Color terminology for race

This article is about arbitrary divisions of humanity by skin color. For the anthropological concept of race, see Race (human categorization).

Identifying human races in terms of skin colour, at least as one among several physiological characteristics, has been common since antiquity.

Such divisions appeared in early modern scholarship, with the conventional but now obsolete categorization dividing mankind into five colored races: "Aethiopian or Black", "Caucasian or White", "Mongolian or Yellow", "American or Red", and "Malayan or Brown" subgroups. This framework was coined by members of the Göttingen School of History in the late 18th century, in parallel with the Biblical terminology for race (Semitic, Hamitic and Japhetic).

It was long recognized that the number of categories is arbitrary and subjective, and different ethnic groups were placed in different categories at different points in time. François Bernier (1684) doubted the validity of using skin color as a racial characteristic, and Charles Darwin (1871) emphasized the gradual differences between categories. There is broad agreement among modern scientists that typological conceptions of race have no scientific basis.

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