8

Racialized Groups and Social Constructions

Does the nonexistence of races mean, then, that “blacks,” “whites,” “Asians,” and “Native Americans” refer simply to collections of individuals who have nothing in common other than that a racial label has wrongly been applied to them? No, it does not.

For several centuries Americans believed that the groups we now call “whites,” “blacks,” “Asians,” and “Native Americans” were races, and as a result of this belief the groups have been treated so. American society structured into its institutions and norms of group interaction the idea that whites were a superior and more worthy “race”—through slavery, segregation, naturalization laws, immigration policies, and discrimination in education, housing, and labor. By purveying the idea that all “nonwhites” were inferior or deficient in some regard, that this was most especially true of “blacks,” and that people of different races were to be separated from one another, educational and scientific authority as well as popular thought rationalized institutional racial hierarchy and separation.

This process is what I mean by “racialization,” which is the treating of groups as if there were inherent and immutable differences between them; as if certain somatic characteristics marked the presence of significant characteristics of mind, emotion, and character; and as if some were of greater worth than others.1

Over time, certain groups once seen as races have come to be seen as something else, for instance as ethnic groups. This is what happened to southern and eastern European immigrant groups (though they were never seen as paradigmatic races). And some groups are seen and treated as races in the present in part because they were so seen and treated in the past. Whether a group is racialized is a matter of its treatment by the larger society. Whether the group takes on a self-identity as a race is a different matter. The contrast between “whites” and “blacks” is instructive in this regard. Through law, custom, and popular understanding and behavior, people of African descent were turned into the racial group “black.” They were consigned to a subordinate place in society, denied various rights, discriminated against, and subjected to norms meant to keep them separate from whites, all on the basis that they were members of “the black race.” Blacks by and large accepted racialism with regard to themselves and whites; they accepted the idea that both groups were races, though often rejecting the implication of their own inferiority.

Whiteness was similarly built into the structure of American society. Until this century, it was a prerequisite for naturalization. More generally, in seeing the “nonwhite” races as inferior, people of European descent became the superior racial counterpart. (Of course it was largely powerful whites who did the creating, though powerless whites often bought into that creation.) Whiteness, however, was generally less explicitly defined than were the other racial identities. Ian Haney-Lopez points to one aspect of this inexplicitness in his discussion of the large number of naturalization cases brought before sundry courts of the nation, which determined whether Syrians, Indians, Armenians, Chinese, and Japanese persons were sufficiently white to count under the 1790 Naturalization Act and subsequent laws and constitutional amendments.2 The courts treated whiteness as if it were a natural, biological category, yet were entirely inconsistent in its definition and application.

Although for much of American history subsequent to the development of the idea of “race” whites were not reluctant to avow their whiteness and its alleged superiority, as the dominant group they did not have to think about their whiteness or what it consisted in. They constituted the norm, the “we” against whom the various inferiorized “they”s were defined. Thus whiteness was always a kind of inexplicit identity to those who possessed it, as the color term used to represent it suggests, while at the same time it constituted an indispensable source of value.3

This inexplicitness, as we saw in chapter 3, deepened in the post—Civil Rights era, for three reasons. First, “color blindness” was understood to imply that it was inappropriate and possibly even racist to take note of people’s racial identity. In addition, many whites came to think that the antidiscrimination legislation and rulings of the Civil Rights era had created a level playing field in which race no longer really mattered. So calling attention to whiteness was not only frowned upon; it was unnecessary, passe. Finally, the rise of white ethnic consciousness in the 1970s and its validation in the multicultural era of the 1980s and beyond provided whites with an alternative identity that appeared to replace whiteness (though actually presupposing it).4

Yet whiteness continues to structure life chances and opportunities in every domain of social existence. It remains a deeply meaningful social identity, even if whites do not explicitly acknowledge or even recognize it as such. Of course, few whites would actually disavow their whiteness, even their mere classificatory whiteness. That is, they know what to check off on the Census when presented with an array of “racial choices,” even if they might want to add that “it doesn’t mean anything.” Thus “whites” remain very much a racialized group.

