## 1. History of the Concept of Race



The dominant scholarly position is that the concept of race is a
modern phenomenon, at least in Europe and the Americas. However, there
is less agreement regarding whether *racism*, even absent a
developed race concept, may have existed in the ancient Greek and
Roman worlds. The influential work of classicist Frank Snowden (1970;
1983), who emphasized the lack of antiblack prejudice in the ancient
world, led many scholars of race to conclude that racism did not exist
in that epoch. However, later classicists have responded that
Snowden's work unnecessarily reduced all forms of racism to its
peculiarly American version based on skin color and other markers of
non-white identity. Benjamin Isaac (2004) and Denise McCoskey (2012)
contend that the ancient Greeks and Romans did hold proto-racist views
that applied to other groups which today might be considered white.
Isaac persuasively argues that these views must be considered
*proto-racist*: although they were formed without the aid of a
modern race concept grounded in ideas of deterministic biology (2004,
5), they nevertheless resembled modern racism by attributing "to
groups of people common characteristics considered to be unalterable
because they are determined by external factors or heredity"
(2004, 38). More importantly, both Isaac and McCoskey contend that
ancient proto-racism influenced the development of modern racism.



Perhaps the first, unconscious stirrings of the concept of race arose
within the Iberian Peninsula. Following the Moorish conquest of
Andalusia in the eighth century C.E., the Iberian Peninsula became the
site of the greatest intermingling between Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim believers. During and after their *reconquista*
(reconquest) of the Muslim principalities in the peninsula, the
Catholic Monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand sought to establish a uniformly
Christian state by expelling first the Jews (in 1492) and then the
Muslims (in 1502). But because large numbers of both groups converted
to Christianity to avoid expulsion (and before this to avoid
persecution), the monarchs distrusted the authenticity of these Jewish
and Muslim *conversos* (converts). To ensure that only truly
faithful Christians remained within the realm, the grand inquisitor
Torquemada reformulated the Inquisition to inquire not just into
defendants' religious faith and practices but into their
lineage. Only those who could demonstrate their ancestry to those
Christians who resisted the Moorish invasion were secure in their
status in the realm. Thus, the idea of purity of blood was born
(*limpieza de sangre*), not fully the biological concept of
race but perhaps the first occidental use of blood heritage as a
category of religio-political membership (Bernasconi and Lott 2000,
vii; Hannaford 1996, 122-126; Frederickson 2002,
31-35).



The Iberian Peninsula may also have witnessed the first stirrings of
antiblack and anti-Native-American racism. Since this region was the
first in Europe to utilize African slavery while gradually rejecting
the enslavement of fellow European Christians, Iberian Christians may
have come to associate Black people as physically and mentally
suitable only for menial labor. In this they were influenced by Arab
slave merchants, who assigned the worst tasks to their dark-skinned
slaves while assigning more complex labor to light or tawny-skinned
slaves (Frederickson 2002, 29). The "discovery" of the New
World by Iberian explorers also brought European Christians into
contact with indigenous Americans for the first time. This resulted in
the heated debate in Valladolid in 1550 between Bartolome Las
Casas and Gines de Sepulveda over whether the Indians were by
nature inferior and thus worthy of enslavement and conquest. Whether
due to Las Casas' victory over Sepulveda, or due to the
hierarchical character of Spanish Catholicism which did not require
the dehumanization of other races in order to justify slavery, the
Spanish empire did avoid the racialization of its conquered peoples
and African slaves. Indeed, arguably it was the conflict between the
Enlightenment ideals of universal freedom and equality versus the fact
of the European enslavement of Africans and indigenous Americans that
fostered the development of the idea of race (Blum 2002,
111-112; Hannaford 1996, 149-150).



While events in the Iberian Peninsula may have provided the initial
stirrings of modern racial sentiments, the concept of race, with its
close links to ideas of deterministic biology, emerged with the rise
of modern natural philosophy and its concern with taxonomy (Smith
2015). The first important articulation of the race concept came with
the 1684 publication of "A New Division of the Earth" by
Francois Bernier (1625-1688) (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, viii;
Hannaford 1996, 191, 203). Based on his travels through Egypt, India,
and Persia, this essay presented a division of humanity into
"four or five species or races of men in particular whose
difference is so remarkable that it may be properly made use of as the
foundation for a new division of the earth" (Bernasconi and Lott
2000, 1-2). First were the peoples inhabiting most of Europe and
North Africa, extending eastward through Persia, northern and central
India, and right up to parts of contemporary Indonesia. Despite their
differing skin tones, these peoples nevertheless shared common
physical characteristics, such as hair texture and bone structure. The
second race was constituted by the people of Africa south of the
Sahara Desert, who notably possessed smooth Black skin, thick noses
and lips, thin beards, and wooly hair. The peoples inhabiting lands
from east Asia, through China, today's central Asian states such
as Uzbekistan, and westward into Siberia and eastern Russia
represented the third race, marked by their "truly white"
skin, broad shoulders, flat faces, flat noses, thin beards, and long,
thin eyes, while the short and squat Lapps of northern Scandinavia
constituted the fourth race. Bernier considered whether the indigenous
peoples of the Americas were a fifth race, but he ultimately assigned
them to the first (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 2-3).



But while Bernier initiated the use of the term "race" to
distinguish different groups of humans based on physical traits, his
failure to reflect on the relationship between racial division and the
human race in general mitigated the scientific rigor of his definition
(Bernasconi and Lott 2000, viii). Central to a scientific concept of
race would be a resolution of the question of monogenesis versus
polygenesis. Monogenesis adhered to the Biblical creation story in
asserting that all humans descended from a common ancestor, perhaps
Adam of the Book of Genesis; polygenesis, on the other hand, asserted
that different human races descended from different ancestral roots.
Thus, the former position contended that all races are nevertheless
members of a common human species, whereas the latter saw races as
distinct species.



David Hume's position on the debate between polygenesis versus
monogenesis is the subject of some scholarly debate. The bone of
contention is his essay "Of National Characters," where he
contends that differences among European nations are attributable not
to natural differences but to cultural and political influences.
Amidst this argument against crude naturalism, Hume inserts a footnote
in the 1754 edition, wherein he writes: "I am apt to suspect
*the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there
are four or five different kinds)* to be naturally inferior to
whites. There *never* was a civilized nation of any other
complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in
action or speculation" (Zack 2002, 15; emphasis added). Whereas
even the most barbarous white nations such as the Germans "have
something eminent about them," the "uniform and constant
difference" in accomplishment between whites and non-whites
could not occur "if nature had not made an original distinction
betwixt these breeds of men" (Zack 2002, 15). Responding to
criticism, he softens this position in the 1776 edition, restricting
his claims to natural inferiority only to "negroes,"
stating that "*scarcely* ever was a civilized nation of
that complexion, not even of individual eminent in action or
speculation" (Zack 2002, 17; Hume 1776 [1987], 208; emphasis
added). Richard Popkin (1977) and Naomi Zack (2002, 13-18)
contend that the 1754 version of the essay assumes, without
demonstration, an original, polygenetic difference between white and
non-white races. Andrew Valls (2005, 132) denies that either version
of the footnote espouses polygenesis.



A strong and clear defense of monogenesis was provided by Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804) in his essay "Of the Different Human
Races," first published in 1775 and revised in 1777. Kant argued
that all humans descend from a common human "lineal root
genus" in Europe, which contained the biological
"seeds" and "dispositions" that can generate
the distinct physical traits of race when triggered by divergent
environmental factors, especially combinations of heat and humidity.
This, combined with patterns of migration, geographic isolation, and
in-breeding, led to the differentiation of four distinct, pure races:
the "noble blond" of northern Europe; the "copper
red" of America (and east Asia); the "black" of
Senegambia in Africa; and the "olive-yellow" of
Asian-India. Once these discrete racial groups were developed over
many generations, further climatic changes will not alter racial
phenotypes (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 8-22).



Yet despite the distinction generated between different races,
Kant's monogenetic account led him to maintain that the
different races were part of a common human species. As evidence, he
adduced the fact that individuals from different races were able to
breed together, and their offspring tended to exhibit blended physical
traits inherited from both parents. Not only did blending indicate
that the parents were part of a common species; it also indicated that
they are of distinct races. For the physical traits of parents of the
same race are not blended but often passed on exclusively: a blond
white man and a brunette white woman may have four blond children,
without any blending of this physical trait; whereas a Black man and a
white woman will bear children who blend white and Black traits
(Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 9-10). Such inter-racial mixtures
accounted for the existence of liminal individuals, whose physical
traits seem to lie between the discrete boundaries of one of the four
races; peoples who do not fit neatly into one or another race are
explained away as groups whose seeds have not been fully triggered by
the appropriate environmental stimuli (Bernasconi and Lott 2000,
11).



