Race (human categorization)

• 1. Introduction

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  Race, as a category for sorting human beings, has shaped laws, wars, and daily lives for centuries. Yet in 2023, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine formally declared that researchers should not use race as a proxy for describing human genetic variation. How did a concept so powerful it underpinned slavery and genocide come to be regarded by modern science as, in their words, a "misleading and harmful surrogate"? The word itself entered common usage in the 16th century, when it could mean almost any grouping of people, including those bound by close kinship. By the 17th century it had narrowed to describe physical traits. By the 19th century it had become a system of hierarchy. And by the late 20th century, the tools of genetics began dismantling it from the inside. What remains is a fascinating, troubled, and still unresolved question: is race a biological reality, a social construction, or something else entirely?

• 2. The Colonial Invention

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  According to scholars Smedley and Marks, the European concept of race arose precisely at the intersection of two historical forces: the Scientific Revolution, which privileged the classification of natural kinds, and the age of European imperialism and colonization. As Europeans encountered peoples from different parts of the world, they began speculating about physical, social, and cultural differences. The rise of the Atlantic slave trade added a powerful incentive to that speculation. Categorizing human groups became a way to justify the subordination of African slaves. Drawing on classical sources and on closer conflicts at home, including the hostility between the English and Irish, Europeans began to link inherited physical differences to inherited moral and intellectual qualities. According to scholars Bancel and colleagues, the epistemological moment when the modern race concept was invented and rationalized falls somewhere between 1730 and 1790. Author Rebecca F. Kennedy has argued that the Greeks and Romans would have found these concepts confusing in relation to their own systems of classification. The concept that emerged from this period was not neutral taxonomy. It consistently placed the White European at the top of every ranked scheme.

• 3. The Classifiers and Their Systems

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  The first post-Graeco-Roman published classification of humans into distinct races appears to be Francois Bernier's 1684 work, "Nouvelle division de la terre par les differents especes ou races qui l'habitent." By the 18th century, scientific classification of human variation had become a serious preoccupation. Carl Linnaeus, the inventor of zoological taxonomy, produced in 1735 a classification of Homo sapiens into four continental varieties: europaeus, asiaticus, americanus, and afer. Each was assigned a different humour. Homo sapiens europaeus was described as active, acute, and adventurous; Homo sapiens afer was characterized as crafty, lazy, and careless. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 1775 treatise "The Natural Varieties of Mankind" proposed five major divisions and, notably, did not arrange them in a hierarchy. Blumenbach also observed that "one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them." This observation would become central to later critiques of the whole enterprise. Subsequent classifications by Georges Buffon, Petrus Camper, and Christoph Meiners did not share Blumenbach's restraint, and consistently ranked Africans as inferior to Europeans.

• 4. Polygenism and Its Supporters

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  In the last two decades of the 18th century, a theory called polygenism emerged, arguing that different races had evolved separately on each continent and shared no common ancestor. In England, historian Edward Long and anatomist Charles White promoted it. In Germany, ethnographers Christoph Meiners and Georg Forster advanced it. In France, Julien-Joseph Virey. The theory crossed the Atlantic too: in the United States, Samuel George Morton, Josiah Nott, and Louis Agassiz promoted polygenism in the mid-19th century. The theory reached its institutional peak with the founding of the Anthropological Society of London in 1863. That organization broke away from the Ethnological Society of London during the American Civil War, the split driven significantly by what was called the "Negro question." The Anthropological Society held a substantially racist view; the Ethnological Society, a more liberal one. The monogenist position, which held that all humans shared a common origin, eventually prevailed in science, not least because Charles Darwin's work on evolution provided a framework in which a single human lineage was far more coherent than multiple separate ones.

