Historical Origins of Racial Classification
See also: Historical definitions of raceGroups of humans have probably always identified themselves as distinct from other groups, but such differences have not always been understood to be natural, immutable and global. These features are the distinguishing features of how the concept of race is used today.
The word "race" was originally used to refer to any nations or ethnic groups. Marco Polo in his 13th-century travels, for example, describes the Persian race—the current concept of "race" dates back only to the 17th century.
Read more about this topic: Contemporary Views On Race
Famous quotes containing the words historical, origins and/or racial:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“... all Americans are the prisoners of racial prejudice.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)