The chicken or the egg is commonly stated as "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Questions like this also evoked the questions of the origins of life and the universe. Though applying the simple question of “which came first?” to race as a social construct or a biological construct has been debated and tested throughout history for many years. Placing race on a measurement scale becomes very problematic to measure, however society may sometime do it by eye shape, sometimes it may be done by hair texture or bone structure of the face or even by skin color. To the contrary, Stephen Jay Gould explains, “Racial classification is completely cultural, for being black has been defined as just looking dark enough that anyone can see that you are. For under the skin we are effectively the same, but we are fooled by our visual differences which are quite noticeable.” Black, white, brown are merely just colors, but we attach to them meanings of assumptions and even laws that create enduring social inequality. Race has a distinct nature that provokes biological implications upon social relations.
Nevertheless, it is important to understand the background of the era that created this field of racial science. Society has always felt intellectually inclined to produce scientific reasons for racial differences. Stephen Gould identifies the efforts by nineteenth century scientists to associate bodily appearances with different intellectual levels, in which included phrenology, crainometry, and morphology. This scientific belief was so encompassing, that Gould uses influential American figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln (those we idolize as enlightened) as examples, he states “Others among our heroes argued for biological inferiority. Thomas Jefferson wrote, albeit tentatively: “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and of mind."" With extensive research towards the Eugenics Movement, Creighton University Historical Department states that:
WHICH CAME FIRST