Because of their social and historical treatment, members of racialized groups share certain experiences (for example, discrimination, stigmatization, exclusion, and privilege).5 Often they adopt a group identity based on the experience of racialization, and such self-claiming may further contribute to their racialization. American blacks have forged a distinct group identity in the face of being treated as a race. In partial contrast, Asian Americans have not generally embraced a racialized identity, although they are often seen as a racial group by others.

Panethnicity and Racialization

Racialization is best understood against the background of “panethnicity,” the word for a grouping of disparate ethnocultural groups under a common umbrella identity.6 “Hispanic/Latino,” “Native American,” and “Asian American” name panethnic groups (these designations can also be understood racially). The precise boundaries of the group are often not fixed. “Hispanic/Latino” includes U.S. Americans with ancestry from Latin America (sometimes Brazil is included, and sometimes Spain; both are matters of contention). “Native American” is also a panethnic group, an identity for the quite diverse tribal groups of North America. “Asian American” is taken to refer either to U.S. Americans whose ancestry lies in the nations of east and southeast Asia or (more recently) to that group plus South Asian Americans.

The impetus to forming panethnic groups in the United States is multi-faceted.7 Joining with others gives a racialized or ethnocultural group visibility, political influence, and power that it could not have on its own; Asian Americans, for example, have a political and social presence that Vietnamese Americans alone cannot have. The subgroups composing a given panethnic group are often quite culturally distinct from one another, and, especially in the nation of origin, might even be hostile to one another (Japanese and Koreans, for example). But generally there is greater cultural commonality among the ethnocultural groups within a panethnic group than between those and ethnocultural groups comprising another panethnicity. Culturally, Chinese Americans share more with Laotian Americans than with Colombian Americans.

One of the strongest reasons for forming panethnicities is discriminatory treatment or stigmatizing as a member of the racial group corresponding to the panethnicity. A watershed in contemporary Asian American panethnic formation, for example, was the murder in 1982 of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American mistaken for a Japanese American (or, possibly, for a generic “Asian” on whom the murderer took out his anti-Japanese resentments).8 Discriminatory treatment toward Asian ethnocultural groups is frequently directed toward them not as Laotians or Chinese but as “Asians.”

Though panethnicity is not itself a cultural or ethnic identity, it is sometimes treated, especially by outgroup members, as if it were. That is, non-Asians often regard “Asian American” as a group with a single ethnoculture and identity. (This is not the same, though, as treating it as a racial group.) “Asian Americans” are a relatively recent panethnic formation, and those who are so called are concerned that their internal diversity be recognized. One of the ironies of Asian American political efficacy, for example, was its gaining recognition in the Census for the many distinct Asian ethnicities, while retaining the recognition that all these groups deserved protection against discrimination (a major purpose of Census categories since 1970). In the 1990 Census, respondents were asked to self-designate from a list of “Asian or Pacific Islander” ethnic categories—Chinese, Laotian, and so on—which were collectively called a “race” on the census form. (In 2000 the list of ethnic choices was retained, and, though the overall grouping was not explicitly called a race, the question to be answered was “What is this person’s race?”, with “white”, “black, African American, or Negro,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” and “some other race” as alternatives for non-Asians.)9 It was only through the submerging of their particularity in an overall panethnicity that the ethnic particularities gained recognition on the Census.

Though panethnicity is not a cultural identity (or only a weak one at best), and though it is generally created for strategic reasons, it can nevertheless be personally important as a communal or collective identity. Many Asian Americans’ identity as such may be no less significant to them than their Chinese American or Indian American identity. For very assimilated Asian Americans whose ethnic identity may be weak, it may be even more important. Or the two different types of identities might both be important, but in different contexts. On the other hand, panethnicity can also seem like an artificial, contrived identity; Eric Liu, for example, expresses this idea in the title of his book The Accidental Asian.10

“European American” is coming to be a panethnic identity for whites of European ancestry, though the political purposes of such an identity do not parallel those of the other groups mentioned; for example, there is no history of stigma and victimization to provide a common identity, nor minority status that provides a reason for common cause. “European American” is both benign—giving an ethnic-like identity to those whose backgrounds are too mixed to claim a specific ethnicity—and problematic in that it implies that all ethnicities of Americans are on the same social level (or, to put it another way, that white ethnicities do not partake of white privilege).11

