What is “race”? We hear a great deal today about race and racism, but where did this thinking start? In the next few lessons in History we will be looking into the ideas and influences that gave rise to the sort of issues we struggle with today.
DNA was only discovered and properly understood in the late twentieth century and then people were able to prove that there really is no important difference between the make-up of people of different races, but before that scientists often tried to prove that the characteristic features such as skin tone that we link to “race” were linked to other differences such as temperament, intelligence, and character and this was often used to justify decisions to treat people of different races in different ways.
The sort of thinking that regarded people of other races as different has always been around, but it really gained ground and support during the nineteenth century when it was given a (false) “scientific” backing. [This sort of false science is called pseudo-science]
Some important things happened in the nineteenth century that influenced this:
- The abolitionist movement This was the growing number of people and writers who were fighting for the banning (abolition) of slavery. People who were profiting from slavery were desperately looking for support for the practice of keeping slaves and denying equality to different races whilst abolitionists were working equally hard to convince everyone that all people were entitled to equal treatment and were really just the same despite small differences on the surface.
- Darwin and evolutionary science Charles Darwin was one of a group of natural scientists who began publishing books about the idea of evolution and how there is a probable link between humans and other animals. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus invented a system for classifying all living things into groups, families, and species. It was easy to jump from there to the point of classifying the different human groups (races) as being different species and then to decide that some races were more “evolved” or advanced than others and therefore superior.
- Developments in mass media and photography Around the same time there were significant developments in photographic technology and newspaper printing that allowed for the spreading of photographs of different cultures and races and this was used to make the ideas of Darwin and others even more widely known and popular.
The following article takes an interesting look at how science was used to justify ideas about race and at how some people opposed this and it poses some interesting questions for you to answer in short paragraphs:
https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-2/science-race