that Black people did not descend from Adam and Eve. For Nott, the races were separate species ‘marked by peculiarities of structure, which have always been constant and undeviating.’ Among those peculiarities, the supposedly larger skull size of whites argued for their normative superiority, while the smaller cranial volume in Africans meant that ‘the intellectual portion of the brain is defective’.

Agassiz claimed there are no passages in the Bible asserting that Adam and Eve were the first humans

Some 19th-century American thinkers explicitly cite La Peyrère. A summary of his thinking by a so-called ‘Philalethes’ appears in The Anthropological Review in 1864:

After two centuries of neglect and oblivion, the name of Isaac de La Peyrère is once more received and honoured, as that of the first scholar who broke through the meshes of groundless traditional prejudice, and proved that even in Scripture there are no decisive evidences of man’s descent from a single pair; nay more, that there are distinct indications of non-Adamite races.

Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham, a Unitarian minister and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, suggested a comparison between La Peyrère and Galileo in 1851 – both were intellectual heroes persecuted by the Church. However, there were significant methodological differences between the Anglo-American scientists and their 17th-century predecessor: 19th-century anthropologists were ostensibly concerned with empirical evidence, whereas La Peyrère primarily drew on Biblical support. But since La Peyrère’s theology was largely perceived as heretical, it would have disinclined the orthodox in Christian America.

However, figures like Nott and Agassiz did enter the fray of Biblical interpretation. Nott questioned the historical accuracy of Genesis. And Agassiz claimed that there are no passages in the Hebrew Bible asserting that Adam and Eve were the first humans. Agassiz also took an interpretive line that echoed La Peyrère’s. Despite advocating for a hierarchy of human races, he wrote that each race is ‘equal before God’ and he embraced different races as ‘brethren in humanity’. La Peyrère had likewise maintained that all humans are children of God, even while claiming that different species of humans are made in different images of God.

In sum, La Peyrère provided a polygenetic framework that was renovated and defended on purportedly scientific grounds in the 19th century. Thinkers like Morton, Gliddon, Nott and Agassiz all reframed polygenism in essentialist terms, differentiating the races by phenotypic features, such as skin colour and skull size. In their view, polygenic theories explained normative properties, not least moral disposition and intelligence. Polygenism thus took on an explicitly racialist tone that leant itself to political factions keen to defend white supremacy, the subjugation of native Americans, and the enslavement of Black people.

T hinkers like Morton, Gliddon, Nott and Agassiz exerted an enormous influence on American attitudes to race. As Brace points out: ‘The concept of “race” that is now generally accepted throughout the world is the direct legacy of the polygenist winners of the debate that ran throughout the first half of the 19th century.’ Polygenism gives a clear explanation for why biological races are as essential as they are and unalterable : to wit, the races of humans were created by God as such and therefore have stable physical differences that correlate with normative properties. Polygenism allows for an especially essentialist notion of race. This essentialism was present in La Peyrère’s polygenism, so it’s puzzling that the respected historian of philosophy Richard Popkin saw his polygenism as ‘benign’.

As Darwin’s explanation of human diversity via natural selection emerged as a serious competitor to polygenism, the multiple-origin theory of humankind began to wane among scientists. The theory of evolution, paired with new evidence for a much older Earth, explained how a fully diverse human population could stem from a common ancestor, as monogenism claimed. Although polygenism fell out of favour, scientific racism did not. It adapted to take on new forms, including evolutionary forms. Coon, for example, combined evolution with a semblance of polygenism in The Origin of Races , as we saw. Carleton Putnam, a graduate of Princeton and Columbia (and Coon’s cousin), drew on Coon’s work in his own Race and Reason: A Yankee View (1961) to argue for white supremacy and segregation. That very year, Louisiana’s Board of Education made Race and Reason required reading for all high-school students in the state. David Duke, the notorious white supremacist and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, credited Race and Reason with beginning his ‘enlightenment’.

The scientific and philosophical communities are in broad agreement that there are no racialist races

Naturally, there were vocal critics of polygenism. The German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), for example, rejected Morton’s conclusions and advocated racial equality. In response to Putnam and Louisiana, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists passed a resolution in 1962, saying:

We … deplore the misuse of science to advocate racism. We condemn such writings as Race and Reason that urge the denial of basic rights to human beings. We sympathize with those of our fellow teachers who have been forced by misguided officials to teach race concepts that have no scientific foundation, and we affirm, as we have in the past, that there is nothing in science that justifies the denial of opportunities or rights to any group by virtue of race.

The Columbia school of anthropology in New York, led by Franz Boas and his student Margaret Mead, was transformational in moving anthropology away from scientific racism in the early 20th century. Boas argued that human behavioural differences are a matter of social factors rather than innate biological differences; the diversity we find within our species is better explained without polygenism and its offshoots.

Today, all modern humans are recognised as belonging to one species, of the genus Homo . The 19th-century discovery of other hominin species, like H neanderthalensis and H erectus , has highlighted H sapiens ’ own commonalities as a species. However, there is ongoing disagreement about exactly what a species is and what a race is. That said, the scientific and philosophical communities are in broad agreement that there are no racialist races, which is the pernicious conception of race; there are no biological race essences that underlie normative properties like intelligence and moral character. And, of course, there is no hierarchy of human races fixed by God from creation.

The statue of Louis Agassiz that fell during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Courtesy Wikipedia

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The Concept of Race

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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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Ideas of Race and Racism in History

About this episode, youtube video.

• Nicholas Breyfogle

Guests Alice L. Conklin Hasan Kwame Jeffries Robin Judd Deondre Smiles

The issues of race and racism remain as urgent as ever to our national conversation. Four scholars discuss such questions as: Since Race does not exist as a biological reality, what then is race and where did the idea develop from? What is racism? How have race and racism been used by societies to justify discrimination, oppression, and social exclusion? How did racism manifest in different national and historical contexts? How have American and World history in the modern eras been defined by ideas of race and the power hierarchies embedded in racism?

• Nicholas Breyfogle | Associate Professor, Department of History; Director, Goldberg Center, The Ohio State University
• Alice Conklin | Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, Department of History, The Ohio State University
• Robin Judd | Associate Professor, Department of History, The Ohio State University
• Hasan Jeffries | Associate Professor, Department of History, The Ohio State University
• Deondre Smiles | Ph.D. Geography '20; Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada

This content is made possible, in part, by Ohio Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this content do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Cite this Site

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle 

Hello, and welcome to Ideas of Race and Racism in History brought to you by the history department Clio Society, the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University and by the Bexley Public Library. My name is Nick Breyfogle. I'm an associate professor of history and director of the Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, and I'll be your host and moderator today. Thank you for joining us. The issues of race and racism have a long history in the United States and around the world, and they remain as urgent as ever to our national conversation. Today we'll take part in the discussion among four scholars, Alice Conklin, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Deondre Smiles, and Robin Judd. We'll explore the ways in which understanding the history of race and racism can help us as we navigate these issues today. They'll discuss such questions as, since race doesn't exist as a biological reality, what is race? And where did the idea develop from? And when, for that matter also? How have race and racism been used by societies to justify discrimination, oppression and social exclusion? And how does racism manifest in different national historical contexts? However, American and world history in the modern era has been defined by ideas of race and the power hierarchies embedded in racism. With that introduction, let me lay out the plan. Each of our panelists will speak for a few minutes on questions of race and racism, historically, each exploring a different topic. And I'll introduce them before they speak. Then, they will take your questions, and we'll open things up for discussion. If you're interested in asking a question, please write it in the Q&A function just at the bottom of your screen at any time. We received several questions in advance when people signed up and registered, and we'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can in the time we have. Now, let's begin with Dr. Alice Conklin, who will discuss the science of race and how race developed as a scientific concept. Dr. Conklin is a professor of history at The Ohio State University, and a cultural, political and intellectual historian of modern France and its empire with the focus on the 20th century. She's currently working on a transnational history of French anti-racism between 1945 and 1965. Let me hand the microphone over to you, Alice.

