Race begins with one molecule: melanin. When you look down the tunnel through which race crawled, past the Valladolid Debate and the Spanish Limpieza de Sangre, past the Jim Crow laws and the Chinese Exclusion Act you eventually reach something deceptively simpler: human skin.
Early humans evolved in environments with different levels of UV radiation. Melanin acted as a barrier against UV radiation, creating differences in melanin levels correlating to UV radiation levels. These differences in skin color arose through biological adaptations, not the existence of distinct biological races. Skin color has an evolutionary history, but race has a social history.
From Plato’s allegory of the cave to Enlightenment language, connotations attached to light and dark existed far before modern racial ideologies. Plato’s allegory of the cave synonymously discussed moving from the darkness of the cave to the light above as transitioning from ignorance towards knowledge, while Enlightenment language commonly used ‘darkness’ as a metaphorical term for ignorance. In present day language, we continue to use terms such as ‘shed light on’ and ‘a bright future’ to represent positive outcomes and discussions. Meanwhile, the use of ‘a dark future’ in a conversation would likely result in concern versus optimism. Society has unconsciously associated light with the positive and darkness with the negative. Why is that so?
The answer may begin with something far more fundamental than race: human survival. For the majority of human history, daylight allowed for visibility while darkness limited what could be seen and made the environment less predictable. For hunter-gatherers and ancient civilizations, daylight was crucial to survival. Over time, these physical differences between light and dark became metaphors for knowledge and ignorance, safety and harm, and, ultimately, good and evil.
So it is perhaps no surprise that the associations we have attached to darkness can take on consequences far greater than language. In 2020, 46-year-old African American man George Floyd died after Minneapolis police responded to a report that he had used a counterfeit $20 bill. The question is not whether calling something ‘dark’ caused George Floyd’s death. Rather, it is whether centuries of literature, religious discourse, war, and associations between darkness and negative characteristics have contributed to the way dark skin has been perceived and prejudiced against.
After crawling through the tunnel of race, past centuries of classification, conflict, and hierarchy, we emerge where we began: with human skin. The biology of skin may have been written in melanin, but the meaning we attach to it was written by us.
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