February 9, 2022
Race: a Word of Surprisingly Recent and Uncertain Origin
First surfacing in the 15th century as raza in Spanish, razza in Italian, and race in French before entering English in the 16th century, it has had six different etymologies proposed for it.
The absurdity of Whoopi Goldberg having to apologize and be suspended from her work for saying that the Holocaust isn’t “about race” isn’t about race, either. It’s about absurdity—and specifically, the level of it to which popular discourse has descended in America in an age of identity politics and Me Too and cancel culture. Goldberg was of course foolish in saying that the Holocaust wasn’t about race, since from its Nazi perpetrators’ point of view it was all about race. But her intentions were not malicious, and it is only our aberrant age that makes us demand public apologies or worse for the crime of being foolish. One agrees with Jonathan Tobin, editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, who wrote, “While it’s difficult to sympathize with [Goldberg], the practice of punishing people for speech we don’t like by taking away their livelihoods is deplorable.”
There’s always been a lot of foolish talk about race, even though the word itself is of surprisingly recent and uncertain origin. First surfacing in the 15th century as raza in Spanish, razza in Italian, and race in French before entering English in the 16th century, it has had six different etymologies proposed for it, none provable. It has been traced to Latin radix, root; to Latin radius, a staff, spoke, or radius, that is, a line of descent; to Latin ratio, a calculation, namely, the calculated value of a breed of animal; to medieval Latin generatio, reproduction; to old French haras, a stud farm; and even to Arabic ras, “head” (the Hebrew cognate of which is rosh), in the sense of the beginning of something.
All these etymologies relate to animals or human beings who are descended from a common ancestor. The earliest formal definition of the word includes both its animal and human aspects. This can be found in Sebastian de Covarrubias’ 1611 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Spain’s first Spanish-Spanish dictionary, which defined raza as, “A breed of thoroughbred horses, [commonly] stamped with an iron brand to identify them.” To which Covarrubias added, “In [human] lineages, raza applies to their bad side [se toma en mala parte], as in the case of the raza of the Moor or the Jew.”