The books explains race as a group of people who share a set of characteristics- typically, but not always, physical ones- and are said to share a common bloodline. "When the term race comes up in America today, we usually think in two colors: black and white. But, at the turn of the twentieth century, Americans categorized themselves into anywhere from 36 to 75 different races that they organized into hierarchies".

In the early modern world, European colonizers, confronted with people living in newly discovered lands, interpreted human physical differences first with biblical and later with scientific explanations. They used a story in the book of Genesis 9, the curse of ham, to determine primitive and degraded races of Africa. In the tale, …show more content…
Lapps were people who were ugly, squat, small, and animal-like.

Scientific racism basically looked at white people and found traits of those who were "different" from them. Those who were found to have this sense of "otherness" (as the book explains) were then placed in to categories that white people believed made them similar to one another. This was the idea of ethnocentrism- the belief that one's own culture or group is superior to others and the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of one's own.

During the twentieth century, in Nazi Germany, the idea of "Jewishness" was their way of determining inferiority. It became a social identity since they had different religious beliefs than the norm. After it was determined that Jews were intrinsically inferior, due to their opposing beliefs of Christians, Judaism converted from a religion to a race. Nazis determined that there was a scientific way of detecting "Jewishness" by measuring ratios of forehead to nose size to face length. Unfortunately, this did not turn out the way they planned were not successful with determining Jewishness using this