Notes

Chapter 1. “Racism”: Its Core Meaning

1. David Duke, before he shed his formal ties to the Klan in order to become a politician, was criticized by a fellow Klansman for “conduct unbecoming a racist.” See James Ridgeway, Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture (New York, 1990), 146.

2. Bernard Weinraub, “Stung by Criticism of Fall Shows, TV Networks Add Minority Roles,” New York Times, Sept. 20, 1999, At, A14.

3. “Black and White in Baltimore,” Indianapolis Star-News, Aug. 23, 1999 (article ID no. 1999235133, on www.Indystar.com).

4. David K. Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (New York, 1997), 92.

5. Kathleen Ostrander, “Milton Board Decides to Retire Indian Logo, Name,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (on line), July 20, 1999.

6. In chapter 7 I will argue that there are no races in the sense in which “race” is generally understood in popular discourse, so that it is misleading to say that someone “is of a certain race.” It is more accurate to say that she has, or has been assigned, a racial designation, or that she is a member of a racial group; I will generally use the latter expression.

7. James Nuechterlein, First Things, Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 6, 1996, B9.

8. Time, Dec. 5, 1994, cited in Extra! g, no. 2 (March/April 1996): 18.

9. Robert Miles, Racism (London, 1989), 41–68.

10. “Police Probe Sees No Racism in Noose Prank,” Boston Globe, May 5, 1999.

11. Boston Globe, Apr. 29, 1999, B1.

12. “Identifying the Face of the Enemy,” The Plain Dealer, July 13, 1999.

13. See note 2. It was the newspaper article, rather than the NAACP itself, that framed the issue as one of racism. Kweisi Mfume, the president of the NAACP, said only that the programming was “a virtual whitewash.”

14. Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 80–83. Michel Wieviorka reports that current usage of the term “racism” in France corresponds to something like Margalit’s suggestion, “e.g. anti-worker racism, anti-women racism, anti-young people racism, anti-old people racism.” “Is It So Difficult to Be Anti-racist?” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-racism, ed. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (London, 1997), 141. Wieviorka agrees that these are misleading extensions of the term “racism.”

15. Of those listed, only ‘sexism”—discrimination against or the denial of dignity to women, or discrimination on the basis of sex in general—has fully succeeded in attaching moral condemnation to its referent in popular thought and speech.

16. Several sources note that Racism, a book by the German social scientist Magnus Hirschfeld, was the first and most prominent instance of the term “racism” in this period. Trans. and ed. Eden and Cedar Paul (London, 1938, reissued Port Washington, N.Y., 1973 [orig. pub. in German, 1933]).

17. The noun “America” is best jettisoned as referring to the United States of America, as both North and South America include many nations whose existence is ignored by this terminology; I will avoid using it whenever possible. But there is no readily available adjectival form of “the U.S.” or “USA,” and I will follow general convention in using “American” for this purpose, except when highlighting a difference between Latin America and the United States.

18. Elazar Barkan, T he Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (New York, 1992).

19. It is telling that Gunnar Myrdal’s monumental 1944 account of the pervasive inferior treatment of African Americans, An American Dilemma (New York, 1964 [ 1944]), did not use the word “racism” to describe and condemn that treatment.

20. George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison, Wis., 1985), ix.

21. John Rex, “Racism,” The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought, ed. William Outhwaite and Tom Bottomore (Oxford, 1994), 538.

22. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 7.

23. Pam Belluck, “A White Supremacist Group Seeks a New Kind of Recruit,” New York Times, July 7, 1999, At, A14.

24. Jorge L. A. Garcia argues effectively against the view that the core of racism, as we now understand the idea, lies in a system of beliefs. “The Heart of Racism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 27, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 5–45; “Current Conceptions of Racism: A Critical Examination of Some Recent Social Philosophy,” Journal of Social Philosophy 28, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 5–42; and “Philosophical Analysis and the Moral Concept of Racism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 25, no. 5 (1999): 1–32. Garcia argues that the “heart of racism” is race-based ill will. More generally, Garcia develops a persuasive case for the centrality of morality to our current concept of racism. My own argument against belief-centered accounts of racism and for the centrality of the moral in racism is very much indebted to Garcia’s work.

25. On Barzun’s terminology, see Miles, Racism, 44. The 1999 Encyclopedia Britannica Online’s entry on “racism” begins, “Racism, also called ‘racialism’.…”

26. In Britain the term “racialism” has a good deal more public currency than it does in the United States, and has come to take on some of the wider scope of the American use of “racism.” In the 1970s several British theorists suggested that “racialism” be used to denote practices of racial discrimination, and “racism” be confined to racist ideologies of biological determinism and hierarchy. (Miles, Racism, 53, citing Sivanandan; Rex, “Racism,” Blackwell, 149, citing Banton.) John Rex claims that this suggestion never gained wide acceptance, and that “racism” remains the term of choice in expressing general condemnation in the racial domain in Britain. John Rex, “Racism, Institutionalized and Otherwise,” in Racism, ed. Leonard Harris (Amherst, N.Y., 1999), 149. In chapters 3 and 6, I will discuss some other meanings that have been given to “racialism.”

27. Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, Mass., 1988 [1954]).

28. According to Michael Banton, Oliver Cox in his important 1948 work, Class, Caste, and Race (New York, 1970 [1948]) did define “racism” as “a philosophy of racial antipathy.” Banton, Racial Theories, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 171.

29. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York, 1968). (Kerner was chairman of the commission.) Tom Wicker’s brief introduction used the expressions “racism” and “white racism” as well (vii, ix).

30. Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York, 1992 [1967]).

31. The Seattle Times received hundreds of letters and phone calls in response to the whale killing, many of which deplored it but without expressing hostility toward the tribe, or Native Americans in general. A substantial minority of callers and writers expressed distinctly racist sentiments. The subsequent debate about “racism” involved the sort of confusions I am attempting to address in this book. Many supporters of the Makah saw all opposition as racist, and some writers evidenced racism while denying it. Alex Tizon, “Whale Killing Uncovers Anti-Indian Hatred,” Boston Globe, May 30, 1999. Tizon, a Seattle Times reporter, commented, “Airwaves and editorial pages across Western Washington have carried anti-Indian vitriol not heard or seen for a quarter-century.”

32. Laurence Thomas draws a similar distinction to that between inferiority and antipathy racism in “The Evolution of Antisemitism,” Transition 57 (1992): 94–108, esp. 107–8, although for Thomas the more basic character of antipathy racism is a judgment of the target group—-Jews, in Thomas’s discussion—as morally depraved and evil. My notion of antipathy racism does not require such a judgment; antipathy can be directed toward those thought of as inferior but not evil. People sometimes defend themselves against the charge of being racist by saying that they do not hate anyone because of their race. But they may still be inferiorizing racists.

Conflating the two forms can distort the specific character of historical forms of racism. Barbara Katz Rothman, for example, says, in relation to Nazism, “To have such a program…there has to be a concept of race, a separate biological group capable of infiltrating, weakening, destroying, not by military force, but by procreation, by the force of life itself. For the Ku Klux Klan, blacks were such a force; lynching was the cure.” The Book of Life: A Personal and Ethical Guide to Race, Normality, and the Implications of the Human Genome Project (Boston, 2001), 61–62. But the Klan did not view blacks as an internal destructive agent, but as a group that needed to be kept subordinate, in accord with their inferior natures. Lynching was not a way to exterminate blacks but to keep them “in their place.”

33. This typology is standard. See, for example, Louise Derman-Sparks and Carol Brunson Phillips, Teaching/Learning Anti-racism (New York, 1997), 10.

34. Beverly Tatum, a particularly insightful observer of race in America, echoes a widespread view in defining “racism” as a “system of advantage based on race,” though she is aware that this definition does not capture all of what people mean by the term. Tatum, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations about Race, rev. ed. (New York, 1999), 10.

35. For a detailed argument against the “system of advantage” definition of “racism” see L. Blum, “What Is ‘Racism’ in Antiracist Education?” Teachers College Record 100, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 860–80, and Garcia, “Current Conceptions,” 11–14.

36. Inferiorizing racism is sometimes assumed to consist merely in the belief that one’s own group is superior to some other group. This definition will do for practical purposes, but it does not capture the full force of inferiorizing racism in its familiar manifestations. The respect in which the group is seen as inferior must be reasonably fundamental—such as moral character, intelligence, or capacity for living a self-directed life. It is not racist to view group A as by nature better at badminton than group B. In addition, the group seen as inferior must be viewed not merely as inferior to some other group but as significantly defective. Suppose, for example, that someone believes that Asians are intellectually superior to whites, but that whites’ intelligence is more than adequate for the tasks of life. In this view, whites are not deficient; they are just less intelligent than Asians. (I am accepting this use of “intelligence” for the sake of argument only, as this alleged quality is the focus of one of the central expressions of inferiorizing racism, especially against blacks and Latinos. I do not regard intelligence is a unitary measurable characteristic.) Historically, systems of racial degradation have involved not only the belief that some groups were superior to others, but that the inferior ones were importantly deficient and thus unworthy of full human status or civic or moral equality; this is my view of inferiorizing racism.

37. A Soldier’s Story. Written by Charles Fuller. Dir. Norman Jewison. Columbia Pictures, 1984.

38. A group of black and Latino/Hispanic sixth-graders in Washington D.C. assented to a troubling array of negative stereotypes about their own groups, such as “Blacks are poor and stay poor because they’re dumber than whites (and Asians)” and “Black people don’t like to work hard.” Reported in Martha Minow, Not Only for Myself: Identity, Politics, and the Law (New York, 1997), 149–50.

39. Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York, 1971).

40. Opinion surveys show especially a downward trend in whites’ alleging lack of innate intelligence in blacks. Schuman et al. cite National Opinion Research Council (NORC) polls that put that figure at 10 percent in 1996 (compared, for example, to 27 percent in 1977). Explanations of blacks’ lower socioeconomic status in terms of inadequate motivation, by contrast, have shown a steady rise—to 52 percent in 1996 (from 34 percent in 1977). Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, Lawrence Bobo, and Maria Krysan, Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretation, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 156–57. As the authors remind us, these figures measure only what people are willing to avow. The extent of innatist racism is surely higher. Nevertheless, the comparative drop in avowed innatist inferiorizing racism over time surely represents a genuine change in cultural attitudes.

Several scholars of race within the social sciences have seen the decline of avowed belief in black racial inferiority as calling for new theories to make sense of personal racism and racial prejudice on the contemporary scene. David Sears’s and Donald Kinder’s concept of “symbolic racism” and John McConahay’s similar notion of “modern racism” are influential representatives of this tendency. Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago, 1996); John B. McConahay, “Modern Racism and Modern Discrimination: The Effects of Race, Racial Attitudes, and Context on Simulated Hiring Decisions,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 9 (1983): 551–58. Both postulate continuing negative racial affect toward, and negative stereotypes of, blacks, disengaged from beliefs about racial inferiority but wedded to a perception of blacks as violating “cherished American values such as the work ethic, self-reliance, impulse control, and obedience to authority.” David Sears, John Hetts, Jim Sidanius, and Lawrence Bobo, “Race in American Politics,” in Racialized Politics: The Debate About Racism in America, ed. Sears, Sidanius, and Bobo (Chicago, 2000), 17. To an extent, these theories claim that antipathy racism has been sustained while inferiorizing racism has declined. But the idea of violating cherished American values is, in my view, related to inferiorizing racism. Some of these alleged violations (lack of impulse control, lack of self-reliance) seem to me an only slightly different way of seeing blacks as not fully civilized. The key question here is whether the attributed characteristics are viewed by the subject as a matter of the culture of African Americans, and thus as susceptible to change; or whether they are seen as inherent. (This issue will be discussed in chapter 7.) Also, one would need to know whether the allegation is merely a socially acceptable cover (perhaps adopted unconsciously) for racial antipathy, or whether, as some of the authors writing in this tradition allege, it is a fully independent factor. If the former, it remains a clear instance of racism. Even if these perceptions of blacks are not fueled by a pre-existing racial hostility, if they are simply, or primarily, a product of racial stereotyping, they are objectionable on this score as well. Finally, to the extent that these beliefs are a product of independent intellectual processes, unrelated to racial animus or racist stereotypes, they seem to me not pertinent to personal racism at all, although it can be argued (as some of these authors do) that adherence to such beliefs has the effect of hindering policies that would address the historical injustices which blacks have suffered. But I have cautioned that we keep considerations pertinent to social policy regarding race and considerations relevant to attributing personal racism clearly distinct.

41. Allport, Nature, 9.

42. Ibid., 8.

43. Adrian M. S. Piper penetratingly articulates and analyzes this form of prejudice and discrimination, which she calls “second-order discrimination.” “Higher-order Discrimination,” in Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology, ed. Owen Flanagan and Amélie O. Rorty (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). As Piper says, one sign of the presence of such prejudice is the subject’s devaluing the characteristic in question—for example, being a good dancer—only in the targeted group (e.g., blacks) but not in members of other groups. Piper discusses a further type of unacknowledged prejudice, which she also calls “second-order discrimination”: when a characteristic—say wearing baggy pants and a backward baseball cap—is disliked or devalued in anyone, but precisely because it is associated with a specific devalued group (in this case, blacks). In the second case, blackness is devalued in general, even when it is found in non black groups.

44. Generally, prejudiced people adopt the common cultural stereotypes attached to the target groups. But this is not essential to prejudice. The racially prejudiced person’s negative beliefs could be completely quirky and idiosyncratic (for example, thinking that Mexican Americans are emotionally closed and are scheming to take over the society, two characteristics not generally associated in the United States with Mexicans or Mexican Americans).

45. Janet Ward Schofield and H. Andrew Sagar, “Integrating the Desegregated School: Problems and Possibilities,” in Advances in Motivation and Achievement: A Research Annual, ed. M. Maehr and D. Bartz (Greenwich, Conn., 1984), 33–36.

46. A well developed literature in social psychology—much of it inspired by what Allport called “the contact hypothesis”—attempts to articulate the conditions under which contact between racial groups leads to understanding, acceptance, and a reduction in prejudice. A good summary of this literature can be found in Walter Stephan, Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping in Schools (New York, 1999), 40–57.

47. Allport’s point about the “inflexibility” of the generalization is that it must be resistant to counter-evidence. (Appiah also builds such resistance into his definition of “racism” in “Racisms,” in The Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg [Minneapolis, 1990], 5, 6–8.) If someone immediately gives up a generalization about a group upon being presented with evidence that some members of the group do not possess the characteristic in question, Allport says the generalization was a “misconception” but not an inflexible generalization, as involved in prejudice (9). Allport is certainly correct that genuine prejudices generally involve inflexible generalizations and not mere misconceptions. But I think that a person who had formed a genuine antipathy toward a group, yet one based on a misconception she abandons in the face of counter-evidence, was still prejudiced until the time she abandoned her antipathy. Her prejudice may not have been deeply-rooted, but it was still a prejudice.

48. See, for example, Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines, Reaching Beyond Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 15. The authors comment on their survey question “To what extent is opposition to affirmative action driven by racial prejudice?” by saying, “Racism is not the only issue, however,” thereby seeming to equate “racism” and “racial prejudice.”

49. Ted Golda, “A Megastar Long Buried under a Layer of Blackface,” New York Times, Oct. 22, 2000, Arts & Leisure, 1, 34.

50. Ibid. Blackface minstrelsy is a racially complex phenomenon to which contemporary historical scholarship has devoted a good deal of attention. Its ambiguity is expressed in the title of Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993). Blacks themselves came to use blackface in performance modes that, W. T. Lhamon Jr. argues, subverted the stereotypes it traded on. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

51. Ellis is interviewed in Studs Terkel, American Dreams: Lost and Found (New York, 1980), 200–211.

52. A further complexity is that not every genuine racist is equally psychically invested in his or her racism. The film Remember the Titans, although clearly somewhat sentimentalized, portrays a white football player, Gerry Bertier, who at the beginning of the film is a racist. (Several of the characters, including Bertier, are based on actual persons.) Bertier is hostile to and holds demeaning views of the black football players who join the team as part of the integration of his Virginia high school in 1971. But through forced contact with the black players and under the direction of the new black coach, Bertier fairly quickly changes and sheds his previous racism. Other white players turn out to be more resistant, and one of them finds the path to racial acceptance impossible. Prior to the team’s integration Bertier was certainly a racist—he was psychically invested in racist hostilities and inferiorizing views of blacks—but this investment did not run very deep. Remember the Titans. Dir. Boaz Yakin. Walt Disney Pictures, 2000.

53. The flag most commonly associated with the Confederacy and generally known in contemporary culture as “the Confederate flag” is a blue cross with white stars, set on a red background. This flag is sometimes inaccurately referred to as the “stars and bars,” which was the official flag of the Confederate States of America. See Sanford Levinson, “They Whisper: Reflections on Flags, Monuments, and State Holidays, and the Construction of Social Meaning in a Multicultural Society,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 70, no. 3 (1995): 1086 n. 21.

54. Patricia Williams, The Rooster’s Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 29. Williams points out that the brouhaha surrounding this incident focused so much on free speech and First Amendment concerns that the issue of the cultural meaning of the flag was misrepresented. “There was a ubiquitous assumption that the white student’s attribution of meaning to the Confederate flag was ‘just hers,’ so no one else had any ‘business’ complaining about it. The flag’s meaning became a form of private property that she could control exclusively and despite other assertions of its symbolic power” (29–30).

55. In recent years the Confederate battle flag has become a rallying symbol for a barely disguised neo-Confederate racist movement in the South. See “Rebels with a Cause,” Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, no. 99 (Summer 2000): 6–1 2, and Ron Nixon, “Letter from South Carolina,” Nation, May 15, 2000, 21–23.

56. Two black founders of a company called “NuSouth” have made one attempt at forging such a new symbol. They have created a logo for a line of clothing, consisting of the Confederate flag in the colors of African liberation—red, green, and black. Though these men are primarily out to make money rather than engage in a political project, this is nevertheless the sort of process that could lead to the cultural shift required for the widespread discrediting of the Confederate flag as an appropriate symbol of southern pride. See Jack Hitt, “Confederate Chic,” Gentleman’s Quarterly, Nov. 1997, 261ff. The ingeniousness of the “NuSouth” flag is that it both evokes the flag that is so meaningful to many people, yet explicitly and pointedly distances itself from its racist meanings. According to a March 1999 account, several people wore shirts with the logo to the Million Man March in 1995, but 70 percent of sales are to white customers. Curtis Wilkie, “Pair Redo Stars, Bars in Hues of Liberation,” Boston Globe, Mar. 20, 1999, A1, A7.

57. The swastika is a particularly good example of change in the public meaning of a symbol. Although few in the Western world would deny that the swastika is, currently, a racist symbol, it has existed as a good luck (or otherwise innocuous) symbol for several thousand years and in many different parts of the world (including the United States, where it was once used as a Coca-Cola logo), having originated in India. Whether in the foreseeable future the swastika can shed the cultural meanings associated with Nazism is doubtful, though some persons wish to attempt such a resuscitation. Sarah Boxer, “A Symbol of Hatred Pleads Not Guilty,” New York Times, July 29, 2000, A1 8.

58. Tatsha Robertson, “Old Symbols, New Debates,” Boston Globe, Aug. 7, 1999, B1, B5.

59. I am grateful to David Wong for pressing me to clarify what it is that makes a symbol racist.

60. There is no denying that children are often aware that their remark or joke is hurtful. Florence and Miriam Davidson report a child coming into a room and saying, “Is anyone Jewish?” so that, if the answer is no, he can tell a joke. The Davidsons’ informants said that in such situations no one ever admits to being Jewish. To do so would be to spoil the good time of one’s peers, and to reveal oneself as a member of an ethnic group that is ripe for insult and disdain. The children telling the joke, and those laughing at it, realize that it is offensive, and that it puts down an ethnic/racial group; it is in that sense racist. Florence H. and Miriam M. Davidson, Changing Childhood Prejudice: The Caring Work of the Schools (Westport, Conn., 1995).

Children may recognize that a joke i s a t a group’s expense without really understanding how it insults the group. For example, someone in the group hearing the anti-Jewish joke might see that his friends are laughing at it yet not understand why it is funny; perhaps he is not aware of the anti-Jewish stereotypes the joke relies on. Later he might tell that same joke himself, remembering that it drew a laugh in non-Jewish company. As he knows the joke is hurtful, it is as important for the educator to help him see why he should not say it as it is to help the child who actually holds the stereotype of Jews that the joke is based on. The former child is on the road to developing fully racist attitudes as well. To be able to tell racist jokes and to hear them without anyone objecting legitimizes racist stereotypes and thus encourages the actual adopting (not only the purveying) of those stereotypes.

61. Lilia Bartolomé and Donaldo Macedo, “Dancing with Bigotry: The Poisoning of Racial and Ethnic Identities,” Harvard Education Review 67, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 241–42.

