The Heritage of “Race” 0
The concept of separate and distinct human “races” is a social construct, and a poisonous one. We see evidence of that poison in the headlines every day and most emphatically in recent weeks.
It is also an artificial concept that, less than slightly more than four centuries after its birth, is taken by many as immutable and revealed truth.
At Psychology Today Blogs, Carolyn Purnell offers a brief history of the concept of “race.” I commend it to your attention; it is an especially timely read. A nugget:
Prejudices are as old as humankind, but the concept of “race” is not.
For centuries, the term “race” didn’t refer to humans. Instead, it defined the qualities one wanted in a hunting or war animal (e.g., a fast race of warhorses). By the mid-sixteenth century, the term had crossed over to humankind, but it referred only to the elite. For example, the Capetians were the “third race of kings,” after the Merovingians and Carolingians.
Basically, “race” referred to lineage and inherited characteristics, not to broad human groups.
The first modern use of the term possibly appeared in 1684, in an article by the French doctor François Bernier, but few people read Bernier’s work, and the idea was slow to catch on.
“Race’s” real powder-keg moment came in 1735, when the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus published Systema Naturae.
Aside:
She admits this article is inherently superficial due to its brevity.
Strikingly missing from it, in my view, is sufficient emphasis on the influence of chattel slavery in the Americas, which gave wealthy, influential persons economic incentives to propagate the idea that persons of one skin color were inherently superior to persons of other skin colors.
