Concept

Race (human categorization)

Overview

Race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society. The term came into common usage during the 16th century, when it was used to refer to groups of various kinds, including those characterized by close kinship relations. By the 17th century, the term began to refer to physical (phenotypical) traits, and then later national affiliations or perceived ancestry. Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partly based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning. The concept of race is foundational to racism, the belief that humans can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another.

Social conceptions and groupings of races have varied over time, often involving folk taxonomies that define essential types of individuals based on perceived traits. Modern scientists consider such biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits.

Even though there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptions of race are untenable, scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways. While some researchers continue to use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behavior, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is inherently naive or simplistic. Still others argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance because all living humans belong to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.

Since the second half of the 20th century, race has been associated with discredited theories of scientific racism and has become increasingly seen as an essentially pseudoscientific system of classification. Although still used in general contexts, race has often been replaced by less ambiguous or loaded terms: populations, people(s), ethnic groups, or communities, depending on context. Its use in genetics was formally renounced by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2023.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Race (human categorization) is discussed.

In Europe the ancient races were all, according to Shaaffhausen (29. Translation in ‘Anthropological Review,’ Oct. 1868, p. 431.), “lower in the scale than the rudest living savages”; they must therefore have differed, to a certain extent, from any existing race. The remains described by Professor Broca from Les Eyzies, though they unfortunately appear to have belonged to a single family, indicate a race with a most…
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
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(Livingstone heard some one say, “God created white and black men, but the devil created the half-castes.”) Crossed races are always at the same time crossed cultures and crossed moralities: they are, as a rule, more evil, cruel, and restless. Purity is the final result of innumerable adjustments, absorptions, and eliminations; and progress towards purity in a race is shown by the fact that the latent strength in…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day
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When we look to the hereditary varieties or races of our domestic animals and plants, and compare them with species closely allied together, we generally perceive in each domestic race, as already remarked, less uniformity of character than in true species. Domestic races of the same species, also, often have a somewhat monstrous character; by which I mean, that, although differing from each other, and from the…
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection
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Now let us consider the other case which is called morality, the case of the rearing of a particular race and species. The most magnificent example of this is offered by Indian morality, and is sanctioned religiously as the “Law of Manu.” In this book the task is set of rearing no less than four races at once: a priestly race, a…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols
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The truth of the second position--that Mankind, as a whole, have become more heterogeneous--is so obvious as scarcely to need illustration. Every work on Ethnology, by its divisions and subdivisions of races, bears testimony to it. Even were we to admit the hypothesis that Mankind originated from several separate stocks, it would still remain true, that as, from each of these stocks, there have sprung many now…
Herbert Spencer, Essays
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Race (human categorization)

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Race (human categorization)

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