The Race Delusion

10 August 2014

比赛是很重要的。它对我们的生活方式有着巨大的影响。As University of Pennsylvania law professor Dorothy Roberts observes,

Race determines which church most Americans attend, where they buy a house, what persons they choose to marry, whom they vote for, and the music that they listen to. Race is evident in the color of inner city and suburban schools, prison populations, the US Senate, and Fortune 500 boardrooms.[1]

Most philosophers are skeptical of the claim that races represent genuine divisions of the human family. Of course, this view flies in the face of popular opinion. It is indisputable most peoplebelievethat race is real. But then again, there was a time when nearly everybody believed that the earth was the center of the universe. Merely believing that something is real doesn’t make it real. Before we can draw any conclusion about the reality or unreality of race, we need to figure out what races are supposed to be.

What do we purport to talk about when we talk about race?

种族应该是各种类型的人,而不是随便什么类型的人。有些事情取决于社会实践。考虑“丈夫”这个类别。为了让丈夫存在,婚姻制度必须存在。很明显,在一个没有婚姻的世界里是不会有丈夫的。So, we can say that husbands are asocially constructed kind. In contrast, those kinds of things that philosophers callnatural kindsdon’t depend for their existence on social institutions. They would exist even if human society didn’t. Natural kinds exist “out there” in the world, independently of our social institutions and classificatory practices. They include things like oxygen, stars, bosons, and porcupines.

Here’s the question: Are races natural kinds, or are they socially constructed kinds? Is being a member of a certain race more like being a boson than it is like being a husband, or vice versa?

Most present-day philosophers think that races are social constructions. In other words, they think that racial categories—categories like ‘black,’ ‘white,’ ‘Asian,’ and so on— are rather like the category ‘pet’. Pets are animals adopted for companionship or care—that’s pretty much all there is to being a pet. Very importantly, there aren’t any biological characteristics that all pets share (there are no biological characteristics that are unique to dogs, cats, goldfish, and boa constrictors). A person could knoweverythingthere is to know about biology and still not know whether or not a certain animal is a pet, because distinguishing pets from non-pets requires knowledge aboutsocialpractices rather than knowledge of biological facts. Philosophers tend to think of races as social constructions because there aren’t any biological facts about the members of a given race that demarcates them from members of other races. Strange as it may sound, a person could know all there is to know about human biology and still not know whether two people are members of the same or different races.

Having taught classes on the philosophy of race for years, I’m well aware that you are likely to regard this claim as ludicrous. “Surely,” you might argue, “members of a certain race look alike. They resemble one another more closely than they resemble members of other races.” If this is your view, I’m afraid that you are in the grip of a powerful and pervasive illusion. Let me try to change your mind.

There are a couple of reasons why similarity of appearance can’t underwrite race. For starters, consider the notion of similarity. The fact is thatanytwo things are similar in some respects and dissimilar in other respects. Thimbles, cupcakes, and hamsters are all similar in certain ways (for instance, they are all larger than hydrogen atoms and smaller than planets). Likewise, any two people are similar in some ways and dissimilar in others. Now, bearing this in mind, consider three people: Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Hillary Clinton. Question: Does the First Lady resemble Ms. Winfrey more closely than she resembles Mrs. Clinton? If you think that it’sjust plainobviousthat she does, it’s because you are privileging only a few characteristics—skin color, hair texture, and certain features of facial morphology. But two people might be similar in these few ways while being dissimilar in most other ways. Nobody has carried out an exhaustive comparison of the physical features of these three women. Consequently, neither you nor I nor anyone else knows whether Mrs. Obama is more similar to Ms. Winfrey than she is to Mrs. Clinton. And if these reflections haven’t dislodged the feeling that people of the same race are especially similar, try entertaining a different question. This time, ask yourself whether Mrs. Obama resembles Mike Tyson more closely than she resembles Secretary of State Clinton. Do youstill认为某一特定种族的成员特别相似?

The second, deeper reason why notions of race can’t be cashed out in terms of appearance is that it’s possible for a person to be a member of a certain race without having the sort of appearance that’s stereotypically associated with that race. This is beautifully illuminated by an account inKillers of Dream, Lillian Smith’s memoir about growing up in the segregated south at the dawn of the 20thcentury. Smith recounts how a young, ostensibly white child—a little girl—was spotted living with an African-American couple in what was then called “colored town.” Members of the all-white Ladies Club were convinced that she had been kidnapped. They alerted the sheriff, who removed the child and fostered her with the Smiths, a white family.

她叫简妮。

简妮和莉莉安的关系非常亲密,像姐妹一样生活,直到一个非洲裔美国人孤儿院的电话结束了他们的关系。The Smith’s were informed that Janie wasblack,and that the couple from whom she had been forcibly taken were her adoptive parents. Casting her mind back to the moment that her mother informed her that Janie must go, Lillian recalled:

In a little while my mother called my sister and me into her bedroom and told us that in the morning Janie would return to Colored Town…And then I found it possible to say, “Why is she leaving?....

“Because,” mother said gently, “Janie is a little colored girl.”

“但她是白色的!”

“We were mistaken. She is colored.”

