Commentary Race and History: Comments from an Epistemological Point of View

The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus’s (1735) Systema naturae and the demise of racial typol-ogies after World War II (WWII) in favor of population-based studies of human diversity. This framing serves a similar function as the quota-tion marks that almost invariably surround the term. ‘‘Race’ ’ is placed outside of rational discourse as a residue of outdated essentialist and hierarchical thinking. I will throw doubt on this underlying assumption, not in order to re-legitimate race but in order to understand better why race has been, and continues to be, such a politically powerful and explosive concept