The takeaways thus far:

• Much of our life is governed by “Reasonable” ideas that get us through our daily social life.
• “Rational” ideas arise out of the rigors of scientific (or technical) discourse.
• “Race” is not an idea that is supported by science yet it persists in our daily discourse.
• One of the reasons it persists is that “race” is a notion that is bound up with our cultural mythology about kinship and identity.  “Race” encodes the belief that literally superficial aspects of our appearance act as markers for innate differences we can’t see.

“Race” is an active way of thinking that assists in the constitution of our individual identities as well as our social reality. In America, our “race” is a huge determinant or our economic, social and political fates. One of the consequences of 450 years of race thinking is that it has enslaved us all in a self-reinforcing feedback system:

The people who have been subordinated by race thinking…have for centuries employed the concepts and categories of their rulers, owners and persecutors to resist the destiny that “race” has allocated to them…..Under the most difficult of conditions and from imperfect materials that they surely would not have selected if they had been able to choose, these oppressed groups have built complex traditions of politics, ethics, identity and culture….When ideas of racial particularity are inverted in this defensive manner so that they provide sources of pride rather than shame and humiliation, they become difficult to relinquish. For many racialized populations, “race” and the hard won oppositional identities it supports are not to be lightly or prematurely given up.

Paul Gilroy, Against Race

“Race” in America may not be a scientific fact but is an embodied fact. It is only in recent years that the concept of “white privilege” has started to percolate in America. It has begun to dawn upon people of good conscience who think they are “white” that their social position is the result of the centuries-long exploitation of other phenotypes. “White” is not a neutral descriptive term (no human skin is actually white) but a social category larded with invisible values and properties.  The term “white trash” refers to people who are born “white” but who fail to live up to the invisible attributes encoded in the term “white”.

One’s self conception and one’s social identity is a hairball* of psychic, symbolic, social and economic factors. In this America of ours, “race” is a major constituent of this hairball.  Changing how we think about “race” will be necessary for us to begin the un-tangling but will not be sufficient to disgorge the hairball. The threads we follow will lead us directly to issues of power, trauma and myths of originary unity which will further challenge our political institutions and our collective self-awareness:

…where politics fails…it is replaced by enthusiasm for the cheapest pseudo-solidarities…forms of connection that are imagined to arise effortlessly from shared phenotypes, cultures and bio-nationalities.

Paul Gilroy, Against Race

*Or in Lacan’s more topologically elegant notion, a Borromean knot

The Teeming Others

So, according to modern science, “race” is not a fact of nature or in Appiah’s terms a “rational” category. Why then does “race” persist in our discourse and our view of the human world? It persists because “race” is a cognitive activity.  The notion of  “race” allows us to believe that superficial aspects of our appearance are markers of innate differences that are invisible.  “Race” does not exist but racial thinking does.

Among the Asante, everybody agrees (indeed, it goes without saying) that the material world is affected by spirits. Spirits are forces in life just as much as “natural causes”. Unusual, inconvenient and bad things happen to people.  The “why” of how things happen and the way things happen can be attributed to agents or forces whose motives are as manifold as they are invisible. Why did I get sick? Why did my car break down when it did? Why are my tomatoes blighted? Somebody invoked the spirits against me.

Invisible causal forces are amazingly flexible and convenient explanations. What evidence can be mustered that says an event wasn’t the result of witchcraft? If I am informed that I overwatered my tomatoes, I may choose to conclude that the strange people down the street may not have put a curse on my tomatoes…this time anyway. The unseen workings of unseen forces have no problem accommodating disconfirming evidence….exceptions always prove the rule! As with the Inquisition, whether torture exonerated the accused or not, the validity of the witch hunt was always upheld. Among the Americans, everybody agrees (indeed, it goes without saying) that humanity is divided into “races”. Though there are some visual clues as to membership in a “race”, “race” is also a realm wherein invisible “natural” attributes and motives reside and thereby explain history and the current social world.  The race I identify with is kind of like my family writ large. Those other races are indolent, dull, miserly, profligate, hot headed, intemperate, crafty, greedy…fill in the blanks as you need.

“Identity helps us comprehend the formation of that perilous pronoun “we” and to reckon with the patterns of inclusion and exclusion it cannot help creating.” The strange people down the street who might have cursed my tomatoes remind us that other “races” are groups of people who play roles in our social lives that we may view negatively.

Take the situation of the long term residents of Boise Idaho; they don’t like what is happening to their city. It is growing too fast. Traffic is bad. Rents and the prices of houses are skyrocketing. It is widely perceived that this is due to the influx of Californians. Recently a young man who has lived in Boise for years, who was a star on the venerated Boise State football team found a note on his car telling him to “go home”. Recruited to Boise State out of his California high school, he still had California license plates. It is inconvenient that these acquisitive invaders fouling Boise don’t have phenotypic differences to mark them; they only have license plates.

At one level, “race” is merely a category we employ to classify people so that we can make generalizations about them. Unlike license plates, racial markers are neither fungible nor elective. They are either indelible (i.e. skin tone) or they are invisible. In 1892 , Homer Plessy, who presented as “white” was arrested for riding in a “white” only rail car. In appealing his conviction, his counsel argued that since Plessy looked like a “white” man, he should not be convicted. For the Supreme Court, however, the fact that Plessy was an “octaroon” (a creature with some amount of black blood) meant that he was not of the “white” race and the Court did not want to enforce “a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either”.   On the flip side, you can present yourself as “black” like Rachel Dolezal but to do so is shockingly fraudulent (not to mention unfathomable…why would you “trade down” from being “white” to being “black”?).

Though we might want to think of Californians as a teeming, acquisitive, insensitive horde we don’t view them as “related” to each other in any biological sense.