I think I understand what she’s getting at. But not sure.
The distinction of common descent based upon ancestry dates back to the middle ages and was considered a scientific concept. Blumenbach was the first to divide the human species into five distinct races in 1779, based upon skull research.
It appears that Dolezal, while promoting an upcoming book, is fostering the idea that race is only a concept that came about to comfort people’s fears over differences they saw between people. But I would argue that those differences existed first and were not born from racism, but the other way around.
Various differences have been around for all of history, but classifying these differences into different “races” (along with the differing treatment that inevitably comes along with such classification) was, at some point, a novel idea, and I think it’s very likely that this sort of classification lead to various forms of mass-mistreatment that we now call racism that probably didn’t exist before.
I recall an anecdote where some very dark skinned Indians went to the US south and could sense that the racists around them were a bit confused on how to treat them. By skin color, they were no different than an African American, but they weren’t of African heritage (yes, yes, no nitpicking) so…should they be racist? Is it a different thing?
Or in the same vein, modern racists try to say that East Asians are naturally smarter. But, genetically, they’re from the same population that became the aboriginals, the Native Americans, populated Indonesia, the Philippines, etc. and none of those groups are particularly noted for educational success.
Back in the day, Irish and Italians were discriminated against, racially, but now no one would give a second thought to someone’s Irish or Italian heritage. They’re just honkies like the rest of all the other honkies.
Racism follows no boundaries that match up to anything genetic and can cut off at arbitrary geopolitical boundaries, where there’s no logical distinction between the people on either side of the fence.
While I wouldn’t say that the titular quote is 100% the explanation for everything, it certainly has a strong claim to correctness.
People have always denigrated the “other.” That probably goes back to our proto-human ancestors, (and possibly beyond), with their family/tribal identification regarding who was safe and who was other and enemy.
Human differences have been noted for millennia. The Romans included a reference in the Greek myth of Phaethon to Phaethon burning Africans black when he lost control of his father’s sun chariot.
However, those two traits were not joined as cause and effect until the eighteenth century. Shakespeare’s Othello was noted as a Moor, but he was still permitted to rise to the rank of general among the Venetians. English and French and Germans and Italians and Swedes and Poles and Spaniards, etc. all regarded themselves as superior to their neighbors, but such differences were typically driven by current feuds and alliances.
In the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus invented the binomial system of classification of flora and fauna that bears his name, today. As part of that classification, each species was assigned traits that characterized them. When he got to humans, he simply continued his practice and divided humans into different groups according to appearance. Others, notably Blumenbach, followed, (although, Blumenbach notably argued that the characteristics were limited to the appearance and did not indicate qualitative differences). Linnaeus wrote in the period when Europeans were consolidating conquests in other parts of the word and in the period when science was beginning to move away from Natural Philosophy to become a series of disciplines that redefined the world. Thus his descriptions of races, (using the existing word identifying people descended from a single ancestor as in “the race of Abraham”), was seized upon by Europeans looking to justify their actions outside Europe. The identity of “us” as English or French or other national groups was then expanded to those who look like us as the world was divided among Europeans, Africans, Asians, (sometimes) Americans, and (sometimes) Pacific Islanders. * Once the concept of race had a scientific imprimatur, all sorts declarations about other people began to be asserted according to “race.”
So “us vs them” on the family/clan/tribal level was passed down to us from ancient times, but did not originally include the concept of race that is now prevalent. It was the desire to divide peoples for political reasons that prompted people to employ the divisions of Linnaeus and his followers, (ignoring the admonitions of Blumenbach), pointing to “science” to justify their beliefs.
Nationalist divisions did not disappear right away, of course. There were a number of bitter feuds among European scientists as to the intelligence, industry, morality, and other traits of various ethnic groups throughout Europe in the nineteenth century and references to various ethnic groups as inherently industrious, lazy, fun-loving, dour, artistic, lacking in imagination, logical, gullible, and other traits have been cited throughout the twentieth century and continue, today.
Does any one cite anything in real life conversations? I mean there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[sup]*[/sup]
*- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio
I agree with the quoted statement, though it may be a little misleading.
Basically I think the concept of race is ill-defined, but it was not suddenly invented one day…humans naturally want to generalize and have always done so. Before we could travel far it was “People from this town are X, people from that town are Y”, and before that simply this tribe vs that tribe.
You could argue that someone had to define what the set of races are, but historically that’s usually not been so necessary. What I mean is, the main thing is just saying “If you look different enough to me, you belong to one of those other groups”. Few people have bothered trying to work out exactly how to draw the lines since invariably that involves looking at humans as a continuum.
I think differently. Europeans not surprisingly prefered to feel superior and to figure out justifications for otherwise immoral actions. That wasn’t a novelty, every culture on Earth did more or less the same. But this time, the circumstances were different. All European nations, and only European nations, had a massive technological advance. This fact provided an objective basis to claim inherent superiority and to assume an inherent inferiority of non-Europeans.
If racism was born out of the observation of differences, why didn’t the Romans, for instance, assume that black people were inferior? They could clearly see the difference in skin colour, after all. They didn’t because it was mostly irrelevant from their point of view. What seemed important to them was rather civilized people vs uncivilized people. They despised perfectly white Germans because they didn’t build big monuments, and, horror, cooked with butter. They were perfectly willing, however to give them high official positions if they had been properly romanized. What mattered was your culture (preferably Greco-Roman) and your apparent civilized state.
Contrarily to modern Europeans, they couldn’t feel safe in their superiority, because there wasn’t a huge technological gap. Regardless how much they could despise some barbarian people, said barbarians could kick their ass in battle and pillage their cities. They couldn’t base their hierachy on skin colour or other superficial physical traits because it would have run against observable evidence (again, contrarily to modern Europeans). Medium brown Persians had a more fearsome civilization than darker brown Ethiopian who had a more fearsome civilization than lily white Germans. So, how could they come up with a hierarchy of races based on skin colour?
Only the modern western civilization could feel completely certain of its superiority and attribute it to differences related to outward appearance, and as a result invent modern racism with a hierarchy of skin-colour based races.
There are many genetiic ways to divide people, you can do so by height, blood type, of by their ability to roll their tongue, but people don’t consider these to represent different races, because unlike race they are seen to be totally irrelevant to a persons identity. If racism didn’t exist, then by definition what we now call race would also be seen as totally irrelevant to a person’s identity, and so would be no more relevant that the presence of absence of ear lobes. The only reason that it is seen as a real distinction it due to racism.
As I understand it, there is no scientific means by which “race” can be unambiguously determined, which means that it is a social construct. So our determination to divide people into “races” has determined how we define those races.
Sure, and so do height classes according to your logic.
If you’re 161-166cm inclusive tall, you’re class G. Deal with it!
But in all seriousness, yes “race” exists as a sociological concept, and it is something society has to come to terms with. Whether the best way to approach that is pretending those terms have concrete meaning is debatable. Personally I’d say not.