Dr. Alice Conklin 

Thank you, Nick. First, a big thanks to the Origins team who came up with the idea of having this webinar. I will briefly speak about the modern history of the idea of race in the West, and particularly the role that colonialism and science together played in creating and perpetuating what we can agree is a bad, but powerful idea. And race is not just a bad but powerful idea. It is also in the long sweep of history, a relatively recent invention. Those in a nutshell will be my themes today, in these brief remarks, that the very idea of race was invented in the West quite recently, that it is pernicious, and that it remains powerful. When we understand how the very idea of different races came into existence. We understand, in part, why racism remains so difficult to dislodge. The history of the idea of race in the West is a huge topic. To tackle it in the five minutes I have, I want to make three main points.

These are first, the idea of race as something biologically real came into existence first as a folk idea and then as a scientific one. This idea was arguably the greatest error modern Western science ever made. Second, the scientific idea of race was an error because it was based on three false premises. These were one that biologically distinct races existed in nature. Two that some races were more intelligent than others. And three, these races could be classified and ranked from superior to inferior, according to the typical brain shape, weight, or size for each so-called race. In these scientific classifications, white Caucasians were always on top, black groups on the bottom. My third point today will be that many reputable scientists clung to these flawed premises and kept trying to classify and rank peoples long after their own best evidence began showing that their hypotheses were wrong. In so doing, these experts gave the backing, the prestige, the authority of science, to the most vicious prejudices circulating in society. Let me begin with a few facts. Traditionally, we answer the question of how did the race idea begin by looking at the history of colonial expansion into the Americas. When Europeans first crossed the Atlantic, they viewed Indigenous peoples as nations, not races. By the mid-17th Century, however, colonial leaders had relegated Africans alone to a status of permanent slavery. In order to justify this new colonial form of slavery, planters in places like Virginia helped to pioneer informally a new idea, that of race. Colonial leaders began to homogenize all Europeans, regardless of ethnicity, or status or social class, into a single novel category. White people of African descent were similarly homogenized into the category of black. In this system, physical features became markers of social status. Historians call this informal idea of race, a folk idea of race. There was nothing scientific about it. Yet of race ideology developed as a folk idea, it was soon imported into science, or to be more precise, it was imported into the scientific outlook, known as the enlightenment. In other words, the first modern scientists did not invent the race concept. Slave-based colonialism had already done that. But by the end of the 18th century, enlightened naturalist turned to science to rationalize the inhumanity of slavery that had developed in the Americas. These thinkers began arguing that nature itself provided a justification for this new social order that granted privileges to all whites, and relegated Africans to perpetual servitude.

Enlightenment scientists soon eagerly took up a whole series of questions with race at their center. They asked questions like, are all races fully human? Are all races equal? They also gave themselves the task of ranking the races of humankind on the basis of intelligence. Since classification was considered the basis of all good science. None of them questioned the biological reality of races or the superiority of white Europeans as establishing these rankings became the basis of a new professional discipline, anthropology where the science of humanity, the 19th century, saw the full flowering of the science. And it was science in the sense that it met the best scientific standards of the day. The science, moreover, leached out into society. Thanks to the invention of photography, of museums, of the penny press, and the violent colonization of Africa and large parts of Asia that took place over the course of the 19th century, the race classifications that appeared in scientific journals became fatally easy to disseminate visually to a wider public. People became used to seeing images of beauty and intelligence that correlated with whiteness, other so-called races of the world might be presented as noble, or romantic. Certainly, they were exotic, but they were always presented as inferior, a view that the best science of the day endorsed. Alas, many of these images are still with us.

Let me now fast forward. By the end of World War II, for complex reasons, science began to correct itself and abandon the belief that race was biologically real, and that races could be placed in a fairly firm racial hierarchy. Scientists today of course, recognize that there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all blacks, or all whites. To conclude, science in the West managed for a long time to convince ordinary people that race was biologically real, when it wasn't and isn't. human races are not biological units. Races are social constructs. Human race exists solely because we humans created them, and only in the forms in which we perpetuate them. Historically, race has never been just a matter of creating categories of people. It has always been a matter of creating hierarchies. And when it came to creating racial hierarchies, Western colonialism and Western science have a lot to answer for. Thank you.

Thank you, Alice very much for those great introductory remarks and really fascinating inspiration of the kind of origins of the modern ideas of race and racism. Our next panelist is Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries who will speak to us today about race and the black experience in American history. Dr. Jeffries is an associate professor of history in the Department of History at The Ohio State University, where he teaches courses on the African American freedom struggle. He's the editor of the award-winning collection of essays, Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement  He earned his B.A. from Morehouse College, his Ph.D. from Duke University. I'll pass you over to Hasan now. Thank you.

Dr. Hasan Jeffries 

Well, thank you very much, Nick. It is a real delight and pleasure to be able to be a part of this conversation, especially at this particular moment in time, I just want to go ahead and jump right into my remarks. I'm so glad that we left off with Dr. Conklin laying out the basic groundwork that this idea of race just simply isn't real. It is not real  in a biological sense. But at the same time, as she pointed out, it is socially meaningful, so biologically meaningless, but socially meaningful, because it has structured global society for the last 500, 600 years. And it all, it is also culturally relevant. Because we use race today and have used it certainly in the American context, as a stand in for cultural heritage, and for cultural ancestry. Which is why we cannot pretend as though race itself isn't a meaningful, impactful construct in the lives of all people, and certainly all Americans.

But while race isn't biologically real, racism is absolutely real. And it has deep roots in the American experience, and has shaped the lives of all Americans dating back to the founding of this nation, and the original colonial endeavor. 1619. We've heard so much about 1619 over the last year or so, last two years. 1619 marks the year in which the first group of enslaved Africans were brought to British North America, brought to Virginia and that really is an important moment in what would become the American journey. Because a decision is made or choices made to embrace the enslavement of people based on, for economic necessity, for economical, rather economic advantage, exploitation based on this idea of race. And so we see at this moment in 1619, that literally embedded in our DNA as what will become a nation, or is racism, intertwined with capitalism. I mean, that is literally in our DNA, because it serves as a justification for the enslavement of this critical labor force. It also serves as justification for the taking of land for those who were already present here. It is the justification for what would be the institution of slavery that would last for two-and-a-half centuries.

In America, we also see that racism is embedded in our founding documents, the 1776 Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, who absolutely says all men are created equal. But that's because he does not have to qualify it with a racial qualifier. He does not have to say all white people, because he knows, everyone knows he's just talking about white men. He doesn't have to say all white men, because everyone knows he's not talking about women. Thomas Jefferson has a very rich history with the colorline and is one of the people in America who really lays the groundwork for a scientific rationalization of what racism was. So we see it embedded in our founding documents.

Same way with the Constitution, the father of it is James Madison, a person who, like Jefferson, enslaved 100 or so people over the course of his lifetime and never freed a single soul. So we see it embedded in our founding documents. Now there are times such as here in Ohio, it comes into the union, that we think we are on the right side of history. Ohio comes into the union and 1803 and rejects the institution of slavery, but not because it rejected the idea of racism, not because the those white men who were in the, who brought Ohio into the union, rejected white supremacy. They just didn't want black people here. So there are times when we see we are on the right side of history as a nation. But for the wrong reasons, racism and white supremacy specifically, was something that really impacted the entire nation. When we get to the Civil War, which was absolutely fought about maintaining the institution of slavery in the states where it existed, and having the opportunity to expand it in the places where it wasn't. For the West, we see that once that battle is over, racism doesn't end. In fact, the principal legacy of the institution of slavery, North and South was the persistence in the belief in of white supremacy.

