The myth of race, the paucity of language

[DanaC]

The meaning of the word race has changed considerably over the centuries. What's interesting is that, it seems to take on the newer meanings without ever completeely dropping the old. Those earlier meanings were often quite vaguely defined compared to what came later. it was kind of about blood - and about geographical loyalty and identity - kind of about nation in a way. The English race, the French race etc. But also - at lower levels of that - so someone might describe the Cornish as a race of men - or Yorkshiremen. There's a sense of breed about it too. The word was used in different ways to convey all those different meanings - it wasn't really about colour, or rather it wasn't about the divide between light and dark as it started tobecome - it wasn't about racial hierarchies in that way.

Growth of interest in natural history and the beginnings of the scientific method led to an attempt to categorise the fuck out of everything. Taxonomic studies of animals and plants - and of humans. You end up with a set of meanings around race that draw arbitray divisions - or divisions based on fundamentally superficial features.

The dwellar men may be interested to know that a lot of the focus of those studies was on the womenfolk - taking as the start point that the white, European woman represented the pinnacle of womanhood, they then used the body shape, and particularly breast size and shape to help clarify racial distinctions between the 'lesser' or less evolved races.

This idea of the evolution of civilisations - all wrapped up in the idea of races - held that man started in a state of nature and progressed at different paces according to a range of factors. But that progression was not just in terms of civilisation and technical development, it was seen as a progression of man - so the cultures that were less developed in the eyes of the Europeans, were also assumed to be a less developed, less evolved people. They were further behind on the journey.

Then the idea of evolution took on very different connotations, with Darwin's theory - this then gets applied to evolution of humans - and race starts to take on another set of new meanings.

Today - we are far more concerned in much of our cultural discourse in self-identity, than externally imposed identities. At the same time, so much of what we have learned about ourselves as a species, from a genetic standpoint sets on its head the idea of race as any kind of useful distinction.