This is part of the Culture War Encyclopedia.
Last updated Feb 18, 2024.
CONTENTS
Definition of Race
Race in the Culture War
Helpful Analogy
Race in Critical Theory
Race in Critical Race Theory
Definitions of Race in CRT
The Social Construction of Race in CRT
W.E.B. DuBois on the Social Construction of Race
John O. Calmore on the Social Construction of Race
Activist Distortion of Race in CRT
Race as a Power Construction in CRT
Biology & History
Commentary
Bibliography
“Race may be America’s single most confounding problem, but the problem with race is that few people seem to know what race is.” - Ian F. Lopez1
Definitions of Race
We will, of course, be discussing the term race as it is applied to groups of humans of different genetic origins unless otherwise specifically noted.
The Cambridge dictionary defines race as
one of the main groups to which people are often considered to belong, based on physical characteristics that they are perceived to share such as skin colour, eye shape, etc.:
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, in common usage, the term applies to
any one of the groups that humans are often divided into based on physical traits regarded as common among people of shared ancestry
and in as it is used in biology in general, not just to the human species, a race is
a group within a species that is distinguishable (as morphologically, genetically, or behaviorally) from others of the same species
There are outdated usages of the term race. Merriam-Webster provides this example,
archaic : a group of people sharing some habit or characteristic (such as profession or belief)
…as in…
“…the whole race of politicians put together.” — Jonathan Swift
According to Oxford, in some cases, the word ethnicity
is a “politically correct” term equivalent to the word “race,” which may have pejorative associations
In the Etymology Dictionary, they define race as
people descended from a common ancestor, class of persons allied by common ancestry
Race in the Culture War
Race tends to be a wedge between the more ‘progressive’ views and the more common views regarding it. It can be confusing. The root of the confusion is this - as with other politically and emotionally charged terms, people on one side of the debate have decide to use the term race differently than the other side uses them. This side publishes papers and books using race and related terms in their own way, cite each other, use these terms as such in college textbooks and so on.
Helpful Analogy
Let us try to avoid the confusion surrounding the term race by removing the emotional factor (because emotions cloud reason). Imagine a debate about colors. . .
Team Other says that colors exist; red, yellow, green, blue, purple exist. We can see them because they have their own measurable frequencies of light.
Team Progressive says that colors are products of social thought. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no optic or photo reality; rather, colors are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient. Some cultures recognize orange as a color. Other cultures think of orange as tone between the color red and the color yellow. There are endless tones between all these - just look at a real rainbow. Therefore there are no colors.
Team Other replies that we can all see that there are colors.
Image source here.
Team Progressive says tones near each other on the rainbow share certain physical traits, of course, such as their light frequency. But their light frequencies vary endlessly. Also there are no superior colors and tones have little or nothing to do with distinctly human, higher-order traits, such as personality, intelligence, and moral behavior.
Team Other looks confused. They say that of course there are endless gradations of colors, as in the rainbow, there is a range of tones between the major colors but this does not mean that colors do not exist. Yes, different cultures divide the rainbow up differently. Some do not consider orange or green to be a major colors but rather mid-tones. This does not mean that there are only a few tones nor does it mean that colors do not exist. Also, what does morality or whatever have to do with this?
Team Progressive then says that the term ‘color’ is misunderstood, that it was a word invented a few centuries ago to support the view that different colors have their own natural origin, that there are only a few colors, that some are better than others and that mid-tones only exist as a result of the unnatural perversion of color mixing. But science has since found that there are no divisions between tones of the rainbow and that there are no superior tones and therefore, they conclude, there are no colors.
Team Other nods their heads, acknowledges that in the past people had some wrong views regarding colors but that is the antiquated view that we have moved on from long ago. That is not what we mean by the word color today. We use that word to refer to the major tones which are real and measurable as are the endless colors between these major colors. Yes, there are no divisions between colors. Colors exist.
Team Progressive responds that colors, in the antiquated sense of the term do not exist so colors do not exist. But tones exist, of course. But they are not colors.
Team Other asks, “Is this what we pay for you to go to college for?”
If we were to take the imaginary debate above and make it about the human species and race rather than about the rainbow and color you get the heart of the debate about race that ‘crits’ put forth. ‘Crits’ are those in the fields of critical theory, critical legal studies (CLS) and Critical race theory (CRT).
Ok, well, we would also need to replace the argument that colors “correspond to no optic or photo reality” with the argument that races “correspond to no biological or genetic reality” (which is an actual quote from a crit as we’ll see below), but you get the idea.
Underneath the fog of war, it really is that simple. But oh, what a thick fog it is! To be fair, in this case the confusion is generated by one side as they insist on altering certain terms to fit their arguments.
