Developing a Foundational Understanding of the Sociohistorical Context
The Origins of Race
For a more comprehensive history on the origins of race, see https://understandingrace.org/
While Race is not explicitly tied to a specific culture, the dominant American culture uses race as a primary way to categorize people into a hierarchy. As Pillow and Gay state, “While neither racism nor race are fixed positions, they do award power to certain groups of people over others” (p.37, 2024).
Race, though often inaccurately defined by physical characteristics, is actually a social construct. Race was first introduced in the 1400s through an edict from Pope Nicholas V that characterized Indigenous, Jewish, and Muslim people as “enemies of Christ” (Imani, 2021). This characterization was used as a rationalization for the enslavement of indigenous people from Africa and the Americas, as well as the displacement of Jewish people from Spain and Portugal. As Spain, Portugal, France, and England continued to expand colonization, the concept of race was closely tied to religion. At this time, race was used by these Christian nations as a rationalization for the colonization, enslavement, and forced assimilation of Black and Indigenous people.
The first ship carrying enslaved people from Africa to the United States arrived in Virginia in 1619, two years before the arrival of the Puritans at Plymouth Rock (Hannah-Jones et al., 2021). As the American colonies grew, racialized language was perpetuated as a strategy to continue the subjugation of Black and Indigenous peoples. Though Black Africans and Indigenous people were referred to by colonists using racialized language for years prior, it wasn’t until the 1690s that the word “White” appeared in the law (Imani, 2012). Throughout our history, how we have defined whiteness has changed significantly. Some racial and ethnic groups, including those of Black African, Asian, and American Indigenous descent, have always been racialized as “other.” Some fair-skinned ethnic groups, including those of Greek, Italian, and Irish descent, were at one time marginalized as “not white” but later able to assimilate into Whiteness (Roediger, 2018).
As the American colonies grew, so too did the “scientific” explanations of White Supremacy (Imani, 2021, page number). In the mid-1750s, Swedish scientists grouped humans by physical characteristics, including eye color, hair color and texture, facial features, skin tone, behavior, societal structure, and clothing. These six groups reflected the racist attitudes of the time and included White people, wild people, red people, yellow people, black people, and perhaps most offensively, monster people. Throughout the rest of the 1700s and 1800s, other scientists built on this work, eventually making claims that the appearance and head/brain size of White Europeans made them superior to Black and Indigenous people. Racist scientists believed that Black people had higher tolerances for pain. The legacy of these false scientific assertions remains. Contemporary doctors self-report that they believe that there are significant biological differences between Black and White people. A majority of surveyed doctors believe that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than White people’s and that Black people have thicker skin than white people (Hoffman et al., 2016). These kinds of debunked scientific assertions surely contribute to the higher mortality rates for Black mothers and infants in the United States.
Today, scientists have a clear understanding that race is not actually a biological category. In fact, once scientists were able to examine the human genome, Yu et al. (2002) discovered that there is more variation in the DNA of two people from the continent of Africa than there is between a person from Europe and one from Africa. Genetically and biologically, there is no clear break between races (Jablonski, 2012).
