In my paper, I argue that al-Jahiz’s (d. 868/869) classification of muwallad poets should be understood as an extension of his meditations on animal breeding and taxonomy. Over the past century, the consensus on how to interpret the Arabic term “muwallad” in texts about poetry and language has shifted. Scholars have moved away from using terms that emphasized enslavement or race to terms that prioritize the status of muwallad poets as “new” or “modern.” This revision has been justified be gesturing toward how the word was used by various critics and compilers hundreds of years after al-Jahiz. I contend that this shift has muddled different usages from discrete moments in history. I argue that in al-Jahiz’s corpus, we should explain muwallad by highlighting the recurring themes with which al-Jahiz surrounds the term: mixture, corruption, and impurity. With this in mind, I will explore these themes in Kitab al-Hayawan, Kitab al-Bayan, and a number of al-Jahiz’s epistles. By focusing on how “muwallad” is used in al-Jahiz’s corpus, we can see how Mu‘tazili natural philosophy could be wedded to empirical observations of animal breeding practices. These ideas about animals and breeding were brought to bear upon conceptions of human difference, and because these disparate ‘races’ were understood to possess differing natures—and language was an expression of the speaker’s nature—poetry became a site of race-making.