The boundaries of panethnic groups generally correspond to those of racialized groups—European Americans (“whites”), Asian Americans (”yellows”), Native Americans (“reds”). This is not surprising, since racial mistreatment is one important reason for panethnic formation. But since it is not the only reason, the boundaries are not precisely coincident. The recent official inclusion of South Asians in the “Asian” or “Asian/Pacific Islander” Census category suggests two distinct possibilities—a racialized group (or panethnic group with a racial impetus) that omits South Asians; and a panethnic group that includes South Asians. South Asians lobbied the Census Bureau for inclusion as “Asians” partly on the grounds that they were discriminated against as Indians, historically and in the present,12 but they are not generally regarded as the same racial group as East and Southeast Asians.

As personal identities, panethnicity and race are distinct. Panethnicity involves an awareness of component ethnic identities even where these are not important to the individual in question; race does not. Panethnicity invokes culture; race invokes stigma, discrimination, and hierarchy. Nevertheless, in practice these different elements are often mixed up together, as David Hollinger’s felicitous phrase “ethnoracial groups” expresses.13

Latinos as an Incompletely Racialized Group

Panethnicity allows us to recognize a vital difference between race and racialization. Race is an “all or nothing” matter: groups and individuals are either of a particular race or not (though there may be disagreement as to which race some individuals should be assigned to, as Haney-Lopez’s discussion of the naturalization cases shows).14 Here I am interested in the group rather than the individual dimension of this categorization. Every group that is a race is equally a race. In contrast say, to being respected by others, being cohesive, or being politically engaged, being a race is not a matter of degree.

Racialization, however, is a matter of degree—determined by a particular society and a particular history. Racialization concerns the way a group is experienced, viewed, and treated in a society at a given time in its history, and it includes the character of the identity the group has appropriated for itself.

The difference between race and racialization is well exemplified by the group in the United States called “Latinos” or “Hispanics” (both terms are used, for the first time, on the 2000 Census15), a group I have sometimes intentionally omitted in listings of racial groups. “Latino/His-panic,” as I shall call it in this chapter, is unquestionably a panethnic group. But is it a race? In light of my argument that there are no races, I would answer that question “no.” Are they a race in the popular sense of “race,” in which “blacks” and “whites” are paradigm races? To this I would respond that a “yes” or “no” answer can not be provided. Are Latino/His-panics, then, a racialized group? I would say “partially.”

On the federal Census only this ethnoracial group is granted a distinct status other than race (implying that it is an “ethnicity”). The Census thus allows individuals to select a Latino/Hispanic (that is, ethnic-like) identity and a white, black, or Asian racial identity.16 In this official sense, then, Latinos are not a race.

In addition, the two largest Latino ethnic groups in the United States, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, explicitly think of themselves as “mixed race.” (The general idea of such mixedness is captured in the Spanish word mestizaje.17) Such self-designation is especially made by Mexican Americans, as Mexican identity is viewed as an amalgam of Spanish and indigenous peoples.18 (There were relatively few African slaves in Mexico, and this phenotypic strand has largely been physically “absorbed” into the general population, so is not generally recognized as a distinctive element in the mix.19) With various degrees of explicitness, most Latin American nations view themselves as similarly mixed, with different mixtures predominating in different nations. Although mestizaje implies a plurality of races making up the mix, some Latin Americans refer to the resultant mix as itself a race. Thus Mexicans and Chicanos (Mexican Americans) sometimes refer to themselves as “La Raza,” the race. (Brazilians, though Portuguese-speaking, hence not Hispanic, and thus at best problematically “Latino,” are comparable to Latin Americans in important respects, and sometimes think of themselves as a distinct, Brazilian, race.20) If Latinos are a plurality of national races, and if those are themselves mixtures of paradigmatic races (blacks, whites, indigenous peoples) and are viewed that way by Latinos themselves, they cannot all be one race.

