Breaking Bias: Where Stereotypes and Prejudices Come From--and the Science-Backed Method to Unravel Them by Anu Gupta

Author:Anu Gupta [Anu Gupta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House LLC
Published: 2024-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

Western Nations Codify the Story of Race as Policy

Modern democracy and nation-states were birthed after Linnaeus drafted of the story of race: the first French republic and the American democracy were established between 1788 and 1792. Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, expressed his views about the “natural” inferiority of black humans and the savagery of indigenous humans, ideas advanced by Linnaeus that justified the brutal policies of slavery and genocide.

Against this backdrop, Blumenbach finalized the story of race by inventing the superior “Caucasian” category, providing the legal fiction of “whiteness” a scientific backing. Immediately, the story of race was codified into the policies of every nation ruled or colonized by Europeans—in other words, our entire planet—and whiteness became the established standard for humanity.

In one of my first antiracism trainings in the 2000s, Margery Freeman, an ardent antiracist educator, brought this fact home for me: race is not about being black or brown, but about being as close as possible to this idealized, made-up fiction of whiteness. From the late 18th century onward, as the newly minted “white” thinkers put forth ideas for new political systems to address human equality and well-being, they restricted the application of those systems exclusively to “white” people, i.e., pure European Christians without any traceable Native, African, or Asian ancestry.

For example, the American Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted American citizenship exclusively to “free white person[s],” a policy that more or less remained on the books until 1965.* The French adopted a similar policy of Français de souche, “purebred French,” when they began settlement of Algeria in the 1830s. The British, Dutch, Belgians, and policymakers from other European nations codified the story of race for citizenship in their settlement and colonization of societies globally, from Canada to South Africa to Australia. The story of race also replaced the lexicon of casta across the Spanish- and Portuguese-dominated world. Until the mid- to late 20th century, whether a human was in Australia, Argentina, Canada, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Cambodia, Algeria, or India, fitting the definition of whiteness became the prerequisite to enjoy the political, social, economic, and cultural rights and liberties guaranteed by all emerging Western political systems and to be protected by their laws.

Take a minute to understand the application of these rights and liberties in Table 5.2 below.

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