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The Origins of Scientific Racism
Author(s): John P. Jackson, Jr. and Nadine M. Weidman
Source: The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 50
(Winter, 2005/2006), pp. 66-79
Published by: JBHE Foundation, Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25073379
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The Origins of Scientific Racism
John P. Jackson Jr. and Nadine M. Weidman
Editor's Note: After the publication of Darwin's Origin of the
Species, scientists promptly developed theories of genetic racial
inferiority.
Scientific racism, which was widely accepted, led to the field of
eugenics which ultimately resulted in the sterilization of
thousands of
black Americans and culminated in the murder of 6 million
European Jews.
DESPITE CHARLES DARWEN's idea that there
were no fixed divisions between species, let alone
races, polygenist notions of race, which assumed
that the divisions between races were ancient and fixed,
| thrived in the new evolutionary thought. Moreover; the idea
articulated by Herbert Spencer, that evolution was a struggle
between races rather than between individuals, became a

dominant fixture of twentieth-century racial thought. Finally,
the notion that there were several European races, such as
those sketched by William Z. Ripley, would begin to ^^|H
loom large in the twentieth century. Jf
Evolutionary thought grew into a significant ̂ HL^j?B
ideology that can be called "scientific racism" ^^^H
at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of ^^^^^^^H
the twentieth century. Scientific racism was ^^^^^^^H
the result of two Unes of scientific thought ̂ ^^^K||9H
merging. First, new ideas about heredity pro- ̂ ^^Hs|^9
vided an explanation of the way traits could ^^^|^h|H
be held stable for generation after generation. ̂ ^^^^^^|
Second, ideas flowered about the supremacy of ^^^^^^H
the north European races
? what was called
^^^^^H
Aryanism or Teutonicism in the nineteenth century ^^^^H
and Nordicism in the twentieth. These two Unes of ^^^
thought were conceptually distinct. That is, one
ares
could firmly beUeve in the notion that heredity was fixed and
immune from environmental influences while rejecting the
idea that the Nordics were the supreme race. Alternatively,
one could beUeve in Nordicism and reject the findings of
modern science regarding heredity. However, among some

thinkers these two ideas joined in the eugenics movement
and changed how the Western world thought about race.
The Problem of Heredity
After the pubUcation of On the Origin of Species, Charles
Darwin needed to answer a strong objection to his work:
how were the characteristics that allowed organisms to sur
vive transmitted from generation to generation? Natural
selection turned on the idea that tiny advantages could accu
mulate in an organism's Une of descent, but Darwin had no
mechanism that could explain this process. Indeed, most
ideas about heredity argued that it would be impossible for
characteristics to be transmitted down the generations.
There were two fundamental problems. The first was
"blending" inheritance. Darwin's theory depended on a ben
eficial trait in a parent generation being transmitted, more or
less intact, to the offspring generation. The problem was that
the dominant theory of inheritance did not allow for the sur
vival of a trait in this fashion; rather, in succeeding genera

(tions a favorable trait would eventually be obliterat
L ed by other traits over time. So, if tallness of a
^L plant
was a beneficial trait, and two tall plants
^^k
crossed to produce offspring, the offspring
^^A
would not be as tall as the taller of its two
^^B parents
but would be midway in height
^^^B
between the two. In artificial selection, the
^^^1
breeder could control crosses to ensure that
^^B
a specific trait was selected for. However,
^^V
Darwin's natural selection did not allow for
^^?
a guiding hand in this manner. Hence, it was
^m
not clear exactly how an advantageous trait
^ could be passed down without being swamped by
random crosses with inferior types.

Darwin j^ a famo^ review of Darwin's On the Origin of
Species, Fleeming Jenkin put the case for blending inheri
tance in explicitly racial terms. Jenkin argued that a white
man who was shipwrecked on an island inhabited by
Negroes would naturally rise to become their king.
However, his natural superiority over the savages would not
last through generations as the superior white qualities
would be swamped by the inferior Negro stock. "Can any
one believe" asked Jenkin, "that the whole island will grad
ually acquire a white, or even a yellow population, or that
the islanders would acquire the energy, courage, ingenuity,
John P. Jackson Jr. is an assistant professor in the department of
commu
nications at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Nadine M.
Weidman is a
lecturer in history of science at the Harvard University
Extension School.
This essay is excerpted from their book, Race, Racism and
Science: Social
Impact and Interaction, published by Rutgers University Press.
Reprinted

by permission.
66 WINTER 2005/2006
2015 08:47:15 UTC
THE ORIGINS OF SCIENTIFIC RACISM
I patience, self-control, endurance, in virtue of which quaUties
our hero killed so many of their ancestors, and begot so
many children; those quaUties, in fact, which the struggle for
existence would select, if it could select anything?"
To deal with the problem of blending inheritance, natural
selection needed a mechanism that would allow for benefi
cial traits to be passed to succeeding generations intact and
there was no clear idea what that mechanism could be.
The second problem natural selection faced was the inher
itance of acquired characteristics. In the late twentieth centu
ry and continuing now into the twenty-first,
the accepted idea is that heredity is largely
isolated from environmental influences. In
the nineteenth century, most ideas about

heredity did not distinguish so sharply
between heredity and environment. Indeed,
such a distinction made little sense given
widespread ideas about how an organism's
characteristics were formed by the environ
ment and passed along to subsequent gen
erations. Most learned people of the nine
| teenth century believed in the doctrine of
"inheritance of acquired characteristics."
Most often associated with the French evo
lutionist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744
1829), the doctrine taught that environ
mental pressures change the physical nature of an organism
and that these acquired characteristics were inherited by sub
sequent generations.
In this view, an organism acquired traits through interac
tions with the environment and passed those changes to off
spring. Thus, there was no sharp
-
distinction between heredity

! and environment. Even Darwin
I argued for a version of the doc
| trine of the inheritance of
ae- -
quired characteristics when he put forth "pangenesis" as the
mechanism by which characteristics were passed from gen
eration to generation. Darwin argued that there were tiny
particles that cells dissipated through the body and passed
into the offspring. Because each part of the body manufac
tured its own particles, the environment could directly affect
heredity as changes in bodily form that owed to the environ
ment would be transmitted to the offspring. Darwin's theory
j
of pangenesis gained few adherents and quickly disappeared
/
Francis Galton
"Galton believed that Negroes were at least
two grades below Anglo-Saxons in ability
and intelligence.
"

as a mechanism for heredity after Darwin's death; however,
most scientists continued to accept that traits acquired through
environmental influences could be inherited biologicaUy.
Francis Galton
Most British inteUectuals in the 1830s dismissed the Utopian
schemes of Wilham Farr and others who argued for controUed
breeding, but they were taken up by Darwin's cousin, Francis
Galton (1822-1911). Galton coined the phrase "nature versus
nurture" and he came down strongly on the side of nature.
Galton's early Ufe and upbringing was
much like his cousin's. He was born into a
wealthy family and expected to become a
physician. Also like Darwin, he was miser
able at medical school. He was spared from
completing his medical education by his
father's death in 1844. Upon inheriting the
family fortune, Galton was free to pursue
his interest in natural history.
The kind of science Galton produced
exemplified a widespread understanding in

