Classifying Race What is race? humans could also be placed in hierarchies opposites. Fair-skinned The concept of ‘race’ is deeply embedded in where different physical characteristics Europeans were our thinking. Many of us take it as a matter of indicated moral virtues. A popular view considered civilized, fact that people can be grouped into ‘races’ developed, that ‘natural’ inequalities existed intelligent and ‘ruled by according to their origins and appearance. between different ‘racial’ groups, religious custom’ while ‘Race’ asks us to define ourselves and each These theories were the starting point for black Africans were other by dividing characteristics such as skin modern racism, and contributed to the portrayed as lazy, savage, colour. political use of ‘race’ as a method of social crafty and ‘ruled by Carl Linnaeus But, biologically speaking, human beings are and cultural segregation. authority’. in fact just one species or ‘race’. We are one Petrus Camper , a Dutch anatomist believed of the most genetically similar species on the Race, politics and science that the angle of the face of different peoples planet. The small amount of genetic In the 17 th and 18 th centuries the economies showed that black Africans were more like difference between humans that does exist of Europe and America were largely apes than white Europeans. However, often has little to do with where someone dependent on the use of African slave labour. Camper did believe humans were one race comes from. There can be more genetic Yet slavery went against the basic human and openly opposed slavery, famously stating variations between two Chinese people, for rights of freedom and equality that were that ‘all of us are black, only more or less’. example, than between a Chinese and an supposedly championed by American and A scientific understanding African person. ‘Race’ is in fact a social idea European societies. Racial theories were that has evolved over time, and not a genetic used to overcome this contradiction and of difference truth. justify why black Africans could be enslaved Today’s anthropologists (who study the and treated badly. By classing Africans as Race and racism origins and characteristics of human beings) ‘less than human’ it was easier to argue that do not use race to classify humans. During ‘The Enlightenment’ (see ‘The ‘human rights’ did not apply to them. However, while different ‘races’ do not exist, Enlightenment and its impact on medicine) The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus human beings do of course vary. Genetics is biologists and philosophers developed racial believed that the human species comprised helping us understand those differences and ideas that drew on the ancient idea of ‘The four distinct races: Europeans, Africans, put them in context by allowing us, for Chain of Being’. This theory suggested that American Indians and Asians – a theory instance, to identify those of us who are the universe was naturally ordered in a series known as polygenism. Linnaeus presented susceptible to certain diseases (see ‘An of hierarchies. Some thinkers believed Europeans and Africans as extreme Introduction to Genetics’). .