. It makes kids think all tough and bad. 
Those who, like Roland, dismiss the gangs cholo styles as affectations can point to the fact tl eral companies market overpriced knockoffs of   wear  targeted at teens.
But there s also something going on out he transcends adolescent faddishness and pop cultur cism. When white kids call their parents  racist  1 ging them about their baggy pants; when the Spanish to talk to their boyfriends; when M American boys feel themselves descended in spii white  uncles ; when children of mixed marriagi that they are whatever race they say they are, all < are more than just confused.
They re inching toward what Andrea Jones c: dream of what the 21 st century should be.  In the e^ diverse communities of Northern California, they re ing the complicated reality of what their 21st centur
Meanwhile, in the living room of the Miller San Leandro home, the argument continues ur  You don t know what you are,  April s father has more than once. But she just keeps on telling doesn t know what time it is.
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the
___________________________________________Article 49
In the eighteenth century a disastrous shift occurred in the way Westerners perceived races. The man responsible was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, one of the least racist thinkers of his day.
Geometer of Race
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
Stephen Jay Gould, a contributing editor of Discover, is a Professor of zoology at Harvard who also teaches geology, biology, and the history of science. His writing on evolution won many prizes, including a National Book Award, a National Magazine Award, and the Phi Beta Kappa Science Award. For Discover  j November 1993 special section on ten treat science museums, Gould wrote about the glass flowers at Harvard s Botanical Museum.
'nteresting stories often lie encoded in names that either capricious or misconstrued. Why, for examp fecal radicals called  left  and their conservative conn  right ? In many European legislatures, the most	of
Members sat at the chairman s right, following a courtesy as old as our prejudices for favoring e o of most people. (These biases run deep, extending w can openers and scissors to language itself, w ere stems from the Latin for  right,  and sf ster.   . tended fe  left. ) Since these distinguished nobles an	of Ae
to espouse conservative views, the right and legislature came to define a geometry of po ti	o 
Among such apparently capricious names in my Wogy and evolution, none seems more d ignatjon of tts more questions after lectures, than the o xjorth Africa bght-skinned people in Europe, western Asia, an .
  Caucasian. Why should the most comm	strad-
the Western world be named for a mountain groenbach
Russia and Georgia? Johann Friewho (1752-1840), the German anatomist and	invented
fished the most influential of all racial classi
this name in 1795, in the third edition of his seminal work, D< Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (On the Natural Variety o Mankind). Blumenbach s definition cites two reasons for hi choice the maximal beauty of people from this small region and the probability that humans were first created in this ares
Caucasian variety. I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because... in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones [original forms] of mankind.
Blumenbach, one of the greatest and most honored sdei tists of the Enlightenment, spent his entire career as a profe sor at the University of Gottingen in Germany. He first pr sented De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa as a doctor dissertation to the medical faculty of Gottingen in 1775, as ti minutemen of Lexington and Concord began the Americ Revolution. He dien republished the text for general distrib tion in 1776, as a fateful meeting in Philadelphia proclaim our independence. The coincidence of three great documei in 1776--Jefferson s Declaration of Independence (on the p itics of liberty), Adam Smith s Wealth of Nations (on the et nomics of individualism), and Blumenbach s treatise on rac classification (on the science of human diversity) records 1 social ferment of these decades and sets the wider context t makes Blumenbach s taxonomy, and his subsequent dedsior call the European race Caucasian, so important for our hist and current concerns.
The solution to big puzzles often hinges upon tiny curii ties, easy to miss or to pass over. 1 suggest that the key to
Reprinted with permission from Discover magazine, November 1994, pp. 65-69.   1994 by The Walt Disney Company.
9. UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL PLURALISM
demanding Blumenbach s classification, the foundation of much that continues to influence and disturb us today, lies in the peculiar criterion he used to name the European race Caucasian the supposed superior beauty of people from this region. Why, first of all, should a scientist attach such importance to an evidently subjective assessment; and why, secondly, should an aesthetic criterion become the basis of a scientific judgment about place of origin? To answer these questions, we must compare Blumenbach s original 1775 text with the later edition of 1795, when Caucasians received their name.
Blumenbach s final taxonomy of 1795 divided all humans into five groups, defined both by geography and appearance  in his order, die Caucasian variety, for the light-skinned people of Europe and adjacent parts of Asia and Africa; the Mongolian variety, for most other inhabitants of Asia, including China and Japan; the Ethiopian variety, for the dark-skinned people of Africa; the American variety, for most native populations of the New World; and the Malay variety, for the Polynesians and Melanesians of the Pacific and for the aborigines of Australia. But Blumenbach s original classification of 1775 recognized only the first four of these five, and united members of the Malay variety with the other people of Asia whom Blumenbach came to name Mongolian.
