According to Audrey Smedley, in Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, race is "a set of beliefs and attitudes about human differences, not the differences themselves." However, most humans have been conditioned to believe that "race" has basically everything to do with biological and genetic differences among human populations that are visible and obvious. Now, "race" is being viewed as a social or cultural invention.

Smedley believes there is evidence that asserts that "race" appeared as a new ideology about human differences in the 18th century. Since this era, the ideology have been used as a device to stratify society and to grant privileges, benefits and rights to some and not to others. Therefore, the arguments of inherited differences and their unchangeability have been critical to constructing and preserving race ideology from the beginning. These beliefs have been associated with such natural features as skin color and other physical appearances. This is why the conditioning to the belief has been so powerful and so difficult to abolish. So, we as humans think we see race when w

Consequently, throughout the twentieth century, biological and anthropologists, geneticists, human biologists, and other scientists have been making enormous progress in their studies of human heredity and variability. Their new discoveries have made it necessary to reconceptualize human physical variability without the classification of "race".

e encounter certain physical differences such as skin color, eye shape and hair texture; however, what we actually perceive is the social meaning of race. This social meaning have been linked to those physical features by the ideology of race and the historical legacy it has left us.

In Thomas Jefferson's lifetime, the transformation of Africans and their descendants in the American colonies into subhuman creatures was to a great extent completed. From the latter half of the eighteenth century on, practically all references to blacks as well as to Indians were rested in the idiom of "race." As a new and infallible truth, race had to await the development of a proper substitute for religion, and science became that substitute. It provided an intellectual response fitted to the needs of a materialistic, practical society that had elevated greed to a holy passion and made property and the gain of property a protected and sacred right, superseding even the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Thus, the practices and customs of black slavery and white freedom helped for the basis for the racial Worldview. By the latter part of the eighteenth century race appears not merely as a subdivision of interacting populations in the colonies but as an intellectual construct about human differences and power relationships and a new and unprecedented quality introduced into the structuring of social status. This was the only slave system whose reasoning became uninhibitedly and solely "racial." By increasingly limiting perpetual slavery to Africans and their descendants, the colonists were announcing that blacks would forever be at the bottom of the New World social hierarchy. Also, by ke

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Approximate Word count = 1387
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)