The "science" of race was furthered by the man sometimes
considered to be the father of modern anthropology, Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach (1752-1840). In his doctoral dissertation, "On
the Natural Variety of Mankind," first published in 1775,
Blumenbach identified four "varieties" of mankind: the
peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. His essay was revised
and republished both in 1781, wherein he introduced a fifth variety of
mankind, that inhabiting the South Pacific islands, and in 1795,
wherein he first coined the term "Caucasian" to describe
the variety of people inhabiting Europe, West Asia, and Northern
India. This term reflected his claim that this variety originated in
the Caucuses mountains, in Georgia, justifying this etiology through
reference to the superior beauty of the Georgians. The 1795 version
also included the terms Mongolian to describe the non-Caucasian
peoples of Asia, Ethiopian to signify Black Africans, American to
denote the indigenous peoples of the New World, and Malay to identify
the South Pacific Islanders (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 27-33;
Hannaford 1996, 207).



While noting differences in skin tone, he based his varieties upon the
structures of the cranium, which supposedly gave his distinctions a
stronger scientific foundation than the more superficial
characteristic of color (Hannaford 1996, 206). In addition, he
strongly denied polygenetic accounts of racial difference, noting the
ability of members of different varieties to breed with each other,
something that humans were incapable of doing with other species.
Indeed, he took great pains to dismiss as spurious accounts of
Africans mating with apes or of monstrous creatures formed through the
union of humans with other animals (Hannaford 1996, 208-209). In
final support of his more scientific, monogenist approach, Blumenbach
posited the internal, biological force which generated racial
difference, the "nisus formativus," which when triggered
by specific environmental stimuli generated the variations found
within the varieties of humans (Hannaford 1996, 212).



Despite the strong monogenist arguments provided by Kant and
Blumenbach, polygenesis remained a viable intellectual strain within
race theory, particularly in the "American School of
Anthropology," embodied by Louis Agassiz, Robins Gliddon, and
Josiah Clark Nott. Agassiz was born in Switzerland, received an M.D.
in Munich and later studied zoology, geology, and paleontology in
various German universities under the influence of Romantic scientific
theories. His orthodox Christian background initially imbued him with
a strong monogenist commitment, but upon visiting America and seeing
an African American for the first time, Agassiz experienced a type of
conversion experience, which led him to question whether these
remarkably different people could share the same blood as Europeans.
Eventually staying on and making his career in America, and
continually struck by the physical character of African Americans,
Agassiz officially announced his turn to polygenesis at the 1850
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS) in Charleston, South Carolina. Nott, a South Carolina
physician, attended the same AAAS meeting and, along with Gliddon,
joined Agassiz in the promulgation of the American School's
defense of polygenesis (Brace 2005, 93-103).



Along with Agassiz, Nott was also influenced by the French romantic
race theorist Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), whose "Essay
on the Inequality of the Human Races" (1853-1855) Nott
partially translated into English and published for the American
audience. Although the Catholic Gobineau initially espoused
monogenesis, he later leaned towards polygenesis and ended up
ambivalent on this issue (Hannaford 1996, 268-269).
Nevertheless, Gobineau lent credence to the white racial supremacy
that Nott supported (Brace 2005, 120-121). Gobineau posited two
impulses among humans, that of attraction and repulsion. Civilization
emerges when humans obey the law of attraction and intermingle with
peoples of different racial stocks. According the Gobineau, the white
race was created through such intermingling, which allowed it alone to
generate civilization, unlike the other races, which were governed
only by the law of repulsion. Once civilization is established,
however, further race mixing leads to the degeneration of the race
through a decline in the quality of its blood. Consequently, when the
white race conquers other Black or yellow races, any further
intermingling will lead it to decline. Thus, Gobineau claimed that the
white race would never die so long as its blood remains composed of
its initial mixture of peoples. Notably, Nott strategically excised
those sections discussing the law of attraction when translating
Gobineau's essay for an American audience (Bernasconi and Lott
2000, 45-51).



Eventually, polygenesis declined through the intellectual success of
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution (Brace 2005, 124). Darwin
himself weighed in on this debate in the chapter "On the Races
of Man" in his book *The Descent of Man* (1871), arguing
that as the theory of evolution gains wider acceptance, "the
dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent
and unobserved death" (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 68), with the
former winning out. The rest of the essay entertained both sides of
the debate regarding whether or not different races constitute
different species or sub-species of humans. Although Darwin did not
explicitly take sides in this debate, the preponderance of his
argument gives little support to the idea of races being different
species. For instance, he noted that couples from different races
produce fertile offspring, and that individuals from different races
seem to share many mental similarities. That said, while Darwinian
evolution may have killed off polygenesis and the related idea that
the races constituted distinct species, it hardly killed off race
itself. Darwin himself did not think natural selection would by itself
generate racial distinctions, since the physical traits associated
with racial differences did not seem sufficiently beneficial to favor
their retention; he did, however, leave open a role for sexual
selection in the creation of races, through repeated mating among
individuals with similar traits (Bernasconi and Lott 2000,
77-78). Consequently, later race thinkers would replace
polygenesis with natural selection and sexual selection as scientific
mechanisms whereby racial differentiation could slowly,
unintentionally, but nevertheless inevitably proceed (Hannaford 1996,
273).



Sexual selection became a central focus for race-thinking with the
introduction of the term "eugenics" in 1883 by Francis
Galton (1822-1911) in his essay "Inquiries into Human
Faculty and Development" (Hannaford 1996, 290). Focusing on
physical as opposed to "moral" qualities, Galton advocated
selective breeding to improve the "health, energy, ability,
manliness, and courteous disposition" of the human species in
his later essay "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and
Aims" (Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 80). Following the same
currents of "Social Darwinism" that advocated the
evolutionary improvement of the human condition through active human
intervention, Galton proposed making eugenics not only an element in
popular culture or "a new religion" (Bernasconi and Lott
2000, 82) but even a policy enforced by the American government. While
positive eugenics, or the enforced breeding of higher types, never
became law, negative eugenics, or the sterilization of the
feebleminded or infirm, did become public policy enforced by a number
of American states and upheld by the United States Supreme Court in an
eight-to-one decision in *Buck v. Bell* (274 U.S. 200, 1927).
The widespread acceptance of negative eugenics can be inferred by the
fact that the Court Opinion justifying the decision was authored by
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a figure usually associated with
progressive and civil libertarian positions, and whose doctrine of
"clear and present danger" sought to expand the protection
of free speech.



The apogee of post-Darwinian race-thinking was arguably reached in the
book *The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century* by Houston
Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), the son-in-law of German opera
composer Richard Wagner. Chamberlain argued in the evolutionary terms
of sexual selection that distinct races emerged through geographical
and historical conditions which create inbreeding among certain
individuals with similar traits (Hannaford 1996, 351). Moving from
this initial specification, Chamberlain then argued that the key
strands of western civilization--Christianity and ancient Greek
philosophy and art--emerged from the Aryan race. Jesus, for
instance, was held to be of Aryan stock, despite his Jewish religion,
since the territory of Galilee was populated by peoples descended from
Aryan Phonecians as well as by Semitic Jews. Similarly,
Aristotle's distinction between Greeks and Barbarians was
reinterpreted as a racial distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans.
These Greek and Christian strands became united in Europe,
particularly during the Reformation, which allowed the highest,
Teutonic strain of the Aryan race to be freed from constraining Roman
Catholic cultural fetters. But while Roman institutions and practices
may have constrained the Teutonic Germans, their diametric opposite
was the Jew, the highest manifestation of the Semitic Race. The
European religious tensions between Christian and Jew were thus
transformed into racial conflicts, for which conversion or ecumenical
tolerance would have no healing effect. Chamberlain's writings,
not surprisingly, have come to be seen as some of the key intellectual
foundations for twentieth century German anti-Semitism, of which Adolf
Hitler was simply its most extreme manifestation.