And so we see that white supremacy as a shared national ideology would go on into the late 19th Century, early 20th Century, serving as the justification for the for new systems of labor, exploitation of African Americans, that being Jim Crow, and all of it is enforced by violence. And so we also see in this moment of the 20th century, just as violence was a cornerstone of the institution of slavery, violence was the cornerstone of the new freedom. And so this becomes the era of lynching. And all of it is justified by these myths connected to race, whether it's black criminality, or black brutality, right? It all connects to this idea that somehow dark skin, darker skin, non-European ancestry leads to this inherent danger among African Americans or by African Americans. We also see as we move into the 20th century, during the era of Jim Crow, and just one more to two more quick comments, that we see how racism becomes embedded in our broader society. Whether we're talking about the criminal justice system and convict leasing, whether we're talking about homeownership in the New Deal, whether we're talking about segregated schools, these aren't just personal decisions that are being made by white folk in America. These are systems that are put in place, that are designed to disadvantage African Americans for the purpose of providing basic privileges for white Americans.

In 1965 1964, the Civil Rights Movement does not end racism in America. It certainly does outlaw and end legal racial discrimination. But just as white supremacy continued after slavery, a belief in white supremacy, a belief in racism continued after the Civil Rights era. Now the language that we use certainly changes by individuals, and we move into this era of colorblind legislation, but we still see purposeful actions and intent in legislation and business decisions and the like. But we also see the legacy of racism being the implicit biases that we harbor. And so even if we were to eliminate thoughtful or purposeful racial discrimination on the part of some, we still internalize this legacy of racist beliefs, not because we were born, anyone in this world was born racist, or harboring racist views, but because we were born in a society that normalizes racism and racist views. That is the problem. We haven't fundamentally changed that. So I'll just end simply by saying we are in the midst of a national conversation and national debate which we think we need to be having about whether or not we should be talking about race or racism. And the answer to that is a simple absolutely, because both race and racism continue to shape the contours of the lives of every single person. And you cannot understand the problems that we face as a society today, unless we take seriously race and racism, just as we can't understand the problems of yesterday, unless we understand race and racism, and the role of race and racism. And we certainly can't solve the problems that our children are going to be facing in the future unless we take seriously the role of race and racism in society. So thank you very much, and I turn it back over to Nick.

Thank you very much, Hasan. Our next speaker is Dr. Deondre Smiles, who'll discuss issues of race and racism in the context of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples. Dr. Smiles is a member of the Lekwungen Band of Ojibwe. He is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Smiles' research centers around conversations of the political role of the Indigenous deceased in relationships between Indigenous communities and the state. Smiles also has broader interests in critical Indigenous geographies, political ecology, science and technology studies and tribal cultural resource preservation. Smiles earned his Ph.D. in geography from the Ohio State University, where he also spent a year as a President's Postdoctoral Scholar in the history department. I'll pass the floor over to Deondre.

Dr. Deondre Smiles 

I'm muted. There we go. Thank you so much, Nick. I, in a typical academic fashion, I have made a short PowerPoint that I will share for you all, very quick. I'll make sure to keep myself within five minutes. So I'll share that. Alright, and we'll turn the subtitles off. There we go. So hello, everyone. As Dr. Breyfogle mentioned, my name is Dr. Deondre Smiles. I'm a citizen of the  Lekwungen Band of Ojibwe, which is a tribal nation located in north central Minnesota, about 200 miles north northwest of Minneapolis. I'm an assistant professor, newly minted assistant professor, here in the Department of Geography up in, we call it beautiful British Columbia right now. As I look out my living room window, it's a little cloudy as it is fall here. As you mentioned, I did a Ph.D. from 2016 to 2020 in geography at OSU and then I stayed for a year as a postdoc before moving to Canada. I'm so, I'm pleased to be with you all today. And as usually is the custom whenever we do anything up here in Victoria academically, I want to just briefly acknowledge and respect the Lekwungen peoples, whose traditional territory I'm presenting from today, as well as Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ, seen as peoples whose historical relationships with this land continue to the state. So in order to give this justice, we probably wouldn't need several hours. But in five minutes, I'll briefly talk about the ways that indigenous histories oftentimes get obscured in the ways that we teach it and the ways that we learn about it. And so I start off by showing this map, or this is a popular map that I always show in my lectures whenever I give guest lectures on this topic. And I usually ask, you know, are people familiar with the ways that the land, in the ways that land is controlled and is occupied? How has that changed in the United States? How has this gone all the way up to where we're looking at in the present day, we'll go through this one more time. But as you see, the green represents Native lands, white represents settler-controlled land. And this is what it looks like today. And one more time, a very, very good map by Sam Hiller down at LSU.

So there's a variety of different explanations as to how land in histories have been obscured. And we'll go through a couple here, but first, I want to highlight a term called settler colonialism, which I'll use in my answers today and also refer to in this talk. So settler colonialism is distinct from more what we would call maybe more traditional extractive colonialism where the idea that a colonizing power comes in and extracts resources out of a territory to bring back to the colonized country. Settler colonialism works a little differently. It's a form of colonialism that is built upon the settlement and enduring occupation of land by a colonizing power at the expense of indigenous presence upon the land. So to put that into more lay terms, settlers would come from say, England from the United Kingdom, and they would come to North America and they would occupy land and they would come into friction and conflict with Indigenous peoples and they would gradually push them off of the lands in order to build up white Anglo European cities and villages and structures of inhabitants. The late scholar Patrick Wolf, who in settler colonial studies is one of the fore runners of the modern field, famously said that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. He said that because there is, while there is a beginning to colonization, there is no point in settler colonial logics where colonization is meant to end. There is no point where that settler colony says, okay, we've gotten what we need, we can pack up and go back to Europe. Settler colonialism is instead built in, is structurally constructed, in order to endure and to permanently occupy the space. It does so by eliminating in the pursuit of replacements, and it relies on the myth of terra nullius to proceed.

So the next question that probably pops up is well, what is terra nullius? That's right, it's a Latin term that stands for nobody's land. And I'll again put this into kind of more general terms. So terra nullius, is this logic where the land was believed to be empty. Europeans would come and say, well, look at all of this, look at all this open land for us to be able to settle into, farm into, make industrial use out of. Generally speaking, that wasn't exactly the case. They would find Indigenous peoples on that land. And that would be waved away by saying, well, if you take a look at these, quote, savage people, right, they don't farm like we do. They don't really make use of the land like we do. They're not making productive use of the land at all. And they're so bad at trying to make use of it productively per our standards that it might as well be empty and unused.

 Terra nullius is a is oftentimes a very colloquial term when we study this sort of thing. In the Australian context, it's actually a legal term. There's a series of court cases in the 1990s that talked about whether the British Crown, whether the British Crown could recognize terra nullius as a legal framework through which settlers occupied the continents that Australia. But in American and Canadian settler colonialism, which are the two forms of colonialism that I work with, there are similar concepts. Probably the most well-known ones, the idea of Manifest Destiny is represented here by the famous picture Manifest Destiny, as you see here, settlers moving from the right or from the east, across to the left of the West are bringing progress and light and driving away Indigenous peoples and their and wild animals and trying to tame them and trying to build a country, right? This is one of the most enduring images of the way that we've constructed American history is through the building of a country out of nothing, that there was nothing here and hardworking pioneers constructed a country and built up a continent. So of course, as we talked about this is accomplished through elimination and destruction.

So on one hand, you have the destruction of indigenous identity, right? The policy of assimilation. And again, I use it here and quote, "savage indigenous peoples" were to be brought into quote "modern European society." Of course, there was no guarantee of full political rights. But the idea was that, you know, maybe, it may not be humane to just brutally genocide them, so let's try to find ways to try to make them into better human beings. It's probably, for those of you that follow the news, especially indigenous news articles, residential schools, or boarding schools have been in the news quite recently. Boarding schools and residential schools were just one such technique, right? In these schools, they were, Indigenous children were discouraged from practicing their language, practicing their culture, their religion, and they were generally trained in manual labor. They were trained to fill in kind of the lower rungs of settler colonial economic society.

