On March 23, the NYT ran an article by geneticist David Reich.
Reich suggested that there are genetic differences that correlate with racial
categories and that impending genetic discoveries are likely to prove
problematic for the orthodoxy that “race is a social construct.”
It was in graduate school that I first ran up against this
dogma. As I will describe below, I find the proposition misleading at best, and
so I would engage professors on this and related questions. The experience was
invariably unsatisfying. Partly, this is a consequence of my own views being
incomplete. My objections to the proposition were only then just emerging. However,
one factor that contributed to my frustration was the psychoanalytical inference
clearly drawn by some, though not all, of my professors. I was secretly a
racist, they imagined.
The inability to deviate from the orthodoxy around the
social construction of race and related questions without being regarded with great suspicion has been
recently highlighted by Sam Harris’s spat with Vox editor Ezra Klein. For those
interested, see Harris’s podcast with Charles Murray, a Vox article by Richard
Nisbett and others that criticized the podcast, and Andrew Sullivan’s article in New York Magazine.
“Race is a social construct.” For those who subscribe to
it, the proposition barely requires elaboration. It’s too obvious to merit
discussion. Those who want to discuss it must have a “secret agenda,” as a
professor once said of me.
My agenda isn’t secret. What bothers me about social
construction as applied to race is the sloppiness with which it is applied. It
isn’t its falseness that most bothers me. There are false ideas that bother me
less. What bothers me is that arguments in defense of it are incredibly fuzzy
and evasive and yet countless people purport to find them persuasive.
Some truths derive their veracity from popular assent. In
other words, some things are true as a consequence of people believing them to
be true.
Take money. Money in
fact has value, and it has that value as a consequence of our collective belief
that it has value. You can test the proposition that money has value. It is a
falsifiable claim, meaning that you could prove it to be false if indeed it was
false. To test the proposition, bring your money to the store and attempt to
exchange it for goods and services.
What if people did not believe that money had value? You
wouldn’t be able to exchange it for goods and services. That same object would in fact no longer have value, or at
least exchange value.
Let’s apply this conception of social construction to
race. Does the proposition “I am white” derive its truth from our collective
assent to its veracity? In other words, am I white only because we all believe
I am white?
The word white refers, first and foremost, to my skin
color. The color of my skin would remain the same regardless of whether or not
we believed it was the color that it is. The color of my skin, whatever we
choose to call it, is an objective fact about the universe.
At this point, some will be tempted to argue that colors
are socially constructed. They’re not. Language is socially constructed, but
the phenomena to which our words refer are not socially constructed. The fact
that to English speakers leaves are green but to Spanish speakers leaves are
verde has no consequences for the existence or nonexistence of the neurological
phenomenon we call green. You could view things differently, and that would be
an interesting position to take philosophically. But if you do, a conversation about
this position ought to precede a discussion of race. Rejecting the existence of
an objective universe is a radical position, and if you take this position, it
is no wonder that conversing with you fails.
Physical features such as skin color, hair texture, and
facial features are taken as proxies for ancestry, and so “I am white” also
implies a claim about my ancestry.
Ancestry is not socially constructed. You either have
ancestors who inhabited East Asia 35,000 years ago or you do not. Whether or
not you believe you have ancestors that inhabited East Asia 35,000 years ago,
whether or not even 100% of us believe you have such ancestors, has no
consequences for the veracity of the proposition. Again, if you disagree with
this, that’s interesting philosophically, but you are using language
differently than the rest of us.
These are the fundamentals to which the word race refers.
It refers to physical attributes such as skin color, hair texture, and facial
features, and it refers to ancestry. All of these things are phenomena about the
universe immune to our beliefs about them. I don’t turn brown as a consequence
of insisting that I am brown, and I don’t have ancestors from Mesoamerica as a
result of believing that I do.
Whether or not someone is treated as belonging to a
particular racial category depends on whether or not we believe that they
belong to that category. If we think someone is a Native American, we treat
them as such.
One may be tempted to call this social construction. But if
this is social construction, it is a vapid term indeed. It would mean that the
statement “race is socially constructed” could be translated as “people believe
race exists and adopt policies based on that belief.” That’s not a penetrating statement. Obviously, people generally act on their beliefs. The interesting
question is whether or not those beliefs are true. Social construction as a
term worth invoking refers to propositions the veracity of which depend on
people believing them.
My intuition is that those who invoke social construction
when discussing race do so because they feel that it undermines the basis for
racial prejudice. If only everyone believed that there was no such thing as
biological races, that race was “merely a social construct,” “an idea, not a
fact,” they’d recognize that racism is irrational.
But the most nefarious propositions about race are not
simply true-only-if-you-believe-them. They’re false. While some aspects of race
are true regardless of our beliefs,
other aspects are false regardless of
our beliefs. Sometimes these sentiments are implied rather than explicitly
subscribed to, but they can nonetheless be formulated as propositions. Such and
such race has nothing of value to contribute to society. Such and such race cannot
achieve intellectually. Such and such race is uniquely greedy or ill-intentioned.
These aren’t social constructs. They are false
statements. Even if we all believed them, they wouldn’t be true.
The dysfunction of discussions of the social construction of race
stems from attaching to that word different propositions. There’s a place
for the social constructionist to stand, but it is a meager, un-insightful space.
If we believe someone is white, we will treat them as if they are white, and it
will therefore be true that we treat them as if they are white. That’s the social
constructionist’s contribution to the conversation, and it isn’t enlightening. Every
other proposition about race is a truth-claim upon which our convictions do not
impinge. Whether or not someone actually is of a particular ancestry is either
true or not true regardless of our beliefs. And whether or not a particular
racial group is uniquely intelligent or altruistic is either true or not true
regardless of our beliefs. Social construction has nothing of utility to say
about any of these claims, which is a problem, since these are the
propositions that matter when you are discussing race.
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