Race and Nature

Critical Race Theory

Critical race theorists, seeking to understand the making and maintenance of racial hierarchies, have shown how racial categories shift over time and across space and have thus effectively challenged the notion that race has a basis in biology. Instead, they find race rooted in history and culture and consider European imperialism key to the creation and naturalization of racial categories and to the assignment of social significance to the physical markers of difference.

In her 1992 influential work on European travel writing, Mary Louise Pratt examined how the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné's (Carl Linnaeus) plant classification system, first introduced in 1735, reordered the natural world according to a European logic while at the same time making it appear that the system simply described the world as it already existed. But, Pratt shows, Linné classified more than plants. By 1758, he had classified humans into distinct types, which included the Wild Man, the American, the European, the Asiatic, and the African. Linné assigned physical and behavioral characteristics to each type, and the types appeared to exist as a part of nature. The European, for instance, appeared fair, blue-eyed, inventive, and governed by laws, while the African was black, flat-nosed, indolent, and governed by caprice. As Pratt points out, Linné's Eurocentric system not only encouraged comparison among human types but also naturalized the myth of European superiority.

The belief in European superiority, as many scholars have pointed out, was central to the colonial project. If Europeans existed on the highest plane of civilization, then surely the imposition of their religion, laws, and values onto “less civilized” peoples and lands was a justified and even noble pursuit. With the rise of scientific racism in the mid 19th century, European superiority and non-European inferiority came to appear as biological facts rather than surmountable cultural conditions, and various “scientific” strategies emerged for assessing the relative position of human races—for example, measuring the length and shape of heads of people of different races. Although the scientific value of such strategies has been undermined, scientific racism worked to make both race and racial hierarchies appear natural and, thus, to justify European colonialism and its embedded racism.

Critical race theorists, in tracing the social production of race both historically and in the contemporary moment, denaturalize racism as well as race by revealing it as the practice of appealing to markers of difference that are culturally rather than naturally constructed. Racism connects to power because race seems natural. Revealing race as social therefore presents one way of disempowering racism.

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