62. In this section I am discussing symbols that are racist because of their content and in light of their history and cultural meaning. A symbol or epithet can be racist, however, because of the displayer’s or speaker’s intention in using it, not because it is in any way culturally racist. For example, in 1994, Nation of Islam lieutenant Khallid Muhammad referred to Jews as “bagel-eaters” in a speech at Keene College. This remark was antisemitic because Muhammad intended it as a racial or ethnic insult, not because “bagel-eater” is a culturally established offensive expression for Jews. Jayson Blair, “K. A. Muhammad, 53, Dies; Ex-official of Nation of Islam,” New York Times, Feb. 18, 2001.

63. Mike Royko, “Time to Be Color Blind to All Words of Hatred,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 9, 1994, 3.

64. In a 1998 case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals described “nigger” as “the most noxious racial epithet in the contemporary American lexicon,” and asserted that the word “as applied to blacks is uniquely provocative and demeaning and there is probably no word or phrase that could be directed at any other group that could cause comparable injury.” Monteiro v. Tempe Union High School Disctrict, 158 F. 3d 1022 (CA 9 1998), cited in Randall Kennedy, “Who Can Say ‘Nigger’…and Other Related Questions,” Tanner Lectures, Stanford University, 1999, pp. 4–5 (in manuscript).

65. An interesting perspective on the word’s use by younger blacks is provided by a black student: “When T called me a ‘nigger’ it really made me mad. It didn’t use to make me as mad when I heard that word. But now I know how my African ancestors were made slaves and it’s different. I know what it means.” Deborah Byrnes, “Addressing Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in the Classroom,” in Common Bonds: Anti-bias Teaching in a Diverse Society, ed. Byrnes and Gary Kiger (Wheaton, Md., 1992), 19. It must be mentioned, however, that the use of “nigger” by blacks has been defended by many blacks—a familiar pattern of a group appropriating a term used to insult them for positive purposes. Such “reclamation,” by stigmatized groups, of derogatory terms referring to them is insightfully explored in Lynne Tirrell, “Derogatory Terms: Racism, Sexism, and the Inferential Role Theory of Meaning,” in Language and Liberation, ed. Christina Hendricks and Kelly Oliver (Albany, N. Y., 1999). There is no inconsistency in regarding the use of racially charged symbols and language as morally asymmetrical with respect to their use by an in-group or an out-group. Indeed, I defend a similar asymmetry in chapter 2.

66. I am grateful to Jorge Garcia for pressing me to recognize racist believing as a phenomenon distinct from racist belief. Garcia explores both in “Heart of Racism” and, especially, “Current Conceptions,” 14–16.

67. Anthony Appiah similarly distinguishes between “propositional racists,” who abandon racist beliefs in the face of counter-evidence, and “racially prejudiced” persons, who do not (generally because they have an ideological attachment to those beliefs, perhaps because they serve to rationalize such persons’ own privileged position). “Racisms,” 6–9.

68. It is by no means easy to discern whether a person actually holds a belief subconsciously or acts as if she holds such a belief but really does not.

69. David T. Wellman, Portraits of White Racism, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), xi. Wellman’s is by no means an idiosyncratic view. The idea that racist beliefs should be understood as those whose social effect is to defend white privilege is a familiar trend in discussions of racism. See for example, Harlan Dalton, Racial Healing: Confronting the Fear between Blacks and Whites (New York, 1996), 93.

70. Wellman’s use of “defend” in his definition of “racist beliefs” carries an implication that the belief s proponents are taking sides in a social struggle over advantage and disadvantage, an implication somewhat at odds with his phrase “regardless of the intentions involved.”

71. In 1999 the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights circulated guidelines stating that the use of any educational test that has a significant disparate impact on members of any race is discriminatory and is illegal “unless it is educationally necessary and there is no practicable alternative form of assessment.” Patrick Healy, “Civil Rights Office Questions Legality of College’s Use of Standardized Tests,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 28, 1999, A28.

72. For example, though Martin Trow concedes that the current degree of underpreparation of blacks and Latinos that results in lower scores on tests than whites is indeed rooted in historical racial injustices, he nevertheless contends that the positive value of color blindness, and of uniformity of standards are more morally compelling than the reasons in favor of admitting those black and Latino applicants. “California after Racial Preferences,” Public Interest (Spring 1999): 64–85. For my argument that “color blindness” can not bear the moral weight that views like Trow’s place on it, see chapter 4.

73. See, for example, Gertrude Ezorsky, Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), 9. The term “institutional racism” was coined by Ture and Hamilton in 1967, but their usage differs from more recent ones in an important respect. They use it to refer to intentional subordination, accompanied by antiblack attitudes. The more recent definitions, on which I have drawn, retain the idea that racially unjust outcomes can be a product of the “normal” workings of institutions and policies, but jettison Ture and Hamilton’s implication that these workings are always undergirded by racial animus. Ture and Hamilton, Black Power, 3–6.

74. Indeed, Ezorsky recognizes these benefits. Racism and Justice, 24.

75. The Supreme Court, however, has ruled such a compromise between seriority and affirmative action unconstitutional. Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, 106 S.Ct. 1842 (1986).

76. One could define “institutional racism” as “race-blind processes that increase, or maintain, racial injustice and that involve nothing ethically positive enough to outweigh this ethically deleterious feature.” This would be an improvement over the definition offered in the text, if more cumbersome. But it would still suffer from the implication (denied by the definition but carried by the common associations with “racism”) that the processes are themselves somehow tainted with racist motives. Andrew Koppelman, Antidiscrimination Law and Social Equality (New Haven, Conn., 1997), 48.

77. William Julius Wilson finds this practice and motivation in some employers, in his study of employers in Chicago. W. J. Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York, 1996), chap. 5.

78. Such intentional exclusion might not be an entirely straightforward case of racial bias or antipathy, but rather “statistical discrimination”, in which employers harbor no animus toward blacks but believe on the basis of a statistical generalization that blacks are less reliable workers than some other groups. See chapter 4.

79. My account of institutional racism as “racist institutions” or “institutionalized racism” is indebted to Garcia, “Heart of Racism,” 10–11, 24–28; and “Current Conceptions,” 6.

80. Gaston County v. United States, 395 U.S. 285 (1969). My account of the Gaston County case is drawn from Robert E. Smith, Racism in the Post Civil Rights Era: Now You See it, Now You Don’t (Albany, N.Y., 1996), 58–59.

81. “Insurer to Pay Back $206 Million,” Boston Globe, June 22, 2000, D2.

82. Greg Winter, “Coca-Cola Settles Racial Bias Case,” New York Times, Nov. 17, 2000, A1, C6.

83. This development, and its wider deleterious effects on urban black communities, has been extensively documented by William Julius Wilson in two famous studies, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago, 1987), and When Work Disappears. Wilson’s arguments about the racial dimension of black poverty and their ethical implications are given nuanced scrutiny by the philosopher Bernard Boxill in Blacks and Social Justice, rev. ed. (Lanham, Md., 1992), 30–31, 44–46, 227–245.

84. It has been plausibly argued that the increased ideological opposition to such programs, which is harmful to low-income persons of every race, has in part been driven by their association with persons of color, and especially blacks (who indeed are disproportionately benefited by them). See Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York, 1992). If this is so, then racial animus or disaffection would play some role in the sustaining (though not the original causing) of both the race and the class injustices described in the text.

85. Wilson, When Work Disappears, 208.

86. One shortcoming I see in Jorge Garcia’s theory of racism (see note 24) is a failure to explain why contemporary reflective attitudes accord different moral valences to different forms of ill will or unconcern—and in particular why race-based ill will is more vicious than other forms. In Garcia’s view race-based ill will is simply one subspecies of ill will (or, perhaps, of unjustified ill will), distinguished from other forms by its object and cause (the other’s [assigned] race), but not by its moral weight or significance. (This viewpoint is implied rather than explicitly stated.) Although in his articles on this subject Garcia occasionally mentions the sorts of historical and social considerations I argue are central to the distinctive moral opprobrium of “racism,” he never builds these into his account of racism.

87. To say that these systems were “race-based” is to say that they were understood, especially by their perpetrators, to be appropriate and justified because of the racial character of the subjugated group. It is not to say they were motivated in their fundamental character by racial animus or an intrinsic desire to subjugate a racial group. On the contrary, as will be discussed further in chapter 6, most were motivated largely by greed for power and financial gain. (Nazism is an exception, in its relation to Jews.)

88. Consider the following want ad in the New York Evening Post, from 1830: “Wanted, A Cook or Chambermaid…must be American, Scotch, Swiss, or African—no Irish.” Cited in Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York, 1990), 131. On the lowly status of Irish Americans during this period, see David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).

89. Discrimination against the Irish was never given the force of law, as it was in respect to blacks, who were deprived of suffrage rights, could not intermarry, and were subject to other restrictions. (See chapter 7.) In this vital respect no “white” immigrant group faced legally enforced barriers comparable to those endured by blacks or, indeed, by Asians. (See chapter 7 for more on differential treatment of racial groups.)

90. Racism in the slavery and segregation eras was more likely to function in this all-or-nothing way. Nevertheless, there is much evidence that, even in such contexts, white attitudes toward blacks were often vary ambivalent. Thomas Jefferson is a particularly striking example. See Lott, Love and Theft, and Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York, 1998).

91. Bob Blauner, “‘Talking Past Each Other’: Black and White Languages of Race,” in Race and Ethnic Conflict: Contending Views on Prejudice, Discrimination, and Ethnoviolence, ed. Fred L. Pincus and Howard J. Ehrlich (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1994).

92. Confining the opprobrium of “racism” to particular categories requires more fine-tuning than I am able to give of what counts as a distinct “category.” Verbally insulting someone with a racist epithet is not morally worse than murdering him for personal gain (a nonracist reason) even though both are instances of “behavior.” One can avoid this problem formally by saying that the types in question must all be morally comparable, in the absence of racial considerations. So racist insults would be compared to (and would be worse than) nonracist insults; racist murders worse than nonracist murders. The latter intuition is recognized legally in the idea of a “hate crime”: a crime otherwise of the same type (e.g., violent assault) is rendered worthy of more severe punishment if it is motivated by hatred for certain categories of person.

93. This section is indebted to a discussion of an earlier draft with David Wilkins, Lani Guinier, Martha Minow, and especially David Wong and Jorge Garcia, and to subsequent comments from Garcia, to whom I am also grateful for his suggestion of the name of the section (“Selective Racism”), and of the type of racism or prejudice discussed therein.

94. A form of selective prejudice well known to social psychologists is that wherein attitudes toward individual members of a group do not always translate into comparable attitudes toward the group as such. Thus cooperative learning in schools, in which members of racial group A get to know, like, and respect members of racial group B, does not always result in a reduction of prejudice toward or stereotypes of group B itself. See Stephan, Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping, 42.

95. Someone who is hostile toward young males in general, not specifically black males, presents a different case, which is not racial prejudice but some combination of age and gender prejudice.

96. This form of selective racial prejudice is also manifest in white persons who say to a black person with whom they are friendly or toward whom they have positive feelings, “I don’t think of you as black,” wrongly thinking this remark to be a compliment and a demonstration that they lack prejudice. A similar phenomenon involves Christians saying “But some of my best friends are Jews” as evidence that they lack prejudice, failing to recognize that, as in the former case, seeing some individuals as exceptions to negative group-targeted affect or generalizations leaves those negative sentiments fully in place. This is a slightly different form of the phenomenon discussed in note 94.

97. Shipler reports a subtle but no doubt fairly common form of veiled animus toward blackness. A young light-skinned mixed-race woman said of her white employer who liked the Cosby Show that she “became very irate when one of the daughters named her twins Winnie and Nelson [after the Mandelas] because then the show became too black.” Shipler, Nation of Strangers, 134–135. It is as if many white people took the Cosby Show to be making a deal with them that they would warmly accept this black family-centered show as long as it did not mark itself as being “too black.” This form is in certain ways akin to what Adrian Piper called a form of “higher-order discrimination” (see note 43), in being directed toward blackness itself.

98. A modification of this form of selective prejudice—a common form, I would suggest—involves the subject being prejudiced against blacks in general, with the prejudice against young black males being especially intense; such prejudice cannot be accounted for as a summing of prejudice against young people and males. The confluence of identity categories is necessary to trigger the (given level of) prejudice.

99. I wish to thank the Francis Villemain Memorial Lecture series at San Jose State College, at which material from this chapter (and chapter 3) were presented in something like its present form.

Chapter 2. Can Blacks Be Racist?

1. The schema of “white” vs. “people of color” does not exactly apply to the Nazi philosophy, as both the superior groups (“Aryans”) and the inferior groups (Slavs, Jews) were primarily distinct Europeans subgroups who were conceived of as distinct races. Yet even in Nazism the superior “races” were viewed as lighter and the inferior as darker. Moreover, the Nazis did regard all the groups we now think of as “people of color” as inferior, though the Nazi alliance with the Japanese forced them to temper their view in that case. Neo-Nazism within the United States has tended to drop the “Aryan” emphasis and call the superior group “whites”; Jews are distinctly regarded as “nonwhite.”

2. Other ethnoracial groups were not included in these surveys, in part because all the studies have a historical dimension reaching back at least several decades, when the numbers of Asians and Latinos were much smaller, but also because the race problem has been standardly defined as “black and white.”

3. Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation, with a new preface by the author (Princeton, NJ., 1996); Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color; Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, and Krysan, Racial Attitudes.

4. Blauner, “Talking Past.”

5. Hochschild, Facing Up, 63 (1991 figures).

6. Blauner, “Talking Past,” 20. Admittedly, Blauner’s article was originally published in a general-circulation rather than scholarly publication. That form of writing can discourage qualification and nuance. Nevertheless, precisely because it will be read by a wider public, the author has a particular responsibility to guard against this sort of overstatement.

7. Navarette, Darker Shade of Crimson, 107–8.

8. Apache, Apache Ain’t Shit, Tommy Boy Music, Time Warner, 1993. Cited in “Lyrics by Black or Latin Artists Who Put out Violent Racism and Who Were Either Awarded Grammy’s or Were Promoted by Artists Who Won Grammy’s,” July 26, 1999, at www.home.att.net/*~phosphor/introtogrammys.html. This website has many examples of similar lyrics; whites are frequently referred to as “devils.”

Singing these lyrics does not make the performer or the writer “a racist” nor someone who harbors racist attitudes. Nevertheless, such performers are certainly purveying racist sentiments, even if they are just out to make a buck and do not expect to be taken seriously.

9. “‘Racial’ prejudice is severe against the roughly 700,000 Koreans who remain in Japan from among those imported for forced labor there during World War II. Despite the fact that more than forty years have passed and most of these so-called Koreans have become Japanese in language and living style, they are prevented as much as the laws permit from acquiring Japanese citizenship. Most Japanese still feel that marriage with the child of a Korean or Chinese immigrant, as with the surviving 2 percent of Japanese irrationally designated as outcasts (burakumin), would sully their ‘pure’ Japanese blood.” Edwin O. Reischauer, “Race Prejudice Pervades the World,” in The Japanese Today: Change and Continuity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), reprinted in On Prejudice: A Global Perspective, ed. Daniela Gioseffi (New York, 1993), 183. An article in the New York Times details the continuing devaluation of ethnic Koreans in Japan. Howard French, “Forever Korean: Once Scorned, Always Scorned,” New York Times, Nov. 20, 2000. On the burakumin, see Claude Fischer et al., Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (Princeton, N.J., 1996), esp. chap. 8. On more general racism within Japanese society, especially in connection with the explicitly racial discourse circulating in Japan during World War II, see Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997), 127–28. A particularly poignant and horrible example of transnational racism is that of a Mauritanian black man who was expelled by Arab authorities because he was black, then immigrated to the United States, where he was murdered eight years later by a white skinhead in Denver, Colorado. James Brooke, “Killing Wasn’t Much, Skinhead Says,” New York Times, Nov. 22, 1997, 47.

10. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Annandale, Australia, 1998), 34.

11. “Friends Helped Labor Nominee Move Up, Then Almost Brought Her Down,” New York Times, Mar. 12, 1997. (The article is about Alexis Herman, then President Clinton’s secretary of labor; Godwin was a classmate and friend of Herman’s.)

12. The New Republic, Nov. 6, 1995, 27.

13. I remember reading and being impressed with this point years ago in Bernard Boxill’s first edition of his pioneering work, Blacks and Social Justice, but am unable to find the reference in the more recent edition. Boxill, Blacks and Social Justice, rev. ed.

14. Ibid., 51.

15. Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America (Minneapolis, 1991), 28.

16. Studs Terkel, Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (New York, 1992), 205.

17. This example, and much of the accompanying argument in the remainder of this chapter, is taken from Lawrence Blum, “Moral Asymmetries in Racism,” in Racism and Philosophy, ed. Susan Babbitt and Sue Campbell (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999), 79–97. The example itself is adapted from Valerie Ooka Pang, “Racial Prejudice: Still Alive and Hurtful,” in Nitza Hidalgo, Emilie Siddle, and Ceasar McDowell, Facing Racism in Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 29.

18. I am not saying, however, that white dominance in the major institutions in the society is entirely irrelevant to the harm caused by nonwhites in subinstitutions in which they hold power. In the example earlier, the white student, though a minority in the school and thus vulnerable to the prejudices of his classmates, is “buffered” from the more extreme pain of a black student who knows that he is not only a minority in the school but subordinated and stigmatized in the larger society.

19. Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s influential account of race and racialization in the United States rejects the “racism equals prejudice plus power” view and asserts that blacks can be racist. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2d ed. (New York, 1994). 69–73. Garcia, however, points out in his perceptive assessment of their account that Omi and Winant retain a definitional link between racism and systems of domination. They see racism as an attempt to impose domination on another racial group. Racism does not require an actually existing structure of domination in the society, but does require an intention to dominate on the part of the racist. Garcia agrees with my rejection of this view on the grounds that racial antipathy is racism independent of any attempt to dominate. Garcia, “Philosophical Analysis,” 10–12.

20. “Playboy Interview—Spike Lee—Candid Conversation,” Playboy, July 1991, 51.

21. Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, expanded and updated (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995 [1992]), 33.

22. McCall describes a form of antiwhite hatred shared by his black ninth-grade peers, which led to violence against whites: “We all hated white people.…We walked through secluded areas of the building after classes on Fridays. When we came upon a white boy, somebody would light into him, then everybody sprang and we’d do him in.” Nathan McCall, Makes Me Wanna Holler (New York, 1994), 58.

23. For examples, see “For the Record,” in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report (published by Klanwatch, Spring 1997), 31: “A white woman was allegedly assaulted and robbed by a black man who used racial epithets.” “A white man was allegedly attacked by two Hispanic men who used racial slurs.”

24. Garcia makes this point about the powerless bigoted racist very convincingly. “Some Current Conceptions,” 13.

25. “Playboy Interview.”

26. Spike Lee’s portrayal of racism in his superb film Do the Right Thing (Universal Pictures, 1987) belies his cavalier remarks about individual racial prejudice on the part of persons of color. In one powerful montage scene, Lee displays five characters—a Korean, an African American, an Italian, a Jew, and a Latino—spewing out racial epithets at one of the other groups. The audience is clearly meant to react to this scene not as a universal condition of innocuous prejudice but rather as a disturbingly widespread manifestation of racism, which the film implies is in some form responsible for the serious racial divisions and troubles explored therein.

27. That racism is ideology is an argument much less frequently made, however, than that racism is prejudice plus power. Outside of some academic circles, “racism” has long since broadened its reach beyond ideology.

28. Miles’s understanding of “ideology” seems too expansive to me; it jettisons whatever advantage is gained by using the connection to the original Nazi ideology as leverage to prevent conceptual inflation.

29. This theory of white inferiority is derived from a book by Michael Bradley, The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man’s Racism, Sexism, and Aggression (Toronto, 1978). Frank Dikötter argues that around the middle of the last century, a racial consciousness emerged in China in relation to Westerners, as a result of first contacts and a need to defend Chinese civilization. “The Idea of Race in Modern China,” in Ethnicity, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith (Oxford, 1996), 245ff.

30. Miles would not be unhappy with the consequence that blacks can be racist; he rejects the view that only whites can be racist. Racism, 6.

31. Appiah makes a similar point when he says that certain racially prejudiced persons may not be morally responsible for their prejudices and so might be bad people yet not be responsible for being bad. “Racisms,” 9.

32. Muhammad explains to Baldwin an elaborate theory of history premised on the idea that the white man is a “devil” whose reign on earth is soon coming to an end, when he will be totally destroyed. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York, 1988 [1963]), 90–93.

33. Marilyn Friedman suggests that it might sometimes be of value, and in any case justified, for the racially victimized to be racist toward, though not physically harm, their victimizers. Without engaging all of her quite interesting arguments on this point, I suggest that the most she shows is that it might make someone feel good to be racist, not that it would be genuinely empowering or enhance a worthy form of self-respect. The initial plausibility of her argument lies in conflating the targeting of one’s actual victimizer with targeting “a member of the group that systematically perpetrates the primary racism.” Friedman, “Racism: Paradigms and Moral Appraisal (A Response to Blum),” in Babbitt and Campbell, Racism and Philosophy, 102–7. Bernard Boxill seems to me correct on this matter when he argues that while it generally expresses and enhances self-respect to protest and defend oneself against racial wrongs, the form of that protest is not a racist attack on one’s victimizer but an assertion of one’s dignity and a challenge to the perpetrator’s view of oneself. (Boxill cites W. E. B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass in support of this view.) Boxill, Blacks and Social Justice, 187–88.