“But she looks—“

“She is colored. Please don’t argue!”[2]

有什么能让珍妮变成黑人吗?这个故事告诉我们,种族主要不在于一个人的长相。If that were the case, it would be possible to change one’s race cosmetically (an idea lampooned in Harlem Renaissance writer George Schuyler’s 1934 deeply insightful novelBlack No More). What made Janie black had nothing to do with her physical attributes. Her supposed blackness (in common with Lillian’s putative whiteness) was a matter of social convention rather than biological reality.

You might be persuaded by my arguments that race isn’t based on superficial physical attributes but hold on to the idea that race is based on something biologically deeper. Perhaps you believe that race is somehow inscribed in our genes, and racial membership is based on genetic similarity rather than similarity of surface traits. This is an increasingly popular view, but it’s a wrong-headed one. In my next blog posting I’ll put it under the philosophical microscope to show how and why it fails.


[1]Roberts, D. (2012)Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Recreate Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: New Press, p. 3.

[2]Smith, L. (1994)Killers of the Dream.New York: Norton, pp. 13-14.

Comments(3)


Guest's picture

Guest

Sunday, August 10, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

David, I certainly don't

David, I certainly don't disagree with your conclusion; I hope that it's becoming increasing clear to people that race is not a biological category.
However (just as, as you mention, people once believed that the Earth is the center of the universe) analytic philosophers continue to believe that there is a important distinction between social convention and reality, and that that distinction is firmly rooted in the latter (it's not a socially constructed distinction.)
In my view, racial prejudice can be seen as, in some sense, continuous with metaphysical distinctions like that between appearance and reality. Such extramundane distinctions lead to a worldview that privileges some categories over other categories (so, those who find themselves subsumed under the category of "gay" are inferior because the category somehow defies "what Nature intended", etc.)
Racists don't believe that group B is inferior to group A simply because it is pragmatic, or socially agreed upon, that group B ought to be considered inferior; they believe that there is something deep in nature that makes it so. That "cutting at nature's joints" is the more general delusion that encourages particular delusions like racist thinking.
Once we accept that the genealogy of nearly all of our categories ultimately reveals nothing but a history of conceptual and semantic stipulation and legislation by us collectively (including natural kind categories, natural laws, modal necessities, moral acts, etc.), we are no longer inclined to give in to superstitious thinking that tends to encourage and justify racial (ethnic, gender, gay, etc.) prejudice. (I say "nearly" all because it is plausible that certain basic concepts are 'hard-wired', as some psychologists believe...but that needn't open the door to a heavy-duty realist view that opposes the real to the merely conventional.)
为了论证种族不是生物学上的,根本没有必要诉诸于现实/社会的区别,因此也没有必要将种族纳入社会建构的范畴,如果这意味着要反对形而上学上的“真实”的话。(但是,也许我期待着这个博客的第二部分。)

David Livingstone Smith's picture

大卫Livingsto……

Monday, August 18, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

Ernest,

Ernest,
Thanks for your thoughtful response to my blog posting.
我当然反对社会习俗在某种程度上不同于现实的说法。毕竟,社会习俗是真正的社会习俗。因此,声称种族类别是社会建构的并不等于说种族是不真实的。种族问题的反现实主义者不得不进一步论证,他们认为?没有什么符合种族的概念吗?那是,那没有?任何拥有种族应有的属性的群体。
This brings me to your next point. I think that we agree that the ordinary concept of race is bound up with a kind of folk-metaphysical theory about the relation between appearance and reality (or, as I prefer to think of it, appearance and essence). The folk-metaphysics that underpins racial thinking is false, but this doesn?t impugn the general notion of natural kinds. One can be a realist about natural kinds while rejecting the view that races are natural kinds. I think, by the way, that when we let our philosophical hair down we are ALL realists about natural kinds, and essentialists to boot. Longstanding philosophical beliefs are often underpinned by stubborn psychological biases?biases that we philosophers rather ludicrously dignify as ?intuitions.? As Kant understood very well, there?s no escape from the architecture of the human mind, although it?s too bad that he didn?t deploy this insight to interrogate his own racist beliefs.
David

Guest's picture

Guest

Tuesday, August 19, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

谢谢大卫。I think I agree

谢谢大卫。我想我同意你说的。如果我当时再仔细一点,我就会这么说了。现实主义不需要传统的形而上学故事,因为后者认为,关于自然种类及其模态属性的主张是理所当然的,因为世界是独立于我们概念化/谈论它的方式的。我认为正是这个故事试图证明深刻而顽固的心理偏见是正确的;它会让我们认为,我们偏爱的信念(包括我们最好的生物科学的结果)是从自然法则中获得真理的,而自然法则支配着我们概念饱和的经验观察和反事实推理之外的东西。我喜欢阿米·托马森(Amie Thomasson)所主张的那种“简单现实主义”。
I have no issue with the general notion of natural kinds or their essences, and of course one can be a realist about such things while denying that races are like this. But I also think it's important to remove the temptation (succumbed to by philosophers and non-philosophers alike) to be realist in a 'heavy-duty' sense. Removing this temptation, I think, will go a long way toward making apparent that our stubborn psychological biases are just that; they are not rooted in some extra-linguistic Reality since there just is no such thing.

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