Race as a human kind

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 91-115

  Sundstrom, Ronald R ^a  

^a University of Memphis   (United States)

Author keywords

human kinds; metaphysical pluralism; philosophy of race; promiscuous realism; race; race theory; racial realism

Indexed keywords

EID: 84998035263     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453702028001592     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. See Michael Root's ‘How We Divide the World’, Philosophy of Science 67 (2000), as well as his forthcoming book with the same title.
2. See Root's ‘How We Divide the Word’
3. David Ruben's ‘Realism in the Social Sciences’ in Dismantling Truth, ed. Hilary Lawson and Lisa Appignanesi (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), pp. 58–75.
4. See, for example, Philip Kitcher's ‘Species’, Philosophy of Science 51 (1984): 309–33.
5. Ian Hacking's dynamic nominalism is an example of this sort of theory. Hacking holds that although human kinds are nominal, there are differences between sorts of nominal kinds. He argues that human kinds are ‘dynamic’, in that they involve social forces, which contrasts them with traditional nominal categories such as ‘white things’. See Hacking's ‘A Tradition of Natural Kinds’, Philosophical Studies 61 (1991): 122–3
6. The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
7. See my discussion of nominalism and its application to race in ‘Racial Nominalism’, Journal of Social Philosophy (forthcoming).
8. See Root's How We Divide the World (Introduction).
9. See, for example, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
10. an Hacking, as well as Root, draws upon G. E. M. Anscombe's notion of ‘intention’ as spelled out in her book by the same name. Institutional facts are created by social agents intentionally acting under norms. These institutional facts are social facts and contrast with what Anscombe called ‘brute’ facts, the facts of the physical and biological sciences. See Anscombe's Intention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957)
11. ‘On Brute Facts’, Analysis 18 (1958): 69–71.
12. See Paul Starr's ‘Social Categories and Claims in the Liberal State’, in How Classification Works: Nelson Goodman among the Social Sciences, ed. M. Douglas and D. Hull (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 154–79 (154).
13. Root, How We Divide the World.
14. See Hacking's ‘Making Up People’, in Reconstructing Individualism, ed. T. Heller, M. Sosna and D. Wellberry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 222–37.
15. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 17.
16. See Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 1.
17. According to the statistics from the US Department of Health and Human Services (US DH&H) [http://raceandhealth.hhs.gov/]: ‘Infant mortality rates [IMRs] vary substantially among and within racial and ethnic groups. Infant death rates among blacks, American Indians and Alaska Natives, and Hispanics in 1995 or 1996 were all above the national average of 7.2 deaths per 1,000 live births. The greatest disparity exists for blacks, whose infant death rate (14.2 per 1,000 in 1996) is nearly 2.5 times that of white infants (6.0 per 1,000 in 1996). The overall American Indian rate (9.0 per 1,000 live births in 1995) does not reflect the diversity among Indian communities, some of which have infant mortality rates approaching twice the national rate. Similarly, the overall Hispanic rate (7.6 per 1,000 live births in 1995) does not reflect the diversity among this group which had a rate of 8.9 per 1,000 live births among Puerto Ricans in 1995.’ See also the section on ‘Health’ in the Council of Economic Advisors for the President's Initiative on Race (CEAPIR), Changing America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being by Race and Hispanic Origin (September 1998).
18. According to the US DH&H [http://raceandhealth.hhs.gov/]: ‘Many minority groups suffer disproportionately from cancer. Disparities exist in both mortality and incidence rates. For men and women combined, blacks have a cancer death rate about 35 percent higher than that for whites (171.6 vs. 127.0 per 100,000). The death rate for cancer for black men is about 50 percent higher than it is for white men (226.8 vs. 151.8 per 100,000). The death rate for lung cancer is about 27 percent higher for blacks than for whites (49.9 vs. 39.3 per 100,000). The prostate cancer mortality rate for black men is more than twice that of white men (55.5 vs. 23.8 per 100,000). Paralleling the death rate, the incidence rate for lung cancer in black men is about 50 percent higher than in white men (110.7 vs. 72.6 per 100,000). Native Hawaiian men also have elevated rates of lung cancer compared with white men. Alaska Native men and women suffer disproportionately higher rates of cancers of the colon and rectum than do whites. Vietnamese women in the United States have a cervical cancer incidence rate more than five times greater than white women (47.3 vs. 8.7 per 100,000). Hispanic women also suffer elevated rates of cervical cancer.’ See also the section on ‘Health’ in CEAPIR, Changing America, and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) publications Chronic Disease in Minority Populations (1994)
19. Prevalence of Selected Risk Factors for Chronic Disease by Education Level in Racial and Ethnic Populations — United States, 1991—2 MMVR, 43(48) (1994): 879–94.
