Classification before Counting: The Statistical Races
Classification before Counting: The Statistical Races
This chapter begins with framing America's history of measuring races, and how the government decides what those races are. The significance of measuring races lies in how law and policy are not about an abstraction called race, but are about races as they are made intelligible. A German doctor in 1776 divided the human species into five races. Today, nearly two and a half centuries later, these are the same five races into which the U.S. Census divides the American population, making America the only country in the world firmly wedded to an eighteenth-century racial taxonomy. Embedded in this science were theories of a racial hierarchy: there were not just different races but superior and inferior races.
Keywords: races, human species, U.S. Census, American population, racial taxonomy, racial hierarchy
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