The Jena Declaration and the decency not to use the term "race"

Excerpts: From the beginning, the idea of human races and their existence has been linked to an evaluation of these supposed races. Indeed, the notion that different groups of people differ in value preceded supposedly scientific work on the subject. The primarily biological justification for defining groups of humans as races – for example based on the colour of their skin or eyes, or the shape of their skulls – has led to the persecution, enslavement and slaughter of millions of people. Even today, the term ‘race’ is still frequently used in connection with human groups. However, there is no biological basis for races, and there has never been one. The concept of race is the result of racism, not its prerequisite.

On 9 August 2019, we marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Ernst Haeckel, former professor in Jena, dubbed the ‘German Darwin’ and probably the best-known German zoologist and evolutionary biologist. With his supposedly scientific classification of human ‘races’ into a ‘family tree’, Ernst Haeckel, the founder of phylogenetics, made a fateful contribution to a form of racism that was seemingly based on science. The position of human groups in his tree of life was based on arbitrarily selected characteristics such as skin colour or hair structure, presented from a phylogenetic point of view. This resulted in these people being viewed in a particular sequence, which implied that some groups had higher or lower status on biological grounds than others.

(...) Despite, or maybe precisely because of the close connection between racism and the supposed existence of races, it is the duty of science and thus also of a scientific society such as the German Zoological Society to evaluate the possibility of human races being a reality. The question is whether races in general, and races of humans in particular, are a biological reality, or whether they are pure constructs of the human mind. For the influential taxonomist Ernst Mayr, the existence of human races was a ‘biological fact’ (Mayr 2002), at least before the colonial age. The justification for his view is still reflected in the common concept that human races correspond to ‘geographical types’ that we also find in other species and that are based on many criteria. An alternative to geographical types of humans that correspond to races did not seem possible to Mayr, although he came out clearly against any kind of racism.

For geographical races (or subspecies), Mayr generally emphasised the necessary ‘taxonomic difference’ between geographically separated populations of a species. This places the concept of ‘race’ somewhere between the concept of population (which due to its existence as a reproductive community, actually corresponds to an individual in the philosophy of science) and that of species. Today, this taxonomic difference is predominantly determined through genetic distances. However, determining which taxonomic difference or genetic differentiation would be sufficient to distinguish races or subspecies is completely arbitrary and thus also makes the concept of races/subspecies in biology purely a construct of the human mind. This does not mean that there is no genetic differentiation along a geographical gradient. However, the taxonomic evaluation of this differentiation (as race or subspecies, or not) is arbitrary. This is even more strongly the case for humans, where the greatest genetic differences are found within a population and not between populations. (...)

The division of people into races was and is first and foremost a social and political classification, followed and supported by an anthropological construct based on arbitrarily chosen characteristics such as hair and skin colour. This construct served – and still serves – to justify open and latent racism using supposed natural circumstances and thus to create a moral justification. (...)

The linking of features such as skin colour with characteristics or even supposedly genetically fixed personality traits and behaviours, as was done in the heyday of anthropological racism, has now been soundly refuted. To use such arguments today as seemingly scientific is both wrong and malicious. There is also no scientifically proven connection between intelligence and geographical origin, but there is a clear connection with social background. Here too, racism in the form of exclusion and discrimination creates supposed races.

However, racism continues to exist among people. In the 20th century, racial research, racial science and racial hygiene or eugenics, as seemingly scientific disciplines, were only some of the excesses of racist thinking and action.

Simply removing the word ‘race’ from our daily language will not prevent racism and intolerance. A feature of current forms of racism is precisely the tendency in far-right and xenophobic circles to avoid the term ‘race’. Racist thinking is perpetuated through terms such as selection, maintaining purity or ethnopluralism. However, the term ethnopluralism is nothing more than a new formulation of the ideas of apartheid. Designating ‘the Africans’ as a supposed threat to Europe and attributing certain biological characteristics are also in the direct tradition of the worst racism of our past. So, let us ensure that people are never again discriminated against on specious biological grounds and remind ourselves and others that it is racism that has created races and that zoology/anthropology has played an inglorious part in producing supposedly biological justifications. Today and in the future, not using the term race should be part of scientific decency.

Jena Declaration

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photograph by Garry Winogrand (1965) via