Transcription
Race is a construct, or a human invention. But who invented it? Race is a system that categorizes human differences—like facial features, hair texture, skin color, etc.—and ranks those differences based on social and political hierarchies. Race was invented as a justification for the forced labor and displacement of indigenous peoples during the Age of Exploration, which was really the age of colonization.
With literal laws and documents, in 1452, Pope Nicholas I issued an edict that declared that all non-Christians could be reduced to perpetual slavery. By 1500, this was codified as the Great Chain of Being, in which European Christians placed themselves on top of a human hierarchy, as being closest to God, with all other peoples below them. As the British and other European empires created colonies, they also passed laws, like the 1662 Partus Sequitur Ventrem, which extended the condition of enslavement from mothers to children. At this point, race had more to do with religion and region than it had to do with skin color or facial features.
Until 1664, the Maryland General Assembly passed a law that dictated that a black skin and residency in Maryland both defined black people and condemned them to enslavement. "White" wasn't a racial or legal designation until laws were passed, like the 1691 law from the Virginia colony that defined white people and passed a law preventing them from having children or marrying black people—a law that stood in Virginia until the Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967.
By the 1700s, European scientists started to use scientific classifications to codify, justify, and standardize the differences and hierarchies created by race. Carl Linnaeus gave us binomial nomenclature, but he also classified human beings into six variations, making sure to account for skin color, facial features, hair texture, hair color, eye color, and other "scientific" things like form of government and what kind of clothes they wore. Racistly, however, he also defined everyone who wasn't Homo sapiens europeus, like he was, as being inherently inferior as a matter of their biology and anatomy. By the end of the 18th century, Johan Blumenbach had separated human beings into five varieties: for Blumenbach, all human differences could be separated into American, Negro, Malayan, Mongolian, and Caucasian—again placing a special emphasis on skin color, facial features, and nationality to dictate who can and cannot participate in society and who is deserving of basic human rights.
From the 1800s on, the United States and other governments around the world used these classifications to categorize people according to race. In this way, race isn't just about categorizing people; it's about dictating, through laws, who has access to basic freedoms and things like housing and education. So race wasn't discovered by humans and then used for evil; it was invented by humans and then used for evil. The study of how those racist laws have racist outcomes is called Critical Race Theory. It's really not that scary.
Today, scientists like those at the American Association of Biological Anthropologists have conclusively demonstrated humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters, and race does not have its roots in biological reality but in policies of discrimination. Race was invented over the past 600 years to do racism. As Dr. Dorothy Roberts said, "Race is not a biological category that's politically charged; it's a political category that's been disguised as a biological one." Race is made up, but racism is real.