Race in Critical Theory
In Critical Theory - the Key Concepts (2015)2 , Dino Franco Felluga writes the following from the perspective of critical theory3,
RACE AND ETHNICITY
As with class or gender and sex, it is important to keep in mind that racial distinctions, as we now understand them, are in fact of recent invention. Today, race tends to be understood as “the major groupings of mankind, having in common distinct physical features” (OED); however, this sense of the term '“race” does not appear until the eighteenth century and does not become fully instantiated until the nineteenth. That instantiation was aided by Charles Darwin’s evolutionist theories, which eventually inspired the eugenics movement at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, not to mention the violence perpetrated in the name of racial purity throughout the twentieth century. As Lerone Bennett for example explains in The Shaping of Black America, “race did not have the same meaning in 1619,” the year the first African slaves were sold into captivity on American soil, “that it has today.” As he clarifies, “The first white settlers were organized around concepts of class, religion, and nationality, and they apparently had little or no understanding of the concepts of race or slavery” (1975: 10). By looking to a time before contemporary notions of race are postulated, critical theorists are able to illustrate that race is by no means a biological fact but rather a discursive creation, an ideology, albeit one that has, of course, had real, material effects.
Some theorists have argued that the contemporary concepts of race and racism are a direct result of developments in the nineteenth century, including Enlightenment philosophy, imperial expansion, and the rise of capitalism. Just at the moment when Enlightenment principles of inalienable rights would seem to make slavery unthinkable (remember that it was acceptable in, say, ancient Greece where it was not tied to race). We see the growth of the African slave trade and its use in the plantation system of America and the West Indies. We also witness at this time a rush of colonial expansion, including the brutal oppression and exploitation of colonized peoples. As Helen Scott explains in “Was There a Time Before Race?” (2002), the way around the new ideology of “personal liberty and freedom” was to define “slaves as property, rather than as people,” thus placing, “the property rights of the planter above the individual rights of the slave” (173), a development that is explored especially by Critical Race Theory (see whiteness as property). Similarly, by defining the colonial Other as racially inferior, even subhuman, one could legitimize the brutality of colonial occupation or, later in the twentieth century, the mistreatment of immigrant labor.
Postcolonial theorists often turn to the discursive instantiation of racial ideology, underscoring at once the hegemonic power of such representations of the Other and their artificiality or arbitrariness, as in Edward Said’s influential analysis of Orientalism (1978). Indeed, influenced by poststructuralist theory, they are careful of any claims to fix the identity of an oppressed group, as in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s demands for subaltern subjectivity in her provocatively titled essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988a). Instead, what tends to be underscored are the spaces where identities are blurred or mixed, as in the key concepts of contact zone and transculturation, hybridity, intersectionality, liminility, and mimicry. So, in seeking to theorize an Afro-American tradition of literature, Henry Louis Gates underscores the “double-voicedness” and “doubleplay” that black forms of literature “bore to white forms,” often through the mechanisms of parody and pastiche. He terms this general form of signification “Signifyin(g)” (1988: xxiv), a practitioner that contests the monolithic and homogenous.
Cornel West could be said to explore a similar notion of heterogeneity in his writings on race. As he states, “Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogenous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing” (1993: 203-4). In the different arena of Birmingham School Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall similarly seeks to contest any monolithic or homogenous sense of race or even racism by adopting Antonio Gramci’s key concepts (hegemony, war of position, war of maneuver) in his explorations of race in contemporary culture: “In the analysis of particular historical forms of racism, we would do well to operate at a more concrete, historicized level of abstraction (i.e., not racism in general but racisms)” (1986: 23).
Instead of making claims about biological race or any essentialist notion of racial identity, theorists are more likely to turn to the concept of ethnicity in order to understand group identity, particularly in the sense articulated well by Richard Schermerhorn: “a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of their peoplehood” (1970: 12).
Again they tend to want4,
no essentialist notion of racial identity
but, rather they5
turn to the concept of ethnicity
which is looser because it is not necessarily based on inherited traits but also things like religion, music, clothing style, food and so on. As loose as the concept of ethnicity is, critical theorists, Felluga goes on to write6 are likely to reject
any essentialist notion of ethnicity
Below we will see a crit argue for replacing the term race with the term culture which is even further away from what we mean by race than the term ethnicity is. Thereby, the channels of communication are distorted by even more noise.
Intentional or not, there is a trend here of compromising the integrity of the terms in such a way that it makes communication about these things less clear and more confusing.