34. Some dimensions of this asymmetry argument will apply to racist practices and institutions as well; but I am concerned here only with personal racism.

35. In an insightful critique of the article on which this chapter is based, Marilyn Friedman raised two objections. One is that my discussion of moral asymmetry seemed to imply that racial victimization of whites by persons of color was the paradigmatic form of racism, so that the sources of asymmetry involved in forms of racism against persons of color appeared as “extra” factors over and above the core meaning of racism as it occurred in antiwhite racism. I think Friedman may have been right about this, and through my account of the historical sources of the moral opprobrium attached to racism in chapter 1 I have tried to make it clear that our sense of what racism is derives primarily from the racism of whites. At the same time, the contemporary meaning of “racism” certainly does include antiwhite racial antipathy and inferiorization.

Friedman’s second criticism was that I seemed to regard single acts as the fundamental unit of racism, rather than patterns or structures. I have tried to make clear in chapter 1 that what is conceptually fundamental in racism are two themes—antipathy and inferiorization—and that no specific category in which those themes are manifest (acts, beliefs, symbols, statements, persons, structures, institutions, societies) is more fundamental than any other. Friedman, “Racism: Paradigms,” 98–107.

36. Shipler, Nation of Strangers, 150.

37. Examples of violence against vulnerable but nonsubordinate groups: the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American, in 1982, and the murder of Asian American children in an elementary school in Stockton, California, in 1989, both discussed in Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: 1992), 134–60. Others include violence against Jews and Asian Americans by Benjamin Smith previously noted, and Buford Furrow. Furrow, an emotionally disturbed man with a history of involvement with anti-Semitic groups, declared he had intended his shootings at a Jewish community center to send “a wake-up call to America to kill Jews.” Linda Deutsch, “Gunman at Jewish Center Gets Life Term,” Boston Globe, Mar. 27, 2001, A3.

38. “Asian Americans” do not constitute a unified group from the point of view of positional inferiority. Groups present in the United States for several generations, such as Korean Americans, Japanese Americans, and Chinese Americans, are not positionally inferior, while newer immigrant groups from Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, for example) are.

39. Differences in European and American relationships to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are not the only factors accounting for the presence of such laws in Europe and their absence in the United States. A stronger emphasis in the United States on protecting speech independent of content is another factor.

40. Laurence Thomas insightfully explores several other moral and epistemological asymmetries between subordinate groups (which he calls “diminished social categories”) and nonsubordinate groups. “Moral Deference,” African-American Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions, ed. John P. Pittman (New York, 1997).

41. Hochschild, Facing Up.

42. Dalton, Racial Healing, 206–10.

Chapter 3. Varieties of Racial Ills

1. This was reported to me by one of my high school students, and it is a common complaint among college students of color. Vivian Paley reports a similar incident. A black high school student says, “Yes, the teachers always turn to me when anything about black people comes up and I don’t like that.” Vivian Gussin Paley, Kwanzaa and Me (Cambridge: Mass., 1995). 135.

2. Thomas Morgan, “The World Ahead: Black Parents Prepare Their Children for Pride and Prejudice,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 27, 1985, 2.

3. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton N.J., 1994).

4. Taylor’s essay has lent support to a commonly held view that the ethnic dimension of personal identity is the primary appropriate object of recognition, although the argument Taylor actually proffers for the good of recognition is much less particularized in scope. (The Haitian American student did, indeed, care about her ethnic identity; but she needn’t have.) Taylor also assumes (again, echoing a widely held view) that everyone who is attached to her ethnic identity must be steeped in the culture that is connected to that ethnicity; but someone could care about her Japanese American identity without having grown up in or adopted anything like a distinctive Japanese American culture. It is the importance of the ethnic identity feature to the student, not the presence or absence of an ethnoculture, that triggers the need for recognition. For further critique of these assumptions in Taylor’s work, see Lawrence Blum, “Recognition and Multiculturalism in Education,” presentation to the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, April 2001; “Ethnicity, Identity, Community” in Justice and Caring: The Search for Common Ground in Education, ed. Michael Katz, Nel Noddings, and Kenneth Strike (New York, 1999); and K. Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Cultural Reproduction,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutmann.

5. Skin Deep, Dir. Frances Reid. Iris Films, 1991.

6. Racial groups generally wish recognition not only for the distinctness of their identities, but also as equals. For a view that Taylor fails adequately to distinguish between these forms of recognition—and, more generally, fails to appreciate how issues facing racial groups are different from those facing ethnocultural groups—see L. Blum, “Recognition, Value, and Equality: A Critique of Charles Taylor’s and Nancy Fraser’s Accounts of Multiculturalism,” in Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate, ed. Cynthia Willett (London, 1998), 73–99, and L. Blum, “Multiculturalism, Racial Justice, and Community: Reflections on Charles Taylor’s The Politics of Recognition,’” in Defending Diversity: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives on Pluralism and Multiculturalism, ed. L. Foster and P. Herzog (Amherst, Mass., 1994), 175–206.

By tying the form of recognition involved here to the individual’s relationship to her group identity, I deliberately avoid having to take a position on the complex matter of the character of the group identity in its own right. In the context of “identity politics,” conceptions of these group identities are often, and rightly, criticized for being too narrowly construed, thereby constricting individual members; for pretending that clear and sharp boundaries can be drawn around group identities; and for encouraging a narrow group-focused concern. By focusing on the individual, my account takes the identity as the individual himself construes it; it is that identity that warrants recognition, not the group identity as construed by some subgroup (for example, a traditionalist or conservative one).

7. A further dimension of this situation involves the white friends’ failure to see the importance of celebrating King’s birthday in its own right, not its importance to the friend. The former might involve an ignorance of or, worse, a resistance to crediting King as an important national leader and to acknowledging the centrality of race and racism in American history.

8. Sometimes the demand, or plea, to be seen as an individual is a way of denying group-based identities that one would rather not acknowledge. For example, it can be a way for white persons to deny that, like it or not, they are seen as white, and that certain privileges come with that status. (See “White Privilege,” below.) But appreciation of individuality is only one value in the general domain of race and culture, and should not be understood as a necessarily overriding one.

9. Race and skin color are not the same thing, as we shall see in chapter 4, but “skin color” is sometimes used, as here, to mean “race.”

10. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream (1963),” in Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco, 1991), 219.

11. Letter from John Ciccone, director of the South Boston Information Center, to Boston Globe, Nov. 12, 1998.

12. Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan.5, 1994, B4.

13. Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism (New York, 1997), 5.

14. David Hollinger, PostEthnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995), 171.

15. Sleeper, Liberal Racism, 9.

16. Values involved in the affirmative action dispute are, for example, the principle of “selection by merit”; procedural fairness; race blindness; correcting historical injustices; educating future leaders of major racial groups; the value of racial diversity to education; and the like. Affirmative action will be discussed in more detail in chapter 4.

17. Sleeper, Liberal Racism, 4.

18. In chapter 6 I will appropriate the term “racialism” for a different use.

19. A countervailing argument is that one should select the white instructor precisely in order to break down the very social division that makes the black students uncomfortable with the white instructor.

20. Nor need a racialist think of racial identity as “primordial” in order to be a racialist. She might well recognize the socially formed and contingent character of racial identities, yet still give them too much importance. This point will be discussed further in chapter 8.

21. See Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education, chap. 2.

22. Navarette, Darker Shade, 81.

23. On reasons for and values of in-group socializing, especially among black students, see Tatum, “Why Are All the Black Kids.” Tatum is particularly sensitive to the developmental dimensions of same-race socializing—how different students’ needs are dependent on their stages of racial identity development.

24. The freedom that student groups sometimes seek for cultural expression is a further value, different from the value of recognition of the ethnocultural group. Here students seek only the freedom to express their culture, whether anyone else recognizes the culture (or cultural identity) or not. In practice these two values are not always easy to distinguish, since both the freedom and the recognition have to be granted by the wider institution, and granting the freedom does itself involve a kind of recognition. Yet what one desires from recognition depends on other persons in a way that desiring freedom of cultural expression does not. In “Politics of Recognition,” Taylor argues that the Quebecois desire freedom to maintain their distinctive ethnoculture but also (what they do not always admit) acknowledgment from the Anglo-dominated Canadian society as a whole (64).

25. Shipler, Country of Strangers, 45 (drawing on interviews with black college students).

26. Tatum argues that the healthiest form of racial identity among minorities involves a security about one’s racial identity that permits friendships with members of other races who respect one’s own race and racial identity. “Why Do All the Black Kids,” 76. Tatum draws her scheme of racial identity development from William Cross Jr., Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American Identity (Philadelphia, 1991).

27. In describing the experiences of Cedric Jennings, a black student at Brown University from a poor, urban background, the writer Ron Suskind says, “He feared that if he got close to Harambee [a residence hall for black students and students interested in Afro-American studies], the undertow would be irresistible and his oaths about integration, about taking the toughest path, mixing with kids from all races and creeds, would give way to a separatist compromise.” (Suskind adds his own comment: “At Brown, that’s the path of least resistance almost everyone takes.”) Ron Suskind, A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League (New York, 1998), 332.

28. “Liberal” and “conservative” were determined by listings of members of the Liberal and Conservative parties in New York.

29. The liberals also hung up on the black caller more frequently than did the conservatives, although the conservatives were less likely to help the blacks than to help the whites. Thus the conservatives could be accounted more prejudiced than the liberals; but it was the liberals’ particular form of prejudice in which Gaertner and Dovidio were interested.

30. On this and the other experiments, see Samuel Gaertner and John F. Dovidio, “The Aversive Form of Racism,” in Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism, ed. Gaertner and Dovidio (Orlando, Fla., 1986).

31. Gaertner and Dovidio draw the term “aversive racism,” the idea of a conflict between racist feelings and an egalitarian conscience, and the centrality of avoidance (rather than a desire to dominate the racial other), from Kovel’s White Racism.

32. Gaertner and Dovidio, “Aversive Form,” 63.

33. In an article published in 1997, Gaertner and Dovidio (in concert with other authors) reassess their “aversive racism” hypothesis and the experiments on which it was based. They say that the differential treatment of blacks and whites need not have stemmed from an animus toward blacks but from a “prowhite” sentiment analogous to favoring members of one’s family in invitations to a holiday dinner. (Both the new analysis, and the analogy on which it draws, seem faulty to me.) Abandoning the idea of an antiblack animus seems to me akin to acknowledging that a more benign sentiment such as racial discomfort might be operating. Nevertheless, Gaertner and Dovidio continue to refer to the subject as an “aversive racist.” This seems even more conceptually misleading than in their original hypothesis, since they now much more definitively deny that any racial animus is involved. Samuel L. Gaertner, John F. Dovidio, Brenda S. Banker, Mary C. Rust, Jason A. Nier, Gary R. Mottola, and Christine M. Ward, “Does White Racism Necessarily Mean Antiblackness? Aversive Racism and Prowhiteness,” in Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society, ed. Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell, and L. Mun Wong (New York, 1997), 167–78.

34. Gaertner and Dovidio would not call such children aversive racists either, since their view thereof involves a self-conception as a racial egalitarian. It is this self-conception that drives the aversions from consciousness. But it is the alleged aversions themselves that my example of the children is meant to question.

35. Walter and Cookie Stephan examine several forms and sources of “intergroup anxiety” that would apply specifically to racial anxiety yet would not count as racism or racial prejudice (though they do count prejudice as one source of such anxiety). Walter G. Stephan and Cookie White Stephan, “Intergroup Anxiety,” Journal of Social Issues 41, no. 3 (1985): 157–75.

36. At the same time, racial anxiety can certainly mask an unconscious hostility or animus. Perhaps we should read Gaertner and Dovidio’s concept of aversive racism as implying that it always does.

37. On the civic value of racially mixed schools in which students learn to become more comfortable with members of different racial groups, see Lawrence Blum, “Racial Integration in a Multicultural Age,” in NOMOS XLIII: Moral and Political Education, ed. Stephen Macedo and Yael Tamir (New York, 2001).

38. Walter Stephan, Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping in Schools (New York: 1999), provides a wealth of information about how to improve intergroup relations in schools.

39. Shipler, Nation of Strangers, 448.

40. “The over-readiness to make blanket charges of racism—against people, points of view, institutions—has had an effect very nearly the opposite of the one intended. How seriously can one take the idea of racism if everyone is said to be a racist?” Paul M. Sniderman and Thomas Piazza, The Scar of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 6–7, 66.

41. Sniderman and Piazza seldom cite particular authors as espousing the views they oppose; here, however, they appear to have in mind theorists such as Sears and McConahay (discussed in chapter 1, note 40), who tend to see current racism as bolstered by core American values.

42. Sniderman and Piazza, Scar of Race, 92–97.

43. Ibid., 108–9.

44. Part of the reason Sniderman and Piazza may be equivocal about counting some white stereotyping of blacks as racial prejudice is that they seem ambivalent about whether the stereotyping is, in some sense, warranted. On the one hand they repeatedly refer to the stereotypes as “one-sided,” “moralistic,” “oversimplified”; on the other hand they say the stereotypes (even the “nasty” ones) “capture real features of everyday experience” or have “an element of reality.” Ibid., 42–44.

45. Ibid., 109.

46. I want to clarify that I am taking no stand on the empirical links between personal racism (in any of its forms) and stances on race-related policy matters. I am concerned only to recognize that these are two different issues, and that different moral vocabularies apply to each. I do, therefore, agree with Sniderman and Piazza as against “new racism” theorists that policy stances that amount to opposition to black interests are not automatic, or criterial, indicators of personal racism. But this still leaves it open whether in fact much opposition to policies that benefit blacks is driven by personal racism.

47. Ibid., 176–77.

48. The authors’ particular concern to demonstrate shortcomings in affirmative action is part, I think, of what leads them to this normatively unwarranted, morally neutral stance toward historical racial injustices.

49. Sniderman and Piazza themselves imply, at several places, that a central cause of continuing racial inequality is a legacy of institutionalized racism with roots in the slavery and segregation eras. But they ref use to take the next step—coming to grips with this legacy as a core moral response to contemporary racial injustice. The following passage illustrates some of the confusion here; “All this further strengthens the argument that the central problem of racial politics is not the problem of prejudice. Bigotry provides a temptingly simple cause for a complex problem; it underlines the moral appeal of working to overcome the legacy of slavery and discrimination by fixing attention on the evil originally responsible for it. And not least, it fixes responsibility for the persistence of the problem on ‘them’—on the out-and-out bigots—in the process diverting attention from ‘us.’” Ibid., 107. Overcoming the legacy of slavery and discrimination is precisely not a way of putting the blame on “bigots,” especially not current ones. Instead, it is a way of calling attention to ongoing processes and structures that operate independent of bigotry. It is also quite misleading to speak of the cause of slavery and segregation as being “bigotry.” The causality is, if anything, in the other direction; bigotry arose as a rationalization for slavery and segregation, themselves founded on power, status, and economic gain. (See below, chapter 6.)

For an excellent critique of other errors of historical analysis in The Scar of Race, see George Lipsitz, “‘Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac’: White Supremacy, Antiblack Racism, and the New Historicism,” American Literary History 7, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 700–25, esp. 705–10. (Lipsitz is blind, however, to the genuine interest and merit in Sniderman and Piazza’s arguments.)

50. Dalton. Racial Healing, 7.

51. Charles Mills explains the “invisibility” of white privilege as an epistemologically deep dimension of its character: “In a racially structured polity, the only people who can find it psychologically possible to deny the centrality of race are those who are racially privileged, for whom race is invisible precisely because the world is structured around them, whiteness as the ground against which the figures of other races—those who, unlike us, are raced—appear.” Mills, Racial Contract, 76.

52. Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 article, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies,” is generally credited with bringing the idea of white privilege to the attention of a wide academic audience. In Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, ed. Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont, Calif., 1992), 70–82. The article is widely reprinted and still frequently referred to. McIntosh listed forty-six unearned advantages or “privileges” (having introduced the term, McIntosh goes on to question it) that accrue to white persons in relation to persons of color.

53. Beverly Tatum defines racism as “a system of advantage based on race.” “Why Do All the Black Kids,” 7 (drawing from David Wellman). Dalton says racism is “culturally acceptable ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that serve to sustain the racial pecking order.” Racial Healing, 92.

54. White privilege is more closely tied to structures of racial injustice, discussed in chapter 1, in connection with institutionalized racism.

55. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in the United States, 1860—1880 (New York, 1992 [1935]).

56. Derman-Sparks and Phillips, Teaching/Learning Anti-racism, 24.

57. One problem I see in Charles Mills’s excellent and compelling argument for the pervasiveness and invisibility of white privilege in Western society is a conflation of racial and national privilege. Mills is correct to say that being born in the West grants unearned privilege; and that, within Western nations, being white is privileged. But he fails to note, and implies the contrary, that being born black or otherwise “of color” in the West also garners national privilege. Blacks may, on the average, benefit less than whites from national privilege; but simply being born in the United States gives them unearned advantages over black persons born in the “Third World.” Mills, Racial Contract, 19–40.

Chapter 4. Racial Discrimination and Color Blindness

1. David Wasserman points out that the concept of discrimination encompasses distinct, morally significant features. “Discrimination, Concept of’ in Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, vol. 1 (San Diego, 1998), 805–814. My view of what those features are differs from Wasserman’s in certain respects.

2. Whether the difference between effort and ascription is morally relevant (to injustice or discrimination in selection) for some reason other than what it is to be treated as an individual is a different matter. For example, it could be argued that only those characteristics reflecting the applicant’s effort are fair to use in college admissions. (As far as I know, however, no colleges operate with such a principle, which would disallow legacy status, geographical location, class background, and other ascriptive factors standardly taken as pertinent.)

3. To be precise, what is described here is the structure of “reward goods”—goods to be allocated selectively—and the form of discrimination applicable to them. “Equality goods” involve a different form of discrimination. This distinction will be discussed below.

4. The judgment of wrongful discrimination on the basis of arbitrary and irrelevant characteristics depends on a further tacit assumption—that the goals of the institution are worthy, or at least morally acceptable. We would not say that it was “wrongful discrimination” for a neo-Nazi group to refuse admission to an aspirant because she was too short. We simply do not apply the morally negative concept of discrimination when the goals of the organization are unworthy, though we might say that it is irrational of such a group to distinguish among aspirants on the basis of certain qualities.

5. This account of the conceptual and empirical substructure of discrimination as arbitrariness involves some oversimplification; it assumes that determination of the legitimate goals of an institution is logically prior to, and entirely distinct from, a determination of “relevant qualities.” But we sometimes judge an institution’s goal as unworthy, at least in part, because countenancing it will yield a determination of relevance that we find objectionable. Robert Post describes a case in which a court ruled that it was illegitimate for an airline to utilize its “sexy image” as a basis on which to hire only “attractive female flight attendants,” on the grounds that doing so played into unfortunate gender stereotypes. Robert Post, “Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law,” California Law Review 8, no. 1 (Jan. 2000): 23. Post’s article details the intricate and complex relationships between determination of legitimate institutional goals and judgments of the legitimacy of treating certain characteristics as relevant (primarily with regard to gender-related characteristics in employment contexts). Post’s argument also suggests that our considered judgments about morally legitimate institutional goals and relevant characteristics is affected by whether the institution is public or private. See also Deborah Rhode’s discussion of “bona fide occupational qualifications” in Justice and Gender: Sex Discrimination and the Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 92ff.

6. Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier, “The Future of Affirmative Action: Reclaiming the Innovative Ideal,” California Law Review 84, no. 4 (July 1996): 953–1036, esp. 969–970.

7. See David Wilkins, “Introduction: The Context of Race,” in Gutmann and Appiah, Color Conscious, 18: “The looser the fit between these ‘color blind’ criteria and the social purposes of the job, the less force there is to the claim that departing from these criteria to achieve some other social purpose (for example, breaking racial stereotypes) violates the rights of either those who are not selected or, more important, those who ultimately use the service.” Wilkins’s stance suggests a slightly different way of framing the normative structure underlying “discrimination”: to regard some of the goals guiding the selection procedure not as goals of the institution itself but as more general social goals (correcting for historical racial injustice, for example, or breaking racial stereotypes) that are appropriate for the institution to pursue. It will become legitimate for the institution to make use of those goals in its selection procedure when the institution’s own goals underdetermine the criteria to be used in selection, that is, when there is a looseness of fit between the institution’s goals and currently utilized selection criteria (for example, SAT scores). (This point is similar to that made by Robert Post above, note 5.)

8. Wilkins, “Context of Race,” 18.

9. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978). The other justices forming the majority did not concur with this “diversity” rationale, though they did concur in upholding certain forms of affirmative action admission practices that Powell saw as in accord with that rationale.

