Michael Banton gives this list (in Racial Theories, Cambridge, 1987) of different senses of the notion of race:
1. Race as lineage:
This has to do with biological lineage in modern times, although (as we will see below) the religious story of lineage is much older. There are, of course, difficulties in identifying race this way. First, you have to be able to identify a species, and more importantly be able to say what a species is, which since the 19th century is increasingly difficult. Student of biology will know the history of classification, from Linnaeus onward.
This is the direction the discussion of race went in England. In Germany it was a different story. They were caught up with "Naturphilosophie" in the 19th century. This was a heritage of Hegel's. The German's believed that outward characteristics, such as skin colour, were not a good means of classifying people. Carl Carus, for example, substituted classification on the lines of the senses -- eye people, ear people, and so forth. He also added to this the notion of cultural evolution, calling some people the "day people" (the most developed), some the "twilight" people (divided into West and East), and some the "night" people (Africans and Australians). It was the duty of the day people to help along those in the other categories. Gustav Klemm (1802-1867) talked about stages of mankind, much on the same lines as Carus' cultural evolution.
All this meant that later theorists could use a kind of "natural" sense to race, which gave it a kind of scientific validity.
2. Race as type:
George Cuvier is an important figure in the history of biology. Cuvier was a comparative anatomist. He was able to classify animals according to similarities in anatomy, and deduce the form of an animal from a relatively small part -- e.g., the jawbone. Cuvier was also interested in classifying nature, and this led him to classify humans as well. He was one of the first to link certain anatomical features with things like intelligence. The closer physiology was to animals, he thought, the closer the human was to an animal. Blacks, not surprisingly, came out at the bottom, and whites at the top. The distinctions he made really blurred the biological picture more than anything, because they obscured whether the differences he noted were at the level of species, genus, or variety. Race and variety got blurred.
Nevertheless, this way of talking about race caught on. It led to the search for the relative capacities of brains (by measuring skulls, both inside and out). Amazingly, they ignored that fact that skull size and stature might be connected within a species.
Arthur Gobineau (1816-1882), a French writer, follows this version of racial classification. He is sometimes called the father of racism. He argued (influenced by German romanticism) that the Aryans were the original race, and spread out to create the other major civilizations. The Aryans overstretched their reach, and something went wrong with some of the civilizations.
This is also the tradition of race theory in which the original divisions of the races into Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid (based on their places of origin) appear.
3. Race as subspecies:
Darwin argued that race was a subspecies. There were variations within a species, so that the subspecies could produce viable offspring, but they still had evolutionary differences. The move here was that Darwin went from typological to population thinking. No longer was there a type, that had an "essence". Now there were just different populations in different places.
This of course raises the question of the place of natural selection in this process. What were the different sub-species selected for? Indeed, there was a realization that the evolutionary process was still going on, and that some groups seemed better adapted than others, especially if you started considering society as that which you had to adapt to.
In the two decades before WWI, the belief in white superiority reached it's peak. People looked at the size of the British Empire, and assumed that the natives of Britain must be better adapted to the world stage than others.
This received academic support from an American at this time, William Graham Sumner. Sumner taught at Yale (the first person to teach a course in the US called Sociology). He wrote a book as a course text called Folkways, in which he outlined and described human customs in general. Sumner argued, among other things, that before the Civil war things in the South had been peaceful, and therefore there was no point in trying to deal with racial relations there.
The most modern variant on this description of race is the genetic explanation.
4. Race as status:
Of course, race has as much to do with behaviour and social organization as anything. This implies that we do not identify one race by itself, but rather look at the relationship between races, and what each has to gain or lose by its relative place on the social hierarchy.
5. Race as class:
Marx, for example, reduces all differences to class difference. Race becomes another economic relation; skin colour is incidental.
But besides these denotations of race, there are what David Theo Goldberg calls the "masks of race". His list encompasses Banton's, and adds some others:
1. Race as natural kind, social creation:
Related in some way to race as root, like the root of a vegetable. It follows on the Aristotelean concern with classification. It emerges in English first in 1508. At the time, race signified a "breed or stock of animals", a "genus, species, or kind of animal", a "variety of plant", and slightly later, a "tribe, nation or people considered of common stock."
2. Race as pedigree and population.
This is equivalent to Banton's notion of race as lineage. The difference between this and the previous one is that this one takes into account origins, while the other one doesn't necessarily.
There was a debate over polygenism and monogenism at the time. These are views concerning the question of human origins. Did we all come from one stock, or not?
The Religious story: The Hamitic hypothesis goes like this: Noah had three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth. After the flood, these sons with their families dispersed to different areas. Shem was supposedly the originator of European (Caucasian) races, Japheth the originator of Oriental races, and Ham the originator of African races. These get sorted later into the divisions of Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid. The important thing is that there are differences of origin for the different races.
It should be noted that this is usually linked with the story of Cain and Abel, to say that the curse of Cain is handed down to Ham. Either the curse goes through Ham, or it is argued (by Paracelsus first) that Adam was really the father only of the Jewish people, and the others came from elsewhere.
3. Race as breeding populations or gene pools.
19th century, the discussion was about populations, and specifically the nature of species and sub-species. For Darwin, the subspecies was the race. These are populations separated geographically, such that reproduction is possible, but made less likely due to, initially, geographical factors, and then cultural ones.
4. Race as class:
Race is often used as an indication of social standing, relative to the position of others. Race and class are not the same thing, but they can end up being coextensive in certain circumstances. We have come to realize that social position is constructed and imposed, rather than natural, and race turns out to be this way as well. It has more to do with social inheritance than anything else.
5. Cultural Race:
"The cultural conception of race is identified with language group, religion, group habits, norms, or customs: a typical style of behaviour, dress, cuisine, music, literature, and art." The attempt to trace the "families" of languages goes a long way back, and is linked with the race discussions of the 18th and 19th centuries. This version of race has to do with a shared history, and some racism comes coded through the means of culture. Goldberg cites the case of Thatcher, when she was prime minister of Britain, saying something about the fear that Britons would be swamped by people [from the new commonwealth or Pakistan] with a different culture." They would somehow dilute what it was to be a real Briton. You get the same thing in Canada, when people talk about assimilation into "Canadian" culture, which usually means white settler culture.
6. Ethnorace:
One theorist distinguishes between ethnicity and race by saying that the first is socially defined on the basis of cultural criteria, and the second is socially defined on the basis of physical criteria. (Van den Berghe). However, it seems that the first may collapse into the second. That means that ethnicity might be roughly the same as race. Ethnicity may still emphasize cultural content while race may emphasize descent, but these get blurred. If you ever have to fill out an affirmative action form for a job, you will sometimes find a list of "ethnicities" where you are supposed to check off what you belong to. But this list often mixes race (African descent) with ethnicity (Italian-American), and groups that belong somewhere between (e.g., Hispanic). And what about Jews? Usually, taken as a race, but in Jewish circles there is the tendency recently to racialize the basic distinction between Sephardic and Ashkenazi. Some Ashkenazis in Israel refer to Sephardic Jews as "Asiatic" Jews. Ethnicity? Race? Religion?
7. Race as nation:
Nations tend to have geographic locations, which is the way Darwin used to think about sub-species. And, some might be inclined to see certain racial categorizations as really national ones. Being "Canadian", a national designation, for some really is a racial designation. Same with immigration policies in a variety of countries (eg, US, Australia). There is a sense that there is a national self-consciousness, that would be eroded if you get the wrong people in.
Now, all this means that our notions of race cannot be taken for granted. When someone talks about race, they might be talking about any of these.