Bodily notions of inherited difference preceded fully secular modern racism.
Evidence
Blumenbach echoed theories from antiquity about skin color and its relationship to the weather: dark skinned people lived in hot climates while light skinned in cold climates. However, he maintained that individual human bodies have lighter and darker parts and further that one could, even in colder climates, become dark after exposure to the sun. His views were more complex than previous iterations of weather-based theories and also more contradictory. Painter notes that while he argued that culture and climate played a determining role in human appearance, he also believed that certain groups maintained their distinctiveness over generations. Thus, the Swiss retained their “open countenance,” and the Turkish their “manly and serious” demeanor; Jews, despite living alongside gentiles for long periods, were marked by inherent difference which in their “eyes alone” could be seen the “breathe of the East.” What we see therefore is that both bodily and cultural notions of race developed coterminously. Furthermore, Blumenbach believed that the “Caucasians” were the first human race from which all others either diverged or degenerated. Finally, the revival of classical scholarship from the Renaissance period on meant that features associated with Greek and Roman physiques were considered supreme and paleness was projected back onto antiquity as the beauty ideal. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 125 (
#contradicts, via linked claim)
If the Spanish origin of the term is true, then the problem with “race” goes back to its beginnings. It was used to expel from Spain people “tainted” by Jewish and Moorish blood - hence “race” in the “physical” and “visible” sense, we might think. Yet the list of people to which the doctrine of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre) was applied went on and included descendants of heretics and of “penitenciados (those condemned by the Inquisition)” (Stolcke, 1994:276-7). Thus at this terrible beginning, “race” was hardly based on the perception of phenotypal difference but on a religiously and politically, hence “culturally,” defined distinction that was legislated to be hereditary, innate, and immutable. It was what we would now call an “ethnic” distinction, as defined by Nathan Glazer as well as by Pierre van den Berghe. Stuart Hall (1994) said memorably that race and ethnicity play hide-and-seek with each other. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 724 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
This is illustrated in Modood’s description of antisemitism as ‘a form of religious persecution [which] became, over a long, complicated, evolving but contingent history, not just a form of cultural racism but one with highly systematic biological formulations’. … Centuries before those modern ideas we have come to call ‘racism’ … the move from religious antipathy to racism may perhaps be witnessed in post-Reconquista Spain when Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity or be expelled. At this stage, the oppression can perhaps be characterised as religious. Soon afterward, converted Jews and Muslims and their offspring began to be suspected of not being true Christian believers, a doctrine developed amongst some Spaniards that this was because their old religion was in their blood. In short, because of their biology, conversion was impossible. — Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Refutations of Racism in the ‘Muslim…, 48 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Bodily and cultural notions of race developed together from the start — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 125; Modern biological racism grew out of earlier religious antipathy toward converts — Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Refutations of Racism in the ‘Muslim…, 48; Race originated as a cultural-religious distinction legislated into biological heredity — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 724 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Bodily and cultural notions of race developed together from the start
#contradicts(0.85) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 125 - Race originated as a cultural-religious distinction legislated into biological heredity
#corroborates(0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 724 - Modern biological racism grew out of earlier religious antipathy toward converts
#corroborates(0.80) — Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Refutations of Racism in the ‘Muslim…, 48 - Anti-Muslim racism has shifted from bodies to culture while keeping an essentialist logic
#contradicts(0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 156 - Modern scientific racism displaced religion from the race concept.
#qualifies(0.75) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 156 - Racist assimilationism in its physical form predates cultural assimilationism.
#corroborates(0.75) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 45