10. In fact, Bakke yields a fairly weak diversity-based rationale for singling out racial identity, as the First Circuit Court of Appeals pointed out in its rejection of the Boston Latin School’s affirmative action admissions policy. Wessmann v. Gittens, 98–1657 (1st Cir. 1998). There are many forms of diversity of opinion and experience relevant to education; why, then, should race be privileged over other dimensions of diversity? See Elizabeth Anderson, “Integration, Compensation, and Affirmative Action,’’presentation to Harvard Colloquium in Constitutional Law and Political Theory, Nov. 2000. A step toward putting the Bakke diversity rationale on a stronger footing was taken in a U.S. District Court case, concerning affirmative action in the University of Michigan’s undergraduate admissions, in December 2000. In that case, the judge found that the university had provided empirical support for the view that racial diversity promoted educational goals that (in contrast to some of the civic goals mentioned in the text) had no intrinsic bearing on race—goals such as “engagement in active thinking processes, growth in intellectual engagement and motivation, and growth in intellectual and academic skills.” Gratz v. Bollinger (case # 97-CV-75231-DT), Dec. 13, 2000 (United States District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division), 23.

11. See a recent reiteration of the argument that the mere taking account of race (to favor blacks and Latinos) automatically constitutes discrimination against whites in Roger Clegg, “Photographs and Fraud over Race,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 24, 2000, B17.

12. Johanna Schneller, in “Drama Queen,” Premier, Aug. 2000, 59, uses “golden” and “tawny” to describe Jennifer Lopez’s skin color.

13. Skin Deep, Air. Reid.

14. See for example Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London, 1997), 14, and F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (University Park, Pa., 1991), 99–105.

15. William Julius Wilson reports a study finding that even after education, income, family background, and place of residence were taken into account, “dark-skinned black men were 52% less likely to be working than light-skinned black men.” W. J. Wilson, When Work Disappears, 136.

16. See Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans (New York, 1993).

17. Yvonne treats skin color as analogous to eye color—a nonracial characteristic that happens to partially correlate with race (although Yvonne is not affected by the correlation). On eye color, see chapter 5.

18. The idea of immutable characteristics has played a role in the rationale for antidiscrimination law. “Since sex, like race and national origin, is an immutable characteristic determined solely by the accident of birth, the imposition of special disabilities upon the members of a particular sex because of their sex would seem to violate ‘the basic concept of our system that legal burdens should bear some relationship to individual responsibility.’” Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 686 (1973) (plurality opinion), cited in Andrew Koppelman, Antidiscrimination Law, 64. Koppelman makes a compelling case that immutability is not properly seen as so fundamental to the wrong of discrimination as this quote states (64–67).

19. Hopwood v. State of Texas 78 F. 3d 932 (5th Cir. 1996).

20. To acknowledge that race and racial identity are pertinent to educational goals is not to address the question of whether such goals are constitutionally legitimate, or, if they are, whether they carry sufficient weight to trump what the Fifth Circuit Court and other courts have regarded as discrimination against whites that attends the use of racial diversity as a factor in admissions. Justice Powell’s majority opinion in the Bakke case argued in the affirmative on this question; the Fifth Circuit, in the Hopwood case, explicitly ruled in the negative.

Moreover, my discussion of the Hopwood case is not meant as a critique of the full scope of the court’s legal reasoning in the case, but only of the portion that confuses skin color with racial identity. As I argue below I also think the court has misunderstood the character of discrimination, and racial discrimination in particular. But I am not in a position to say whether my criticism is legally, as well as morally, pertinent. For extended critiques of the court’s legal reasoning in Hopwood (and similar reasoning in comparable cases), see Reva Siegel, “The Racial Rhetorics of Colorblind Constitutionalism: The Case of Hopwood v. Texas,” in Race and Representation: Affirmative Action, ed. Robert Post and Michael Rogin (New York, 1998), 29–72, and Anderson, “Integration.”

21. As of November 2000, Michigan, Washington, D.C., Santa Cruz, California, and San Francisco were the only jurisdictions with laws against weight-based discrimination. Carey Goldberg, “Fat People Say an Intolerant World Condemns Them on First Sight,” New York Times, Nov. 5, 2000, 28.

22. White in Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., 473 U.S. 432 (1985), cited in Post, “Prejudicial Appearances,” 9–10.

23. I take the importance of stigma from Koppelman, Antidiscrimination Law, and Glenn Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). Loury utilizes this idea primarily in regard to race. Both Koppelman and Loury cite Erving Goffman’s pioneering work in this area, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York, 1986 [1963]).

24. This view of group harms is drawn from Owen Fiss, “Groups and the Equal Protection Clause,” in Equality and Preferential Treatment, ed. M. Cohen, T. Nagel, and T. M. Scanlon (Princeton, N.J., 1977), as described in Koppelman, Antidiscrimination Law, 81–82.

25. Subordination is not necessarily or even typically recognized as such, since to do so would imply recognizing it as morally wrong. Typically the dominant society regards the inequality as natural or deserved. It is this attitude that spawns inferiorizing or stigmatizing.

26. Koppelman, Antidiscrimination Law, 84.

27. Dinesh D’Souza cites a report in 1993 by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights based on an informal survey indicating that one-third of taxi drivers ref use to stop for black customers. Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York, 1995). 250–51.

28. Economists refer to this as “statistical discrimination” when the costs of acquiring the information necessary to make a fully-informed decision are too high or outweigh the costs and risks of making the decision based on the available, incomplete information.

29. D’Souza, End of Racism, 252.

30. Jody David Armour, Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism: The Hidden Costs of Being Black in America (New York, 1997), 20–21, 39–40. Armour’s book is an indispensable discussion of the moral character of rational discrimination, to which my own account is indebted.

31. Ibid., 38.

32. Charges of various sorts of bias in the criminal justice system more generally have been rife since the 1990s. One particularly troubling example is a report that at every point in the juvenile justice system, black and Latino youth are more harshly treated than their white counterparts. They are arrested more often and are much more likely to be held in jail, sent to juvenile prison, sent to adult prison, and given longer prison terms. “Among young people who have not been sent to a juvenile prison before, blacks are more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced by juvenile courts to prison.” Fox Butterfield, “Racial Disparities Seen as Pervasive in JuvenileJustice,” New York Times, April 26, 2000, A1, A18. By comparing similarly situated youth at each stage, the study, sponsored by the Justice Department, shows the magnifying of racial disparities at each successive stage in the process.

33. Fred Kaplan, “Meter Is Running on Giuliani’s Crackdown on Cabbies,” Boston Globe, Nov. 12, 1999, A3. Mayor Giuliani has raised the penalty to suspension, pending a hearing. Previously drivers were only fined. The article points out that almost all cabdrivers in New York are immigrants, and some are black. This fact might suggest that straightforward antiblack prejudice is not involved, but it cuts no ice against the idea that racial stereotyping is operating; one respondent, a professor who has studied black immigrant groups in New York, says, “A lot of West Africans or Haitians or Jamaicans who come here—they don’t know they’re ‘black’ yet.” At the same time, an instructor in a mandatory course in “racial sensitivity” for all new cabdrivers says, “The irony is, our drivers are victims of racism themselves. Some of them say the only way they can get a cab when they’re off duty is to wave their hack licenses in the air.”

34. Armour, Negrophobia, 56–57.

35. Although both cases involve race, they are not entirely comparable, since in the black case the women’s activity, justified though it is, plays into an existing and hurtful stereotype of the black rapist, while in the other there is no comparable race-specific stereotype.

36. Suppose, for example, that cabdrivers were permitted to ask prospective customers where they were going, and, if the driver had reason to be fearful of the location, to negotiate a compromise location.

37. As David Wasserman points out, such a group would be partly analogous to those regarded by eugenicists in the early twentieth century as “undesirables” whose numbers should be reduced through control of their reproduction. Wasserman, “Discrimination,” 809b. Wasserman claims that this argument depends on drawing an analogy with blacks, who are seen as the paradigmatic victims of stigmatizing discrimination. I am not certain of this; but in any case, the analogy does not necessarily depend on seeing eugenics as racist. Not all eugenicists were racists; E. A. Hooton, for example, thought some members of every group were biological undesirables. The opprobrium attached to eugenics, plausibly regarded as carrying over to discrimination against those with propensities to diseases or disabling conditions, is at least partly independent of the opprobrium of racism.

38. To say that everyone is entitled to a certain equality good is not to say who is morally bound to provide the good. In the case at hand, a teacher is plausibly regarded as one, although only one, of several agents (schools, principals, school systems) charged with providing equal education. Cabdrivers are transportation agents charged with providing equal access to public transport.

39. Glenn Loury identifies discrimination with “reward bias”—by which he means bias in job selection and compensation—and argues that discrimination is a less important factor in accounting for blacks’ unequal position in society, than others, such as exclusion from social networks of dominant groups. Anatomy of Racial Inequality. This interpretation of “discrimination,” perhaps corresponding to economists’ use of the term, seems to me unnecessarily narrow. We customarily speak of discrimination in regard to certain equality goods as well.

40. Some would object to the inclusion of gays and straights on this list, arguing that those who engage in homosexual activity violate moral norms governing behavior, just as do liars and cheats; stigmatizing of them would therefore be justified. By contrast, blacks, Latinos, and women are unjustifiably stigmatized because of unchosen attributes, not what they do. By including gays and lesbians in the category of the unjustifiably stigmatized, however,

I am rejecting that point of view. For a thoughtful defense of my viewpoint, which is sensitive to the religiously based arguments on the other side, see Patricia Beattie Jung and Ralph F. Smith, Heterosexism: An Ethical Challenge (Albany, N.Y., 1993).

41. In accord with customary usage, by “color blindness” I will mean race blindness rather than skin-tone blindness. Conflating race with skin tone, as the court did in the Hopwood decision, suggests the idea that we should be “blind to skin color” because skin color is a superficial characteristic (as well as an immutable one), indicating nothing of substance about a person. But race blindness arises from an entirely different source, presupposing that race is, or has been made to be, a deeply important characteristic.

42. See the argument in chapter 1 that the moral power of the term “racism” derives in part from the historical abuses perpetrated in the name of race.

43. I think an argument can be made that obesity is currently a more stigmatized characteristic than blackness. It has not, however, been nearly the source of political and economic inferiorization that blackness has been. Similarly, gays and lesbians have, until recently, been seen and treated as a pariah caste, evil or sick, and in any case barely worthy of human respect. But since gays and lesbians are not visible as such in the way racial groups are (though a person’s “race” is not always visible either [see chapter 6]), as a group they have not suffered the economic and political disabilities attending the stigma attached to blackness.

44. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. at 303, quoted in Laurence Tribe, Constitutional Choices (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 224. The other major cases are City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469 (1989) (striking down municipal minority set-aside program, holding state and local government to a “strict scrutiny” standard that the opinion implied was difficult to meet) and Adarand Constructors, Inc., v. Pena, 515 U. S. 200 (1995) (ruling that federal race-based set-aside programs also had to satisfy a “strict scrutiny” standard). See Anderson, “Integration.”

45. The distinction between “race neutrality” and “race egalitarianism” is drawn from Glenn Loury, foreword to William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions (Princeton, N.J., 2000). Actually Loury uses “race blindness” for my “race neutrality.” I do not follow Loury’s usage since I am taking these three distinct meanings all to be candidates for color or race blindness. My discussion of the first two meanings of “color blind” is, however, indebted to Loury’s account.

46. The percentages differ in different states. As of this writing Texas has guaranteed places to those within the top 10 percent, Florida is talking about 20 percent, and California 4 percent.

47. Mary Frances Berry, “How Percentage Plans Keep Minority Students Out of College,” Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 4, 2000 (on line: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v46/i48/48a04801.htm). Berry argues that despite these figures the percentage plans do a disservice to black and Latino students in comparison to traditional affirmative action programs.

On the history of the Texas legislature’s adoption of the 10-percent plan, see David Montejano, “Maintaining Diversity at the University of Texas,” in Race and Representation, ed. Post and Rogin, 362–67. On other states’ rejection of such plans (for example because their high schools are not sufficiently segregated for the plans to generate what they regard as adequate diversity at the college level), see Patrick Healy, “Texas Plan for College Diversity Draws Fire,” Boston Globe, Aug. 22, 2000, At, 17.

48. Montejano says, “A final advantage of the ten percent plan was that it was easy to present and defend rhetorically: it was simple, fair, predictable, and, most importantly, it did not use race-specific criteria. This rhetorical advantage became evident in the various public forums where the ten percent plan was discussed.” “Maintaining Diversity,” 364. Glenn Loury points out that the plan’s acceptability also relies on an at least tacit recognition that substantive issues of racial justice are pertinent to race-related policy. If the Texas legislature had crafted a race-neutral plan that nevertheless had the effect (and aim) of admitting a higher percentage of white applicants, the public would no doubt have rejected it. Glenn Loury, foreword to Shape of the River, xxiv.

49. The scores of admittees under percentage plans are lower than they were under affirmative action. For example, “About 250 had scores below 1000 last year [1999], compared with 133 in 1997.” Healy, “Texas Plan,” 17.

50. My argument here does not endorse the notion of standards or “qualifications” employed by either traditional affirmative action or the percentage plan. Indeed, I entirely agree with Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier’s thoroughly documented argument that qualification as grades and test scores is deleterious both to appropriate educational purposes and to fairness. I utilize the traditional notion of qualification only to show the irrationality of countenancing the percentage plans while rejecting affirmative action. Sturm and Guinier, “Future of Affirmative Action”.

51. Justice Brennan’s majority opinion in the Weber affirmative action case argued that the legislative intent behind Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (prohibiting employment discrimination) included remedying the consequences of past discrimination so as to integrate previously discriminated-against racial minorities into the economic mainstream. United Steelworkers of America, AFL-CIO-CLC v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193 (1979). See discussion in Anderson, “Integration.”

52. See discussion in Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 316–18.

53. Again, my argument here has been a moral rather than a legal one although the courts may have been influenced by a misunderstanding of the moral ideal of color blindness, or of the moral character of discrimination. Legal scholars have disagreed about whether the Constitution (especially the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments) supplies an understanding of discrimination that locates its central wrongfulness in the subordinating of groups, in prejudice, or in distinctions made on the basis of characteristics that bear no relation to legitimate purposes. My argument for the greater moral weight of the first two of these has no bearing on this constitutional dispute, though my sympathies are of course with those who seek to find constitutional bases for these moral intuitions. See Siegel, “Racial Rhetorics,” Fiss, “Groups,” and Anderson, “Integration.”

54. “Racial integration” is perhaps a more accurate expression of the ideal of race harmony, but that term too has lost public favor, and I think “color blindness” has taken up the slack and become a kind of repository of the various ideals intermixed in the civil rights and antidiscrimination struggles of the past several decades, including racial harmony. On racial integration and racial harmony, see also chapter 3.

55. It might be thought that the idea of “race neutrality” best captures the idea of race as something not seen at all. But this is so only in a superficial sense. Race neutrality forbids race to be used in policy contexts; but there is little reason to think that such proscription would have the effect of reducing actual awareness of race. Indeed, I will argue in chapter 9 that race equality is empirically more likely to diminish a destructive racial consciousness than is a ban on the public use of racial categories.

56. Siegel asks, “Is every act of racial differentiation an act of race discrimination or does race discrimination involve a systematic practice of group subordination?” “Racial Rhetorics,” 38. Why are these the only two choices? Why can’t there be unjustified racial differentiation that does not involve subordination? (To be fair to Siegel, she is concerned with a legal context in which the two choices she cites are in fact the two understandings of “discrimination” in the context of equal protection doctrine; and she is arguing that in law the racial differentiation has unjustifiably come to overshadow subordination.)

57. Garcia draws a distinction similar to mine by saying that discrimination “on the basis of” is not always immoral, while discrimination “against” is. “Heart of Racism,” 14. In “Philosophical Analysis,” Garcia calls the latter “racist discrimination” (16). I would supplement Garcia’s view by including non-animus-based discrimination against an inferiorized group as a morally wrong form of discrimination. (I would, however, agree with Garcia in not calling this “racist discrimination,” since it lacks a racist motive.)

58. If such benignly motivated but still wrongful discrimination against whites does not count as ‘racial discrimination,’ how shall we refer to it? It has something of the force of discrimination based on an irrelevant characteristic (supposing race to be irrelevant in the hypothetical example in which race-sensitive aims can be achieved without use of race-sensitive admissions practices). Yet that expression could be misleading, since racial identity would still remain relevant to various institutional goals. Perhaps ‘discrimination based on an inappropriate characteristic’ would be a more accurate expression, as a way of saying that race would be inappropriate at the admissions stage, yet still pertinent to institutional goals.

59. Some might argue that it is appropriate for any educational institution to continue to favor black and Latino applicants as long as racial egalitarianism has not been achieved in the society as a whole, even if it has been achieved locally. My argument requires only that the scenario described provide a plausible reason that affirmative action is no longer appropriate.

Chapter 5. “Race”: What We Mean and What We Think We Mean

1. Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought, 536. Lawrence Bobo, a prominent political scientist in the field of racial attitude analysis, reports a comparable account; “Common usage tends to associate ‘race’ with biological based differences between human groups, differences typically observable in skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and other physical attributes.” Lawrence Bobo, “Racial Attitudes and Relations at the Close of the Twentieth Century,” America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, vol. 1, ed. Neil Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (Washington, D.C., 2001), 267.

2. Lothrop Stoddard, the influential early twentieth-century racist propagandist, said, “Race is what people physically really are. Nationality is what people politically think they are.” Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 68–69. In the popular account of race this statement may not seem far off the mark, even if its adherents would typically reject the racist use to which Stoddard put it.

3. Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, 4th ed., rev. and enl. (Cleveland, Ohio, 1964), 24.

4. Most Americans now know that the more definitively racial terms “Mongoloid” or “yellow” are no longer acceptable for people of east (and perhaps southeast) Asian extraction; so they use the seemingly geographical term “Asian,” but still think of the group thus designated as a race. (To the extent that South Asians succeed in becoming included in the “Asian American” rubric, “Asian” and “Asian American” are likely to become less racial and more panethnic categories [see chapter 8], although this development would by no means guarantee the weakening of a “racial” way of viewing East Asians.) “Red” has similarly lost favor as a designation of Native Americans, although, again, this linguistic shift does not signal the disappearance of a racialized view of this group. I have intentionally omitted Latino and Hispanics from this list of racial groups because, as I will discuss in chapter 8, racial designation for this group is problematic. The scientific counterpart of “Caucasian” (or “Caucasoid”) for blacks is “Negroid.” Unlike “Caucasian,” which is now used fairly frequently, “Negroid” is almost never employed in common parlance, perhaps because of its likeness to “Negro,” which is now seen as an outdated and disrespectful term (although it is still preferred by 2 percent of African-Americans (see note 22). In order to preserve the symmetry with “black,” I will generally use “white” rather than “Caucasian.” For a historically informed discussion of the significance of popular usage of “white” and “Caucasian,” see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color.

5. I will use “somatic” characteristics to mean external, visible, bodily ones. Occasionally I will use “phenotypic” to indicate that such characteristics are the external expression of a person’s genetic makeup (“genotype”).

6. The way we think about eye color in relation to race is interestingly indicative of an arbitrariness in the somatic characteristics taken to count as “race.” Different eye colors are taken to correlate with different races, at least in part, but eye color is not itself viewed as a racial characteristic. This feature of the popular account of race is strikingly illustrated in a famous classroom intervention carried out in 1968 by Jane Elliott, a third-grade teacher in Iowa. All of her students were white, and to teach them something about race and racism, Ms. Elliott divided the class into two groups, brown-eyed and blue-eyed. She then proceeded to treat the brown-eyed group as if they were inferior, and deserved inferior treatment. (She subjected the blue-eyed group to the same treatment the next day.) Ms. Elliott’s exercise with her class had the effect, and intention, of conferring a racial significance on eye color. Her ability to do so depends on the fact that ordinarily eye color does not have such significance. (Elliott’s experience, and its impact on the children in her class, then and fifteen years later, is described in William Peters, A Class Divided, Then and Now, rev. ed. [New Haven, Conn., 1987].)

7. In Britain, by contrast, Indians have sometimes been thought of as blacks, and in Australia aboriginals are sometimes called “blacks,” although they themselves prefer the designation “indigenous Australians.”

8. Robb Armstrong, “Jump Start,” United Feature Syndicate, 1997 (in Boston Globe).

9. Rainier Spencer points out how race makes us see “a khaki-colored person with a narrow nose and slightly kinky hair” as “obviously more black than white” even though such a person, as described, is clearly something like an equal mixture of African and European ancestry. Rainier Spencer, Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States (Boulder, Colo., 1999), 17. Jacobson too emphasizes the way that racial thinking shapes perception: “The American eye sees a certain person as black, for instance, whom Haitian or Brazilian eyes might see as white. Similarly, an earlier generation of Americans saw Celtic, Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon, or Mediterranean physiognomies where today we see only subtly varying shades of a mostly undifferentiated whiteness.” Whiteness, 10.

