Post #3: Argument

    Welcome back to my blog about Race, a book by Marc Aronson! This week, we progressed in the timeline to the point where the concept of ‘race’ has been developed, which was during the 1700s. At this point, there was (and there still is) a lot of question regarding what defined a person as a member of a specific race. Did you have to act a certain way? What if you were a different religion? Could Catholic Irish people be ‘white,’ or only English Protestants? This uncertainty was part of the development of the modern idea of race, and so Aronson explained this element, just as he explained the other building blocks in his quest to explain how race came to be and how it evolved to be as divisive as it is today.

    In the introduction to his book, Aronson explained that his definition of race is based on four ‘pillars:’ “1) Physical differences matter … 2)These differences in our bodies cannot change … 3) This is because they are inherited … 4) Each group has a distinct level of brainpower and moral refinement, thus they are naturally and unchangeably ranked (2-3).” Starting thousands of years ago, Aronson has moved through time, slowly explaining how the four pillars came to be. For example, the basis for the fourth pillar was laid during fighting in Europe. “Shouldn’t they be separated out into superior and inferior groupings of their own (103)?” many people asked. As the globe became more and more connected, the need to categorize people also spread.

    Up until this point, Aronson had been providing necessary background information, sharing stories and historical events that contributed to the concept of race. As he reached the Enlightenment, his argument became more explicit as he explained the way in which all of the strands were brought together by different philosophers. David Hume, for example, thought that “dark-skinned men and women might resemble whites, but they were actually created at a different time, with different capacities, for other reasons (123).” As a philosopher in the Englightenment, Hume’s view was considered very ‘logical,’ and was similar to the view of other thinkers at the time. It is easy to see how this idea was one of the first examples of race as we know it today.

This image (Strange Bedfellows?: Abolitionism and White Supremacy' - Louis Agassiz, Ezra Cornell, and A.D. White), was originally from Types of Mankind, by J. C. Nott and George R. Glidden, and shows some of the scientific theories about race that were common at the time (116-117). 

    Throughout the text that I have read, Aronson has built up his history of race by layering information. I have enjoyed this approach and it makes sense to me. I understand that race is a human construct, but I also understand how it was constructed, and it makes a lot more sense to me. Before reading this book, I didn’t really know where race came from. I had a vague idea that somebody in the 1700s had decided that people who had different skin colors were inferior, but I didn’t understand how such an idea could be supported or become so widespread.

    From looking at the chapter titles, I can infer that the rest of the book will be dedicated to more recent historical events in which race played a major role (the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement, etc.) and also to explaining the role that race plays in modern society. Aronson will presumably continue to develop his argument to explain how this Enlightenment idea evolved and became so pervasive. I am excited to see how the new understandings I have about race can be applied to these events, and hear how Aronson thinks that the origins of race affect modern and recent historical events.


"'Strange Bedfellows?: Abolitionism and White Supremacy' - Louis Agassiz, Ezra Cornell, and A.D.             White." Cornell University, events.cornell.edu/event/strange_bedfellows_abolitionism_and                           _white_supremacy_-_louis_agassiz_ezra_cornell_and_ad_white. Accessed 18 Mar. 2021.