Consciously or not, many Americans still see the world as a hierarchy of races. Census forms and other documents prompt us to choose where we fit. A century ago the social sciences—promoters of the term “Caucasian”—busily defined homo sapiens as a set of related species and ranked them based on skull measurements. Prejudice and politics were never far from the project. As shown in this essay collection, anthropologists of many nations competed to rank their ethnicities higher than their neighbors. As one contributor wryly put it, “The classification of humans by humans is inherently messy.”
