Assignment

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE RACE CONCEPT

Michael Yudell, PhD, MPH

At the dawn of the 21st century, the idea of race—the belief that the peoples of the world

can be organized into biologically distinctive groups, each with their own physical, social, and
intellectual characteristics—is understood by most natural and social scientists to be an unsound
concept. The way scientists think about race today, after all, is different than it was in the wake
of the Civil Rights Movement when some promoted black genetic inferiority as an argument
against egalitarian social and economic policy, and certainly different than one or two centuries
ago as scientific justifications for slavery and later Jim Crow were articulated. In other words,
race, its scientific meaning seemingly drawn from the visual and genetic cues of human
diversity, is an idea with a measurable past, identifiable present, and uncertain future. These
changes are influenced by a range of variables including geography, politics, culture, science,
and economics.

Today, despite the growing consensus among scientists that race is not, in fact, a useful

classificatory tool,1 an understanding of human difference and diversity remains a hallmark of
contemporary scientific practice, and thus presents a seeming contradiction—how can one study
human difference without talking about race? On the one hand, beginning in the 1930s, advances
in population genetics and evolutionary biology led many to conclude that the race concept was
not a particularly useful or accurate marker of biological difference. By the 1970s, many
prominent biologists, including the geneticists Richard Lewontin and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza,
came to see the race concept as a deeply flawed way to organize human genetic diversity that is
inseparable from the social prejudices about human difference that spawned the concept in the
18th century and have accompanied its meaning since.2 Historians and social scientists believe
that race is socially constructed, meaning that the biological meaning of race has been
constrained by the social context in which racial research has taken place.

On the other hand, because studying genetic differences can improve our understanding

of human evolution, disease, and development, the relationship between genetics and human
diversity remains an ongoing area of scientific inquiry. The challenge has been to develop a new
scientific terminology and methodology that finds meaning in the study of human difference
without recapitulating outmoded and racist notions often associated with the concept of race
itself. Some scientists have developed novel ways to measure difference between various human
populations, including using ancestry, ethnicity, and population as replacements or surrogates for
race. Others, however, remain steadfast in their belief that technological and methodological
improvements now allow an examination of racial difference with increasing precision that is
disconnected from any social prejudices.

This briefing paper will describe the role that scientific thought has played, from the late

18th through the 20th century, in developing a language to measure the meaning of human
difference in the form of race, and will also describe how over the course of the 20th century,
most scientists came to reject this concept. Finally, this paper concludes with a brief examination
of the current state of racial thinking in biology.

Pre-20th Century Conceptions of Race

Ever since Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence “that all men are
created equal,” America has struggled with the chasm between this Jeffersonian ideal and the
realities of the American experience. Jefferson himself was the author of some of America’s
earliest ideas about race and science. In 1787, little more than a decade after he had penned the
Declaration, Jefferson suggested in his work on the natural history of Virginia, Notes on the State
of Virginia, that the difference between the races “is fixed in nature,” and hypothesized that
blacks were “originally a distinct race.”3 The contradiction between the Declaration and Notes
may be understood, however, by Jefferson’s view of humanity itself. If blacks were of a separate
creation, and set apart from the definition of “all men,” then the equality set out in the
Declaration did not apply to all.

Notwithstanding Jefferson’s prominent voice on this issue (notably filled with

contradictions4), Americans, and before them, their European counterparts had long considered
the nature of human difference. Historian Frank Snowden, looking at black-white contact before
the sixth century A.D. found that although there is an “association of blackness with ill omens,
demons, the devil, and sin, there is in the extant record no stereotyped image of Ethiopians as the
personification of demons or the devil.”5 In ancient Greece and Rome “the major divisions
between people were more clearly understood as being between the civic and the barbarous,”
between the political citizen and those outside of the polis, and not between bloodlines or skin
color.6 Most scholars now accept the viewpoint that in the ancient world “no concept truly
equivalent to that of ‘race’ can be detected in the thought of the Greeks, Romans, and early
Christians.”7 Rooting human variation in blood or in kinship was a relatively new way to
categorize humans. The idea gained strength towards the end of the Middle Ages as anti-Jewish
feelings, which were rooted in an antagonism towards Jewish religious beliefs, began to evolve
into anti-Semitism. These blood kinship beliefs rationalized anti-Jewish hatred instead as the
hatred of a people. For example, Marranos, Spanish Jews who had been baptized, were
considered, by virtue of their ancestry, a threat to Christendom because they could not prove
purity of blood to the Inquisition.8