If Chamberlain's writings served as intellectual fodder for
German racial prejudice, Madison Grant (1865-1937) provided
similar foundations for American race prejudice against Black people
and Native Americans in his popular book *The Passing of the Great
Race* (1916). Rejecting political or educational means of
ameliorating the destitution of the subordinate racial groups in
America, Grant instead advocated strict segregation and the
prohibition of miscegenation, or the interbreeding of members of
different races (Hannaford 1996, 358). Like Galton, Grant had similar
success in influencing American public policy, both through the
imposition of racist restrictions on immigration at the federal level
and through the enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws in thirty
states, until such prohibitions were finally overturned by the United
States Supreme Court in *Loving v. Virginia* (388 U.S. 1
[1967]).



If the apogee of biological race was reached in the early twentieth
century, its decline began at about the same time. While writers such
as Chamberlain and Grant popularized and politicized biological
conceptions of race hierarchy, academic anthropologists since
Blumenbach gave the concept of race its scientific validity. But
academic anthropology also provided the first challenge to biological
race in the person of Columbia University professor Franz Boas
(1858-1942), a German-born Jewish immigrant to the United
States. Boas challenged the fixed character of racial groups by taking
on one of the key fundaments to racial typology, cranium size. Boas
showed that this characteristic was profoundly affected by
environmental factors, noting that American-born members of various
"racial" types, such as Semitic Jews, tended to have
larger crania than their European-born parents, a result of
differences in nourishment. From this he concluded that claims about
racially differential mental capacities could similarly be reduced to
such environmental factors. In so doing, Boas undermined one measure
of racial distinction, and although he did not go so far as to reject
entirely the concept of biological race itself, he strongly influenced
anthropologists to shift their focus from putatively fixed biological
characteristics to apparently mutable cultural factors in order to
understand differences among human groups (Bernasconi and Lott 2000,
84-88; Brace 2005, 167-169; Cornell and Hartmann 1998,
42-43).



A stronger anthropological rejection of the biological conception of
race was leveled by Ashley Montagu (1905-1999). Drawing on
insights from modern, experimental genetics, Montagu forcefully argued
that the anthropological conception of race relied on grouping
together various perceptible physical characteristics, whereas the
real building blocks of evolution were genes, which dictated
biological changes among populations at a much finer level. The
morphological traits associated with race, thus, were gross aggregates
of a variety of genetic changes, some of which resulted in physically
perceptible characteristics, many others of which resulted in
imperceptible changes. Moreover, since genetic evolution can occur
through both the mixture of different genes and the mutation of the
same gene over generations, the traits associated with races cannot be
attributed to discrete lines of genetic descent, since the dark skin
and curly hair of one individual may result from genetic mixture while
the same traits in another individual may result from genetic mutation
(Bernasconi and Lott 2000, 100-107). Montagu's efforts
eventually resulted in the publication of an official statement
denying the biological foundations of race by the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1950,
although it would take until 1996 for the American Association of
Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) to publish a similar document (Brace
2005, 239).


## 2. Do Races Exist? Contemporary Philosophical Debates



Ron Mallon (2004, 2006, 2007) provides a nice sketch of the
contemporary philosophical terrain regarding the status of the concept
of race, dividing it into three valid competing schools of thought
regarding the ontological status of race, along with the discarded
biological conception. *Racial naturalism* signifies the old,
biological conception of race, which depicts races as bearing
"biobehavioral essences: underlying natural (and perhaps
genetic) properties that (1) are heritable, biological features, (2)
are shared by all and only the members of a race, and (3) explain
behavioral, characterological, and cultural predispositions of
individual persons and racial groups" (2006, 528-529).
While philosophers and scientists have reached the consensus against
racial naturalism, philosophers nevertheless disagree on the possible
ontological status of a different conception of race. Mallon divides
such disagreements into three *metaphysical* camps (*racial
skepticism*, *racial constructivism*, and *racial
population naturalism*) and two *normative* camps
(*eliminativism* and *conservationism*). We have used
'constructivism' throughout for the sake of consistency
but it should be read as interchangeable with
'constructionism.'



*Racial skepticism* holds that because racial naturalism is
false, races of any type do not exist. Racial skeptics, such as
Anthony Appiah (1995, 1996) and Naomi Zack (1993, 2002) contend that
the term race cannot refer to anything real in the world, since the
one thing in the world to which the term could uniquely
refer--discrete, essentialist, biological races--have been
proven not to exist. Zack (2002, 87-88) provides an accessible
summary of the racial skeptic's argument against the biological
foundations for race, sequentially summarizing the scientific
rejection of essences, geography, phenotypes, post-Mendelian
transmission genetics, and genealogies as possible foundations for
races. Aristotelian *essences*, thought to ground the common
characteristics of distinct species, were correctly rejected by early
modern philosophers. If essences cannot even ground differences among
species, then they clearly cannot ground the differences among races,
which even nineteenth century racial science still understood as
members of the same species. Whereas folk theories rely on
*geography* to divide humanity into African, European, Asian,
and Amerindian races, contemporary population genetics reveal the
vacuity of this foundation for two reasons. First, geographically
based environmental stimuli lead to continuous physical adaptations in
skin, hair and bone rather than the discrete differences associated
with race; and second, although mitochondrial DNA mutations provide
evidence of the geographical origins of populations, these mutations
do not correlate with the physical traits associated with racial
groups. Similarly, *phenotypes* cannot ground folk theories of
race: for instance, differences in skin tone are gradual, not
discrete; and blood-type variations occur independently of the more
visible phenotypes associated with race, such as skin color and hair
texture. Race cannot be founded upon *transmission genetics*,
since the genes transmitted from one generation to the next lead to
very specific physical traits, not general racial characteristics
shared by all members of a putatively racial group. And finally,
*genealogy* cannot ground race, since clades (populations
descended from a common ancestor) may have common genetic
characteristics, but these need not correlate with the visible traits
associated with races. Zack concludes: "Essences, geography,
phenotypes, genotypes, and genealogy are the only known candidates for
physical scientific bases of race. Each fails. Therefore, there is no
physical scientific basis for the social racial taxonomy" (Zack
2002, 88).



Racial skeptics like Appiah and Zack adopt normative racial
*eliminativism*, which recommends discarding the concept of
race entirely, according to the following argument. Because of its
historical genealogy, the term race can only refer to one or more
discrete groups of people who alone share biologically significant
genetic features. Such a monopoly on certain genetic features could
only emerge within a group that practices such a high level of
inbreeding that it is effectively genetically isolated. Such genetic
isolation might refer to the Amish in America (Appiah 1996, 73) or to
Irish Protestants (Zack 2002, 69), but they clearly cannot refer to
those groupings of people presently subsumed under American racial
census categories. Because the concept "race" can only
apply to groups not typically deemed races (Amish, Irish Protestants),
and because this concept cannot apply to groups typically deemed races
(African Americans, Whites, Asians, Native Americans), a mismatch
occurs between the concept and its typical referent. Thus, the concept
of race must be eliminated due to its logical incoherence (Mallon
2006, 526, 533).



Appiah has since modified his skepticism in such a way that softens
the eliminitivist element of his position. Appiah has come to argue
for *racial nominalism* by admitting the importance of
"human folk races," namely, that they are forms of social
identity that do in fact exist (2006, 367). The way in which they are
social identities, however, is a problem because we treat them as if
there were some biological underpinning to them (2006, 367). The folk
theory of race, then, is false because it is based on mistaken
beliefs, yet it is nonetheless true that we continue to categorize
people along its lines. Appiah's nominalist view of race aims to
reveal how these social identities work by analyzing the labels we use
for them. According to Appiah there are three ways that we categorize
using folk racial labels: ascription, identification, and treatment,
and it takes all three for a given label to be a functioning social
identity (2006, 368-370). As a result, we come to live as these
identities and look to them as a central resource for constructing our
lives. Furthermore, norms of identification and authenticity arise
around them (2006, 372). Since there is no biological story that can
be told to ground these labels then race is not real (2006, 372). For
a critique of Appiah's modified view that focuses on Appiah
(1996) see Ronald R. Sundstrom (2002).



*Racial constructivism* refers to the argument that, even if
biological race is false, races have come into existence and continue
to exist through "human culture and human decisions"
(Mallon 2007, 94). Race constructivists accept the skeptics'
dismissal of biological race but argue that the term still
meaningfully refers to the widespread grouping of individuals into
certain categories by society, indeed often by the very members of
such racial ascriptions. Normatively, race constructivists argue that
since society labels people according to racial categories, and since
such labeling often leads to race-based differences in resources,
opportunities, and well-being, the concept of race must be conserved,
in order to facilitate race-based social movements or policies, such
as affirmative action, that compensate for socially constructed but
socially relevant racial differences. While sharing this normative
commitment to race *conservationism*, racial constructivists
can be subdivided into three groups with slightly different accounts
of the ontology of race. As we will see below, however, Sally
Haslanger's eliminitivist constructivism illustrates how these
commitments can come apart.



