On the Origin of Racialism

Preposterously, if civilization was to end today and our history as a species was to be studied, it would become immediately clear to the future historian that nobody cared much about "racism" as we see it today. More preposterous to the modern reader then is that the word "racism" does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary of 1910. Yet, the related term "racial-ism" has been around for longer, first appearing in print in 1907. Does this then suggest that racism did not exist before the twentieth century?

Some who have expressed an opinion on the matter suggest that the intellectual roots for the concept of racism stem from nineteenth century thought, where racism began as a branching out of "scientific racism," which used ideas of evolution developed in the nineteenth century to propose anthropological, pseudoscientific hierarchies supporting the classification of human populations into physically discrete human races, that might be asserted to be superior or inferior. Indeed, such mentality was the foundational base of Nazi ideals and their conviction regarding a superior Aryan race. Thus, as we find that racism is rarely considered in conversations that predate at least the nineteenth century, the conventional narrative that denies the existence of race hatred in the Ancient World arises. This common narrative posits that prejudices have existed in cultural or ethnic capacities but never in a racial sense.

I argue that an early form of modern racism — indeed a pre-racism — was common and prevalent in the Graeco-Roman world; I further argue that this pre-racism gave rise to the beginning of modern racism through the eighteenth century.

It is important to emphasize that I will not speak on the aforementioned cultural or ethnic prejudices and restrict my argument to only a racial sense. Within antiquity, I consider purely the direct or indirectly expressed ideas and thoughts of racial prejudice and cannot speak on racial actions or state-treatment. It should also be understood that in determining whether there was racial prejudice and racism in Antiquity, I reason within the terminology of race, racism, racialism, and racial prejudice — arguing of a form that precedes our modern perspective and has had a rich development throughout modern history.

The Enlightenment Bridge

In the current socio-political climate, we find right-winged nationalism to be in high tide, bringing along with it a form of extremism conducive to the resurrection of neo-Nazi thoughts among certain minority groups. Of course, this harks back to Nazi Germany wherein mankind saw one of the most disturbing and twisted state-imposed sets of theories and applications of earlier eighteenth century thoughts, which were in fact drastically more moderate in nature. In this earlier stage, before being appropriated and twisted by Nazis, racialism remained a more moderate doctrine that concerned itself more with environmentalism and the various relationships between the non-Europeans and their European masters.

Many Enlightenment thinkers, most notably Carl Linnaeus, express clear Graeco-Roman concepts and ideas. Linnaeus labeled five "varieties" of human species. Each one described as possessing specific characteristics varying by culture and place — the Americanus, the Europeanus, the Asiaticus, the Afer, and the Monstrosus. Linnaeus considers a cartographical distribution based on geography, rather than hierarchy. Moreover, it seems Linnaeus's rank order was not determined in the classical order favored by most Europeans in racialist tradition, but instead was influenced by the medical theory of humors.

In this way, Linnaeus, directly invokes ideas of antiquity found throughout the Hippocratic Corpus. The way Linnaeus describes the Asiatic race is remarkably similar to how the author of Airs, Waters, Places describes "the people who live near the river Phasis" — considered by ancient Greeks to be the border separating Europe and Asia. Linnaeus characterized the Asiatic race as people who were "yellow, melancholic, stiff; black hair, dark eyes; severe, haughty, greedy; covered with loose clothing; and ruled by opinions." The author of Airs, Waters, Places characterizes these people as having "skin that is yellowish as if they had jaundice." We thus begin to see environmental determinism expressed in Airs, Waters, Places as at least one direct thread linking to Enlightenment era ideas of Carl Linnaeus — and amongst the earliest racial prejudices of skin color being linked with personality characteristics en masse.

Similar sentiment can be found in Livy's History of Rome (38.17) where a Roman orator trying to inspire the legion to fight some Gauls declares: "those ancestors of ours had to deal with genuine Gauls bred in their own land; these are degenerates, a mongrel race, truly what they are called — Gallograeci. Just as in the case of fruits and cattle, the seed is not so effective in keeping up the strain as the nature of the soil and climate in which they are reared are in changing it." Here too we find ideas of environmental determinism expressed in a battle-time scenario.

Scientific Racism and Its Consequences

It is beyond the scope of this work to consider all the forms through which environmental determinism evolved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but one can consider the advent of scientific racism and eugenics as perhaps the most crucial and paradigm-shifting in relation to an evolving idea of racialism. Linnaeus, after having already taken ideas of environmental determinism from antiquity and reinforcing them with evolutionary biology, set the stage for Darwin.

The French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau proposed three human races (black, white, and yellow) in his best-known book, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, arguing that "the white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength." Gobineau also later uses the term "Aryans" to describe the Germanic people. This work is followed eventually by Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, which popularized a movement centered around his Nordic Theory, advocating for selective breeding and compulsory sterilization.

Interestingly enough, the concept of eugenics can itself be traced to at least as far back as Plato, who in his Republic suggested state-run selective mating in order to produce a guardian class composed of philosopher-kings: "the best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior, as seldom as possible." This represents the form of pre-racism discussed earlier as much as it does Nazi eugenics and modern racialism.

Conclusion

It becomes evidently clear the nature in which racialism has evolved — in modern history and in ancient history — and yet has carried ideas of antiquity into the modern era's understanding of racism qua racism. At no point is one required to make any logical leaps that contradict or change the established sense of racism. On the contrary, in seeing how racial prejudicial ideas of antiquity existed and have manifested scientifically as well as socio-politically in our modern understanding of racism, the argument remains cogent and sincere to its initial claims.

Bibliography

• Hippocratic Writings. Edited by G. E. R. Lloyd, translated by J. Chadwick & W. N. Mann, Penguin UK, 1983.
• Plato. Republic. Sterling Publishing Company, 2005.
• Demby, G. The Ugly, Fascinating History Of The Word 'Racism'. NPR.org, 6 Jan. 2014.
• Fredrickson, G. M. Racism: A Short History. Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Gobineau, A. An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.
• Gould, S. J. The Mismeasure of Man (Revised & Expanded). W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
• Grant, M. The Passing of the Great Race. Wermod and Wermod Publishing Group, 2012.
• Isaac, B. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Linné, C. von. Caroli a Linné Systema Naturae Per Regna Tria Naturae. Nabu Press, 2011.
• Livius, T. The History of Rome. Translated by Rev. Canon Roberts, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, 1905.