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What is race? This question might seem passé to some. In fact, most books today, written at the popular level, take it for granted that race is socially constructed. If they even take the time to define it, then they may have a line, or at most a page, devoted to this thesis. Now, this is understandable because virtually every academic, in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and economics has essentially said the same. Many of them will say that not only is race a social construction, but also that it has no biological foundation. This has the unsurprising effect of making many feel that they must ignore what seems so plainly obvious, namely that people not only look different from one another, but also that groups of people look different than other groups of people.
It is for this reason that I have sought to construct a theory of race that recognizes the sociality of the concept, and yet does not ask people to ignore the physicality of what their eyes tell them every day in every encounter with every person.
Philosophers of Race
In surveying prominent philosophers of race, one finds three different categories in which to situate different conceptions of race: racial skepticism, racial constructionism, and racial population naturalism.[1] Anthony Appiah, best categorized as a racial skeptic, would argue that races do not exist at all. He says, “The truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask ‘race’ to do for us.”[2] Racial Constructionist like Charles Mills, on the other hand, argue that race is real insofar as it is constructed through meaning arising from social interactions. He is careful to distinguish what he is claiming from competing theories of race when he says,
Race is not foundational: in different systems, race could have been constructed differently or indeed never have come into existence in the first place. Race is not essentialist: the same individuals would be differently raced in different systems. Race is not "metaphysical" in the deep sense of being eternal, unchanging, necessary, part of the basic furniture of the universe. But race is a contingently deep reality that structures our particular social universe, having a social objectivity and causal significance that arise out of our particular history.[3]
Of course, not all constructionists would agree with this framing, and indeed there are variations of racial constructionism which fall along a spectrum.[4] Finally, Philip Kitcher articulates the racial population naturalist view when he posits that,
the core of any biological notion of race should be that phenotypic differences have been fashioned and sustained through the transmission of genes through lineages initiated by founding populations that were geographically separated, and that the distinct phenotypes are currently maintained when people from different races are brought together through the existence of incipient isolating mechanisms that have developed during the period of geographical separation.[5]
This is not an argument for a kind of race essentialism because it does not ascribe any sort of content to whatever races may exist, whether ethically or intellectually.
Sociobiological Constructivism
Informed by the distinctions made above, I will argue for what I am calling a Sociobiological Constructivist Approach to understanding race. Race is a real, yet non-essential feature of a person’s existence in the world.[6] It is real in at least two senses. First, there is a limited sense in which it is biological. The workaround race and genetics is fraught with difficulty and debate about what may be genetic in nature versus what may be environmental when it comes to the physical appearance of a given ‘race.’[7] Historically, various fields believed in “racial essences” that were unique to each race, inheritable, and behavioral. In claiming that race is biological, this present work does so not on the basis of genotypic populations that are identifiable and distinguishable, nor accepts the notion of biobehavioral traits that are intrinsic to each race.
In what limited sense, then, is race biological? This sense attempts to acknowledge that there are certain phenotypic expressions that, when encountered, are reasonably recognized as both being different and categorical. Ron Mallon calls these “thin racial endowments.”[8] To borrow from Glenn Loury, this might be better referred to as “embodied social signification.” [9] This is to say that when encountering someone of a different race, at least one of two things will happen because of the person’s encounter with the physical-biological-phenotypic expressions they observe. A person will instantly recognize difference when they see it in another, and/or attempt to categorize that difference into a limited number of racial categories.[10]
This definition neither claims that these races are perpetually persistent throughout history, nor into the future.[11]But they need not be immutable to be meaningful. The more relevant factor is whether or not they are recognizable today. Loury argues along similar lines when he says,
For me, the term ‘race’ refers to indelible and heritable marks on human bodies—skin color, hair texture, bone structure—that are of no intrinsic significance but that nevertheless have, through time, come to be invested with social expectations that are more or less reasonable and social meanings that are more or less durable. When we talk about race in America or anywhere else, we are actually dealing with two distinct processes: categorization and signification. Categorization entails sorting people into a small number of subsets based on bodily marks and differentiating one’s dealings with such persons accordingly. It is a cognitive act—an effort to comprehend the social world around us. Signification is an interpretative act—one that associates certain connotations or ‘social meanings’ with those categories. Informational and symbolic issues are both at play. Or, as I like to put it, when we speak about race, we are really talking about ‘embodied social signification.’ It is instructive to contrast a social-cognitive conception of race with acts of biological taxonomy— sorting humans based on presumed variations of genetic endowments across what had for eons been geographically isolated subpopulations. Such isolation was, until recently, the human condition, and it may be thought to have led to the emergence of distinct races. Nevertheless, using the term ‘race’ in this way is controversial, particularly if the aim is to explain social inequalities between groups. [12]
This, then helps to explain the second sense in which race is real. If the first is biological, the second is social. Simply put, the biological manifestations take on social meanings that in turn perpetuate the biological manifestations. That is to say that the current phenotypic expressions–skin color, hair texture, bone structure–of modern racial groups need not continue to present the way they do in racial groups, but because each group is also social, they stand as signifiers for that group telling each member that they have a greater likelihood of befriending and/or reproducing with a person with similar features because they may have similar social experiences as to themselves. A person then acts on that, and to the degree that these bio-social ques were correct, they lead to a perpetuation of the phenotypes through this social process.