Beginning in the eighteenth century, at the height of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe,

these ideas were applied to explaining the diversity of humankind, driven in part by the
experiences with new peoples during colonial exploration, the need to rationalize the inferiority
of certain peoples as slavery took hold in European colonies, and the development of a new
science to assess and explain diversity in all species. While the term race existed before the 18th
century, mostly to describe domesticated animals, it was introduced into the sciences by the
French naturalist Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon in 1749. Buffon saw clearly demarcated
distinctions between the human races that were caused by varying climates. Buffon’s
climatological theory of difference was infused with notions of European superiority. To Buffon,
the natural state of humanity was derived from the European, a people he believed “produced the
most handsome and beautiful men” and represented the “genuine color of mankind.”

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The Swedish botanist and naturalist Carolus Linnaeus also made lasting contributions to
the race concept at this time. Linnaeus’s “natural system,” which became the basis for the
classification of all species, divided humanity into four groups: Americanus, Asiaticus,
Africanus, and Europeaeus. To these groups he ascribed typological, or physical and behavioral
characteristics. Americanus were “reddish, choleric, and erect; hair black… wide nostrils…
obstinate, merry, free… regulated by customs.” Asiaticus were “melancholy, stiff; hair black,
dark eyes… severe, haughty, avaricious… ruled by opinions.” Africanus were “black,
phlegmatic… hair black, frizzled… nose flat; lips tumid; women without shame, they lactate
profusely; crafty, indolent, negligent… governed by caprice.” Finally, Europeaeus were “white,
sanguine, muscular… eyes blue, gentle… inventive… governed by laws.”9 Towards the end of
the 18th century, German scientist Johann Blumenbach constructed a racial classification that
built upon Linnaeus’s work and proposed five racial types: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian,
American, and Malay. Blumenbach’s addition posited the Caucasian as the ideal, or mean race,
and on either side of that mean were racial extremes; the Mongolian and Ethiopian on one side
and the American and Malay on the other. Both divergences from the Caucasian ideal were
considered inferior.10

If racial science is science employed for the purpose of degrading a people both

intellectually and physically, then beginning in the 19th century, American scientists played an
increasingly active role in its development, all the while shaping the race concept. Scientists like
Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and George Gliddon offered a variety of explanations for the nature
of white racial superiority meant to address the nature of physical and intellectual differences
between races, the “natural” positions of racial groups in American society, and the capacity for
citizenship of non-whites. At the core of this work, known as the American School of
Anthropology, was the theory of polygeny—the belief that a hierarchy of human races had
separate creations. Samuel Morton’s experiments on cranial capacity and intelligence sought to
demonstrate this theory. Morton collected hundreds of skulls from around the globe, measured
their volume, and concluded that the Caucasian and Mongolian races had the highest cranial
capacity and thus the highest levels of intelligence, while Africans had the lowest cranial
capacity and thus the lowest levels of intelligence. This work became the basis for more than a
century of work studying intelligence and race. More than a century after Morton’s death, the
evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, using Morton’s same experimental material and
methods, could not replicate the earlier findings. Gould concluded that Morton’s subjective ideas
about race difference influenced his methods and conclusions, leading to the omission of
contradictory data and to the conscious or unconscious stuffing or under-filling of certain skulls
to match his pre-ordained conclusions.11 Indeed, the case of Samuel Morton illustrates how
social conceptions of human difference shape the science of race.

Early 20th Century Ideas About Race

At the dawn of the 20th century, explanations for racial difference based on measurable
and observable physical traits such as cranial capacity and skin color gave way to a whole new
way of thinking about the subject. Race instead came to be understood as a reflection of unseen
differences that the scientists of the time attributed to the recently discovered factors of heredity,
also known as genes. Genetics quickly came to provide the formative language of modern racism
as ideas about racial differences became rooted in biology. This geneticization of race–the idea

