The presence and absence of race

ABSTRACT

Wade examines the presence and absence of race, and David Theo Goldberg's thesis in The Threat of Race that racism under neoliberalism continues in hidden form, not named as such. Wade argues that Goldberg's approach privileges an overly institutional presence for race and thus loses sight of the real and continuing presence of race in contemporary societies, especially notable in biotechnological and genomic contexts. This depends on defining race in a clear way, so that it can be recognized when it is present: race is not about biology, but about a constant movement between nature and culture, mediated by classifications of Others, based on histories of western colonialism and postcolonialism. Wade goes on to argue that, in Latin America, racialized difference is, if anything, made more explicit in the context of what Charles Hale has labelled ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’.

Keywords:

• David Theo Goldberg
• Latin America
• mestizaje
• neoliberalism
• race
• racism
• The Threat of Race

Notes

¹Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1993); Robin E. Sheriff, Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2001); France W. Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1998); John Burdick, Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil (London and New York: Routledge 1998); Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press 1999); Marisol de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2000); Mary Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2001); and Denise Ferreira Da Silva, ‘Facts of blackness: Brazil is not (quite) the United States … and racial politics in Brazil?’, Social Identities, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998, 201–34.

²Sheriff, Dreaming Equality, 59.

³Nelson, A Finger in the Wound, 173, 74.

⁴Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture, 261–2.

⁵David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2009) (subsequent page references will appear parenthetically in the text).

⁶Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (London: Routledge 1993); Howard Winant, ‘Difference and inequality: postmodern racial politics in the United States’, in Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith (eds), Racism, the City and the State (London and New York: Routledge 1993).

⁷See also my discussion of Goldberg's definition of ‘race’ in Peter Wade, Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (London: Pluto Press 2002), 6–9.

⁸Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. from the French by Catherine Porter (London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993).

⁹Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso 1993); Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Penguin 2000); David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell 1993); David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2002).

¹⁰Wade, Race, Nature and Culture.

¹¹Sarah Franklin, ‘Life itself: global nature and the genetic imaginary’, in Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey, Global Nature, Global Culture (London: Sage 2000), 188–227; Paul Rabinow, ‘Artificiality and the Enlightenment: from sociobiology to biosociality’, in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations (New York: Zone Books 1992); Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock (eds), Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research/ Oxford: James Currey 2003).

¹²Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Naturalizing the family: literature and the bio-medical sciences in the late eighteenth century’, in Ludmilla Jordanova (ed.), Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature (London: Free Association Books 1986), 106–7.

¹³Wade, Race, Nature and Culture, 1–16.

¹⁴Deborah A. Bolnick, ‘Individual ancestry inference and the reification of race as a biological phenomenon’, in Barbara A. Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee and Sarah S. Richardson (eds), Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2008).

¹⁵Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge 1994), 79, 83; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [1952] (London: Pluto Press 1986).

¹⁶Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press 1996).

¹⁷Rita Astuti, Gregg E. A. Solomon and Susan Carey, Constraints on Conceptual Development: A Case Study of the Acquisition of Folkbiological and Folksociological Knowledge in Madagascar, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, vol. 69, no. 3 (Oxford and Boston: Blackwell 2004).

¹⁸Verena Stolcke, ‘Race and sex’ (review of Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos), Current Anthropology, vol. 43, no. 4, 2002, 679–80; Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney (eds), Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis (London and New York: Routledge 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Sexual affronts and racial frontiers: European identities and the cultural politics of exclusion in colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 34, no. 3, 1992, 514–51; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press 2002); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge 2000); Peter Wade, Race and Sex in Latin America (London: Pluto Press 2009).

¹⁹The specificity of race comes over very clearly in Juliet Hooker, Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009). Hooker also emphasizes the (learned) visibility of race as a key feature of its ‘social ontology’ (99).

²²Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), Chief Executive's Letter CE(02)01, 4 October 2002, available online at www.hfea.gov.uk/1606.html (viewed 6 November 2009). See also Ben Campbell, ‘Racialization, genes and the reinventions of nation in Europe’, in Wade (ed.), Race, Ethnicity and Nation.