Great Britain about what counted as good
science. Galton claimed to be a strict adher
ent to induction, the form of reasoning that
moves from specific instances to a general
rule. Following the philosophy of science
laid down by Francis Bacon (1561-1626), most nineteenth
century British scientists argued that a good scientist proceed
ed by induction, gathering as many facts as possible without
any theory or general principle that might prejudice a neutral
and objective view of these facts. Darwin, for example, made
much of his inductivist principles
in On the Origin of Species
although historians have shown
that Darwin clearly had his theo
ry of natural selection in mind
and he set out to find examples to help him prove it.
Galton, however, seemed to be an avid inductivist who was
convinced that the road to science was collecting and tabu
lating as many examples as possible. For Galton, the induc
tivist method helped him sidestep the central problem of the

mechanism of heredity. Galton argued that we did not need
to know the mechanism of heredity to see its effects. We
could observe and enumerate how traits passed from gener
ation to generation while remaining agnostic on the actual
WINTER 2005/2006 67
2015 08:47:15 UTC
THE JOURNAL OF BLACKS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
mechanics of how this occurred. In other words, as long as
we could see the effects of heredity, we could control its
deleterious social impacts.
The most gifted prot?g? of Galton, and a key figure in pro
moting Galtonian views of heredity and science, was Karl
Pearson (1857-1936), who set out his views about science in
an influential work, The Grammar of Science (1882). For
Pearson, a good scientist avoided all speculation about unob
servable entities and focused only on directly sensed evi

dence. Pearson argued that there was no point in trying to
uncover the "real" causes of anything in science; they were,
in principle, unknowable.
However, the scientist could
apply mathematics, in partic
ular statistics, to scientific
phenomena without actually
committing to the existence
of an underlying causal
agent. In other words, if sta
tistics showed that heredity
worked in a particular man
ner, then the scientist's work
was done.
The idea that the scientists should focus only on biological
traits that could be directly measured and tabulated became
known as biometrics. Pearson founded the journal
Biometrika in 1901, which became the main outlet for sta
tistical studies of the physical traits of organisms. This view
of the sufficiency of statistical constructs to explain scientif

ic phenomena would continue on into the twentieth century,
particularly in psychometrics and IQ testing. Galton and
Pearson are correctly seen as the founders of this approach
and both contributed key ideas to the science of statistics.
One of Galton's most famous works makes his approach
clear and underscores the social motivations of his work. In
Hereditary Genius, pubUshed in 1869, Galton undertook a
statistical analysis of "men of genius" in the United
Kingdom. His book attempted to rank the geniuses in the
country in order to determine if mental ability was inherited
and concluded that it was. For Galton, society should take
steps to ensure the emergence of more geniuses and fewer of
lower inteUectual abiUty. Galton beUeved that improving the
race meant that the government should encourage breeding
among the best people and take steps to keep the superior
stocks from mixing with inferiors. The death of classical
In the nineteenth century cranial measures were used to
establish that Negroes
were at least two grades below Anglo-Saxons in ability and
intelligence.

Greek civilization, for example, owed to the lax morality
that discouraged marriage and to women of high ability
refusing to become mothers. Additionally, "in a small sea
bordered country, where emigration and immigration are
constantly going on, and where the manners are as dissolute
as were those of the Greeks ... the purity of a race would
necessarily fail."
Galton did not shy away from racial interpretations of his
data. He believed that Negroes were at least two grades below
Anglo-Saxons in ability and intelligence. "Every book allud
ing to Negro servants in America is full of instances" of the
half-witted nature of the race,
he wrote. "I was myself
much impressed by this fact
during my travels in Africa."
Like Spencer, Galton be
lieved that the inferior races
were losing the evolutionary
battle for existence in the

face of their superior Eur
opean conquerors. Galton
also argued for a social pro
gram that would prevent the
same fate for England, and he was very concerned about the
low level of the common EngUsh population. "It seems to
me," he concluded, "that the average standard of abiUty of the
present time should be raised" because "the needs of central
ization, communication, and culture caU for more brains and
mental stamina than the average of our race possess."
Heredity Genius drew mixed reviews from the English
press in the 1870s. Many scientists appreciated Galton's
sophisticated statistical technique but many religious
reviewers objected to his unapologetic naturaUsm, which
seemed to leave no room for God's grace or people's control
over their own salvation. Many reviewers criticized Galton's
assumption that heredity and not environmental factors was
the cause of genius, an idea that cut against most of the com

mon thinking of the time. Galton argued that the numbers
showed that the hereditary material was somehow immune |
from environmental influences, an idea that beUed widely
held ideas about the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
But evidence for Galton's view would soon be forthcoming
from German cytologists
? scientists who study cells.
However, Galton and Pearson would not necessarily appre
ciate the new evidence.
68 WINTER 2005/2006
2015 08:47:15 UTC
Hard Heredity
The move from "soft" heredity, which drew no sharp dis
tinctions between heredity and environment, and "hard"
heredity that did, had two scientific components. First, by the

1880s, advances in the microscope led cytologists, particu
larly German ones, to many new scientific discoveries: the
nucleus of cells, for example, and the process of mitosis,
wherein cells divide. In the 1880s several German cytolo
gists, including August Weismann, Moritz Nussbaum, Oscar
Hertwig, and Albeit Kolliker put forth a number of new
ideas that joined these discoveries A
in cytology to inform scientific T*h
understanding of Vererbung or f^
heredity. ^Jk
Although most late-nineteenth-
-
r-^Hl
century Germany cytologists had <^^^^^%fck mIM
similar findings and arguments, W Jj?I W^^?|B
the most famous contribution was
^^Jg^/ ^?|H
that of August Weismann, who <SBf 1
argued that the body actually con- BTT m
tained two kinds of cells. Most of ?lBP 11
the body was made up of somatic | /1
cells. Germ cells, by contrast,
were found only in the gonads and produced the sperm and

egg. Germ cells were the units of heredity and, unlike somat
ic cells, were immune to environmental influences. This sep
aration of germ cells from somatic cells required a drastic
reorientation of the common attitudes toward the body and
reproduction. In Weismann's view, the body and all of its
somatic cells were merely the conveyors of germ cells. The
body did not really produce germ cells, it just transmitted
them, unaltered, from generation to generation. This
Weismann called the continuity of the germ plasm.
Weismann believed that his theory meant the death of the
theory of acquired characteristics. In a rather grisly experi
ment, he cut the tails off mice, generation after generation.
Yet each time a new generation of mice was born from muti
lated parents, they were born with tails. Weismann pointed
to this as proof that germ plasm was immune from environ
mental influences and acquired characteristics could not be
transmitted from generation to generation.
The second major contribution to the new notion of hered
ity came from the work of the Austrian monk Gregor
Mendel (1822-1884). In the 1860s Mendel published a paper
that argued that characteristics of pea plants were preserved

as they passed down through generations. When he crossed
tall pea plants with short pea plants, the resulting offspring
were not medium in height but were almost uniformly tall.
Mendel could calculate the ratio of tall with short pea plants
and found that inheritance was always in a 3:1 ratio. Mendel
argued that this could be explained by supposing that the
units of inheritance, what he caUed "factors," existed in pairs
in the plants. Crossing these factors brought mathematicaUy
precise and very predictable patterns of inheritance. Mendel
pubUshed his work but it was ignored in the 1860s and for
three decades afterward. But on
the eve of the twentieth century,
^^T
when many scientists were look
?rf^g%? ing
for a new theory of heredity,
uirfl /mm ^k ^y
f?un<? Mendel's explanation
yjj|l X?f flfel wery promising-
Mendel's ideas
BMii^^r ^^Bl
('ea*t a sefious ?i?w to me meory

