Two
How science invented race

There is a lot of confusion over what we mean when we say race is a "construction." Much of the problem involves the fact that in order to rebut scientific racism publicly, we are often obliged to accept the dichotomy of "nature" and "culture" that we now realize to be an oversimplification. But since that dichotomy remains a fixture of popular science, and of public discourse, we often have to say, "No, it's the opposite; it's culture" - when we would really like to say something rather more nuanced. To a first approximation, then, we mean that, unlike a naively regarded fact of nature, which is presumably there to be observed and transparently understood, race is a product of history; and although it is often associated with variation in biological form, it is inherited according to cultural, not biological, rules. And thus, rather than seeing race as a simple product of nature, it is better understood as a product of "nature/culture," the ascription of arbitrary cultural meaning to patterns of human diversity, often in defiance of the biological patterns themselves.

Consider the history of the concept of race. By "race" I mean the idea that the human species comes naturally partitioned into a reasonably small number of reasonably discrete kinds, each with distinct properties. And that, by the way, is empirically false; the human species does not come that way - which may perhaps explain why nobody even imagined that pattern until the seventeenth century. Scholars since antiquity had always described human differences in local terms, not in continental terms. (Some biblical traditions had Noah's sons repopulate the earth after the Deluge, with Ham the father of Africans, Shem the father of Asians, and Japheth the father of Europeans; but of course the ancients had only a limited knowledge of the world, and as brothers, the sons of Noah all looked pretty much alike.)

Although the ancients recognized that people in different places often looked different, they interpreted that variation in local, not continental, terms. The idea that each continent contains largely homogeneous masses, which are different from the masses on other continents, had to wait until the seventeenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century, the idea that the peoples of the world could be collapsed into a few para-continental clusters was being taught by the influential Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus and the influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

There was, naturally, some opposition to the idea. The French naturalist Count de Buffon rejected the entire classificatory enterprise of Linnaeus, for whom the subspecies of Homo sapiens were simply a lower level than the species of the genus Homo (sapiens and troglodytes, Linnaeus thought incorrectly) and the genera in the Order Primates (Homo, Simia, Lemur, and Vespertilio, the bat, he also thought incorrectly). Buffon felt that this pattern - what we would now call a nested hierarchy - had to have been brought about by some process, of which common descent was the most obvious candidate, but which scholars back in the mid-1700s knew to be false. Buffon's insight would later be borne out by Darwin, but Linnaeus's impact on the field of biology in the century before Darwin was vast. The simple reason was that the pattern is real. Animals and plants come in groups-within-groups, as a result of their ancestry.

The impact of Linnaeus upon the scientific study of the human species was that for the next 200 years, in order to study the human species scientifically, you first had to classify it. Interestingly, Linnaeus's classification listed four geographically based subspecies (and color-coded, for your convenience, as red, white, yellow, and black) - but he did not call them races. Buffon, who rejected classification, described human diversity without the classificatory premise, but casually introduced the word "race" into his travelogue descriptions of diverse peoples. A generation later, Buffon's term would be synonymized with Linnaeus's concept, and biologists would seek the structure of the human species in the identification of its core units, the races. Of course, they disagreed quite extensively on what criteria to apply, and consequently on how many units there were, much less what they were - as even Darwin noted in The Descent of Man.

The concept of race that was thus produced has two components: discontinuity between groups, and homogeneity within groups. Why did this idea arise when it did - in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries? It was likely a convergence of four factors. First, long sea voyages became the norm, which tended to strike passengers with the discontinuities of human form, rather than long land voyages, which tended to strike travelers with continuity of human form. Second, the encounter of Europeans with unfamiliar and fluid forms of social organization in other parts of the world was quite different from the centralized and bounded nation-states that they were familiar with; while the economics of slavery encouraged expanding the universe of the potentially enslaveable. Third, a cartographic image became popular at the same time: each of the four different continents allegorically embodied as a woman, later coming to represent the inhabitants of the continents themselves (science, apparently, may well have come to imitate art). And fourth, it was the flowering of science as a method to produce reliable knowledge, which was generally thought to begin with extensive collection and rigorous classification, as Linnaeus embodied.

Linnaeus's own classification of human subspecies was not based merely on naturalistic features like geography and facial appearance, but also on traits like clothing and legal system. White Europeans were governed by law ("Ritibus"), yellow Asians by opinion ("Opinionibus"), red Americans by custom ("Consuitudine"), and black Africans by whim ("Arbitrio"). Likewise, white Europeans were characterized by tight-fitting clothes ("Vestimentis arctis"), yellow Asians by loose-fitting garments ("Indumentis laxis"), red Americans paint themselves with fine red lines ("Pingit se lineis daedaleis rubris"), and black Africans anoint themselves with grease ("Ungit se pingui"). Clearly, there was a bit more here than mere biology; there were cultural value judgments as well.

But there was also a bigger problem with race, since the term had been introduced without a formal definition. Buffon used it casually, in the sense of a "breed" or "strain"; but when it was combined with Linnaeus's formal subspecies, it became possible to simultaneously have both continents and ethnic groups as categories. Moreover, simply within the continents it was obvious that, say, a Dane and a Sicilian tend to look a bit different from one another. That might imply the existence of even smaller groups-within-groups, below even subspecies (which is as low as scientific taxonomy goes). The Races of Europe, published in 1899 by William Z. Ripley, gave an unfamiliar plural for the more familiar singular, and came up with three of them; a revision in 1939 by Carleton Coon identified no fewer than eleven. Fieldwork showed that there was indeed a lot of biological heterogeneity outside Europe as well. Charles Seligman's Races of Africa (1930) identified eight of those.

The concept was consequently protean enough to be able to accommodate continental groups like Africans and Asians, physical groups like Pygmies and Nordics, linguistic groups like Bantu and Slavic, and ethnic groups like Jews and Gypsies, simultaneously. More­over, the descriptive traits associated with each race might not be the products of microevolution, but of history, prejudice, diet, or habits. One such idea was the "racial odor." As Harvard's early twentieth-century race expert, Earnest Hooton, explained it:

I once took occasion to ask a brilliant Japanese student of anthropology whether he detected any odor as a distinguishing feature of Whites. He said that he did most decidedly, and that he found it very unpleasant. Then he went on to say that it particularly assailed his nostrils whenever he entered the Harvard gymnasium. I gave up at once, because I had to admit that his experience coincided with mine. That gymnasium, now happily replaced, was one of the oldest in the country and its entire structure seemed to be permeated by the perspiration of many generations of students.

(Hooton, 1946: 541)

But that didn't mean that you couldn't oversell cultural features or prejudices as if they were racial features. The other American expert on race was Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian, and he soberly explained that Negroids were "Not very ambitious; emotions and passions strong but less rational; idealism rather weak;.Love of amusement and sport strong, of exploration weak, of adventure moderate;.Musical ability well represented, but not of high intellectual order;.Rather careless and free from lasting worries, but ridden by superstitious fears" (1930: 170).

It is hard to know how these ostensibly scientific assessments would have been altered if there were not such...