Summary |
Conceptions of Race: General Problems If our recent history has taught us anything, race seems to
be extremely important in determining issues such as the likelihood of being
incarcerated, getting a quality education, access to healthcare, and adequate
housing, just to name a few. So what
race we are taken to be seems to be an incredibly important determinant in our
life prospects. And if race helps
determine our life prospects wouldn’t it have to exist?
Second, we seem to be quite good at categorizing people into
different races. Now there are some
individuals that are hard for most people to racially categorize. For instance, the Public Broadcasting System has
a webpage that provides a very difficult Racial Sorting Task http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htm which
is worth taking for anyone who thinks that it is always clear what race someone
belongs to. That being said, for the
majority of people, we seem to agree with others in our community as to what
race someone is. And if that’s the case,
wouldn’t races have to exist?
It is particularly hard to even figure out how to start answering this question. To show why we can look at three closely related challenges
to developing an account of race. Let’s
call the first challenge “the Domain Problem”, the second “the Expertise and
Deference Problem” and the third “the Mismatch Problem” or as it is more
commonly known, “the Mismatch Argument”.
The Domain Problem is best captured by the
question, “If there are races, what kind of thing are they?” For instance, we might think that races are
natural categories and that for someone to be a member of a race is for them to
have a set of natural properties some of which are shared with other members of
the same race. Natural properties are
properties that exist in the world independently of the way we categorize
it. So for instance, having the property
of being a hat is not a natural property, whereas having the property of being
made of wool is. Let’s say that if this
is the right way to think of races, then the right domain from which to study
races would be the natural domain. This was a common approach to race in the 19th
and 20th centuries and natural historians such as Johann Blumenbach,
Thomas Huxley, and Friedrich Ratzel saw investigations of race as falling
within this natural domain. Today, some
philosophers view race as being explainable in terms of a subset of natural
properties we refer to as biological properties.
But around the end of the 20th century
we started to see the development of arguments which suggested that race is not
a natural phenomenon, but a socio-historical one. What follows from this is that the important
racial properties associated with race are not natural but
socio-historical. For instance, in
W.E.B. Du Bois’ groundbreaking 1897 speech “The Conservation of Races” he tells
us that while races, “transcend scientific definition” they “nevertheless are
clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and the Sociologist”.
That might be a bit hard to understand so let me
give you an example. In the U.S., we
have quite a few doctors. When they are
working, they are normally easily identifiable.
They often wear white coats with stethoscopes around their necks, they work
in hospitals and universities, and often talk in ways that suggest a high level
of medical expertise. And in order to be
a practicing doctor in the US, you have to graduate from an accredited
medical school, complete a residency program, and obtain a license to practice
in a particular state or jurisdiction. But
the fact that doctors have the properties of having medical degrees and licenses
depend on the existence of institutions which can be explained historically and
socially. And while doctors, and
virtually all other people share in natural properties like having a brain, the
properties that make a person a doctor are social properties. Because of this, doctors can be thought of as
socio-historical constructs.
Now there is a big difference between being
considered to be of a particular race and being considered to be a doctor; but,
the idea is that racial properties are largely determined by our history and
social institutions. Since W.E.B. Du
Bois’ speech, the idea that race falls within the domain of sociology and
history has been increasing in popularity and I think I can safely say is the
dominant view among academics (or at the very least sociologists and
historians).
Another possibility is that racial properties are
not just natural properties, or socio-historical properties, but a combination
of these two. If this is the case, then
to get a grasp on what races are may involve research in both the natural and
the socio-historical domain.
So what we can gather from this discussion is that figuring
out what races are seems really difficult because there is still substantial
debate about what is the proper domain of investigation.
A related problem is “the Expertise and Deference Problem”. The idea is roughly this:
language seems to work in such a way that there are lots of specialty
terms that we can meaningfully use without being in possession of much
information. For instance, I might say
that my friend Julio has tuberculosis without being able to tell you what tuberculosis
is. I know that it is not good to have
tuberculosis, and that it is a medical condition; but, this doesn’t distinguish
tuberculosis from lots of other conditions that are medical and also bad. So if I can’t distinguish tuberculosis from
other bad medical conditions, in virtue of what do I get to say I am speaking
meaningfully about tuberculosis, and not, let’s say, cancer? To answer this question, the theory of
semantic deference claims that I can speak meaningfully about tuberculosis because
there are experts in my community (namely research doctors) that do know what tuberculosis
is and how to tell it apart from other bad medical conditions. To put the point more generally, I can meaningfully
talk about things in the world even though I don’t know much about the things
I’m talking about because I can defer to experts for fixing the meaning of the
terms. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam
once said, we should think of language less like a singular tool and more like
the running of a complex steamship in which many of us have different and cooperative
roles to play.
So now that we have an understanding of the role of semantic
deference and expertise in the role of fixing the meaning of medical terms, we
can ask, “Do racial terms work in the same way as medical terms like
‘tuberculosis’?” It does seem hard for
many of us to say much meaningfully about race, so maybe we can just defer to
race experts in the way I deferred to research doctors in the tuberculosis example. This seems like a good solution, so what’s
the problem? Well, there are several
problems. For starters, experts normally
occupy a domain, and as we’ve already seen, it’s not clear in which domain we
should locate our experts. For instance,
would we consult a biologist, a historian, a sociologist, or a philosopher? Additionally, there is little agreement even
within these domains as to how to characterize races. For instance, take the naturalist’s domain: are races the kind of things in which all
members share some sort of underlying essential properties? Should races be primarily defined in terms of
ancestral relations or geographic locations?
Or perhaps races can be picked out by referring to groups that have a
higher frequency of non-coding DNA in common.
Even though we are working within a singular domain, there is still
massive disagreement on what races are within that domain. In short, it’s not clear there is a unified group
of experts to defer to even if we can solve the Domain Problem. So we don’t seem to have a solution to the
Expertise and Deference Problem.
Finally, there is the Mismatch Problem, or as it has been
coined by philosopher Ron Mallon, the Mismatch Argument. Here’s the problem: race is an area that we need to investigate
and that normally involves some people specializing in race issues. And during such investigations, specialists
sometimes come up with highly specialized definitions of what race is and what racial
terms pick out in the world. For
instance, if the specialists (or experts) tell us that races are biologically
isolated populations of individuals then it might turn out that some of the
things we thought were races actually aren’t races while other things we
thought weren’t races actually are. For
instance, as the philosopher Anthony Appiah suggests, the Amish might meet this
definition of race even though we don’t tend to think of Amish as a race. The worry here is that what experts tell us
racial terms pick out ends up deviating substantially from what we normally
think racial terms pick out. And if this
happens, then our expert accounts of what race is may not match up with our
ordinary account of race and all the important explanatory work such ordinary
accounts of race play in our everyday lives.
The Domain Problem, the Expertise and Deference Problem, and
the Mismatch Problem are three problems that any account of race will need to
deal with. -David Miguel Gray |