*Thin constructivism* depicts race as a grouping of humans
according to ancestry and genetically insignificant,
"superficial properties that are prototypically linked with
race," such as skin tone, hair color and hair texture (Mallon
2006, 534). In this way, thin constructivists such as Robert
Gooding-Williams (1998), Lucius Outlaw (1990, 1996) and Charles Mills
(1998) rely on the widespread folk theory of race while rejecting its
scientific foundation upon racial naturalism. *Interactive kind
constructivism* goes further, in arguing that being ascribed to a
certain racial category causes the individuals so labeled to have
certain common experiences (Mallon 2006, 535; Piper 1992). For
instance, if society ascribes you as black, you are likely to
experience difficulty hailing cabs in New York or are more likely to
be apprehended without cause by the police (James 2004, 17). Finally,
*institutional constructivism* emphasizes race as a social
institution, whose character is specific to the society in which it is
embedded and thus cannot be applied across cultures or historical
epochs (Mallon 2006, 536). Michael Root (2000, 632) notes that a
person ascribed as Black in the United States would likely not be
considered Black in Brazil, since each country has very different
social institutions regarding the division of humanity into distinct
races. Similarly, Paul Taylor (2000) responds to Appiah's racial
skepticism by holding that races, even if biologically unreal, remain
real social objects (Mallon 2006, 536-537). Indeed, in a later
work Taylor (2004) argues that the term "race" has a
perfectly clear referent, that being those people socially ascribed to
certain racial categories within the United States, regardless of the
widespread social rejection of biological racial naturalism.



Sally Haslanger's constructivism (2000, 2010, 2019) is not,
however, conservationist. She understands races as racialized groups,
whose membership requires three criteria. One, members are those who
are "observed or imagined" to have certain bodily features
that are evidence of certain ancestry from certain geographical
locations; two, "having (or being imagined to have)" those
features marks members as occupying either a subordinate or privileged
social position, thereby justifying that position; and three, the
satisfaction of the first two criteria plays a role in members'
systemic subordination or privilege (2019, 25-26). Racial
identity in such contexts need not focus exclusively on subordination
or privilege, as "many forms of racial identity are important,
valuable, and in some cases even inevitable responses to racial
hierarchy" (2019, 29-30). She worries, however, that even
though we should embrace "cultural groups marked by ancestry and
appearance" in the short term to fight for justice, she worries
about embracing them for the long term (2019, 30).



Constructivism also cleaves along political and cultural dimensions, a
distinction owed to Chike Jeffers (Jeffers, 2013, 2019).
Haslanger's view is paradigmatic of political constructivism by
understanding the meaning of race as determined by hierarchical
relations of power *by definition*: "race is made real
wholly or most importantly by hierarchical relations of power"
(Jeffers 2019, 48). Jeffers' cultural constructivism corrects
for political constructivism's inability to account for race
existing after racism, including the idea of racial equality (2013,
421; 2019, 71). Cultural constructivism rejects "the idea that
cultural difference is less important than differences in power
relations for understanding racial phenomena in the present"
(2019, 65). At the extreme, political constructivism argues for, one,
differential power relations bring racial difference into existence;
two, differential power relations are fundamental for understanding
the present reality of race; and three, differential power relations
are essential to race, so race will cease to exist in an egalitarian
society where appearance and ancestry do not correlate to certain
hierarchical positions (2019, 56-57). Jeffers concedes
race's political origin while rejecting the two other ways that
power relations define race (2013, 419; 2019, 57-58). The
cultural significance of race can be seen in three ways. First, even
the emergence of racial categories counts as a cultural shift, insofar
as new social contexts are created in which those viewed as being of
different races are also viewed as having different cultures. Second,
there are "novel forms of cultural difference" that emerge
in the wake of racial difference. And third, racial groups are shaped
culturally by happenings prior to racial formation (2019,
62-63). Jeffers thus writes of Blackness, "What it means
to be a Black person, for many of us, including myself, can never be
exhausted through reference to problems of stigmatization,
discrimination, marginalization, and disadvantage, as real and as
large-looming as these factors are in the racial landscape as we know
it. There is also joy in blackness, a joy shaped by culturally
distinctive situations" (2013, 422).



There are also views that challenge the broad strokes of
constructivism while avoiding racial skepticism: Lionel K.
McPherson's deflationary pluralism (2015), Joshua
Glasgow's basic racial realism (2015, with Jonathan M. Woodward,
2019), and Michael O. Hardimon's deflationary realism (2003,
2014, 2017). McPherson argues that "race" should be
replaced with his concept of socioancestry, since
"'race' talk overall is too ambiguous and contested
to be salvaged in the search for a dominant understanding"
(2015, 676). He aims to sidestep Appiah's eliminativism by
claiming that deflationary pluralism "does not maintain that
'race' talk is necessarily an error and does not take a
hard line about whether races exist" (2015, 675). Socioancestry
retains the possibility of "color-conscious social
identity" without the burdens of assumptions or confusions about
race and racial nature (2015, 686). This is because it is
"visible continental ancestry," rather than race, which is
the root of color-consciousness (2015, 690). Socioancestry, then,
focuses on visible continental ancestry alone to explain social group
formation. Accordingly, socioancestral identities develop "when
persons accept (or are ascribed) a social identity because they share
a component of continental ancestry that distinctively shapes
color-conscious social reality" (2015, 690).



Glasgow's basic racial realism aims to capture our operative
meaning of race: "the meaning that governs our use of the term,
even when we are unaware of it" (2019, 115). Glasgow defines his
position in the following way: "Races, by definition, are
relatively large groups of people who are distinguished from other
groups of people by having certain visible biological traits (such as
skin color) to a disproportionate extent." The position is
therefore anti-realist, since it claims that races are neither
biologically nor socially real (2019, 117). Glasgow's position
is grounded in judgments about our commitments, believing that we are
more willing to give up on the biological basis for race than we are
to give up on the idea that there are certain "core features and
identities" connected to the idea of race" (2019, 127). In
other words, disbelieving in the biological reality of race
doesn't lead to eliminativism. Glasgow holds, however, that it
also doesn't lead to social constructivism. Race is not socially
made because, "no matter which social facts we attend to, we can
always imagine them disappearing while race stays. And if race is
conceptually able to persist across all social practices, then by
definition it is not a social phenomenon" (2019, 133). This
intuition is based in his focus on our ordinary usage of the term
"race," which is fully captured by visible traits.



Hardimon's deflationary realism argues that we need four
interrelated race concepts to coherently answer the question of what
race is to human beings: the racialist concept of race, the minimalist
concept of race, the populationist concept of race, and the concept of
socialrace (2017, 2-3, 7). The racialist concept of race is the
view that there are fixed patterns of race-based moral, intellectual,
and cultural characteristics that are heritable, based in an
underlying biological essence, correlate to physical characteristics,
and form a distinct racial hierarchy (2017, 15-16). Minimalist
race "says that people differ in shape and color in ways that
correspond to differences in their geographical ancestry. Essentially
that is all it says" (2017, 6; see also 2003). It aims to
capture in "a nonmalefic way" what the racialist concept
of race says that it captures. In other words, it admits of the
nonsocial and biological reality of race but in a value-neutral way
(2017, 7). Populationist race aims to do the same thing in a more
robust and specific way by giving a genetic underpinning to the
minimalist conception based on a "geographically separated and
reproductively isolated founding population" (2017, 99). This
concept is distinguished from cladistic race because it does not
require monophyly (2017, 110). Finally, socialrace captures race in
terms of its social relations and practices. It refers to "the
social groups in racist societies that appear to be racialist races as
social groups that falsely appear to be biological groups"
(2017, 10; see also 2014). Hardimon argues that it is only through
using all four concepts, with the rejection of the first being the
basis for the construction of the latter three, that we can actually
understand our concept of race.



