Historical race concepts

Historical race concepts have varied across cultures and over time, and have been controversial for social, political and scientific reasons. Until the 19th century, race was thought by many to constitute an immutable and distinct type or species which shared particular racial characteristics, such as body constitution, temperament and mental capacities.

One concept, that of Christian Western Europe, conceived of the races as constituting a hierarchical chain of life known as the Great Chain of Being, which was believed to have been created by God, in which the people thought the Christian European races were closest to God in perfection.

The word "race", interpreted to mean common descent, was introduced into English in about 1580, from the Old French rasse (1512), from Italian razza, which may have been derived from the Arabic Word "ras" "رأس" meaning the head of someone or something. In this context, "ras" points to the root or the head of selected species. The etymology can be further traced back to Latin gens or Arabic "genat" "جينات" meaning clan, stock or people and genus meaning birth, descent, origin, race, stock, or family, and cognate with Greek genos (γένος) "race, kind," and gonos "birth, offspring, stock. This late origin for the English and French terms is consistent with the thesis that the concept of "race" as defining a small number of groups of human beings based on lineage dates from the time of Christopher Columbus. Older concepts, which were also based at least partly on common descent, such as nation and tribe entail a much larger number of groupings.

During the Age of Enlightenment, Europeans tried to define race as a biological concept, in keeping with their scientific ideas. In the centuries that followed, scholars made attempts to classify and define racial types, and to determine racial origins and correlates. As forensic anthropologists, biomedical researchers, and other scholars have collected and analyzed data on individuals and populations, some maintain that race denotes scientifically practical distinctions.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach divided the human species into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research (description of human skulls), and called them (1793/1795):

• the Caucasian race or white race
• the Mongolian or yellow race
• the Malayan or brown race
• the Negroid race, or black race
• the American or red race.