Race: What It Is and What to Be Expected of It

This essay discusses race as a socially constructed concept.

I. Introduction

The concept of “race” is gaining importance in English, especially American English discourse these days. Considerations over race are almost unavoidable in policy making and political speeches. But despite the prevalence of the concept of “race”, philosophers dispute whether “races” really exist, and a consistent single account, or even a dominant account, of such a concept appears never to have been reached.

Primarily, theorists have tried to provide analyses of “races” from two approaches—the biological approach and the social approach. Biological accounts of races include attempts to equate race with “subspecies”, “ecotypes”, “inbred lineages”, or “cladistic groups”, etc. Social accounts, by contrast, advocate that the concept of “race” is a social construction, which gains its meaning from objective social reality or historical conditions. Despite the great variety in biological accounts, most of them suffer from a semantic mismatch with our ordinary usage of “races” and embody inconsistency in the theories themselves. By contrast, analyses from the social perspective embrace greater coherence, even if few reliable empirical evidences can be found to support them. Generally, the idea that race is socially constructed, like the concept “gender”, is more promising than seeing it as some biological reality, like the concept “sex”.

But if race is a concept constructed by men, is there sufficient reason to retain it in social science studies? My own stance on this question is that race does need to be considered at present and for some period in the future, due to the social reality and historical stage we are in. Yet it should be expected that at some time in the future, the term “race” would lose its sense and we would take up a new measure, “ethnicity” for instance, to mark the distinctive physical and cultural features among social groups.

In the following parts, I will proceed by first elaborating on several biological accounts with reasons why they fail to work satisfactorily. Then I will explicate a possible way to define race as a social construct by mostly referring to Haslanger’s theories. In the closing part, I will voice my own opinions on how we should treat the concept “race” in the present context and in the ideal future context.

II. Biological Racial Realism

To get hold of how we might tell different races biologically, it is beneficial for us to consider how we tell one sex from the other. The most definite and essential way of doing so is probably by checking the existence of the Y chromosome in the chromosomal complement. The more usual and accessible means is to check the characters of individual organisms: a most decisive way is to check the reproductive organs; moreover, we can tell by looking at secondary sex characteristics, like the presence of Adam’s apple and the shape of the body, etc.

But deciding to what race an individual belongs can be hundreds of times more complicated than deciding sex. At the genetic or chromosomal level, no decisive evidence can be picked out to categorize people into a specific race. And at the biological character level, telling an organism’s race is perplexing, for the phenotypes we use to designate races are usually continuous and constantly contradict each other. We think of a creature with a uterus as a woman, and one with an Adam’s apple as a man. These two characters are not likely to occur on a single organism simultaneously. Yet when deciding individuals’ races, chances are good that typical phenotypes belonging to different racial groups are manifest in a single person.

Having realized that explaining races merely from a genetic perspective is hopeless, many theorists like Mayr and Andreasen tried to provide an account appealing to the evolutionary story. They argue that before an ancestral species evolves into two distinctive species incapable of producing fertile offspring with each other, the ancestral species undergoes a stage where there are subspecies existing within it. These subspecies have accumulated features unique to the group and distinct from other groups. In the animal world, where reproductive isolation exists owing to geographical or spatio-temporal structural reasons, such an account may be reasonably accepted. Yet with human beings, where genetic flow through interbreeding has not been rare since ancient times, introducing “subspecies” as a synonym for “races” can be awkward, as there is no way to demarcate groups in the absence of reproductive isolation. In the evolutionary view, other claims, trying to interpret races as ecotypes, for instance, basically meet the same problem as the subspecies theory.

In addition to the above attempts to analyze races biologically, there are defenses of biological racial realism using more anthropological methods. A representative definition is from Hardimon, asserting that the word “race” means a group distinguished from other individuals by distinctive physical features, whose members are linked by a common ancestry peculiar to the group, and that has the same geographic location as its origination. Though this sounds plausible, the account is suspicious from every aspect. First of all, people’s physical features, as we have discussed, are continuous and can vary greatly within a group. Secondly, the fact is that most acknowledged races share the same ancestry, which is not peculiar to the race. And thirdly, scarcely any races are monophyletic according to human history.

However sophisticated biological analyses of races may be, they more or less deviate from our ordinary usage of “races” and fail to tell the complete story of the origin of all races and how they can be demarcated from each other.