Moreover, because of this historical mestizaje, persons of Latin American ancestry in the United States have a wide range of somatic characteristics, which span the conventional phenotypes of paradigmatic races—blacks, Native Americans, and whites. So from the perspectives of official categorization, of self-identification, especially in the nation of origin (or commonwealth in the case of Puerto Rico), and of physical appearance in the U.S. context, Latinos do not represent a race.

Nevertheless, Latino/Hispanics are by no means unequivocally regarded, either by others or themselves, as not a race, in the popular meaning. Several factors tilt toward a racial way of viewing this group. First, despite the wide range of phenotypes, many Latinos’ skin color is a shade of brown or bronze distinct from the large majority of both whites and blacks. With the powerful propensity in U.S. culture toward racialization and seeing somatic differences in a race-like manner, it is easy for Latino/Hispanics to be viewed as “browns” in a racial color spectrum.

Furthermore, when the Latin American, in contrast to the more broadly Hispanic version of the identity is emphasized, colonization becomes salient. The original occupants of Latin American lands were colonized by Spanish conquerors, and, with the subsequent importation of African slaves, Latinos today often experience themselves as a formerly colonized and thus inferiorized people. This legacy contributes to a more racialized self-understanding in the nation of origin that carries over to the immigrant generation and to some extent beyond.

In addition, in part because the two largest Latino/Hispanic groups, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, were incorporated through war and conquest (and, in the case of Puerto Rico, remain in a dependent territorial relationship), Latinos’ experience in the United States also has an inferiorized, and in this respect racialized, dimension. On various standard measures of socioeconomic status, Latino/Hispanics are much closer to blacks and Native Americans than to whites.21 Moreover, these groups, by and large, occupy a lower position on the social scale, a further racializing factor.

Also, in light of antidiscrimination legislation and affirmative action, there are benefits to the various Latino national subgroups in forming an overarching identity that can be seen as a disadvantaged racial, or at least race-like, minority. Despite its official nonrace status on the Census, the Latino/Hispanic category is there because the group is discriminated against in a manner analogous to the groups labeled “races” on the Census; so it is essentially treated, by those who make use of Census data, as a racial or race-like minority.

If we try to put these diverse and contrary tendencies together into an answer to the question whether Latinos/Hispanics are a race in the popular understanding of that concept, it is impossible to give a definitive answer. But one can say that Latino/Hispanics are a panethnic group that is viewed (both by ingroup and outgroup) as partially racialized.

So one group can be more racialized than another group; and the degree of racialization depends not only on historical factors but local ones. In parts of the country with heavy concentrations of Mexican Americans, like California, that group may be seen more racially than other Latinos, and also seen as something like equally racially with blacks. At the same time, some groups in the United States (whites and blacks) have fully undergone the process of racialization.

Racialized identity is context-bound and a matter of degree in another sense as well. Races are not confined to nations. There are blacks in Africa, the U.S., the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. On the standard binary understanding of racial classification, all these persons are equally “black.” But in the United States, groups inside its borders are those most distinctly regarded as races. This is most strongly true of blacks. In practice, most white U.S. Americans regard African Americans as more paradigmatically black than Afro-Caribbeans and even Africans. When they think of race, and of who is a racial group, African Americans provide the standard. It is to this group that white Americans most commonly attribute racial characteristics—“otherness,” homogeneity, certain mental and temperamental characteristics, and so on. White Americans, and perhaps other nonblacks as well, especially those whose ancestors have been in this country for several generations, are much less likely to have as clearly defined a sense of Africans as possessing certain definite racial characteristics as they are of African Americans. In this sense, one might say that the boundaries around racialized groups do not precisely correspond to those around races. Again, this is in no way to deny that if asked what racial group a (sub-Saharan, nonwhite [e.g., South African or Zimbabwean]) belongs to, few white Americans will hesitate to say “black.” These groups are equally classificatorily “black.” But the form and extent of racialization—seeing a group as a race—is not coextensive with mere practices of racial classification. The former but not the latter comes with the social meanings described in chapters 5–7.