Felluga also writes7 that the goal of CRT,
is not just to change the law, as in the civil rights movement, but also to uncover “how law was a constitutive element of race itself: in other words, how law constructed race” (xxv). At the same time, CRT questions the tendency of some deconstructionist and postmodern CLS scholars to dismiss race altogether because, these CLS scholars argue, the very concept of race entails an overly essentialist view of subjectivity (e.g., biological, inherent, immutable); this is a CLS position that CRT scholars “have come to call ‘vulgar anti-essentialism’” (xxvi). As the editors of Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings explain,
“It was obvious to many of us that although race was … socially constructed (the idea of biological race is “false”), race was nonetheless “real” in the sense that there is a material dimension and weight to the experience of being “raced” in American society, a materiality that in significant ways has been produced and sustained by law. Thus, we understood our project as an effort to construct a race-conscious and at the same time anti-essentialist account of the process by which law participates in “race-ing” American society.” (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xxvi)
Critical Race Theory therefore adopts a rather complex approach to issues of race, as evidenced in key concepts that it shares with Black Feminist thought (see feminism), including the Matrix of Domination, intersectionality, and whiteness as property. For example, rather than see racism as an aberrant, now no longer common act that directly targets minorities by denying them their rights, CRT scholars examine what they term “micro-aggressions,” those common, quotidian, minor acts that serve to mark a racial minority as inferior (repetition of racial cliche’s, body language, even simply the avoidance of someone’s gaze). “White privilege” functions in much the same way: “reserving favors, smiles, kindness, the best stories, one’s most charming side, and invitations to real intimacy for one’s own kind of class” (Delgado and Stefancic 2001: 25). Racism, according to CRT, “is ordinary, not aberrational - ‘normal science,’ the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country” (7). A legal notion of equality that is “color blind,” purporting to provide the same opportunities to everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation and so on, only addresses “the most blatant form of discrimination, such as mortgage redlining or the refusal to hire a black Ph.D. rather than a white high school dropout, that do stand out and attract our attention” (7). According to CRT, the liberal doctrine of “color blind” equality (e.g. the principle of meritocracy, which is used to reject affirmative-action rules) in fact serves to legitimate all the other forms of oppression and marginalization that constitute the daily experience of subaltern racial, gender, and sexual identity. The law’s support of color-blind equality thus keeps dominant identity groups from having to address the real, everyday injustices or even the systemic mechanism (e.g., standardized tests, police profiling, legal precedence) that deny subaltern groups power, status, respect, and wealth.
Race in Critical Race Theory
Definitions of Race in CRT
Critical race theory (CRT) comes from critical legal studies (CLS) which comes from critical theory (see those entries in the Culture War Encyclopedia for more). In Critical Race Theory - an Introduction, authors Delgado and Stefancic define8 race as the
notion of a distinct biological type of human being, usually based on skin color or other physical characteristics.
They define9 the ‘biological view of race’ as the
once popular view that humanity is divided into four or five major groups, corresponding to objective and real physical differences.
Ibram X. Kendi puts forth this definition in How to be an Antiracist (2019)10,
RACE: A power construct of collected or merged difference that lives socially.
In A Critique of “our Constitution is Color-Blind”,11 Neil Gotanda writes about “the rule of hypodescent”.12
1. The rule of hypodescent.
American racial classifications follow two formal rules:
1) Rule of recognition: Any person whose Black-African ancestry is visible is Black.
2) Rule of descent: (a) Any person with a known trace of African ancestry is Black, notwithstanding that person's visual appearance; or, stated differently, (b) the offspring of a Black and a white is Black.
Historians and social scientists have noted the existence of these rules, often summarized as the "one drop of blood" rule, in their analysis of the American system of racial classification. [94] Anthropologist Marvin Harris suggested a name for the American system of social reproduction: "hypodescent." [95]
Further on, he writes,13
Support for racial subordination.
The hypodescent rule when combined with color-blind constitutionalism, conveys a complex and powerful ideology that supports racial subordination. Briefly, hypodescent imposes racial subordination through its implied validation of white racial purity. Subordination occurs in the very act of a white person recognizing a Black person's race. Much of constitutional discourse disguises that subordination by treating racial categories as if they were stable and immutable. Finally, the treatment of racial categories as functionally objective devalues the socioeconomic and political history of those placed within them. Through this complex process of assertion, disguise, and devaluation, racial categorization based on hypodescent advances white interests.
Notice that he wrote that
subordination occurs in the very act of a white person recognizing a Black person's race.
Color-blindness is bad but also the opposite - awareness of race - is bad if the person in question is white. Interesting.
The Social Construction of Race in CRT
In Cynical Theories - How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody (2020), authors Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay write,14
Critical race Theory holds that race is a social construct that was created to maintain white privilege and white supremacy. This idea originated long before postmodernism with W.E.B. Du Bois, who argued that the idea of race was being used to assert biological explanations of differences that are social and cultural, in order to perpetuate the unjust treatment of racial minorities, especially African Americans.
There are good reasons to accept this claim. Although some average differences in human populations - such as skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and relative susceptibility to certain diseases - are observably real, and an individual’s geographical heritage can be discovered via DNA tests, it is not clear why this has been regarded as so significant as to divide people into groups called “races.” For one thing, biologists don’t. Biologists talk of populations, which can be identified through genetic markers as having had slightly different evolutionary heritages, but reducing this to what we usually call “race” is so often wrong as to be nearly useless in practice. For example, in medicine, “race” is not very useful because socially constructed racial categories do not reliably map meaningfully onto more biologically relevant genetic lineages. For another thing, the contemporary idea of “race” doesn’t stand up historically. There is compelling reason to believe that it was not considered significant in earlier periods. The Bible, for example, written over two thousand years ago in the Mediterranean, where black, brown and white people were to be found, is filled with moralistic tribalism, but makes almost no mention of skin color. In late medieval England, references to “black” people often simply described the hair color of Europeans now regarded as “white.”