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that racial differences in appearance and complex social behaviors can be understood as genetic
distinctions between so-called racial groups—was shaped, in large part, by the eugenics
movement. For the first two decades of the new century, many geneticists considered themselves
eugenicists. Eugenics, according to Francis Galton, the founder of the movement, promised to
give “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over the less
suitable.”12 This could be done either through positive eugenics—certain groups were
encouraged to breed with one another – or negative eugenics—in which certain groups or
individuals would be denied the right to reproduce, either through sterilization, as was the case in
the United States, or through genocide, as was the case in Nazi Germany. Under the guise of this
biological banner, eugenic racial science exerted a diverse influence: becoming a powerful
ideological force in Nazi Germany, influencing the creation of eugenic sterilization laws in the
United States that resulted in at least 30,000 sterilizations, stoking racial hatred in early 20th
century America, and becoming a scientific buttress of 20th century American racial ideology.13

During the first three decades of the 20th century, eugenicists and many geneticists

fiercely advocated “the belief that human races differed hereditarily by important mental as well
as physical traits, and that crosses between widely different races were biologically harmful.”
American eugenicists dedicated considerable resources to the study of black-white differences
during the first three decades of the 20th century, and sought to apply these ideas to the public
sphere. Well-respected geneticists wrote openly that “miscegenation can only lead to
unhappiness under present social conditions and must, we believe, under any social conditions be
biologically wrong.”14 In his seminal work on race and intelligence, Race Crossing in Jamaica
(1929), Charles Davenport, a Harvard trained biologist and the titular head of the American
eugenics movements from the outset of the 20th century until the 1930s, wrote “we are driven to
the conclusion that there is a constitutional, hereditary, genetical basis for the difference between
the two races [whites and blacks] in mental tests. We have to conclude that there are racial
differences in mental capacity.”15 In their influential text Applied Eugenics (1933), eugenicists
Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, who endorsed segregation as a “social adaptation,”
wrote “that the Negro race differs greatly from the white race, mentally as well as physically, and
that in many respects it may be said to be inferior when tested by the requirements of modern
civilization and progress.” Moreover, they suggested “negroes, both children and adults, have
been found markedly inferior to white in vital capacity… Differences in temperament and
emotional reaction also exist, and may be more important than the purely intellectual
differences.”16 It must be stated that the genetic claims of racial difference advocated by
eugenicists—from differences in intelligence to disease rates to musicality—have all been shown
to be false.

Eugenic propagandists gave race an unalterable permanence; neither education, nor

change in environment or climate, nor the eradication of racism itself could alter the fate of non-
whites. In the United States, the impact of eugenics on matters of human difference was felt
widely. In Virginia, as head of the State’s Bureau of Vital , eugenicist and white
supremacist Walter Plecker helped to shape the State’s segregation policies. For example,
Plecker helped push Virginia’s anti-miscegenation Racial Integrity Act of 1924, and used that
law to expose individuals he believed were passing as white in an attempt to stop what he feared
to be the mongrelization of the races.17

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African-American intellectuals were prominent among those who responded to the
growing chorus of scientific racist thinking at this time. In 1909 Kelly Miller, the Dean of
Howard University, argued against scientific racism, writing that “since civilization is not an
attribute of the color of skin, or curl of hair, or curve of lip, there is no necessity for changing
such physical peculiarities…”18 The most determined critic of the biological race concept was
W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP and editor of its magazine The Crisis. Du Bois
challenged the biological race concept at a time when science was being exploited in the service
of racist ideas and practices. Du Bois was the first to synthesize a growing anthropologic
literature that argued that race was not, in fact, a useful scientific category, and showed, instead,
that race was socially constructed. For example, Du Bois believed race an ineffective
measurement given that “the human species so shade and mingle with each other that… it is
impossible to draw a color line between black and other races.”19

Mid-20th Century Ideas About Race

Beginning in the 1930s, an increasing number of geneticists, anthropologists, and social
scientists began moving away from typological and eugenic descriptions of human difference to
view races through the lens of population genetics and evolutionary biology. This approach
rejected a eugenic notion of fixed genetic differences between so-called racial groups, and
instead understood human races as dynamic populations distinguished by variations of the
frequency of genes between populations. By rooting the meaning of race in genetic variation it
became more difficult (though still possible) to argue that one race or another had particular
traits specifically associated with it, or that one individual was typical of a race. Furthermore, the
four or five racial groups identified by 18th and 19th century scientists, now varied depending
upon the genes and traits examined by geneticists. Theodosious Dobzhansky, the evolutionary
biologist whose work between the 1930s and 1970s had a tremendous influence on the way that
scientists thought about race, concluded that the number of human races was variable depending
upon what traits were being examined. In fact, the concept of race in the context of population
genetics and evolutionary biology is simply a tool for making genetic “diversity intelligible and
manageable” in scientific study.20 In other words, while human differences are real, the way we
choose to organize those differences is a methodological decision and not one that reflects an
underlying evolutionary hierarchy or the conservation of racialized traits through the admixture
of populations. This new approach was brought about by new findings in genetics that
demonstrated genetic variation was much more common within species than once thought, and
by the development of what is known as the evolutionary synthesis in biology, a union of
population genetics, experimental genetics, and natural history that rejected eugenic notions of
difference between and among species. Finally, changes in the concept of race were influenced
by a growing cadre of scientists who were generally more liberal on matters of race than had
been their predecessors.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, books by the biologists Dobzhansky and L.C. Dunn,

