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The Political Ontology of Race

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Polity

Abstract

Race theory is dominated by two camps. Eliminativists rely on a biological ontology, which contends that the concept of race must be biologically grounded, in order to repudiate the very term, on grounds that it is epistemologically vacuous and normatively pernicious. Conservationists use a social ontology, in which race is based on social practices, in order to retain racial categories in remedial social policies, such as affirmative action and race-based political representation. This article attempts to reorient this debate in two ways. First, it challenges the idea that racial identity is entirely unchosen by defending a political ontology of race that, unlike the biological and social ontologies, affirms the role of non-white agency in determining the political salience of ascribed racial identity. It then transcends the normative impasse between eliminativism and conservationism by contending that all three ontologies are potentially valuable and dangerous, depending on where they are applied. The biological ontology is defensible for evolutionary and medical research, the social ontology for affirmative action and anti-discrimination policy, and the political ontology for political representation.

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Notes

  1. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, rev. ed. (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 134–35.

  2. Marie Arana, “He's Not Black,” Washington Post, November 30, 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802219.html (last accessed February 27, 2009).

  3. K. Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections,” in Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 54–55.

  4. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott, “Introduction,” in The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), vii; Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 122–26; George Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2002), 31–35.

  5. This portrait of eliminativism draws on Michael Hardimon, “The Ordinary Concept of Race,” The Journal of Philosophy 100 (September 2003): 454–55.

  6. For an argument of this type, see Paul Taylor, “Appiah's Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Reality of Race,” Social Theory and Practice 26 (Spring 2000): 103–28.

  7. Ron Mallon, “Race: Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” Ethics 116 (April 2006): 545.

  8. Although the idea of race has usually referred to a small number of groups, the volatility of the race concept is demonstrated by the widely varying numbers of races (from four to sixty-three) that are said to exist. See Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1998), 21.

  9. Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity”; Naomi Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race (New York: Routledge, 2002).

  10. Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race, 87–88.

  11. See Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 73; Zack, Philosophy of Science and Race, 69; Mallon, “Race,” 526, 533.

  12. Hardimon, “The Ordinary Concept of Race,” 455.

  13. Philip Kitcher, “Does ‘Race’ Have a Future?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 35 (Autumn 2007): 294–96.

  14. Nevan Sesardic, “Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept,” Biology and Philosophy 25, No. 2 (March 2010): 146; Cf. Ron Mallon, “Human Categories beyond Non-essentialism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 15(November 2007): 146–18.

  15. Robin Andreasen, “The Cladistic Race Concept: A Defense,” Biology and Philosophy 19 (June 2004): 425.

  16. Robin Andreasen, “A New Perspective on the Race Debate,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science 49 (June 1998): 214–16; Cf. Robin Andreasen, “Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?” Philosophy of Science 67, Supplement (September 2000): S653–66.

  17. Philip Kitcher, “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture,” in Racism, ed. Leonard Harris (New York: Humanity Books, 1999).

  18. Sesardic, “Race”; Kitcher, “Does Race have a Future?” 304.

  19. Kitcher, “Does Race have a Future?” 298.

  20. Ibid., 304.

  21. Robin Andreasen, “The Meaning of ‘Race’: Folk Conceptions and the New Biology of Race,” The Journal of Philosophy 102 (February 2005): 100–01; Andreasen, “The Cladistic Race Concept: A Defense,” 430–31; Joshua Glasgow, “On the New Biology of Race,” The Journal of Philosophy 100 (September 2003): 456–74.

  22. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), Chapter 5.

  23. Hardimon, “The Ordinary Concept of Race.”

  24. Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki, The Black Image in the White Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010).

  25. Andreasen, “The Meaning of ‘Race,” 102.

  26. Ian Hacking offers a defense for the provisional use of American racial categories in medicine. He contends that racial categories need not reflect essentialist, uniform differences, and 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 or Asian American donors. Hacking therefore 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. Ian Hacking, “Why Race Still Matters,” Daedelus 134 (Winter 2005): 102–16; Cf. Kitcher, “Does Race have a Future?” 312–16. Dorothy Roberts emphasizes the dangers of using racial categories within medicine, and suggests 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 the a new political synthesis of colorblind conservatism with biological racialism. Dorothy Roberts, “Is Race-based Medicine Good for Us? African American Approaches to Race, Biomedicine, and Equality,” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 36, (Fall 2008): 537–45. Roberts, however, 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. She thus reminds us that we can have racism without race.

  27. Charles Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 47–48, 209. Mills distinguishes between the neutral, social scientific concept of “the social construction of race” and the radical concept of “racial constructivism,” which emphasizes the political motivations that led white Westerners to divide humanity into races in the first place. But the authors he cites as progenitors of the neutral concept acknowledge the political animus behind the social construction of race. Thus, his conceptual distinction is not particularly revealing. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).

