On the new biology of race

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 100, Issue 9, 2003, Pages 456-474

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EID: 33645821508     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2003100930     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. See, for example, Michael Root, "How We Divide the World," Philosophy of Science, LXVII, Supplementary Volume (2000): S628-39;
2. Ronald R. Sundstrom, "Race as a Human Kind," Philosophy and Social Criticism, XXXVIII (2002): 91-115;
3. Sundstrom, "'Racial Nominalism'," Journal of Social Philosophy, XXXIII (2002): 193-210;
4. and Paul C. Taylor, "Appiah's Uncompleted Argument: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Reality of Race," Social Theory and Practice, XXVI (2000): 103-28.
5. Andreasen, "A New Perspective on the Race Debate," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, XLIX (1998): 199-225;
6. Andreasen, "Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?" Philosophy of Science, LXVII Supplementary Volume (2000): S653-66;
7. Kitcher, "Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture," in Leonard Harris, ed., Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity, 1999), pp. 87-120.
8. Andreasen, "A New Perspective," p. 207.
9. and "Race," p. S660;
10. Cavalli-Sforza, "Genes, Peoples, and Languages," Scientific American, CCLXV, 5 (1991): 104-10.
11. As is often pointed out, such folk categorizations often inconsistently offer groupings that overlap race, ethnicity, and national origin. The history of intellectuals theorizing about race - as opposed to folk categorization - offers an extremely varied set of lists of the races, which differ not only on how many races there are, but also on which races there are (none of which seems to match Andreasen's list). To mention just a few examples, Bernier lists four or five (he is noncommittal about whether Native Americans constitute a distinct race); Voltaire offers seven; Kant offers four or five, depending on the essay; and Du Bois eight. As Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott note, by the end of the nineteenth century, the number of races "grew from four or five to fifty or even eighty," except in the U.S., which sought to condense everyone of European descent into one race, to the exclusion of blacks, Asians, and Native Americans in particular - "Introduction," in Bernasconi and Lott, ed., The Idea of Race (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), p. x. As the question posed here is whether there is any biological referent to what we, especially in the U.S., currently identify as races, I will be concerned with whether Andreasen and Kitcher can - or even need to - account for a biological basis of the current folk concept of race.
12. cf. Andreasen, "Race," p. S664.
13. For two detailed analyses of what 'race' means and has meant, see K. Anthony Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections," in Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton: University Press, 1996);
14. and David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), chapter 4. Here, I only make some intuitive observations about what people mean or have meant by 'race.' I take it, though these observations are made from the armchair, so to speak, it is more or less obvious that these have been, at one time or another, conventional notions of 'race'.
15. See Luther Wright, Jr., "Who's Black, Who's White, and Who Cares: Reconceptualizing the United States's Definition of Race and Racial Classifications," Vanderbilt Law Review, XLVIII (1995): 513-69
16. for summary and analysis of legal definitions of race in the U.S. Two relevant results can be found there: when not conflated with ethnicity and national origin, the legal definition of 'race' usually boils down to either overt physical traits or descent. (And, since on the second criterion one is of race R when both of one's parents are of R, presumably parental racial classification at some point must be defined by some non-genealogical criterion, most likely physical traits.) Finally, see Charles Hirschman, Richard Alba, and Reynolds Farley, "The Meaning and Measurement of Race in the U.S. Census: Glimpses into the Future," Demography, XXXVII (2000): 381-93, for how U.S. citizens self-identify in census reporting.
17. "The Conservation of Races," reprinted in Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams, eds. (Boston: Bedford, 1997).
18. See, for instance, Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple, 1993)
19. and M. Annette Jaimes, "Some Kind of Indian," in Zack, ed., American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995) pp. 133-53.
20. While Andreasen is working independently of common-sense notions of race, she is also engaging in dialogue with those in "the race debate," as indicated by the title of her paper, "A New Perspective on the Race Debate." As such, it seems all parties ought to be in the same neighborhood, more or less.
21. Appiah, "Race, Culture, Identity," p. 41.
22. Cavalli-Sforza, P. Menozzi, and A. Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton: University Press, 1994).
23. For Andreasen's take on this disagreement, see "A New Perspective," p. 213.
24. Nor, for that matter, is it like Putnam's case of lemons that have changed from yellow to blue, since the proposed theory of race is not that the original objects picked out as races have themselves undergone a constitutional change, like lemons that have changed from yellow to blue - see Putnam, "Is Semantics Possible?" reprinted in his Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (New York: Cambridge, 1975), pp. 139-52.
25. Zack, "Life after Race," in Zack, ed., American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), pp. 297-307, here p. 303.
26. Rosenberg, Jonathan K. Pritchard, James L. Weber, Howard M. Cann, Kenneth K. Kidd, Lev A. Zhivotovsky, and Marcus W. Feldman, "Genetic Structure of Human Populations," Science, CCXCVIII (December 20, 2002): 2381-85.
27. "Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations," The New York Times (December 20, 2002), Late Edition, Section A, page 37. It should be noted that geographic populations are not identical to breeding populations. In defense of the breeding population model, however, one might argue that reproductive isolation results from geographic barriers. A claim of this sort is made in the Times' report on Rosenberg et al., "Genetic Structure."
28. One potential practical problem with the revisionist program is that such a revised concept may retain some hidden references to the previous, inadequate concept. Appiah expresses concern about this in "Social Forces, 'Natural' Kinds," in Abebe Zegeye, Leonard Harris, and Julia Maxted, eds., Exploitation and Exclusion: Race and Class in Contemporary US Society (London: Hans Zell, 1991), pp. 1-13, in favor of abandoning race-talk: "if you want to talk about morphology, talk about morphology; if you want to talk about populations, talk about populations" (p. 12, n. 9).
29. See Linda Martin Alcoff, "Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary," The Journal of Ethics, VII (2003): 5-27.