IjjF JBL
?f "blending" inheritance just as
ipR ftlWI?PI
Weismann's work had to the theo
^ft 1^1
TBHHT ry of acquired characteristics.
^B S |J% ^^nl
There was no firm consensus
^B y | I
over these issues at the dawn of the
;^^ twentieth century. The biometri
cians, Galton's followers, did not immediately appreciate
MendeUsm because biometrics focused on continuous rather
than discontinuous variations. Pearson, in particular, object
ed to MendeUsm because of its focus on discontinuous vari
ations. It also violated his views on the place of unobserv
able entities in science with its talk of unobservable "factors"
that caused these variations. Additionally, Lamarckians, par
ticularly in France, resisted Weismann's theories of the con
tinuity of germ plasm.
Nonetheless, the new scientific ideas had important imp?
cations for the development of racial ideologies. The notion

that heredity was everything and environmental factors
could not change the essence of a person's talents and abi?
ties certainly resonated with racist notions that there was
some inherited racial essence that could not be erased by
education or civi?zation. To see how racial themes blended
with the new ideas about heredity, we first need to look at the
developing ideas about race among social thinkers.
The Rise of Nordicism
Wil?am Z. Ripley's tripartite division of Europeans into
Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean races in 1899 was wide
WINTER 2005/2006 69
2015 08:47:15 UTC
THE JOURNAL OF BLACKS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
ly accepted even though no one could find a pure example of
any of these races. A significant group of writers believed the
most superior of the three was the Teutonic race, which was

also called the Aryan race in the nineteenth century and came
to be called the Nordic race in the twentieth.
The Nordicists added several important ideas to racial ide
ology. First was the notion that civilization itself was the
product of race, and many Nordicists devoted their work to
discovering the Nordic nature of all great civilizations of the
past. The belief in Nordic superiority was not new at the end
of the nineteenth century. Many
writers in the United States
before the Civil War trumpeted
the superiority of the Teutons.
The ancient Roman historian,
Tacitus (ca. 55-120), expressed
admiration for the Teutonic
tribes who lived north of what
Tacitus considered a decadent
Rome. Many writers in the United States in the early nine
teenth century took Tacitus' writings as proof that democra
cy as a form of government was actually an ancient practice
that began in the woods of ancient Germany. These writers

used this theory of the 'Teutonic origin" of democracy as
proof against conservative critics who argued that democra
cy was an inherently unstable form of government. Not so,
they argued: democracy originated in the German tribes with
their primitive parliaments and protorepresentative govern
ment and was therefore an ancient form of governance rather
than an untested theory. The Teutonic tribes of Angles and
Saxons brought this heritage to England; it then crossed the
Atlantic to the United States. Hence, democracy was in
some sense part of the racial heritage of the Germanic peo
ple who settled in the United States.
"The best remedy for whatever is amiss in America
would be if every Irishman killed a Negro and be
hanged for it.
"
The second contribution of the Nordicists to racial thought
was the claim that race, not nation or political alliance, was
the basis of social order. In the late nineteenth century, the
defense of democracy became deemphasized in favor of

more general arguments that the very capacity for civiliza
tion was racial in nature. In the 1880s, during a lecture tour
of the United States, writer Edward A. Freeman argued that
there were three homes of the Teutonic race: the United
States, England, and Germany. These nations, Freeman
argued, should put their differences behind them, for they
could surely rule the world. The division between superior
Anglo-Saxons and inferior Celts as well as other lower races
was succinctly stated by Freeman: "The best remedy for
whatever is amiss in America would be if every Irishman
killed a Negro and be hanged for it."
Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) gave one
of the most widely read and elab
Gobineau was from an aristocrat
and honor as had the ancient
Teutons. In the modern age, the
masses had risen and destroyed the natural order. Gobineau
pointed to the political turmoil of the French Revolution
wherein the ruling classes had been overrun by the masses.

Both the central ideas of Nordicism ? that race was the
basis of all civilization and that race must be the basis of
political order
? came together in Gobineau's most extend
ed treatment of race, the Essay on the Inequality of the
Races, published in four volumes between 1853 and 1855.
Gobineau was not concerned with biology as much as histo
ry and linguistics. He affirmed the widely accepted division
of the races into white, black, and yellow, and introduced the
idea that civilization itself was based on race. The white
race, which Gobineau called the "Aryan" race, was the only
one capable of creative thinking and civilization building.
The downfall of such great civilizations as Egypt and Greece
owed to the commingling of Aryan blood with that of the
lesser races.
The Supremacy of Nordics
Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) followed and
extended Gobineau's theories. Although he was English by
birth, Chamberlain was a fervent admirer of Germany, mov

ing to Bayreuth, Germany, at the end of the nineteenth cen
tury. In 1899 Chamberlain published Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century, which laid out his racial ideas in full.
Like Gobineau, Chamberlain believed that race was the key
70 WINTER 2005/2006
2015 08:47:15 UTC
to all of history and the only truly creative race was the
Aryan. Much of the Foundations is devoted to showing that
all great historical figures were, on close examination,
Aryan. For example, Marco Polo, Copernicus, GaUleo, and
especially Jesus Christ were Aryans in Chamberlain's
account.
"Man can breed from the best, or he can eliminate the
worst by segregation or sterilization.
"

Both Gobineau and Chamberlain were, in some significant
sense, "racial mystics." Their discussion of the great
Teutonic race was shot through with talk of German blood
that mystically bound all Teutons together with a racial soul.
Although Chamberlain accepted all the anthropological evi
dence for the existence of the Teutonic/Aryan/Nordic race,
for him the reahty of race turned on a spiritual sharing of the
"race-soul." Hence, the importance of Chamberlain placed
on the supposed Aryan identity of Christ can be understood
as an embrace of a mystical racism that had a spiritual, not
materiaUstic, core.
The Founding of Anthroposociology
A French writer, Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936), firmly
and forcefully rejected racial
mysticism. Lapouge was the
founder of a science he dubbed
"anthroposociology." He was a
tireless correspondent and organ
izer within the scientific commu
nity (he provided William Z.

Ripley with photographs for
Ripley's Races of Europe, for
example). Lapouge was one of the first to successfully
develop a full-blown version of scientific racism. Lapouge
grounded his theories of race firmly in Darwin rather than in
some mystical "racial soul" and this would have profound
influence on twentieth-century racial theories.
Lapouge's theories were developed most fully in two
works: Social Selection (1896) and The Aryan and His
Social Role ( 1899). For Lapouge, they key racial marker was
the cepha?c index, which anthropologists had used to divide
the European population into different races based on the
shape of their heads. Lapouge tied the index not just to head
shape but also to a range of socially desirable characteristics.
He was the champion of the dolichocephalic Aryans, long
headed, blond, blue-eyed, creative, strong, and natural lead
ers. By contrast, brachycephalic types were round-headed,
dark-skinned, and timid. "Brachies," as Lapouge called

them, were natural followers who did not have the imagina
tion necessary to create and lead. Lapouge's "Dolichos"
dominated northern Europe, England, and Germany.
Additionally, Lapouge followed Gobineau in arguing that
the French Revolution had destroyed the ancient aristocra
cies, which, according to Lapouge, had been dominated by
Dolichos.
An outspoken atheist, Lapouge had no patience for Cham
berlain and Gobineau's emphasis on a "race soul." Anthro
posociology was completely materialist and rejected any
and all appeals to any sort of quasi-religious mysticism. For
Lapouge, the science spoke for itself and had no need for
any other concepts
?
certainly not for any religious or
moral ideas. He called for the elimination of all moral senti
ment that would stand in the way of a massive breeding pro
gram that would eliminate racial inferiors. In his writings,
Lapouge demanded that sentimentality, especially …
Variable descriptionDescription of variables in the Rent-a-Car

