Negroid, Mongoloid and
Caucasoid. These are the three races, right? Not so, according to science. While the American concept of race took off in the late 1600s and persists even today, researchers now argue that there’s no scientific basis for race. So, what exactly is race, and what are its origins?
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There was really no such thing as race then,” explained anthropologist Audrey Smedley, author of Race in
North America: Origins of a Worldview, in a 2003
PBS interview. “Although ‘race’ was used as a categorizing term in the English language, like ‘type’ or ‘sort’ or ‘kind, it did not refer to human beings as groups.”
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In the 1800s, Dr. Samuel Morton argued that physical differences between races could be measured, most notably in brain size. Morton’s successor in this field, Louis Agassiz, began “arguing that blacks are not only inferior but they’re a separate
species altogether,” Smedley said.
Thanks to scientific advances, we can now say definitively that individuals such as Morton and Aggasiz are wrong. Race is fluid and thus difficult to pinpoint scientifically. “Race is a concept of human minds, not of nature,” Relethford writes.
Unfortunately, this view hasn’t completely caught on outside of scientific circles.