The Aryan race is a concept historically influential in Western culture in the period of the late 19th century and early 20th century. It derives from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages and their descendants up to the present day constitute a distinctive race or subrace of the larger Caucasian race. Belief in the existence of an Aryan race is sometimes referred to as "Aryanism".
While originally meant simply as a neutral ethno-linguistic classification, it was later used for ideologically motivated racism in Nazi and neo-Nazi doctrine, as well as in occultism and white supremacism in particular.
Read more about Aryan Race: Origin of The Term, 19th-century Physical Anthropology, Indo-Aryan Migration
Famous quotes containing the word race:
“...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the “tough guy;” today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)