20. According to the US DH&H [http://raceandhealth.hhs.gov/]: ‘AIDS has disproportionately affected minority populations. Racial and ethnic minorities constitute approximately 25 percent of the total US population, yet they account for nearly 54 percent of all AIDS cases. While the epidemic is decreasing in some populations, the number of new AIDS cases among blacks is now greater than the number of new AIDS cases among whites. There are several different HIV epidemics occurring simultaneously in the United States, each of which must address the specific population affected and their associated risk factors. For example, although the number of AIDS diagnoses among gay and bisexual men has decreased dramatically among white men since 1989, the number of AIDS diagnoses among black men who have sex with men have increased. In addition, AIDS cases and new infections related to injecting drug use appear to be increasingly concentrated in minorities; of these cases, almost 75 percent were among minority populations (56 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic). Of cases reported among women and children, more than 75 percent are among racial and ethnic minorities.’ See the section on ‘Health’ in CEAPIR, Changing America, and the reports of the Office of Minority Health Resource Center (OMH-RC), US DH&H, Closing the Gap/Aids (July 1995), and Closing the Gap/The Minority AIDS Crisis (April 1999).
21. See also the CDC's HIV/AIDS among Racial/Ethnic Minority Men Who Have Sex with Men (19 January 2000).
22. According to the US DH&&H [http://raceandhealth.hhs.gov/]: ‘The prevalence of diabetes in blacks is approximately 70 percent higher than whites and the prevalence in Hispanics is nearly double that of whites. The prevalence rate of diabetes among American Indians and Alaska Natives is more than twice that for the total population and at least one tribe, the Pimas of Arizona, have the highest known prevalence of diabetes of any population in the world. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death among people with diabetes, accounting for over one-half of all deaths…. Individuals with diabetes, however, face not only a shortened life span, but also the probability of multiple acute and chronic complications, including endstage renal disease (ESRD), blindness, and lower extremity amputations…. Rates for diabetes-related complications such as ESRD and amputations are higher among blacks and American Indians compared to the total population. Even among similarly insured populations, such as Medicare recipients, blacks are more likely than whites to be hospitalized for septicemia, debridement, and amputations — signs of poor diabetic control. Scientists are concerned that a number of people in these minority groups develop type 2 (non-insulin-dependent) diabetes in adolescence, and therefore face a lifetime of diabetes and its potential complications. Undiagnosed and poorly controlled diabetes increases the likelihood of serious complications; for every two persons who are aware of their illness, there is one person who remains undiagnosed.’ See also the section on ‘Health’ in CEAPIR, Changing America, and the OMH-RC's Closing the Gap/Diabetes (January 1995).
23. According to the US DH&HS [http://raceandhealth.hhs.gov/]: ‘Major disparities exist among population groups, with a disproportionate burden of death and disability from cardiovascular disease in minority and low-income populations. The age-adjusted death rate for coronary heart disease for the total population declined by 20 percent from 1987 to 1995; for blacks, the overall decrease was only 13 percent. Compared with rates for whites, coronary heart disease mortality was 40 percent lower for Asian Americans but 40 percent higher for blacks in 1995. Stroke is the only leading cause of death for which mortality is higher for Asian-American males than for white males. Disparities also exist in the prevalence of risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Racial and ethnic minorities have higher rates of hypertension, tend to develop hypertension at an earlier age, and are less likely to undergo treatment to control their high blood pressure. For example, from 1988 to 1994, 35 percent of black males ages 20 to 74 had hypertension compared with 25 percent of all men. When age differences are taken into account, Mexican-American men and women also have elevated blood pressure rates. Among adult women, the age-adjusted prevalence of overweight continues to be higher for black women (53 percent) and Mexican-American women (52 percent) than for white women (34 percent). Furthermore, the rates for regular screening for cholesterol show disparities for certain racial and ethnic minorities — only 50 percent of American Indians/Alaska Natives, 44 percent of Asian Americans, and 38 percent of Mexican-Americans have had their cholesterol checked within the past 2 years.’ See also the section on ‘Health’ in CEAPIR, Changing America.