While other factors may have contributed, race and racism as we understand them today probably arose as social constructions, made by Europeans to morally justify European colonialism and the Atlantic Slave Trade. European historians have tracked the rise of color-based prejudice over the early modern period, from roughly 1500 to 1800, and argued that prejudice on the grounds of religious differences gave way to racism - a belief in the superiority of some races over others - over the course of the seventeenth century.15 In order to justify the abuses of colonialism and kidnapping, exploitation, and abuse of slaves, their victims had to be regarded as inferior or subhuman (even if they they had converted to Christianity). This raises a common point of confusion, because it is also undeniable that other people at other times practiced slavery, colonialism, and even genocidal imperialism, and they justified these atrocities similarly - by characterizing those they enslaved or conquered as inferior, often using characteristics like skin, hair, and eye color, which we might identify with race today. This sort of discrimination and even dehumanization was already widespread, but in Europe and its colonies, a few key differences lead to a unique analysis.
Firstly, the concept of race was not consistently connected to heritability in Europe until the sixteenth century. Before then, it was generally assumed that traits like skin color were determined lagely environmentally, rather than genetically, although the related concepts in ancient Greek (genos) and Latin (genus) along with records from the Chinese and elsewhere indicate that descent wasn’t wholly neglected.16 Secondly, the consricted ideas of race were specifically used to justify the structures of European colonialism and Atlantic Slave Trade. Third - and perhap more importantly - this was done by emerging forms of scholarship in what we would now call the social sciences and natural sciences although they had neither separated clearly into the disciplines we would now call “anthropology,” “sociology,” and “biology” nor formed what we would now consider rigorous methods.
This is important because naturalism and science were rapidly becoming a knowledge-production, thus idea-legitimizing, methodology the likes of which the world had never seen. It is the legitimatizing authority of science that, ultimately, postmodernism rails against most vigorously. The rise of the sciences - and of intellectual and political culture that accepted science as legitimate - together with the construction of race. This, we hear from Theorist today, is the “sceintific origin” of racism, which can be taken to mean that these discourses that misapplied very preliminary results from science allowed the first socially constructivist racists to come into existence. In other words, with this oversimplified, overreaching, and self-serving scientific categorization came social constructions associated with extremely low-resolution categories: being black (“blackness”) and being white (“whiteness”), to which value judgements were soon attached. Enter racism as we understand it today.
The earliest contributors to the effort to challenge the assumptions underlying racism were former American slaves, including Sojourner Truth17 and Frederick Douglas,18 in the nineteenth century. Later, in the twentieth century, influential race critics like W.E.B. Du Bois19 and Winthrop Jordan20 set out the history of color-based racism in the United States. The work of these scholar and reformers should have been sufficient to expose racism for the ugly and unfounded ideology that it is, but belief in the racial supremacy of whites survived nonetheless. This was especially extreme and long-lived in the American South, where slavery remained an essential part of the economy until Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves in 1863. Jim Crow laws, racial redlining, and legal segregation survived the longest, persisting into the mid-1960s and, in some ways, beyond. Even after the victories of the Civil Rights Movement under Martin Luther King, Jr., when discrimination on the grounds of race become illegal and attitudes about race changed remarkably fast in historical terms, these longstanding narratives didn’t disappear. Critical race Theory was designed to pick at, highlight, and address them.
John O. Calmore on the Social Construction of Race
Race consciousness is the origin of critical race theory according to crit John O. Calmore.
The editors of Critical Race Theory - The Key Writing That Formed the Movement (1995) included an essay by John O. Calmore titled Critical Race Theory Archie Shepp and Fire Music Securing An Authentic Intellectual Life in A Multicultural World. The editors of that book write21 that in his essay, Calmore provides
a systematic description of Critical Race Theory
I would not use the term systematic to describe it - I would liken it to a long, meandering jazz solo - nor is it a complete picture of CRT, but by including it in The Key Writings, it is fair to say that the editors, themselves crits, more-or-less agree with Calmore’s essay and thus it warrants inclusion here. The editors of The Key Writings, however, did abbreviate his article. It had originally been published (in longer form) in Southern California Law Review 65 (July, 1992). See it here. In his description of CRT, Calmore states22 that CRT begins with the view that race is a social construct,
Critical race theory begins with a recognition that “race” is not a fixed term. Instead, “race” is a fluctuating, decentered complex of social meanings that are formed and transformed under the constant pressures of political struggle. The challenge thus presented is to examine how individual and group identities, under broadly disparate circumstances, as well as the racial institutions and social practices that are linked to those identities, are formed and transformed historically by actors who politically contest the social meanings of race.
He also writes,23
Although antiessentialist, critical race theory nonetheless emphasizes the commonalities developed from a race consciousness that recognizes, in Patricia Williams' words, that “the simple matter of color of one's skin so profoundly affects the way one is treated, so radically shapes what one is allowed to think and feel about this society, that the decision to generalize from this division is valid.” [175] What critical race theory expresses in this way is not a matter of essence, but certainly one of prevalence. It is not a matter of necessary, inevitable expression, but one of deliberate identification and incorporation of data available from colored histories and subjugated narratives, from colored biographies and group identities.