The third school of thought regarding the ontology of race is
*racial population naturalism*. This camp suggests that,
although racial naturalism falsely attributed cultural, mental, and
physical characters to discrete racial groups, it is possible that
genetically significant biological groupings could exist that would
merit the term races. Importantly, these biological racial groupings
would not be essentialist or discrete: there is no set of genetic or
other biological traits that all and only all members of a racial
group share that would then provide a natural biological boundary
between racial groups. Thus, these thinkers confirm the strong
scientific consensus that discrete, essentialist races do not exist.
However, the criteria of discreteness and essentialism would also
invalidate distinctions between non-human species, such as lions and
tigers. As Philip Kitcher puts it, "there is no...genetic
feature...that separates one species of mosquito or mushroom from
another" (Kitcher 2007, 294-296; Cf. Mallon 2007,
146-168). Rather, biological species are differentiated by
reproductive isolation, which is relative, not absolute (since hybrids
sometimes appear in nature); which may have non-genetic causes (e.g.,
geographic separation and incompatible reproduction periods or
rituals); which may generate statistically significant if not uniform
genetic differences; and which may express distinct phenotypes. In
effect, if the failure to satisfy the condition of discreteness and
essentialism requires jettisoning the concept of race, then it also
requires jettisoning the concept of biological species. But because
the biological species concept remains epistemologically useful, some
biologists and philosophers use it to defend a racial ontology that is
"biologically informed but non-essentialist," one that is
vague, non-discrete, and related to genetics, genealogy, geography,
and phenotype (Sesardic 2010, 146).



There are three versions of racial population naturalism: cladistic
race; socially isolated race; and genetically clustered race.
*Cladistic races* are "ancestor-descendant sequences of
breeding populations that share a common origin" (Andreasen
2004, 425). They emerged during human evolution, as different groups
of humans became geographically isolated from each other, and may be
dying out, if they have not already, due to more recent human
reproductive intermingling (Andreasen 1998, 214-216; Cf.
Andreasen 2000, S653-S666). *Socially isolated race*
refers to the fact that legal sanctions against miscegenation might
have created a genetically isolated African American race in the USA
(Kitcher 1999). Finally, defenders of *genetically clustered
race* argue that although only 7% of the differences between any
two individuals regarding any one specific gene can be attributed to
their membership in one of the commonly recognized racial categories,
the aggregation of several genes is statistically related to a small
number of racial categories associated with major geographic regions
and phenotypes (Sesardic 2010; Kitcher 2007, 304).



The question is whether these new biological ontologies of race avoid
the conceptual mismatches that ground eliminativism. The short answer
is that they can, but only through human intervention. Socially
isolated race faces no mismatch when applied to African Americans,
defined as the descendants of African slaves brought to the United
States. However, this racial category would not encompass Black
Africans. Moreover, because African American race originated in
legally enforced sexual segregation, it is "both biologically
real and socially constructed" (Kitcher 2007, 298). Genetic
clustering would seem to provide an objective, biological foundation
for a broader racial taxonomy, but differences in clustered genes are
continuous, not discrete, and thus scientists must decide where to
draw the line between one genetically clustered race and another. If
they program their computers to distinguish four genetic clusters,
then European, Asian, Amerindian, and African groups will emerge; if
only two clusters are sought, then only the African and Amerindian
"races" remain (Kitcher 2007, 304). Thus, genetic
clustering avoids racial mismatch only through the decisions of the
scientist analyzing the data. The same problem also confronts
cladistic race, since the number of races will vary from nine, at the
most recent period of evolutionary reproductive isolation, to just
one, if we go back to the very beginning, since all humans were
originally Africans. But in addition, cladistic race faces a stronger
mismatch by "cross-classifying" groups that we typically
think of as part of the same race, for example by linking northeast
Asians more closely with Europeans than with more phenotypically
similar southeast Asians. Robin Andreasen defends the cladistic race
concept by correctly arguing that folk theories of race have
themselves generated counter-intuitive cross-classifications,
particularly with respect to the Census' Asian category, which
previously excluded Asian Indians and now excludes native Hawaiians
and Pacific Islanders. (Andreasen 2005, 100-101; Andreasen 2004,
430-431; Cf. Glasgow 2003, 456-474; Glasgow 2009,
91-108). But this hardly saves her argument, since the US
Census's history of shifting racial categories and past use of
ethnic and religious terms (e.g., Filipino, Hindu, and Korean) to
signify races is typically taken as evidence of the *social*,
rather than biological, foundations of race (Espiritu 1992, Chapter
5).



Quayshawn Spencer (2012, 2014, 2019) is resistant to arguments that
cladistic subspecies are a viable biological candidate for race (2012,
203). Instead, he defends a version of biological racial realism that
understands "biologically real" as capturing "all of
the entities that are used in empirically successful
biology...and that adequately rules out all of the entities that
are not" (2019, 77; see also 95). Spencer argues that such an
entity exists and can be found in the US government's Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) and its racial classifications. The basis
for this claim is that population genetics has identified five
distinctive "human continental populations" that satisfy
the criteria for biological reality (2019, 98; 95). The OMB
classifications map onto these continental populations. The importance
of the OMB is that its ubiquity in our lives means that one of the
primary ways that we talk about race is through its categories.
Spencer highlights this centrality when he points out the ways that
Americans self-report their races correspond to the parameters of the
OMB classifications (2019, 83-85). Spencer is pluralist about
race talk, however, meaning that OMB race is just one dominant meaning
of race, while there is no single dominant meaning among users of the
term (2019, 213).



In each case, racial population naturalism encounters problems in
trying to demarcate discrete boundaries between different biological
populations. If discreteness is indispensable to a human racial
taxonomy, then mismatches can only be avoided, if at all, through
human intervention. But as noted above, biological species are also
not genetically discrete, and thus boundaries between non-human
species must also be imposed through human intervention. And just as
the demarcation of non-human species is justified through its
scientific usefulness, so too are human racial categories justified.
For instance, Andreason contends that a cladistic race concept that
divides northeastern from southeastern Asians is scientifically useful
for evolutionary research, even if it conflicts with the folk concept
of a unified Asian race. In turn, the concepts of genetically
clustered and socially isolated race may remain useful for detecting
and treating some health problems. Ian Hacking provides a careful
argument in favor of the provisional use of American racial categories
in medicine. Noting that racial categories do not reflect
essentialist, uniform differences, he reiterates the finding that
there are statistically significant genetic differences among
different racial groups. As a result, an African American is more
likely to find a bone marrow match from a pool of African American
donors than from a pool of white donors. Thus, he defends the practice
of soliciting African American bone marrow donors, even though this
may provide fodder to racist groups who defend an essentialist and
hierarchical conception of biological race (Hacking 2005,
102-116; Cf. Kitcher 2007, 312-316). Conversely, Dorothy
Roberts emphasizes the dangers of using racial categories within
medicine, suggesting that it not only validates egregious ideas of
biological racial hierarchy but also contributes to conservative
justifications for limiting race-based affirmative action and even
social welfare funding, which supposedly would be wasted on
genetically inferior minority populations. In effect, race-based
medicine raises the specter of a new political synthesis of colorblind
conservatism with biological racialism (Roberts 2008, 537-545).
However, Roberts' critique fails to engage the literature on the
statistical significance of racial categories for genetic differences.
Moreover, she herself acknowledges that many versions of colorblind
conservatism do not rely at all on biological justifications.


## 3. Race versus Ethnicity



Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann (1998) provide a helpful
discussion of the differences between the concepts of race and
ethnicity. Relying on social constructivism, they define race as
"a human group defined by itself or others as distinct by virtue
of perceived common physical characteristics that are held to be
inherent...Determining which characteristics constitute the
race...is a choice human beings make. Neither markers nor
categories are predetermined by any biological factors" (Cornell
and Hartmann 1998, 24). Ethnicity, conversely, is defined as a sense
of common ancestry based on cultural attachments, past linguistic
heritage, religious affiliations, claimed kinship, or some physical
traits (1998, 19). Racial identities are typically thought of as
encompassing multiple ethnic identities (Cornell and Hartmann 1998,
26). Thus, people who are racially categorized as black may possess a
variety of ethnic identities based either on African national or
cultural markers (e.g., Kenyan, Igbo, Zulu) or the newer national,
sub-national, or trans-national identities created through the mixing
of enslaved populations in the Americas (e.g., African American,
Haitian, West Indian).



Cornell and Hartmann outline five additional characteristics that
distinguish race from ethnicity: racial identity is typically
externally imposed by outsiders, as when whites created the Negro race
to homogenize the multiple ethnic groups they conquered in Africa or
brought as slaves to America; race is a result of early globalization,
when European explorers "discovered" and then conquered
peoples with radically different phenotypical traits; race typically
involves power relations, from the basic power to define the race of
others to the more expansive power to deprive certain racial groups of
social, economic, or political benefits; racial identities are
typically hierarchical, with certain races being perceived as superior
to others; and racial identity is perceived as inherent, something
individuals are born with (1998, 27-29).



