The Age of Classification
A significant portion of this unit will require a foundational understanding of the scientific discourse surrounding race during the founding of the country and throughout. In order to understand the Laws of Naturalization of 1790, it is important to analyze the context in which they were written. Despite common belief, that racism and race were created and perpetuated only by poor people, the institution and constructions of the race were largely produced, perpetuated and validated by the academic elite. One of the most infamous academics who are responsible for coining some of our common knowledge and terminology surrounding race is Johann Blumenbach, an eighteenth-century naturalist and anthropologist. Throughout his life, during the age of classification and collection, Blumenbach collected and classified skulls as a way of understanding hierarchies. He, along with many other scientists and anthropologists, engaged in centuries-long expeditions of trying to understand and sort the world that they lived in using science. Blumenbach collected and categorized sixty skulls during his time, with the hopes of tracing human origins.
Surveying the whole range of physical characteristics, but chiefly the skull, he separated humans into four different categories. He adopted several different new terminologies to identify these new species. He established five new groups 1) Caucasian, the most superior group because he believed the people surrounding that region were the most beautiful people in the world and had the most evidence to show that human life originated there 2) the Mongolian 3) Ethiopian 4) Malayan, whom he believed morphed into change into what we know as the African 5) the American. For each of these “categories”, Blumenbach felt he could classify their space in the human hierarchy, utilizing the science and religious beliefs of the day. Blumenbach believed darkness was a sign of change from the original. All of mankind had fallen from perfection, but the darker you were the further you had fallen. Despite the modern-day evidence and protestations from Blumenbach himself, his work and classification would be a stone, laying the foundation for racial classifications and the acts of terror laid in their names.
It is important to start here in the classroom when discussing race because often time students are under the impression that race in itself is a biological fact rather than an ideological phenomenon. By beginning to see race as a constructed idea rather than a fixed attribute, they can lay the foundation of being able to understand race from a nuanced view and see as a more movable and adaptable force, and a concept that needed to be crystallized over a period of time.
Lone Man Teaching
As easy it may seem to frame the conversation using Blumenbach as an anchor, or as a villain, it is very important to note to students how his work was co-opted by many other academics at the time and contextualize the timing of his work in the Age of Scientific Classification, when Europeans were working to find new ways to predict and understand human evolution and human traits. By isolating Blumenbach on his own, we cause to the students to identify him and his work as the evil of history, without real analysis of the current of racist science and colonial creations of that time period which resulted in a centuries-long expedition of parceling who would have access to civil rights, the right to life and most importantly who has access to humanity.
Challenging this way of teaching in the classroom can be completed in a variety of different ways. The following two charts serve as sample activities for students in analyzing Blumenbach’s work.
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Racial Classification
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Region
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Physical Characteristics
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Hierarchy
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Reasoning
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Caucasian
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Malay
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The first strategy to utilize charts to have students keep track and identify the different ways in which Blumenbach classified humans and his reasoning for doing so. After reading an article,1 detailing the findings of Blumenbach, students will chart and organize his ideas in a chart. By doing this, students are able to identify the different forms of evidence that Blumenbach used in his reasoning by categorizing the different groups that Blumenbach created. Doing this gives students a chance to create a visual board in which they can use to make connections later on the lesson. The chart also provides a space for discourse on the findings and whether or not these findings would match up with our modern-day descriptions. Asking students to discuss their findings and observations from the chart will allow them to make relevant modern and historical connections.
Another important technique, and way to fight against the use of the lone man teaching is to utilize contextualization charts to have students deeply analyze material and unpack the social, political and economic context in which they arose. This helps students get away from thinking just of Blumenbach as an isolated figure but placing him in context with the Age of Classification and situating this time in the conversations around African docility and agency were being discussed in lights of historical events such as the Haitian Revolution, slave insurrections on the slave trade and the ideas of the American Revolution and Enlightenment.
For each of the circle students should answer the following questions: 1) What was this event? 2) How does this event or topic relate to Blumenbach? 3) How might these historical events been influenced by the teachings of Blumenbach? The purpose of the students putting these topics in conversation with Blumenbach is to have students understand how ideas are shaped and influenced by others. It will also help to further add context to how the law could have been influenced by the global and domestic issues surrounding the nation at the time.
A culminating activity for this lesson could be providing supplementary secondary source analysis to put further place Blumenbach in conversation with historical events. A good piece to send students home to write a reflection on would be “Slavery and Citizenship in the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions by Malick W. Ghachem. In this article, Ghachem places the scientific ideas on race, humanity and ability to self-govern in conversation with the discussion surrounding black citizenship in the wake of the French Revolution. He provides provoking questions on how our cultural understandings of race can have legal consequences in terms of determining who can gain access to citizenship. The article does an excellent job in illustrating the variety of different ideologies that occupied national discourses in Europe and America and does a great job a getting students geared for the next lesson in the unit which will focus on how these ideologies translated into American legal code.
