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race A historical means of social clas-
sification and differentiation that attempts to
essentialize political and cultural differences
by linking physical traits (i.e. skin, blood,
genes) and social practices (i.e.religion,vio-
lence, passion) to innate, immutable charac-
teristics (seeessentialism). Race as a concept
presumes that characteristics (tendencies,
behaviours, dispositions, interests) of an indi-
vidual can be projected to understandings of
essential traits of a population or that the pre-
sumed traits of a population can be discerned
through the characteristics of an individual.
Though these assumptions have been widely
and exhaustively disproven, they still operate
as ‘common sense’ in society with powerful
and violent effects. As such, race is asocial
constructionbutracismis a material fact.
The contemporary meaning of ‘race’ has
roots in older forms of hierarchy and classifi-
cation, but its contemporary form as an innate
physiological or genetic means of differentiat-
ing individuals and populations is largely
the product of eighteenth-century social
relationships associated with the European
enlightenmentandcolonialism(see also
europe). Most scholars agree that earlier
forms of social differentiation and hierarchy
were different from modern ideas of race. In
the ancient world, for example, the Greeks
distinguished between the ‘civilized’ and ‘bar-
barous’, the Romans between freedom and
slavery, and the Christians between the savage
and the saved. But in all these cases difference
was not fixed: barbarians could become ‘civil-
ized’ in Greek cities, Roman slaves were not
determined by inherited traits, and Christians
were offered the possibility of salvation
through conversion.
The most powerful antecedents to the con-
temporary notion of race can be found in the
Christian notion of the Great Chain of Being,
which depicted a hierarchy in the order of
things as immutably fixed by God, and the
idea of succession to kingship or royalty based
on a line of descent (or bloodline). These
notions provided the basis for identifying
populations through a fixed and defining fea-
ture such as blood. In the fifteenth century, for
example, it was deemed impossible for Jews to
convert to Christianity by virtue of their blood,a doctrine that helped to define the notion
of a Jewish population that was supposedly
distinctive and unassimilable through its
shared immutable qualities. Similar appeals
to a naturalized hierarchy were made in
the sixteenth-century debates between
Bartolome ́de Las Casas and Juan Gine ́sde
Sepu ́lveda, concerning the treatment of the
indigenous inhabitants of the Spanish colonies
in South America as either child-like human
beings (who could thus be converted to
Christianity) or ‘savages’ (whose exploitation
could be justified through their lower position
in the natural order of things). The Spanish
Empire developed a doctrine of ‘blood purity’
(limpeza de sangre) that allowed and even
required the differential treatment of those
who could not be converted because of the
supposed impurity of their blood, and the
subsequent hierarchical classification by
blood provided an influential precedent for
modern formations of race (Darder and
Torres, 2004).
The term ‘race’ came into English usage in
the seventeenth century and here too it was
most forcefully articulated through Anglo-
American projects of colonization in the
New World. In developing a concept ofcivil-
ization that was supposedly coterminous
with thewest, particularly in the eighteenth
century, Europeans and Americans fabri-
cated cultural and behavioral (‘racial’) traits
that legitimized their own superiority and
exploitative colonial practices. But these
ascriptions were more than the productof
an expansive, exploitative and European pro-
ject ofmodernity, and scholars such as Ann
Stoler (1995) and Paul Gilroy (2000a) have
sought to show that ‘race’ isconstitutiveof
modernity itself.
The modern notion of ‘race’ thus has a
complexgenealogy, but it has been most
forcefully advanced through the claim that it
is a demonstrably scientific concept. As such,
‘race’ is inseparable from the development of
so-called ‘natural history’ in general and the
work of the Swedish scholar Carolus Linnaeus
(1707–71) in particular. Linnaeus is usually
regarded as the founder of modern scientific
systems ofclassification. He divided human
beings into four taxonomic sub-orders, whoseGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_R-new Final Proof page 615 2.4.2009 9:12pm