| Chapter 2: | Asian American Identity: A Review |
The history of racial classification in the West has been described as a “culmination of the academic world’s contributions to Europe’s headlong charge into a doctrine of white supremacy” (Harrell, 1999, p. 32). The creation of the racial classification system as we know it today began with the work of academics such as J. F. Blumenbach and Carolus Linnaeus. The former, a race theorist, recognized and rank-ordered five races of humans with Caucasians as the pinnacle of the species; the latter ascribed particular characteristics to each race (Bernal, 1987; Harrell, 1999). In Linnaeus’ characterizations, Europeans were cheerful and muscular, Asians were sad and stiff, Native Americans were easily angered and upright, and Africans were sluggish and relaxed (Bernal, 1987).
These characterizations have continued to be present in the work of psychologists such as Rushton (1995) that insist on extending the “grand, racist scholarly tradition” (Harrell, 1999, p. 34). Harrell further notes that psychology as a new science was influenced by the insidious and dominant White supremacist thinking of the early 18th century. From these early beginnings of the research on race and racial classification systems, it is not hard to understand how this characterization has become part of American mainstream thinking today.