Naomi Zack

Philosophical aspects of the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’

I apply philosophical analysis to the ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ (American Anthropological Association, 1998) and the commentary on its earlier draft published in the Anthropology Newsletter(1997). Racial essentialism is the theory that there are distinct and general human biological traits that determine racial membership and cause the presence of specific racial traits. This theory is false, as is the belief that a taxonomy of human races, or race, exists. But the 1998 ‘AAA Statement on “Race”’ fails to repudiate racial essentialism explicitly. Instead, the Statement denies that race determines culture or psychology and thereby misses the broad logical point that race cannot determine anything, because it does not exist. In the ANdiscussion of Kennewick Man, which appeared to be a debate about racial essentialism, contributors spoke past one another in confusing population-based measures of human diversity with race. The same confusion clouds contemporary concerns about the relevance of common-sense racial categories to medical diagnosis and treatment. Education is the solution to the publics ignorance about the scientific foundation for its ideas about race. It is an empirical question whether such education will remedy racism or unjust treatment based on the false racial taxonomy. Although mixed-race categories are no more real than ‘pure’ ones, their acceptance may help unsettle the prevailing false taxonomy of race.

Racism and Neo-racisms

“Racism” as prejudice and discrimination came after races were posited and racism was practiced. Racism occurs in discourse (speech, gesture, symbols) and in action. Hearts-and-minds racism pertains to deliberate individual action. Racist hate crimes are a classic, broadly despised example of racist action, but racist action is more widespread than hate crimes that require immediate racist motives. Institutional racism affects millions and may lack individual intent. Still, its victims, such as poor nonwhite school children and minorities incarcerated for minor crimes or crimes they did not commit, may be harmed as much or more than with racist intent. Implicit racism includes white privilege, micro-aggression, and epistemic injustice.

Egalitarian Spiritual and Legal Traditions

The egalitarian spiritual and legal tradition started in the ancient world when Cosmopolitans and Stoics proclaimed human equality and brotherhood. Medieval theologians promised human equality in heaven. George Berkeley’s plans for a seminary in Bermuda included Native Americans and James Beattie scolded David Hume for his lack of empiricism in describing Africans. Nineteenth-century African English and African American thinkers and activists resisted slavery. Jim Crow followed reining in the Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided an aspirational foundation for global egalitarianism. In 1954, the US Supreme Court legally ended school segregation in Brown v Board of Education. The Civil Rights Movement motivated legislation against racial discrimination, in 1964–1965.

Social Construction and Racial Identities

Race was socially constructed through colonialism and global development affects poor nonwhite populations. Within US society, technologies of race and racism and individual racial identities, including mixed race, reproduce racial divisions and status. When segregation and marriage laws kept racial divisions in place through state force, custom now takes their place. Both monoracial identities and mixed ones, require constant internal dialogue, with or without external group support. Pragmatic and accommodationist approaches to racism allow nonwhites to live within racist systems by avoiding conflict. Politicized racial identities are forms of resistance. Racial eliminativism, based on the biological emptiness of race, is an ineffective social project and some scholars seek to retain minimal biological race.

Race According to Biological Science

Modern biologists and anthropologists invented ideas of scientific race as a universal system of human typing that began with geography and description but by the nineteenth century relied on essences and assessment. When racial categories were seen to be arbitrary and culture viewed as the result of history, ideas of populations were substituted for race. But populations are more numerous than races and can only work as races if social races are assumed to be real and used to identify populations. Also, there are more differences within populations of physical racial traits, than between populations. By the twenty-first century, the idea of race was abandoned in biological science, although in the “race debates” some philosophers, try to retain it.

Political Philosophy, Law, and Public Policy

In democratic political life, political philosophy, law, and public policy are often interrelated. John Rawls’s abstract thought experiment to develop, behind a veil of ignorance, basic institutions for already well-ordered and law-abiding societies, may not be relevant to the correction of practical injustice. Amartya Sen’s idea of addressing human capabilities and practices of applicative justice, better addresses real-life injustice. Concerns about affirmative action and racial profiling involve questions about their injustice. The US Supreme Court has upheld affirmative action only as part of a full range of individual qualifications. Police racial profiling has led to homicides against unarmed young black men, although police discretion has been upheld by the US Supreme Court.

Feminism, Gender, and Race

Feminism has developed into gender studies and its focus on white middle-class women has broadened. Intersectionality as a method of analysis and basis for political action is more contextualized than identity politics, because people have multiple identities. Within philosophy, first white feminism and then African American philosophy became established. Black feminist philosophers proceed by reclaiming historical figures for philosophical analysis and inspiration, forging connections between different traditions in philosophy, and philosophizing contemporary concerns of black women. Black male philosophy is both the work of black male philosophers and a focus on the experience of black men, especially harmfully false and dangerous stereotypes. A new question of intersection arises: Who may write about whom and is the race/gender of sources important?

Ethnicity and Related Forms of Race

Ethnicity, including language, belongs to culture, race to biology. But ethnic groups have been treated as races and racial groups have ethnicities. US immigration has resulted in the racialization of different ethnic groups, as well as invention of the idea of ethnic groups. Despite the assimilation of European groups, Anglo-Americans remain dominant and we don’t know if Latinx, Asian, and Middle Eastern immigrants will assimilate, given views of them as “undocumented,” “foreign,” and “terrorist suspects.” Indigenous groups throughout the world continue to base their identities on geographical and ancestral ties. In Brazil, race is intertwined with socioeconomic class, while in India, caste is tied to occupation.

Race in Contemporary Life

As a social construction, race is part of family genealogy and it creates intergenerational groups and identities for individuals. Racial differences matter in concrete areas of life, such as marriage rates, social class, employment, wealth, and health. Marriage rates vary by race and ethnicity: African Americans marry less than whites, due to external economic constraint; Mexican immigrant women marry younger but for economic rather than cultural reasons. Social class now includes cultural capital in tastes and consumption, which may make it difficult for minorities to fully thrive within white-dominated institutions. Race affects health in environmental ways based on nonhereditary factors. Race-targeted medicine therefore needs to be distinguished from race-based medicine.

Ideas of Race in Twentieth Century American and Continental Philosophy

After World War II, American and continental philosophers addressed race in progressive ways that avoided modern science. W.E.B. Du Bois pioneered a methodology of looking for social causes of social circumstances, such as conditions of African Americans living in slums. Alain Locke and William T. Fontaine followed a more theoretical pragmatic tradition. Cornel West, whose idea of prophecy is not prediction, but criticism, has furthered Du Bois’s sense of black destiny. The analysis of experience in Husserl’s phenomenology was developed as existentialism in Franz Fanon’s focus on white supremacy and Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of French anti-Semites. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic continues to motivate analyses of racism. Black theological existentialism is egalitarian in a spiritual dimension.