We talk about destruction of the land. So for those of you that may be calling in from the upper Midwest, you probably recognize that the picture on the first slide is a picture of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe. A well-known story from where I'm from in Minnesota. And the story was that, for those of you that don't know, the Cliff notes version is Paul is this legend of this giant Lumberjack and together with his blue ox, who he oftentimes tied a plow to, they basically reshaped the geographies of the Midwest in the northwest. They cut down trees. Their footsteps are so big that they filled up with water and became Minnesota's 10,000 Lakes. They rough housed and created the Grand Tetons and Yosemite. This is a form of kind of whitewashing the destruction of the land, right?

In actuality, there was widespread over hunting and destruction of animals and plants important to Indigenous peoples. The over hunting of bison on the Great Plains was one such example. Another example is as covered by scholars such as Nick Estes, the flooding of Indigenous territories in the name of flood control and irrigation. That picture here on the right is during the 1930s, when the Indigenous Chief pictured here on the left-hand side here is signing away his land to authorities in the Dakotas for a flood control project called the Pick-Sloan Act. And you can see he's not very happy about that, right? He's signing that knowing that he really doesn't have a choice and that his people will be monetarily compensated. But hundreds of 1000s of acres of their land would subsequently be underwater, as well as something that is, well, as other forms of destruction of the land and energy production initiatives such as pipelines have been very prominent in news media and public consciousness today, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline on Keystone XL, etc.

So what does this all have to do with teaching about indigenous peoples in history, right, in K through 12 education and even beyond. I talk about how, you know, people oftentimes don't know these histories. And then I teach about these things in college. And a lot of times my students say, I didn't know that this happened. Why did I not know this happened? This makes me angry that I didn't know and I say, well, it's not really your fault, right? It's how education about Indigenous peoples have proceeded. Or there's a lack of Indigenous histories and presences in social studies, education in K through 12, in college curriculum beyond elective coursework. And then if you're lucky enough at the college level, your school might have an Indigenous Studies Program, right? We have American Indian Studies at OSU. Up here at UVic, we have Indigenous Studies. Things are getting better. I was fortunate enough when I grew up in the Twin Cities that I went to a school that actually had a Native education program. But we still have a lot of work to go. And a lot of times this kind of comes out of kind of a broader view that, well Native Americans and indigenous people are part of the past and have either assimilated or disappeared completely. Then I say, well, what I taught earlier this summer in the workshop is well that's not the case, right? That there are, there oftentimes you are more than likely to have an Indigenous student in your classroom. And recognizing that we are a part of contemporary American society, and that we are still here is an important juncture point and beginning point to beginning to uncover the ways that Indigenous histories have been obscured in this country.

So in the interest of time, I will leave you with a question to think about, right? What was it? When was the first time you learned about Indigenous peoples, either in the United States or if you're not from the US in your home country, right? Was it in grade school or college? What did you first learn about them? And did you ever spend a lot of time on this topic. I can say in K through 12, we probably spent maybe a grand total of maybe like five or six classroom days on it and a lot of the things that I learned were in extracurricular things such as our Native education program. So I will leave it at that. Thank you. I don't know if this information is made available. But if you want to talk to me outside of this webinar today, there's my contact information, and I can make that available later on, too. Thank you all very much.

Thanks so much, Deondre. And last, but not least, let me introduce you to Dr. Robin Judd, who will talk today about race and Nazi Germany. Dr. Judd is associate professor of history at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Contested Rituals, Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and the Making of German Jewish Political Life. And she's completing her newest book, Love, Liberation and Loss: Jewish Military Marriages After the Holocaust. She currently directs the history department's Hoffman Leaders and Leadership in History Fellowship Program and is the Vice President for Programming of the Association for Jewish Studies, the leading Jewish Studies organization worldwide. at OSU, she teaches classes in Holocaust studies, Jewish history, and immigration history, and has received seven teaching awards. Over to you, Robin.

Dr. Robin Judd 

Wonderful, and I am just going to share my screen and go from there. I thank you so much, Nick, and the Origins team for inviting me and for organizing this session. So to jump in, and to take advantage of the five minutes or so that I have to speak. When I talk with my students about considering race and racism and Nazi policy, I often want them to come away from my courses with three important points.

And the first is the recognition of how tempting it is to back shadow and how very important it is for us as historians not to take the information that we have about what happens next and to place it on the past. But to really wrestle with the past and the past actors and what they knew and what was available to them. And that allows us to move to our next two points, right.

The second point is the constant interplay of ideology and action and behavior that today I'll be talking a bit more about, sort of the place of race and racism and Nazi thought. But it almost means nothing unless we also connect that with action, and also to be thinking about place in time that even in as short of a period of the study of Nazism from its formation of the German Workers Party in 1919, until the end of the war, and the sort of the post war years. Even though that's a pretty short period, even there, we see how place in time can really shape the ways in which people understood race and racism. So if we were to think about this teleology, if we were to think about this arc of different periods of time, what are some of the major points that I hope students understand? Well, first, I want them to understand the foundation. How before 1933, even before the Nazis are coming into power, and then consolidating power, there's first an understanding of racial purity, that there's a belief that there's something that can allow for a pure race, and something that can allow for an impure race. And that there are, there is a hierarchy of racism, races, and there's a superiority of one particular race. There's an uber mentioned race, and that is the Germanic race for the Aryan master race. There's a belief that not only is there a hierarchy of races, but at the very top of the race, the Aryan Germanic people, and the very bottom of the races, the Jews are locked in a struggle. And that struggle is almost going to be never-ending until the Jews are eliminated, that the Jews themselves are a racial category. They're not a national category. They're not a religious category. But to speak to what Deondre and Hasan and Alice set out, right, this is an imagined category, a sense that Jews live off of other races and weaken them, that they're parasitic, that they use their sexuality and sex for that to happen, that there's something in physically the act of reproduction that can sort of shift the genetic makeup and a person not using that language at this time, right to make these races and pure. That there're these deviant dangerous characteristics that are racial in nature. That they can't be removed. That there's, that even if a Jew converts, that this Jew will be forever deviant in some way. And that the family is absolutely central to race. That the nation is talked about in terms of a genealogical term, it's the volksgemeinschaft that the family is the source of reproduction, and that nonAryans have to be extirpated. They have to be taken from the national family tree, root and branch until if that's our foundation, then between '33 and '39 we see it built upon, right? In '33 to '39 we see the notion of living space, lebensraum, around being intricately connected to race. There's an explicit linkage of race with citizenship, that one can only be a citizen if one is of Germanic, or kindred blood, that there are certain groups that pose a racial threat to this revitalized state, and those include Jews and Roma Sinti, but they also include those who identified with hereditary and cognitively inherited diseases.

And as early as 1933, the Nazi state enforces sterilization and in 1939, it begins the so-called euthanasia program, or the T4 Program. And in this period of '33 to '39, there's a lot of attention on the United States. There's fascination with the so-called unruly racism of the US and there're questions as to how to separate the unruly racism of the United States with the very sort of organized racism of Nazi Germany. When we move to '39 to '41, we see that next layer being built upon right here, race and lebensraum, race and living space go hand in hand. There is the T4 program that gets introduced where we have the so-called euthanasia program. We have this focus on Slavs and the introduction of Slavs and Roma Sinti as slave laborers. We have the creation of ghettoisation for Jews in Poland, and we have the forcible movement of ethnic Germans. There's a supposed linkage between Jews and the war, between Jews and disease and that gets built upon one more time in 1941 to 1945 with the final solution. When we not only have an explicit link of Jews with the Soviet state, but we also have this racial threat that we imagine and all kinds of lands the Nazis claim for themselves, and an articulation of a need for the final solution, a need to eliminate racial threats through killing. So for my students, it's very important for them to understand the way in which the narrative gets built upon, and the ways in which Nazi Germany does not operate alone. That there's sort of a constant gaze to other racialized societies and how they are playing, how they play, that play out, and enact racial ideologies there. And with that, I'll end and hand the floor back over to you, Nick. Thank you.