data setPownEAverage daily rate Rent-A-Car charged for its
economy cars in a given weekPownLAverage daily rate Rent-A-
Car charged for its luxury vehicles in a given
weekPcompAverage daily rate of the only competitor across all
vehicle categoriesSessionBinary variable with 1 indicating
weeks when college is in sessionData are in the next
worksheetWeatherNumber of days in a week with severe
weatherUnemploymentNumber of unemployed workers in the
county as of Tuesday each weekFlghtWkNumber of flights (in-
and outbound) serving the local airport that weekCancWkTotal
number of flights cancelled that weekHolidayBinary variable
with 1 indicating weeks of national holidays (long
weekends)WrecksNumber of major accidents that
weekDiscountNumber of customers in a given week using the 15
percent discount off the base rate offered through our affiliate
partner, a credit card companyUpgradeNumber of customers
who received a free upgrade to a luxury vehicle due to the
unavailability of economy vehiclesTotalAdAmount spent on
local advertising each weekAdBlbdWeekly spending on
billboard adsAdPaperWeekly spending on ads in local
newspapers, including the online versionAdTVWeekly spending
on ads placed with local TVQENumber of rental contracts
initiated each week in the economy categoryQ_lengthNumber of
paid days of rentals, grouped by the agreement starting
dateAge<25Number of rental agreements in a given week for
which the person listed as the primary driver on the rental
agreement was less than 25 years oldAge25_50Number of rental
agreements for which the person listed as the primary driver on
the rental agreement was between 25 and 50 years of
ageAge51+Number of rental agreements in a given week for
which the person listed as the primary driver on the rental
agreement was 51 years of age or olderFleetAgeAverage age of
our fleet measured in weeksBedTaxAmounts collected from the
1% local hospitality tax in the county - this information is
reported only on a monthly basis
VariablesWeekPownEPownLPcompSessionWeatherUnemplFlght

WkCancWkHolidayWrecksDiscountUpgradesTotalAdAdBlbdAd
PaperAdTVQEQ_lengthAge <25Age 25-50Age
51+FleetAgeBed'Tax129.9937.9937.75047014190221284304300
0873349641450.3104025.67229.9941.9941.50173941201670430
430007632713461751.3324.9926.9935.25028144130126543043
0008231520511152.3428.9937.9935.5118804701682430430007
727524421153.3524.9936.9924.51088147001010043043000763
162051554.370251.75629.9943.9928.7513799476017244304300
0783011559455.3728.9944.9934.5118574700203181581500813
5514551256.3821.9925.993310871470041881581500913322061
1057.3926.7648.9929.5108704700121081581500772602040175
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15551945.25226.9941.9935.25001155530167012371237008235
314511746.2
"Race" and the Construction of Human Identity
Author(s): Audrey Smedley
Source: American Anthropologist, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Sep., 1998),
pp. 690-702
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological
Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/682047
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AUDREY SMEDLEY
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA 23284-2040
"Race" and the Construction of Human Identity
Race as a mechanism of social stratification and as a forrn of

human identity is a recent concept in human history. Histori-
cal records show that neither the idea nor ideologies associated
with race existed before the seventeenth century. In the
United States, race became the main form of human identity,
and it has had a tragic effect on low-status "racial" minorities
and on those people who perceive themselves as of "mixed
race." We need to research and understand the consequences
of race as the premier source of human identity. This paper
briefly explores how race became a part of our culture and con-
sciousness and argues that we must disconnect cultural features
of identity from biological traits and study how "race"
eroded and superseded older forms of human identity. It
suggests that "race" ideology is already beginning to
disintegrate
as a result of twentieth-century changes. [race, identity,
history, ethnicity, culture]
Scholars in a variety of disciplines are increasingly
holding that "race" is a cultural invention, that it
bears no intrinsic relationship to actual human
physical variations, but reflects social meanings imposed
upon these variations. If such a perspective is to be widely
accepted, we are challenged to explore its ramifications
and consequences. "Race" emerged as the dominant form
of identity in those societies where it functions to stratify

the social system. Scholars in psychology, anthropology,
and other social fields need to examine in much greater
depth the reality of"race" as identity in our society. We
need to explore not only the consequences but the parame-
ters and social correlates of"racial" identity.
Within the last several decades we also have seen nu-
merous studies on "ethnicity" and "ethnic" differences.
Most often we see titles of publications that cover both
"race" and"ethnicity." Some studies treat the two as if
they are similar phenomena, perhaps differing only in de-
gree. Others, such as Stephen Steinberg's The Ethnic
Myth, and Ronald Takaki's various publications (1987,
1993) make a clear distinction between the two. My pur-
pose in this paper is to do several things. One is to drama-
tize the significance of"race" as distinct from "ethnicity"
by referring to historical data on human interactions in the
past. The second is to raise to greater clarity the reality of
race as a form of human identity by delving into some con-
temporary issues seldom confronted either by the public,

the media, or the scholars who write about them.
P>blems and Issues of Identity: Ethnicily and Race
Reading the histories of societies in the ancient world
can be very enlightening for those of us who do compara-
tive studies in history and anthropology. These histories
reveal an extraordinary amount of interaction among peo-
ples of different ethnic groups who occupied city-states,
villages, and towns. Throughout the known Old World,
trade was extensive, much travel was undertaken despite
enormous hardships, battles were fought among neigh-
boring and distant groups, alliances were established, and
treaties of peace were made. During the expansion of im-
perial states, armies marched on foot or rode on camels,
asses, horses, or elephants over tremendous distances.
The image of Alexander of Macedon marching his arrny to
the plains of Afghanistan, or sailing nearly halfway
around the world to India, in the absence of steam engines
and air power, seems an astonishing accomplishment. In

times of relative peace, some individuals traveled widely
and for many different reasons and they were received in
alien lands with hospitality. They traded with one another,
intelmarried, and spread cultural knowledge from region
to region.
All of this attests to the fact that interethnic interaction
has a long history. We humans are not new to the challenge
of trying to get along with "alien" others. What strategies
were used in ancient times to accommodate or transcend
differences? How did ancestral societies perceive and
deal with humans who differed from themselves, both cul-
turally andlor physically? In contemporary times many
areas of the world are reeling with "ethnic" conflicts, and
"ethnicity" seems to be a relatively new notion about hu-
man identities encumbered with elements of exclusivity,
opposition, competition, and antagonism. Some groups
define themselves in terms that appear rigid and unyield-
ing and in opposition always to "the others." In many
American Anthropologist 100(3):690-702. Copyright (C) 1999,

American Anthropological Association
2017 20:25:41 UTC
SMEDLEY / RACE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF HUMAN
IDENTITY 691
cases we have seen populations assert an almost perma-
nent attachment to an ethnic or religious identity, as if such
features of our social selves are determined by our DNA
and cannot be transformed or diminished by any social
mechanisms. We have seen the hardened nature of ethnic
boundaries in places like the former Yugoslavia and
Uganda traIlsform neighbors and even kinspeople into
hated enemies, subjected to unimaginable brutalities. At
the same time more societies than ever before have be-
come seemingly much more multiethnic since World War
II as various peoples from largely Third World countries
began searching for job and educational opportunities in
the nations of Western Europe and the United States. In

some cases, populations that were once deemed generally
ethnically homogeneous are now unambiguously and ir-
revocably heterogeneous.
The media portrays a popular conception of these phe-
nomena as if they were something new in the human expe-
rience, and many scholars in the social sciences treat mlll-
tiethnicity as not only a modern phenomenon or a novel
condition, but one that inevitably creates problems and
potential, if not real, hostilities. Two broad categories of
problems can be identified: one having to do with how
people of different groups get along with one another; the
other is the problem of how individuals and groups per-
ceive who they are-the problem of"identity." The sets of
problems are clearly interrelated but not identical.
In the f?st categoly, there seems to be an underlying
premise or assumption that people of different ethnic
groups are in competition with one another so that conflict
and hostility are inevitable. Another related and often un-

