Ideas of Race, Egalitarianism, Biological Science, and Ethnicity Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering the canonical history of philosophy, egalitarian traditions, biological science, and theories of race and ethnicity.

Racialism

The belief that the human species is naturally divided into distinct biological races, where members of each group share hereditable physical and cognitive/moral traits.

Polygenism

The theory that different human races originate from distinct, separate creations or ancestral lineages.

Monogenism

The theory that all human races share a single, common ancestral origin (e.g., created by God or originating from a single ancestral group).

Systematics

The scientific study and classification of organisms to determine their evolutionary or taxonomic relationships.

Eugenics

The practice or philosophy of controlling human breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.

Philosophy of Race

The philosophical examination of the metaphysics (reality/nature), ethics, and social/political dimensions of racial categories and racial injustice.

Biological Racial Determinism

The belief that an individual's physical, intellectual, moral, and cultural traits are strictly dictated by their biological race.

Keime

Latent "seeds" that Immanuel Kant theorized were activated by migration to distinct climates, fixing hereditable physical traits across four primary races.

Footnote M of Of National Characters

A footnote authored by David Hume claiming non-White individuals are naturally inferior, which provided philosophical authority to racial hierarchy and influenced later thinkers such as Kant.

Egalitarianism

The doctrine that all human beings are equal in fundamental worth, moral standing, and rights.

Cosmopolitanism

The ideology that all human beings belong to a single global community regardless of political, national, or racial boundaries.

Intellectual History

The study of historical ideas, thinkers, and texts within their cultural and philosophical contexts.

Sociology of Knowledge

The study of how human thought, knowledge, and ideological structures are produced by social, historical, and institutional forces.

Biblical Monogenism

The belief that all humans share a single creation by God (imago Dei—made in God's image) or descend from Adam and Eve / Noah's family, with racial variations resulting from environmental dispersals.

Curse of Ham

A pro-slavery interpretation asserting that Noah cursed his son Ham (Genesis 9:18–27), marking his descendants with dark skin and condemning them to be "servants of servants" to justify perpetual enslavement.

Population

A statistical grouping of individuals of the same species living in a geographic area, characterized by continuously varying allele frequencies (clines) rather than rigid boundaries.

Social Construction

The view that racial categories are socio-historical products created by human decisions, laws, and power dynamics rather than natural biological divisions.

The "Common View/Argument" About Race

The mistaken assumption that visible physical traits (like skin color) correlate with fixed, underlying biological differences in intelligence, behavior, or character.

Racialized Groups

Human groups that have been socially categorized and treated as "races" due to historical processes of oppression and ideology, despite lacking a biological basis.

Ancestry

An individual's actual genealogical lineage and geographic origin over time.

Subspecies

A formal biological subdivision of a species requiring significant genetic differentiation (typically at least $25\%$ genetic variance).

Universal Human Racial Taxonomy

The historical project attempting to categorize all humans into a single, objective set of biological racial groups.

Phrenology

A 19th-century pseudoscience pioneered by Franz Joseph Gall claiming that skull size, shape, and surface bumps reflect internal mental faculties and moral character.

Caste

A rigid, hereditary social stratification system enforced by custom or law.

Ethnic Enclaves

Geographic areas with high concentrations of a specific ethnic group, maintaining distinct cultural identity and economic networks.

Diaspora

The dispersion of a population from their original ancestral homeland across different regions.

Assimilation

The process by which an ethnic minority group adopts the cultural norms and identity of a dominant group.

Primordialism

The view of ethnic identity as fixed, ancient, and biologically or culturally innate.

Constructivism

The view of ethnic identity as fluid, situational, and socially constructed over time.

Racial Eliminativism

The philosophical view that because biological race does not exist, we should abolish racial concepts and terminology entirely.

Politics of Difference

An approach advocating for the political recognition, valuation, and protection of distinct cultural and social group identities rather than imposing a single universal standard.

Common-Bundle View

The view asserting that group identity is defined by a necessary bundle of shared core traits, such as language, descent, and geography.

Familial-Historical View

Jorge J. E. Gracia's model of ethnicity based on Wittgenstein's family resemblance, where group members are linked by a web of historical events and relationships tracing back to common origins without requiring every member to share a single fixed trait.