• 5. What Genetics Actually Found

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  When Craig Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly announced the mapping of the human genome in 2000, it carried an unexpected payload for race science. Upon examining the data, Venter concluded that while genetic variation within the human species is on the order of 1-3%, the types of variation do not support the notion of genetically defined races. He stated: "Race is a social concept. It's not a scientific one. There are no bright lines... when we try to apply science to try to sort out these social differences, it all falls apart." Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks had already summarized the scientific picture by the 1970s: most human differences were cultural; what was not cultural was largely polymorphic, found across diverse groups at different frequencies; what remained was clinal, varying gradually with geography; and what was left after that was very small. The Human Genome Project itself stated that no allele will be found in all members of one population and in none of any other. An average of 85% of statistical genetic variation exists within local populations; only about 8% separates large groups living on different continents. Anthropologist C. Loring Brace noted that a skin-lightening mutation estimated to have occurred 20,000 to 50,000 years ago accounts partly for lighter skin in populations that migrated north into what is now Europe. East Asians, he observed, owe their relatively lighter skin to entirely different mutations.

• 6. The Clines Debate

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  C. Loring Brace introduced a concept that would cut through the confusion: the cline. Rather than discrete groups, human physical and genetic traits vary in gradients across geography. Brace wrote of skin color in Europe and Africa: "To this day, skin color grades by imperceptible means from Europe southward around the eastern end of the Mediterranean and up the Nile into Africa. From one end of this range to the other, there is no hint of a skin color boundary." Anthropologist Frank Livingstone drew the blunt conclusion: "There are no races, only clines." Theodore Dobzhansky responded more cautiously, arguing the word "race" could still be used if one distinguished between "race differences" as objectively ascertainable biological phenomena, and the "race concept" as a matter of social judgment. In 1964, biologists Paul Ehrlich and Holm pointed out that different traits produce different clines that do not line up with each other. Melanin distribution decreases from the equator north and south; frequencies for the beta-S hemoglobin haplotype radiate out of specific points in Africa. If you choose skin color, you get one set of groupings. If you choose blood type, you get another. Europeans and Africans are closer to each other than either is to Chinese populations when the ABO blood group system is used. The number of races detected always depends on which traits you choose to count.

• 7. Race as Social Reality

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  Even as scientists dismantled race as a biological category, social scientists were documenting its very real effects as a social one. Racial discrimination, they found, does not require biological reality to cause material harm. Scholars in critical race theory and racial formation theory investigated how ideas and images of race become embedded in everyday life, in law, in policing, and in rates of incarceration. The one-drop rule in the 19th-century United States defined anyone with any known African ancestry as Black, regardless of appearance. By the early 20th century, this was made statutory in many states. Brazil developed a strikingly different system. Anthropologist Marvin Harris observed that Brazilian racial identity was not governed by rigid descent rules; a Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial type of one or both parents, and full siblings could belong to different racial groups. A 2000 survey of self-reported ancestry among people from Rio de Janeiro found that 38% of those identifying as white reported some African ancestry, and virtually all those identifying as Black did too. Over a dozen racial categories were recognized in Brazil, grading into each other as continuously as the spectrum of color. Imani Perry has argued that race "is produced by social arrangements and political decision making," and that "race is something that happens, rather than something that is." Anthropologist Stephan Palme has argued that race "is not a thing but a social relation."

• 8. A Discipline Divided

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  In 2007, Ann Morning interviewed over 40 American biologists and anthropologists and found significant disagreements over the nature of race, with no single viewpoint holding a majority in either group. The rejection of race as a biological concept is not uniform across the world. Lieberman and colleagues found in a 2004 study that rejection of race ranged from high to low across different countries: highest in the United States and Canada, moderate in Europe, lowest in Russia and China. A 2007 review suggested the contrast between the United States and China might reflect different social functions. In China, the race concept has been used to stress the unity of ethnically diverse populations. In the United States, using racial categories is seen as undermining social cohesion. In Europe, the European Parliament adopted a resolution in 1996 stating that the term should be avoided in all official texts, partly because of its association with Nazi and Fascist laws of the 1930s and 1940s. Among forensic anthropologists, the picture differs again. Professor George W. Gill has argued that the idea of race as only skin deep "is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm," and that many morphological features track geographic boundaries. C. Loring Brace has countered that what forensic anthropologists identify is regional ancestry, not race, and that assigning a skeletal remain to the category "black" is a socially constructed act meaningful only in the specific social context of the United States. The National Academies' 2023 report, co-chaired by Charmaine D. Royal and Robert O. Keohane of Duke University, affirmed that race has "a long history of being incorrectly identified as the major genetic reason for phenotypic differences between groups."