We now encounter the paradox of Blumenbach s reputation as the inventor of modem racial classification. The original four-race system, as I shall illustrate in a moment, did not arise from Blumenbach s observations but only represents, as Blumenbach readily admits, the classification promoted by his guru Carolus Linnaeus in the founding document of taxonomy, the Systema Naturae of 1758. Therefore, Blumenbach s only original contribution to racial classification lies in the later addition of a Malay variety for some Pacific peoples first included in a broader Asian group.
This change seems so minor. Why, then, do we credit Blumenbach, rather than Linnaeus, as the founder of racial classification? (One might prefer to say  discredit,  as the enterprise does not, for good reason, enjoy high repute these days.) But Blumenbach s apparently small change actually records a theoretical shift that could not have been broader, or more portentous, in scope. This change has been missed or misconstrued because later scientists have not grasped the vital historical and philosophical principle that theories are models subject to visual representation, usually in clearly definable geometric terms.
By moving from the Linnaean four-race system to his own five-race scheme, Blumenbach radically changed the geometry of human order from a geographically based model without explicit ranking to a hierarchy of worth, oddly based upon perceived beauty, and fanning out in two directions from a Caucasian ideal. The addition of a Malay category was crucial to this geometric reformulation and therefore becomes the key to the conceptual transformation rather than a simple refinement of factual information within an old scheme. (For the insight that scientific revolutions embody such geometric shifts, I am grateful to my friend Rhonda Roland Shearer, who portrays these themes in a forthcoming book, The Flatland Hypothesis.)
blumenbach idolized his teacher Linnaeus an edged him as the source of his original fourfold rat cation:  I have followed Linnaeus in the number, b fined my varieties by other boundaries  (1775 edit in adding his Malay variety, Blumenbach identified as a departure from his old mentor in the most respe  It became very clear that the Linnaean division < could no longer be adhered to; for which reason I, work, ceased like others to follow that illustrious m Linnaeus divided the species Homo sapiens int< varieties, defined primarily by geography and, intert in the ranked order favored by most Europeans i tradition Americanus, Europaeus, Asiaticus, a African. (He also alluded to two other fanciful cate; for  wild boys,  occasionally discovered in the woe sibly raised by animals most turned out to be mentally ill youngsters abandoned by their parents strosus for hairy men with tails, and other travelei lations.) In so doing, Linnaeus presented nothing merely mapped humans onto the four geographi conventional cartography.
Linnaeus then characterized each of these grou] color, humor, and posture, in that order. Again, n categories explicitly implies ranking by worth. Onci naeus was simply bowing to classical taxonomic making these decisions. For example, his use of the reflects the ancient and medieval theory that a pers ament arises from a balance of four fluids (humor  moisture ) blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), choly (black bile). Depending on which of the fou dominated, a person would be sanguine (the chee: blood), phlegmatic (sluggish), choleric (prone to angi cholic (sad). Four geographic regions, four humor
For the American variety, Linnaeus wrote  n cus, rectus  (red, choleric, upright); for the Euro] sanguineus, torosus  (white, sanguine, muscular); f  luridus, melancholicus, rigidus  (pale yellow, mela and for the African,  niger, phlegmaticus, laxus  ( matic, relaxed).
I don t mean to deny that Linnaeus held com liefs about the superiority of his own European others. Being a sanguine, muscular European s better than being a melancholy, stiff Asian. Inde ended each group s description with a more ove bel, an attempt to epitomize behavior in just two the American was regitur consuetudine (ruled 1 European, regitur ritibus (ruled by custom); the tur opinionibus (ruled by belief); and the Africa! bitrio (ruled by caprice). Surely regulation by es1 considered custom beats the unthinking rule of h and all of these are superior to caprice thus lead) plied and conventional racist ranking of Europeal and Americans in the middle, and Africans at th< Nonetheless, and despite these implications, ometry of Linnaeus s model is not linear or hierai
Scientists assume that their own shifts in interpretation record only their better understanding of newly discovered facts. They tend to be unaware of their own mental impositions upon the world s messy and ambiguous factuality.
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we visualize his scheme as an essential picture in our mind, we see a map of the world divided into four regions, with the people in each region characterized by a list of different traits. In short, Linnaeus s primary ordering principle is cartographic; if he had wished to push hierarchy as the essential picture of human variety, he would surely have listed Europeans first and Africans last, but he started with native Americans instead.
The shift from a geographic to a hierarchical ordering of human diversity must stand as one of the most fateful transitions in the history of Western science for what, short of railroads and nuclear bombs, has had more practical impact, in this case almost entirely negative, upon our collective lives? Ironically, Blumenbach is the focus of this shift, for his five-race scheme became canonical and changed the geometry of human order from Linnaean cartography to linear ranking in short, to a system based on putative worth.
I say ironic because Blumenbach was the least racist and most