Also,24
When people of color deemphasize an individuality that tries to transcend color—when we attempt, in other words, to express valid generalizations generated out of race consciousness—we challenge the underlying inadequacy of dominant legal discourse, that which Kimberlé Crenshaw has labeled “perspectivelessness.” [179] This position of perspectivelessness holds that legal analysis is possible without taking into account various conflicts of individual values, experiences, and worldviews. According to Crenshaw, by stripping away the analysis of any particular cultural, political, or class characteristic, this perspectivelessness is presented as the objective, neutral legal discourse, with a corollary of “color blindness,” used to reduce conflict and devalue the relevance of our particular perspectives.
Social Construction & Activist Distortion of Race
As Jayne Chong-Soon Lee writes25,
Since the meaning of race depends on the specific social contexts in which it is embedded, we will find as many definitions of race as there are social constructs.[18] With this in mind, we can navigate among different definitions of race simultaneously: biological, social, cultural, essential and political.[19]
Lee states26 that
race is defined not by its inherent content, but by social relations that construct it...
Since the meaning of race depends on the specific social contexts in which it is embedded, we will find as many definitions of race as there are social contexts.[18] With this in mind, we can navigate among different definitions of race simultaneously: biological, social, cultural, essential, and political.[19]..
In perhaps the most penetrating account of the history of race, Michel Omi an Howard Winant explore the construction of racial identities, and trace how race has changed over time...
Omi and Winant ague that we should stop thinking of race “as an essence, as somethig fixed, concrete and objective.”[20] They suggest that we instead think of “race as an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.[21]
Furthermore27,
Race and racism are fluid...
Because the meaning of race is constructed by the social contexts in which it is located, there can be no consistent content to race. It can always be defined in many different ways, often simultaneously...
...race is always defined by its social context, and never solely by its content.
Lee also writes28 that it may be too late to save the term race from the racist connotations it has already lost. Despite this fact, he claims29,
Our best hope is to abandon “race” for “culture”.
Critical race theorist Neil Gotanda also calls for a redefinition of race. As he writes in A Critique of “our Constitution is Color-Blind” ,[page 34] one can
do more than assert generally that race is not scientific or that race is socially constructed. One can say that our particular system of classification, with its metaphorical construction of racial purity for whites, has a specific history as a badge of enslaveability. As such, the metaphor of purity is not a logical oddity, but an integral part of the construction of the system of racial subordination embedded in American society. Under color-blind constitutionalism, when race is characterized as objective and apolitical, this history is disguised and discounted.
Delgado and Stefancic write30 that a major
theme of critical race theory, the “social construction” thesis, holds that race and races are products of social thought and relations. Not objective, inherent, or fixed, they correspond to no biological or genetic reality; rather, races are categories that society invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient. People with common origins share certain physical traits, of course, such as skin color, physique, and hair texture. But these constitute only a small portion of their genetic endowment…
Notice that they assert that this concept of human races has no basis in reality and then go on to describe the reality that serves as the basis for the concept of human races. They continue to convey that these physical traits
are dwarfed by what we have in common, and have little or nothing to do with distinctly human, higher-order traits, such as personality, intelligence, and moral behavior. That society frequently chooses to ignore these scientific truths, creates races, and endows them with pseudo-permanent characteristics is of great interest to critical race theory.
Another, somewhat more recent, development concerns different racialization and its consequences. Critical writers in law, as well as in social science, have drawn attention to the ways the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market. At one period, for example, society may have had little use for blacks but much need for Mexican of Japanese agricultural workers. At another time, the Japanese, including citizens of long standing, may have been in intense disfavor and removed to war relocation camps, while society cultivated other groups of color for jobs in war industry or as cannon fodder on the front. In one era, Muslims are somewhat exotic neighbors who go to mosques and pray several times of day - harmless but odd. A few years later, they emerge as threats.
Popular images and stereotypes of various minority groups shift over time, as well. In one era, a group of color may be depicted as a happy-go-lucky, simplified, and content to serve white folks. A little later, when conditions change, that very same group may appear in cartoons, movies, and other cultural scripts as menacing, brutish, and out of control, requiring close supervision. In one age, Middle Eastern people are exotic, fetishized figures wearing veils, wielding curved swords, and summoning genies from lamps. Later, after circumstances change, they emerge as fanatical, religiously crazed terrorists bent on destroying America and killing innocent citizens.
Note how a given color may have different connotations in different cultures or periods of history. In the ancient West, blue or purple was the color of royalty whereas royalty wore red in the East. Consider that some cultures consider some colors to be better than others. Yes, there is no universal system by which we can say how many colors there are or where one color begins and the other color ends. In the end, the word color is a word, like other words, that we use to communicate that which we could not otherwise communicate.