Thank you so much to all four of you for these, these great opening remarks. I mean, it's so helpful to have a moment where we can sort of lay out some basic kind of aspects of the history that are important for us to think about and to walk away with. While you guys have all been talking, there have been an incredibly large number of questions that have come in. We will do our best to answer as many of them as we can. And I apologize in advance to the people who have asked if we don't get to your question. It's not because we didn't love it, just that there's really so many that have come in. But let's start here. Alice, I'm going to throw a question your way. Just to begin with, we've had several questions about really sort of the difference between perhaps modern racism and the premodern world. And in the sense that, you get the sense that racism in some ways began with the last few 100 years, or race or ideas of race began, our last few 100 years. What's different about kind of modern ideas of race and racism? What might we have seen in earlier societies? People have asked about the Greeks and Romans. People have asked about the kind of early Islamic civilizations. I'm hoping you could talk a little bit about what, yeah, what makes modern ideas of modern race modern?

Well, I could answer that in one word, which is science. In many ways, race and racism, though always linked, they're not the same thing. So you can have what we call racism, or we might call it ethnocentrism. I mean, that's existed historically forever, outsiders and insiders. So I very consciously use the word modern, because the modern way of sort of being in the world, modern rationality, we trace, typically back to the scientific revolution, or what's called the new science, if you don't like the word revolution. So in that sense, there is, it's very important to hold on to that concept when listening to me, because what I'm talking about is we live in a kind of post, but we live in the world that the scientific revolution created in every sense. And our modern lifestyle is linked to the development of modern science with its norms, its pursuit of a certain kind of truth, and the ways of ascertaining that truth. So when I say that the best science of the day accepted this concept of race, I'm talking about people who actually put their ideas through the scientific processes, we understand, that peer review, publish articles in scientific journals, debates. And it's through that process that they ultimately recognize their errors, too. So I want to, I hope that clarifies what is modern about the idea, our idea of race. I'm not sure it's the only genealogy for our modern idea of race, but it's an important one.

Do you think too, Alice, that there's something about the state and citizenship that informs modern kinds of modern notions of race, but also the implications of those notions?

Absolutely. I think that the next step, and the argument you might take, is whatever scientists thought they were doing in their laboratory got politicized, always gets politicized, more dangerously in some moments than others. We know that living through a moment in which science is being contested. So the whole development of the modern nation state made it really almost impossible that the race concept did not somehow get politicized, I would say weaponized even, as nations began to think of themselves as perhaps needing to correspond to a specific race. And of course, the Nazi state is the ultimate expression of that horrific kind of politicization and weaponization.

So, excuse me, Hasan, let me throw a question your way because there were a couple of questions that came out of your initial comments about the relationship between kind of race and racism on one hand, and capitalism on the other, or capitalism and class on the other. With a question in particular, is capitalism somehow implicit in American racism and kind of vice versa?

I would say that racism is implicit in American capitalism, and it has always been. Capitalism, racism gave us slavery. Capitalism and racism gave us Jim Crow. Capitalism and racism have given us mass incarceration. Now, we also, there's nothing inherently, I mean, that's just a critique of the economic system in which we live. And sometimes it's the way that capital operates, the way that sometimes you know, African Americans have been excluded from participating in particular capitalist endeavors from employment to homeownership. But also the way in which racism as an ideology is used to justify the flight of capital, the flight of jobs more recently, in the modern American context. A multinational corporation closes a factory in Cleveland, Ohio, and moves to Mexico or to China. And white workers who are now unemployed are blaming Mexican workers and Chinese workers, as opposed to the multinational corporation that has chosen to flee this country for tax breaks and for lower wages. I mean, that's racism and capitalism being played out on a global scale. So I would say yes, they're intimately connected, and have always been so, which means that if we want to seriously do away with racism, we have to reimagine how our economic system operates in American society. Thank you.

I'm curious, Robin and Alice, do you see similar kinds of connections between kind of race and capitalism in the European context?

Certainly, I mean, one of the things that we talk a lot about in my courses is how the Nazis manipulated and used the economy toward their benefit, which was, by definition, a racialized economy. The Aryanization of Jewish businesses allowed for the Nazi state to recover the forced labor of Roma Senti, of Slavs, of Jews, that allows for the Nazi war machine to succeed for as long as it does. And, indeed, that there's a way in which the economies of small towns where internment camps or prison camps were located would become revitalized because of the work that was required. So there's so many ways in which the economies become intertwined and economic revival becomes intertwined with racial ideologies.

And if I may just add, I mean, the parallel to what we've seen since the 1980s in rural white communities being revitalized following deindustrialization by the placement of a prison and the warehousing of mainly black and brown people there. And you see exactly I mean, the way in which that is sort of racism and capitalism intertwined.

Absolutely. I mean, and it, you know, one begins to sort of break down, okay, well, what's needed, right? What's needed to build the present. Now what do we need in terms of workers? What do we need in terms of the profiting of the products? You know, what do we need? Do we need wood? Do we need steel? You know, who's going to be bringing it in and out? You know, who's going to be serving the meals and all of these kinds of questions. And then when we break it down to the local level, I think it allows students to really see how often racism can be intertwined with our economy.

I would just add that obviously, the whole history of European Colonialism in Africa and Asia is premised and in a very similar way on how to get, and you mentioned this, Deondre, too because settler colonialism worked the same way in America, as it did in South Africa, or Algeria, in places where the Europeans settled. But if you go to other parts of Africa, where they practice extractive colonialism, the whole idea was to integrate these economies in such a way that you had a cheap, docile labor force in the global south, and you had the wealth skimmed off and headed back to what they called the metropoles, or Europe itself. And Europeans are, you know, have long, there's long been a criticism within Europe, obviously, of these racist colonial economics. But it's really actually only in the last 20 years, that the same kind of reckonings going on there that has a much earlier history in the US.

Marvelous, thank you. I have a question that I wanted to send to Deondre, which has to do with sort of how do we differentiate between ethnicity, nationality and race? And in particular, how do those categories, what do those categories mean in the case of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples?

And so that's a great question. And that's a very, very complex one, when it comes to Indigenous peoples, especially in the American in the Canadian context is because a lot of times, sometimes people will refer to Indigenous peoples as a race and you'll if you ask many Indigenous peoples, they'll oftentimes say, well, we're not a race, right? We're a nation. You know, I can speak for like my own people where, you know, the Ojibwe, we have a long, long history of using our tribal identity, as viewing it in political and kinship sort of frameworks, rather than racial or biological constructs. I mean, there's well known examples of black Americans becoming adopted into the tribe and becoming well-respected members of the tribal community. And so, a lot of times when I get asked that sort of question, I always say, well, in terms of Indigenous peoples, you know, we get placed into racial categories and ethnic categories for the ease of demographics and things like that. But I always say, try to think about nationhood and kind of like, kind of national sort of frameworks above everything, right? Because we are not only peoples, but we're also political entities that many times predate the United States or predate Canada. And so that's generally a good entry way to think through such a thing such as that.

There's a series of thank you, Deondre, sorry, I was just reading all the different questions and trying to get them all in some form or other. Robin, there's a series of questions for you. And I guess I'll take two of them in particular. One about which was asked so why was being a Jew not considered a religion? And then also, are there similarities between the ideas of the volksgemeinschaft and of citizenship in Nazi Germany with modern perceptions of who is deemed American in our society?

That's, they're both such good questions. So one of the reasons why then Nazis were hesitant to think about the Jews as a religion was because Germany, when the Nazis come to power and then seize and consolidate power, Germany is a highly integrated mixed society. Jews intermarried at a very high rate, converted to Christianity, at a very high rate, in which you, they're no longer considered Jews, by themselves or by the Jewish community. But they are considered Jews by the Nazis, right. And so part of the part of what happens is that the Nazis don't want to work with Judaism and Jewishness as a religious category, because then it would allow for conversion to be meaningful. And instead, the Nazis want to use this imaginary category of race as a way of thinking, this biological race as thinking of that there's something quite inherent to the Jews that can't be converted out. I think the question about the volksgemeinschaft is a wonderful one. And certainly, this sort of the thinking about this messy, weird category of the nation state as being part of a family unit, right, and nationalist family unit is resonant to all of us, because we've been hearing a lot about that, right, over the last several years. And certainly, I think there's rhetoric, exclusionary rhetoric, in the nation now that imagines the US as this family, but it's not, but it's a particular family. It's a family of certain like individuals that excludes all the others and I think that's been quite resonant today.