Alternatives to Racial Identity

This contextualization of racialization applies, to some degree, to immigrant, ethnic, and panethnic groups, as well as to groups in other countries. From a purely conceptual or classificatory point of view, panethnic groups can well also be, or overlap strongly with, racial groups. Both Asian Americans and European Americans are simultaneously panethnic groups and racial groups. Similarly, ethnic groups are parts of larger racial groups—Jamaican Americans are black, Irish Americans are white, and Korean Americans are Asian. Immigrant groups also “have race”. A Nigerian immigrant is black. A Vietnamese immigrant is Asian (again, the racial, not the panethnic category). A Polish immigrant is white.

At the level of classification, then, there is no inconsistency between fully having an ethnicity, a panethnicity, an immigrant status, and a race. But in respect to the degree to which a group is in everyday life viewed by others racially, with all the baggage this normally implies, a panethnic, ethnic, or immigrant identity may at least partly crowd out a racialized identity.

Mary Waters’s work on Caribbean immigrants in New York City is suggestive concerning the relations among immigrant, ethnic, and racial identities. Waters studied whites’ perceptions of African American and Caribbean workers at two work sites. She found that “the whites who worked at American Food and the white teachers we interviewed tended to see the immigrants as sharing an immigrant identity with them—because many of these whites are the descendants of European immigrants.” Of the immigrants themselves, she says that “the act of immigration tends to erase the slave narrative and replace it with an immigrant narrative.”22 That is, the immigrant narrative is, in part, an alternative to a racial narrative, deemphasizing victimization and the sense of inferiorization bound up with race. In its providing whites a sense that they have something in common with the Caribbeans, it dampens the strong sense of otherness that is integral to racial perception. In these ways, an immigrant identity can weaken, at least to some extent, a racialized sense of the group in question.

Countering this deracializing element is the powerful salience of “black” phenotypic characteristics, which exert a racializing force that can homogenize immigrant blacks and native blacks in the view of the white majority. This racializing factor is even more powerful toward those in the next generation who have lost the most obvious markers of immigrant identity (a Caribbean accent, for example). Waters found that the second generation much more strongly identified with African Americans—seeing themselves and being seen more exclusively as “black.”23

What is true of immigrant identity is also true, though to a lesser extent, of ethnic identity. That is, the idea of ethnicity carries a weaker sense of both otherness and inherency than does race. Jesse Jackson’s campaign to encourage American blacks to adopt “African American” as their preferred identity label is interesting in this regard. Jackson wanted to emphasize that American blacks (in the sense of those whose ancestry lay in the slave era) had a distinctive culture as well as a race. But he did not mean for this recognition to mask the fact that American blacks were a racial group. He could take for granted that, as the most explicitly racialized of American groups, blacks or African Americans would themselves never be confused as to the race-related disadvantages and stigma with which they were encumbered. The ethnicization carried by “African American” has produced some confusion, however, among nonblacks, whites in particular. For them, the ethnicized identity does in fact mask racial disadvantage.24 It encourages whites to think of blacks as just another ethnic group.

The degree of a group’s racialization vis-a-vis its ethnicization is not easy to determine. We can say with certainty that it is not revealed solely in the degree of the dominant culture’s use of racial as against ethnocultural vocabulary in referring to the group. We saw that people are often reluctant to talk about someone’s race, and that ethnic categories are generally less charged and more acceptable; but someone using the language of ethnicity may still be thinking about the group in question in a fully racialized way. Thus, although the label “African American” invites nonblacks to supplant a racial with an ethnic way of viewing American blacks, it very seldom has this actual effect. The actual withering away of a racial way of viewing African Americans is obviously nowhere on the horizon.25

Is “Race” a Social Construction?

Recent academic writing frequently refers to race as a “social construct” or “social construction.”26 This language can illuminate the meaning of “race,” but only if it clearly and explicitly distinguishes between races, which do not exist, and racialized groups, which do. The statement “race is a social construction” does not draw that distinction, and can lead to obfuscation rather than illumination.

Several distinct meanings have been attached to the term “social construction.”27 One is that the thing in question has been wrongly thought to be a product of “natural” (biological or physical) processes when it is in fact a product of social ones. Masculinity and femininity are frequently cited examples. Femininity in a given society involves not merely the possession of certain bodily organs and a particular chromosomal structure (“nature”) but socially prescribed ways of behaving. This notion of social construction is sometimes but not necessarily conjoined with the view that only biological or physical entities or processes are “real” while social ones are not.

