is considerable value in this experimental work. For one thing, it takes the real world seriously, which is an important safeguard against speculative flights of fancy. For another, it highlights certain implications of our beliefs and commitments more clearly and directly than armchair reflection does. For example, if certain ways of thinking about race correlate more robustly with racial prejudice than others, this is something that people interested in fighting prejudice should know. And if the vast majority of people who use race-talk in fact understand themselves to be talking about pixies and goblins, this is something that theorists devoted to exploring “folk” concepts of race should know.
These virtues aside, though, experimental philosophy still leaves room for the sort of project I have in mind, and might require it. Like me, the experimental race theorist wants to know what we mean when we talk about race. Unlike me, he or she is willing to conduct the polls and surveys that will yield hard data in answer to this question. But, just as with the social scientist, old-fashioned philosophical reflection will help in thinking through the limitations and the implications of these data. (I presume the thoughtful experimentalist will agree with this.) We still need to ask whether the survey questions import assumptions that need to be unpacked, and whether the experimental subject’s assent means what it seems to. And it will be difficult to ask these questions responsibly without being informed by a body of critical reflections on the content, uses, history, and structure of racial discourse – without, in short, an old-fashioned philosophy of race.
Beyond these considerations of experimental design and interpretation, we need to ask specifically philosophical questions about the prospects for discursive innovation. Might a theoretical concept of race – a concept as distant from folk understandings as the physicist’s account of light is from mine – do some useful work? Might an innovation in popular discourse be similarly useful, and in fact be on the horizon? These are not questions about whether people in fact assent to P, or whether their refusal to do so correlates with their assent to R. They are questions about whether assenting to some distinct but related proposition Q would be a worthwhile outcome if we could bring it into being, and whether some specific constellation of human practices is developing itself in ways that will incline people to think Q rather than P or R. If we answer these latter questions in the affirmative, we will have to work up the resources for finding, understanding, and deploying these new concepts. And we might have to unearth those resources from a painting or a play, rather than from a summary of survey responses. In short, and once again, we might have to do the work of old-fashioned philosophy.
This defense of (very) old-fashioned philosophy is in no way meant to provide a blanket defense of the stories I propose to tell in my capacity as a representative thinker. If my story about us – which is to say, about us by and large – fails to ring true, then take that as a provocation to compose a better story, one that does less violence to our intuitions about what we mean and do, or one that shows us how to reconstruct our practices until they serve us more effectively. This provocation is also the work of philosophy.
1.6 What race-talk does
The aim so far has been to get clearer on the subject of this study, on some of the methods and limits of the discussion, and on why it’s okay, even important, to start a study of race-talk somewhere other than in the weeds of a fight about whether to abolish race-talk altogether. Now we can finally get down to the business of definition.
My reading of the racial practices in which I’ve been immersed and raised suggests that race-talk – including the internal, often intuitive form of it that I’ve been calling “race-thinking” – is a way of assigning generic meanings to human bodies and bloodlines. In this spirit, some scholars urge us to think of race as a “political technology” that “displaces social conflicts” onto human persons and populations.8 To make sense of all that, and of how I mean for it to specify the conceptual role of “race,” we’ll need some more definitions.
1.6.1 Bodies (appearance)
To borrow an image from an old and problematic but familiar metaphysic, “body” refers to the things our souls or minds travel around in. The body is the thing we try to alter with body-building or aesthetic surgery, the thing we cover and call attention to with clothes and jewelry (and colored contact lenses, and hairstyles, and so on). This is the human body as it figures into the world of, as philosophers sometimes say, medium-sized objects, which one can experience with the unaided human senses (without, say, a microscope).
A little more precisely: the body is the phenomenal aspect of human being. It is the way human being appears to the human senses. I put the point this generally because I mean to avoid focusing too closely on the sense of sight, though this is particularly tempting when it comes to race in places like the US. Focusing just on the visible dimensions of these social identities threatens to obscure the way other senses get mobilized for our racial practices. For example, language and speaking style often serve as markers of racial identity. We’ll say more about this – and about how this works when algorithms code racism into our virtual worlds – in a later chapter.
Two things are particularly interesting about human bodies in this regard. First, perception, the receipt of information through the physiological pathways that we call the senses, is always culturally mediated. Racial perceptions are no different, though they are more interesting and more significant than many others. And second, as feminist scholars and others have pointed out for over a hundred years, and as my references to bodybuilding and the like show, human bodies are particularly effective bearers of meaning. Race-thinking, even at the level of language, reflects an aspect of this broader fact of human association.
1.6.2 Bloodlines (ancestry)
By “bloodlines” I mean ancestry or heritage. I mean the causal antecedents of an organism that flow through the reproductive activities of other, sufficiently similar, organisms. This is what used to be called the “stock,” especially when it referred to some quality in a type of animals, or of humans, that breeders, or eugenicists, sought to cultivate by carefully monitoring reproduction.
Like phenomenal appearance, ancestry is also a rich repository of meaning. A distressing but important model for this in a study of race comes from animal husbandry. Breeders treat an animal’s bloodlines as resources for predicting its fitness and value. These breeding practices have provided a template for using ancestry in race-thinking, most obviously in the case of the institution of transatlantic chattel slavery.
That said, though, other ways of thinking about human ancestry are less distressing but equally relevant to our subject. For example, we use family histories as sources of information about our risks of developing certain diseases. In a similar way, contemporary societies tend to be constructed in ways that transmit certain risks and rewards, certain advantages and disadvantages, across the generations. Race-thinking might appeal to ancestry in this more diagnostic spirit. In addition, people track down lost relatives and plot out family trees to deepen their sense of what their lives are or ought to be about. The history of racial discourse is replete with appeals to this existential, ethical dimension of human ancestry. African American literature in particular offers many examples of people returning – “returning” – to their ancestral homeland in an attempt to fill in some missing part of their lives and identities.
1.6.3 Assigning generic meaning
By “assigning meaning” I mean that we take some superficial information about a human body and that body’s ancestry and then draw inferences about deeper and more distant matters. I’ll refer to the development, establishment, or application of this pattern of inference as a process of racialization. These meanings are “generic” in the sense that they apply most saliently to