by the anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Ashley Montagu, by the political scientist and later
Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche, and by the historian Jacques Barzun popularized the idea that race
was not the immutable constant once proclaimed so by science. Advances in genetics,
particularly the discovery of the structure of the double helix in 1953, confirmed the complexity
of human heredity and continued to undercut the simplistic theories of eugenicists and other

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racial scientists who advanced the idea of a fixed racial taxonomy. Yet, despite the best
intentions by scientists like Dobzhansky and Dunn to reconceptualize the concept of race for
modern biology, evidence suggests that these geneticists and their scientific allies ultimately
helped to preserve the concept of race in science, and hence for use by both scientific and non-
scientific racists—its methodological utility to evolutionary biologists and population geneticists
would quickly be exploited and manipulated by racists (scientists and non-scientist alike).
Dobzhansky understood and feared this possibility. He acknowledged the imprecise nature of the
race concept and worried that a genetic race concept could also begin to “serve as a racial
standard with which individuals and groups of individuals can be compared” in the same way
that a typological concept of race could.21 But for him and other population geneticists and
evolutionary biologists at mid-century, the concept of race was a methodological tool by which
to measure genetic difference within species, not a way to understand the physical and
intellectual differences between peoples with varying skin color.

The impact of this new way of thinking about race quickly made its way beyond

scientific circles. For example, in 1944 An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern
Democracy, by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, sought to recast America’s racial
problems as a moral conflict between the egalitarian impulses of America’s democratic creed
and its racist practices. Myrdal rejected the idea of white over black in an unchangeable
biological hierarchy of races; his conclusion was influenced by changes in the biological race
concept. Several chapters of An American Dilemma examined then-contemporary discoveries in
genetics that led to the rejection of typological and eugenic notions of race in favor of race as
“quantitative notions of the relative frequency of common ancestry and differentiating traits.”
Myrdal acknowledged “the great variability of traits among individuals in every population
group… and the considerable amount of overlapping between all existing groups.” Finally,
Myrdal believed through genetics “the fundamental unity and similarity of mankind… is
becoming scientifically established.”22

It is significant to note that Myrdal’s text is cited in the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme

Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, which unanimously struck down legalized
segregation in public education. Brown did not comment directly on the nature of race or on the
alleged superiority or inferiority of racial groups, yet, by identifying segregation’s harmful
impact on black children’s psyches and the wrongness of causing these children “a feeling of
inferiority,” the Court implicitly acknowledged that thinking about races as inferior and superior
was erroneous. Although not cited in the Brown ruling, it is hard to imagine that the publication
of two United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
“Statements on Race” in 1950 and 1951, both of which sought to place the race concept squarely
in the context of population genetics and evolutionary biology, did not also have some impact on
the thinking of the Court. The First Statement argued that “from the biological standpoint, the
species Homo sapiens is made up of a number of populations, each one of which differs from the
others in the frequency of one or more genes,” and that “for all practical social purposes “race” is
not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.” Although the First Statement, chaired
by Ashley Montagu, called for abandoning the concept of race in favor of ethnicity, the Second
Statement held fast to the validity of the population genetics-based race concept as discussed
above. Montagu, however, was not deterred, and spent much of the rest of his career fighting
against the use of race in scientific thought, believing that its use was not scientifically

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appropriate because it was a “trigger word… utter it and a whole series of emotionally
conditioned responses follow.” 23

