Race and reflexivity

Abstract

It is widely recognized that our understanding of the racial order will remain forever unsatisfactory so long as we fail to turn our analytic gaze back upon ourselves, the analysts of racial domination, and inquire critically into the hidden presuppositions that shape our thought. However, for reflexivity to be employed widely in the interest of scientific truth, analysts must acknowledge that reflexive thinking entails much more than observing how one's social position (racial identity or class background, for example) affects one's scientific analyses. In this paper, we deepen the meaning of scholarly reflexivity, discussing how it can be directed at three levels of hidden presuppositions: the social, the disciplinary, and the scholastic.

Keywords:

• Race
• reflexivity
• Bourdieu
• whiteness
• race theory
• philosophy of science

Notes

1. Whether or not Durkheim satisfactorily followed his own guidelines is a different matter. Certainly, he failed to scrutinize how the anthropology of ‘primitive societies’, a tradition of research on which he relied heavily in Elementary Forms (1995 [1912]), was (mis)informed by its colonial project and by white supremacist modes of classification. Like other thinkers of the classical generation, he championed the benefits of reflexive thought while remaining less than unambiguously reflexive when it came to matters of racial inequality and cultural difference.

2. Durkheim insisted that the starting point of scientific inquiry must be a rigorous delineation of the problem at hand, rather than an uncritical acceptance of definitions already provided by folk wisdom or academic culture. To this end, we present herewith our own definition of ‘race’: race is a symbolic category, based on phenotype or ancestry and constructed according to specific social and historical contexts, that is misrecognized as a natural category. We have unpacked this definition elsewhere (Desmond and Emirbayer 2009).

3. We do not contend that the influence of one's racial identity on one's thinking somehow requires more vigilance than the influence of, say, one's family background or sexuality. In fact, the widespread habit of applying reflexivity narrowly to the ‘holy trinity’ of race, class, and gender is a limiting practice itself in need of reflexive consideration. Can it be doubted that, for some intellectual pursuits, religion (or religious aversion to religion), cosmopolitanism (or lack thereof), age, or politics hold considerably more sway than racial identity, gender, or class? If we have chosen here to apply our ideas about reflexivity exclusively to race scholarship, it is because, first, many recent contributions to reflexivity have been advanced by race scholars and, second, we see in this area of study a particularly pressing need to reconsider the most basic imperatives of reflexivity, given the eclipse of identity politics in scholarly writing (if not in the political sphere).

4. Of course, as philosophers of race (e.g., Appiah 1990, 2006; Shelby 2005) have observed, the putatively simple act of identifying one's location, of knowing ‘who one is’, is in actuality often exceedingly complex, contentious, and unceasing.

5. Although the ensuing paragraphs focus on white privilege in American scholarship about race, the ideas presented therein can be generalized to other national and intellectual contexts.

6. For reflexive critiques of how racialized presuppositions have influenced modern philosophy, see Goldberg (1993) and Mills (1999).

7. Additionally, social-scientific questions and intellectual interests often are influenced by forces beyond the scientific field, especially those emanating from the political field. In some instances, questions follow the money, as lines of inquiry – even entire subfields – are built up or abandoned in accordance with federal funding priorities. (Thus, Haveman [1987] shows how grants distributed after the War on Poverty helped to create and legitimatize the field of poverty research.) In other cases, scientific questions are molded by the zeitgeist of the times. Gould (1996, p. 28) has demonstrated as much in observing that ‘[r]esurgences of biological determinism correlate with periods of political retrenchment and destruction of social generosity.’

8. One white scholar reflects on his earlier work this way: ‘[W]hile many scholars of color have valued this article, and while I continue to think it is a valuable contribution, at the same time, I now consider it an example of white racism. By myself – as a white scholar – I assumed that I could represent well the racial “other.” Given the deadly history of the representation of people of color by white scholars and given the fact that I too continue to embody white racism, acting alone as a white scholar like this is much too dangerous’ (Scheurich 2002, p. 17).