Ibram X. Kendi writes31,
It is one of the ironies of antiracism that we must identify racially in order to identify the racial privileges and dangers of being in our bodies. Latinx and Asian and African and European and Indigenous and Middle Eastern: These six races - at least in the American context - are fundamentally power identities, because race is fundamentally a power construct of blended difference that lives socially. Race creates new forms of power: the power to categorize and judge, elevate and down grade, include and exclude. Race makers use that power to process distinct individuals, ethnicities, and nationalities into monolithic races.
The first global power to construct race happened to be the first racist power and the first exclusive slave trader of the constructed race of the African people. The individual who orchestrated this treading of an invented people was nicknamed the “Navigato,” though he did not leave Portugal in the fifteenth century. The only thing he navigated was Europe’s political-economic seas, in order to create the first transatlantic slave-trading policies. Hailed for something he was not (and ignored for what he was) - it is fitting that Prince Henry the Navigator, the brother and then uncle of Portuguese kings, is the first character in the history of racist power. . .
Kendi writes32,
Beginning in 1735, Carl Linnaeus locked in the racial hierarchy of humankind in Systema Naturae. He color-coded the races as White, Yellow, Red, and Black. He attached each race to one of the four regions of the world and described their characteristics. The Linnaeus taxonomy became the blueprint that nearly every enlightened race maker followed and that race makers still follow today. And, of course, these were not simply neutral categories. Racist power created them for a purpose.
Linnaeus positioned Homo sapiens europaeus at the top of the racial hierarchy, making up the most superior character traits. “Vigorous, muscular. Flowing blonde hair. Blue eyes. Very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by law.” He made up the middling racial character of Homosapiens asiaticus: “Melancholy, stern. Black hair'; dark eyes. Strict, haughty, greedy. Covered by loose garments. Ruled by opinion.” He granted the racial character of Homo sapiens americanus a mixed set of attributes:”Ill-tempered, impassive. Thick straight black hair; wide nosrils; harsh face; beardless. Stubborn, contented, free. Paints himself with red lines. Ruled by custom.” At the bottom of the racial hierarchy, Linnaues positioned Homo sapiens afer: “Sluggish, lazy. Black kinky hair. Silky skin. Flat nose. Thick lips. Females with genital flap and elongated breasts. Crafty, slow, careless. Covered by grease. Ruled by caprice.”
In Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (1995)33 in the section Race and Postmodernism34 is the essay Navigating the Topology of Race in which Jayne Chong-Soon Lee writes3536
The term race may be so historically and socially overdetermined that it is beyond rehabilitation.
Race as a Power Construction
Recall that earlier we saw Ibram X. Kendi’s definition of race is37,
A power construct of collected or merged difference that lives socially.
In How to be an Antiracist (2019), Kendi also writes38,
Incorrect conceptions of race as a social construct (as opposed to a power construct), of racial history as a singular march of racial progress (as opposed to a duel of antiracist and racist progress), of the race problem as rooted in ignorance and hate (as opposed to powerful self-interest) - all come together to produce solutions bound to fail.
Furthermore39,
Race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw color but did not group the colors into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to those colors and rank the races to justify racial inequity, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early.
Biology & History of Race
In biology, the our species is classified as Homo sapiens. There are varieties of our one human species in terms of (among other things) skin tone, hair color, hair texture, facial features and rhythmic abilities. These differences are phenotypes meaning that they are determined by genes and the environment. Because of the regional varieties of conditions found on Earth, human phenotypes tend to be regional in origin.
For example, people in the Congo tend to look more like each other than they look like people in Ethiopia and people in the Congo tend to look more like people in Ethiopia than they look like people in Thailand. Relatively recently for our species, it has become much easier for humans to move from one region to an other and thus these regional differences have become more fluid.
We tend to use the term ‘race’ with regard to humans to indicate major groupings of human varieties based on general phenotypes (such as skin tone and eye features) under general headings like ‘white’, ‘black’ and ‘Indian’. For convenience, we sometimes think of humans in terms of these ‘races’. There are, however, no clear lines that divide these varieties of the human species.
According to Britannica in their entry on race,
The modern meaning of the term race with reference to humans began to emerge in the 17th century. Since then it has had a variety of meanings in the languages of the Western world. What most definitions have in common is an attempt to categorize peoples primarily by their physical differences.
Also,
At no point, from the first rudimentary attempts at classifying human populations in the 17th and 18th centuries to the present day, have scientists agreed on the number of races of humankind, the features to be used in the identification of races, or the meaning of race itself. Experts have suggested a range of different races varying from 3 to more than 60, based on what they have considered distinctive differences in physical characteristics alone (these include hair type, head shape, skin colour, height, and so on). The lack of concurrence on the meaning and identification of races continued into the 21st century, and contemporary scientists are no closer to agreement than their forebears. Thus, race has never in the history of its use had a precise meaning.
