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The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. and ed. Thomas Bendyshe, London: Anthropological Society, 1865, 312.) However, his appraisal of the aesthetic of whites as Caucasians was (ab)used to legitimize and inspire racist interpretations of his human racial taxonomy.
- The Origin of Race
- Race and The Enlightenment
- Enter White Supremacy
- The Arrival of Race in The English-Speaking World
- Racism Leaves Its Legacy
- The “Black” Irish
- Race and Slavery
- Race: The Great Divider
- Race and Immigration
- Race and Colonialism
It’s probably impossible to pinpoint the origins of race to one time and place, but racism as we know it existed long before White settlers of European-descent enslaved Black Africans. In the later part of the 14th century, there was an anti-Jewish contingent in Spain that demanded conversion or death; the period became known as the Spanish Inquisi...
During the 18th century, European Enlightenment-era scholars and scientists including Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus and German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach further solidified the basis for race and, by extension, racism. Influenced by the classification systems earlier botanists and biologists had developed for plants, Linnaeus crea...
At the end of the 1700s, Blumenbach came up with five human categories: American, Malay, Ethiopian, Mongolian, and Caucasian. Tellingly, Blumenbach chose the term “Caucasian” to represent Europeans because he considered a skull he’d found in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia to be his most beautiful discovery. The classification systems of both Linn...
One of the earliest known uses of “race” in the English language was in the late 16th century when it had a different meaning than the one we apply to it today. Back then, it was a term of categorization used to rank human beings by, in a sense, class rather than appearance. In the days of Shakespeare, people might refer to a “race of saints” or a ...
By the 18th century, as colonization in the New World introduced Europeans to people from different parts of the planet that had markedly different cultures and appearances, “race” began to take on a different meaning. Settlers on the American continents used it to separate themselves from Native Americans (Amerindians) and the Black people who had...
The English didn’t reserve their system of segregation only for people originating on other continents who looked significantly different. As early as the 17th century, they were lumping the Irish into the “other” category and regarding them as savages. Indeed, they were considered the Black people of Europe. Although the Irish resisted England’s a...
New Word Settlers were battling Indians for their land and enslaving Africans at the same time, but both groups faced wildly different fates in America. Africans had more immunity to the diseases Europeans brought from the old continent to the new one, unlike Native Americans, many of whom succumbed to them. In other words, there weren’t enough Nat...
Although the demands of slavery required an enormous amount of strength and stamina, White Americans regarded Africans as being intellectually inferior and therefore better suited to lives of enslavement. As they saw it, God had created a hierarchy of men in which White people were at the top and Black people were at the bottom. The successful Hait...
Even after the Civil War led to the emancipation of the slaves, segregation and Jim Crow laws kept the so-called races separate. The influx of people from other parts of the world into the United States made classification more important to the ruling class. “The history of U.S. immigration and nationality law demonstrates how race became a factor ...
During the 19th and 20th centuries, European colonization of Asian and African countries aided and abetted the idea of racial superiority. “What is sometimes overlooked is that the racial ideas of the pro-slavery lobby were also aimed at Africans in their home continent,” David Olusoga wrote in theGuardian in 2015. “The impact of Atlantic slavery o...
- Jeremy Helligar
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (11 May 1752 – 22 January 1840) was a German physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist. He is considered to be a main founder of zoology and anthropology as comparative, scientific disciplines. He has been called the "founder of racial classifications."
- Christian Wilhelm Büttner
- Göttingen
Expanding on the work of Carolus Linnaeus, German professor of medicine Johann Friedrich Blumenbach introduced one of the race-based classifications in On the Natural Variety of Mankind. In the second edition Blumenbach changed his original geographically based four-race arrangement to a five-group one that emphasized physical morphology (the ...
Dec 20, 2007 · Firstly, the mapping of the human genome is enabling the importance of genetics in creating and perpetuating differences between populations to be analysed thoroughly. 2 Secondly, personalised medicine has been rejuvenated by pharmacogenomics, which is finding racial classification, for all its weaknesses, a convenient though crude route to unde...
- Raj Bhopal
- 2007
This illustration, from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s 1795 De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, shows Blumenbach’s categorization of humans in to five different “varieties.” He made these classifications from differences in skull structure, which he attributed to different climates.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's anthropological classification under the heading "Racial Geometry." In this chapter Gould claims that Blumenbach's influence was crucial in the transition from a geographical to a hierachical ordering of human diversity. This shift not only shaped the further development of anthropology, but-according to Gould-it had
