race is an invention

Race has no basis in biology, it had to be invented; but like other social constructs (e.g. money, fame) is has very real consequences for people’s lives.

This episode from the Seeing White podcast series was eye-opening about the history of how race was constructed. From an interview with Ibram Kendi about his book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, an important figure was the 14th-century Portuguese historian Gomes de Zurara, who was hired to whitewash the reputation of Prince Henry the Navigator. As a slave-trader, Henry’s profiting off of human misery did not sit well with the Catholics of his day. So Zurara sought to portray the various peoples Henry enslaved—people of widely varying skin tones from across the African coast who had never been considered a unified group—as a single group fundamentally different from Europeans, and, crucially, inferior to them. In this way, their enslavement could be seen as a blessing, lifting these people out of what he called “bestial sloth” into the light of European Christian civilization. This novel distinction, between superior “white” Europeans and inferior “black” Africans, was successful in making the profitable slave trade seem morally palatable to nominally Christian Europeans and so gained currency in Spain, France, England, and eventually the latter’s American colonies. It’s important to recognize that before this point, the idea of “race” did not exist. The French did not think of themselves as part of a group with the English that did not include Moroccans. Italians were closer both culturally and genetically with African Tunisians (formerly Carthaginians) than with the German peoples. To the point about genetics,

There is more genetic variation within groups that have come to be called races than there is across groups that have come to be called races.

This is what Ta-Nehisi Coates means by “race is the child of racism”. From his book Between the World and Me:

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.

In the book, Coates refers not to “white people” but to “people who believe that they are white” and even “people who need to be white”, which was my first encounter with skepticism of the idea that race is a natural, essential category. And historically, white people did need to believe in race, for, as is often the case, economic reasons. As noted above, race had to be invented by Christians who wanted to do some very profitable but inconveniently un-Christian enslaving and selling of other people, in order to reconcile enslavement with the principles of their religion.

A later Seeing White episode delved into the legal history of whiteness in the United States. For a long time, in order to become a U.S. citizen you had to be considered white, a concept inconsistently defined across states and time. For instance, a Japanese man, Takao Ozawa, argued before the Supreme Court that as a light-skinned Asian man he should be considered white and granted citizenship. The Court decides against him by moving the goalposts and arguing that while he is light-skinned, to be white you must also be Caucasian. That term is synonymous with “white” today but literally means you are a descendant of peoples from the Caucasus Mountains in western Asia. This new definition was tested in a later case brought by Bhagat Singh Thind, an Sikh immigrant from India who served in the U.S. Army and sought to become a naturalized citizen. Thind had anthropology on his side, because what the earlier Supreme Court failed to realize is that South Asians are just as much Caucasian descendants as “white” Europeans, as the term for people living around the Caucasus Mountains in 4000 BC—“Proto-Indo-Europeans”—would suggest. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court ruled that Thind did not meet the “common sense” definition of white, abandoning any attempt at defining whiteness and revealing the ultimate fluidity and arbitrariness of the concept.

“Colorblindness”

“Colorblindness” refers to a movement to ignore race. While a society in which one’s perceived race doesn’t matter is a laudable ideal, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes in “The ‘Colorbindness’ Trap: How a civil rights idea got hijacked“ about the long history of racist reactionaries weaponizing the ideal of “colorblindness” to oppose justice and maintain the system of racial caste in the United States.