The Race Race

Well Shaped Female Skull

background photo: Serhii Tyaglovsky on Unsplash

The human race should just slow down and think about what it is doing.
〰 Michael Palin 〰

A Racy Word

Race is a funny (in the sense of odd) word in English. Oddly enough, it entered Old English around 1300 in the sense of narrative, account, as well as the act of running. The original Old Norse rās referred to the rush of running water.

In a way, the narrative-definition makes sense, when we think of a story as a current of events, flowing ~ or rushing ~ from one scene to the next.

The story of race begins with a verb. To race, in the sense of rushing, was first recorded in English around 1200 (btw, many English words are ‘first recorded around 1200’, according to etymonline ~ presumably lexicography wasn't 'a thing' before that date.)

Over time, the speed of the word race accelerated. From a course which runs naturally e.g. the race of life (1300) via the track of celestial bodies across the sky (1580s) the running in a competition (1809) spread into a wide range of competitive activities with high velocity as a central feature:::

race horse (1620s)

foot-race (1660s)

racing (as a noun, 1670s)

race-course (1764)

race track (1814)

arms race (1930)

rat race (1934)

moon race (1963)

The other race-word, in the sense of people descended from a common ancestor entered the English language in the 1560s via the Roman lineage. Coming from the French race, it carried the meaning of breed, lineage, family plus some overlaps with gender and sex.

In contrast to the competing/rushing-race, this other English race is a collective noun. In its initial sense it could refer to ‘wines with a characteristic flavour’ or a ‘group of people with common occupation’.

The adjective racy (1650s = a characteristic agreeable taste; a flavour imparted by the soil) reflects the original meaning of the collective-race noun. In other words, the collective-race in essence captures a connection with the earth, or a particular patch of earth, which we might call home-soil.

In its early life, race could be synonymous with generation, vintage, type, or nation. The meanings of tribe and ethnicity developed in the late 18th – early 19th century, influenced by the work of German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840).

True to the obsession of science with categorising and classifying the world, Blumenbach came up with the idea to divide mankind into five races, based on different shapes of the skull:::

Mongolian

Ethiopian

Malay

Native American

Caucasian

Blumenbach’s ‘Caucasian Race’ included all Europeans (except Lapps and Finns), Armenians, Iranians, Indians, Arabs and Jews.

With the head shape as the touchstone for this categorisation you would have thought that Blumenbach studied a considerable number of skulls from ‘Caucasian ancestors’ across the board (male, female, adult, juvenile etc...)

Far from it! The distinguished anthropologist based his assessment on one solitary Georgian skull. That ‘Caucasian skull’ was allegedly 'the finest in Blumenbach’s collection'.

original photo: Markus Ganahl on Unsplash, sand sculpture from 2021 festival in Rohrschach, Switzerland

Why Semites are Caucasians

Ten years after Blumenbach’s death, English ethnologist and MD Robert G Latham published a groundbreaking book of his own, reminiscent of 'a taxonomy of humans'. He was taking physiognomy and stature into account as well.

In The Natural History of the Varieties of Mankind, Latham presents a much greater diversity of human ethnic groups. His system is supposedly a more accurate reflection of different types of people populating planet Earth.

(I never read the book. The 500+ page tome  is freely available on Project Gutenberg)

In his commentary on Blumenbach’s system, Latham laments: “Never has a single head done more harm to science than was done in the way of posthumous mischief by the head of this well-shaped female from Georgia.”

The comment reveals far more about the deeply rooted 'mischief' of Anthropocentric mentality ~ and the entrenched misogynistic attitude of science ~ than the alleged 'harmful dead female' to whom R. G. Latham intended to pass the buck.

If a (male) scientist uses a ‘well-shaped female head’ as a basis for random 'scientific' categorisation

~ and another (male) scientist later falsifies this colleague's earlier theory

~ how bizarre is it to accuse an innocent female of ‘posthumous mischief’?!

Despite Latham’s attempts to set the records straight, Blumenbach’s categorisation stuck, and all kinds of people identify with ‘Caucasian’ to this day.

Why Caucasian?

I mean, Blumenbach could have called the race ‘Georgian’ or 'Aryan'. Why has the Caucasian region become so relevant for the ‘racial distinction’ of mankind?

The geographical location is based on an ancient myth, first mentioned in the Jewish Torah, adopted by the Christian Old Testament, and reshuffled in the Islamic Qur’an. The story I’m referring to is the myth of Noah’s Ark.

According to the Holy Books of the Jews and Christians a global climate catastrophe happened fairly early on in the history of mankind. The humans God had created were not behaving as the divine Creator had intended, so he sent a massive flood which lasted 40 days and drowned the whole planet out.

However, not every human was destined to die. God recognised one guy as different from the hoi polloi. His name was Noah (= rest). And because he was a man (I presume) his whole family received the divine nod of approval as well.

God instructed Noah to build a large box and make it seaworthy. This ark (= large box, chest; seat of emotions) was meant to be big enough to temporarily house Noah’s family and a whole zoo of land animals.

God was up to something. He wasn’t joking, and Noah knew it. So he built that ark, gathered his three sons and all four wives (three daughters in law + his own madam), specimen pairs of all land animals, and some birds who wouldn’t have lasted for forty days without touching dry ground 〰 and the rest is history, or so we’ve come to believe...