10. Perhaps an exception would be persons who change the relevant features of physical appearance, as John Howard Griffin, a white reporter, did when he treated his skin in order to live as a black man in the South in the early 1960s. John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me (New York, 1976 [1960]).

11. Janet Ward Schofield, Black and White in School: Trust, Tension, or Tolerance? (New York, 1989), 39–74. Blacks and whites were the only racial groups present in the school; the study was done in the Northeast in 1979.

12. Mary Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley, Calif., 1990). Waters is concerned to show how whites’ privileging ethnic over racial identity, with regard to both themselves and others, can blind them to racial inequities. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, ethnicity did not carry such unequivocally positive connotations but rather suggested “out-siderhood.” Werner Sollors, “Foreword: Theories of American Ethnicity,” Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University, 1996), x–xi. Sollors claims that the word “ethnicity” was first used in the United States in 1941. British scholars John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith say it was the 1950’s. “Introduction,” in Ethnicity, 4.

13. The development of the idea of “people of color”—an umbrella identity for nonwhite panethnic or ethnoracial groups—may seem like a counter-example, as it expresses a sense of identification across racial groups. But in this case it is not racial belonging or classification itself, but rather the experience of being discriminated against, excluded, or stigmatized on account of one’s race that provides the bond. Also, obviously, “people of color” is not a fully inclusive commonality since it excludes whites.

14. Reluctance to use racial designations is not equal across racial groups. In general, blacks are much less reluctant than other groups. I speculate about the reasons for this later in this chapter.

15. Audrey Smedley emphasizes this comprehensive nature of race as a form of consciousness in Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, 2d ed. (Boulder, Colo., 1999).

16. Let me guard against some possible misunderstanding of what I am claiming to explain in my proffered account of “racial thinking.” First, the use of racial labeling is not a fully reliable indicator of racial thinking; it is neither necessary nor sufficient for it. Someone—especially black persons themselves—may use the racial label “black” with more of a cultural than a racial significance (although, as we will see in chapter 8, its use can have both a fully racial and a fully cultural significance). On the other side, persons may use an ethnic or panethnic expression such as “European American,” “African American,” or “Latino” yet still think of the group referred to as a race.

Nor am I claiming that my account of race is meant to capture every form of racial consciousness on the contemporary American scene. For example, I believe that it is at least possible for persons to use racial terms in a purely classificatory and evaluatively inert sense, as akin to what the “popular account” wrongly takes to be the most common one. This purely classificatory sense is likely to involve some combination of phenotypic characteristics, ancestry, and geographical origins. As I argued earlier, however, I think people are able to accomplish this morally neutral use of race much less than they may say or think they do. Nevertheless (as I will explain in detail in chapters 7 and 8), because the sciences have by and large delegitimized race and racial thought, some persons who are particularly influenced by scientific perspectives but who continue to employ racial terminology may do so in a “scare quote” sense—that is, distancing themselves from the meanings commonly attached to racial labels.

17. See Smedley, Race in North America, 22 ff.

18. This general point about common humanity is well made by Anthony Skillen, “Racism,” Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, vol. 3 (San Diego, Calif., 1998), 779. Paul Gilroy gives it eloquent expression in a recent book: “The term ‘race’ conjures up a peculiarly resistant variety of natural difference. It stands…in opposition to most attempts to render it secondary to the overwhelming sameness that overdetermines social relationships between people and continually betrays the tragic predicaments of their common species life.” Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures, and the Allure of Race (London, 2001), 29. (The American title of this book is Against Race.)

19. The impact of race thinking on individual human connection is poignantly and powerfully described in a New York Times article about two Cuban American friends, a dark-skinned and a light-skinned man. In Cuba the friends’ somatic differences did not seem important to them; but when both immigrated to Miami, the segregated social space, assumptions pervasive in the society, and expectations in their peer groups all had the effect of making the two friends drift apart. The article shows two people being subjected to a “racializing” of their consciousness and their interaction. It is more difficult to see racialization as a created process, rather than a mere reflection of a preexisting human reality, in persons who have grown up with racial consciousness, since they take this racial distancing for granted. The two Cuban-American friends did not have such a consciousness in Cuba, but then they did in the United States. Mirta Ojito, “Best of Friends, Worlds Apart,” New York Times, June 5, 2000, At, A16–17.

20. A website called “National Forum on People’s Differences” invites users to post questions they have “always been too embarrassed or uncomfortable to ask.” The responses, reported in Harper’s Magazine, testify to a revealing but unsurprising willingness to overgeneralize and stereotype groups in explicitly racial terms. Some examples: “Why do white people smell like wet dogs when they come out of the rain?” “Why do most black people wear their hats backwards? I have tried this many times, and I do not think this is comfortable.” “It seems to me that the majority of white people are overly stuffy and stiff. Why can’t they relax?” “Race, the Final Frontier,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2000, 24, 26.

21. For this reason I think Appiah is incorrect when he implies that we can have a concept of race (used in ascribing and claiming racial identities) independent of, and logically prior to, racism. Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity; Misunderstood Connections in A. Gutmann and K. A. Appiah, Color Conscious (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 82. Nevertheless, as we will discuss in chapter 7, the contemporary implication of differential value among races is much weaker than it was in the classic nineteenth-century conception of race.

The modes of thinking, perceiving, and experiencing of racial others that I am alleging should not be thought of as absolutely inevitable, but rather as strong tendencies. For example, it is hardly impossible to empathize with someone of a different racial group; but thinking of her as of a different race tends to inhibit that empathy. Moreover, fully empathizing with a racial other has the effect of partially deracializing her in one’s eyes.

Similar considerations apply to overgeneralizing and racial fate. It is not impossible to generalize about a racial group without overgeneralizing; but there is a strong tendency toward the latter. And it is not impossible to think about the characteristics of a racial group without thinking of them as inescapable; but there is a strong tendency to do so.

22. A survey conducted in 1990 found 78 percent of black Americans preferring “black,” 20 percent “African American,” and 2 percent “Negro.” Andrew Hacker, Two Nations, 48. Yet the meanings of the apparently racial and ethnocultural associations of “black” and “African American” may be in some dispute, as suggested in a New York Times article from June, 2000. A girl is reported as responding to a black friend’s asking her “What are you?” by telling him that she is half Puerto Rican and half white. The friend says, “But you act black.” The girl comments, “I told him you can’t act like a race. I hate that idea. He defended it, though. He said I would have a point if he’d said African-American, because that’s a race, but black is a way of acting. I’ve thought about it, and I think he’s right.” Tamar Lewin, “Growing Up, Growing Apart,” New York Times, June 25, 2000, 12. These teenagers’ reflective assurance that “African American” is a race—which they correctly understand is not the sort of thing that can have a culture, while “black” refers to a cultural style—shows the presence of racial consciousness but in a seemingly reversed language in which to express its contrast with culture.

23. Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York, 2000), 219–29.

24. Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York, 1992), 13–14; “Racisms,” 4–5. “Race, Culture, Identity,” 54–56. The idea of “racialism” is useful in capturing a belief in race without what is generally regarded as its most odious feature, the belief in a hierarchy of worth. This use of “racialism” differs from that employed in chapter 3, where it meant “conferring too much importance on race.” That use was moral, this one doctrinal.

25. Moreover, although “black” has been used for several centuries to refer to African Americans, its revival in the 1960s to replace “Negro” as the most common self-designation was prompted by the Black Power movement. At that time, and to some extent since then, “black” has connoted group pride, in addition to any other connotations it might have carried. It has become a term reappropriated, or reclaimed, by the black community, not one simply foisted upon them. See Lynne Tirrell’s discussion of reclamation in “Deregatory Terms: Racism, Sexism, and the Inferential Role of Meaning.” In Language and Liberation, edited by Christina Hendricks and Kelly Oliver, 41–79 (Albany, N.Y., 1999). This seems a third reason why blacks may prefer “black” to “African American.”

A different, but not unrelated, reason for that preference is expressed by Gwen Tomalson, in an interview with Lillian Rubin. Replying to Tomalson’s saying “I’m black of course” when asked about her ethnicity, Rubin comments, “Many black people now prefer to think of themselves as African-American.” Tomalson replies, “Yeah, well that’s a little fancy for me…Maybe I’m African-American too. I guess I am. My people were dragged here from Africa, so that makes me African-American, but it doesn’t mean anything to me.” Lillian Rubin, Families on the Fault Line: America’s Working Class Speaks about the Family, the Economy, Race, and Ethnicity (New York, 1994), 151.

26. Thus a further reason whites might be reluctant to go in for racial designation is that they are, at least tacitly, aware of connotations of their own superiority, and reject that implication or do not wish to publicly avow it, as racial superiority is inconsistent with the belief in equality which most whites, in the past 50 years or so, have come to hold, try to hold, or at least think they should hold.

Chapter 6: “Race”: A Brief History, with Moral Implications

I am grateful for Judith Smith’s wisdom and insight on the historical matters dealt with in this and other chapters, and her feedback on various drafts.

1. This account of the ancient Greeks (and to some extent Romans) is drawn from Frank M. Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). I am grateful to Marcia Homiak for assistance with this section.

2. Miles, Racism, 15. See also Frank Snowden, “Europe’s Oldest Chapter in the History of Black-White Relations,” in Racism and Anti-racism in World Perspective, ed. Benjamin Bowser (London, 1995).

3. In his comprehensive and important Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York, 1963), Thomas Gossett summarizes a similar range of observations about the Greeks and Romans: “In neither Greece nor Rome does there appear to have been much prejudice against Negroes because of their race” (7). Gossett implies that though the Greeks and Romans lacked prejudice against them, they did regard “Negroes” as a “race.” Unfortunately throughout his book Gossett equates “race” with the possession of certain somatic characteristics.

4. Bernard Williams makes these points in his discussion of Greek slavery and Aristotle’s defense of it in Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), esp. 106–17. Aristotle’s discussion of slavery is in the first book of his Politics, 1253b23–1255b39.

5. Slavery that is not based on race or ethnicity is no more morally acceptable than slavery that is. My point is that racism is not the inevitable concomitant of slavery.

6. Smedley, Race in North America, 37–41. Smedley says that though there is not conclusive evidence for the origin of the term, it appears to involve reference to a “breeding line or stock of animals”; the Oxford English Dictionary continues to list this as one of the five meanings of the word “race.” OED on-line, Aug. 4, 1999, http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl/. My account of the development of the idea of “race” is indebted to Smedley’s remarkable work of historical and scientific synthesis.

7. Smedley does suggest that the word’s origin in the idea of breeding for a purpose supplied the potential for its being used to denote hierarchy, and also that, more than the concepts of “nation,” “people,” “variety,” and “kind,” it implies an innate nature. These associations, which became firmly attached to the idea of race by the nineteenth century, were only dimly present in its earliest uses.

8. Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2000), 49.

9. Carl Sauer, Sixteenth-Century North America (Berkeley, Calif., 1971), 252, cited in Smedley, Race in North America, 74.

10. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York, 1975), quoted in Smedley, Race in North America, 73.

11. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969), 26. Jordan adds: “Initially…English contact with Africans did not take place primarily in a context which prejudged the Negro as a slave, at least not as a slave of Englishmen” (4). On the level of civilization of various African kingdoms of which Europeans became aware, see also Nash, Red, White, and Black, 145–47.

12. Basil Davidson, The Search for Africa: History, Culture, Politics (New York, 1994), 43.

13. “White” was occasionally employed, along with “Christian,” butits full racial meaning had not yet developed.

14. Native Americans in the United States never became as fully racialized a group as did Africans and Europeans. Alden Vaughan, a colonial historian, argues that “red” was not widely used until the nineteenth century, and that early European colonizers viewed the cultural practices but not the somatic characteristics of Native Americans as inferior. “From White Man to Redskin: Changing Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian,” in Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York, 1995), 3–33. Vaughan summarizes: “Anglo-America’s fundamental contempt for Indian culture remained relatively constant throughout the history of British America and beyond. What changed under the influence of the new perception of Indians as innately dark-skinned were expectations of the Indians’ civil and theological redemption” (19).

15. On interracial mating, see Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York, 1999). 10–32.

16. For further exploration of the differences between Latin America and the United States regarding slavery and conceptions of race or race-like groupings, see Smedley, Race in North America, chap. 6. “In summary, the documented evidence from a variety of sources suggests that [in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies] whereas minute physical variations and admixtures were recognized and utilized to create an ideology of social inequality, they were not homogenized and translated into specific, exclusive, and distinct groupings [as in the British colonies of North America]. And even the names and categories invented to try to represent every possible ancestral combination were not associated explicitly with stereotyped behavior or institutionalized as dogma about innateness” (136). See also F. James Davis, Who Is Black? esp. 99–105.

The experience of the French in the New World provides further evidence of significant differences among the European colonial powers in their treatment of subject peoples, and of the role of demographic, economic, and religious factors rather than inherent moral propensities in accounting for these differences. The French, concentrating their colonizing activities in the area of Canada, engaged in a very profitable fur trade, which required the cooperation, not military subjugation, of indigenous peoples. The small numbers of French also provided an incentive for amicable rather than hostile relations. Like the Puritans in New England, French Jesuits attempted to convert the “natives,” but their conception of conversion directed them to show regard for the religions and ways of life of the indigenous peoples (especially the Hurons), and to work within their indigenous religions to bring them gradually toward Catholicism. Gary Nash summarizes: “The French coexisted fruitfully with native societies to a degree unprecedented elsewhere in North America.” Red, White, and Black, 46. See 41–48 for general discussion of the French presence in the Americas. My remarks about the relative absence of a conception of “race” in Iberian America should not be taken to suggest that these societies are “racial democracies,” in the slogan that for much of the twentieth century was used to describe Brazil’s official self-conception. Recent work has shown that degree of African, indigenous, and European ancestry strongly correlates with socioeconomic position, and that positive value has always attached to lightness of skin color. See for example, Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford, 2000), 85–129, 146–62, and Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge, U.K., 1997), esp. 250–63. In Brazil there has been a movement to claim a “black” identity, partly in order to gain recognition of the discriminatory character of Brazilian society, and partly to appropriate an African origins identity as a source or pride rather than disvalue. Nobles notes that this “movimento negro” has been small and fragile in part because of the fluidity of color categories in Brazil (146), which is to say, the absence of anything like a fully developed nation of race in the North American sense.

17. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (eds.), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, Wisc., 1977); Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); O. E. Uya, African Diaspora and the Black Experience in New World Slavery (Lagos, Nigeria, 1992).

18. Williams, Shame and Necessity, 112.

19. Aristotle’s discussion implies that some thinkers were lodging a challenge to the rightness and necessity of slavery, and that he was replying to them. So some Greeks must have been questioning it ethically, and not accepting its necessity.

20. Smedley, Race in North America, 99. On black families that became relatively wealthy, respected landowners in the Virginia colony, see T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Own Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York, 1980), and Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 29–46.

21. Berlin documents the fall in status of persons of African descent in the English colonies with the rise of the plantation system. Many Thousands Gone, esp. 15–177.

22. Cited in Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to Be Red,” American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (June 1997): 631.

23. The “curse of Ham,” the fact that ancient Hebrews owned slaves, and the fact that Jesus never condemned slavery were all used as scriptural rationalizations for slavery by southern Christians. Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York, 1993), 192.

24. Racist ideologies also accommodated themselves, though not without some contention, to the eventual Christianization of most slaves. Most colonies passed laws declaring that baptism was not incompatible with slavery. See ibid., 15.

25. See ibid. 3–27, for a detailed account of the complex but almost wholly nonracial factors that led to the gradual imposition of slavery on Africans and their descendants in preference to other groups.

26. Slave owners, especially those in the lower southern colonies, were therefore particularly dismayed and horrified by the Stono Uprising in South Carolina in 1739, in which escaping slaves used drumming and dancing to communicate with co-conspirators. Nearly successful, these slaves had intended to escape English control by reaching the Spanish colony at St. Augustine, Florida. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery (New York, 1992), 210–211.

27. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 109. For other accounts of Bacon’s Rebellion, see Smedley, Race in North America, 103–04; Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York, 1997), 203–22; and Nash, Red, White, and Black, 110–14. Berlin comments: “Throughout the seventeenth century, black and white ran away together, joined in petty conspiracies, and, upon occasion, stood shoulder-to-shoulder against the weighty champions of established authority. In 1676, when Nathaniel Bacon’s ‘Choice and Standing Army’ took to the field against forces commanded by Virginia’s royal governor, it drew on both white and black bondmen in nearly equal proportions” (45).

28. Barbara Fields, however, reminds us in an influential essay that for different economic groups of white Southerners, “race” and “white supremacy” meant very different things. “From the democratic struggles of the Jacksonian era to the disenfranchisement struggles of the Jim Crow era, white supremacy held one meaning for the back-country whites and another for the planters.” “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction, ed. J. M. Kousser and J. M. McPherson (New York: Oxford, 1982), 157.

29. “Massachusetts Slave Petition,” in The Democracy Reader, ed. Diane Ravitch and Abigail Thernstrom (New York, 1992), 107–8. Benjamin Banneker, a scientist and free black, used a similar argument against slavery in a famous letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1791 (to which Jefferson respectfully replied without acceding to Banneker’s argument), in which he argued that blacks should be seen as the equals of whites. See Gary Nash, ed., Race and Revolution (Madison, N.J., 1990), 177–81.

30. George Frederickson notes that “the notion that all human beings were equal in some fundamental sense had long been a standard belief of Western Europeans. But before the eighteenth century, universalistic affirmations of equality existed only in forms that had no clear application to the organization of human society. Equality in the eyes of God—an essential Christian belief—was usually seen as no impediment to a hierarchical order in human affairs.” White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981), 141. For the impact of egalitarian ideals on slavery and movements to abolish it, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York, 1966).

31. George Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York, 1971), 2.

32. Ibid., 3.

33. On Abolitionism in the United States and England, see Davis, Problem of Slavery, and David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984).

34. In both North and South, free African Americans could not carry firearms, could not purchase slaves, and were liable to the criminal penalties meted out to slaves. They could not testify against whites, hold office, vote, or serve on juries or in the militia. Free African Americans in northern cities faced residential segregation, pervasive job discrimination, segregated public schools, and daily affronts such as exclusion from public concerts, lectures, and libraries, and segregation or exclusion from public transportation. See Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1992), and Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modem Politics (Stanford, Calif., 2000), 29.

35. Jonathan Marks, Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (Hawthorne, N.Y., 1995), 52. In 1962 Sherwood Washburn, president of the American Anthropological Association, called for physical anthropology to take a new approach to the study of race that deemphasized classificatory aspects and focused on the historical study of different human groups and the processes that generated them. Ibid., 59.

36. Ibid., 55.

37. Smedley, Race in North America, 160; Marks, Human Biodiversity, 50.

38. Stephen Jay Gould argues that because Linnaeus’s typical way of ordering the four groups—Americanus (indigenous Americans), Europaeus, Asiaticus, and Africanus—did not correspond to the value ranking of racist thought (since Europeans were not at the top), it should be taken as indicating that Linnaeus was much more focused on a geographical than a value-based order. Stephen Jay Gould, “The Geometer of Race,” Discover, Nov. 1994, 67, and The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and enl. ed. (New York, 1996).

39. Smedley, Race in North America, 165. Buffon by no means avoided Eurocentrism in his judgments of other peoples; but he did not build these judgments into his scientific categories. In addition, he condemned in the harshest terms slavery and justifications for it that implied that Africans were suited to such a state: “It is said that they tolerate hunger easily; that they can live for three days on a portion of a European meal; that however little they eat or sleep, they are always equally tough, equally strong, equally fit for labor. How can men in whom there rests any feeling for humanity adopt such views? How do they presume to legitimize by such reasoning those excesses which originate solely from their thirst for gold?” Count de Buff on, “Varieties of the Human Species,” in Natural History, General and Particular, trans. William Smellie (London, 1812 [1749]), 394.

40. Marks, Human Biodiversity, 152.

41. Frederickson, Black Image, 84–90.

42. Despite the use of his view by defenders, Agassiz himself was an opponent of slavery. But the idea of race was used against black people much more broadly than in defending slavery, as we have seen above. There was a large space for rationalizing many forms of discrimination on the basis of African inferiority, such as the denial of the right to vote in most northern states through the Civil War period. Ibid., 183.

43. Darwin’s use of the term “race” here hearkens back to the older meaning applying to animal and plant groupings.

44. See Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 66ff.

45. Darwin, Descent of Man (London, 1901 [1871]), 276, 278, cited in Ashley Montagu’s commentary on UNESCO Statement on Race, 1950, in Montagu, Statement on Race (New York, 1972), 23–24. Carl Degler writes that “Darwin’s principal reason for rejecting the idea that the races were different species was that he could not figure out how natural selection could have separated the races. The physical differences between races, Darwin thought, could not be accounted for by natural selection, because ‘none of the differences between the races are of any direct or special service to him.’ He even sought to prove that there was no connection between climate and dark skin color.” In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York, 1991), 15.

