Color terminology for race
Such divisions appeared in early modern scholarship, usually dividing humankind into four or five categories, with colour-based labels: red, yellow, black, white, and sometimes brown.
François Bernier (1684) doubted the validity of using skin color as a racial characteristic, and Charles Darwin (1871) emphasized the gradual differences between categories.
Specifically, Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer (a medieval rabbinical text dated roughly to between the 7th to 12th centuries) contains the division of mankind into three groups based on the three sons of Noah, viz.
[8] François Bernier in a short article published anonymously in 1684 moves away from the "Noahide" classification, proposes to consider large subgroups of mankind based not on geographical distribution but on physiological differences.
Writing in French, Bernier uses the term race, or synonymously espece "kind, species", where Hornius had used tribus "tribe" or populus "people".
Instead his first category comprises most of Europe, the Near East and North Africa, including populations in the Nile Valley and the Indian peninsula he describes as being of a near "black" skin tone due to the effect of the sun.
His fourth category are the Lapps (Lappons), described as a savage race with faces reminiscent of bears (but for which the author admits to rely on hearsay).
The author furthermore considers the possible addition of more categories, specifically the "blacks of the Cape of Good Hope", which seemed to him to be of significantly different build from most other populations below the Sahara.
[9]In the 1730s, Carl Linnaeus in his introduction of systematic taxonomy recognized four main human subspecies, termed Americanus (Americans), Europaeus (Europeans), Asiaticus (Asians) and Afer (Africans).
[16] Hannah Franzieka identified 19th-century writers who believed in the "Caucasian hypothesis" and noted that "Jean-Julien Virey and Louis Antoine Desmoulines were well-known supports of the idea that Europeans came from Mount Caucasus.
"[17] In his political history of racial identity, Bruce Baum wrote, "Jean-Joseph Virey (1774–1847), a follower of Christoph Meiners, claimed that "the human races... may divided... into those who are fair and white and those who are dark or black.
[19] Following World War II, more and more biologists and anthropologists began to discontinue use of the term "race" due to its association with political ideologies of racism.
[1] However, many Middle Eastern and South Asian people in the Anglophone world self-identify as "Brown", considering their skin color central to their identity.
[30][31] The Martinique-born French Frantz Fanon and African-American writers Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and Ralph Ellison, among others, wrote that negative symbolisms surrounding the word "black" outnumber positive ones.
In 1920s Georgia, Willie Perryman followed his older brother Rufus in becoming a blues piano player: both were albino Negroes with pale skin, reddish hair and poor eyesight.
[34] The piano player and guitarist Tampa Red from the same state developed his career in Chicago at that time: his name may have come from his light skin tone, or possibly reddish hair.