The Torah and Bible unanimously declare the Great Deluge a 'global event'. All the heathens drowned, and only the faithful survived. Those faithful survivors were Noah, his three sons Sem, Ham and Japhet, and ‘the four wives’ ~ too insignificant as individuals to be mentioned by name.

In contrast to the Bible and Torah, the Qur’an insists that the flood was a local event, drowning only Noah’s wicked people. All other nations survived!

All three Abrahamic religions agree that when the ark eventually landed on dry ground, Noah and his family found themselves on Mount Ararat, which is close to the Caucasian mountains.*

After finding their bearings in the unfamiliar surroundings of Mount Ararat, Noah’s sons, Sem, Ham, and Japhet allegedly set off in different directions, each followed by their anonymous significant other. The descendants of Sem became the Semites, Ham founded the clan of Hamites, and Japhet is recognised as the ancestor of the Japhites.

The word Semitic was coined in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History (GSH), referring to the language group of ancient and contemporary languages spoken in parts of Asia, North-Africa and Southern Europe.

This means, Arabs and Jews (among others) were classified as Semitic by the GSH and as Caucasian by J.F. Blumenbach, both in Germany in the late 18th century.

*As an aside, the story of Noah's Ark, popularised by the Abrahamic religions, is not the only myth of its nature. 'Great Flood Myths' have been told in many cultures all over the world. Some of them are mentioned in this short video on worldhistory.org. This means, calling Noah and his sons the 'progenitors of ALL HUMANS on planet earth' is only an assumption ~ a hypothesis ~ representative of the European mindset in the Era of Enlightenment.

Race + Ism = Agenda

When J. F. Blumenbach had completed his system of ‘five races’ he insisted that the categorisation and distinction had nothing to with supremacy or inferiority. In the mind of its originator, the ’racial division concept’ was a purely scientific exercise, on a par with the systematic arrangement of living organisms into classes, orders, families, genus, and species.

What Blumenbach and his contemporaries couldn’t foresee was that their Age of Reason, aka the Era of Enlightenment, would kickstart the competing-race of the Anthropocene and send us all hurtling into Post-Truth Chaos.

[Having said that, the writing was about to appear on the proverbial wall. In 1856 Charles Darwin published his ‘bestseller’ On the Origin of the Species which would be used to cement the theory of the 'competitive nature of man' and ‘survival of the fittest’ in the collective Western mind for generations to come.]

By 1928 collective-race had paired up with -ism to establish a doctrine of racial supremacy, along with “the theory that human characteristics and abilities are determined by race.”

A prime example for racial supremacy is associated with the so-called Aryan race. The word aryan, originally a Persian term, is closely related to Iran. In Sanskrit, arya means compatriot.

The German philologist Max Müller (1823-1900) picked up the word and suggested it as a name for the Indo-European race, aka Caucasian or Japhetic. 〰 Japhet, Noah’s 3rd son and presumably Sem’s youngest brother, was declared ‘ancestor of the European people’.

As a linguist, Müller proposed the name Aryan for languages "spoken in Europe, Sanskrit and Persia"** based on certain linguistic similarities. 19th century European philologists suspected that Aryan was the name Indo-Europeans used in reference to themselves. The name never really stuck until it was adopted by Nazi ideology in the sense of “member of a Caucasian Gentile race of Nordic type.”

** Müller's list is a bit odd. As far as I'm aware, Sanskrit was never a region or country, not even an ordinary 'spoken language'. Sanskrit is the 'sacred language of Hinduism' used in classical texts and religious contexts

Under the name Aryan, some alleged 'descendants of Japhet' in Nazi Germany (1933-1945) declared themselves superior to their assumed Semitic cousins, and attempted to eradicate them!

From 1950 onwards, UNESCO has made several attempts to promote racial equality, publishing ‘Declarations of Principles of Tolerance’.

“Tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world's cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human,” we can read in the UNESCO statement from 1995.

“Tolerance is harmony in difference. It is not only a moral duty, it is also a political and legal requirement. Tolerance, the virtue that makes peace possible, contributes to the replacement of the culture of war by a culture of peace.”

In the teeth of such declarations, expressions of racism have intensified in the past decades, exploding into the #blacklivesmatter movement.

In 1997, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OBM) released guidelines for collecting data on race and ethnicity. In contemporary America, there are officially six races:

• American Indian or Alaska Native: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America.

• Asian: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent. 

• Black or African American: A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.

• Hispanic or Latino: A person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin.

• Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands. 

• White: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.

• Some other race.

In 2019, the translation of an American questionnaire into German for the use at schools in South-Tyrol*** caused a storm of indignation among teachers and students. The bone of contention 〰 the English word race had been translated into German as Rasse.

Same word, different connotations. Rasse is understood as relating to pedigree, breed, bloodline ~ all irrevocably associated with Nazi doctrines 〰 and Aryan supremacy.

The CEO of the South-Tyrolian healthcare provider apologised for the ‘mistranslation’. He didn’t see anything wrong with the principle of reducing fellow humans to ‘living organisms’ and labelling them according to a taxonomy of more or less arbitrary categories. Never mind the supremacist attitude.

*** South-Tyrol, home of Ötzi the Iceman, is an 'autonomous province' in Northern Italy. The region was annexed by Italy in 1918, and officially ‘created’ in 1948. The native language of the South-Tyroleans is German, despite the fact that the region has been 'occupied territory' and separated from the motherland Tyrol for over a century.