In the classic nineteenth-century sense races were purported to be natural rather than socially constructed; for they were understood as biological entities, in the same sense that the human species is. A racialized group, however, is socially constructed rather than natural, a group created by social and historical forces and treated as if it were a race.

A second meaning of “social construction” is that the thing in question is defined by social convention, and so is marked by an element of arbitrariness. Conventions of games, such as strikes, passed balls, and field positions in baseball, are examples. What makes something a strike is in a sense arbitrary. Baseball could have developed, or been “constructed”, in such a way that four strikes instead of three counted as an out. In this sense strikes are indeed social constructs. But within the actual rules of baseball, it is not arbitrary that a particular pitched ball is a strike rather than a ball. Strikes are perfectly real; one simply has to understand the sort of convention-bound reality they possess.

An example of social construction more relevant to race is that of nations,28 which are historically contingent human creations that need not have existed or developed the particular character they have. The difference between baseball and nations is that everyone recognizes the conventional dimension of the former but not always the latter. Nations are sometimes talked or thought about as if they were natural human forms, primordial communities, created by God, destined to serve an historical mission, and the like. Rather, nations are, in Benedict Anderson’s striking phrase, “imagined communities.”29 Because people can forget this, and especially because a “natural” view of nations provides fertile soil for virulent and destructive forms of nationalism, the idea of social construction can serve to remind us of the historically contingent character of nations. In this sense, a social-construction perspective is sometimes spoken of as “denaturalizing” that which is constructed.

Races are often spoken of as social constructions in this sense. But while there are, in fact, nations, there are not races. The groups we call “races” do not possess the features popular understanding attributes to races. In this sense “whites,” “blacks,” “Asians,” and “Native Americans” are not races; they are racialized groups. By contrast, Nigeria, Mexico, and Thailand are nations.

Unlike races, racialized groups are real, and like nations they can provide a foundation for an appropriate and important social identity, for loyalty, for a sense of community and shared fate (though not a shared destiny30), for sentiments of shame and pride. But as social creations they may wrongly be viewed as if they were natural, and they may encourage misplaced attachments, overblown and excessive loyalties, and disproportion in how one regards one’s racialized identity in relation to other significant identities. Such distortions of racialized identities are likely to stem from wrongly thinking that one is not merely a member of a racialized group but of an actual race. But they are also possible in someone who is fully aware that her racial identity is socially and historically created and contingent.

Imagine, for example, an Asian American who recognizes and accepts a racialized (not merely panethnic) identity as “Asian”—seeing the source of that identity in the resentments, discrimination, and stereotyping to which her group is subject, not in characteristics inherent in her racial group. She may exaggerate the importance of this racialized identity in relation to her other identities—professor, Korean American, parent, resident of Peoria, woman, lover of tennis. She may, for example, become blind to the fact that groups other than her own also suffer from discrimination and stereotyping. She may fail to recognize that despite differences she has much in common with other women professors.

Misunderstandings of Social Construction

The idea of social construction has been subject to misunderstandings (often with some basis in the writings of its proponents) that bear clearing up if we are to make the best use of it in understanding “race.” For one thing, “social construction” has sometimes been taken to imply that we could do away with what is socially constructed (genders, nations, racialized groups) if we so chose. Certainly, to recognize something as a human creation implies that it need not exist, at least in the form that it does, and thereby provides a basis for hope that we could live without various forms of injustice, oppression, and constraint attached to such creations. But to think we can simply jettison those creations is to fall prey to a kind of social voluntarism regarding social structures and identities. Racialized thinking is deeply embedded in our social existence; its constructedness notwithstanding, we may not be able to change these social forms without far-ranging and currently barely imaginable changes in familiar structures, such as an end to racial inequality and race-based social segregation.

