agree that the best testimony of the physical sciences effectively refutes the Klansman. The pages to follow will present some of the details of this scientific challenge and swiftly survey some ways of interpreting it. I also agree that social science and policy analysis are essential to the work of taking race seriously. I am also convinced, though, that studying race effectively in these domains requires some clarity about several squarely philosophical questions.
The inevitability of philosophy is easiest to see in relation to the social sciences. Once we decide what racial prejudice is, psychologists can test for it; and once we decide what injustice is, policy analysts can devise ways to contest it. But settling the best ways to think about justice and prejudice is a philosophical project, even if people other than philosophers often, by necessity, do the work.
The natural scientist’s challenge to race-thinking also leaves openings for the philosopher. Many people take the scientist’s victory over the Klansman to show that all race-thinking is futile, that all race-talk is false and objectionable. What it actually shows, though, is that certain dialects of race-talk are problematic. After all, not everyone who wants to talk about race – or, as I’ll say from here on out, not every racialist – is a member of the Klan. Some speakers of race-talk are, as we’ll see, devout anti-racists, fully committed to the thought that racial differences, whatever they are, make no difference to judgments about human worth or capacity.
The existence of people who reject obviously objectionable forms of race-talk without rejecting race altogether is a sign that philosophical attention is necessary. The philosopher J. L. Austin put the key point like this: “If a distinction works well for practical purposes in ordinary life (no mean feat, for even ordinary life is full of hard cases), then there is sure to be something in it, it will not mark nothing.”6 When people persist in using an idea or concept to organize their lives, we have to take that seriously, at least long enough to see what purposes it serves and what work it’s doing.
I don’t mean to have settled accounts with the scientific challenge to race-talk just yet. Maybe the anti-racist racialist is just confused and trying to use race-talk to do work that may be important – like resisting racism – but that it just isn’t up to. Maybe race is an essentially biological concept and the repudiation of that concept by contemporary physical science means that it belongs in the dustbin of history. We’ll consider these possibilities in later chapters. The point right now, though, is that it’s impossible to evaluate these arguments without some prior clearing of the philosophical ground. Why might one think that race is an essentially biological concept? If race-thinking is older than modern physical science, then maybe something else is going on. What exactly does the anti-racist racialist want race-talk to do? If there is a way to make the race concept do this work without turning into a Nazi, then maybe there’s something here to consider.
Having put off the inevitable encounter with the scientific anti-racialist, I will adopt an expository strategy that requires some comment. Hardline anti-racialists sometimes signal their suspicion of race by putting quotation marks around the offending word, in the manner that has earned scare quotes their name. This strategy strikes me as premature until we know more about the grounds for their suspicion. In light of these considerations, and as you may have noticed, I will use scare quotes sparingly, mainly to observe what philosophers call the “use-mention distinction.” When I’m talking about the word, term, or concept, I will use quotation marks. When I am not mentioning the term “race” but using it to talk about whatever the term denotes, it will appear without quotation marks.
1.4 Words vs things
I’ve said little to this point about anything apart from words, terms, and concepts. You may be wondering what happened to the things we call races. When do we talk about them?
In order to do the work of this book, which does, trust me, involve examining the entities we call races, I’ll need to find the lowest common denominator for the various dialects of race-talk. I’ll need to find the conceptual role that “race” plays at various sites, including at the opposed sites from which we receive the specific dogmas of Klan-style racism and the critical reactions of anti-racist racialists. Once we identify the core meanings that link these two extremes, we’ll be able to see the disagreement between them as a disagreement about the same subject. This will leave us in a better position to evaluate race-thinking as a resource, instrument, or tool that can be used for good or for ill.
All of this is to say: we can’t talk meaningfully about the things that words like “race” denote until we get clear on, well, just what the words denote. The concept of race, like all concepts, is a lens that we use to examine certain aspects of reality; and when you’re using things with lenses, whether they’re telescopes, cameras, or conceptual frames, it’s important to be clear about the condition of the apparatus before making judgments about whatever the apparatus shows you. Once we know a bit more about the racial discourse lens, then we can ask whether the subjects of that discourse actually exist, whether we’d be better off not talking about them even if they do exist, and so on.
1.5 What do you mean, “we”?
It may seem, especially in the next section, that I’m telling you what I mean by race rather than what we mean by it. And this may make it seem as if I’m making it all up as I go. This is an occupational hazard in philosophy, and hence another aspect of what it can mean to approach race as a philosopher.
I should say that this is an aspect of what it means to approach race as a philosopher of a particular kind – as someone working in the wake of figures like John Dewey and John Austin. Working in the traditions epitomized by those figures means taking terms in common usage and availing myself of their commonness. The philosopher working in this vein takes herself as a representative figure, empowered to think the thoughts that anyone with sufficient time and leisure might think, committed to using and refining the language that we all share. In this spirit, then, when I attribute meanings and actions and assumptions to some “we,” I am speaking from my experience as one of us. To do philosophy like this is to act as a supremely interested observer of what we do, someone encouraged to push past familiar assumptions and customs in search of the organizing structures that lie behind what we do.
One currently popular alternative to this approach is particularly relevant to the study of race. Instead of revising the tradition of armchair speculation to arrive at the approach noted above, I could conduct surveys and polls, in the hope of producing empirical generalizations about what we think. Approaching race theory in that way might make me a social scientist of some sort: someone whose expertise comes in at the observation stage, or in working through that stage in a certain way, using certain tools (statistical analysis, experimental design, and so on). The expertise of the philosopher, such as it is, comes into play later, at the teasing-out stage, or perhaps earlier, in refining the language in which scientists pose their questions. This sort of work should be informed by the scientist’s best hypotheses, but should consist principally in thinking through the implications of what we say.
Then again, turning to empirical inquiry might simply make me a different kind of philosopher. I am thinking here of what is now called “experimental philosophy,” and of the way this work has been brought to bear on race theory by philosophers like Josh Glasgow and Edouard Machery.7 The burden of this work is in part to break the stranglehold that armchair reflection has on our methods, even in areas where actual data might be quite useful. Instead of considering the ethical dimensions of human agency in a speculative vacuum, experimental ethicists ask – in conversation with researchers in psychology and elsewhere – about the empirical conditions under which people are in fact more likely to behave in the ways that we think of as virtuous and vicious. Similarly, experimentally inclined philosophers of race sometimes eschew the assumption of representativeness that I rely on above and turn instead to essentially psychological studies of what people in fact
