by “The Theoretical Naturalist,” Anjali Benjamin-Webb

I am a woman, a world traveler of predominantly Sri Lankan, African American, and Native American descent, and I am captivated by classical physiognomy, or the art of making character judgements based on physical attributes. I feel that being a ‘multi-racial’ person who does not necessarily resemble any one race more than another helps me to take an objective look at sweeping generalizations made about racial difference. With the understanding that race is a social construct, I see race as a set of assumptions made about the meaning of one’s physical appearance, and I am working towards an answer to the question: “What is racial difference?”

Socially, I see racial difference as a collective push for individualism. It registers an odd sense of wanting to feel independent as an individual who is also part of a whole. Politically, I see racial difference as a disadvantage. Governments have constructed racial devices to efficiently divide, quantify, and typecast socially normalized ‘races.’ Personally, I see ‘racial difference’ as a very superficial way of differentiating one person from another based on visual cues and geographic similarities. I am of two minds as I think of how differentiation is, in theory, something to be proud of, but in practice, a means for prejudice, rejection, and alienation.  Little did I know that one day I would be studying in depth a subject directly aligned with my interpretation of racial difference: physiognomy.

Pioneers of physiognomy, including Pliny the Elder (23-73 AD) were not only dictating their own realities, but those of realities to come. Imagine coming up with a new way to categorize a subgroup of human beings with no real evidence to prove that your theory is founded in fact. Now imagine this same theory becoming the basis for both biased and unbiased schools of thought. Physiognomy has borne a large burden in attempting to classify and categorize not only humans, but also all living things.

As I engage with modern scholarly debates, I am convinced that physiognomy is undeniably Proto-Racism, contrary to the beliefs of some scholars such as historian Joseph Ziegler. The paradoxical and conclusionary nature of physiognomy is what keeps it alive and relevant, as paradoxes and predetermined conclusions regularly inform the current social analysis of the constructs of race.

I find myself dissecting current events, only to find traces of physiognomic reasoning at their root: police shootings of unarmed black men, xenophobic attitudes against people who bear physical traits that mark them as different, and the long history of racial profiling. I find the historical scope that studying the practice of physiognomy facilitates to be most valuable in answering the question: What is racial difference?