Race as a category for identity or a means by which to identify one’s self is a modern concept.

“The very category of ‘race’– denoting primarily skin color– was first employed as a means of classifying human bodies by Francois Bernier, a French physician, in 1684.  The first authoritative racial division of humankind is found in the influential Naturae Systemae (1735) of the preeminent naturalist Carolus Linnaeus.”

~ Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1988), 100.