A related misunderstanding of the import of social construction is that it is simply a form of labeling or categorizing: to be black is simply to be labeled or identified according to the rules that govern the practice of racial categorization. But this is like saying that to be a judge is simply to be a person whom society labels “judge.” To be a judge is a good deal more; it involves being accorded authority to engage in certain behavior within certain institutional structures. Similarly, to be a racialized black person is not simply to be called “black.” For racialization imposes certain ways of viewing the person who is called or self-identified as “black”—as having something fundamental and natural in common with other black people; as radically other than persons of different races; and as possessing certain humanly significant characteristics inherent in her racial nature.31

If there are no races, it might seem natural to express this truth by saying that to be black is just to be called “black” by one’s society, or to call oneself “black”. But, consider the following incident: In 1977 two aspiring firefighters who were brothers identified themselves as “black” on a civil service exam. Under an affirmative action plan that admitted black aspirants with lower scores than whites to firefighter vacancies, the Malone brothers joined the force. They served for ten years. Then the fire commissioner noticed that they had been classified as black. They were promptly fired, but appealed, in a case that appeared before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.32

All available evidence brought before the court led it to conclude that the Malones were white.33 Despite their claiming of the category “black,” they seemed quite clearly to be white. They were members of the racialized group “white,” despite claiming to be black, just as I am an American even if I go to the United Kingdom, affect a British accent, and attempt to pass myself off as British.34

In the sense of a racialized group, the Malone brothers were white, not black; they were not merely identified or categorized as white. Still, racial-ized groups are social constructs, just as nations are; they are not natural, biological entities.

The social construction of race sometimes takes the form, “Biological races are not real, but social races are,” or “Race is socially but not biologically real.” If the social reality attributed to “race” involved decisively discarding the moral and conceptual trappings that attend popular understandings of it—as the idea of “racialized groups” is meant to do—I would not object to these expressions. Frequently, however, this social interpretation of race reimports all the associations of radical differentness among groups and commonality among all members of a group, excepting only the idea that characteristics of the group are grounded in their biology.35 At this point in our history, I think any conferring of reality on “race” is likely to carry these false and invidious associations. The term “racialized groups” is preferable as a way of acknowledging that some groups have been created by being treated as if they were races, while also acknowledging that “race” in its popular meaning is entirely false.

Scalar Uses of Race

In the film Boys on the Side, a black character, Jane, calls a white character, Robin, “the whitest gal on the face of the earth.”36 The qualified inherentist regards some members of a racial group as “more black” or “more white,” and the selective racist does as well. Yet some people are baffled or outraged at such “scalar” uses of racial concepts.37 “Either he’s black or he isn’t. You can’t be ‘more black’.” What sense can we make of this interpretation of scalar race?

Scalar concepts admit of degrees, binary ones do not; “pregnant” is a binary concept, and “tall” is scalar. But race admits of both versions. Classification is a binary use of “race.” To which racial group does a person belong—black, white, Native American, Latino, Asian? In this classificatory sense, a person can not be “more black.” She can, perhaps, be more obviously black. That is, it might be less or more easy to discern whether she is black. But whether she is black is not a matter of degree.

“Racialization” can be a matter of degree, but only at the level of the group, not of the individual. Whether an individual is a member of a given racialized group remains a binary matter. What is a scalar conception of race that applies at the individual level?

Two pertinent features of racialized groups are that they involve membership in a collectivity, and that cultural characteristics may become associated with that collectivity, and with the group identity. Thus, when Robin first meets Jane in the film, she tells Jane that she has done some singing—songs by the Carpenters. This revelation, together with the way Robin talks and dresses, prompts Jane’s scalar racial remark. (Jane wouldn’t have made the remark, probably, if Robin had said she sang Bonnie Raitt or Janis Joplin songs.38) Thus one meaning of a scalar concept of race is cultural.

There are several other scalar uses of race. (1) A person can make her racial identity less or more central to her overall identity. A “less black” person relates less of what she does and experiences to her black identity. (Or a person embraces her racial group identity, as contrasted with wishing she were something else.39) (2) A person can be less or more personally and socially involved with these in her racial group. A “more Asian” person hangs out primarily with other Asians or Asian American. (3) A person can be less or more devoted to the welfare of her group. A “more black” person can be what has been called a “race man” or “race woman”—someone devoted to the advancement of black people. (4) A person can adhere less or more to, and express, political values taken as appropriate to a racial group. Being a black nationalist or separatist is a way of being “more black.” (Obviously there can be a good deal of disagreement over what should constitute the political values of a given racial group.)

