Historical Race Concepts - Age of Enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

See also: Scientific Racism#Origins of scientific racism

As noted earlier, scientists attempted to classify Homo sapiens based on a geographic arrangement of human populations based on skin color, others simply on geographic location, shape, stature, food habits, and other distinguishing characteristics. In the 18th century, scientists began to include behavioral or psychological traits in their reported observations- which often had derogatory or demeaning implications – and often assumed that those behavioral or psychological traits were related to their race, and therefore, innate and unchangeable. Other areas of interest were to determine the exact number of races, categorize and name them, and examine the primary and secondary causes of variation between groups.

The Great Chain of Being, a medieval idea that there was a hierarchical structure of life from the most fundamental elements to the most perfect, began to encroach upon the idea of race. As taxonomy grew, scientists began to assume that the human species could be divided into distinct subgroups. One’s “race” necessarily implied that one group had certain character qualities and physical dispositions that differentiated it from other human populations. Society gave different values to those differentiations, which essentially created a gap between races by deeming one race superior or inferior to another race, thus a hierarchy of races. In this way, science was used as justification for unfair treatment of different human populations.

The systematization of race concepts during the Enlightenment period brought with it the conflict between monogenism (a single origin for all human races) and polygenism (the hypothesis that races had separate origins). This debate was originally cast in creationist terms as a question of one versus many creations of humanity, but continued after evolution was widely accepted, at which point the question was given in terms of whether humans had split from their ancestral species one or many times.