Race; a Changing Term

Race is a contentious topic for many people today, but the word race has developed over many hundreds of years and to understand it purely you must fully understand the context of the term race. In this blog we will discuss the three major stages of race's life as a word, firstly its use in categorizing people into groups of shared lineage,  secondly its use to put humans on a hierarchical ladder with some races being better than others, and finally today as a way to categorize people visually

Race as we know it today is a way to visually categorize people into different groups based on appearance, but it has not always been this way. The word race was first used to describe a group of people with the same lineage (British race, Roman race, etc.), and it was first used by the French and later adopted by the English. The word race was not used much in the context of your personal ethnicity, but rather whose rule you are under. For example, if someone was born in Eastern Europe in the time of the Byzantine Empire, their race would be considered as Byzantium or Roman, rather than Albanian or Serbia. This definition of race quickly changed when Western Europeans realized that using racism could justify their treatment of other people. 

Race's definition quickly changed from a way to categorize people using their lineage, to a hierarchical scale where every race is worth more or less compared to each other. The first person who thought to divide humans into different categories using superiority as a measure was a man named Johan Friedrich Blumenbach who divided humans into the following 5 major groups: Caucasian,  Mongolian, Ethiopian,  American, and Malay. Although it is obvious today, this idea of race was widely accepted by most until the early to mid-20th century and is still accepted by many today.  The effects of using this categorization to justify the atrocities felt by subjugated people across the world. But out of this fallacy came our commonly accepted meaning of race today.

Race today is still a complex word that many people across the world look at differently. For most race simply means what you look like and how you are perceived in today's world. For example, if someone is one-eighth black but feels the societal impacts of their race because of their appearance they are considered black in society, but if someone if one-quarter Asian but does not feel the societal disadvantages of being Asian in North America because of their appearance, they would be considered white. This makes race today a complex issue intersecting heritage, privilege, and ethnicity. 

With all that being said, it is safe to say that we do not know how the word race will be used in the future, but it does tell us an important lesson about history. History is written by whoever holds the power in any given society, throughout time this has always been men from Western powers. Because of this many of the things we think of as normal today, are rooted in a deep history packed with context.