As may now be obvious, race is a non-essential feature of one’s existence in this world.[13] This argument is necessary on multiple fronts. First, unlike one’s biological sex, one’s race is not a necessary biological feature to one’s identity formation. Genetically speaking, there are two different and distinct sexes that make up the human species. To be one sex, versus the other, has intrinsic ramifications for one’s existence in the world which are not due solely to the process of socialization. A person can be perceived to be Black, and if born in three different societies, have completely different experiences as a result. Whereas that same person, if born a biological male, may have different experiences due to his maleness, but in each social history, there will be features of his identity formation that will be consistent due to his maleness.[14]
Second, while one’s racial identity may carry some social expectations, it does not function deterministically because there is no bio-behavioral essence. This is to say that before any one person belongs to a racial or even ethnic category, they are first individual agents capable of unique particularities that contradict every social expectation that would be derivative of their racial or ethnic categories. While all people do belong to socialized groups, and those groups play an indisputable role in their identity formation, the most basic level of analysis that best explains each person is that of the individual.
Conclusion
Sociobiological Constructivism attempts to acknowledge the mutability of racial categories while, at the same time, recognizing that those categories are attached to signifiers, represented in phenotypic features which get perpetuated through social rituals in various groups. Our categories today may not be the same 100 years from now, and yet they do have recognizable and distinct features about them that are observable in groups of people around us. This may not be the definitive word on a philosophy of race, but hopefully it pushes the conversation forward and in such a way that our theorizing about race matches our experience of it.
[1] Ron Mallon, “‘Race’: Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” Ethics 116.3 (2006): 525–26.
[2] K. Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Crit. Inq. 12.1 (1985): 35.
[3] Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 48.
[4] Mallon, “‘Race’: Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” 534, cites what he calls a “thin constructionism, interactive kind constructionism, and institutional constructionism.”
[5] “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture,” in In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology, by Philip Kitcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 239.
[6] This is contra to many scholars in the biblical and theological disciplines.
[7] As an example of the complexity, see E. J. Parra, R. A. Kittles, and M. D. Shriver, “Implications of Correlations Between Skin Color and Genetic Ancestry for Biomedical Research,” Nat. Genet. 36.11 (2004): S54–60.
[8] Ron Mallon, “Passing, Traveling and Reality: Social Constructionism and the Metaphysics of Race,” Noûs 38.4 (2004): 647.
[9] Glenn C. Loury, Why Does Racial Inequality Persist?: Culture, Causation, and Responsibility (New York: The Manhattan Institute, 2019), 2–3, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/racial-inequality-in-america-post-jim-crow-segregation.
[10] These categories will inevitably be broader than the typical categories of ethnicity, since people of different ethnicities can carry the same phenotypic features.
[11] Mallon, “‘Race’: Normative, Not Metaphysical or Semantic,” 538–45. This is one of the difficulties present among those who subscribe to racial population naturalism, because when one looks further back in history, it is inevitable that races one might observe today would not be recognizable at another point in history.
[12] Loury, Why Does Racial Inequality Persist, 2–3.
[13] This is not to argue that race is an irrelevant feature of one’s existence, only that the relevance of one’s race differs due to a variety of different factors.
[14] One thinks of common physical features and experiences that are unique to being male, such as bone density, testosterone, brain development, aggression proclivities, male puberty etc.…
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