wisdom and accepted practice to say that people of certain races, which is to say people who have certain kinds of bodies or are descended from people with certain kinds of bodies, also have certain levels of intelligence, or that they are predisposed to like and produce certain kinds of music, or that they have a certain predilection to give themselves over to various passions, sexual and otherwise. Many people still say such things and many more still believe them, but this kind of inference is less central to overt public discourse than it was in, say, the late nineteenth century. This is the great triumph of the physical scientist’s challenge to the Klansman, discussed above. The transmission of traits across human generations just doesn’t work the way the Klan requires, for reasons and in ways we’ll consider in the pages to come.
Still, this running together of physiology, cognition, culture, and psychology isn’t the only way to assign generic meanings. As we’ll see later on, much thinner inferences are available. One might focus, for example, on the question of whether having a certain kind of body, or being descended from people with certain bodies, correlates with certain levels of income or net worth, or with different degrees of access to credit or of household proximity to environmental hazards.
These inferences are about generic meanings in the following sense. If I look at John’s face and decide that he looks smart, I probably haven’t yet started thinking racially. If, on the other hand, I decide that he looks smart because his facial features mark him as a member of a human population that tends to be smart, then I’m on the way to race-thinking. Race-thinking is about kinds, called races, and only derivatively about individuals with racial identities.
1.7 Modern racialism
The moral of the story in the previous section is that we humans seem to be in the habit – we’ll soon consider how widespread a habit this is – of sorting ourselves into more or less distinct kinds based on a trio of factors: appearance, ancestry, and the deeper significance that is supposed to follow from the first two factors. We also sort ourselves into a great many other kinds of groupings, from neighborhoods, gangs, and states to families, unions, and fan clubs. But specifically racial sorting begins, as I’ll continue to say, with appearance and ancestry.
To the extent that racial sorting involves comparing human bodies, it’s worth noting that we can compare people with respect to a variety of traits. In principle, any of these – height, eye color, attached or detached earlobes, even – might provide the basis for drawing racial distinctions. We’ve already noted that different ways of drawing racial boundaries hold sway in different places.
In practice, though, a particular regime of comparison has had a much wider impact on human social life around the world than any other. I’m thinking of the system that relies mainly on skin color, facial features, and hair texture to divide humankind into four or five color-coded groups – black, brown, red, white, yellow – and that tends to think of these populations as interestingly descended from the pre-modern inhabitants of the world’s major land masses. Since this is the system that people living in and in the wake of the modern West most often invoke when they think and talk about race, I’ll call it “modern racialism.” For the same reason, I will refer to the groups that are the subject of this kind of modern race-thinking as “modern races,” in order to distinguish them from the populations that result from just any process of racial sorting.
Distinguishing modern racialism from racialism per se immediately raises a couple of questions. The first is straightforward. What do words like “modern” and “Western” mean here? I’m not using the word “modern” simply to connote novelty or recent origin. When it appears here, “modern” will be the adjective form of “modernity,” which seems to name a period of history but actually names a cluster of intellectual and social conditions, all of which emerge worldwide – in different ways in different regions – during overlapping periods of history. We’ll return to this in the next chapter, but for now let’s just say that the modern condition involves capitalism, liberalism, and secularism; that Europe’s particular path to modernity involved the establishment and spread of colonies, nation-states (as opposed, say, to feudal or ancient imperial states), scientific techniques, and the technological and economic fruits of applying these techniques; and that European modernization generated misleading narratives of cultural uniqueness, according to which only European nations, and not all of them, were enlightened enough to replace superstition with science.
The conditions that define European modernity are also bound up with talk of “the West.” This is as it should be, since ideas like “the West” and “Europe” are also modern innovations. To talk about the West in this way is to refer less to a geographic location than to a kind of society. It is a way, usually, of talking about certain modern societies, typically the industrialized ones that had colonies – or, if they still have them, “possessions” – in the Americas, Asia, or Africa. Why call it “the West”? What is it west of? The east, as in “the Far East” and “the Middle East,” both of which are, I hope it is already apparent, as much racial designations as geographic markers. There’s much more to say about this, but Edward Said and the people working in his wake already said most of it.9
With the concept of the modern squared away, we can turn to the second question about the difference between racialism and modern racialism. It has become fashionable to claim that modern Europe invented the concept of race. If that’s the case, then how can we distinguish racialism from modern racialism? Why aren’t they the same thing? First of all, even if no one had ever engaged in race-thinking outside of the parameters of the modern world, it is conceptually possible that they might. As noted above, humans can in principle sort each other by appeal to any number of traits. And in the sort of discussion we’re trying to have here, it seems appropriate to start quite generally and abstractly and work back, in later chapters, toward the specific and concrete.
The logical possibilities aside, it also happens to be the case, as a matter of empirical fact, that people outside the geographic borders and conceptual parameters of the modern West have assigned generic meanings to human appearance and ancestry. Race-thinking is a way of imagining the distinctness of human peoples, and societies everywhere and at all times have done that. It’s just that after the seventeenth century or so, Europeans developed a distinctive approach to this activity and gave it a name that stuck. They developed this approach, then refined it, named it, exported it, tried (or pretended to try) to make it scientific, and built it into the foundation of world-shaking – world-historical, Marx would say – developments in political economy. Non-Europeans of course joined in along the way, some willingly but many more under the pressure of various forms of coercion and influence. This all led to the most influential and self-aware form of race-thinking the world has ever seen. But it was all a variation on a deeper theme.
1.8 Politics and method
The distinction between race-thinking and modern race-thinking will come a bit more clearly into focus once we build in a bit more of the social and historical context. That will come in the next chapter. The aim of this chapter has been to explain why one might examine race from the standpoint of philosophy and to set some ground rules for doing so. That task will be complete once we establish a few more ground rules.
1.8.1 Politics and context
I mentioned above that I will quickly come to focus on (what we misleadingly call) “the West,” eventually settling on the English colonies in North America that became the United States. I adopt this increasingly narrow focus for reasons I keep repeating: the English, with some notable assistance from the Spanish, produced the distinctive form of race-thinking that laid the groundwork for contemporary US conceptions of race. And the USA is the context that I’ve chosen for this inquiry into a necessarily context-bound subject.
In light of this commitment to a situated analysis of race, it is important to be clear
