COLORS INTO RACES

The modern meaning of race originated in eighteenth-century zoology, and was later applied to. humans by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who formulated a terminology of physical anthropology and classified humankind into the now all-too-familiar color categories: black, brown, yellow, red and white. Blumenbach, influenced by the relatively open-minded and non-xenophobic ideology of the Enlightenment, stressed both the continuity of racial varieties as part of a great human unity, and the impossibility of drawing exact demarcations. Similarly his compatriot, Johann Herder, in locating race within the social sciences, saw it as the result more of the “physico-geographical history of man” than of a “systematic natural history.” The scientific interest in racial classification was deepened by European exposure to a greater variety of previously unknown human “types” in the expeditions of the late eighteenth century, as well as by Europe's increasing intercontinental trade with, and economic dependency upon, non-European resources – especially the African slave trade.

During the nineteenth century scientists reified the concept of race and endowed it with explanatory powers beyond its initial taxonomic purpose. In the first half of the century, polygenism became popular and the perceived distinctions among races sharply widened. Physical differences were correlated with cultural and social status through biological justification.