Race and ethnicity differ strongly in the level of agency that
individuals exercise in choosing their identity. Individuals rarely
have any choice over their racial identity, due to the immediate
visual impact of the physical traits associated with race. Individuals
are thought to exercise more choice over ethnic identification, since
the physical differences between ethnic groups are typically less
striking, and since individuals can choose whether or not to express
the cultural practices associated with ethnicity. So an individual who
phenotypically appears white with ancestors from Ireland can more
readily choose whether to assert their Irish identity (by celebrating
St. Patrick's Day) than whether to choose their white identity
(Cornell and Hartmann 1998, 29-30). Moreover, Mary Waters (1990)
argues that the high level of intermarriage among white Americans from
various national ancestries grants their children significant
"ethnic options" in choosing with which of their multiple
heritages to identify. Waters (1999) and Philip Kasinitz (1992)
document how phenotypically black West Indian immigrants exercise
agency in asserting their ethnic identity in order to differentiate
themselves from native-born African Americans, but discrimination and
violence aimed at all Black people, regardless of ethnicity, strongly
constrains such agency.The greater constraints on racial identity stem
from the role of informal perceptions, discriminatory social action,
and formal laws imposing racial identity, such as Census
categorization (Nobles 2000), the infamous "hypodescent"
laws, which defined people as black if they had one drop of African
blood (Davis 1991), and judicial decisions such as the
"prerequisite cases," which determined whether specific
immigrants could be classified as white and thus eligible for
naturalized citizenship (Lopez 1996).



The line between race and ethnicity gets blurred in the case of Asians
and Latinos in the United States. Yen Le Espiritu (1992) notes that
Asian American racial identity, which of course encompasses a
remarkable level of ethnic diversity, results from a combination of
external assignment and agency, as when Asians actively respond to
anti-Asian discrimination or violence through political action and a
sense of shared fate. Consequently, Espiritu uses the term
"panethnicity" to describe Asian American identity, a
concept which has racial connotations, given the role of "racial
lumping" together of members of diverse Asian ethnicities into a
single racial group defined by phenotypical traits. Thus, she declares
that "African Americans [are] the earliest and most developed
pan-ethnic group in the United States" (1992, 174). Hispanic or
Latino identity exhibits traits similar to pan-ethnicity. Indeed,
unlike Asian identity, Hispanic identity is not even a formal racial
identity under the Census. However, informal perceptions, formal laws,
and discrimination based on physical appearance nevertheless tend to
lump together various nationalities and ethnicities that share some
connection to Latin America (Rodriquez 2000). Moreover, scholars have
noted that Jews (Brodkin 1998) and the Irish (Ignatiev 1995) were once
were considered distinct, non-white races but are now considered to be
racially white ethnic groups, partly by exercising agency in
distancing themselves from African Americans exercising political
power. Thus, it is conceivable that groups today considered to be
sociological racial groups could transform into something more like an
ethnic group. For this reason, Blum describes Hispanics and Asians as
incompletely racialized groups (Blum 2002, 149-155).



A robust philosophical debate has emerged regarding the status of
Hispanic or Latino identity. Jorge Gracia (2000) defends the utility
of Hispanic ethnic identity as grounded primarily in the shared,
linguistic culture that can be traced to the Iberian Peninsula. Jorge
Garcia (2001, 2006) challenges this approach, arguing that the
diversity of individual experiences undermines the use of Hispanic
ethnicity as a meaningful form of collective identity. Linda Martin
Alcoff (2006) develops a "realist" defense of Latino
identity against charges of essentialism and views it as a category of
solidarity that develops in reaction to white privilege. Christina
Beltran (2010), on the other hand, does not try to paper over the
diversity within *Latinidad*, which she instead portrays as a
pluralistic, fragmented, and agonistic form of political action.


## 4. Race in Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy



Two strands in moral, political, and legal philosophy are pertinent to
the concept of race. One strand examines the broader conceptual and
methodological questions regarding the moral status of race and how to
theorize racial justice; the other strand normatively assesses
specific policies or institutional forms that seek to redress racial
inequality, such as affirmative action, racially descriptive
representation, the general question of colorblindness in law and
policy, residential racial segregation, and racism in the criminal
justice system and policing.



Lawrence Blum, Anthony Appiah, and Tommie Shelby articulate
indispensable positions in addressing the moral status of the concept
of race. Blum (2002) examines both the concept of race and the problem
of racism. He argues that "racism" be restricted to two
referents: *inferiorization*, or the denigration of a group due
to its putative biological inferiority; and *antipathy*, or the
"bigotry, hostility, and hatred" towards another group
defined by its putatively inherited physical traits (2002, 8). These
two moral sins deserve this heightened level of condemnation
associated with the term racism, because they violate moral norms of
"respect, equality, and dignity" and because they are
historically connected to extreme and overt forms of racial oppression
(2002, 27). But because these connections make "racism" so
morally loaded a term, it should not be applied to "lesser
racial ills and infractions" that suggest mere ignorance,
insensitivity or discomfort regarding members of different groups
(28), since doing so will apply a disproportionate judgment against
the person so named, closing off possible avenues for fruitful moral
dialogue.



Due to the historical connection between racism and extreme
oppression, Blum argues against using the term race, since he rejects
its biological foundation. Instead, he advocates using the term
"racialized group" to denote those socially constructed
identities whose supposedly inherited common physical traits are used
to impose social, political, and economic costs. To Blum,
"racialized group" creates distance from the biological
conception of race and it admits of degrees, as in the case of
Latinos, whom Blum describes as an "incompletely racialized
group" (2002, 151). This terminological shift, and its supposed
revelation of the socially constructed character of physiognomically
defined identities, need not require the rejection of group-specific
policies such as affirmative action. Members of sociologically
constructed racialized identities suffer real harms, and laws might
have to distinguish individuals according to their racialized
identities in order to compensate for such harms. Nevertheless, Blum
remains ambivalent about such measures, arguing that even when
necessary they remain morally suspect (2002, 97).



Similar ambivalence is also expressed by Anthony Appiah, earlier
discussed regarding the metaphysics of race. While his metaphysical
*racial skepticism* was cited as grounding his normative
position of *eliminativism*, Appiah is "against
races" but "for racial identities" (1996). Because
of a wide social consensus that races exist, individuals are ascribed
to races regardless of their individual choices or desires. Moreover,
racial identity remains far more salient and costly than ethnic
identity (1996, 80-81). As a result, mobilization along racial
lines is justifiable, in order to combat racism. But even at this
point, Appiah still fears that racial identification may constrain
individual autonomy by requiring members of racial groups to behave
according to certain cultural norms or "scripts" that have
become dominant within a specific racial group. Appiah thus concludes,
"Racial identity can be the basis of resistance to racism; but
even as we struggle against racism...let us not let our racial
identities subject us to new tyrannies" (1996, 104). This
residual ambivalence, to recall the metaphysical discussions of the
last section, perhaps ground Mallon's contention that Appiah
remains an *eliminativist* rather than a *racial
constructivist*, since ideally Appiah would prefer to be free of
all residual constraints entailed by even socially constructed
races.



Tommie Shelby responds to the ambivalence of Appiah and Blum by
distinguishing *classical black nationalism*, which rested upon
an organic black identity, with *pragmatic black nationalism*,
based on an instrumental concern with combating antiblack racism
(2005, 38-52; 2003, 666-668). Pragmatic nationalism allows
Black people to generate solidarity across class or cultural lines,
not just through the *modus vivendi* of shared interests but
upon a principled commitment to racial equality and justice (2005,
150-154). As a result, black solidarity is grounded upon a
principled response to common oppression, rather than some putative
shared identity (2002), thus mitigating the dangers of biological
essentialism and tyrannical cultural conformity that Appiah associates
with race and racial identities. Anna Stubblefield (2005) provides an
alternative defense of Black solidarity by comparing it to familial
commitments.



Shelby (2005, 7) briefly mentions that his pragmatic, political
version of black solidarity is compatible with John Rawls's
*Political Liberalism*, but his more detailed defense of the
ideal social contract method of Rawls's *A Theory of
Justice* for theorizing racial justice has drawn substantial
controversy (Shelby 2004). Elizabeth Anderson eschews ideal theory for
analyzing racial justice because it assumes motivational and cognitive
capacities beyond those of ordinary humans; it risks promoting ideal
norms (like colorblindness) under unjust conditions that require
race-specific policies; and its idealizing assumptions, like an
original position in which parties do not know relevant personal and
social racial facts, precludes recognition of historical and present
racial injustice. She instead uses a normative framework of democratic
equality to ground her moral imperative of integration.