9. The ‘insider doctrine’ is also (at least indirectly) responsible for the rise of whiteness studies. The doctrine became so established with the rise of ‘identity politics’ that white analysts who wished to study race and ethnicity felt they had to emulate their nonwhite peers by ‘studying their own community.’ (In many cases, they were instructed to do so in so many words by nonwhite thinkers.) Because the insider doctrine permits one to speak on behalf of a group only on condition that one actually belongs to that group, white scholars were forced to establish whites as a legitimate racial group that could be analysed. This is part of the reason why virtually all whiteness scholars are themselves white.

10. Recent examples include Bonilla-Silva (1999) vs. Loveman (1999); Steinberg (1997) vs. Wilson (1978); Alba and Nee (1997) vs. Zhou (1997); Wacquant (2002) vs. Anderson (2002), Duneier (2002), and Newman (2002); Mincy (2006) vs. Patterson (2006); and Small, Harding, and Lamont (2010) vs. Steinberg (2011).

11. Examples of such frameworks include structuralism (Bonilla-Silva 1997); cognitivist approaches (Brubaker, Stamov and Loveman 2004); theories of group position and threat (Blumer 1958; Bobo and Hutchings 1996); Marxism (Cox 1948; Bonacich 1972); racial formation approaches (Omi and Winant 1994 [1986]; see also Winant 2000); and ethnomethodology (Moerman 1974).

12. Of course, if the point of this discussion is to warn against false universalization, then one also must bear in mind the danger that, in highlighting it, Bourdieu himself falsely universalizes what is, in fact, a privileged condition enjoyed only by a few. Even in the US, many academics do not produce under circumstances of leisure; for instance, critical race theory was in considerable part the creation of legal scholars of colour whose everyday racial realities stood in sharp tension with the exigencies of their professional and academic lives. Bourdieu's ideas about skholè thus tell us more, arguably, about his own situation – and that of other (white) elites in the academy – than, as a true descriptive statement, about the conditions of work of many knowledge producers. However, it might also be pointed out that many of the knowledge producers whose ideas have most deeply influenced and shaped race scholarship – and hence have come under our purview – do work (and have worked) in scholastic contexts precisely of the sort described by Bourdieu.

13. On the other side of the ledger, authors such as Hays (2003) and Edin and Kefalas (2005) have sought to think through the political implications of different ways of portraying disadvantaged actors, stressing how these approaches have shaped their academic writing.

14. According to Gutmann (1996), colour-blindness is pervasive in American thought not because it is a just response to racial injustice but because it is ‘the ideal morality for an ideal society.’ Through an abracadabric act that transforms ethics into ontology (a way to live into how life is), colour-blindness demands an instant good society, one without history, where things are right and nothing is in need of restoration (see Desmond and Emirbayer 2011).

15. In a later work, Glazer (1997) partially renounced his earlier views on affirmative action.

16. Several thinkers have harvested the low-hanging fruit of decrying racial classification; sorely needed, however, are rigorous empirical investigations of the genesis, development, and dynamics of racial taxonomies, investigations such as Jung's (2003) review of Hawaii's shifting racial boundaries or Brubaker et al.'s (2006) analysis of ‘everyday ethnicity’ in Transylvania.

17. Of course, oftentimes members of disadvantaged groups hesitate to draw attention to internecine problems, not out of a kind of ethnic chauvinism or adulation, but because they are aware that doing so may result in a wide array of consequences: the group may be denigrated by members of dominant groups; the documentation of internecine problems may be employed as evidence of harmful public policies (e.g., harsher sentencing); and initiatives designed to alleviate the problems may have the opposite effect (see Crenshaw 1991).

18. We use these categories in a slightly different way here than above, where they were deployed to discuss the three distinctive forms of the scholastic fallacy. Here, they summarize some of the key implications of our analysis as a whole.

19. Others (Shelby 2002; Blum 2007) have pointed out the philosophic shortcomings of viewing racism as an individual moral vice, as a matter ‘of the heart’ (e.g., Garcia 1996).

20. Thus, it is a mistake to conceive of reflexivity as a kind of sudden conversion experience. Rather, it is best understood as a sustained process – and a thoroughly collective one at that. Similarly, it is erroneous to divide (in legalistic fashion) social scientists into two camps – the ‘reflexive’ and the ‘unreflexive’ – just as it is erroneous to separate the general population into ‘racists’ and ‘non-racists’ (see Wacquant 1997).