  28. Here I depart from Mills's own preferred terminology. Working within the terminological domain of analytical metaphysics, Mills (45–49) distinguishes two forms of “objectivism”: “realism” (the position that entities “exist or do not exist independently of human consensus or dissent”) and “constructivism” (“an objective ontological status is involved which arises out of intersubjectivity”). Taylor distinguishes “real” from “objective,” holding that races are socially “real” (through intersubjective agreement that constrains individual subjectivity) if not “objective” (“valid … from any [specific society's] perspective”). I adopt Taylor's terminology because it reflects the distinction between inter-subjectivity and objectivity convincingly made by hermeneutic thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 89–92.

  29. Mallon “Race,” 534–36.

  30. Mills, Blackness Visible, 50–54.

  31. Taylor, “Appiah's Uncompleted Argument,”6; Taylor, Race, 86.

  32. Taylor, Race, 90–91.

  33. The idea that white racial identity has a real, pecuniary value has a long lineage. Recall Homer Plessy, who in his famous attempt to remain seated in a whites-only rail car contended not only that he was white, but that his white racial identity represented a form of property of which the Louisiana segregation statute deprived him. The Supreme Court agreed that white race was property, but rejected Plessy's claim because, according to Louisiana law, Plessy was not white, even though he had three white grandparents. The Court presumably would have held that Plessy had been deprived of property if Plessy had been white and forced to sit in a colored rail car. See Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 163 U.S. 537, 549. Cheryl Harris provides a fascinating account of the property value of perceived white racial identity through an analysis of racial passing. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Critical Race Theory, ed., Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas. (New York: The New Press, 1995).

  34. Mallon, “Human Categories beyond Essentialism,” 155–56.

  35. Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).

  36. Taylor, Race, 81. There are some problems with Taylor's data. I could not verify his data on the incomes of Asian Americans, and the 2004 Census places Asian American median household income ($56, 231) above that of non-Hispanic Whites ($48,784). Asian Community Survey 2004, 17 (http://www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/acs-05.pdf).

  37. Asian Community Survey 2004, 17–18.

  38. Taylor, Race, 145.

  39. Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, 98.

  40. Lawrence Blum, I’m not a Racist, But … The Moral Quandary of Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, 148–54. Latinos/as are similarly incompletely racialized due to two countervailing forces. On the one hand, Latino/a legal categorization can include racial identities—white, black, Asian, or native American—with strong phenotypical differences, thereby lessening the racial character of this group. On the other hand, most individuals of Latin American descent in the United States share similar skin tones, a history of colonization and conquest, and past and present discrimination based on visible characteristics and imputed cultural traits.

  41. Blum, 163, uses scalar race to further the eliminativist position that “[r]aces … simply do not exist,” even if scalar racialized groups do. Like Appiah, he argues that the term race can only apply to discrete, inheritable groups, not the continuous and fuzzy categories of scalar racialized identities. But, as I argued earlier, a biological ontology based on the species concept can admit of races that are not discrete and thus mitigate the contrast between scalar racialized groups and races. For this reason, Blum's idea of scalar race poses a bigger problem for defenders of a social ontology of race that requires discrete, social categories of white, black, Asian, and other races.

  42. Blum, I’m not a Racist, But, 161.

  43. Ron Mallon, “Passing, Traveling and Reality: Social Constructionism and the Metaphysics of Race,” Nous 38 (December 2004): 655.

  44. Mills, Blackness Visible, 55–59.

  45. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 41–44. Mark Warren draws a similar contrast. He states that markets are not political because they “cannot intend, think, interact, or argue … Deciding in the political sense requires references to intentionality,” which “[b]ehavioral conceptions of politics define away.” Mark Warren, “What is Political?” Journal of Theoretical Politics 11 (1999): 211.

  46. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9.

  47. Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 194–95.

  48. For a compelling account of how black Americans overcame the collective action problem in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, see Dennis Chong, Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).

  49. Warren, “What is Political?”

  50. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7, 27–28, 57. Importantly, this portrait of power is both expansive and restrictive. It is expansive because it can include not only the coercive power of the state but also economic power of property relations and the cultural power to define meanings and identities. But it is restrictive by focusing on the Weberian sense of “power over,” rather than the broader Foucauldian sense of structuring power. This restriction is justifiable since even Foucault admits that different forms of power reflect different types of human relationships, and the Weberian notion best reflects our intuitions of how power functions within specifically political relationships. See Warren, “What is Political?” 215–19, 221.

  51. My approach does not contradict Mills's compelling ideas of the United States as a “Racial Polity” and of “Global White Supremacy as a Political System.” Mills, Blackness Visible, 74–77; 98–106; 130–36. Reading Mills through the framework of politics provided above, only whites could have been free to engage in racial politics. Blacks and other non-whites were the objects upon which whites exercised their agency. Mills rightly understands race “as a politically constructed categorization” (76), and that “the decision as to where to draw the line [between different races] is politically motivated” (48). But in his opinion, such politics were solely practiced by whites: “Westerners created race in the first place, by demarcating themselves from other ‘races’”(xv). Similarly, my approach to politics coheres with his portrait of “Herrenvolk ethics,” wherein whites extend towards other whites egalitarian respect and recognition as persons, while simultaneously extending towards non-whites hierarchical disrespect and negative recognition as sub-persons, resulting in “polities that are democratic for the master race, the Herrenvolk, but not for the subordinate race(s)” (70–72; 159). Understood through my framework, concepts like Herrenvolk ethics, the Racial Polity, and Global White Supremacy reflect whites freely engaging in political action over non-whites while suppressing racial political action by non-whites.

