is right, although there's some additional background history on the subject (which is why I usually date the invention of "race" as used today to the 1500s). But why trouble yourself with education when you can just make up whatever crap you want to believe? Freedumb!
The word "race," along with many of the ideas now associated with the term were products of European imperialism and colonization during the age of exploration. (Smedley 1999) As Europeans encountered people from different parts of the world, they speculated about the physical, social, and cultural differences among various human groups, which marked the early stages of the development of science. Scientists who were interested in natural history, including biological and geological scientists, were known as “naturalists”. They would collect, examine, describe, and arrange data from their explorations into categories according to certain criteria. People who were particularly skilled at organizing specific sets of data in a logically and comprehensive fashion were known as classifiers and systematists. This process was a new trend in science that served to help answer fundamental questions by collecting and organizing materials for systematic study, also known as taxonomy.[11]
As the study of natural history grew, so did society’s effort to classify human groups. Some zoologists and scientists wondered what made humans different from animals in the primate family. Furthermore, they contemplated whether homo sapiens should be classified as one species with multiple varieties or separate species.
In the 16th and 17th century, 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. Occasionally the term “race” was used but most of the early taxonomist used classificatory terms such as “peoples,” “nations,” “types,” “varieties,” and “species.”
Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) and Jean Bodin (1530–1596), French philosopher, attempted a rudimentary geographic arrangement of known human populations based on skin color. Bodin’s color classifications were purely descriptive, including neutral terms such as “duskish colour, like roasted quinze,” “black,” “chestnut,” and “farish white.” [11]
17th century
German and English scientists, Bernhard Varen (1622–1650) and John Ray (1627–1705) classified human populations into categories according to stature, shape, food habits, and skin color, along with any other distinguishing characteristics.[11] Ray was also the first person to produce a biological definition of species.
François Bernier (1625–1688) is believed to have developed the first comprehensive classification of humans into distinct races which was published in a French journal article in 1684, Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races l'habitant, New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it. (Gossett, 1997:32–33). Bernier advocated using the “four quarters” of the globe as the basis for providing labels for human differences.[11] The four subgroups that Bernier used were Europeans, Far Easterners, Negroes (blacks), and Lapps.[12]
18th century
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 creating a hierarchy of races. This notion placed the Atlantean race with highest superiority, later causing a great uprising from the lower races and destroying Atlantis. 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.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
Blumenbach's five races.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) divided the human species into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research (description of human skulls), and called them (1793/1795):
the Caucasian race
the Mongoloid race
the Malay race
the Negroid race
the American race
(See also color terminology for race.)
These five groupings together with two other additional groupings called the Australoid race (1940s) and the Capoid race (early 1960s), making a total of seven groupings in all, are today known as the traditional racial classifications or the historical definition of race. These groupings are still used today in historical anthropology that describes human migration and in forensics.