46. “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.” Cited in Frederickson, Black Image, 230, drawn from Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (London, 1959), 343, citing Darwin’s Descent of Man. See also Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 8, 15.

47. At the same time, in his 1871 Descent of Man Darwin questioned the value of the concept of race, “observing that the experts classified humans in as few as two and as many as sixty-three separate races.” Daniel Blackburn, “Why Race Is Not a Biological Concept,” in Race and Racism in Theory and Practice, ed. Berel Lang (Lanham, Md., 2000), 4.

48. Spencer wrote several works over the course of his life that defined his philosophy, which became more evolutionist with the rise of Darwinism (although Spencer was an advocate of evolution prior to Darwin)—for example, The Study of Sociology, 2d ed. (London, 1874). Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest,” which makes no appearance in Darwin, and which served as a shorthand for the vindication of existing race and class hierarchies. Degler points out that Darwin later accepted this phrase as “a kind of shorthand for natural selection.” In Search of Human Nature, 11. For Spencer’s influence on American racial thought, see Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 29–30.

49. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 25.

50. Ronald Takaki, “The Heathen Chinee,” in Strangers From a Different Shore. A History of Asian-Americans (Boston, 1989), 99–112.

51. On the general issue of race and naturalization, see Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, Ian Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York, 1996); and Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Images of Citizenship in US. History (New Haven, Conn., 1997).

52. Frederickson, Black Image, 165–197. For an excellent account of Reconstruction, its effects both on blacks and citizenship, its demise, and its legacy, see Smith, Civic Ideals, 70–86.

53. The 1873 “slaughterhouse cases,” U.S. v. Reese (1876) and U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), and the 1883 civil rights cases restricted federal protection of black civil rights that the Reconstruction Amendments intended to guarantee, and opened the door to disenfranchising black voters in the South through poll taxes and property requirements. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988).

54. Baker, From Savage to Negro, 33.

55. Quoted in ibid., 27.

56. Kant’s contribution to racial thought has not been generally recognized in contemporary philosophy. His key work is “Of the Different Human Races,” from 1777 (reprinted in The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott [Indianapolis, 2000], 8–22), but he continued to explore the issue in the better-known Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View in 1798. Bernasconi and Lott credit Kant with “a clear and consistent terminological distinction between race and species that was lacking in his predecessors but also an insistence on the permanence of racial characteristics across the generations.” “Introduction,” Idea of Race, viii.

Though Herder was a proto-racialist, he did not (in contrast to Hegel and racial thought more generally) see different Volksgeisten as ranked in a hierarchy, and he opposed slavery and other attempts by one people to dominate another. He thought each people had a distinct spirit with its own value that was neither better nor worse than any other. See J. G. von Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, abr., intro, by Frank E. Manuel (Chicago, 1968 [1791]). In this regard Herder influenced Du Bois (who studied Herder’s thought during his two years in Berlin in the 1890s); Du Bois proposed a similar egalitarian, racialist view of the spirit of the white, the black, and other races, in “The Conservation of Races” (1897) and The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams (Boston, 1997 [1903]). (This edition of Souls includes several other essays including “Conservation.”) In these respects both Herder and Du Bois were early theorists of what we now know as “multiculturalism,” or egalitarian cultural pluralism. In his influential essay, Appiah cites Herder’s views as crucial background to Matthew Arnold, whom Appiah regards as having articulated an important version of literary racialism. Herder, like Arnold, saw the spirit of a people as primarily expressed in its language and literature. Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 52–64.

57. Possibly the most influential European racial theorist, Comte Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82) combines the phenotypist and the national-spirit forms of racism. See discussion of de Gobineau, and European racism more generally, in George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison, Wisc., 1985), Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C., 1996), and Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

58. For the post-World War II period, when the two forms especially begin to converge and intermingle, see Miles, Racism. At the same time, European hostility is often more directed toward cultures and religions (often Islam) than toward a racialized conception of somatic characteristics; cultural incompatibility with an alleged national culture (defined as implicitly or explicitly “white”), rather than straightforward inferiorizing, has been the central theme. See Tariq Modood, “‘Difference,’ Cultural Racism, and Anti-racism,” in Werbner and Modood, Debating Cultural Hybridity. This phenomenon has been called “cultural racism.” Although this label seems partially justified to me, to some extent it too is conceptually inflated. Some elements of what is called “cultural racism” seem more accurately called “nativism”—a hostility to the foreign. In addition, unless “culture” is employed as a veiled way of talking about race, it can not be assumed that cultural animosity is racial. Modood himself guards against this inflation by requiring the cultural hostility to complement an already present racialization. (See chapter 8.)

59. Robert Miles usefully refers to classic race theory as “scientific racism,” as distinct from contemporary forms (primarily in United Kingdom) that involve many of the same elements but without the authority of science, which has since abandoned them. See chapter 7.

60. See Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 55. In chapter 7, note 21, I explain why I do not retain this use of “essence” for psychological, mental, and temperamental characteristics alleged to inhere in racial groups.

61. The mechanism of this generational transfer of racial characteristics was not understood or even postulated in the nineteenth century. When races were conceived of as timeless subspecies created as such by God, the need for such a mechanism was obviated. In light of evolution, opinion differed as to whether cultural characteristics could be inherited, with Darwinists denying and Lamarckians affirming it. But in neither case was a genuine biological mechanism of inheritance postulated. In its absence, the idea of “blood” was employed as a kind of place-holder. As the historian of anthropology George Stocking remarks, “‘Blood’ was for many a solvent in which all problems were dissolved and all processes commingled.” George W. Stocking Jr., “The Turn-of-the-Century Concept of Race,” in MODERNISM\modernity 1, no. 1 (1993): 6. Stocking continues, Those of us today who are sophisticated in the concepts of the behavioral sciences have lost the richly connotative nineteenth-century sense of ‘race’ as accumulated cultural differences carried somehow in the blood.”

62. The European view agrees on the innateness but is less definitive about the biology.

63. Fields, “Ideology and Race,” 147.

64. See Gould, Mismeasure of Man, esp. 192, and Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Amherst, N.Y., 1998). Eugenics was a movement to breed more “desirable” human beings, through encouragement of positive traits and discouragement of negative ones. The movement presupposed a belief shared by most scientists in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth that these traits were largely genetically determined. Most eugenicists believed that racial groups (defined by the conventions of the time) differed substantially in their possession of desirable and undesirable traits; in this regard most eugenicists were racists, and the converse was true as well (almost by definition, as genetics became the form in which biological innatism came to be understood in racial thought). E. A. Hooton, however, a prominent physical anthropologist of the 1920s, was a nonracist eugenicist. He believed that all races contain a relatively equal proportion of “desirable” and “undesirable” genetically determined characteristics. See Marks, Human Biodiversity, 99–101. Paul points out that Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, and his biometrician followers initially thought that Mendelian laws of inheritance applied only to uninteresting characteristics (like seed color in garden peas), and doubted their applicability to humans, but later accepted the Mendelian innatist explanations of all human characteristics (46–48).

65. As we will see in chapter 7, a genetic perspective properly understood undermines rather than supports racial thought.

66. Alfred Binet, a French scientist, developed the test that, in altered form, would become the American IQ test; Binet did not see it as measuring innate ability. For a detailed critique of the American IQ school, see Gould, Mismeasure, 176–263, and Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 50–71.

67. Smedley, Race in North America, 308–9.

68. Previously, for several decades after the 1840s, the Irish had undergone a similar racialization driven in part by the partly racialized conflict between the English and the Irish of several centuries’ standing. See Smedley, Race in North America. The racialization of Irish Americans has been extensively documented in recent historical studies: Allen, Invention of the White Race, vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 133–163; and Jacobson, Whiteness. For a period in the mid-nineteenth century, racial Anglo-Saxonism, drawing some of its ideas from European national-character racialism, was influential in the United States. See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

Shifting understandings of who counted as “white” are reflected as well in a series of court cases from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s involving a variety of groups—Japanese, Syrian, Indian—attempting to claim naturalized citizenship under the “free white persons” designation in the 1790 statute. See Haney-Lopez, White By Law. Haney-Lopez demonstrates that the courts were never able to find a consistent definition or basis for classifying persons as white. He plausibly suggests that this difficulty is a sign both of the unscientific character of that designation and of a constancy in its meaning—that it always signified privilege and superiority.

69. This racializing of groups that later became unequivocally “white” is akin to the more national, less phenotypist European version of racialism, though in Jacobson’s account there is little direct influence of European racial thought on the proliferation of “white races” in the United States.

70. The 1924 Act limited yearly immigration to 2 percent of a national group’s percentage in the 1890 census. Jacobson documents the strong influence of prominent racists and eugenicists, such as Lothrop Stoddard, Harry Laughlin, and Madison Grant, on the congressional debate regarding the Act; the 2-percent formula originally emerged in the Report of the Eugenics Committee of the United States Committee on Selective Immigration. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 81–89.

Hostility to immigrants as such is not racism but what is generally known as “nativism.” In the case at hand, however, the eugenicists objected not to all immigrants (for example, not to “Nordics”), but only to certain groups, regarded as racially distinct.

71. This claim of marginality applies only to geneticist racism, not to geneticism more generally. As we will see in chapter 7, developments in understanding the human genome have spurred a general “geneticization” of human characteristics. These developments have not, however, generally attached themselves to racial thought, though some commentators worry, with some reason, that any form of geneticism and hereditarianism lends aid and comfort to racial thinking. Rothman, The Book of Life.

72. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the authors of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York, 1994), go to great lengths to attempt to distance themselves from various positions that they are concerned could be taken as racist. Their lack of success in doing so has been pointed out by the book’s many critics. See especially Steven Fraser, ed., The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America (New York, 1995), and Bernie Devlin, Stephen Fienberg, Daniel Resnick, and Kathryn Roeder, eds., Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to “The Bell Curve” (New York, 1997).

Chapter 7. Do Races Exist?

1. We will see in chapter 8 that racial groups can share some commonalities of experience that do provide a common bond. Racial thought, however, implies something different—that the groups are bound together by inherent nature. This is the “falsely grounded” sense of commonality I refer to in the text.

2. “Current ways of talking about race are the residue, the detritus, so to speak, of earlier ways of thinking about race; so that it turns out to be easiest to understand contemporary talk about ‘race’ as the pale reflection of a more full-blooded race discourse that flourished in the last century.” Appiah “Race, Culture, Identity,” 38.

3. Mills, Racial Contract, 23.

4. I am not able to accord the issue of stereotyping attention within the confines of this book. Here is a brief summary of what I take to be the moral harms of all stereotyping, whether the content of the stereotyping is in some way flattering or (as is usually the case) primarily negative: stereotypes always involve false conceptions of groups, thus generating unwarranted and constricting expectations of individual members; stereotyping involves not seeing the internal diversity of a group; it discourages seeing members of groups as individuals; it invites members of the target group to internalize the stereotype, leading to various sorts of psychic damage and restriction. Nor are all racial stereotypes racist. A racist stereotype is one that portrays the stereotyped group as humanly inferior or deficient, or in a hateful, evil, demeaning, or degrading manner. Thus the stereotype of blacks as being innately musical is not a racist stereotype, but the stereotype of blacks as lazy is; the latter but not the former is a demeaning stereotype, and involves a significant deficiency. To say that a stereotype is not racist is not to say that it is therefore morally all right, as I argued in more general terms in chapter 1. All stereotyping is bad. In addition, depending on their content and the social and historical context, some stereotypes can be more damaging than others, inviting various forms of mistreatment and misrecognition. These points are explored in detail in L. Blum, “Racial and Ethnic Stereotyping,” presentation to the Hoffberger Center for Professional Ethics, University of Baltimore, October 25, 1995.

5. For a sophisticated account of a conception of race that places hierarchy at the center of racialization, see Sally Haslanger, “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?” Nous, Mar. 2000, 31–55.

6. The relation between what a group or individual is by nature and what they are “stuck with” is by no means as simple as racial thought implies. I might have poor eyesight by nature, but I can wear glasses. On the other hand, if I am born deaf, the sort of accommodation my society makes to deaf people will very much determine the degree to which my life is restricted by this condition.

7. We saw in chapter 6 that the popularity of The Bell Curve suggests at least some continuing vitality of biologistic inherentism, even though the book remains a minority voice within both science and the general culture, where biologistic racism is seen with general disfavor.

8. The internally racist self-attributions on the part of black and Hispanic students cited in chapter 1, note 38, appear also to be inherentist: “Everyone knows that black people are bad. That’s just the way we are.” “Black people don’t like to work hard.” “Blacks are poor and stay poor because they’re dumber than whites (and Asians).” Minow, Not Only for Myself, 149.

9. In chapter 5 I make a more general version of this point—that characteristics can be attributed to a racial group in a way that implies inescapability, or does not. Here I am applying this point specifically to the use of culture in such attribution.

10. William E. Cross Jr., “Oppositional Identity and African American Youth: Issues and Prospects,” in Toward a Common Destiny: Improving Race and Ethnic Relations in America, ed. Willis D. Hawley and Anthony W. Jackson, 185–204 (San Francisco, 1995).

11. Sally Haslanger suggests a view that lies somewhere between cultural and biological inherentism—that a racial group’s cultural practices might affect their biological properties which in turn affect their inherent psychological propensities. The idea that because Asians eat little red meat (a practice partly cultural in character) they lack a competitive nature is an example. (This view is fully inherentist only if the cultural characteristics are regarded as inherent, which they may well not be.) (Personal communication.)

12. For example: “Since World War II, and especially in the past fifteen or twenty years, the cultural conception of race has tended to eclipse all others. It has become paradigmatic.” David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (London, 1993), 71. Michel Wieviorka reports, although he does not endorse, “an image of racial difference [invoked by the idea of ‘cultural racism’] which is not natural or biological but contained in language, religion, tradition, national origin.” “Is It So Difficult to Be an Anti-racist?” in Werbner and Modood, Debating Cultural Hybridity, 141–42.

13. Thus I agree with the Parekh report (with one qualification) when it states, “Academic theory distinguishes between biological racism, which typically uses skin color as a marker of difference…and cultural racism, which focuses primarily on supposed differences of culture. Either way, the variations among human beings are imagined to be fixed and final, something determined by nature and unchangeable.” Commission on the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain (chair: Bhikhu Parekh), T he Future of Multi-ethnic Britain (London, 2000), 60. The qualification is that talking of “skin color as a marker of difference” as a way to define racism is a bit misleading. As we saw in chapter 4, someone who prefers one skin shade to another, and discriminates on that basis, is not necessarily racist. It is only when skin color is taken, not only as a marker of difference, but as signifying inherent mental or temperamental characteristics that constitute such difference, that we have a case of racial discrimination. Indeed, taking skin color as the primary external marker of these characteristics is not essential to racism, or Jews could not be targets of racism.

14. In fact, many theorists who have posited a cultural turn in contemporary understandings of race do say that for a culturalist discourse to be racial, it must be inherentist. An influential case in point is the theory of “new racism” advanced in Britain in the early 1980s to explain the continuing advocacy of excluding Asians and West Indians as immigrants despite abandonment of theories of biological inferiority. Tariq Modood, a British political theorist, describes this development: “What had emerged was a racism based upon cultural differences, upon the ‘natural’ preference of human beings for their own cultural group [which was understood to coincide with a racial group as conventionally understood], and the incompatibility between different cultures, the mixing or coexistence of which in one country, it was alleged, was bound to lead to violent social conflict and the dissolution of social bonds.” “‘Difference,’ Cultural Racism, and Anti-racism,” in Werbner and Modood, Debating Cultural Hybridity, 154. Martin Barker, a key figure in analyzing the new racism, shows that the theories in question postulate an evolutionary and genetically based propensity to favor one’s own cultural or racial kind. So the new racism, though at least overtly abandoning a theory of racial hierarchy, did not even attempt to abandon biologism and inherentism. Martin Barker, “Biology and the New Racism,” in Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg, 18–37 (Minneapolis, 1990).

Modood’s own reason for retaining a conception of race within the cultural turn differs from Barker’s; but it too recognizes that exclusion or devaluing based purely on cultural difference is insufficient to constitute a valid use of race. Modood says that “cultural racism” adds to an already existing racial understanding of the target groups “a further discourse which evokes cultural differences from an alleged British or ‘civilised’ norm to vilify, marginalise or demand cultural assimilation from groups who also suffer from biological racism.” Modood, “‘Difference,’” 155. Modood is particularly concerned to conceptualize the distinct form of victimization suffered by south Asian Muslims in Britain.

Both Barker and Modood assume that reference to biology (“instinct,” phenotype) is what makes a conception of a group racial. In a sense my own requirement of inherentism is actually weaker than this; for I allow nonbiologistic forms of inherentism. To be sure, cultural inherentism is not a coherent form of inherentism; I agree with the tacit implication of Barker, Modood, and other commentators that biological inherentism is the only intellectually sound form of inherentism. (I argue below, however, that the form of biological inherentism required to provide a sound and rational basis for the contemporary notion of race runs afoul of the findings of modern genetics.) But I am interested in the actual employment of race in popular usage; for that, only intelligibility is necessary, not coherence. Since people are quite capable of holding genuinely contradictory beliefs (as Barbara Fields notes with respect to whites’ views of blacks in the United States, discussed in chapter 6), they are certainly capable of holding incoherent ones. If I am right that many people are (generally tacit, but occasionally explicit) “cultural inherentists,” then, I am suggesting, they can operate with an intelligible, if incoherent, conception of race.

15. Modood notes with approval that in 1998 the British government introduced “perceived religion” as a ground for protections accorded racial groups under law. Modood, “Liberal Multiculturalism and Real-World Multiculturalism,” presentation to the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Division, Boston University, April 25, 2001, 9. Muslim identity in Britain generally takes the form of a communal, ethnic identity more than one based on personal faith; and anti-Muslim prejudice has a corresponding character as more like a racial prejudice than a religious one. So the law that Modood approves of may come close to capturing the specific character of anti-Muslim prejudice. Nevertheless, on a more general level, it seems to me to come at the cost of clearly distinguishing between religious and racial bigotry and victimization. If a Bosnian Muslim is demonized for his religious practice by a white Britisher who views him as of the same race as herself, will this count as racism in the terms of the legislation in question? What about the victimization of a Pakistani of Muslim ancestry who has converted to Christianity (and known to have done so by the victimizer) and who is harassed as a “Paki”? Why not protect both racial and religious groups separately, allowing a clear recognition that some persons will suffer from both forms of victimization, while others may suffer only one?

16. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford, 1989), 167. As mentioned earlier, ethnic groups can be thought of as possessing inherent characteristics; their cultures can be thought of as inherent rather than changeable. This would be a case of racialized ethnicity, an ethnic group thought of as more like a racial group.

17. The idea and terminology of “metaphysical inherentism” comes from Sally Haslanger. Berel Lang uses the related term “metaphysical racism” in his insightful essay “Metaphysical Racism (or: Biological Warfare by Other Means),” in Race/Sex: Their Sameness, Difference, and Interplay, ed. Naomi Zack, 17–28 (New York, 1997). Lang defines metaphysical racism by saying that it “asserts a basis for group difference…in essential…features of a group” (24). He seems to mean by this, however, something more fundamental than cultural or biological racism; metaphysical racism underlies both. By contrast, I see metaphysical inherentism as an alternative to cultural or biological inherentism. I would also suggest that Lang is unclear as to whether he wants “metaphysical racism” to mean “metaphysical inherentism” or “uncommitted inherentism” (which I discuss below).

18. Although I am talking about racial inherentism here, uncommitted inherentism can attach to all sorts of groups—ethnic, professional, regional, and so on.

19. Pressed on his views of the group in question, Miguel might back off from the generalization entirely, not only from the implication of inherency. “All I can really say is that the people I have encountered from this group are lazy, and other people say they are lazy; but I can’t really say the group as a whole is lazy.”

20. The ways that stereotypes shape the perceptions on which people often allegedly base racial generalizations are dramatically illustrated in an experiment by B. L. Duncan. A group of persons viewed a videotape of a heated exchange, in which one person mildly shoved a second. The parties to the exchange were varied with regard to race (white shoved black, black shoved black, and so on) for different audiences. The audiences were asked to say whether they saw the exchange as violent. A white audience, in the case of a black shoving a white, saw the act as “violent” 75 percent of the time, but when a white shoved a black, the percentage was only 17 percent. Reported in Walter Stephan and David Rosenfield, “Racial and Ethnic Stereotypes,” in In the Eye of the Beholder: Contemporary Issues in Stereotyping, ed. Arthur G. Miller, 3–4 (New York, 1982). Stephan and Rosenfield report similar experiments with black audiences that yield the same perception of blacks as more violent than whites.