Charles Mills, extending his critique of how early modern social
contract thinking obfuscates racial injustice (1997), fears that
Rawls's ideal theory can similarly serve as an ideology that
whitewashes non-white oppression (Mills 2013). But rather than
jettisoning a contractarian approach entirely, Mills instead develops
a model of a non-ideal contract, in which the parties do not know
their own racial identities but are aware of their society's
history of racial exploitation and its effects. Because the parties
know of racial hierarchy but do not know if they will be its
beneficiaries or victims, Mills hypothesizes that they will rationally
agree to racial reparations as a form of corrective or rectificatory
justice (Pateman and Mills 2007, Chapters 3, 4, 8).



Shelby responds that, while Rawls's ideal theory of justice
excludes a theory of rectification because it is not comprehensive,
rectificatory justice is not only complementary but in fact
presupposes an ideal theory that can clarify when injustices have
occurred and need to be rectified. More importantly, Shelby suggests
that complying with rectificatory justice through racial reparations
could well leave Black people living in a society that nevertheless
remains racially unjust in other ways. For this reason, Shelby
concludes that ideal theory remains indispensable (2013).



Christopher Lebron (2013, 28-42) also suggests that the
approaches of Rawls and Mills are complementary, but in a very
different way. He argues that Rawls's focus on the basic
structure of society provides explanatory mechanisms through which
white supremacy persists, something unspecified in earlier work by
Mills (2003). And in sharp contrast to Shelby (2013), Lebron
criticizes Mills for rehabilitating Rawlsian contract thinking, since
even a non-ideal form eliminates the epistemological advantage of a
non-white perspective on white supremacy. Instead of reformulating
contractarian thinking to fit the needs of racial justice, Lebron
instead focuses on analyzing how "historically evolved
power" and "socially embedded power" perpetuate
racial injustice.



Turning to the second strand of practical philosophy devoted to race,
various scholars have addressed policies such as affirmative action,
race-conscious electoral districting, and colorblindness in policy and
law. The literature on affirmative action is immense, and may be
divided into approaches that focus on compensatory justice,
distributive justice, critiques of the concept of merit, and diversity
of perspective. Alan Goldman (1979) generally argues against
affirmative action, since jobs or educational opportunities as a rule
should go to those most qualified. Only when a specific individual has
been victimized by racial or other discrimination can the otherwise
irrelevant factor of race be used as a compensatory measure to award a
position or a seat at a university. Ronald Fiscus (1992) rejects the
compensatory scheme in favor of a distributive justice argument. He
claims that absent the insidious and invidious effects of a racist
society, success in achieving admissions to selective universities or
attractive jobs would be randomly distributed across racial lines.
Thus, he concludes that distributive justice requires the racially
proportional distribution of jobs and university seats. Of course,
Fiscus's argument displaces the role of merit in the awarding of
jobs or university admissions, but this point is addressed by Iris
Young (1990, Chapter 7), who argues that contemporary criteria of
merit, such as standardized testing and educational achievement, are
biased against disadvantaged racial and other groups, and rarely are
functionally related to job performance or academic potential.
Finally, Michel Rosenfeld (1991) turns away from substantive theories
of justice in favor of a conception of justice as reversibility, a
position influenced by the "Discourse Ethics" of
Jurgen Habermas (1990), which defines justice not by the proper
substantive awarding of goods but as the result of a fair discursive
procedure that includes all relevant viewpoints and is free of
coercive power relations. Thus, affirmative action is justified as an
attempt to include racially diverse viewpoints. All of these positions
are summarily discussed in a useful debate format in Cohen and Sterba
(2003).



The issues of race-conscious electoral districting and descriptive
racial representation have also garnered substantial attention.
Race-conscious districting is the practice of drawing geographically
based electoral districts in which the majority of voters are Black.
Descriptive racial representation holds that Black populations are
best represented by Black politicians. Iris Marion Young (1990,
183-191) provides a spirited defense of descriptive
representation for racial minorities, grounded in their experiences of
"oppression, the institutional constraint on
self-determination", and domination "the institutional
constraint on self-determination" (1990, 37). Anne Phillips
(1995) furthers this position, arguing that representatives who are
members of minority racial groups can enhance legislative
deliberation. Melissa Williams (1998) also defends the deliberative
contribution of descriptive racial representation, but adds that
minority constituents are more likely to trust minority
representatives, since both will be affected by laws that overtly or
covertly discriminate against minority racial groups. Finally, Jane
Mansbridge (1999) carefully demonstrates why a critical mass of
minority representatives is needed, in order to adequately advocate
for common minority interests as well as to convey the internal
diversity within the group. In a later work, Young (2000) addresses
critics who argue that descriptive representation relies upon group
essentialism, since members of a racial group need not all share the
same interests or opinions. In response, Young suggests that members
of the same racial group do share the same "social
perspective" grounded in common experiences, similar to the
*interactive kind* variant of *racial constructivism*
discussed earlier. But because it is unclear that Black individuals
are more likely to share common experiences than common interests or
opinions, Michael James prioritizes using race-conscious districting
to create Black racial constituencies which can hold Black or
non-Black representatives accountable to Black interests (James 2011).
Abigail Thernstrom (1987) condemns race-conscious districting for
violating the original principles behind the 1965 Voting Rights Act
and the 15th Amendment, by promoting the election of black
representatives rather than simply guaranteeing black voters the right
to cast ballots. J. Morgan Kousser (1999) responds that race-conscious
districting simply reflects the right to cast a
"meaningful" vote, as implied by the 15th
Amendment protection against not only the denial but also the
"abridgment" of the right to vote. Lani Guinier (1994)
compellingly suggests that instead of drawing majority black
districts, we should adopt more proportional electoral system that
facilitate the electoral strength of racial and other minorities.
Michael James (2004) suggests that alternative electoral systems
facilitate not only descriptive racial representation but also
democratic deliberation across racial lines.



A general advantage of using alternative electoral systems to enhance
minority racial representation is that they are technically
colorblind, not requiring lawmakers or judges to group citizens
according to their racial identities. The general value of
colorblindness is an ongoing topic of debate within legal philosophy.
Drawing on Justice John Marshall Harlan's famous dissent in
*Plessy v. Ferguson*, and a not-uncontroversial interpretation
of the origins of the equal protection clause, Andrew Kull (1992)
argues that contemporary American statutory and constitutional law
should strive to be colorblind and combat racial inequality without
dividing citizens into different racial groups. Ian Haney Lopez (2006,
143-162), on the other hand, fears "colorblind white
dominance," whereby facially race-neutral laws leave untouched
the race-based inequality that operates within American political,
legal, and economic structures. Elizabeth Anderson (2010) provides a
trenchant critique of colorblindness as a normative standard for law,
policy, or ethics. Racial segregation and the potential for
integration have garnered much less philosophical attention than
affirmative action and racially descriptive representation. Bernard
Boxill (1992) offers a treatment of busing and self-segregation, while
Howard McGary (1999) offers a clarification of integration and
separation. Iris Young (2002, chapter 6) treats residential
segregation in the context of regional democracy, while Owen Fiss
(2003) analyzes it in the context of the legacy of racism. Anderson
herself (2010) argues for the moral imperative of integration, with
Tommie Shelby (2014) and Ronald Sundstrom (2013) offering critical
responses to Anderson's argument. More recently, Andrew Valls
(2018, chapter 6) has written on the subject.



In recent years, the problem of racism within policing and criminal
justice in the United States has attracted intense popular and
scholarly attention. Mathias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser (2004) offer
a qualified defense of racial profiling that engages both utilitarian
and non-consequentialist reasoning. Annabelle Lever's (2005)
objection and response prompted a subsequent round of debate (Risse
2007, Lever 2007). Michelle Alexander (2010) famously depicted the
contemporary American criminal justice system as the "New Jim
Crow," for its intense racial disparities. Naomi Zack (2015)
provides a trenchant critique of racial profiling and police homicide.
David Boonin (2011), on the other hand, reluctantly defends racial
profiling on pragmatic grounds. Finally, Adam Hosein (2018) argues
against it for reasons of political equality. Shelby (2016) offers a
justification of Black resistance based in the unjust legacy of racial
segregation while deepening his earlier critique of Anderson's
view.