stated assumption is that different ethnic groups can have
no common interests which makes any form of unity or
even amity impossible.
It is the second problematic that this paper addresses,
the one involving identity, an arena of problems that may
be more peculiar to Americans, in terms of their individual
conceptions of who they are, than to peoples of other na-
tions. There seems to be a psychologically based assump-
tion in our society that people must know who they are,
that a solid and positive sense of one's individual selfness
(or "identity") in a wider world of other "selves" is a nec-
essary condition for good psychological health. We hu-
mans are apparently the only animal that anguishes over
the question, "Who am I?" Perhaps the question arises be-
cause in industrial societies we lack a sense of bonding to a
kinship group, a village, or other more limited territorial
entity, and because our heavy focus on individualism dis-
connects us from others and fosters an abiding sense of

isolation and insecurity. Whatever the cause, some les-
sons from history might provide a broader context in
which to comprehend the dilemmas of human identity that
we experience in the modern world.
Historical Constructions of Identity
Historical records, including the Old and New Testa-
ments of the Bible, evince scenarios of interethnic interac-
tion that suggest some very different principles in opera-
tion throughout much of human history.' Ethnic groups
have always existed in the sense that clusters of people liv-
ing in demarcated areas develop lifestyles and language
features that distinguish them from others and they per-
ceive themselves as being separate societies with distinct
social histories. Although some conflicts among different
groups have been characteristic from the earliest recorded
histories, hostilities were usually neither constant nor the
basis on which long-term relationships were established.
One factor separates many in the contemporary world,
at least some of our understandings of it, from earlier con-

ceptions of human identity. That is that "ethnic" identity
was not perceived as ineluctably set in stone. Individuals
and groups of individuals often moved to new areas or
changed their identities by acquiring membership in a dif-
ferent group. People of the ancient world seemed to have
understood that cultural characteristics were external and
acquired forms of behavior, and that "barbarians' could
learn to speak the language of the Romans or the Greeks
and become participants in those cultures, and even citi-
zens of these states. Languages were indeed avenues to
new social identities, and ethnic identity itself was fluid
and malleable.
Until the rise of market capitalism, wage labor, the Prot-
estant Ethic, private property, and possessive individual-
ism, kinship connections also operated as major indices
that gave all peoples a sense of who they were. Even in the
technologically and politically most advanced societies of
the ancient world such as in Rome, kinship was the impor-
tant diacritic of connectedness to the social system. In all

of the mostly patrilineal societies of the Middle East, Af-
rica, and the Mediterranean, the norrnal person was identi-
fied by who his or her father was. The long list of names of
who begat whom in the Old Testament (Book of Genesis)
attests to the importance, especially at the tribal and chief-
dom levels, of genealogical identity.
Another important diagnostic of identity was occupa-
tion. Whether one was a farmer, carpenter, fisherman, tan-
ner, brass worker, herdsman, philosopher, government of-
ficial, senator, poet, healer, warrior, or harlot, was
significantly salient in the eyes of the ancient world to re-
quire the label. Occupations determined to some extent
how people were viewed and treated, as well as under-
scored their contribution to the society.
Throughout much of the period of the early imperial
states, numerous groups were in contact with one another,
and individuals often traveled from one region to another
as traders, warriors, craftsmen, travelers, geographers,
teachers, and so forth. From one end of the Mediterranean

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692 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 100, NO. 3 *
SEPTEMBER 1998
to another, in spite of the lack of modern forms of transpor-
tation, many men and women were interacting in an inter-
ethnic melange that included a wide range of cultures and
peoples. From time to time, a conquest state would expand
outward and incorporate some or most of this great vari-
ety. Populations did not necessarily lose any form of eth-
nic identity, but change was clearly understood as virtu-
ally inevitable as each society learned something new
from the cultures of others. Judging from the Greek histo-
rians such as Herodotus, Strabo, and Thucydides, the
Greeks were conscious of their borrowings from other
cultures (see Godolphin 1942).
When Alexander conquered peoples and lands all the
way to the Indus Valley in India, interacting with "civi-
lized" populations, nomadic pastoralists, settled villagers,
and a variety of hunting and fishing peoples, he exhorted
his warriors to intermarry with the peoples they conquered

in order to learn their languages and cultures. Garrisons of
military men were stationed all over the Roman world,
from Brittany to the Danube and the Black Sea, from Gi-
braltar to the Tigris/Euphrates valley and the Indian
Ocean, and soldiers often took local women as wives.
When the arrnies of the Moroccan king brought down the
Songhai empire in 1591, his soldiers stayed on in the
Western Sudan frontier area and intermarried with the lo-
cal people. Most of northern Africa, including Egypt of
the Delta, has been periodically invaded and ruled by out-
siders for the last three thousancl years or so. Hittites and
Hyksos from the mountainous areas of Turkey, Assyrians,
Persians, Syrians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Babylonians, Ro-
mans, and various more recent Turkish and Arabian
groups have settled in the towns of the coasts and inter-
acted with the indigenous Berbers and other peoples like
the Libyan groups, the Garamantes, the Carthaginians,
Syngambrians, and many others. Less well known is the
fact that both the Greeks and the Romans used mercenar-
ies from inner Africa (Nubians, Ethiopians, Kushites,
among others) in conflicts such as the Persian and
Peloponnesian wars (Herodotus, in Godolphin 1942).2
Peoples of different cultures coexisted for the most part
without strife, with alien segments often functioning in
distinct roles in the larger cities. One-third of the popula-
tion of Athens were foreigners as early as the Classical pe-
riod, five hundred years before the Christian era (Board-
man et al. 1986:222). And the city of Alexandria was (and

still is) a heterogeneous, sophisticated, and complex com-
munity under the Greeks, Romans, Christians, and Arabs.
Carthage was founded in North Africa by Phoenicians, but
peoples from all over the Mediterranean world and other
parts of Africa made their residence, or served as slaves, in
this great trading city. Moreover, men and women of dif-
ferent ethnic groups intermarried frequently, largely be-
cause malTiage was often used as a political or economic
strategy. Men gave their daughters and sisters to other
men, the historians tell us, because they desired political
and/or economic alliances with powerful and wealthy
men, without regard to ethnic origins. Timotheus was the
son of a Jewish mother and a Greek father. Samson mar-
ried a Philistine woman; Moses married an Ethiopian
woman; and many leaders, and lesser men, of the Greeks
and Romans married women not from their own societies.
Different societies and localized segments of larger so-
cieties were known either by their ethnic name for them-
selves or by the region, town, or village of their origins.
That identities of tlliS type were fluid is indicated by the
depictions of individual lives. Paul of Tarsus traveled and
preached extensively throughout much of the known
Mediterranean world during the early Christian era and
encountered individuals of different ethnic backgrounds.
He even identified himself as a Roman on occasion when
it was useful to do so. There are other examples of indi-
viduals in ancient writings who changed their ethnic iden-
tities for personal or private reasons.
Scholars who have studied African societies, especially
African history, have also been aware of the malleability

of ethnic identity on that continent. New ethnic groups
have emerged out of the colonial period, and individuals
have been known to transform themselves according to
their ethnic or religious milieus. One may be a Christian in
one context, and a Muslim in another, with no sense of am-
bivalence or deception. I have encountered this phenome-
non myself. Most Africans spoke several different lan-
guages, and this facilitated the molding of multiple
ethnicities by providing immediate access to cultural
knowledge. In situations of potential or real conflict, alle-
giances could be fly established without denial of the
extrinsic nature of sociaVethnic identities (Connah 1987;
Davidson 1991).
In addition to identities that are predicated on place of
birth, membership in kin groups, or descent in the male or
female line from known ancestors, language spoken, and
lifestyle to which individuals have been conditioned, an-
other feature critical to individual identity in the state sys-
tems was social position. Aristocrats seemed to have been
recognized even beyond the boundaries of their immedi-
ate societies. And certain men were widely famed for their
specialized skills or crafts that set them above others.
Every society had its large body of commoners and usu-
ally a great number of slaves captured in war or traded in
when this enterprise became a common regional feature.
Slaves were usually outsiders, but slavery was not consid-
ered by law and custom a permanent condition as slaves
could be manumitted, redeemed by kinspeople, or could
purchase theirown freedom (Smedley [1993]1999: ch. 6).
While enslavement was considered an unfortunate cir-
cumstance and most slaves did the menial and onerous
tasks of society, the roles of slaves varied widely. There
are numerous examples of slaves rising to political power
in the ancient states of the Mediterranean and in the Mus-
lim world. Often they held positions as generals who led