Although empirically many of these tendencies occur together, they are distinct and can operate independently. A Latino individual may live in a very white-centered professional and social world yet make his Latino identity central to his self-conception and engage in activities aimed at bettering the lot of Latinos. A black person can be socially “more black” but politically “less black.” And so on.

In general, racial scalarity has a different moral valence for whites than for persons of color. It is impossible for a white person to be devoted to the welfare of whites, or to be “politically white”, without being very close to a white supremacist. Cultural or social whiteness are somewhat less suspect. Devotion to the welfare of one’s inferiorized racial group, by contrast, is largely a good.

In general, the terrain marked out by scalar uses of race is quite emotionally and morally charged. For people of color, the idea of “racial degrees” raises issues of group loyalty, of deserting one’s group for a taste of power and acceptance in the dominant group, of assimilation. As long as there are dominant groups, subordinate groups, inferiorized groups, and not-fully-accepted groups, it is hard to envision the terrain of scalar race disappearing. That is, it is hard to imagine not only scalar judgments being made (especially by members of the racial group themselves), but value being attached to those judgments.

Some observers worry about such judgments sowing dissension within race-based communities, and also about their constricting the autonomy of those held to standards of scalar blackness and the like. Stephen Carter, for example, strongly identifies with his black identity, and with a black community.40 He is “more black” along most of the dimensions I have mentioned. Yet he strongly resists the legitimacy of scalar race as a way of thinking about black people. Acknowledging that “less black” is inevitably taken as a moral criticism, Carter is leery of allowing anyone to set the standards as to what should count for more and less black.41 People should be free, Carter suggests, to make of their racial identity what they will, and others, he feels, do not have the standing to criticize those choices.

Carter’s is indeed a humane position, respecting autonomy and rightly distrustful of the abuses to which the policing of racial identities can lead. But until racial identities are equally valued in the larger society—until they become something like what white ethnicities have become—that position will run up against some unpleasant realities. For example, as long as “black” is a generally stigmatized identity it will be difficult for blacks to avoid thinking ill of those who appear to avoid loyalty to other blacks, to black welfare, to black identity. Solidarity among the victimized exerts a strong and appropriate moral pull. Carter’s position is a morally coherent one, though perhaps psychologically difficult to sustain.

Analogous arguments can be made for Native Americans who particularly scorn “assimilation,”42 for Latinos and Hispanics, and for Asian Americans. Ideally an individual should be fully free to be “weakly X” along every dimension of scalar race without being scorned for doing so. But current racial arrangements are not yet hospitable to that stance, which requires full equality.

Blacks, whites, Asians, and Native Americans have been treated as if they were races. This makes them racialized groups, but not races; for there are no races. This is not merely a shift in terminology. Racialization does not, but race does, imply inherent characteristics, a virtually unbridgeable moral, experiental, and cognitive gulf among racial groups, and a hierarchy of worth. Racialization is a matter of degree; Latino/His-panics are partially racialized, blacks fully so.

Merely classifying persons into racial groups does not necessarily carry all the deleterious assumptions of racial thinking. From a classificatory point of view of view, then, having an ethnicity or being an immigrant (Jamaican, for example) is fully consistent with having a racial designation (black). In terms of day-to-day racial thinking, however, viewing someone ethnically or as an immigrant can crowd out viewing him or her racially.

Races are not socially constructed; they simply do not exist. Racialized groups, however, are socially constructed, by the historical process of racialization. There did not have to be racialized groups, just as there did not have to be nations; but there are, they are fully “real,” and there is a good deal of agreement as to how we determine someone’s racialized group. Nevertheless, we sometimes speak of people as being “more black,” “less Latino,” “more white,” and so on. This scalar way of talking about race derives from the identities, communities, and cultures that are attached to racial groups, and is potentially morally problematic yet seems inevitable as long as racial inequality exists.