For people of color, the body is inescapable, and pride in it never far from disgust. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the concept of separate, hierarchically ordered “races” had yet to be fully articulated. Adherence to the Bible meant that we must all, to some degree, be members of the same human family, however warped by foreign climes.⁴⁶

In the mid-seventeenth century, François Bernier, traveler and physician, became one of the first to classify humans without reference to the children of Noah. After seeing Africans in Turkish and Arabian slave markets, he described them as having distinctively thick lips and oily skin. Chinese and Southeast Asians, by contrast, had “little pig eyes, long and deep-set.”⁴⁷ Both were notable for their three or four tufts of beard.

This last detail might seem especially odd, but the Victorian naturalist Charles Hamilton Smith would later obsess over hair as a signifier of racial type, dividing humans into “Caucasian or Bearded,” “Mongolians or Beardless,” and “Wooly Haired or Tropical.”⁴⁸ And soon a horde of ethnologists, biologists, and craniometrists would rush to find new ways of proving the superiority of the white European race, be it Caucasian, Aryan, or Nordic. Long before that point, though, it was taken for granted that to be white was the apex. In the words of Arthur de Gobineau, the white race “possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength.”⁴⁹

When Carl Linnaeus, the famous Swedish lover of lists, wrote his Systema Naturae in 1735, splitting the natural world up into kingdoms, families, and orders, he defined Simia (monkeys) and Bradypus (sloths) by their physical characteristics (focusing on teeth especially), but chose not to define humans anatomically. Their most distinctive feature, he said—their “Providential gift”⁵⁰—was reason, so next to HOMO he wrote simply Nosce te ipsum. Know yourself.

He did, however, list four “varieties” of human you could know yourself to be: European, American, Asian, and African. In 1758, he added more detail, claiming that Americans were red, bilious, and governed by “customs”; Europeans white, sanguine, and governed by “laws”; Asians basan (a yellowy, tanned sheepskin color), melancholic, and governed by “opinion”; while Africans were black, phlegmatic, and governed by “chance.”⁵¹

Though this taxonomy was new, it drew on the ancient idea that the body was made up of a balance of substances called humors, which affected temperament and health. So if Asians were melancholic, that meant their dominant humor was black bile, secreted from the gallbladder.

In Linnaeus’s time, “race” was seen more often in terms of families and horses rather than people. Even in the 1840s, Charles Dickens could still refer to the Chuzzlewit family as a “race.”⁵² This older definition of race saw it not as an immutable brand—able to identify you at first meeting—but a set of inherited characteristics, fluid and changeable over time. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, cracks were appearing in the unity of God’s creation.

In Coningsby, a novel by future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a character called Sidonia is obsessed with the idea of a pure Caucasian race, “perceptible in its physical advantages, and in the vigour of its unsullied idiosyncrasy.” By contrast, all “mixed races” seem destined to “wear away and disappear,” lacking the requisite “vigour” to compete.⁵³ Sidonia is the exponent of a new way of looking at race. For him, race is not a set of traits passed down within a family and changeable over time, but a fixed sign, the marker of a person’s strength, virility, and purity.

By this view, one race is capable of being definitively sullied by its contact with another. Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races would give this as the reason for the rise and fall of civilizations: union with other varieties created “hybrids,” causing “a confusion which, like that of Babel, ends in utter impotence, and leads societies down to the abyss of nothingness.”⁵⁴ In Mein Kampf, Hitler would make a similar argument—it’s often suggested he read Gobineau—about cultural decline: “the Aryan neglected to maintain his own racial stock unmixed and therewith lost the right to live in the paradise which he himself had created.”⁵⁵ The mixed-race person was, by definition, fallen.