²⁰Peter J. Aspinall, ‘“Mixed race”, “mixed origins” or what? Generic terminology for the multiple racial/ethnic group population’, Anthropology Today, vol. 25, no. 2, 2009, 3–8.

²¹Katharine Tyler, ‘The genealogical imagination: the inheritance of interracial identities’, Sociological Review, vol. 53, no. 3, 2005, 476–94; Katharine Tyler, ‘Race, genetics and inheritance: reflections upon the birth of “black” twins to a “white” IVF mother’, in Peter Wade (ed.), Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books 2007); Wade (ed.), Race, Ethnicity and Nation; Wade, Race, Nature and Culture.

²³See HFEA, ‘My information: what can my donor-conceived offspring find out about me’, 23 September 2009, available at www.hfea.gov.uk/1974.html (viewed 23 November 2009). For all the Codes, see www.hfea.gov.uk/1682.html (viewed 23 November 2009).

²⁴See Campbell, ‘Racialization, genes and the reinventions of nation in Europe’, which reports on studies done in Spanish IVF clinics. For the form, see Real Decreto 412/1996, 1 March 1996, available online at www.juridicas.com/base_datos/Admin/rd412-1996.html (viewed 6 November 2009); the decree is still in force today.

²⁵Michal Nahman, ‘Materializing Israeliness: difference and mixture in transnational ova donation’, Science as Culture, vol. 15, no. 3, 2006, 199–213.

²⁶Charis Thompson, ‘Biological race and ethnicity: dead and alive. The case of assisted reproductive technologies in the US’, paper presented at Anthropology and Science: The 5th Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, University of Manchester, 14–18 July 2003.

²⁷Esteban González Burchard, Elad Ziv, Natasha Coyle, Scarlett Lin Gomez, Hua Tang, Andrew J. Karter, Joanna L. Mountain, Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, Dean Sheppard and Neil Risch, ‘The importance of race and ethnic background in biomedical research and clinical practice’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 348, no. 12, 2003, 1170–5; Richard S. Cooper, Jay S. Kaufman and Ryk Ward, ‘Race and genomics’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 348, no. 12, 2003, 1166–70; Koenig, Lee and Richardson (eds), Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age.

²⁸Bolnick, ‘Individual ancestry inference and the reification of race as a biological phenomenon’; Sijia Wang, Nicolas Ray, Winston Rojas, Maria V. Parra, Gabriel Bedoya et al., ‘Geographic patterns of genome admixture in Latin American mestizos’, PLoS Genetics, vol. 4, no. 3, 2008, e1000037; Alondra Nelson, ‘Bio science: genetic genealogy testing and the pursuit of African ancestry’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 38, no. 5, 2008, 759–83; Ricardo Ventura Santos and Marcos Chor Maio, ‘Race, genomics, identities and politics in contemporary Brazil’, Critique of Anthropology, vol. 24, no. 4, 2004, 347–78.

²⁹Sérgio D. J. Pena, Denise R. Carvalho-Silva, Juliana Alves-Silva, Vânia F. Prado and Fabrício R. Santos, ‘Retrato molecular do Brasil’, Ciência Hoje, vol. 27, no. 159, 2000, 16–25; Ricardo Ventura Santos, Peter H. Fry, Simone Monteiro, Marcos Chor Maio, José Carlos Rodrigues, Luciana Bastos-Rodrigues and Sérgio D. J. Pena, ‘Color, race and genomic ancestry in Brazil: dialogues between anthropology and genetics’, Current Anthropology, vol. 50, no. 6, 2009, 787–819.

³⁰Pena et al., ‘Retrato molecular do Brasil’; Gabriel Bedoya, Patricia Montoya, Jenny García, Ivan Soto, Stephane Bourgeois, Luis Carvajal, Damian Labuda, Victor Alvarez, Jorge Ospina, Philip W. Hedrick and Andrés Ruiz-Linares, ‘Admixture dynamics in Hispanics: a shift in the nuclear genetic ancestry of a South American population isolate’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 103, no. 19, 2006, 7234–9. See also Rick Kearns, ‘DNA study: Colombia's founding mothers recognized’, Indian Country Today, 9 November 2006, available online at www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/28153639.html (viewed 5 November 2009).

