of these points. The twentieth century’s first full edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, completed in 1911, defined “race” as a group of individuals “descended from a common ancestor,” which implied that white people and black people, among others, had wholly separate lineages going back through evolutionary time. Civilization was defined as that period since “the most highly developed races of men have used systems of writing.” The century’s earliest version of the Oxford English Dictionary, the concise edition published in 1911, contained no entries for racism, colonialism, or homosexuality.
The standard view of human society was that differences of belief and practice were matters of development and deviance. A more or less straight line ran from primitive societies to advanced ones. In New York City, you could retrace this natural odyssey just by walking from one side of Central Park to the other. Exhibits on Africans, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans were housed (as they are today) under the same roof as dioramas of elk and grizzlies in the American Museum of Natural History. You had to go across the park, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to see what real achievement looked like. Contemporary society still had its flaws: the poor, the sexually aberrant, the feebleminded, overly ambitious women. But these were simply evidence of the work yet to be done in perfecting an already advanced civilization.
The idea of a natural ranking of human types shaped everything: school and university curricula, court decisions and policing strategies, health policy and popular culture, the work of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and U.S. colonial administrators in the Philippines, as well as their equivalents in Britain, France, Germany, and many other empires, countries, and territories. The poor were poor because of their own inadequacies. Nature favored the robust colonizer over the benighted native. Differences in physical appearance, customs, and language were reflections of a deeper, innate otherness. Progressives, too, accepted these ideas, adding only that it was possible, with enough missionaries, teachers, and physicians on hand, to eradicate primitive and unnatural practices and replace them with enlightened ways. That was why America’s foremost periodical on world politics and international relations, published since 1922 and now the influential Foreign Affairs, was originally called the Journal of Race Development. Primitive races were simply those that had yet to enjoy the benefits of muscular Christianity, flush toilets, and the Ford Motor Company.
About all of these things, however, we have since begun to change our minds.
Concepts such as race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and disability remain some of the most basic categories that we use to make sense of the social world. We ask about some of them on job applications. We measure others on census forms. We talk about all of them—incessantly in twenty-first-century America—in liberal arts classrooms and on social media. But what we mean by them is no longer the same as in the past.
In the 2000 census, for the first time Americans were allowed to report multiple answers to questions about their racial or ethnic identity. The Common Application, the admissions form used by over six hundred American colleges and universities, requires that an applicant’s sex match the legal description on a birth certificate but now permits further elaboration of how one perceives or represents that fact. In 2015 a majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices ruled that federal protection of the institution of marriage did not require that a couple consist of a chromosomal female and male. In schools, public buildings, universities, and workplaces, things that were not long ago seen as defects—from deafness to being a wheelchair user to having a particular style of learning—are now treated as differences that should be accommodated, the better to ensure that no ideas, skills, or talents go unexpressed merely because of a sound wave or a staircase.
We usually narrate these changes as an expansion or contraction of our moral universe. In the United States, the political left tends to trace a long, necessary arc from the dismantling of racial authoritarianism in the era of Jim Crow, through the Stonewall riots and the Americans with Disabilities Act, toward the first major female candidate for U.S. president. The narrative is one of progress, of an ever greater fulfillment of the rights enshrined in the nation’s founding documents. On the political right, some of these changes are said to constrict a community’s ability to determine its own social mores. A new form of state-sanctioned intolerance, protected in safe spaces and monitored by language police from