Even as biological and anthropological thought embraced the new genetic-based race

concept, many scientists held-fast to obsolete notions of race, suggesting that even widely
accepted and validated science could not be an antidote to the racism of many in the field and
beyond. R.A. Fisher, one of the founders of population genetics, asserted in 1951, for example,
that “available scientific knowledge provides a firm basis for believing that groups of mankind
differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development.”24 Writing in 1961,
Carlton Coon, recently elected as President of the American Association of Physical
Anthropologists, resuscitated the 19th century scientific racism of Samuel Morton, arguing in his
book The Origin of Races that the five races of humanity had separately evolved into Homo
sapiens. Coon’s confidant and cousin was the notorious mid-20th century racist Carlton Putnum,
whose racist tract Race and Reason drew heavily on the ideas in The Origin of Races.25

That these arguments about the nature of race and racial difference were occurring during

the years of America’s Civil Rights Movement help illustrate the relationship between science
and society. Dobzhansky and other biologists remade the race concept because they believed it
methodologically important to their work and because they wanted to jettison from scientific
thought and practice the racism inherent in typological and eugenic ideas about race. Even as
science debated the meaning of race in biology, the abhorrent effects of American racism were in
plain view. The same week that UNESCO published its “Second Statement on Race” a mob of
three thousand whites prevented an African-American U.S. Army veteran from moving into an
apartment in a formerly all white apartment building in Cicero, Illinois.26

Late-20th Century Ideas About Race

By the 1960s and 1970s, geneticists were able to reveal with increasing sophistication
and precision the shortcomings of the concept of race in biology. In 1972, the geneticist Richard
Lewontin, who had been a student of Dobzhansky’s at Columbia in the 1950s and was
considered a leader in his field, published a study showing that human populations were even
more genetically diverse than once thought. Lewontin, using molecular genetic techniques in gel
electrophoresis he himself had pioneered in the mid-1960s, found that most genetic variation
(85.4%) was “contained within” racial groups or “between populations within a race” (8.3%),
whereas only 6.3% of “human variation was accounted for by racial classification.” Based on
these findings, Lewontin concluded that race had “virtually no genetic… significance.” After all,
if more genetic diversity occurred within so-called racial groups than between them, then what
exactly would race be measuring if it were meant to organize populations based on genetic
difference? Lewontin concluded that the “use of racial categories must take its justifications from
some other source than biology. The remarkable feature of human evolution and history has been
the very small degree of divergence between geographical populations as compared with the
genetic variation among individuals.”27

At the end of the 20th century, the geneticist L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza confirmed
Lewontin’s findings using contemporary DNA techniques. His results showed that there was no
significant genetic discontinuity between any so-called races in our species that would justify the

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use of racial classification in humans. Cavalli-Sforza believed that these results and the results of
other studies implied that population genetics and evolutionary biology had satisfactorily shown
that the “subdivision of the human population into a small number of clearly distinct, racial or
continental, groups… is not supported by the present analysis of DNA.” Given that studies had
now confirmed Lewontin’s results for almost three decades, Cavalli-Sforza believed that “the
burden of proof is now on the supporters of a biological basis for human racial classification.”28

Yet even as it became increasingly clear that the race concept was not a useful

classificatory tool, several high profile scientists, none of whom were geneticists, continued to
make claims that race was, in fact, a legitimate biological concept, and that those who argued
against race had political, not scientific agendas. Generally, it was from these findings that the
public became aware of the ongoing debates about the nature of race in science. For example, in
1969 the educational psychologist Arthur Jensen, a professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, argued that intelligence, or IQ, had high genetic heritability, and that therefore redress
for racial discrepancies in IQ through education was useless.29 A few years earlier the Nobel
Prize winning physicist William Shockley, a professor at Stanford University and co-inventor of
the transistor, made similar claims, calling for the National Academies of Science to investigate
the genetic aspects of what he called our nation’s “slum problem.”30 The attempt by men like
Jensen and Shockley to employ the biological race concept demonstrates that no matter how hard
biologists like Dobzhansky, Montagu, and Lewontin tried to either narrowly define race in the
context of biology or abandon it altogether, and that despite the stated shift away from typology
to populationist thinking, race could and would be used for typological, racist, and non-scientific
ends.

Rather than debate the biological nature of race, in the 1970s some scientists instead

began to debate the biological nature of racism. Sociobiology, as developed by the entomologist
E.O. Wilson, claimed racism, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism to be biological traits.
Sociobiology offered theories on why, in an evolutionary and genetic way, populations of
peoples hated, feared, and distrusted one another. So while the …