Racial Categories: Similarities Between Europe And America

The category of race is a common idea that we engage with in our daily lives. From filling out health forms to discussing our own ethnicities in class, our society has accepted race as a universal and natural method of human distinction. Although racial categories have become a commonly accepted means of distinguishing various groups of people, it is actually a social construction based on arbitrary groupings that emerged from early European ideologies. At the start of the nineteenth century, Europe and America held an overwhelming belief in white superiority, and as a result, racial classifications emerged as a way to emphasize that belief. When taking a closer look at racial categories, one can see how they are ideologically unsound, and
Linnaeus categorized humans into five separate species: Homo sapiens monstrosus, white Europeans, yellow Asians, red Americans, and black Africans. The former, included people with birth defects, while the latter three were based on geographic location and appearance (Marks). During the eighteenth century, there was an overwhelming belief in Europe and America that descendants of white Europeans were superior, while Africans were the most inferior and closest in relation to apes (“AAA’s Statement on Race”). Additionally, the United states mirrored similar thoughts. For instance, the 1894 president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Daniel G. Brinton, stated that African Negros were evolutionarily located between Orangutans and European whites. Additionally, he claimed that differences between races were due to differences between genetic makeup rather than differences in “opportunities and externalities” (Pierpont). Linnaeus emphasized this belief by categorizing the human species into separate races. America and Europe’s strong beliefs influenced scientists such as Carl Linnaeus to differentiate the population based on physical appearances and characterize European whites as the pinnacle of development. Furthermore, racial categories were used as justification for the oppression of enslaved people. Europeans, at the time, argued that it was acceptable to abuse slaves and other minority groups because they were a more primitive race. This eventually led to social stratification and establishment of a hierarchy which white Europeans undoubtedly benefited from (“AAA’s Statement on Race”). Although many of us today believe that race emerged in a natural and objective manner, by examining the social and political environment at the time of its creation, it shows that race is a social construction assembled from