III. Social Racial Realism

Given that “races” cannot be fully illustrated by natural science, it is reasonable to think that “race” is only a social construct. But scholars believing in social realism about race differ as well. Some argue that race is real in the social sense without any negative attitude toward the biological candidates, while others believe that race is real only in the social sense. Some think race is only politically real, some see it as politically and culturally real, and some advocate that it is real as a socio-historical construct. In this section I will mainly discuss race as a political socio-historical construct based on Haslanger’s theory.

Sally Haslanger provided a very unique insight into the concept of “race” by paralleling it with the concept of gender. In defining what gender is, she inserts the idea of social hierarchy into the definition. She argues that a woman is an individual with expected body features who is subordinate in social position and whose subordination is reinforced by the existing social gender structure. By the same token, a race is a group of people with certain body features who are assumed to have a certain ideology and occupy a certain position in a society, and that ideology and position a race shares are reinforced by the existing allocation of roles and social positions to different racial groups in the existing society. Haslanger does not explicate how that imbalanced racial allocation of social positions came into being. Yet arguably, it is a consequence of historical events. Especially in the United States, the disadvantaged situation coloured groups are generally in is the aftereffect of their ancestors’ unfortunate past.

Though the idea of hierarchy is built into the concept of gender and race, Haslanger argues that it is not necessary for individuals to be fitted into any gender or racial categories. One can always refuse to be gendered or raced. But the hierarchical notions of gender and race are of political importance, for policy makers need to use them in contexts concerning social equity. She further illustrated that the most ideal situation should be that hierarchical genders are replaced by non-hierarchical genders and races are replaced by some non-hierarchical notions like idealized ethnicities.

IV. Does “Race” Have a Future?

People may feel it is a sensible strategy to eliminate the notion of race because the prevalence of talking about it solidifies social stratification. My attitude toward the usage of the notion is that its elimination is an ideal situation, yet it will not be achieved by scientists’ and politicians’ suddenly abandoning the notion in practice. Instead, it should be achieved via paying closer attention to this concept in the present context.

The social reality is that racial bias and value-based stereotypes are still prevalent, though in a much more implicit way than before. The police are prone to see dark-skinned individuals rather than fair-skinned ones as potential criminals subconsciously. Teachers treat students with different skin tones and eye colours in different manners and attitudes without even realizing it. Under most circumstances, individuals do not intend to prioritize a certain race, but they just do. This instinctive bias is more or less based on the social fact that, in general, whites are better educated, in better material conditions, and commit less crime. Abstracted from these social facts is a folk generalization, which projects onto individuals when people are dealing with specific cases.

Stopping the use of the concept “race” is not the best policy to prevent racial prejudice, for folk generalization is ubiquitous and would proceed even if the word “race” were abandoned. The most effective way of achieving a non-hierarchical notion of social groups should be lifting the overall social position of disadvantaged races, promoting their degree of education and alleviating their poverty through preferential policies, as well as increasing the proportion of these races in the elite class—all of which call for an in-depth discussion of the concept “race” and the application of it in social and political practices.

What is to be expected when the concept of “race” is eliminated in the future world? I do not know what to say for sure. Yet I can describe an interesting situation where a civilization does not have such notions as “race”. Concepts like “race” or even “nation” were not introduced to China until the late 19th century. By that time, the concept closest to “race” was something similar to “ethnicity”, which is a culturally related concept. In the Tang Dynasty (600–900 AC), one could be accepted as ethnically Chinese without a national identity card, regardless of skin tone or eye colour, as long as one spoke Chinese, wore Chinese costumes, and conformed to Chinese etiquette. In fact, there were many westerners with fair skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair living the Chinese way in East Asia at that time. In such a society, one’s biological phenotypes or body features are of trivial importance and have barely anything to do with value-related issues such as fortune, reputation, and position. By describing this ancient Chinese society, I do not mean to say that a society without any concept of “race” or even “nation” is necessarily more advantageous. Nevertheless, it at least shows that the notion “race” is not as essential as many people assume it to be, and a society structured without such a notion is perfectly possible.

References

[1] Haslanger, S. (2000). “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?” Noûs.
[2] Kitcher, P. (2007). “Does ‘Race’ Have a Future?” Philosophy and Public Affairs.
[3] Spencer, Quayshawn. (2017). “Racial Realism I: Are Races Real?” Philosophy Compass.
[4] Spencer, Quayshawn. (2017). “Racial Realism II: Are Folk Races Real?” Philosophy Compass.