Fabulous, thank you. A question that I'll send to Hasan. Can you talk a little bit, you know, in less than 20 hours about the current debate regarding critical race theory? We've had several people asking about this particular debate, so I think we'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Well, if you didn't know what critical race theory, we'd have heard, if you never heard about critical race theory before the start of this year, then there's a good chance what you think it is, it ain't. Critical race theory is simply a legal construct that, in its most simplest terms, says you have to take seriously the role of race and racism in society in order to understand the American past. And in order to understand the American present, that's it, or everything else is just political mumbo jumbo. It's not about sort of white people, you know, creating white guilt and white shame and that and all this other. That's just silly. I think what we're in the midst of is a politically manufactured hysteria that unfortunately we cannot dismiss because it is now impacting what we can and should and could and cannot actually teach in our classrooms. And so we have to take it very seriously. But it is really just saying that the idea and what people are advocating, they're saying you've got to take race and racism seriously in the classroom. And that we need to teach historical facts. We need to focus on honesty, and we have to lean into difficult conversations, and that which makes us uncomfortable, which is one of the things that we're doing right now. And look at that, we're having this conversation. And guess what, no white children blew up in the process, right? I mean it's totally possible for us to do this, and learn something and take it away and take something away.

Nick may have blown up. You still there, Nick?

I'm still there. Sorry. You know, it's the problem of Zoom. I click mute, the unmute, and I don't unmute. But there you go. But now I'm here. I have a sort of larger question here. That what I'll throw to Deondre to start, but I think everybody will want to talk about, which is, are recent racism kind of unit directional issues, meaning, should we only study racial dynamics relative to a normative pattern, that of white Europeans maintaining power or do the speakers believe racial systems should be studied as dynamic systems in which power can shift among racial groups?

So I guess I can start with that. So that's a really, really good question. I would probably say that if that would presuppose a system where you could have, you can presuppose a possibility where Indigenous peoples and Black Americans and Latinx peoples and Asian Americans could have, be allowed to occupy positions in power, where there could be a radical shifting of that dynamic. And I think that in current political discourse that that in itself creates so much kind of pushback, right? The Indigenous circles, the idea of the Land Back Movement, the idea that Indigenous people should be allowed to have ongoing relationships with the land and that land should be returned to Indigenous peoples. I mean, just that in itself. I see about every two months on Twitter, I see somebody going on there saying, oh, well Land Back as ethno-nationalism, right? Well, Indigenous peoples, if they get control of the land are just going to kick white people off of it. And I say, well, that's, I don't think that's exactly what that is. But I think that because of that kind of fear, right? The fear that well, what happens if they get power and they do the same thing to us that day that we did to them? I think that you have to think about how do we construct those kinds of discourses? And how do we make it so that, you know, it's truly, you know, a, quote, multiracial society, multiethnic society? It doesn't carry that Boogeyman with it, where it's like, oh, well, if we lose power, right? Isn't that like the, I'll probably get this wrong, but like the replacement theory, right? Isn't that kind of based on the idea that, oh, you know, other nonwhite Americans are going to, are gaining demographic strength compared to white Americans? And, you know, what are they going to do when that happens? And so I think that deconstructing that would be the first step to even kind of, I think, even approaching the kind of conversation of like, kind of shifting power dynamics or racial dynamics. I mean, I think there's other kinds of, there's other ones that can be described. You know, in Indigenous circles, a lot of times we talk about sometimes a rampant anti Blackness, right, that runs within those circles in the ways that Black Natives are treated, you know. But a lot of it kind of comes after people kind of point to well, that comes from kind of these colonial dynamics rights, where colonial or settler, settler colonial powers, oftentimes positioned Indigenous peoples, as you know, you're racially superior to African Americans and Black slaves, and therefore, you know, you occupy a higher rung in society. And unfortunately, I think some of our, some people kind of carry that colonized mindset with them into the present day, in very destructive and very racist ways. So I'll leave it at that and turn it over to other folks and see if they want to take a stab at this.

I might jump in here and just say, I think for someone who tries to teach European and colonialism to you know what are mostly white students, I try to tell students, what we're really doing is probing sort of the blind spots in liberalism. Not, you know, trying to understand, because there is a lot, not that we only have to study European, white Europeans, and that responsibility, though I think that's very important because a lot of them haven't understood the responsibility, and the complicity that white liberalism historically has played in constructing and perpetuating racism. But I also like to complicate the story by saying, you know, there's always resistance to these sort of white Europeans' privilege, and that white allies have been important to the struggle too and understanding how different sort of power dynamics developed within particular historical situations is critical to trying to change things. So I don't, I'm just sort of getting people to be comfortable with acknowledging that things, that awful things happened in the past, but that they, that we can hope that they can be corrected, if they learn about why it happened. So, you know, to get people past the sort of guilt, you know, guilting of white, anybody who is white, and trying to make them understand that talking about race is actually the first step to some kind of understanding and accountability.

You know, if we have a second, I would just say this is kind of a version of the reverse racism question, right? Like is reverse racism real? I know it's not real because you have to have the power in addition to the prejudice, right? Like it, you can always have prejudice, but that you don't have the historical examples of people of color of African Americans being in significant of positions of power to exert the kind of racial discrimination against white people that white people want to claim. Those who say reverse racism exists in some significant way. It's quite interesting that systemic racism against black people doesn't exist, but apparently systemic racism against white people does exist. It's always the same thing like on a theoretical kind, on a theoretical level. Certainly, right, anybody can harbor a kind of prejudice. But when we actually deal with it on concrete terms and historical reality, and say, well, who has had the power to exercise the prejudice over people, then historically, we're talking about certainly in the American context, and even globally, people of European descent, people of American descent. So we got to deal with the facts, and not deal with the myths centered around sort of the theoretical possibilities, that kind of ain't real, right? I mean, we deal with America.

Or the fear, I mean, you know, to just tap onto what Hasan just said, I think quite brilliantly, right. So much of it is about being afraid. And I think for our students, there's kind of a moment where we encourage them to recognize that that's real, and that it's really important there in the classroom and here and able to have those conversations and we work with them to figure out how to get beyond the fear to being able to see this, these historical patterns. So they understand that there can't be reverse racism in the world in which we exist, because the power just isn't there.

Marvelous. I think this is maybe a good place for us to unfortunately call it a day. We've gone over the hour that we're supposed to have set aside for this. And my apologies, there were so many great questions that I had hoped we might get to. And thank you all for posing those questions and hopefully, to some degree they've been answered through the conversations today. Let me say a very big thank you to Doctors Conklin, Jeffrey, Smiles, and Judd, for sharing their expertise today and their passion for history. Please join me in giving them a kind of virtual round of applause for what they've done today. I'd also like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences, especially Clara Davison, Jake Lac and Maddie Kurma. And also the history department, the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, the Clio Society, Bexley Public Library, and the magazine Origins, Current Events in Historical Perspective for their sponsorship. And once again, thank you, our audience for your excellent questions and for your ongoing connection to Ohio State. Stay safe and healthy, and we'll see you next time. Thank you all so much.

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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
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• 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.
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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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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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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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• Race: Are we so different? , educational website project of the American Anthropological Association
• Race: The Power of an Illusion , PBS website associated with the California Newsreel documentary
• Facts about Race/Color Discrimination , from the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
• Race, Racism, and the Law , edited by Vernellia Randall at the University of Dayton Law School

affirmative action | critical philosophy of race | Douglass, Frederick | Du Bois, W.E.B. | Fanon, Frantz | -->feminist philosophy, approaches: Black feminist philosophy --> | feminist philosophy, interventions: metaphysics | heritability | identity politics | Kant, Immanuel: social and political philosophy | liberation, philosophy of | Négritude | -->race: and Black identity -->

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Talking About Race

Talking about race, although hard, is necessary. we are here to provide tools and guidance to empower your journey and inspire conversation., a lifelong journey, talking about race starts with personal reflection:.