³¹Nancy Scheper-Hughes, ‘The global traffic in human organs’, Current Anthropology, vol. 41, no. 2, 2000, 191–224; Gísli Pálsson and Kristín HarÐardóttir, ‘For whom the cells toll: debates about biomedicine’, Current Anthropology, vol. 43, no. 2, 2002, 271–302.

³²Tessa Mayes, ‘Asian women seek white donor eggs for light-skin babies’, Sunday Times, 16 November 2003, 7.

³³Elly Teman, ‘Surrogate Motherhood in Israel’, MSc thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2000; Wade, Race, Nature and Culture, 106–7; Nahman, ‘Materializing Israeliness’.

³⁴David M. Guss, ‘The Gran Poder and the reconquest of La Paz’, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, 294–328 (296); Mauricio Solaún and Sidney Kronus, Discrimination without Violence: Miscegenation and Racial Conflict in Latin America (New York: John Wiley and Sons 1973); Livio Sansone, Blackness without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003).

³⁵See, for example, Nancy Grey Postero, Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2007), 12; Joceny Pinheiro, ‘Authors of Authenticity: Indigenous Leadership and the Politics of Identity in the Brazilian Northeast’, PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2009, ch. 3; Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos, 189; Nelson, A Finger in the Wound, 231.

³⁶For example, 1821 is not the date for the abolition of slavery in Colombia (201); it was actually 1851, and 1821 was the date of the ‘free womb law’ that freed children born to slave mothers. The demographic figures for Brazil on 203 are wrong; they are right on 229. An estimate of the black population of Colombia is given as 4 per cent (202). The 2005 census gives a—naturally contested—figure of 10.5 per cent; for pre-census estimates of the black population in Colombia, see Peter Wade, ‘The Colombian Pacific in perspective’, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 2, 2002, 2–33 (21). The quotation about Costa Rica attributed to Chomsky on 220 belongs to Gladys Spence (listed in the bibliography on 244). The word crisol is misspelled on 224, as is the city Cartagena on 238. The Portuguese mestiçagem is spelled consistently without the cedilla.

³⁷De la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos.

³⁸Charles R. Hale, ‘Neoliberal multiculturalism: the remaking of cultural rights and racial dominance in Central America’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, vol. 28, no. 1, 2005, 10–28; Florencia E. Mallon, ‘Constructing mestizaje in Latin America: authenticity, marginality and gender in the claiming of ethnic identities’, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, vol. 2, no. 1, 1996, 170–81; J. Jorge Klor de Alva, ‘The postcolonization of the (Latin) American experience: a reconsideration of “colonialism,” “postcolonialism,” and “mestizaje”’, in Gyan Prakash (ed.), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1995); Peter Wade, ‘Rethinking mestizaje: ideology and lived experience’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, 2005, 239–57; Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos.

³⁹Wade, ‘Rethinking mestizaje’.

⁴⁰Donna Lee Van Cott, The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press 2000); Rachel Sieder (ed.), Multiculturalism in Latin America: Indigenous Rights, Diversity, and Democracy (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2002); Willem Assies, Gemma van der Haar and André Hoekema (eds), The Challenge of Diversity: Indigenous Peoples and Reform of the State in Latin America (Amsterdam: Thela Thesis 2000); Postero, Now We Are Citizens.

⁴¹Peter Wade (ed.), Black Identity and Social Movements in Latin America: The Colombian Pacific Region, a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 2, 2002.

⁴²Arturo Escobar, ‘Cultural politics and biological diversity: state, capital, and social movements in the Pacific coast of Colombia’, in Richard G. Fox and Orin Starn (eds), Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1997); Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2008); Mieke Wouters, ‘Ethnic rights under threat: the black peasant movement against armed groups’ pressure in the Chocó, Colombia’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 20, no. 4, 2001, 498–519.

