Race is a framework of ranked categories dividing up the human population. It was developed by Western Europeans following their global expansion which began in the 1400s. Several key elements of this racialization of the world made race vastly different from earlier localized ethnocentric or caste ideologies which stressed differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Race was global, applied to the entire human species. Race consisted of a small number of categories, most frequently just five, although sometimes with sub-races and mixed-race types added to them. Race ranked these categories in terms of assumed and imputed fixed quanta of cultural worth, intelligence, attractiveness and other qualities. Race reinforced pervasive inequality in terms of the political, economic, social, and frequently legal, conditions of everyday existence accorded to persons judged to be of different races. Race was essentialized — it came to seem real, natural and unquestionable to millions of human beings, including both victims and beneficiaries of racialized social ordering.
Race resulted in racism, the cultural and ideological formation that shapes perception and evaluation of self and others according to racial identity, which is institutionalized in both interpersonal and larger scale behavioural social orders. Racism has met resistance and contestation at many levels, from community-based political struggle to academic scholarship. Racism in its regional, national and local forms is seen by some analysts as many different racisms, each culturally interpretable in its own terms. Others, like Michel-Rolph Trouillot (in Gregory and Sanjek 1994), prefer to see these local manifestations (in South Africa, the United States, Haiti, etc.) as refractions of ‘the international hierarchy of races, colours, religions, and cultures’ that has pervaded one increasingly racialized world system since the 1400s. In either view, racial ranking has consistently assigned White persons to the top and Black persons to the bottom. Other racial identities have occupied either bottom or intermediate locations according to varying impositions and refractions of, and resistances to, racist identification and institutionalization.
Before race
Race arose with the perception of global variation in human physiognomic and bodily appearances, variation which is certainly real but vastly more complex than can be contained within a small number of racial types. The entire spectrum of human packaging was not apprehended anywhere on the globe until regular European sea travel linked the Old and New Worlds after 1492, and completed the planetary picture with Pacific Island reconnaissance in the 1700s. Before then, what was more apparent everywhere was the gradual transition in physical types found in all continuous geographic areas. It was the ocean-borne migration and enforced transportation of Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans into the Americas that first brought large blocks of non-contiguous peoples into intimate contact, and fertilized the ground for the emergence of race and racism.
Race built upon the ethnocentrism of the various European colonialist peoples. Ethnocentric feelings of superiority to nearby groups (‘we’re better than them’) are as widely encountered in human societies as are more tolerant views (‘their customs are different’). The ethnocentric ancient Greeks, for example, saw themselves as first among the civilized and barbarian peoples around the Mediterranean. Yet physical appearance and cultural attainment were not linked by the Greeks. They granted civilized status to the Nile Valley Nubians, who were among the darkest people they knew, but not to the light-skinned European barbarian peoples to the north.
Regimes of caste, like racial formations, arrange their members hierarchically, with comparable material and political deprivation for those at the bottom. In South Asian caste societies individuals vary widely in skin colour, but intra-caste (jati) variation overlaps with that of other local castes; dark colour and high status is no rarity, nor is its reverse. Hindu karma ideology posits higher or lower caste status as a distinct possibility for all persons, either in previous lives or future rebirths. The disabilities of harijan (‘untouchable’) status are something a soul is born into, and not the unquestioned consequence of one’s visible physical appearance. Other caste-situations, such as those in Africa and Japan, have their own cultural and geographically limited circumstances, and also do not institutionalize physical appearance into caste (except perhaps in Rwanda where the rulers were darker than their subjects).
Slavery, which both long preceded and continued after the emergence of race, assumed a new dimension with global racialization. Before the 1400s, slavery was widespread in state societies, but its victims, either recruited internally or from neighbouring groups, were largely physically indistinguishable from slave-holders; slavery was a status that, as fortunes changed, might be held by anyone. In pre-1400 Europe and in indigenous non-Western societies, slave descendants (even those few of more distant origins) gradually disappeared, blending into the dominant cultural group. Since systemic racial ordering did not distinguish free and enslaved populations, slave descendants could "accultu-rate and usually had no other choice. They did not remain perpetually demarcated by race as happened following the emergence of the racia-lized enslavement of Africans by Europeans between the 1400s and 1800s (see Drake 1990 [1987]; Sanjek in Gregory and Sanjek 1994).
The rise of race
As the post-1400s racial order solidified from its ethnocentric beginnings, the devaluation of Africans, Native Americans and colonized Asians, and reluctance to sanction intermarriage or to admit persons of mixed background to the full entitlements of solely European ancestry, were evident in all the European colonial societies by the late 1600s. In the 1700s, efforts mounted within the citadels of science in Western Europe to place the exploited peoples into natural schemes, culminating in the division of humankind into Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malayan races by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1795. Ranking of these races followed, with early nineteenth-century anthropology (as the science of races was called) divided between polygenists who believed in separate divine creation of each race, and monogenists who accepted one creation for all humankind, with different races the divergent products of natural history.
Chief among the polygenists was Samuel Morton, whose long-accepted cranial studies during the 1830s and 1840s ‘proved’ the larger brain size, and therefore superiority, of Whites over other races. Only in 1977 did biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1981) reanalyse the data and discover that Morton’s overt racist bias had prevented identification of what clearly were fully overlapping measurements among the ‘racial’ skull samples he used. A radical break with the assumptions of continuing racist anthropometry and psychological testing (see Gould 1981) came with the famous separation of race, language and culture (and methods to study each) by Franz Boas. After proclaiming during the 1890s his inductive discovery that mappings of Northwest Coast Native American biological traits, cultural similarities and linguistic affinities each yielded different results, Boas delighted in criticizing European nationalism, pointing out that a similar historical flow of traits and peoples had occurred on that continent and from beyond.