24. Oliver Fein's ‘The Influence of Social Class on Health Status: American and British Research on Health Inequalities’, Journal of General Internal Medicine 10 (October 1995): 577–86
25. David R. Williams, Yan Yu and James S. Jackson's ‘Discrimination, Race, and Health’ (unpublished paper, presentation for the 1997 joint meeting of the Public Health Conference on Records and Statistics and Data Users’ Conference, August 1997)
26. David Williams and Chiquita Collins's ‘US Socioeconomic and Racial Differences in Health’, Annual Review of Sociology 21 (1995): 349–86
27. David Williams and An-Me Chung's ‘Racism and Health’, in Health in Black America, ed. Rose Gibson and James S. Jackson (London: Sage, 1997)
28. David Williams et al.'s ‘Racial Differences in Physical and Mental Health: Socioeconomic Status, Stress, and Discrimination’, Journal of Health Psychology 2 (1997): 335–51
29. Nancy Krieger, D. L. Rowley, A. A. Herman, B. Avery and M. T. Phillips, ‘Racism, Sexism, and Social Class: Implications for Studies of Health, Disease, and Well-being’, American Journal of Preventive Medicine 9 (1993): 82–122.
30. See also the section on ‘Health’ in CEAPIR, Changing America.
31. See Williams et al.'s ‘Discrimination, Race, and Health’: 19.
32. See also the section on ‘Health’ in CEAPIR, Changing America.
33. See Joe Feagin's ‘The Continuing Significance of Race: AntiBlack Discrimination in Public Places’, American Sociological Review 56 (1991): 101–16
34. Ernest Harburg et al.'s ‘Socioecological Stressor Areas and Black-White Blood Pressure: Detroit’, Journal of Chronic Disease 26 (1973): 595–611
35. Nancy Krieger's ‘Racial and Gender Discrimination: Risk Factors for High Blood Pressure?’, Social Science and Medicine 30 (1990): 1273–81
36. Nancy Krieger and Stephen Sidney's ‘Racial Discrimination and Blood Pressure: The CARDIA Study of Young Black and White Adults’, American Journal of Public Health 86 (1996): 1370–8
37. Williams et al.'s ‘Racial Differences in Physical and Mental Health’
38. Williams et al.'s ‘Discrimination, Race, and Health’.
39. See also OMH-RC's Closing the Gap/Mental Health and Minorities (September 1997).
40. See Williams et al.'s ‘Discrimination, Race, and Health’
41. Williams and Collins's ‘US Socioeconomic and Racial Differences in Health’
42. Krieger et al.'s ‘Racism, Sexism, and Social Class’. A good example of the link between health status and care and socioeconomic status is the disparity of adult and child immunizations between minorities and whites; see US DH&H statistics on this matter [http://raceandhealth.hhs.gov/]. There are certain diseases, such as sickle-cell anemia in the African-American population, that have genetic origins and are not the result of living with racism. The existence of such diseases does not give a biological basis to race, because they are located in small populations, many of which correspond to ethnic groupings, and do not map on to all the individuals and subgroups of a race. In the case mentioned, while the disease is prevalent in West Africans and accordingly African-Americans, it is not prevalent throughout the black population of Africa, nor is it limited to blacks.
43. See Jared Diamond's ‘Race Without Color’, Discover (November 1994): 82–9
44. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza's The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
45. See US Department of Education, The Educational Progress of Black Students, NCES 95–765 (1995), p. 3
46. US Department of Education, The Educational Progress of Hispanic Students, NCES 95–767 (1995), p. 4.
47. See US Department of Education, Minorities in Higher Education, NCES 95–768 (1995), pp. 8–11.
48. See also the section on ‘Education’ in CEAPIR, Changing America.
49. US Department of Education, Black Students, pp. 5–8
50. Hispanic Students, pp. 6–8, pp. 8–9.
51. See US Department of Education, Minorities in Higher Education, pp. 11–29.
52. For the hypothesis of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press, 1996) to be correct, race would have to be biological; however, as I argued in Chapter 2, it is not.
53. See also Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981)
54. for a discussion of race and intelligence. To explain racial differences in educational attainment and academic performance, we must turn away from biology, from ‘intelligence’ and sociobiology, and turn to what makes race real: the social. For a discussion of how racism and the threat of stereotyping influence test performance see Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson's ‘Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65(5) (1995): 797–811.
