The word ‘race’ first appears in the English language in the sixteenth century, probably from an Italian root. It is often a bit of a mystery as to exactly how new words appear in a language, but one thing that seems certain is that their appearance denotes some new social or epistemic understanding of a changed reality.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the new ‘reality’ of the sixteenth century was the discovery of whole new worlds previously unimagined and inhabited by people never before encountered. There seemed genuine confusion as to whether the inhabitants were human and to be regarded as similar to Europeans (cf. Francisco de Vittoria, De Indis, 1532) or brutes more like animals, even monsters – the Spanish Caribe rendering of Arawak karina, ‘strong men’ and Shakespeare’s Caliban or ‘beastial man’.
One thing all agreed on was that they were heathens in need of salvation. On some of the new maps that began to appear following the work of Mercator (d. 1594) whole areas, such as the sub-continent of India, were labelled simply ‘Devil Worshippers’. A crusading concern for conversion provided much of the motivation of early explorers, especially Spaniards like Columbus and Magellan, and above all the Jesuit, Francis Xavier (d.1552), who would later become the patron saint of missionaries. Ultimately, though the scriptural view prevailed that all of humanity had one common origin (monogenism, as in Rev. Thomas Smyth’s, The Unity of the Human Races Proved to be the Doctrine of Scripture, Reason, and Science, 1850) this was compromised by a cultural divisiveness (cf Domingo Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilisation and Barbarism, 1845) and general understanding that one Christian civilisation would prevail with other ‘savage’ cultures destined to disappear ‘at the approach of civilisation like dew before the morning sun’ (Charles Dickens, 1853).
By the eighteenth century a primarily religious understanding of reality was being challenged by a largely rational (or ‘enlightened’) approach. With it came the systematisation of knowledge, such as that of biological classification (Linnaeus, d 1778). A source of confusion that would have dire consequences was that race was used with reference to the categories of both genus and species for groups of people – as in the ‘races of man’ and ‘the human race’ – with genus meaning a group sharing qualities related to birth, descent, origin, race, stock, or family, and species referring to distinctive groups with the implication some would be ‘sub’ or ‘pre’ human (as with the Neanderthals). Anthropology, a word first recorded by medical pioneer Richard Harvey (in 1593), became the comparative study of such groups or ‘varieties’, a word initially used for different members within a single species (Johann Friederich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 1775) and only later substituted with the word ‘races’ in a more divisive, specific sense. Physical difference such as skin colour and skull shape were obvious distinguishing features but there was also growing awareness of linguistic associations or ‘families’ of associated languages that seemed to have ‘mutated’ from a common core, or ur-language (William Jones, Third Anniversary Discourse, to the Asiatic Society, 1786).
Also appearing at this time in ever increasing numbers were the ‘isms’. Words with this suffix, denoting vast conceptual constructs, began to proliferate, perhaps not by accident, after the appearance of the monumental works of Hegel (d.1831). His nebulous philosophical history of the human spirit mind was accompanied by a new word ‘ideology’ coined by the French rationalist contemporary, Destutt de Tracy (1796), and of which Napoleon opined, ‘It is to the doctrine of the ideologues…[that] one must attribute all the misfortunes that have befallen our beautiful France.’ Race would now become an accomplice of potent ideologies expressing ever more nebulous theories.
In the nineteenth century a new ‘scientific’ evolutionary perspective began to characterise the understanding of reality by placing groups of people now regarded as specific races in ascendant order of perfectibility based on emergent characteristics (Samuel Thomas von Sommerring, died 1830). Linguistic or cultural groups also became mistakenly equated with physical groups to create a racial hierarchy (Arthur de Gobineau, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1855). It is in this period that the word ‘racial’ appears to denote species with inherent differences and inequalities, with the ominous implication of a superior or ‘master’ race. (Modern genetics has shown a biological basis for distinct human races to be false.)
Further ominous developments that took place in the nineteenth century were reflected in the appearance of the prejudicial phrase ‘race-hatred’ (1882). This escalation was a clear indication that the most sinister aspects of racial theory were becoming a dangerous reality, one that in the twentieth century led to such terms as ‘racialism’ and then ‘racialist’ (1930) to indicate a belief in the superiority of a particular race.
From being a religious, academic, then a scientific issue race had now become primarily a political and sociological issue, as highlighted by the Civil Rights movement and Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). The word ‘racism’ had taken on an unequivocally hostile denotation indicative of a dehumanised status that humanity had created in seeking to understand itself. It has become the lens through which we now view the past and in 2019, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists stated: ‘The belief in “races” as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past.’