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distinctive traits he directly linked to skin
colour. Thus theEuropeaeuswas supposedly
white, gentle, sanguine, inventive and ruled
by law, while Africanus was black, crafty,
negligent and governed by caprice. In devel-
oping this taxonomy, Linneaus effectively
subsumed cultural formations within the
taxonomical order ofnature. In 1745, the
French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc
Buffon (1707–88) explicitly introduced the
term ‘race’ into natural history and, develop-
ing Linnaeus’ categories, divided human
beings into separate ‘races’. Although Buffon
acknowledged the artificiality of these divi-
sions, they were subsequently reified by the
German anthropologist and physiologist
Johnann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–
1840), who developed a classification of
five human types based on cranial skull
measurements: this system served as the ‘sci-
entific’ basis for racial classification for almost
200 years – and even though it has been
widely repudiated, it is still present in popular
culture today.
But it was throughdarwinismand populist
simplifications of Darwin’s ideas of ‘natural
selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ that the
most pernicious formations of ‘race’ were nat-
uralized. Most notable was Francis Galton
(1822–1911), Darwin’s half-cousin, who
applied a version of Darwinian theories to
human society and in 1883 developed the
concept ofEugenics(‘good genes’) to encour-
age socially engineered heredity as a means of
improving the human race. In the USA, the
Eugenics movement found an appreciative
audience in the context of increasingimmi-
gration,povertyand violent labour politics,
where it seemed to offer a means not only of
social improvement but also of social control.
The initial focus was on ‘positive eugenics’
through birth control, selective breeding and
eventually genetic engineering to assure ‘bet-
ter babies’; but a ‘negative eugenics’ was sub-
sequently developed, which advocated forced
sterilization and segregation to preserve the
purity of the white race. These concepts
reached their hideous climax in Nazi
Germany under the banner of ‘racial
hygiene’, when ‘Aryan’ women were impreg-
nated by SS officers, hundreds of thousands
of people who were declared unfit were s-
terilized, and millions more ‘undesirables’,
primarily Jews but also gypsies and homosex-
uals, were murdered to protect the ‘purity’ of
the Aryan race (see holocaust). Here,modern biological racism was taken to its
‘logical’ end, in which some presumed innate
behavioral qualities and social status could
only be addressed through the extermination
of the biology of individuals who were con-
sidered the sources of the problem (Larson,
1995: cf.biopolitics).
Even after the widespread postwar repudi-
ation of Nazi race science and Eugenics, the
claim that there is an innate scientific basis to
‘race’, fusing physiological features to social
behaviours, is still a common means of social
classification, and continues to be a powerful
strategy of dividing, ranking and controlling
people around the world. Newer efforts from
sociobiology, neo-Darwinism, evolutionary
psychology, some strains of evolutionary
anthropology and biology as well as some
versions of genetics continue to search for a
physical basis for ‘racial’ difference, while
state-sponsored systems of racial profiling
assume that such a basis has been found and
can be deployed as an effective weapon against
crimeorterrorism.
The problem with the debates around race,
as W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out over a century
ago when he abandoned his efforts to show its
erroneous foundation, is that the very idea of
race has been so comprehensively woven into
the social and psychological fabric ofsociety
that simply revealing the fallaciousness of
racial classification does little to expunge the
term or diminish its extraordinary power. He
wrote that ‘in the fight against race prejudice,
we were not facing simply the rational con-
scious determination of white folk to oppress
us; we were facing age-long complexes sunk
now largely to unconscious habit and irratio-
nal urge’ (Du Bois, 1986 [1940], p. 296). This
realization that constructs of ‘race’ are embed-
ded within the formation of modern human
subjectivitywas developed by Frantz Fanon
(1925–61) who, inBlack skin,white masksin
particular, emphasized how ‘race’ is impli-
cated in both how one comes to know and
define a self and how that self is articulated
and transformed as it acts and is acted upon in
the world (Fanon, 1967 [1952]). These and
other critiques prompted a shift towards an
analysis of how ‘race’ comes into being though
law,popularcultureand everyday practices of
racial formation (see alsopost-colonialism).
The critique of race-based cultural forma-
tions hasbeenreinforced by parallel debates
within and, indeed, about the very ‘nature’ of
science. Most famously, Richard LewontinGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_R-new Final Proof page 616 2.4.2009 9:12pmRACE