2017 20:25:41 UTC
SMEDLEY / ' RACE" AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF
HUMAN IDENTITY 693
armies of conquest and were frequently rewarded for their
successes. Whole slave dynasties like the Mamluks in
Egypt reigned in various areas of the Muslim world (Hitti
1953).
With the appearance of the proselytizing universal re-
ligions, Christianity and later Islam, that became competi-
tors with one another for the souls of all human groups, a
new focus of identity was gradually and increasingly
placed on membership in a religious community. During
the Middle Ages of Europe, Christians and Muslims were
competing not only for land and souls, but for political
power and influence. And various sects that developed
within each large religious community complicated mat-
ters by fostering internal dissension and even warfare inter
alia. Whether one was Sunni or Shiite, Protestant or
Catholic, was a critical determinant of one's identity lo-
cally and in the wider world. As with other aspects of eth-
nicity and ethnic differences, individuals often changed
their religious affiliation under circumstances prompted
by self-interest, or self-preservation, as in the case of the
300,000 or more Jews who were forced to convert to Ca-
tholicism in Medieval Spain during the Inquisition (Cas-
tro 1971). Yet Christians, Jews, and Muslims had lived to-
gether in relative amity, and even intermarried, for several
hundred years after the Muslim conquests and before the

rise of the Christian kingdoms to challenge Muslim
power.
What was absent from these different forms of human
identity is what we today would perceive as classifications
into "racial" groups, that is, the organization of all peoples
into a limited number of unequal or ranked categories
theoretically based on differences in their biophysical
traits. There are no "racial" designations in the literature
of the ancients and few references even to such human fea-
tures as skin color. Frank Snowden has demonstrated that
ever since at least the second millennium B.C., the peoples
of the Mediterranean world have interacted with other
groups having a variety of physical traits that differed
from the Italians and Greeks. Artistic depictions of Afri-
cans of clear "negroid" features have been found, and nu-
merous statues and paintings throughout the classical era
show that physical variations in different populations
were recognized and accurately depicted (Snowden
1 983).
Except for indigenous Americans, members of all three
of the large geographic areas that came to be categorized
as "races" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Mon-
goloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid) interacted in the ancient
world. Chinese porcelain vases have been found widely
distributed in the East African coastal trading cities, indi-
cating trade between these peoples at least two thousand
years old. The peoples of the Malagasy Republic represent
a mixture of African and Asian (Indonesian) ancestry dat-
ing back several thousand years. Greek sailors sailed
down the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean and met East Afri-
cans long before the Christian era. The peoples of the
Mediterranean regularly traded with dark-skinned peo-

ples of the upper Nile valley (and all those in between),
northwest Africa, andthe contrasting lighter-skinnedpeo-
ples of Northern Europe. Various states of the Mediterra-
nean called upon and used Ethiopian warriors as merce-
naries in their armies, as we have seen. Some of the more
desired slaves were very fair-skinned Slavs (from whom
the term slave was derived) who were traded down the
Danube by German tribesmen. Northern European slaves
were shipped as far away as Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia,
and the Muslim capital at Baghdad (Davis 1966).
What seems strange to us today is that the biological
variations among human groups were not given signifi-
cant social meaning. Only occasionally do ancient writers
ever even remark on the physical characteristics of a given
person or people. Herodotus, in discussing the habits, cus-
toms, and origins of different groups and noting variations
in skin color, specifically tells us that this hardly matters.
The Colchians are of Egyptian origin, he wrote, because
they have black skins and wooly hair"which amounts to
but little, since several other nations are so too."3 Most
writers explained such differences as due to natural envi-
ronmental factors such as the hot sun causing people to be
dark skinned. No structuring of inequality, whether social,
moral, intellectual, cultural or otherwise, was associated
with people because of their skin color, although all "bar-
barians" varied in some ways from the somatic norm of the
Mediterranean world. But barbarians were not irredeem-
ably so, and, as we have seen, nothing in the values of the
public life denied the transformability of even the most
backward of barbarians.
We in the contemporary Western world have often
found it difficult to understand this phenomenon and as-
sume that differences in skin color must have had some
important meaning. Historians have tried to discover "ra-

cial" meanings in the literature of the ancients, assuming
that these writers had the same attitudes and beliefs about
human differences found in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century North America. The reason for our myopia has to
do with our deeply entrenched conditioning to the racial
worldview (Smedley 1993, 1998). When "race" appeared
in human history, it brought about a subtle but powerful
transformation in the world's perceptions of human dif-
ferences. It imposed social meanings on physical vari-
ations among human groups that served as the basis for the
structuring of the total society. Since that time many peo-
ple in the West have continued to link human identity to
external physical features. We have been socialized to an
ideology about the meaning of these differences based on
a notion of heredity and pelmanence that was unknown in
the ancient world and in the Middle Ages.
2017 20:25:41 UTC
694 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 100, NO. 3 *
SEPTEMBER 1998
counterposed against the vision that the English had of
themselves as a civilized people. Every new experience,
along with a growing technological superiority, widened
the differences and denigrated all other peoples who were
not part of the civilized world. The concept of "civilized"

polities in contrast to savagery and barbarism was begin-
ning to take hold in much of Western Europe, and in this
sense Englishmen were not much different from the rest of
the Western world. But English notions of their own supe-
riority were enhanced by their technological, material,
and politicaI successes, by their earlier successful split
from the Catholic realm, by the early rise of merchant
capitalism, the development of new forms of wealth, no-
tions about individual freedom, property rights, and self-
sufficiency, and by a growing sense of their own unique-
ness even among other Europeans. This was summed up in
the myth of Anglo-Saxonism (Horsman 1981).
"Race" emerged as a social classification that reflected
this greatly expanded sense of human separateness and
differences. Theodore Allen (1997) argues that the "in-
vention" of the white race took place after an early, but un-
successful, colonial revolt of servants and poor freedmen
known as Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. Colonial leaders
subsequently decided it would be useful to establish a di-
vision among the masses of poor to prevent their further
collaboration against the governmental authorities. As
African servants were vulnerable to policies that kept
them in servitude indefinitely, and European servants had
the protection of English law, colonial leaders developed a
policy backed by new laws that separated African servants

and freedmen from those of European background. Over
the next half century, they passed numerous laws that pro-
vided resources and benefits to poor, white freedmen and
other laws that restricted the rights of"Africans," "mulat-
toes,s' and "Indians."
Calling upon the model of the Chain of Being, and using
natural differences in physical features, they created a new
form of social identity. "Race" developed in the minds of
some Europeans as a way to rationalize the conquest and
brutal treatment of Native American populations, and es-
pecially the retention and perpetuation of slavery for im-
ported Africans. As an ideology structuring social, eco-
nomic, and political inequality, "race" contradicted
developing trends in England and in Western European
societies that promoted freedom, democracy, equality,
and human rights. Europeans justified this attitude toward
human differences by focusing on the physical features of
the New World populations, magnifying and exaggerat-
ing their differences, and concluding that the Africans and
Indians and their descendants were lesser forms of human
beings, and that their inferiority was natural and/or God-
given.
The creation of "race" and racial ideology imposed on
the conquered and enslaved peoples an identity as the low-
est status groups in society. Myths about their inferior
Race: The Modern Conception of Human

