Digging up the history of race may help us understand the conditions in which racism appears or flourishes. If we manage to find when, where and why people started getting classified according to race, we could know for certain whether racism is an inevitable aspect of social life or not. Furthermore, if it turns out that ‘race’ is a modern invention, then dismantling certain modern institutions would help fight racism. But if ‘race’ is not modern, then such an approach might be misguided, and we should explore commonalities and differences in how racialisation works in the long term. I mean the 'historical' long term - upwards of half a millennium.

That race theorists have long disagreed about how racial classification started, does not indicate any disagreement over the relevant historical facts. Rather the debate remains unresolved largely because the question itself is ambiguous. When race scholars ask whether or not race is modern, they end up answering six entirely different questions. By smoothing out such creases, we can better understand the history of ‘race’ and racialization.

The first of those six questions is whether the concept of race is modern. The term appears in English translations of many important ancient texts, which makes it seem as though the Ancients had some concept of race. One can find, for example, the term ‘race’ in translations of Hesiod’s genealogical poem Theogony, written around 700 BCE. The term that is translated into ‘race’ is ‘genos’, which - in ancient Greek - meant any 'category' or a collective. For example, Hesiod talks about ‘genos gynaikon’ – the ‘category’ of women or all women altogether.

We must be careful not to project our concepts of race - which is strongly connected to the inherited appearance common to a whole set of people - onto the Ancients. That idea of race likely would have made little sense to them because, in there time, Africans could be found only in Africa and Europeans in Europe. The people anyone except the maritime tradesmen could come across were so akin to one another as well as to the beholder that no one would have thought of classifying people according to appearance. According to the physician and medical theorist Hippocrates, a newborn baby’s skin colour was determined by the climate, not by the physical characteristics of the parents. Ancient Greek theories about pigmentation emphasized how the environment affects the body. They were largely antithetical to later – explicitly racial – theories, according to which the body is impervious to the environment.

Which of the following best describes the purpose served by the last paragraph in the context of the whole passage?
(A) It points out the difference between the ancient and modern definitions of race.
(B) It hints at a possible answer to an important question asked in the fist paragraph.
(C) It offers an example to support a hypothesis presented in the two previous paragraphs.
(D) It describes an aspect of the way the ancient Greeks used to think of race.
(E) It nullifies a possibility described in the previous paragraph and explains why it does so.