Climate theory of racial color failed to explain the rest of the world

Evidence

As English contact with Africans matured, so did the desire to explain the radical color differences. Writers like Gainish applied climate theory to the dark skins of Africa and the light skins of Europe. The popular theory made sense when looking at Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa. But what about the rest of the world? During the final decades of the sixteenth century, a new genre of British literature adopted a different theory. Writers brought amazing stories of the world into Anglican homes, into the Puritan homes of Richard Mather and John Cotton, and into the homes of other future leaders of colonial America. And these worldly stories were as racist as they were amazing. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 69

Categorization

• XREF: The failure of climate determinism to account for the full world echoes a broader pattern: simple environmentalist explanations break under global variation — connects to critiques of geographic determinism elsewhere.