I. THE HISTORY OF "RACE":
How many races are there? What are their names?
Read the following quote from Franklin and identify the "races" that were
obvious to him in the middle of the 18th century.
Benjamin Franklin, 1751 -- "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind"Read the following late 19th century description of the "races" of New England, and note the hierarchy. Francis Walker was the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and president of the American Economics Association."That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionately very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind."
Francis Amasa Walker, "Growth of the nation" (1889)"New England was settled almost exclusively by one branch of the great Teutonic race, from which has proceeded almost every invention and mechanical discovery of the past two centuries. Of that Teutonic race, it was the branch, the English, which had long shown itself preeminent in mechanical insight, that colonized this coast. There is no reason to suppose that otherwise than through coming predominately from the intelligent and virtuous middle class of the old country, constituting thus a picked body, from which were, in a great measure, excluded the weak, the vicious, the effeminate persons of dwarfed stature, tainted blood and imperfect organization, the first settlers of New England possessed any superiority in the quality under consideration over the English people in general. It was to their experiences, extending through many generations, upon this inhospitable shore, that their descendants were to owe the development of a mechanical faculty which was to place them as far ahead of the English as the English are ahead of any other branch of the Teutonic race; as the Teutonic race are ahead of the Slavic or the Celtic."
Read Francis Walker's "race" analysis of late 19th
century immigration trends into the United States. Guess
what his prescription was?
Francis A. Walker, "Restriction of Immigration," Atlantic Monthly (1896)"The immigrant of the former time came almost exclusively from western and northern Europe... Only a short time ago, the immigrants from southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia together made up hardly more than one percent of out immigration. To-day the proportion has risen to something like forty per cent, and threatens soon to become fifty or sixty per cent, or more. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence... They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take readily and easily the problems of self-care and self-government, such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains."
Were Franklin and Walker "incorrect" in their identification of "races"?
Are the racial categories we use today -- white, black,
asian -- more correct?