What Is Race? Four Philosophers, Six Views

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Acknowledgements

In my preparation of this text for this journal, I have benefited from this text having to go through multiple revisions from Ward Jones and Adam Hochman. Thanks also goes to David Ludwig, Jacek Brzozowski, and the anonymous reviewers of this text for their feedback. This text was written whilst affiliated to both Macquarie University and Stellenbosch University, and whilst a FirstRand Scholar and recipient of their 2021 FirstRand FNB Fund Education Scholarship.

Notes

1 Rosenberg and colleagues (2005) do not endorse this racial interpretation of their work. See §III for discussion of this criticism.

2 Asking ‘the most social currency where?’ is an issue I broach in sections III and IV by showing how the answer to this question constrains the scope of metaphysical conclusions that can be drawn from such claims or observations.

3 Spencer discusses the case of South Asians as a challenge to his view since it is not clear ‘whether  …  the OMB truly intends “Asian” to be synonymous with “East Asian”’ (215). I use the case of Asian classification to elaborate on a more general mismatch objection in respect to his identity thesis. Glasgow (120–122) and Jeffers (45) make their own elaborations and expansions of the mismatch objection against Spencer’s view.

4 Although Spencer uses a non-US example to show the flaw in Glasgow’s ordinary race concept that takes an aspect of US race discourse as definitive of race, Spencer’s own OMB race theory is a US race discourse specific to today’s US race categories. Spencer may respond to this as a radical pluralist by saying that there are other race discourses in the US and elsewhere; OMB is just but one race discourse he is arguing presents a biologically real racial classificatory scheme. Although being a pluralist about race may evade criticisms that rest on pointing out how race discourses differ elsewhere in the world, Spencer’s version of pluralism reinforces—at the same time—that the view of race he argues for is US-centric although other places in the world have their own race discourses. His and their scope is US discourse.

5 I am sceptical that ‘Other’ and ‘Non-Niuean’ count as racial categories in Singapore and Niue’s classificatory systems. They seem to be miscellaneous categories for any other races that their classifications do not enumerate. Spencer’s point can, nevertheless, be made with a South African race discourse in which Coloured is viewed as a race. In official government policy and census documents, South Africa no longer uses the terminology of ‘race groups’ but rather calls their groupings ‘population designations’ (Statistics South Africa 2010, 72). These population designations are, nevertheless, designed to correspond with Apartheid racial categories. There still exists a race discourse in South Africa continuous with Apartheid racial discourse that uses Apartheid classifications like ‘Coloured’ as a race. Coloured, when thought of as a race group, includes continentally admixed populations along with some of the most diverse human lineages (Daya et al. 2013; de Wet et al. 2010) whose visual characteristics stretch across the stereotypical visual characteristics of all other South African race groups. Thus, the classification ‘Coloured’ in South African race discourse would be a better example to illustrate the point Spencer is making.

6 In more radical orientations, European Jews have (also) become White in the Western world (e.g., Europe and North America) because of their post-WWII positionality (Brodkin 1998; Fischbach 2020). Jews may have come to be White more consistently earlier on in other parts of the world such as in South Africa as part of the first colonial arrivals at the Cape of Good Hope (cf., van Niekerk 2018, 3) or at the turn of the twentieth century as Jews from Eastern Europe found a place within, and politically aligned themselves with, the White supremacist settler colony that was established there (Hunter 2020). This alliance with White supremacy, as tenuous and conditional as it is/was, came to be in tension with internally controversial Jewish resistance against Apartheid (Beinart 1996) and now Zionism (Gilbert and Posel 2021).

7 Despite the stereotypical association of Jewishness with Whiteness, there are many other varieties of Jewish peoples across the world who are not White or racialized as White (Schraub 2019, 380). One of the factors that perpetuates the view of the stereotypical Jewish person as White is racism (rather than anti-Semitism) as is apparent in the racial hierarchy in Israeli communities (Sasson-Levy 2013) and what it means to be a Black Jew in Israel (East et al. 2020).

8 Of course, a counter-argument to this for a reconstructionist like Hochman is to take the view that it is not race that is relevant to science in these cases but rather racialized groups and the racism enacted against them (e.g., see Hochman 2021b). Nevertheless, contrary to basic realism, the point I am making here is that the groups of our concern would be relevant to science irrespective of whether they are races or racialized groups.

9 In defending his anti-realist reconstructionism from the accusation of not being able to account for phenomena traditionally associated with race and racism, Glasgow claims that ‘something race-related can explain and be a reason for acting, namely racialized groups. These are real, even if race is not’ (247). Glasgow claims that he believes ‘with Haslanger, that there are racialized groups’ (247).