21. What I have called “inherentism” is sometimes referred to as “essentialism” and is almost uniformly rejected. I have avoided “essence” terminology because the complex philosophical history of this term provides meanings according to which races would have essences. For instance, a thing is sometimes spoken of as having an essence when it possesses nontrivial defining features. On this definition, phenotypic, ancestral, and geographical origin criteria could be used to sort people into traditional racial groups; races would then have essences, independent of whether the groups thus defined possessed further psychological or behavioral characteristics. A third familiar use of “essentialism”—solely as a term of criticism—is to refer to overgeneralization about group characteristics (often, tacitly, on the basis of characteristics of the overgeneralizer’s group, for example, generalizing about all women on the basis of the experience of white women); this use does not require that the alleged characteristics be thought of as inherent, and thus, on my view, is not appropriately called “racial.” To avoid the possible confusions of these two other familiar understandings of “essentialism,” I have eschewed this term in favor of “inherentism.” (I am grateful to Sally Haslanger for clarification of essentialism.)

22. Cf. Tatum, “Why Are All the Black Kids, 168: “Most biologists and physical anthropologists tell us that there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ race. All human populations are ‘mixed’ populations.”

23. “The very notion of hybrid or mixed races is based on the false assumption that ‘African’ and ‘Caucasian’ are pure racial types available for hybridization.” Blackburn, “Why Race,” 8.

24. The one-drop rule is an instance of a more general rule of racial classification called “hypodescent,” according to which the offspring of parents of two racial groups is assigned to the lower in social status of the two groups. Gloria Marshall, “Racial Classifications: Popular and Scientific,” in Science and the Concept of Race, ed. Margaret Mead, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ethel Tobach, and Robert E. Light (New York, 1969), reprinted in The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future, ed. Sandra Harding, 118 (Bloomington, Ind., 1993). The adoption of the one-drop rule in the United States was prompted primarily by slave owners’ desire to maximize the slave population when the supply was not being replenished by importation from Africa, especially after the banning of the slave trade in 1808. See Albert Mosley, “Negritude, Nationalism, and Nativism: Racists or Racialists?” in Racism, ed. Leonard Harris (Amherst, N.Y., 1999), 81.

25. Just as blacks have passed, so some who think of themselves and are taken by others as white have some African ancestry and would not be counted as white if all the facts about their ancestry were known.

26. This situation seems less paradoxical once we distinguish races from racialized groups (see chapter 8). Blacks have the least somatic uniformity required to be a race, yet are the most racialized of all groups.

27. I am grateful to Diane Paul for feedback on an earlier draft of the remainder of this chapter, and for sources on material regarding genetics and race.

28. Richard Lewontin, Human Diversity (New York, 1995), 123; Joann C. Gutin, “End of the Rainbow,” Discover, Nov. 1994, 72. The remaining 8–9 percent of total variation is accounted for by differences between ethnic or tribal groups within the same race. In a careful study, Guido Barbujani and his colleagues analyzed molecular diversity at 109 DNA markers in sixteen populations which differed greatly in geographical location, origin, and somatic and cultural characteristics, including Mbuti pygmies from Zaire, Cambodians (sampled in the San Francisco area), northern Italians, Mayans in Yucatan, white Australians, and New Guineans. The authors conclude, “We found that differences between members of the same population accounts for 84.4% of the total, which is in excellent agreement with estimates based on allele frequencies of classic, protein polymorphisms [the basis for Lewontin and Gutin’s estimates].” Guido Barbujani, Arianna Magagni, Eric Minch, and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “An Apportionment of Human DNA Diversity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 94 (Apr. 1997): 4516–19 (quote from 4516).

29. Blackburn, “Why Race,” 14, citing L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, P. Menozzi, and A. Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, 1994). Lewontin makes a similar point: “If, after a great cataclysm, only Africans were left alive, the human species would have retained 93% of its total genetic variation.” Human Diversity, 123.

30. Gutin, “End of the Rainbow,” 72; Paul Hoffman, “The Science of Race,” Discover, Nov. 1994, 4.

31. Figures and general discussion from Lewontin, Human Diversity, 29, 117, 119, 120.

32. For multifaceted critiques of The Bell Curve, see the essays collected in Devlin et al., Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to “The Bell Curve” (New York, 1997).

33. Lewontin, Human Diversity, 29; Jared Diamond, “Race without Color,” Discover, Nov. 1994, 86. Natural selection and adaptation are not the only possible explanations of genetic differences among populations. Another is the so-called founder effect, in which an “unusual condition in a population can be traced to a founding ancestor who happened to carry a novel mutation into the region.” The founder effect explains the high incidence of Huntington’s disease in the Lake Maracaibo region of Venezuela and of Tay-Sachs disease among Ashkenazi Jews. Natalie Angier, “Do Races Differ? Not Really, Genes Show,” New York Times, Aug. 22, 2000, 6.

34. Jared Diamond points out that southern European whites (for example, Greeks and Italians) carry another antimalarial gene that does not cause sickle-cell anemia. So, if one were grouping according to the possession of antimalarial genes, some whites and many blacks would be in one group, while other whites, some blacks, and some Asians and Arabs would be in another. “Race without Color,” 86.

35. James Shreeve, “Terms of Estrangement,” Discover, Nov. 1994, 63. Hypertension is a particularly complex example, because if one were to think consistently about a truly racial explanation, one would have to look at hypertension also among Africans—which turns out to be quite low—as well as among white groups, where it turns out, for example, that Finns and Russians have high rates. Ibid. In other words, here a consistently and comprehensively racial view would lead to jettisoning a race-based generalization about hypertension.

36. See Abby Lippman, “Prenatal Genetic Testing and Screening: Constructing Needs and Reinforcing Inequities,” American Journal of Law and Medicine 17, nos. 1–2 (1991): 15–50. “Geneticization refers to an ongoing process by which differences between individuals are reduced to their DNA codes, with most disorders, behaviors, and physiological variations defined, at least in part, as genetic in origin” (19). Lippman’s concept of “geneticization” has come into wide use among those involved in genetics-related social controversies. Diane Paul, personal communication, Nov. 12, 2000. But Lippman’s qualification, “in part,” muddies the waters a bit. I would prefer to define geneticization as “conferring a substantially greater significance on genetic factors than evidence warrants.” Geneticization is not “genetic determinism” if that means that important human characteristics are fully determined by genetic structure. “Geneticization” makes a somewhat weaker claim of genetic determination.

37. Angier, “Do Races Differ?” 6.

38. The article’s use of the word “shaped” is sufficiently ambiguous, I suppose, to be consistent with a view that the expression of such traits as “intelligence” and “artistic talent” is almost wholly due to cultural, familial, and other environmental factors, with genetics providing only the biological potentialities. But, in context, the use of “shaped” seems to me much more naturally read as implying a strong genetic component to the actual expression of such traits.

A similar implication of geneticization appears in a health newsletter of Johns Hopkins University. “In less than a decade [researchers] identified approximately 50,000 human genes—segments of DNA that influence behavior, physical appearance, vulnerability to illness, and virtually every other human characteristic. This information was compiled to create the genome map.” “What the Human Genome Means to You,” Johns Hopkins Medical Letter, Health after 50 12, no. 10: 6. “Influence” might be a bit weaker than “shaped,” but the context strongly suggests that mapping the human genome has significantly advanced our understanding of what causes individuals to manifest particular traits, or at least what causes human beings in general to do so. In fact, the human genome has done nothing of the sort. Richard Lewontin’s prefatory remarks to the 1998 edition of Human Diversity are pertinent here: “The most important result of studying DNA has been that although there is much more genetic variation than we could have detected from the study of proteins alone, there have been no major changes in our picture of the pattern and origin of human diversity.… The study of DNA has not resulted in the discovery of genes for intelligence, aggressiveness, or the ability to play the viola. The very aspects of human diversity that fascinate us the most remain outside the domain of genetics.”

39. Smedley, Race in North America, 305, lists several such definitions, some drawn from respected textbooks.

40. Ibid., 306.

41. Ibid., 307–8. The genes that determine human skin color vary independently of other genes. There are evolutionary or other explanations of skin color; evidence points to the protection that melanin provides against ultraviolet solar radiation as an explanation for why sub-Saharan Africans, Australian aboriginals, and Indians have dark skin. The reasons why some people have lighter skin and others darker do not carry over to other genetically determined characteristics. Blackburn, “Why Race?” 8, 9. Blackburn points out that there is less scientific consensus on an evolutionary explanation for light skin color, for example in northern Europeans (9–10). Whites do have melanin-producing genes, as do blacks (and all other groups); but other genetic factors “more or less turn off melanin production” in whites. Rothman, Book of Life, 69.

42. Diamond, “Race without Color,” 86.

43. Smedley, Race in North America, 306–7.

44. Cf. Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 73. The distinguished population geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza claims that there is an irreducible arbitrariness in the level of taxonomic classification one chooses to define “races” in the biological sciences: “The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise for reasons that were already clear to Darwin. Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the hands of modern taxonomists, who define from 3 to 60 or more races.…Although there is no doubt that there is only one human species, there are clearly no objective reasons for stopping at any particular level of taxonomic splitting. In fact, the analysis we carry out in chapter 2 for purposes of evolutionary study shows that the level at which we stop our classifications is completely arbitrary.…All populations or population clusters overlap when single genes are considered, and in almost all populations, all alleles are present but in different frequencies. No single gene is therefore sufficient for classifying human populations into systematic categories.” Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza, History and Geography of Human Genes, 19. Despite this arbitrariness regarding scientific classifications of race, I think Michael Root is correct to say that even though there are no races in the popular meaning of the term, there could have been races in that sense. If different population groups had developed in different parts of the world in such a way that they were radically different genetically, phenotypically, culturally, and psychologically, these groups would have a claim to being the fundamental biological divisions of humankind that people wrongly think the groups we currently call races are. Michael Root, “Racial Realism,” in Philosophical Research on African-American Social Inequality, ed. Tommy Lee Lott (Lanham, Md., 2001).

45. Smedley, Race in North America, 305.

46. Some interesting philosophical defenses of the legitimacy of the concept of race seem to me to founder on this confusion between specialized scientific definitions of race and ordinary understandings of it. For example, Albert Mosley deploys a population geneticist account of race (drawn from one of its early proponents, Theodosius Dobzhansky) to defend a belief in race against Anthony Appiah’s critique. Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity”; and In My Father’s House, chap. 1; Mosley, “Negritude, Nationalism, and Nativism,” 74–86. Appiah’s critique, however, is meant to apply to the popular understanding of race, and Mosley does not clearly link his defense of the population genetics account to this popular understanding. Mosley also takes issue with Appiah’s claim that race is a useless and indeed destructive idea for understanding and mobilizing constructive action around problems facing Africa; but Mosley’s pertinent and interesting arguments on this issue of the strategic uses of racial identification seem to me only tangentially related to his defense of Dobzhansky’s account of race.

Philip Kitcher defends a more complex and qualified form of the “reproductive isolation” account of race. If I have understood him correctly (and I am not certain that I have), his argument still renders the relation between our current racial categories and his proposed conception of race problematic, tendentious, or unclear. For example, Kitcher says that racial divisions are sustained by “patterns of mating” that fall along racial lines, a practice he allegedly regards as “natural.” We should not infer from the role of genetics in calling into question inherent differences among “racial” groups that the idea of race is itself a genetic concept. Genetic differences unconnected to psychological traits have little relevance to the commonsense idea of race. Yet when Kitcher goes on to explain why American blacks and whites intermarry at a low rate, he (correctly) cites primarily social and historical reasons (although the rate of increase over the past thirty years is quite substantial), rather than anything that could be considered biological, or inherent in the racial character of the groups in question. It is not clear, therefore, how what Kitcher calls “race” bears on what we ordinarily understand by that term. Philip Kitcher, “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture,” in Harris, Racism, 87–117, esp. 106, 107–8.

47. Barkan, Retreat of Scientific Racism. Smedley also describes the antiracist efforts of the pioneering German American anthropologist Franz Boas. Smedley, Race in North America, 297–300. Boas is discussed more fully in Vernon J. Williams Jr., Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries (Lexington, Ky., 1996), and Baker, From Savage to Negro.

48. See Smedley, Race in North America, 311: “With very few exceptions, contemporary scientists deplore racism as an abominable by-product of the layperson’s confused misconception of the ‘true’ or ‘real’ meaning of race. They believe that if people were only made cognizant of the actual scientific understandings of biological differences, then the irrational prejudice upholding racism would disappear.”

49. Diamond, “Race without Color,” 89.

Chapter 8: Racialized Groups and Social Constructions

1. In Racism (73–77), Miles usefully discusses different ways the concept of “racializa-tion” has been used in literature on race. Miles’s own definition involves attaching social meaning to somatic characteristics in a way that defines collectivities. As he points out, this definition does not require a concept of race to have been developed in relation to such collectivities; somatic characteristics only have to be noted, and taken to define a significant social identity, as in ancient Greece. My own definition is more limited, to such collectivities as distinctly racial attributes are attributed (inherent mental and psychological traits, radical difference between races, and so on).

2. Haney-Lopez, White by Law.

3. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David Roediger (New York, 1998), 102–18. Mills states this very well: “In a racially structured polity, the only people who can find it psychologically possible to deny the centrality of race are those who are racially privileged, for whom race is invisible precisely because the world is structured around them, whiteness as the ground against which the figures of other races—those who, unlike us, are raced—appear.” Mills, Racial Contract, 76.

4. Mary Waters argues that ethnicity in the 1980s provided whites with a form of identity that masked their racial privilege and the racial disadvantages of nonwhites. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 147–68.

5. What I call “racialization” others have called (the process of being) “raced.” (This locution is used more in relation to individuals than is my use of “racialization,” which I apply primarily to groups.) Lucius Outlaw’s use of the similar expression “raciation” is quite interesting. In the introduction to his exceptionally illuminating discussions of race and ethnicity in On Race and Philosophy (New York, 1996), Outlaw introduces the concepts of “raciation” and “ethnicization” as “the complicated processes (biological, socio-cultural, historical) by which such populations and population subgroups are formed and maintained” (5). Outlaw’s descriptions of these processes seem to me to support the idea that the groups we call races are not actually races. But Outlaw talks about races in a way that implies that they are real biological and social divisions. For instance: “Raciation and ethnicization develop as responses to the need for life-sustaining and meaningfully acceptable order of various kinds (conceptual, social, political)” (8). He may or may not be right about ethnicity, but in my view ethnicities are real whereas races are not. I agree that racialized identity can provide a source of order in people’s lives; but I think the human species would have been a lot better off without races, and the idea of races. Racialized identities provide personal order only in response to an oppressive and stratified society. Ethnicity, by contrast, is typically not developed as a response to oppression; although political processes are involved in the creation of ethnic identities, the cultural groupings that form the basis for most ethnicities are more like natural responses to the meaning-seeking proclivities that Outlaw is pointing to.

6. The more general idea of a “pan” identity is of a larger group consisting of distinct subgroups, often national in character, such as “pan-Slav,” “pan-Arab,” and “pan-African.” In all cases the “pan” identity takes a political form, although it implies, independent of empirical foundation, a cultural or linguistic commonality.

7. An excellent treatment of panethnicity in general—and Asian American panethnicity in particular—to which my account is indebted, is Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity.

8. For discussion of the Vincent Chin case, see ibid., 141–55.

9. Indeed the framing of the Census question—and this is true of the 1970 and 1980 Censuses also—weakly implies that each of these separate ethnicities is itself a race. This may in part reflect an earlier twentieth-century understanding of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and others as distinct races.

10. Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (New York, 1998), 63–64. Liu feels that his Chinese American identity, by contrast, has real substance. At the same time he recognizes that “Asian American” can be a very personally meaningful identity, even if it is not to him. Liu’s discussion of these matters is extremely illuminating.

11. See Waters, Ethnic Options.

12. After a lobbying effort, Asian Indians were included in the Asian/Pacific Islander portion of the Census, and are now therefore eligible to seek minority status protection, access to affirmative action status, and the capacity to participate in many federal programs. Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity, 125.

13. Hollinger, PostEthnic America, esp. chap. 1. It is not clear that the “African American” designation is parallel to the others. This label is, I believe, generally understood to apply to black Americans whose ancestry lies in slavery within the United States; thus it does not include Caribbean Americans and recent African immigrants. There may be no label other than “black” to perform this “pan” function for persons of African ancestry, though we have seen that this seemingly purely racial designation tends in the United States to carry ethnocultural associations as well. It is worth noting that for the first generation of slaves, “African American” was a genuinely panethnic designation, since the slaves came from very distinct cultures in Africa.

14. See note 2. There can be disagreement about the criteria for assigning persons to a race—what counts for being “white”—and also disagreement as to whether a particular person meets those criteria.

15. The “Hispanic origins” category was invented in 1977 by the Office of Management and Budget in its guidelines for federal racial classifications (the so-called Directive No. 15) and was first used on the federal Census in 1980; the same category appeared on the 1990 Census. The 2000 Census wording is “Hispanic or Latino.” Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics, 80—83.

16. The census question reads: “Is person 1 Spanish/Hispanic/Latino?” If the answer to this question is “Yes” four further choices are provided: “Mexican, Mexican American, Chi-cano,” “Puerto Rican,” “Cuban,” and “other Spanish/Hispanic/Latino.” If the latter, the subject is to specify which group.

17. Jorge J. E. Gracia (not to be confused with Jorge L. A. Garcia, whose work is discussed elsewhere in this book) discusses the concept of mestizaje in some detail. He claims that it is distinct from amalgamation, in which the component elements lose their distinctive character entirely and become a wholly new entity. In mestizaje, the indigenous, the Spanish (or Iberian), and the African elements continue to be recognizable, but they modify each other both physically and culturally, as well as producing new elements through the mix. Jorge J, E. Gracia, Hispanic/Latino Identity: A Philosophical Perspective (Malden, Mass., 2000), 108–21, esp. 111. I have the impression that mestizo and mestiza identity is sometimes understood to emphasize the indigenous and European elements of the mix, leaving the African element in the shadows.

18. Nevertheless, prior to the 1930 Census, Mexican Americans were scored as “white,” with their Spanish descent in mind. With the influx of larger numbers of immigrants, they were more distinctly viewed in racial terms, reflected in this instruction to the 1930 Census enumerators: “Practically all Mexican laborers are of a racial mixture difficult to classify, though usually well recognized in the localities in which they are found.” Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 189, 72–74.

19. Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans have a much greater degree of African in their national mix than do Mexicans.

20. Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 87, and passim.

21. Rebecca Blank, “An Overview of Trends in Social and Economic Well-being, by Race,” in America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences, vol. 1, ed. Neil Smelser, William Julius Wilson, and Faith Mitchell (Washington, D.C., 2001).

22. Mary C. Waters, “Explaining the Comfort Factor: West Indian Immigrants Confront American Race Relations,” in The Cultural Territories of Race: Of Black and White Boundaries, ed. Michele Lamont (Chicago, 1999), 85, 71. Waters is addressing the question why whites are more comfortable with Caribbean blacks than with African Americans. Some of the factors she cites do not appear to bear directly on an actual deracializing of Caribbean blacks—for example, the perception that Caribbeans are more accepting of white people, especially as having authority over them in jobs, than are African Americans (85).

23. Although Caribbean immigrants can be seen as more welcomed, and less racialized, than native blacks, they can also be the target of nativist hostility—that is, hostility to foreigners or immigrants—that is not directed toward American natives. Nativism is not intrinsically race-based. In its first incarnation in the nineteenth century it was directed primarily against Catholics. Its conceptual target is the “foreign,” not the “racial other.” Blacks can direct nativist hostility toward other persons of color, including other blacks. Latinos who have been in the United States for several generations may direct nativist hostility toward newly arrived Latinos; here the hostility may not be pure nativism, but, to some extent, a not-yet-fully accepted group wishing to distance themselves from a group to which they are ethnically linked yet who are more marginalized and who therefore may taint them by association. This would perhaps be a derivative nativism. See Arian Campo-Flores, “‘Mexicano’ Against ‘Chicano,’” Newsweek, Sept. 18, 2000, 49, 51. Here “Chicano” refers to Mexican Americans who have been in the United States for several generations, and “Mexicano” to new immigrants.

As the vast majority of post-1965 immigrants to the United States are people of color, and most “nativism” is expressed by whites, it has become difficult to disentangle the racial from the purely nativist strands in anti-immigrant hostility, which has intensified (though irregularly) throughout the 1990s. See Juan F. Perea, ed., Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-immigrant Impulse in the United States (New York, 1997).

24. Mary Waters demonstrates this ethnic masking of race in Ethnic Options, 147–68.

25. The cover of Newsweek for Sept. 18, 2000, boldly announces a special report, “Redefining Race in America.” The introductory remarks in the table of contents to the ten articles on this subject suggest that the increase in racial intermarriage, the greater visibility and self-claimed identity of people of mixed race, and the influx of immigrants of many different nonblack, nonwhite groups means that “the old labels of black and white can’t begin to capture the subtleties of blood and identity” (p. 3). In itself this is quite true, but this framing of the articles, and occasional elements of the articles themselves, suggest that the new complexity of the racial landscape is rendering racial categories and antiblack racism increasingly obsolescent, if not obsolete. But the substance of most of the articles does not support this view. Continuing black disadvantage, though downplayed, is occasionally acknowledged. No evidence of any substantial deracializing of whites and blacks is presented.