⁴³Olivier Barbary and Fernando Urrea (eds), Gente negra en Colombia: dinámicas sociopolíticas en Cali y el Pacífico (Cali: CIDSE, Univalle; Paris: IRD; Colciencias 2004).

⁴⁴Juliet Hooker, ‘Indigenous inclusion/black exclusion: race, ethnicity and multicultural citizenship in Latin America’, Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 37, no. 2, 2005, 285–310; Peter Wade, ‘The cultural politics of blackness in Colombia’, American Ethnologist, vol. 22, no. 2, 1995, 342–58.

⁴⁵Peter Wade, ‘Defining blackness in Colombia’, Journal de la société des américanistes, vol. 95, no. 1, 2009, 165–84.

⁴⁶Hale, ‘Neoliberal multiculturalism’; Shannon Speed, ‘Dangerous discourses: human rights and multiculturalism in neoliberal Mexico’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, vol. 28, no. 1, 2005, 29–51.

⁴⁷Corte Constitucional, Sentencia T-422/96, ‘Diferenciacion positiva para comunidades negras’, 10 September 1996: see Wade, ‘The Colombian Pacific in perspective’, 23.

⁴⁸Donny Meertens, ‘Discriminación racial, desplazamiento y género en las sentencias de la corte constitucional. El racismo cotidiano en el banquillo’, Universitas humanística, no. 66, 2009, 83–106.

⁴⁹Sieder (ed.), Multiculturalism in Latin America; Rachel Sieder, Alan Angell and Line Schjolden (eds), The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005).

⁵⁰Shelton H. Davis, ‘Indigenous peoples, poverty and participatory development: the experience of the World Bank in Latin America’, in Sieder (ed.), Multiculturalism in Latin America; Peter Wade, ‘Afro-Latin Studies: reflections on the field’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006, 105–24 (112); Wade, ‘Defining blackness in Colombia’.

⁵¹Christian Gros, ‘Indigenismo y etnicidad: el desafío neoliberal’, in María Victoria Uribe and Eduardo Restrepo (eds), Antropología en la modernidad: identidades, etnicidades y movimientos sociales en Colombia (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología 1997); Escobar, Territories of Difference.

⁵²Escobar, ‘Cultural politics and biological diversity’.

⁵³Peter Wade, ‘The guardians of power: biodiversity and multiculturality in Colombia’, in Angela Cheater (ed.), The Anthropology of Power: Empowerment and Disempowerment in Changing Structures (London and New York: Routledge 1999).

⁵⁴Mala Htun, ‘From “racial democracy” to affirmative action: changing state policy on race in Brazil’, Latin American Research Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 2004, 60–89.

⁵⁵Sieder, Angell and Schjolden (eds), The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America.

⁵⁶Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture; Sheriff, Dreaming Equality; Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy; Burdick, Blessed Anastácia; Nelson, A Finger in the Wound; de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos; Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos; Ferreira da Silva, ‘Facts of blackness’.

⁵⁷Peter Wade, Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000); Hermano Vianna, The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil, trans. from the Portuguese by John Charles Chasteen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1999); Heidi Carolyn Feldman, Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 2006); John Burdick, ‘Class, place and blackness in São Paulo's gospel music scene’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 2008, 149–69.

⁵⁸Barbara Placido, ‘Spirits of the Nation: Identity and Legitimacy in the Cults of María Lionza and Simón Bolívar’, PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998; Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987).

⁵⁹Santos and Maio, ‘Race, genomics, identities and politics in contemporary Brazil’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Wade

Peter Wade is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He is a member of CRESC (Centre for Research into Socio-Cultural Change) at the University of Manchester and of IDCARAN (Grupo de Investigación sobre igualdad racial, diferencia cultural, conflictos ambientales, y racismos en las Américas negras) at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He has recently authored Race and Sex in Latin America (Pluto 2009) and Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Pluto 2002), and edited Race, Ethnicity and Nation in Europe: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics (Berghahn 2007) and Raza, etnicidad y sexualidades: ciudadanía y multiculturalismo en América Latina (with Fernando Urrea Giraldo and Mara Viveros Vigoya, Universidad Nacional de Colombia 2008)