E Nathaniel Gates - Critical race theory : essays on the social construction and reproduction of race

Series Editor
E. Nathaniel Gates

Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Yeshiva University

Edited with introductions by
E. Nathaniel Gates
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Yeshiva University

First published by Garland Publishing, Inc.

This edition published 2013

by Routledge

Routledge
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Routledge
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Introductions copyright 1997 E. Nathaniel Gates.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The concept of "race" in natural and social science / edited with
introductions by E. Nathaniel Gates.
p. cm. (Critical race theory; 1)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8153-2600-9 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-8153-2599-1 (set)
1. Race. 2. Health and race. 3. Race awareness. 4. Human
population genetics. I. Gates, E. Nathaniel. II. Series.
GN269.C657 1997
305.8dc21 97-1994
CIP

SET ISBN 9780815325994
POD ISBN 9780415643061
VOL1 9780815326007
VOL2 9780815326014
VOL3 9780815326021
VOL4 9780815326038

The word "race" is a term that originally signalized a narrow genealogical or class identity. Its appearance in the English language is usually traced to the early 1500s, and for most of the sixteenth century the term was taken to indicate a category or class of persons or things and carried with it no implication of biological identity. Initially, the notion of "race" was employed to facilitate the explication of European history and the then fledgling process of nation formation. Taken in this sense, "race" referred to a lineage or common descent and was employed, occasionally, to identify a population with a common history or origin, as opposed to one with a fixed biological character. Over the comparatively brief span of four hundred years, "race" has taken on an entirely new meaning. Beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the first evidence began to emerge that the term "race" had come to be firmly associated with morphological traits and biological inheritance. Gradually, in tandem with this trend, a novel mode of categorization began to develop whereby various European peoples came to apply the term "race" primarily to those populations that resided outside the European continent or beyond the other narrow pales of European settlement.

With the rapid development of science and its ever escalating application to the natural world, the concept of "race" was given a more general application. From the late eighteenth century on, the term "race" was increasingly utilized in reference to human biological types, as science sought to establish the precise number of "races," their respective characteristics, and their purported hierarchical relationships. In the wake of the Enlightenment and the rise of modern "scientific" taxonomies, the word "race" began to be applied to morphologically distinct, somatically denoted, human social groups that were increasingly viewed as permanently constituted amalgams. This essentially ideological transformation, coupled with a dogmatic insistence that the groups so designated were "natural," and thus not socially created, gave birth to the modern notion of genetically distinct, optically distinguishable "races" that were properly regarded as intellectually, politically, and socially homogenous entities.

This process of racializing formerly distinct and culturally divergent populations, reliant as it was upon a morphologically based taxonomy of human beings, was wholly consistent with the general trend and emphasis of the emerging biological science of the late eighteenth century. Because their primary concern was taxonomic, as was evidenced by their efforts to assign every known plant or animal to a species or appropriate subgroup, the early pioneers in the life sciences saw no reason why the procedures so avidly applied to other life forms should not be adopted with respect to Homo sapiens . This "scientific" assertion of the existence of distinct, biologically constituted "races" quickly found itself at odds with the fundamentals of Christian epistemology, and with the prevailing religious discourse about the nature and development of the world and the human species. In contrast to the newly biologized notion of "race," with its emphasis upon the purported heterogeneity of human beings, orthodox Biblical interpretation suggested that Homo sapiens were a homogeneous, divine creation and that the whole of the human species was descended from Adam and Eve.

One method of resolving this conflict without directly impugning the legitimacy of the Biblical explanation of human origins was to argue that God had responded to the commission of human sin with an act of categorical damnation, and that the descendants of those so damned had been marked with distinctive, "racial," features. Another, less fanciful, approach was to claim that various environmental factors had gradually modified the various descendants of Adam and Eve a process that had ultimately eventuated in the appearance of several distinct human types. These types, over time, were said to have become permanently established, due to a combination of their comparative geographic isolation and the natural operations of heredity. By the late eighteenth century, however, it was readily apparent that neither the immigration of European colonists to the tropics, nor the forcible transfer of African slaves to the temperate climes of the Americas, had appreciably altered their morphological constitutions.

In a move that reflected the temper and economic imperatives of the times, these newly established facts were interpreted as support for the argument that environmental factors such as climate were incapable of altering the physical features emblematic of "race." This seemingly conclusive refutation of the environmentalist thesis produced an even sharper conflict with Christian theology. The most notable implication of the collapse of the environmentalist argument was the apparent support it lent to the polygenist contention that distinct "races" of human beings had always existed and that, to the extent they were "racial," extant hierarchies and classifications were as inevitable and unalterable as they were "natural."