• When were you first aware of your race?
• What do you remember from childhood about how you made sense of human differences? What confused you?
• What childhood experiences did you have with friends or adults who were different from you in some way?
• How, if ever, did any adult give you help thinking about racial differences?

I Am an Educator

Whether you are teaching infants, adults, or any age in between, you are an influential part of your students’ learning and development. Educators too have an important role in communicating our history and culture. What and how the history of race in America is presented is an opportunity to engage in thoughtful, respectful, and productive conversations. Start, continue, or expand the conversation with us.

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There’s no quick or foolproof way to talk about the complexities of race with your child(ren). But, it’s a conversation all families need to have, no matter your race, background, education or experience. Let’s get started, continue, or expand the conversation together.

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You care about making the world a more equitable and just place for all. You may just be starting to think about your role and ability to impact others, or, you may be further along on your journey. Wherever you are, what you do and say matters. Explore how to speak and engage constructively about race, so we can all grow together.

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Book excerpt: "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin

Updated on: August 11, 2024 / 9:34 AM EDT / CBS News

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Writer, poet and activist James Baldwin (1924-1987) was one of the leading literary voices of the civil rights movement. Through a powerful oeuvre of novels, plays and essays, he explored issues of race, class, politics and sexual identity during one of America's most turbulent periods.

Baldwin's essay "My Dungeon Shook," written in the form of a letter to his young nephew, was first published in The Progressive in 1962; the following year a revised version was included in "The Fire Next Time"  (now included in a new collection from Everyman's Library). The letter is a powerful treatise on the state of racism in America - how it affects Black people whose very dignity is circumscribed by social constructs, as well as whites undermined by their lack of understanding and their feelings of fear. It richly illustrates the ironies of how race relations can dampen the humanity of all involved.

Read the essay below, and don't miss Kelefa Sanneh's report on the centenary of James Baldwin on "CBS Sunday Morning" August 11!

"The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name; No Name in the Street; The Devil Finds Work" by James Baldwin

"My Dungeon Shook"

Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation

Dear James:

I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody—with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I don't know, but certainly both you and your father resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy. I am sure that your father has told you something about all that. Neither you nor your father exhibit any tendency towards holiness: you really are of another era, part of what happened when the Negro left the land and came into what the late E. Franklin Frazier called "the cities of destruction." You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a n----- . I tell you this because I love you, and please don't you ever forget it.

I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back; if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmother's so easily wiped away. But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No! This is not true! How bitter you are!"—but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them , for most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under which you were born, for I was there. Your countrymen were not there, and haven't made it yet. Your grandmother was also there, and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocents check with her. She isn't hard to find. Your countrymen don't know that she exists, either, though she has been working for them all their lives.)

Well, you were born, here you came, something like fifteen years ago; and though your father and mother and grandmother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavyhearted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James, named for me—you were a big baby, I was not—here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children's children.

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason . The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them . And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don't be afraid. I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed.

Your uncle, James

       From "The First Next Time" by James Baldwin. Reprinted by arrangement with Modern Library, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 1962, 1963 by James Baldwin. Copyright renewed 1990, 1991 by Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart. 

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Measuring Potential Effects of Introducing the 2024 Race and Ethnicity Standards into the Current Population Survey

When obtaining information on individuals’ race and ethnicity, the Current Population Survey (CPS) currently follows the 1997 OMB standards, which prescribes race and Hispanic ethnicity as distinct concepts that should be asked about in separate questions. In 2024, OMB updated the standards to stipulate that race and ethnicity be asked in one question and that a separate category be added to the single race and ethnicity question for Middle Eastern and North African. We examine the CPS microdata to tease out the effects that introduction of the 2024 standards might have on CPS labor force estimates across time. Our estimates show that individuals who indicate they are Middle Eastern or North African will likely be those who previously would have indicated that they are White, however their proportion of the population is small. In contrast, Hispanics make up a larger proportion of the population. “Other Race” responses in the CPS provide a lower bound estimate of the number of individuals who will identify as just Hispanic (Hispanic Alone) in a combined question while responses to the Hispanic ethnicity question provide an upper bound. Results from the Census Bureau’s National Content test suggest that the upper bound estimate is closer to the proportion of the population that will identify as Hispanic Alone, but there is insufficient information in the National Content test to determine how this will affect the various CPS labor force estimates. To address this issue, we calculate the labor force estimates corresponding to our lower and upper bounds However, we note that to obtain a more precise estimate of the effects changing the race and ethnicity questions on labor force estimates the two sets of questions should administered to the same respondents. One way of accomplishing this is to take advantage of the longitudinal aspect of the CPS. Individuals who initially provided their race and ethnicity using the 1997 standard questions can be asked their race and ethnicity using a combined question in subsequent months. An ongoing question is how the children of Hispanic immigrants who were born in the United States will view themselves. We therefore look at the tendency of individuals to identify as Hispanic because they were either born in a Hispanic country or were born in the U.S. but have one or two Hispanic parents.

We are grateful to Julie Hatch, Rachel Krantz-Kent, and participants in the NBER CRIW conference on Race, Ethnicity, and Economic Statistics for the 21st Century for helpful comments and suggestions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Forthcoming: Measuring Potential Effects of Introducing the 2024 Race and Ethnicity Standards into the Current Population Survey , Mark A. Loewenstein, David S. Piccone Jr., Anne E. Polivka. in Race, Ethnicity, and Economic Statistics for the 21st Century , Akee, Katz, and Loewenstein. 2024

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The Post-liberal Catholics Find Their Man

As vice president, J. D. Vance would elevate their disdain for American liberalism to the highest levels of government.

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

Updated at 10:24 p.m. ET on August 8, 2024

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When journalists write about ties between Donald Trump and the religious right, they usually focus on evangelical Protestants. That emphasis makes sense, given that evangelicals make up a sizable portion of the GOP’s electoral coalition, and their enduring devotion to the morally and religiously louche Republican nominee remains more than a little shocking.

But Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance as his running mate puts a spotlight on a different faction of the religious right: the so-called post-liberal Catholics, who have been Vance’s friends, allies, and interlocutors since his 2019 conversion to Catholicism (he was raised Protestant) and transformation into a MAGA Republican shortly after.

This group of Catholic intellectuals—which includes Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School, and Sohrab Ahmari, a founder and an editor of the eclectically populist magazine Compact —is known for its sweeping attack on classical liberalism. It claims that a long list of contemporary problems (rising rates of economic inequality, drug addiction, suicide, homelessness, childlessness) can be traced back to moral-philosophical errors made centuries ago by the American Founders and their ideological progenitors. In place of our polity’s commitment to individual rights, autonomy, and pluralism, the post-liberals aim to create a society unified around the common good , which is itself fixed on a theological vision of the Highest Good .

Hence the need for what Deneen calls “regime change” in the title of his most recent book. In concrete terms, this means replacing the people and institutions that dominate America’s cultural, economic, and political life with a new elite willing to eschew liberal norms in service of supposedly higher ideals. In this respect, Vance is the man the post-liberals have been waiting for—a self-identified member of the “post-liberal right,” and now a contender for one of the country’s highest political offices.

Adrian Vermeule: Beyond originalism

Trump and his immediate circle may not share theological convictions with the post-liberals, but the two groups do share certain political impulses. Both exhibit a populist skepticism of elites, deference toward social conservatism, and a preference for putting “America first” when it comes to immigration, trade, labor, and foreign policy. Most of all, Trump and the post-liberals share a willingness, even an eagerness, to smash the entrenched power of the liberal cultural establishment. Vance is the embodiment of these shared hopes and drive for disruption. As vice president in a second Trump administration, he would bring both to the highest levels of government, allowing, for the first time, post-liberal Catholic ideas to exert real political influence.