Although most people continue to think of races as physically distinct populations, scientific advances in the 20th century demonstrated that human physical variations do not fit a “racial” model. Instead, human physical variations tend to overlap. There are no genes that can identify distinct groups that accord with the conventional race categories. In fact, DNA analyses have proved that all humans have much more in common, genetically, than they have differences. The genetic difference between any two humans is less than 1 percent. Moreover, geographically widely separated populations vary from one another in only about 6 to 8 percent of their genes. Because of the overlapping of traits that bear no relationship to one another (such as skin colour and hair texture) and the inability of scientists to cluster peoples into discrete racial packages, modern researchers have concluded that the concept of race has no biological validity.
Many scholars in other disciplines now accept this relatively new scientific understanding of biological diversity in the human species. Moreover, they have long understood that the concept of race as relating solely to phenotypic traits encompasses neither the social reality of race nor the phenomenon of “racism.” Prompted by advances in other fields, particularly anthropology and history, scholars began to examine race as a social and cultural, rather than biological, phenomenon and have determined that race is a social invention of relatively recent origin. It derives its most salient characteristics from the social consequences of its classificatory use. The idea of “race” began to evolve in the late 17th century, after the beginning of European exploration and colonization, as a folk ideology about human differences associated with the different populations—Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans—brought together in the New World. In the 19th century, after the abolition of slavery, the ideology fully emerged as a new mechanism of social division and stratification.
Commentary
To some people and cultures, out of the endless tones that exist, only a few are named as colors. For some, green is green. In some contexts, the differences between sage and olive are important. In other contexts, they are both green. In England, a black person can be of Pakistani origin whereas in America, a black person would be of Sub-Saharan Africa in origin, even if they might be lighter skinned than some people from Pakistan. In some systems, the term Asian people includes people from Japan, people from the subcontinent of India and so on, but not Russian people because they are European even those that technically live in Asia. In other systems, a Japanese person would not be considered of the same major racial group as a person from India.
According to Dorothy Roberts in Race40, until recent years, all 95 counties in the state of Virginia
required applicants to identify their race in order to obtain a marriage license. In Rockbridge County, for example, applicants were required to choose a racial identification from a list of 230 terms that includes “Mulatto,” “Quadroon,” “Nubian.” and “Aryan.”
In other words, as with colors, races can be subdivided as much as is convenient to communicate ideas about these differences. Communication improves with clarity and degrades with lack thereof. Information is more useful than noise unless, for example, you want to weaponize confusion.
To replace the word race with the word ethnicity is like replacing the word beat with the word music. In both cases, the former is part of the later but not the same. The former is more specific than the later. Therefore, to replace the former with the later is to lose a word to communicate about something specific for which the later does not allow.
As we have seen, crits have argued for replacing the term race with ethnicity or culture. Again, replacing race with culture is even more confusing than replacing race with ethnicity.
You can carry genes that originate from the area of Palestine/Israel (race) and you may or may not also speak Yiddish, observe the major holidays and eat traditional Jewish food with the family on Saturdays (ethnicity) and you may or may not also speak English, use modern American slang, dress more like other Americans than your more traditional cousins do, eat American food, listen to popular music and so on (culture).
You can be a black (race) American (nationality) and you may or may not live in a neighborhood in New York City filled with immigrants from Jamaica and their American-born children and share their Jamaican accent and dialect, eat the same Jamaican food and so on (ethnicity) and you may or may not also enjoy with your friends Rastafarian slang and reggae music while smoking ganja and like them you may have dreadlocks (culture).
These are all different things. They may overlap, but they may not. You can be an Semitic Hasidic Jew, a Semitic modern Jew, a black American modern member of the Jewish religion, and so on. These differences and similarities, these nuances are lost if the distinctions between these terms are confused with each other.
If I want to talk about a general biological variety of the human species, I will use the word race. If I want to talk about the culture that is normally but not always tied to a biological variety of people, I will use the word ethnicity. I will not use the word ethnicity to talk about purely biological traits in humans despite what some of the crits quoted above suggest.
Perhaps society will grow a new term to replace what we currently mean by race, a new term that has at least as much clarity but certainly not less. That is how language naturally evolves. Attempts to impose newspeak upon a population is not ethical or wise.
As with other terms such as gender, man, woman, free speech, violence, fascist, racism and more, the deconstruction and redefinition of the term
This hijacking of such terms by the academically privileged few presuming to have the authority (moral, academic, intellectual or otherwise) to decide for the vast majority of other speakers of the language to the advantage of that privileged few, intentional or not, is not healthy for society including what Maajid Nawaz calls the minority within the minority all the way down to the individual.
Also see:
Race Consciousness & Racial Separatism in Critical Race Theory
Racial Realism (coming soon)
in the Culture War Encyclopedia.