Boas also applied his anthropology to combat racism. He used his study of changes in head form among descendants of Southern and Eastern European immigrants to counter nativist and "eugenic antagonism to what were seen as sub-races inferior to Northern Europeans. In his 1906 address at Atlanta University, he urged pride among African Americans in the accomplishments of African civilizations, and appreciation that the condition of Black people was of historic making, and could change in the future. During the 1930s he mobilized scientists against Nazi racialism, and his writings and those of his students moulded the liberal view opposing racial discrimination that became widely acceptable in the United States in the 1950s.
By the 1960s anthropology moved beyond the Boasian critique of racial ranking and the target became the very idea of race itself (Montagu 1964). The new anti-racists attacked the notion that the human species was divisible into five, or any other, small number of races. They pointed out that racial appearance is determined by very few of the many genetic loci, and like the far greater number of invisible biological traits, the few visible ‘racial’ features vary in expression continuously across continents. Hair form types and skin colour shades grade into each other; there is no line in nature between a ‘White’ and a ‘Black’ race, or a ‘Caucasoid’ and a ‘Mongoloid’ race. Historical movement of peoples and intermingling of populations complicate but do not disguise the fundamentals of continuous, clinal distribution. Even more destructive of categorical race thinking was the point that the many more numerous invisible traits — for example blood factors and enzymes — also vary continuously across populations, and each varies independently, not in parallel with visible racial markers or in concordance with each other. Simplistic racial categories based merely upon a few ‘package’ traits hardly constitute a scientific approach to human biovariability.
Racism
As global consciousness over racial inequality sharpened during the 1960s, a liberal anthropology affirmed that race does not exist. But racism, the socially organized result of race ranking, clearly did. During the 1930s and 1940s in the USA, several social anthropologists had studied racism in Southern bi-racial communities and in Northern Black ghettos, and their work highlighted contradictions between the US creed of equality and the practice of racial segregation and oppression (Davis et al. 1941; Bond 1988; Drake 1990 [1987]: 44-6, 341). Anthropologists also began to explore the historical formation of racialized societies, comparing local regimes (in Latin America, the Caribbean, the USA, South Africa, Britain) in terms of racial categorization and political economy (Harris 1964; Banton 1983; Drake 1990 [1987]). But with few exceptions – "Eleanor Leacock’s study (1969) of institutionalized racism in New York City public schools was one – by the 1970s anthropologists focused more on ethnicity (expressive processes of cultural identification) than race (repressive processes of social exclusion). While some went as far as to subsume race within ethnicity, or to euphemize race with ‘colour caste’, ‘plural society’ or ‘duality’, others joined "Banton (1983) in stating the need to study ethnicity and race, particularly in societies marked by both White/Black racialization and by White (and Black) ethnic heterogeneity (Drake 1990 [1987]: 58-60).
Still, ethnicity has captured more of the anthropological imagination in recent decades than has race. Ethnographic studies of race in community politics, in schools and housing estates, and in household worker-employer relations (see Cock 1980 on South Africa) are few; Benson’s (1981) careful study of the social networks and acceptance of interracial couples in South London is virtually alone. This situation is likely to change. Global South—North and East-West movements of people are making European and North American societies increasingly more multiracial. As ‘the empire strikes back’, refugees flee repressive societies, and the world’s poor see the future as much in transnational terms as do the rich, so do racial heterogeneity, identity politics and resistance to inequality more and more mark the major institutional landscapes of neighbourhood, workplace, university and political arena, and even kinship and marriage (Gregory and Sanjek 1994).
The publication of Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994) reinvigorated anthropologists’, especially biological anthropologists’, public engagement on the subject of race in the United States. This work was putatively about IQ and class, but clearly put forward an argument linking intelligence with a biological concept of race. Unsurprisingly, its racialist pseudo-science incensed anthropologists (Alland et al. 1996; Marks 2005).This somewhat simplified snippet of biological knowledge undermines most racist ideologies, yet the need for a reiteration of the Boasian tradition in the public sphere was underscored by the Bell Curve furore. From the 1990s onwards, anthropologists in the other subdisciplines reengaged with the notion of race as well, critiquing racial essentialisms embedded in ‘ancestry’ projects (Palmie 2007), collaborating to interrogate racist discourse (Harrison 1998), critiquing geographical conceptions of race from the perspective of physical anthropology (Cartmill 1998), and working to embed anthropological participation in public discourse on race (Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997).
In these circumstances anthropologists ponder not only new research topics, but also the effects of racism and its institutionalization (which no longer requires overt racist attitudes) within their own discipline. The African-American social anthropologist St Clair Drake began his career in the 1930s but despite professional achievements could not do fieldwork in Africa during the 1940s because Melville Herskovits, who chaired the principal funding committee, believed that Whites could do objective research in that continent but Blacks could not (Bond 1988). Zora Neale Hurston, celebrated novelist and student of Boas, died in penury as gender and race discrimination combined to stymie her professional success as an anthropologist. Closer to the present, while anthropologists work and the discipline is widely established in a people-of-all-colours world, by 1989 some 93 per cent of US anthropologists in full-time academic positions were White, even higher than the 89 per cent White figure for all full-time US academics (Alvarez in Gregory and Sanjek 1994), or the 76 per cent White population (which includes persons of North African and Middle East origin) counted in the 1990 US census.
