Race: The Beginning of an Etymological Inquiry

Are we running or dividing? Are we competing or dismissing? Jesse Owens did both simultaneously at the Berlin Olympics hosted by Adolf Hitler in 1936.

Why do we use this one four letter word to describe a current of water turning a wheel, two or four legged animals circling a track as fast as they are able for sport or classify human characteristics and then load that word with false assumptions to justify the ways we structure society?

It’s mostly an English thing. Other Indo-European languages have two separate words for these two separate concepts. Hear now a story from the northern lands :

The first “race” goes to a linguistic gift from Old Norse and Old English. “rase” meant narrative, a course of conduct;” emerges as a contest against rivals in 1510.

The other word, the one that pierces our hearts, came along with William when he Conquered the British Isles in 1066. Race from Razza honors the ancestors, their families and tribes, then speakers of a common language. Finally by the 17th century, race refers to physical traits. Modern scholarship regards race as an assigned identity based on rules made by society. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning.

When did race become a word that goes beyond dispassionate observation of skin tones and eye folds and hair textures? When did it become a weapon in the service of kidnapping, enslavement, torture, murder , daily insult and denial of human rights? That’s another, more complicated story.