T hese ambitions mark a significant change in the Catholic right compared with its most recent moment of maximal influence , during the administration of George W. Bush. Then, writers such as Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and Robert P. George argued that, when properly understood, Catholic Christian revelation, American history and ideals, and the Republican Party’s platform were perfectly harmonious. These thinkers made their case by contending that American liberalism was rooted in theological sources, that Catholic orthodoxy was essentially liberal , and that the GOP was tailor-made to unite the two.

Things feel very different on the Catholic right today. Setbacks at home and at the Vatican—including the election (and reelection) of Barack Obama, Pope Francis’s efforts to push back against the conservative legacies of his predecessors, and the Obergefell decision by the U.S. Supreme Court declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right—discredited the idea that liberalism and traditional Catholicism could go together. One radical response to these developments can be found on the furthest extreme of the Catholic right, among a group called the integralists. Despite their name, they aim to subordinate the state to the Church, not integrate them.

Vance hasn’t gone that far in his public statements. Yet his account of his conversion to the Catholic Church, published in 2020 in the magazine The Lamp , marks him as very much a man of our post-liberal moment. In his essay, Vance explains the intellectual influences on his spiritual evolution. Some are conventional, such as St. Augustine, the theologian and bishop who has been an inspiration to Christian converts down through the centuries. But one is decidedly less orthodox: the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Before Thiel spent roughly $15 million on Vance’s successful 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio, Vance worked as a principal for Mithril Capital, one of Thiel’s many firms. Their first encounter, however, came back in 2011, when Thiel delivered a talk at Yale Law School, where Vance was then a student. As Vance recalls in his essay, Thiel, who has described himself as Christian, observed that the meritocratic striving of smart young people (like Vance) often results in both personal existential emptiness and societal stagnation. That’s a variation on a critique of liberal democracy that Thiel has been developing for much of his career . In his idiosyncratic reading of Western history, the theological precepts of Christian civilization are what inspired the great scientific and technological achievements of the past several centuries. The ideals of liberal democracy, by contrast, are responsible for the meaninglessness and inertia that supposedly plague the present.

Read: Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy

Over the decade following his meeting with Thiel, Vance remained broadly committed to a Bush-era vision of continuity between Christianity and the moral outlook and policy agenda of the pre-Trump Republican Party. That earlier Vance favored pro-business economic policy and saw democracy promotion as a crucial element of American foreign policy. He also emphasized the importance of personal character in public life: Poverty could be explained, in part, by moral depravity, and holding political office required integrity. But around the time that he decided to run for the Ohio Senate seat vacated by the retiring Rob Portman in 2021, Vance underwent a second conversion —to the ideas of the post-liberal Catholics and the right-wing populism associated with Donald Trump.

That’s not to say he got more conservative. This new Vance often sounds like Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, when he talks about economic policy—emphasizing poverty’s structural causes and advocating for a higher minimum wage. On foreign policy, he began defining American interests so narrowly that the fate of a liberal democracy on NATO’s border was a matter of indifference. (“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he said in early 2022, shortly before Russia’s invasion.)

Most strikingly, after more than four years of condemning Trump, Vance began defending the former president’s most reckless acts and ambitions. He started denouncing the American “regime” and, in September 2021, told a far-right podcaster that “we are in a late republican period” in which it would be necessary to “get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” This included “a de-Ba’athification program” with the following directives: “seize the administrative state for our own purposes … fire every civil servant in the administrative state [and] replace them with our people.”

The post-liberal Catholics, including Deneen, in his book on regime change, insist that the moral and political revolution they seek can be accomplished peacefully. But Vance appears ready to excuse some dangerous political brinkmanship. In a recent interview with The New York Times ’ Ross Douthat, Vance defended the idea of states across the country appointing alternative slates of electors after the 2020 election. He seemed to concede that such actions could have precipitated a “constitutional crisis.” So be it.

W hat might be most strange about this unapologetically radical style of politics is how tenuous its ties are to the Catholic Church as an institution and even Christianity as a historical community of faith. Whereas the Bush-era Catholics regularly cited the New Testament, Thomas Aquinas, and John Courtney Murray, today’s post-liberals rarely invoke the Bible or theologians in their political commentary. They don’t base their policy commitments on the Catechism of the Catholic Church . They aren’t in the habit of referring to the social teachings in papal encyclicals. (As with any group, there are exceptions. Ahmari, for example, has cited Catholic teaching in support of political arguments in some works.)

Rather, their theological convictions tend to remain in the background , serving as fuel for something more central to their public thought: a politics of reactionary negation. Their faith confirms that liberalism is the great enemy that must be fought and defeated so that something more wholesome and spiritually invigorating can take its place. But until liberalism has been expunged from the world, Christianity remains mainly a civilizational symbol or identity marker whose public substance is held in abeyance.

Tom Nichols: The moral collapse of J. D. Vance

That’s quite a shift for the Catholic right in a single generation. Not long ago, the group insisted on a near-perfect identification between the Church and American liberalism as expressed by the Republican Party. Now it insists on the discontinuity between Christianity and America’s ruling ideology, which requires nothing short of political revolution to overcome.

Maybe somewhere in between these extremes, a more responsible and enriching form of political engagement for pious Catholics could be found. Regardless, we’re unlikely to see anything resembling such a theological deescalation from J. D. Vance and his post-liberal Catholic allies.

This article originally misidentified The Lamp as an online journal. The article has also been updated to note Sohrab Ahmari’s use of Catholic teaching in his political writing.

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Joe Biden reveals reason why he pulled out of race for the White House

The 81-year-old abandoned his campaign in July after a disastrous debate performance and a series of gaffes led to heavy speculation about his fitness to serve.

Sunday 11 August 2024 23:10, UK

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US President Joe Biden has revealed he dropped out of the race for the White House because Democrats felt his candidacy was "going to hurt" their chances of being re-elected.

The 81-year-old abandoned his campaign in July after months of speculation about his age and his fitness to serve another four years.

Concerns increased among Democrats after a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in June and a series of high-profile gaffes .

Senior Democrats, including former US President Barack Obama, expressed their concerns about him running, while former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Mr Biden 's long-time friend and ally, urged him to step aside.

Asked on the US news show CBS Sunday Morning why he chose to abandon his campaign, Mr Biden said: "Look, the polls we had showed that it was a neck and neck race which would have been down to the wire. But what happened was, a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was gonna hurt them in the races.

"And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic [journalists] would be interviewing me about - 'Why did Nancy Pelosi say [this]? Why did someone [say this]?'

"And and I thought it would be a real distraction."

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Mr Biden added he thought of himself as a "transition president" when he ran in 2020, and added: "I can't even say how old I am. It's hard for me to get out of my mouth."

The US president also said the "critical issue" for him is "maintaining this democracy".

He continued: "Although It's a great honour being president, I think I have an obligation to the country to do the most important thing you can do and that is - we must, we must, we must defeat Trump."

In the interview with CBS' chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa, Mr Biden also said he was "not confident at all" that there would be a peaceful transfer of power if Mr Trump loses the election.

It comes after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021 as they sought to keep him in power two months after his election defeat to Mr Biden.

Read more: New vulnerability on display at Trump news conference Why Harris picked Tim Walz over 'ambitious' Josh Shapiro Who is JD Vance? The 'never Trumper' who is now his VP pick

The US president quickly threw his support behind vice president Kamala Harris when he withdrew from this year's race and urged Democrats to donate to her campaign.

Ms Harris has chosen Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential candidate, with the pair making their first public appearance together at a rally in Philadelphia this week.

Meanwhile, the campaign for Republican candidate Mr Trump has claimed it was hacked by Iran in June.

News website Politico said it had received emails in July from an anonymous source offering authentic documents from inside Mr Trump's operation, including a report about running mate JD Vance's "potential vulnerabilities".

"These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process," Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said.

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