The word “race” has been accompanied for centuries, yet it continues to be one of the most controversial: it has entered everyday life, in official documents, in the laws, in political discussions, until it becomes a term that might seem natural but it is not. Talking about “human races” means moving in a slippery field, made of history, prejudices and power: born to justify slavery and colonization, she fueled hierarchies and violence, until it becomes a myth dismantled by science, but still alive in its social consequences.
The classification of humans in 5 races
The European colonial expansion from the fifteenth century raised a crucial question: how to justify conquest, slavery and domain? It is from here on that the idea of race takes shape. For most of the story, humans have distinguished the “we” from the “others” based on cultural or religious criteria: Christians and pagans, Muslims and the infidels, the sedentaries and nomads, the idea that the differences were written in the bodies, in the color of the skin or in the physical traits therefore, is not a concept born in the laboratory, but in the space of the ensemble ships, of the plantations.
In the eighteenth century modern science began to systematically deal with the differences between human beings. Carl Linnaeusfamous Swedish naturalist, in 1735 he included man in his taxonomy and divides him into varieties related to continents: Homo Europaeus, Asiaticus, Africanus And Americanus. Each attributes physical and moral characteristics, creating implicit hierarchies.
A few decades later, Johann Friedrich BlumenbachGerman doctor, elaborates a classification in five breeds: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malaysian. Although his intent was descriptive, his terminology spreads enormously and becomes the basis for many subsequent theories.
In the nineteenth century, with the development of colonialism and the need to justify social and economic inequalities, racial theories multiply. Frenology (the study of the shape of the skull), anthropometry (physical measurements) and later eugenics build an imaginary in which cultural differences are read as biological differences.
The idea of the breed was not neutral: it served to establish who he was entitled to command and who should obey. It served to justify the slavery of Africans in American plantations, the expropriation of indigenous lands, the colonization of whole continents. Later, in the twentieth century, racial theories would have been used to legitimize totalitarian and genocidal regimes, such as the Nazi regimes. In this sense, the breed has never been only a scientific category, but above all a political tool.
Because for science human races do not exist
With the twentieth century, however, the certainties began to collapse: the anthropologist Franz Boas He showed that physical traits are much more variable than one could think and that cultural differences have no biological bases.
Genetics, starting from the 1950s, confirms that all human beings belong to a single species and share over 99.9% of the genetic heritage. The differences we perceive as “racial” (skin color, somatic traits, hair), are superficial variations, the result of millennial environmental adaptations. To use these new theses, UNESCO, in 1950, published a declaration in which it is clearly affirmed that there are no human biological races and that therefore, more than natural categories, the races are social “myths”.
The breed as a social construction
If science has dismantled the biological idea of race, the company continues to use it. Because, even if the races do not exist in a natural sense, they exist in social consequences. Being perceived as “black”, “white”, “Asian” or “indigenous” can be determined, sadly, the work that is obtained, the possibility of renting a house, the probability of undergoing police checks, access to basic medical care.
Scholars therefore speak of race as a social construction: an invented category, but which has real effects. Ignoring the word may also mean ignoring the discrimination and inequalities it produces.
The debate on the use of the term “race” remains open. Some argue that it is better to abandon it, replacing it with concepts such as “ethnicity”, “origin” or “culture”, because continuing to speak of a race would risk keeping a dangerous fiction alive. On the other hand, others believe that it is necessary to use the word with critical awareness.
In civil rights movements, such as the Black Lives Matterthe term “breed” serves to denounce systemic racism: not to affirm that races exist biologically, but to make visible how they are built socially. In Italy, the word “race” still appears in the Constitution, in article 3, which prohibits “breed” discrimination. In recent years there are those who have proposed to replace it with “ethnic origin”, but the change is not, for now, has been approved.
So if the breed is not a natural reality but a historical invention, born to justify inequalities and exploits, today we know that the breeds do not exist in a biological sense, but there are their social and political effects. Perhaps the question is not so much if we still have to use this word, but how to use it: not to divide, but to unmask the inequalities it has created and which, unfortunately, continue to condition our present.