55. According to the US Department of Education's The Educational Progress of Black Students, ‘Black children are at an educational disadvantage relative to white children for a number of reasons, including lower average levels of parental education, a greater likelihood of living with only one parent, fewer resources in their communities as a result of income-based residential segregation, and, especially, a greater likelihood of experiencing poverty. In 1992, 46 percent of black children, as opposed to 16 percent of white children, lived in a family with an income level below the poverty line’ (p. 1).
56. Further, according to the US Department of Education's The Educational Progress of Hispanic Students, ‘Hispanic children are likely to be at an educational disadvantage to whites for several reasons, including a greater likelihood of living in poverty and lower average levels of parental education. A larger percentage of Hispanic students also attend disadvantaged schools where the overall academic and supporting environments are less conducive to learning. In addition, a much higher proportion of Hispanics than non-Hispanics are foreign born, meaning that Hispanic children are less likely to hear or speak English at home and are more likely to have limited English proficiency’ (p. 1).
57. See US Department of Education, Black Students, p. 18
58. Hispanic Students, p. 20.
59. See US Department of Commerce, Poverty in the United States: 1998(1998).
60. See also the sections on ‘Labor Markets’ and ‘Economic Status’ in CEAPIR, Changing America.
61. ‘Concentrated poverty’ is the general name of this phenomenon. Census tracts, or neighborhoods, that have at least 20% of their population in poverty are called ‘distressed tracts’. ‘Extreme poverty’ tracts have a poverty rate of 40% or higher. See John Kasarda's ‘Inner-City Concentrated Poverty and Neighborhood Distress: 1970 to 1990’, Housing Policy Debate 4(3) (1993): 253–302.
62. See Douglas Massey, Andrew B. Gross, and Mitchell L. Eggers's ‘Segregation, the Concentration of Poverty, and the Life Chances of Individuals’, Social Science Research 20 (1991): 297–420 (416–17).
63. See John Kasarda's ‘Inner-City Concentrated Poverty and Neighborhood Distress’
64. Douglas Massey and Mitchell Eggers's ‘The Ecology of Inequality: Minorities and the Concentration of Poverty 1970–1980’, American Journal of Sociology 95 (1990): 1153–88
65. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's American Apartheid (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993)
66. Paul A. Jargowsky's Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and The American City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996).
67. Race is a more explanatory factor in at least black-white residential segregation. As Massey and Denton point out in American Apartheid: ‘Segregation cannot be attributed to income differences, because blacks are equally highly segregated at all levels of income. Whereas segregation declines steadily for most minority groups as socioeconomic status rises, levels of black-white segregation do not vary significantly by social class. Because segregation reflects the effects of white prejudice rather than objective market forces, blacks are segregated no matter how much money they earn’ (pp. 10–11).
68. See also Craig St John and Nancy A. Bates's ‘Racial Composition and Neighborhood Evaluation’, Social Science Research 19(1) (March 1990): 47–62.
69. See Massey and Denton's American Apartheid, p. 114; emphasis added, p. 115.
70. See Roderick J. Harrison and Daniel H. Weinberg's ‘Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation in 1990’ (unpublished manuscript, US Bureau of the Census, 1992).
71. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, p. 77, 15–16.
72. According to Webster, The Racialization of America(New York: St Martin's Press, 1992), p. 30:
73. ‘Neither the past nor contemporary social relations need to be racially described. Class, or culture, could be the chosen prism through which events are analyzed.’ See Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States.
74. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid.
75. See Charles Mills's The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 126.
76. See, for example, Mills's ‘But What Are You Really?’, in Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 47.
77. See also Howard Winant's discussion of the reality and illusory nature of race, ‘Racial Dualism at Century's End’, in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, US Terrain, ed. W. Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997), pp. 87–115 (90)
78. Paul Gilroy's talk of ‘anti-anti-essentialism’ in his The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 102.
79. See, for example (from a plethora of books and articles), Angela Davis's ‘Gender, Class, and Multiculturalism’, in Mapping Multi-Culturalism, ed. A. F. Gordon and C. Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
80. Gilroy's The Black Atlantic
81. Robert Gooding-Williams's ‘Race, Multiculturalism and Democracy’, Constellations 5(1) (1998): 18–41
82. Mills's ‘But What Are You Really?’, as well as his The Racial Contract
83. Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States. Some racial theorists such as Robert Gooding-Williams, like Appiah, have adopted pluralist metaphysics as an answer to this tension.
