Why race still matters

Daedalus

Volumn 134, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 102-116

  Hacking, Ian ^a  

^a l'alimentation et l'Environnement   (France)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 21644459317     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/0011526053124460     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. His own words are old-fashioned but lovely. The differences between members of classes "are made by nature ... while the recognition of those differences as grounds for classification and of naming is... the act of man." However, "we find a very remarkable diversity ... between some classes and others." Only superficial resemblances link members of one type of class, while members of classes of the other type have a vast number (he said an endless number) of properties they share. Those that share an almost endless number of properties are his real Kinds. From John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, first published in 1843.
2. The discussion of racial classification is found in bk. 1, chap. 7, sec. 4. The changes Mill made in later editions of the book involved sex, not race - doubtless because Mill hoped to get the questions about sex exactly right for Harriett Taylor. See chap. 7, on Millon classification, in my forthcoming book, The Tradition of Natural Kinds (Cambridge University Press).
3. This is one of the conclusions urged in my book The Tradition of Natural Kinds.
4. "Census, Race and Science," Nature Genetics 24 (2000) : 97;
5. "Genes, Drugs and Race," Nature Genetics 29 (2001) : 239.
6. There is a tendency among proper-thinking people to dismiss The Bell Curve cavalierly, as both wrong-headed and refuted, without actually saying why. Many things wrong, and one has an obligation to say what. My own 'genealogical' objections are stated in a piece in The London Review of Books, January 26, 1995.
7. Frederick Kahn, "How a Drug Becomes 'Ethnic' : Law, Commerce, and the Production of Racial Categories in Medicine," Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics 4 (2004) : 46.
8. Anne L. Taylor, "Combination of Isosorbide Dinitrate and Hydralazine in Blacks with Heart Failure," New England Journal of Medicine 351 (2004) : 2049-2057.
9. This also matters to renal transplants. See Pauline C. Creemers and Delawir Kahn, "A Unique African HLA Haplotype May Identify a Population at Increased Risk for Kidney Graft Rejection," Transplantation 65 (1998) : 285-288.
10. For HLA differentiation, see T. D. Lee, A. Lee, and W. X. Shi, "HLA-A, -B, -D and -DQ Antigens in Black North Americans," Tissue Antigens (1991) : 79-83.
11. For maps, see, for example, one of the essays in the November Nature Genetics issue referenced in the text : Sarah A. Tishkoff and Kenneth K. Kidd, "Implications of Biogeography of Human Populations for 'Race' and Medicine," Nature Genetics Supplement 36 (2004): 521-527.
12. Cornel West, "A Genealogy of Modern Racism," in West, Prophesy Deliverance! : An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia : The Westminster Press, 1982), 47-65.
13. Franc¸ois Bernier, "Nouvelle division de la terre,"Journal des Sc¸avans (April 24, 1684): 148 - 155.
14. A definitive account of this paper is Siep Stuurman, "Franc& cedil;ois Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification," History Workshop Journal 50 (2000) : 1-21.
15. Stuurman, "Franc¸ois Bernier and the Invention of Racial Classification," 4.
16. Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code noir, ou, le calvaire de Canaan (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1987).
17. Lawrence Hirschfeld, "The Conceptual Politics of Race : Lessons from our Children," Ethos 25 (1997): 63-92.
18. See also his book Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Conception of Human Kinds (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1996).
19. The expression 'human kind' is obviously derived from 'natural kind.' I regret that it was I who put the phrase into circulation with this use, in Paris in 1992, at a conference on culture and cognition attended by Hirschfeld: Ian Hacking, "The Looping Effects of Human Kinds," in Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack, eds., Causal Cognition : A Multidisciplinary Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 351-383. I have abandoned this terminology, partly, and only partly, because it was modeled on the unsatisfactory idea of a natural kind.
20. Ali Sami, Persepolis (Takht-Jamshid), 9th ed., trans. R. Sharp (Shiraz : Musavi Printing Office, 1977), 35.