The African American slave trade began in 1619 and continued until 1865. The enslavement of persons of color for more than 250 years built wealth, opportunity, and prosperity for millions of white Americans. At the same time, American slavery assigned to black people a lifelong status of bondage and servitude based on race, and created a myth of racial inferiority to justify the racial hierarchy. Under this racist belief system, whites were hard-working, smart, and morally advanced, while black people were dumb, lazy, childlike, and uncivilized.
The idea that black people were naturally and permanently inferior to white people became a powerful idea deeply rooted in individuals’ minds, state and federal laws, and national institutions. This ideology grew so strong that it survived the abolition of slavery and evolved into new systems of racial inequality and abuse.
Among the many unfortunate aspects of slavery was the adoption of the “one-drop rule.” The rule asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry ("one drop" of black blood) is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms), and led to racist classifications by the outdated terms mulatto, quadroon and octaroon for people, half, one-quarter and one-eighth black.
In 1865, Florida passed an act that both outlawed miscegenation and defined the amount of black ancestry needed to be legally defined as a "person of color." The act stated that "every person who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood shall be deemed and held to be a person of color" (this was the equivalent of one great-grandparent). Additionally, the act outlawed fornication, as well as the intermarrying, of white females with men of color.
But as Ibram F. Xendi describes, while ethnic ancestry does exist, there is no such thing as racial ancestry. People are born with an ethnic ancestry that comes from their parents, but are assigned to a race by societal conventions.
People from the same ethnic groups that are native to certain geographic regions typically share the same genetic profile. Geneticists call them “populations.” When geneticists compare these ethnic populations, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a cultural invention.
In 1725, Carl Linnaeus color-coded the ethnic hierarchy of humankind as white, yellow, red, and black. He attached each race to one of the four regions of the world and described their characteristics. But in reality, ethnicity is defined by other factors in addition to just skin color.
Dividing humankind into races based solely on the color of skin is an 18th Century invention, a kind of agreed-upon convention that became useful to justify the slave trade and the eradication of native North Americans.
I have personally been out in public and could not tell the race of someone walking ahead of me, even though I could clearly see the color of the skin on their arms and legs. This is not true for people whose skin is exceptionally dark or exceptionally light, but for many it’s not until I pass them or they turn around so I can see their faces that their racial identity suddenly snaps into place in my mind. Being “black” or “white” is as much the nature of hair, the broadness of the nose, the fullness of the lips, and the shape of the body as it is about the color of skin. It’s a convention for grouping ethnicities that we’ve all subconsciously learned from society but has no real genetic basis. I sincerely doubt that extraterrestrials or persons from a remote civilization untouched by the modern world would group human ethnicities together the same way society does now, post-Linnaeus.
Race, I've learned, is in the eye of the beholder.
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