Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and tables
- Acronyms and abbreviations
- Foreword
- Preface
- Chapter One What Moving Beyond Race Can Actually Mean: Towards a Joint Culture
- Chapter Two The Colour of Our Past and Present: The Evolution of Human Skin Pigmentation
- Chapter Three Races, Racialised Groups and Racial Identity: Perspectives from South Africa and the United States
- Chapter Four The Janus Face of the Past: Preserving and Resisting South African Path Dependence
- Chapter Five How Black is the Future of Green in South Africa's Urban Future?
- Chapter Six Inequality in Democratic South Africa
- Chapter Seven Interrogating the Concept and Dynamics of Race in Public Policy
- Chapter Eight Why I Am No Longer a Non-Racialist: Identity and Difference
- Chapter Nine Interrogating Transformation in South African Higher Education
- Chapter Ten The Black Interpreters and the Arch of History
- Notes
- Contributors
- Index
Chapter Three - Races, Racialised Groups and Racial Identity: Perspectives from South Africa and the United States
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures and tables
- Acronyms and abbreviations
- Foreword
- Preface
- Chapter One What Moving Beyond Race Can Actually Mean: Towards a Joint Culture
- Chapter Two The Colour of Our Past and Present: The Evolution of Human Skin Pigmentation
- Chapter Three Races, Racialised Groups and Racial Identity: Perspectives from South Africa and the United States
- Chapter Four The Janus Face of the Past: Preserving and Resisting South African Path Dependence
- Chapter Five How Black is the Future of Green in South Africa's Urban Future?
- Chapter Six Inequality in Democratic South Africa
- Chapter Seven Interrogating the Concept and Dynamics of Race in Public Policy
- Chapter Eight Why I Am No Longer a Non-Racialist: Identity and Difference
- Chapter Nine Interrogating Transformation in South African Higher Education
- Chapter Ten The Black Interpreters and the Arch of History
- Notes
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
By the nineteenth century, throughout the West there was a general consensus that the human population of the world could be divided into a small number of what were called ‘races’. Although there was not absolutely uniform agreement on how many and which groups were races in this sense, JF Blumenbach's division into five – Malayan; Ethiopian (sub-Saharan African, or black); American (indigenous peoples of the Americas); Caucasians (white, or of European ancestry); and Mongoloid (East/Southeast Asian) – can serve as a rough consensus. Because of controversy over the term ‘race’, I will provisionally refer to such groups in the more neutral terminology of ‘classic racial groups’.
Classic racial groups were thought to possess the following characteristics, which were implied in calling them ‘races’:
1. Each group possessed mental and other psychological qualities specific to that group.
2. The qualities were rooted in the group's nature, generally understood in a biological fashion.
3. The qualities were passed from one generation to the next through some sort of mechanism, generally understood to be biological in character. (Only later, around 1900, was this biological mechanism assumed to be genetic.)
4. The differences between the groups were fixed and unchangeable, and this was thought to follow from their biological character.
5. The groups generally, but not necessarily, differed in certain phenotypic characteristics (especially skin colour, eye shape, hair texture, other facial features). So these features could be regarded as markers of the internal, racedefining characteristics.
6. The groups were understood as originating in specific, generally continent-defined regions of the world (blacks in sub-Saharan Africa, whites in Europe, and so forth).
Note that the fifth feature means that classic racial groups were not defined by phenotypic characteristics. The Nazis did not define what they regarded as racial groups by phenotype, which leads us to a second strand of racial theory that was rather different from Blumenbach's. Nazism drew on a prominent alternative strand in European racial thought in which races were thought of as national (French, German, Italian) rather than continental.
- Type
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- Information
- The Colour of Our FutureDoes race matter in post-apartheid South Africa?, pp. 25 - 44Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2015