5 Summary
Key Takeaways
- The earliest racial classifications, established by Francois Bernier and Carl Linnaeus, created a hierarchy, positioning people of European descent at the top and those of African descent at the bottom. Both Bernier and Linnaeus used physical attributes to group individuals into races, but Linnaeus’s use of the four temperaments and humors in his classification also assigned biological consequences to each race. Linnaeus’s use of the four temperaments and humors in his racial classification system was a turning point in how people began to think about race, as it laid the foundation for racial hierarchies and helped fuel scientific racism that has endured across cultures and centuries.
- In the United States, race became a tool to categorize and marginalize nonwhite people—labeling Native Americans as “savages” and Africans as “subhuman.” This racial framework helped create a privileged white identity, uniting white individuals while systematically excluding and oppressing others based on appearance. From the beginning, the concepts of race and slavery in the Americas were closely linked, evolving together to support the economic and social interests of the colonists. Even as American colonists fought for their own independence from British rule, many continued to enslave others—despite the clear contradiction between slavery and the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness outlined in the American Declaration of Independence. Thus, the ideology of white supremacy emerged alongside the institutionalization of slavery in the United States, providing a moral justification for the oppression of people of color, particularly those of African descent.
- Pseudoscientific theories about racial differences were promoted to justify the belief that nonwhite people were naturally inferior and therefore fit for enslavement. Practices like eugenics, forced sterilization, and experimentation were employed to eliminate those considered inferior, including people of color. Hilter and the Nazi regime adopted these same practices in their systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews.
- The Human Genome Project established that there is no scientific basis for race, however, the notion of white superiority and its biological rationale laid the foundation for modern concepts of race and entrenched systems of oppression that continue to endure today.