  52. Tommie Shelby, “Foundations of Black Solidarity: Collective Identity or Common Oppression,” Ethics 112 (January 2002): 239–40.

  53. Shelby,”Foundations of Black Solidarity,” 242–43.

  54. Tommie Shelby, We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 151.

  55. Ibid., 150–51; Cf. Shelby, “Foundations of Black Solidarity,” 244–55.

  56. Shelby, We Who are Dark, 154.

  57. Ibid., 247.

  58. Ibid., 56.

  59. Ibid., 151.

  60. Ibid., 251.

  61. Ibid., 140.

  62. Ibid., 132.

  63. Ibid., 240.

  64. Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

  65. Mills, Blackness Visible, 64.

  66. Gary Orfield and Susan Eaton, Dismantling Desegregation (New York: The New Press, 1996), 55–57, 343–45.

  67. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (New York: Harper, 1991).

  68. Mills, Blackness Visible, 11.

  69. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 157–58, 175.

  70. Shelby, We Who are Dark, 133.

  71. Ibid., 179.

  72. Shelby's recognition and affirmation of this exclusionary moment within black solidarity differentiates his idea of political blackness from the idea of “political race” articulated by Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, who argue that “political race consciousness is not restricted to those people who are phenotypically black,” in their The Miner's Canary (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 99; Cf. 106–07. While Shelby is not opposed to Guinier and Torres's attempts to demonstrate how blacks and other minorities can lead transformative social movements that not only include whites but also address the injustices they suffer, his approach better addresses the specific vulnerabilities faced by those individuals classified as black through social ontology. Moreover, it unclear that Guinier and Torres are consistent in their suggestion that “political race” can fully divorce itself from the phenotypical race associated with social ontology. They assume that multi-racial coalitions will be instigated and “led” by blacks or other non-whites, who due to racial asymmetries in political and social power will, like the miner's canary, be the first to detect poisonous social conditions that will eventually affect vulnerable whites. See The Miner's Canary, 12, 20, 86.

  73. Shelby, We Who are Dark, 155.

  74. Ibid., 79–80, 85.

  75. On these three justifications for affirmative action, see Carl Cohen and James Sterba, Affirmative Action and Racial Preference: A Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  76. See Justice O’Connor's court opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).

  77. Jeff Zeleny, “Alabama Voters Reject Coalition Bid,” New York Times, June 2, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/us/politics/03elect.html?hp (accessed June 2, 2010).

  78. Melissa Williams, Voice, Trust, and Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 15–18, 50–56.

  79. Ibid., 139, 167–72.

  80. Ibid., 6–7.

  81. Shelby, We Who are Dark, 151.

  82. 509 U.S. 630 (1993).

  83. 532 U.S. 234 (2001).

  84. Chris Hedges, “The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West went Ballistic,” Truthdig, May 16, 2011, http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/the_obama_deception_why_cornel_west_went_ballistic_20110516/ (accessed June 23, 2011).

  85. Gallup Daily Tracking Poll of Presidential Approval http://www.gallup.com/poll/124922/Presidential-Job-Approval-Center.aspx (accessed June 23, 2011).

  86. Pew Research Center, “A Year after Obama's Election: Blacks Upbeat about Black Progress, Prospects,” January 12, 2010, 59. Pdf file of the full report available online at http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1459/year-after-obama-election-black-public-opinion (accessed June 23 2011).

  87. Pew Research Center, “A Year after Obama's Election,” 53.

  88. Pew Research Center, “A Year after Obama's Election,” 54. Interestingly, the respondants most frustrated with the amount of attention that Obama was paying to their concerns were Hispanics, with equal proportions (42 percent) saying that he was paying “the right amount” and “too little” attention.

  89. Melissa Harris-Perry, “Cornel West v. Barack Obama,” The Nation, May 17, 2011, http://www.thenation.com/blog/160725/cornel-west-v-barack-obama (accessed June 23, 2011).

  90. David Canon, Race, Redistricting, and Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 48.

  91. Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates, “Is Obama Black Enough?” Time, February 1, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1584736,00.html (accessed, June 24, 2011).

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    Michael Rabinder James

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The author thanks Amy McCready, Tom Merrill, Joshua Preiss, and Andrew Valls for providing valuable criticisms of earlier drafts of this essay. All errors and omissions remain the responsibility of the author.

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James, M. The Political Ontology of Race. Polity 44, 106–134 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2011.15

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