Origins of Race
5
plain
2017-03-24T20:32:18-07:00
In order to understand the idea of post-racialism one has to understand the idea of “race”. Where did the idea of “race” come from?
Modern scholars mostly agree that “race” has very little to do with science, and more to do with social views. It is an invention to classify groups of people. Audrey Smedley, from PBS, says “race was institutionalized beginning in the 18th century as a worldview, a set of culturally created attitudes and beliefs about human group difference” (Smedley). Until the beginning of the 18th century, African Americans were viewed as a whole positively. However, with the huge introduction of slave trade during this century, by the end their image shifted dramatically. In the PBS newsletter about the origin of the idea of race Smedley states, “the term ‘race,’ which had been a classificatory term like ‘type,’ or ‘kind,’ but with ambiguous meaning, became more widely used in the eighteenth century, and crystallized into a distinct reference for Africans, Indians and Europeans” (Smedley). This is where a slave trade system was created in America that was the only one in the world that was exclusively “racial”. This horrible social idea has sadly been a part of the very foundation of our country. The one drop rule was a social and legal principle that essentially states that an individual with even one ancestor who is of sub-saharan african descent is regarded as “black”. The one-drop rule was deemed law in the 20th century, first with Tennessee (1910) and then Virginia (1924) under the racial integrity act. This concept has developed through time and is essentially codified into American law today. So how can one consider our country post-racial if our own law is subconsciously racist.