Differences and Human Identity
In the eighteenth century this new mode of structuring
inequality in human societies evolved in the American
colonies and soon was present throughout the overseas
territories of the colonizing countries of Western Europe.
"Race" was a form of social identification and stratifica-
tion that was seemingly grounded in the physical differ-
ences of populations interacting with one another in the
New World? but whose real meaning rested in social and
political realities. The terrn race had been used to refer to
humans occasionally since the sixteenth century in the
English language but was rarely used to refer to popula-
tions in the slave trade. It was a mere classificatory term
like kind, type, or even breed, or stock, and it had no clear
meaning until the eighteenth century. During this time, the
English began to have wider experiences with varied
populations and gradually developed attitudes and beliefs
that had not appeared before in Western history and which
reflected a new kind of understanding and interpretation
of human differences. Understanding the foundations of
race ideology is critical to our analysis.
English settlers in North America failed to assimilate
the peoples whom they …

How does Gobineau believe that civilizations fall?
What is eugenics and what role does heredity play in eugenics?
John. P Jackson, “The Origins of Scientific Racism”
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 50 (Winter,
2005/2006) pp. 66-79
Jackson argues that scientific racism grew from a merger of two
thoughts: heredity and the idea of passing down stable traits,
and ideas of north European supremacy. These lines joined in
the idea of eugenics.
Darwin had to answer the question of how survival traits were
transmitted from generation to generation. Natural selection was
the process but he had not put forth a mechanism by which
selection took place. His theory was confronted by two
problems. It was not clear how the most advantageous traits got
passed down when two different individuals with differing traits
mixed. There was also the problem of
In a review of Darwin’s Origin of the Species Fleeming Jenkins
imagines a white man shipwrecked on an island inhabited by
Negroes. This white man, he argues, would be unable to pass
down his superiority through the generations, as his whiteness
would be overtaken by blackness. Interestingly, some of the
traits that Fleeming deems superior about the white man are his
ability to conquer, oppress and rape. (see pgs 66-67)
The second problem was inheritance of “acquired”
characteristics. In the nineteenth century environmental
influences and biological influences were not separated. It was
believed possible to acquire traits through one’s environment
and pass down these newly acquired traits. This idea of
inheritance was developed by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-
1829).

While the idea of acquired traits had many adherents, it also had
its enemies. Francis Galton (1822-1911), Darwin’s cousin,
introduced the phrase “nature versus nurture,” as well as the
notion of eugenics. Galton fell on the side of nature and did not
believe that environment could change what nature has created.
In other words, education, etc., would not improve individuals.
He was a champion of induction—the method of reasoning from
the specific or particular example to the more general. The
inductive method begins with facts and based on these facts
arrives at a conclusion that is said to be objective. Using this
method he skirted the problem of how traits are passed down by
arguing that we can observe the effects of heredity and not
worry about the mechanism by which it came down. Biometrics
was born as the science that focused on the study of measurable
biological traits. Based on his study of Genius, Galton
concluded that the government should put forth measures that
insure the breeding among the best and most intelligent people.
While his ideas were admired, many criticized Galton for
excluding God’s grace, individual’s control over their lives and
privileging heredity over environment. There is also a
prejudice built into his inductive method, which he used to
study the traits of the most educated and economically
successful in his community. He only interviewed those who
were already privileged and educated and did not look into how
the poor and uneducated became so by adverse social
conditions.
Support for Galton’s notion of heredity came from Cytologists
who studied cells. Weismann divided cells into two –germ cells,
which were the cells contained in egg and sperm and immune to
the environment. The other cells were simply carriers of the
germ cells and were called somatic cells. The Austrian monk
Mendel (1822-1884) challenged the idea of blending and argued
that he could predict the traits passed down and they were
discontinuous.

Ideas of heredity worked nicely with ideas of race. Comte
Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882) defended whiteness or
the Teutonic race as the only race able to build civilizations and
engage in creative thinking. He believed Teutons were superior
because they were able to dominate and conquer other
civilizations. He thought African civilization was weak because
Africans coexisted peacefully with their neighbors. But
Gobineau believed there was a heavy price to pay by
conquering. By civilizing the conquered, he believed the
superior race would be weakened by race mixing. This is how
civilizations fall- when there is race mixing.
Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936) – Anthroposociology- He
developed the first full version of scientific racism by building
on Darwin. He built on the cephalic index , which classified
people according to head size and added to this classification
other socially desirable characteristics. Arayans he called
dolichocephalic- long headed , blond, blue eyed, creative,
strong, natural leaders. Brachycephalic were dark-skinned,
round-headed, timid and natural followers. He was an advocate
of selective breeding. He did not believe in the Lamarckian
notion of acquired traits and therefore improvement through
environment. The only way to address the racial crisis for
Lapouge is elimination of inferior race. This idea gave birth to
the rise of Eugenics movement that was dominant between
1900-1945. Eugenics was the way people chose to address
social problems in scientific terms. (1870-1939 industrialization
and movement away from small towns)
The rest of the article has a rich historical discussion of
eugenics in Europe, the US and Nazi Germany.
How did people understand themselves as part of a group before
the idea of race?

What does it mean to argue that race is not a biological fact but
a social construction?
How did the idea of race function to oppress enslaved Africans
in the US?
Explain Theodore Allen’s notion that the idea of race originated
as a response to Bacon’s rebellion?
What does Smedley mean when she says we need to study the
effects of a possible “transgenerational retention and
transmission of an ethos of hopelessness” ?
Audrey Smedley, “’Race’ and the Construction of Human
Identity”
American Anthropologist, Vol. 100, No 3, September 1998.
https://archive.org/stream/raceandConstructionOfHumanIdentity
/SmedleyRace_djvu.txt
Audrey Smedley lays out her project in the first paragraph. She
describes how the idea of race did not exist prior to the
seventeenth century and her project of understanding the
consequence of the use of the concept of race to understand
human identity. She aims to show us the basis for disconnecting
race from human identity.
“Race as a mechanism of social stratification and as a form of
human identity is a recent concept in human history. Historical
records show that neither the idea nor ideologies associated
with race existed before the seventeenth century. In the United
States, race became the main form of human identity, and it has
had a tragic effect on low-status "racial" minorities and on
those people who perceive themselvesas of "mixed race." We
need to research and understand the consequencesof race as the
premier source of human identity. This paper briefly explores
how race became a part of our culture and consciousness and
argues that we must disconnect cultural features of identity
from biological traits and study how "race"eroded and
superseded older forms of human identity. It suggests that