Liberty ∴ Strength ∴ Honor ∴ Justice ∴ Truth ∴ Love
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Calmore, John O. - Critical Race Theory Archie Shepp and Fire Music Securing An Authentic Intellectual Life in A Multicultural World - originally printed in Southern California Law Review 65 (July, 1992), reprinted in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement by multiple authors and editors (copyright 1995, the New Press)
Chong-Soon Lee, Jayne - Navigating the Topology of Race in 46 Stan. L. Rev. 747 (copyright February, 1994, Board of Trustees of the of the Leland Stanford Junior; published by Stanford Law Review)
Delgado, Richard & Jean Stefancic, preface by Angela Harris - Critical Race Theory - an Introduction (3rd edition; copyright 2017, New York University Press, published by New York University Press)
Felluga, Dino Franco - Critical Theory - the Key Concepts (2015, Routledge)
Gotanda, Neil - A Critique of “our Constitution is Color-Blind” originally published in 44 Stanford Law Review 1 (1991), also published in modified form pages 257 – 275 in Critical Race Theory – The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (1995)]
Kendi, Ibram X. - How to be an Antiracist (copyright 2019, Ibram X. Kendi; published by One World, a division of Penguin Random House LLC)
multiple authors & editors - The 1619 Project - A New Origin Story (copyright 2021, The New York Times Company; published by One World, a division of Penguin Random House LLC)
multiple authors & editors - Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (copyright 1995, The New Press; published by The New Press)
Pluckrose, Helen & James Lindsay - Cynical Theories - How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody - (copyright 2020, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay, Pitchstone Publishing, 1st edition, 2020)
At this point in their book, they place the following footnote:
FOOTNOTES
Page 49 in Ian F. Lopez - The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, and Choice, 29 Harv. C.R.-C.I. L. Rev. I, 5-6 [194] according to Delgado & Stefancic - Critical Race Theory - an Introduction (2017, print, 3rd edition, New York University Press)
Page 35 in Kendi - How to be an Antiracist
Gotanda, Neil - A Critique of 'Our Constitution is Color-Blind' 44 Stanford Law Review 1 (1991), also published in modified form, pages 257-275 in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (1995)
Page 24 in Gotanda, Neil - A Critique of “our Constitution is Color-Blind” originally published in 44 Stanford Law Review 1 (1991), also published in modified form pages 257 – 275 in Critical Race Theory – The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (1995)
Page 259 in Gotanda, Neil - A Critique of “our Constitution is Color-Blind” originally published in 44 Stanford Law Review 1 (1991), also published in modified form pages 257 – 275 in Critical Race Theory – The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (1995)
Pages 111-113 in Pluckrose, Helen & James Lindsay - Cynical Theories - How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody - (copyright 2020, Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay, Pitchstone Publishing, 1st edition, 2020)
At this point in their book, they place the following footnote:
Some postcolonial scholars are materialists (often Marxists) and look at colonialism and its aftermath in terms of economics and politics. They are often very critical of the postmodern postcolonialists. See particularly Meera Nanda, Aijaz Ahmad, Benita Parry, Neil Lazarus, abd Pal Ahluwalia.
At this point in their book, they place the following footnote:
Decoloniality and indegeneiy constitute two related but separate fields of study, which share many of the features of postcolonial Theory. They both focus on the ways in which the powerful inheritors of colonialism maintain their social and political dominance, especially by othering through language. Decoloniality focused originally on Latin America. Walter Mignolo, in particular, work on epistemology and challenges the knowledge production methods of Enlightenment thinking. However, decolonial scholars frequently reject postmodernism as a Western phenomenon. Indigenous scholars have taken a similar tack in relation to knowledge and systems of power. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, professor of indigenous education at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, is influential in this area. Her book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999) describes itself as “drawing on Foucault” to argue that Western scholarship is central to the colonialization of indigenous people. See Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999)
At this point in their book, they place the following footnote: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard philcox (NewYork: Penguin Books, 2019).
At this point in their book, they place the following footnote:
Frantz, Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (Harmondsworth (Middlesex: Peguin Books, 1970).
At this point in their book, they place the following footnote:
Frantz, Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
At this point in their book, they place the following footnote:
Said, Orientalism, 3.
Page 314 in in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (see bibliography)
Page 12 in Southern California Law Review 65; page 318 in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement
Page 19 in Southern California Law Review 65; page 322 in slightly different wording in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement
Page 20 Southern California Law Review 65; page 322 in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement
Page 443 in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (see bibliography)
Page 443 in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (see bibliography)
Pages 446-447 in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (see bibliography)
Page 441 in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (see bibliography)
Page 443 in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (see bibliography)
Pages 9-11 in Delgado & Stefancic - Critical Race Theory - an Introduction
Pages 38-39 in Kendi - How to be an Antiracist
Page 41 in Kendi - How to be an Antiracist
multiple authors & editors - Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (see bibliography)
Beginning page 440, Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (see bibliography)
Navigating the Topology of Race by Jayne Chong-Soon Lee (February, 1994, Stanford Law Review)
This essay is was also published in Critical Race Theory - The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (see the bibliography above), spanning pages 441-449.
Page 35 in Kendi - How to be an Antiracist
Pages 201-202 in Kendi - How to be an Antiracist
Page 238 in Kendi - How to be an Antiracist
Pages 45-61 in published in multiple authors & editors - The 1619 Project - A New Origin Story