## 5. Race in Continental Philosophy



While the debates in contemporary philosophy of race within the
analytic tradition have largely revolved around whether or not races
exist along with criteria for determining realness or existence,
philosophers working in the Continental traditions have taken up the
concept of race along other dimensions (see Bernasconi and Cook 2003
for an overview). First, those working within the traditions of
Existentialism and Phenomenology have called on Fanon, Merleau-Ponty,
and Sartre, among others, to understand how race and functions within
our lived, bodily experiences of everyday life. This strand of
scholarship focuses on the materiality of race. As Emily S. Lee puts
it, "both the social structural and the individual subconscious
levels of analysis rely on perceiving the embodiment of race"
(2014, 1). Second, philosophers building on the work of Michel
Foucault have articulated genealogical understandings of race that
focus on its historical emergence as a concept and the ways that it
has functioned within discourses of knowledge and power.



Frantz Fanon has been the primary influence for those understanding
race and racism within Existentialism and Phenomenology. In *Black
Skin, White Masks* Fanon writes, "I came into this world
anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at
the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other
objects" (2008/1952, 89). Furthermore, this "inferiority
is determined by the Other," by the "white gaze"
(2008/1952, 90). Such a position is understood through the schema of
the body: "In a white world, the man of color encounters
difficulties in elaborating his body schema. The image of one's
body is solely negating. It's an image in the third
person" (2008/1952, 90). Rather than being at home in his own
body, and moving "out of habit," Fanon understands his
body as existing primarily as an object for others, requiring him to
move "by implicit knowledge" of the rules and norms of
that white world (2008/1952, 91).



Fanon critiques Sartre's understanding of race and racism by
pointing out that Sartre understands antiracism as a negative movement
that will be overcome (2008/1952, 111-112). Sartre treats
antiracism as the transition toward something else and not as an end
in itself. Against this view Fanon writes, " Sartre forgets that
the Black man suffers in his body quite differently from the white
man" (2008/1952, 117). He is trapped by his body schema,
"a toy in the hands of the white man" (2008/1952,
119).



Lewis Gordon draws on both Fanon and Sartre in articulating his
Africana existentialism. He distinguishes between Existentialism as a
specific historical European movement and philosophies of existence,
or existential philosophies, which are preoccupied with
"freedom, anguish, responsibility, embodied agency, sociality,
and liberation." These concerns yield a focus on the
"lived context of concern" (2000, 10). For Gordon, due to
the history of racial oppression of Black peoples, an Africana
existential philosophy revolves around the questions, "what does
it mean to be a problem, and what is to be understood by Black
suffering?" (2000, 8).



According to Gordon, what is sometimes referred to as the "race
question" is really a question about the status of Blackness,
for "race has emerged, throughout its history, as the question
fundamentally of 'the blacks' as it has for no other
group" (2000, 12). Rather than a denial that other groups have
been racialized, the claim instead is that such other racializations
have been conditioned on a scale of European personhood to Black
subpersonhood (see also Mills 1998, 6-10). Blackness itself has
been characterized as "the breakdown of reason" and
"an existential enigma" in such a way that to ask after
race and racialization is to ask after Blackness in the first
instance.



Both Gordon and Zack use Sartre's notion of bad faith to
understand race. We can understand bad faith as the evasion of
responsibility and fidelity to human freedom, and an understanding of
the human being as a for-itself. Bad faith falsely turns the human
being into an object without agency, into an in-itself. For Gordon,
antiblack racism conceives of Blackness itself as a problem so as to
avoid having to understand Black problems. As a result, actual Black
people disappear along with any responsibility to them (1997, 74).
Gordon gives the example of *The Philadelphia Negro*, Du
Bois' sociological study of the residents of
Philadelphia's Seventh Ward. Gordon recounts how those
commissioning the study set Du Bois up to fail so that he would only
perpetuate the pathologizing of the Black population, presenting
Blackness itself as a problem rather than attempt to understand the
problems of Black people and communities (2000, 69).



Whereas Gordon uses bad faith to understand antiblack racism, Zack
does so to deepen her eliminativism. For Sartre, authenticity is the
antidote to bad faith - to live authentically is to understand
and embrace human freedom rather than evade it. Zack's
eliminativism attributes bad faith to those who affirm that racial
designations describe human beings when in fact they do not (1993,
3-4). If racial identifications lack adequate support because
races do not exist, then identification as mixed race is also done in
bad faith. Instead, Zack understands her position of
"anti-race" as true authenticity that looks to the future
in the name of freedom and resistance to oppression in the name of
racelessness (1993, 164).



Embodiment and visibility are central to these views. Gordon
understands the body as "our perspective in the world,"
which occurs along (at least) three matrices: seeing, being seen, and
being conscious of being seen (1997, 71). In an antiblack world this
means that the Black body is a form of absence, going unseen in the
same manner as Ralph Ellison's protagonist in *Invisible
Man* (1997, 72-3). George Yancy tells us that he writes from
his "lived embodied experience," which is a "site of
exposure" (2008, 65). Black embodiment here is the lens used to
critique whiteness and its normative gaze. For Yancy, Black resistance
itself decodes and recodes Black embodied existence, affirming the
value of the Black body in the face of centuries of white denial
(2008, 112-3).



Linda Martin Alcoff offers a phenomenological account of race
that highlights a "visual registry," which is socially and
historically constructed and that is "determinant over
individual experience" (2006, 194). Like Yancy, Alcoff locates
race in embodied lived experience. Drawing on Maurice
Merleau-Ponty's work, Alcoff notes how the way that our
perceptual practices are organized affects the way we come to know the
world (2006, 188). When race operates through visibility, these ways
of normalized perceptual knowing become racialized. As she notes,
"racial consciousness works through learned practices and habits
of visual discrimination and visual marks on the body...race
exists there on the body itself" (2006, 196).



Lee argues that racial meaning fits squarely within the space that a
phenomenological framework seeks to explore, namely, the space between
the natural and the cultural, the objective and the subjective, and
thinking and nonthinking (Lee 2014, 8). Furthermore, a
phenomenological approach can illuminate how, even when race is
understood as a social construction, it can nonetheless become
naturalized through "the sedimentation of racial meaning into
the very structures and practices of society" (Lee 2019,
xi).



A second line of thought runs through the work of Michel Foucault. In
his 1975-1976 lectures at the *College de France*,
published as *Society Must Be Defended*, Foucault details the
emergence of a discourse on race beginning in early 17th Century
England. According to Foucault, race war discourse emerges through
claims of illegitimacy against the Stuart monarchy. These claims were
couched in the language of injustice as well as foreign invasion, in
which an indigenous race is pitted against in invading outsider (2003,
60). Race, at this point, is not a biological concept, instead
referring to lineage, custom, and tradition (2003, 77). Only later
does this cultural notion of race transform into the scientific notion
of race.



Cornel West employs a Foucaultian methodology to produce a genealogy
of modern racism (1982). West analyzes how the discourse of modernity
came into being to show how central white supremacy is to its
practices of knowledge and meaning making (47). By modern discourse he
means, "The controlling metaphors, notions, categories, and
norms that shape the predominant conception of truth and knowledge in
the modern West," which are driven by the scientific revolution,
the Cartesian transformation of philosophy, and the classical revival
(50). It is a discourse comprising certain forms of rationality,
scientificity, objectivity, and aesthetic and cultural ideals, the
parameters of which exclude Black equality from the outset, marking it
as unintelligible and illegitimate within the prevailing norms of
discourse and knowledge (47-48). Notions of truth and knowledge
produced by these three forces are governed by a value-free subject
that observes, compares, orders, and measures in order to obtain
evidence and make inferences that verify the true representations of
reality.



Ladelle McWhorter uses Foucault's lectures to conduct a
genealogy of racism and sexual oppression of a more proximate time and
place. According to McWhorter, "racism in twentieth-century
Anglo-America [has] to be understood in light of Foucault's work
on normalization," where racism exists as a crusade against
deviance, abnormality, and pathology (2009, 12). Building on
Foucault's analysis of race war discourse McWhorter carries out
a genealogy of race, ultimately arguing that race and sexuality
"are historically codependent and mutually determinative"
(2009, 14). Anglo-American discourse on race is therefore linked to
discourses on eugenics, the family, sexual predation, normality, and
population management, all of which function within the networks of
power that Foucault referred to biopower (2009, 15). Ann Laura Stoler
(1995) offers an extended reconstruction and critique of
Foucault's treatment of race in light of colonialism and empire.
Joy James goes even further, arguing that Foucault is not useful for
thinking about race at all (1996, chapter 1).