Facing America's History of Racism Requires Facing the Origins of 'Race' as a Concept

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The logic behind the history of race initially seems deceivingly clear: to justify the forced deportation of 400,000 Black Africans to North America (and another eleven million to other parts of the Americas between 1525 and 1866), Europeans and their American heirs found it necessary to debase and revile their captives. Yet today’s racism is more than a malignant byproduct of the 19th-century American plantation system; it also grew out of an elaborate and supposedly “scientific” European conception of the human species that began during the Enlightenment.

By the early decades of the 18th century, the Continent’s savants and natural philosophers no longer automatically looked to the Bible to explain the story of the human species. Intent on finding physical explanations for natural phenomena, naturalists employed more “empirical” methods to solve one of the biggest “anthropological” questions of the day: why did people from Africa, millions of whom were already toiling in European plantations, look different from white Europeans?

By the 1740s, one could find a dozen or more purportedly scientific explanations. Some claimed that blackness came from vapors emanating from the skin; others claimed that black skin was passed on from generation to generation via the power of the maternal imagination or from darkened sperm; still others asserted that the heat or the air of the Torrid Zone darkened the humors and stained the skin.

The dominant “anthropological” concept that emerged around 1750 was called degeneration, which can be understood as the precise opposite of what we now know to be true about humankind’s origins. In contrast to the model that shows how evolution and successive human migrations from the African continent account for humanity’s many colors, degeneration theory maintained that there was an original and superior white race, and that this group of humans moved about the globe and mutated in different climates. These morphological and pigmentation changes were not seen as adaptations or the results of natural selection; they were explained as a perversion or deterioration of a higher archetype.

Medical practitioners stepped in to flesh out that vague narrative, creating the basis for the idea of what we now call race. Anatomists, in particular, dissected the bodies of supposedly degenerated Africans, and published numerous now-shocking articles on the supposed damage of living in a tropical climate: black brains, black bile, black sperm and even race-specific black lice.

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