INTRODUCTION

The idea of race, so intrinsic a part of American social life, is a surprisingly ephemeral one. The ancient world conceptualized human diversity in purely local terms, and the idea that the human species could be naturally partitioned into a reasonably small number of reasonably discrete kinds of people does not seem to have been seriously entertained until the late seventeenth century (Hannaford, 1996; Hudson, 1996; Jahoda, 1999; Stuurman, 2000). The term “race” was introduced into biological discourse by Buffon in the eighteenth century, but he used the term in an entirely colloquial, not taxonomic, way. In this sense the term meant the equivalent of a “strain” or “variety” – a group of organisms linked by the possession of familial features. Buffon's rival Linnaeus, the founder of modern taxonomy, divided humans into four geographical subspecies – although he did not call them “races.” The succeeding generation fused Buffon's word with Linnaeus's concept, and thus created the scientific term “race,” used well into the twentieth century.

The Linnaean concept of race, however, was a Platonic or essentialist idea – describing not a reality (how organisms are), but a hyper-reality (the imaginary form they represent). Thus, Linnaeus (1758, p. 21) defined “Homo sapiens Europaeus albus” – that is to say, white European Homo sapiens – as having “long flowing blond hair” and “blue eyes” (Pilis flavescentibus prolixis. Oculis caeruleis).