These articles also share a tendency in contemporary American culture and media to identify the problematizing of racial categories with the mitigating of racism. Though these two things are not entirely unconnected, current personal and societal racism and legacies of historical racism and injustice can outlast a weakening of racial consciousness. Indeed, as we will see in chapter 9, certain forms of nonconsciousness of race actually support racial inequality.

None of this is to deny that some of the developments documented in the articles—a movement in Birmingham, Alabama, to renounce racial prejudice, and the general increase in interracial marriages—are quite hopeful developments.

26. I am indebted to Jorge L. A. Garcia and Sally Haslanger for several conversations about social construction which have greatly contributed to my understanding.

27. Social construction is a complex and contested idea. I will discuss only certain strands within this general rubric that bear specifically on the issue of race.

28. By “nation” I mean “nation-state.” The former word is sometimes used more broadly to include territorially concentrated ethnic groups, such as the Basque, the Kurds, or the Flemings, especially when those groups have a collective identity as distinct from their host nation-states.

29. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (New York, 1993).

30. Being treated as members of a race gives those in a racialized group a basis for a sense of shared fate, that “we are all in this together.” But the idea of a shared destiny carries a further implication of a divinity or world spirit (as in Hegel) or some sort of cosmic ordering within which a self-existing collectivity (not a mere social creation) is accorded a role. This is why I say that racialized groups can not have shared destinies. W. E. B. Du Bois’s early views on race had something of this “shared destiny” flavor, which accompanied his belief that races were real, a view he began to abandon in the early twentieth century. See “Conservation of Races.”

31. Walter Benn Michaels suggests that on a constructivist account of race, it is incoherent to speak of a black person “passing” as white (see discussion in chapters 5 and 7), since an individual could not be “really” black apart from being identified by the wider society as black. “The No-Drop Rule,” Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994): 90. In an insightful discussion of this article, Robert Gooding-Williams notes that social construction regarding race does not mean that people are simply what they are visually taken to be. Rather, the rules of racial designation provide for descent-based criteria as well, and these override somatic criteria; someone passes if her parents are black but she “looks white” (and her ancestry is not known to those to whom she is passing). “Race, Multiculturalism, and Democracy,” Constellations 5, no. 1 (1998): 18–41, esp. 19–22. That having been said, a clearer distinction between races and racialized groups would obviate Michaels’s somewhat understandable response to the idea that races are not real but only social constructs—how, then, could someone be “really” black? The answer is that the complex rules of racial designation apply to racialized groups, not real races; it is racialized groups that are real.

32. Malone V. Haley No. 88–339, Sp. Jud. Ct. Suffolk County, Mass., July 25, 1989. The case is discussed in Christopher Ford, “Administering Identity: The Determination of ‘Race’ in Race-conscious Law,” California Law Review 82, no. 5 (Oct. 1994): 1231–1285.

33. The court used as evidence somatic features associated with race (“fair skin, fair hair coloring”), birth certificate reporting “white” identifications for the previous three generations, the way the Malone brothers appeared to present themselves socially, and their self-identification on a previous civil service exam. Ibid., 1233.

34. In his essay “Race, Culture, Identity,” which has served as a springboard for my own arguments for the nonreality of races in chapter 7, Anthony Appiah draws on Ian Hacking’s idea that the labels we apply to people can serve as a basis for meaningful collective identities. Appiah says that racial identities are created when people shape their life projects by reference to the racial labels that have been ascribed to them, in a process Appiah calls “identification” (78). Appiah is concerned to show how race can continue to be an important social and personal identity even if there are no races and even if people abandon central tenets of a racial outlook, such as that groups defined by phenotype also possess distinctive mental and psychological characteristics (or “racial essence”).

What exactly is a “racial identity,” on Appiah’s account? At the ascriptive level, it involves ancestry and phenotype. “Identification” involves acknowledgment of these ascriptive criteria, but also recognition of the history of attributing racial essences to the groups that are somatically and ancestrally defined, although the identifier need not himself believe in such “essences.” Appiah goes on to propose healthy and appropriate forms of racial, and specifically black American, identification—for example, that it not be too “tightly scripted” (implying a plethora of constricting norms about how blacks ought to behave), that it not be confused with a cultural identity, and that it not be allowed to “imperialize” other important social and personal identities (a fault I have called “moral racialism” in chapter 3).

In this discussion of racial identity, Appiah seems to me to have lost sight of his earlier powerful critique of “race.” His reliance on Hacking seems to have led him to make too much of the fact that we possess socially agreed-upon criteria for racial identities, and to pay too little attention to the moral baggage that normally accompanies racial categorization; that is, he tends to reduce the meaning of race to mere racial classification.

Appiah’s discussion of racial identity does not follow through on the distinction that his previous critique of race should have led him to draw, between a racialized identity and a genuinely racial identity. On Appiah’s account, does the individual who adopts a “black” racial identity recognize that races do not exist? That is, does he reject (doctrinal) racialism? If so, he is more likely to avoid the pitfalls of racial identity that Appiah mentions (too-tight scripting, confusion with cultural identity, imperialization). Such an individual is also, as I have argued, more likely to avoid the other divisive associations with race that I have been concerned to emphasize (radical “otherizing,” moral distance, and so on)—features which Appiah somewhat implies in his critique of race earlier in the article but does not explicitly state, and does not carry over to the discussion of racial identity in the latter part of the article. On the other hand, if this individual views his identity as based on real racial divisions, he is quite likely to fall into the traps Appiah mentions, as well as those he implies earlier. Appiah does not clarify which sort of “racial identity” this individual possesses.

Appiah does recognize that racial identification takes on a feature of race beyond ascription according to standard somatic/ancestral criteria—the history of ascribing racial essences. But he does not explain the implications of this recognition for current racial identifications, and identities. Could not someone recognize that history but regard it as having no bearing on what racial identities currently signify? Might she not say, for example, that people formerly believed that blacks, whites, Asians, and so on possessed certain distinct mental and temperamental characteristics, but that aside from a small minority, such belief s have been abandoned?

Yet if current racial meanings go beyond ascriptive criteria for categorization, perhaps plus a recognition of certain historical features attributed to races, Appiah has not explained what those meanings are. More specifically, he does not, in this section, acknowledge the inherently divisive character of racial identity—its baggage of false homogeneity, exaggerated differentness among races, inherency and unchangeability of characteristics, and the like.

And so, to summarize, I think a major reason for Appiah’s failure to carry his argument against race into his discussion of “racial identity” is his reliance on Hacking’s “labelizing” understanding of social construction in the article on which Appiah draws. See Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas Heller, Morton Sosna, and David Wellbery (Stanford, Calif., 1986). Hacking may well have changed or amplified that understanding in his book-length treatment of this issue, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).

35. Rainier Spencer decries this familiar move undertaken in the name of social construction: “In an effort to distance the acceptance of race from biologistic notions, race is recast as a social construction, suggesting—wrongly—that as such it is independent of and not informed by an underlying belief in biological race. This appears to give race a legitimacy. The false consciousness should not be referred to as a ‘social reality.’” Spencer, Spurious Issues, 39. Orlando Patterson sees a similar pattern in certain contemporary writing about race: “Having demolished and condemned as racist the idea that observed group differences have any objective, biological foundation, the liberal intellectual community has revived the ‘race’ concept as an essential category of human experience with as much ontological validity as the discarded racist notion of biologically distinct groups.” Patterson, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s “Racial” Crisis (Washington, D.C., 1997), 72.

36. Boys on the Side. Dir. Herbert Ross. Alcor Films, 1995.

37. I draw the idea of scalarity from Anthony Skillen, “Racism: Flew’s Three Concepts of Racism,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 10, no. 1 (1993): 78.

38. Donna Reed, Robert Redford, Barbara Streisand, and the film The Way We Were (dir. Sydney Pollack. Columbia Pictures, 1973) are all used as “white” cultural markers in relation to Robin.

39. Harlon Dalton, discussing the issue of scalar race in relation to culture and identity, writes: “What really matters is not whether a black person talks, acts, or performs White, but whether it appears that she would prefer to be White.” Racial Healing, 89.

40. Stephen Carter, “The Black Table, the Empty Seat, and the Tie,” in Early, Lure and Loathing.

41. To be more precise, Carter is distrustful of setting standards for how one manifests attachment to or love for black people; but he does not really raise the question whether “love for black people” is an appropriate norm for black persons. Anthony Appiah is more clearly concerned with the ways constricting standards can get built into what it means to be “black.” Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, and Survival,” and “Race, Culture, Identity.”

42. In his study of ethnoracial groups at the University of California at Berkeley, Troy Duster reports that “Native American students express the highest levels of internal tension and conflict between the demands of assimilation and accommodation to new cultural and social skills required for success in the university setting and maintaining the integrity of their cultural roots and connections.” Duster, Diversity Project, 19.

Chapter 9. Should We Try to Give Up Race?

1. Glenn Loury makes this point well: “Many proponents of color-blindness as the primary moral ideal come close to equating the use of racial information in administrative practices with the continued awareness of racial identity in the broad society…The implicit assumption of color-blind advocates is that, if we would just stop putting people into these boxes, they would oblige us by not thinking of themselves in these terms. But, this assumption is patently false.” Loury, Shape of the River, xxviii.

2. There is evidence that white workers are especially harmed by not recognizing their commonality of interest with minority, especially black, workers. One study found that 59 percent of blacks, compared to 28 percent of nonblacks, would vote for a union if given a chance. Cited in Richard D. Kahlenberg, “Unionization as a Civil Right,” American Prospect, Sept. 11, 2000, 14. Gerald Torres and Lani Guinier plausibly argue that racial minority workers are often the most militant and the least prone to buy into ruling elites’ mystifications of their interests; and that white workers can and do benefit from following the lead of such workers. The Miner’s Canary (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

3. I am grateful to Melissa Nobles for assistance with this section.

4. Nobles, Shades of Citizenship.

5. “Mulatto” was understood as someone with approximately half “black African” ancestry and half white; “quadroon” one-fourth black; and “octoroon” one-eighth white.

6. “The mulatto category was a qualifier of the ‘negro’ category, not a wholly independent category.” Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 82. The elimination of the “mulatto” category from the 1930 Census signaled the ascendancy of the “one-drop” rule. See further discussion below.

7. The designing of racial categories for the Census from 1980 on has an interesting history, recounted in Nobles. The categories were the product of a committee representing a range of federal agencies concerned with collecting racial and ethnic data. The basic structure of categories for all federal agencies was laid out in the so-called Directive No. 15 of the Office of Management and Budget in 1977. This document has remained the basis of Census categorization; but the input of different ethnic and racial groups, often directly sought by the federal government, which has appointed Asian Pacific, black, Hispanic, American Indian, and Alaskan Native advisory committees, has resulted in some changes in the 1990 and 2000 censuses.

8. Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 80.

9. In contrast to the others, the “Asian/Pacific Islander/Native Hawaiian” category is not accorded a panethnic designation on the census; instead, ethnic subdivisions of that category are listed—Chinese, Filipino, Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Vietnamese, and so on—as discussed in the previous chapter.

10. Nobles points out that civil rights groups did not themselves explicitly take up the matter of “race” itself, but were concerned only with attacking racial discrimination. Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 75–77. Challenging discrimination and its moral foundation without challenging the full notion of “race” is one reason racial identity remains regarded as largely unproblematic by many American blacks. See chaps 5 and 6.

11. In its preamble, the OMB Directive no. 15 takes a baby step in the direction of rejecting racialism; “These classifications should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature.” The directive does not give any instruction as to a clear alternative way of thinking about the meaning of these categories (e.g., as referring to racialized groups); nor does it suggest what might be the consequences of jettisoning a scientific or anthropological understanding of them.

12. Patterson makes this argument in Ordeal of Integration, 72–77. He also offered the proposal specifically in relation to the then upcoming decentennial Census in “The Race Trap,” New York Times (date unknown, but almost certainly 1996 or 1997, as those were the years of public debate about categories to appear on the 2000 Census). The same proposal was made by the American Anthropological Association, and was also made in the 1950 UNESCO statement on race, written by a distinguished group of scientists that was dominated by anthropologists: “Because serious errors…are habitually committed when the term ‘race’ is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term ‘race’ altogether and speak of ethnic groups.” Montagu, Statement on Race, 13.

13. Patterson, Ordeal of Integration, 74.

14. Ibid., 76.

15. In his thoughtful account of contemporary usage of “racism” as a category of historical analysis, the historian George Frederickson analyzes it as a form of assertion of ethnic group status based on ancestry. “Understanding Racism; Reflections of a Comparative Historian,” in Frederickson, The Comparative Imagination (Berkeley Calif., 1999), esp. 84–86. One virtue Frederickson sees in this analysis is his claim (drawn from Donald Horowitz) that “designation of people by skin color and the mistreatment of them on that basis has no special features that would distinguish it in any definitive way from group domination based on religion, culture, or the simple belief that some people have defective ancestry” (84). See Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, Calif., 1985), esp. 64–83. Frederickson’s purposes are analytical rather than normative, and his account of racism may well possess some virtues for those purposes. But the statement quoted above does not seem true. As a comparison of Irish and black Americans suggests, race is not the same as ethnicity, even if both involve some tie to ancestry. Nor is race equivalent to “designation of people by skin color.” The ancient Greeks designated people by skin color but lacked a notion of race. Race is not simply seeing skin color as conferring a social identity. It brings the full baggage of implication of unequal worth, inherent mental and psychological characteristics, and moral division. In addition, “ethnicity” really means one thing in the United States—where it is explicitly contrasted with “race”—and another in other parts of the world. Serbs and Croats, Tutsis and Hutus exemplify a form of what amounts to “racialized ethnicity” in which the groups are thought of as having something like different natures and are experienced as radically “other” in the manner characteristic of race. (This kind of ethnicity is akin to the early twentieth-century view of southern and eastern European immigrants that Patterson mentions, and, in that regard, also more akin to the European strand of nineteenth-century racial thought discussed in chapter 6). Horowitz’s work mostly concerns ethnic groups in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, so his notion of ethnicity is closer to this racialized form than to the American version. Regarding the United States, Frederickson and Horowitz’s view overlooks the fact that ethnicity is, in large measure, a less morally troubling form of distinction among persons than race.

16. Cross, “Oppositional Identity,” 198.

17. Norimitsu Onishi, “New Sense of Race Arises among Asian-Americans,” New York Times, May 30, 1996, A1, B6.

18. Ibid., B6.

19. Ibid.

20. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 38.

21. This is true as well of Du Bois, though when he wrote Souls he still believed in races in the classic sense. He abandoned this belief in the early decades of the twentieth-century.

22. Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” 89–90.

23. Liu, Accidental Asian, 79.

24. On the exploitation of black music particularly in the 1950s, see Reebee Garofalo, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the USA (Boston, 1997).

25. Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 35–69. See also note 6. But opposition to interracial marriage and a view of biracial persons as defective have by no means disappeared from American life. In 1994 a school principal in Alabama forbade racially mixed couples from attending the prom, and told a mixed-race student who protested the policy that the rule was aimed at preventing “mistakes” like her. Carlos A. Fernandez, “Government Classification of Multiracial/Multiethnic People,” in The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier, ed. Maria P. P. Root (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1996), 32–33.

26. Maria P. P. Root, “The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as a Significant Frontier in Race Relations,” in Multiracial Experience, xv.

27. Eric Schmitt, “For 7 Million People, One Race Category Isn’t Enough,” The New York Times on the Web, Mar. 13, 2001, http://nytimes.qpass.com/qpass-archives.

28. Shipler, Country of Strangers, 117.

29. As of 1997, the few states that had defined “multiracial” for the purposes of state record-keeping had defined it as “biracial.” California, however, defines a “multiracial” person as “an individual whose biological parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents are of more than one race.” Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 139. This definition is a step toward the idea of thinking of oneself as possessing a mix of racial ancestry without tying that mix to specific persons in that ancestry; this is what I mean by “multiracial.” Maria Root suggests that “biracial” itself can be employed with a similar connotation, “when…there is racial mixing in the family history that is important to the individual.” “Glossary,” in Root, Multiracial Experience, ix.

30. Cynthia Nakashima, “Voices from the Movement: Approaches to Multiraciality,” in Root, Multiracial Experience, 82.

31. Among those claiming dual or multiple racial communities, some may wish the community to accept them as multiracial (as well as “black,” “white,” or “Latino”). Others may be indifferent to this sort of acknowledgment, or even prefer to be thought of as “just like everyone else” in the group.

32. Nakashima, “Voices from the Movement,” 81. Since each racial group has a distinct identity and faces distinct racial issues, some multiracial or biracial people seek community only with those of the same “mix” as themselves, not with all other multiracials.

33. The two major organizations are “Project RACE” (“Reclassify All Children Equally”), and the Association for Multiethnic Americans (AMEA). The former’s mission is to advocate for a multiracial classification on all official forms asking for racial data. The latter’s is to promote a positive awareness of interracial and multi-ethnic identity; this group was supportive of the Census Bureau’s ultimate decision to allow respondents to check “all that apply” without providing a distinct “multiracial” category, while Project RACE was not. See discussion of the philosophies and political initiatives regarding identity recognition and the Census in Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 130–45.

34. Joel Perlmann points out that the separate category “multiracial” conveys no new information about an individual who provides “her component races” but “it sends the message that somehow something more is being communicated, that multiraciality is somehow equivalent to a new racial status.” “Reflecting the Changing Face of America: Multiracials, Racial Classification, and American Intermarriage,” in Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, ed. Werner Sollors (New York, 2000), 516.

35. The methods by which the Census is tabulated also affect the visibility of multiracials. The Census Bureau could simply report the number of all persons who availed themselves of more than one racial designation in the “check all that apply” option. Or they could report how many persons checked each category, thus in a sense double-counting multiracial individuals but not tabulating them as a distinct group. Or, somewhat against the spirit of the new option but in line with the concern to monitor civil rights compliance and to gain an accurate count of racial minorities who might be the target of discrimination or who are entitled to various programs (as a proportion of the actual population), multiracials who are partly white could be counted only in their nonwhite category. These options are not mutually exclusive; different tabulations could be used for different purposes. For a discussion of tabulation options, see Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 164–69. As of this writing (May 2001), the Bureau had begun to avail itself of some of these options. See Schmitt, “For 7 Million.”

36. Nakshima, “Voices from the Movement,” 81. Naomi Zack, a mixed-race philosopher, articulates such a humanistic, antirace position, though one that could be adopted by monoracial as well as multiracial people: “The concept of race is an oppressive cultural invention and convention, and I refuse to have anything to do with it.…Theref ore I have no racial affiliation and will accept no racial designations.” “An Autobiographical View of Mixed-Race Deracination,” American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 91, no. 1 (spring 1992): 6–10. Cited in Nakashima, Voices from the Movement, 89.

37. The Newsweek issue discussed in note 25, chap. 8, partakes to some degree in both these developments—a shift in interest from racism to multiracial people, and a conflating of questioning race with undermining racial injustice.

38. Although how the individual is viewed racially by others is the primary desideratum, the Census no longer gathers such information by having its own enumerators identify a subject’s race. Since 1970 the Census has operated only by self-designation. If the Census allows only the standard racial designations as options, however, it probably presumes that, on the whole, self-designation corresponds to the way the individual is viewed by the wider society. Only if “multiracial” is offered as an option might these two views begin to diverge in significant numbers.

39. Regarding the possible tension between civil rights and individual identity recognition, it is worth noting that Republicans tended to support the addition of a “multiracial” category (through the “Tiger Woods” bill, introduced in 1997), whereas the Democrats opposed it. Nobles comments: “Republicans were attracted to the idea that ‘multiracial’ further complicated the country’s already complex and highly charged racial politics. Democrats, in contrast, dared not risk alienating their key constituencies, and they remained committed, on some level, to monitoring civil rights violations and enforcing of civil rights legislation.” Shades of Citizenship, 141

40. It is worthy of note, however, that at least some mixed-race persons opted for only “black” and not also “white” on the 2000 Census, with its instruction to “check all that apply.” “Many people, indeed most, who could claim more than one race are not expected to do so, demographers and census officials say.” Diana Jean Schemo, “Despite Options on Census Many to Check ‘Black’ Only,” New York Times, Feb. 12, 2000, A1, A9.

I have been able only to skim the surface of the many complex issues regarding mixed-race identity and its significance for race, racial injustice and racism, and harmony among racial groups. These issues are explored in a burgeoning literature, sometimes in the form of collections of personal testimonies of those claiming mixed-race or biracial identity. For some representative examples, see Maria P. P. Root, ed., Racially Mixed People in America (Newbury Park, Calif., 1992); Root The Multiracial Experience, Naomi Zack, American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity (Lanham, Md., 1995); Lisa Funderburg (ed.), Black White Other: Biracial Americans Talk about Race and Identity (New York, 1994); and Sollors Black-White Intermarriage.