The history of using race as an Identifier
The picture on the left is a cranial drawing by Samuel Morton. Samuel Morton was a scientist who was popular in the late 1800s. This cranial drawing relates to our studies throughout the semester in anthropology because when cranial images first became popular, they influenced people’s opinions of brain structure within race. For example, some Black people’s cranial structures were measured to have a smaller volume versus other races, such as people of White or Asian descent. This posed a problem because the volume of each skull ended up suggesting which races had the highest and lowest perceived intelligence. This data was influential for its time because it came from a well-known scientist. Suggesting that people with smaller cranial structure were less intelligent helped encourage racism within the health-care system because of his reputation. While there is no information found today to back up his race-based claims, when information is spread through the means of “scientific findings,” it can have negative repercussions.
The Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a survey that measured data taken between 2010 and 2021 about how people identified racially. The focus of this data was to find out how people identified to help measure the differences between races and the disparities within the health-care system. As time went on, fewer and fewer people identified as being White over the course of the experiment. This data is helpful because then people can gauge how minorities, such as the Black or Hispanic community, are participating in these questionnaires and are perceived. With the newly found data, we can gauge how each community could be better supported.
Montequsqui’s Racial Hierarchy was created in 1748 by the French philosopher Charles Montesquieu. His racial hierarchy stated that White people were at the top of the pyramid followed by people of Arabic and Asian descent. At the bottom of the pyramid, he put everyone that wasn’t in those two racial categories as the people with the least influence and racial intelligence. He referred to the people in this bottom tier as “Savages” - those with African or Native American blood. This pyramid was problematic because it framed races in tiers when in actuality, intelligence is not measured by race.
As a whole, these images are examples of the problematic influences that have affected how minorities are served within the health-care system. Having popular influences throughout history imply that different groups of people have different racially based intelligence makes it so that minorities and especially the Black community are not heard and offered the resources they deserve when they’re needed.