"race" ideology is already beginning to disintegrate as a
result of twentieth-century changes, [race, identity, history,
ethnicity, culture]”
She also writes:“Scholars in psychology, anthropology, and
other social fields need toexamine in much greater depth the
reality of "race" as identity in oursociety.We need to explore
not only the consequences but the parameters and social
correlates of "racial" identity.”
Ethnicity vs Race
In the Old World people traveled a lot to other countries despite
the lack of modern machines that make travel much easier
today. To get to other countries took much effort and struggle
on boats, camels and horses. Travel was undergone primarily
for trade and during war and expansion. When in new lands
peaceful travelers traded goods and culture with each other and
intermarried. Interethnic interaction was vast and existed for a
long time before the idea of race came into usage. Still the
question of difference did arise but not along fixed biological
notions. She asks:“What strategies were used in ancient times
to accommodate or transcenddifferences? How did ancestral
societies perceive and deal with humans who differed from
themselves, both culturally and/or physically?”
In today’s society we question who we are. We look for an
identity. Smedley notes this may be because we don’t have
strong territorial limits belonging to kinship group. We live in
an individualist society and individualism fosters isolation and
insecurity.
From as far back as the Old Testament we have records of ethic
group formation. People were demarcated by land, language and
culture and were able to understand themselves as different than
other groups. Yet, ethnic identities were fluid and changed
when individuals took on a new language and culture. When

people were conquered the soldiers were encouraged to
intermarry. Those who spoke multiple languages had access to
other cultures and multiple senses of identity. With the rise of
proselytizing Christianity and Islam, a battle was raging for
souls and land. Before the rise of Christian Kingdoms under
Muslim rule, Judaism, Christianity and Islam lived together
with each other and even intermarried.
At this time there was no idea of racial classification. It did not
exist as a concept under which to group people. What was
absent from these different forms of human identity is what we
today would perceive as classifications into "racial" groups,
that is, the organization of all peoples into a limited number of
unequal or ranked categories theoretically based on differences
in their biophysical traits.There are no "racial" designations in
the literature of the ancients and few references even to such
human features as skin color.
In the Ancient world people interacted together and lived among
each other without employing racial difference as a means of
division amongst themselves. They traded with each other, lived
and intermarried. Skin color was not given much weight and
there was no idea that differences were fixed by biology or
stagnant.
When the idea of race began to develop physical differences
were given social meanings that were fixed based on ideas of
heredity. The idea of race developed in the eighteenth century
in the American colonies and spread to the colonies controlled
by Western Europe. The term itself was used in the sixteenth
century but not to refer to people in the slave trade.
The English who came to North American had brought with
them a notion of savagery that they had developed in their
beliefs of superiority and domination over the Irish. Against the
idea of savagery, the English understood themselves as

civilized. This sense of superiority was supported by their
technological, political and economic successes and
independence from Catholic rule.
"Race" emerged as a social classification that reflected this
greatly expanded sense of human separateness and differences.
Theodore Allen (1997) argues that the "invention" of the white
race took place after an early, but unsuccessful, colonial revolt
of servants and poor freedmen known as Bacon's Rebellion in
1676. Colonial leaders subsequently decided it would be useful
to establish a division among the masses of poor to prevent their
further collaboration against the governmental authorities. As
African servants were vulnerable to policies that keptthem in
servitude indefinitely, and European servants hadthe protection
of English law, colonial leaders developed a policy backed by
new laws that separated African servants and freedmen from
those of European background. Over the next half century ,
they passed numerous laws thatprovided resources and benefits
to poor, white freedmen and other laws that restricted the rights
of "Africans," "mulattoes," and "Indians." Calling upon the
model of the Chain of Being, and using natural differences
in physical features, they created a new form of social identity.
"Race" developed in the minds of some Europeans as a way to
rationalize the conquest and brutal treatment of Native
American populations, and especially the retention and
perpetuation of slavery for imported Africans. As an ideology
structuring social, economic, and political inequality, "race"
contradicted developing trends in England and in Western
European societies that promoted freedom, democracy,
equality, and human rights. Europeans justified this
attitude toward human differences by focusing on the physical
features of the New World populations, magnifying and
exaggerating their differences, and concluding that the
Africans and Indians and their descendants were lesser forms
of human beings, and that their inferiority was natural
and/or God- given. …. Myths about their inferior moral,
intellectual, and behavioral features had begun to develop and

these facilitated proscription of any competition with
Europeans. By the mid-eighteenth century, Negroes had been
segregated from poor whites in the laws of most colonies and
transformed into property as slaves in a state of permanent
bondage.
This theory argues that wealthy whites feared the collaboration
of poor whites with black and Indigenous peoples after the
uprising of Bacon’s Rebellion and used race and laws to align
poor whites with wealthy whites along race and separate whites
from uniting along class lines.
Edmund Morgan (1975) also interpreted the actions ofthe early
colonists in the process of establishing "racial" identities as
stemming from the propertied colonists' fear of poor whites
and possibly slaves engaging in rebellions together.Colonial
leaders consciously formulated policies that would separate
poor whites from Indians, blacks, and mulattoes and proceeded
to provide the white poor, whom they had hitherto treated
with contempt and hatred, with some privileges and special
advantages. In time, class divisions diminished in the minds
ofpoor whites and they saw themselves as having something in
common with the propertied class,symbolized by their light
skins and common origins in Europe. With laws progressively
continuing to reduce the rights of blacks and Indians, it was not
long before the various European groups coalesced into a white
"racial" category whose high-status identity gave them access
to wealth, power, opportunity, and privilege.
Race eventually became the way people understood their
individual and group identity. After the Civil War race ideas
were strengthened. This continued to have a devastating affect
on blacks, deemed the lowest social group.
The problems that this has entailed, especially for the low-
status "races," have been enormous, immensely complex, and
almost intractable. Constant and unrelenting portrayals of their
inferiority conditioned them to a self-imagery of being

culturally backward, primitive, intellectually stunted, prone
to violence, morally corrupt, undeserving of the benefits of
civilization, insensitive to the finer arts, and (in the case of
Africans) aesthetically ugly and animal-like.Because of the
cultural imperative of race ideology, all Americans were
compelledto the view that a racial status, symbolized by
biophysical attributes, was the premier determinant of their
identity. "Race" identity took priority over religion, ethnic
origin, education and training, socioeconomic class,
occupation, language, values, beliefs, morals, lifestyles,
geographical location, and all other human attributes that
hitherto provided all groups and individuals with a sense of
who they were. The dilemma for the low-status races was, and
still is, how to construct a positive identity for themselves in
the light of the "racial" identity imposed on them by the
dominant society.
Some responses to racism and racial oppression have been
Negritude, Afrocentrism and Nativism. But these notions rely
on a racial world view and the assumption of innateness and
immutability that do not exist. Still, all these movements aim to
restore pride and self image. And while this is critical it must
be remembered that there are no real connections between
culture and biology. Anyone can learn about another culture and
there is no cause to think that one is obligated to learn about
cultures because of a genetic connection. The connections are
social.
Racism in its various forms, legal, social, educational,
economic, etc. has had devastating consequences.
Many minority youth today not only are suffering the
consequences of the oppressive and mean-spirited policies of
white America, but they are descendants of men and women
whose spirits were broken by these practices and who too
often turned their pain and frustrations inward It is not enough
to emphasize black resistance and overcoming

oppression. There are too many African Americans and Native
Americans who do not have the skills to enter mainstream
arenas, who seem to have dropped out of the social system, or
who are incapable of dealing with the reality of modern life:
those into the drug culture, the undereducated, those in our
jails and prisons, or the homeless. We need to understand how
to remove the barriers that have kept them down.
Too few people have studied the phenomenon of the
transgenerational retention and transmission of an ethos of
hopelessness. But some filmmakers have documented the
heartbreaking stories of black men and women who suffered
unbearable discrimination in our nation's indus- tries. 13 And
others have told the painful stories of the hopelessness
suffered by so many on Indian reservations. Their sons and
daughters felt their pain and the degradation they have
experienced. We need to study this phenomenon and to
understand what these kinds of experiences have done to the
self-image and self-esteem of low-status minorities.

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