84. See Gooding-Williams's ‘Race, Multiculturalism and Democracy’. Lucius Outlaw, in On Race and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1996), rejects racial nominalism, and argues that race is real. He does so, unfortunately, by piggybacking a social constructivist account of race on top of biological and anthropological conceptions of race.
85. See my essay ‘The Conservation of Race’, in Without Race (forthcoming).
86. See Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza's The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
87. See Ivan Hannaford's Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996). The 18th century marks the beginning of the modern race concept. The concepts of race that were current in the 17th century, such as the use of the word ‘black’ to describe sub-Saharan Africans or Moors in general, lack the systematic biological and anthropological character of the modern race concept.
88. See Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 162–3.
89. For a nice comparative analysis of the difference between the racial systems of the USA and Brazil, see Carl Degler's Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971). Hispanic, of course, is an ethnic category that includes all the races; however, at least in the USA, the Hispanic identity is a distinct identity. While Hispanic blacks are treated in large part like non-Hispanic blacks, Hispanic whites are raced or are considered ethnic in a way that differentiates them from non-Hispanic whites.
90. For more on the origins of ‘Hispanic’ see Jorge Gracia's Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophic Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999).
91. See discussion of hypodescent in Chapter 2 of Naomi Zack's Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), and Chapter 4 of Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States.
92. See Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States, p. 60. Omi and Winant's work on racial formation has some commonality with Root's three social forces. First, they distinguish between ethnicity and race, which are often conflated; likewise, with Root's system race and ethnicity can be distinguished as distinct human kinds. Second, Omi and Winant's discussion of the process of racial formation, a process constituted by racial projects that impose racial labels and norms, can be loosely compared with the dynamic of Root's three social vectors. Root, however, describes how human kinds may be real at some site, while Omi and Winant describe how race is formed in the USA. Root's project, and my application of his project, is metaphysical, while Omi and Winant's project is sociological. If an ontological position can be derived from Omi and Winant's project, it would be social constructivist.
93. See Barthes's Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, trans. Annette Lavers, [1957] 1972), p. 142.
94. See James Baldwin's ‘Stranger in the Village’, in What Country Have I?: Political Writings by Black Americans, ed. H. J. Storing (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1970), pp. 213–25 (222–3). In the pathological character of US racial norms, and the roles and expectations they breed, we can see the fantastic and awful power of social norms and the ‘normalizing gaze’ (perhaps ‘fist’ would be a better word here) of society. This ‘normalizing gaze’, as Foucault puts it in Discipline and Punish, ‘differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes’ (p. 183).
95. A nice comparison can be made between the reality of race and its construction by social forces, and Foucault's discussion of the existence of the ‘modern soul’. In fact, Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, p. 102, makes this comparison and suggests that the solution to the ‘tension’ in his ‘anti-anti-essentialist’ account of race may be found in Foucault's discussion of the modern soul. According to Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, rather than being a spiritual entity the ‘modern soul’ is the result of the vast modern social dynamic of discipline, surveillance, and punishment: ‘It would be wrong to say that the [modern soul] is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished — and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint’ (p. 29).
96. See Outlaw's On Race and Philosophy, p. 4, 8.
97. Outlaw's defense of the reality of race parallels the arguments for the reality of human kinds given by Root. Indeed, in an earlier version of the introductory chapter of his book, ‘On Race and Philosophy’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 8(2) (1995): 175–99, he drew on Root's arguments, 7, 16, 5, 17.
98. Coon's principal work on race is The Origin of Races (New York: Knopf, 1976). It is odd that Outlaw draws on Coon, for his work is severely outdated, and Ashley Montagu accused him of being racist
99. see Montagu's ‘On Coon's The Origin of Races’, in The Concept of Race (New York: Collier Books, 1964), pp. 228–41.
100. Coon argued that the races were subspecies, and that the older subspecies (Caucasians and Mongoloids) had developed higher intellectual capabilities than ‘Negroids’ or ‘Australoids’ (his term for Pacific, South Asian, and Southeast Asian aborigines). Even biologists who think race is an appropriate category for human taxonomy take issue with Coon's work; see Nei and Roychoudhury's ‘Genetic Relationship and Evolution of Human Races’, Evolutionary Biology 14 (1982): 1–59. Then again, given Outlaw's project of trying to hold on to some approximation of biological race, and his argument that race is anthropologically necessary, it is not odd that he would team up with a problematic figure such as Coon; who believed the same thing but had inegalitarian intentions, 17, 21.
101. Cavalli-Sforza et al., The History and Geography of Human Genes.