Like people speaking their native tongues, people in racialized societies tend to know how to use the language of race even if they’re not quite sure why they use it that way or whether doing so is, on balance, a good idea. We know how to categorize people and, often enough, to react to them, or how race-thinking says we should react to them, even though our grasp of the relevant principles and definitions, such as they are, is unclear at best. Even if Zoe doesn’t quite know how to locate Sikhs on the US scheme of racial types, even if she isn’t sure whether Jewish people or Lapps still count as distinct races, could she really not know what social phenomenon “race” refers to?
To think of race by analogy to natural language – foregrounding its pervasiveness and familiarity, its intuitive practicality, and its central role in experience, cognition, and expression – is to position it as a subject that fairly invites the work of philosophy. People sometimes describe philosophy as the study of big questions, involving weighty concerns like truth, justice, beauty, and goodness. That aspect of the field does bear on the study of race, as we’ll see. But another way to think of the field is as an attempt to untangle the knots that language users often needlessly tie. We often use words in ways that obscure deep disagreements and confusions, which makes it vital that someone think through things that seem familiar, things that are so close to us, so deeply ingrained in experience, so seemingly obvious, that they can easily escape scrutiny. Philosophers sign up for this kind of work, and race is surely a topic that will reward philosophical attention.
Of course, the best reason to approach race from the standpoint of philosophy is simply that race-thinking has left an indelible mark on the contemporary world. Along with many other forces, of course, it has shaped and continues to shape the most private of personal interactions as well as the grandest of geopolitical policy choices. If anything remains of those philosophical traditions that take the question of how to live as their subject, then this is certainly an invitation to philosophy.
1.2 Setting the context
There’s more to say about what it means to approach race philosophically. But showing is usually better than saying, and this particular philosophical showing can’t begin until I settle a couple of preliminary issues. The first thing to explain is how, why, and to what extent the discussion to come will be limited to a specific context.
I’ll frequently refer in what follows to “what we mean” and to “our ideas” (or “our practices” or “our concepts” and so on). This is a way of making clear how deeply the practices of racial identification rely on context. People have become fond of noting that race works differently in different times and places. Philosopher Michael Root has eloquently made the point by saying that race does not travel.3 He says this because children in the USA who share both parents are thought to belong to the same race while in Panama this need not be the case, and because a person who counts as white in São Paulo might be black in San Francisco. If racial identification works like that, then it’s inappropriate for a discussion of such matters to be too abstract, to pretend, as discussions like this sometimes do, that “race” points to the same thing everywhere and for everyone.
In light of considerations like these, I use “we” and “our” expressions as a reminder of something I’ll now declare explicitly. I’m writing from someplace in particular, from a perspective that I’ve learned to adopt by inhabiting it with many other people. The particular place happens to be the United States, and the perspective happens to be that of a more or less typical estadounidense. (This Spanish word for residents of the United States is more precise, and less dismissive of the other residents of the Americas, than referring to those same people as “Americans.”)
The approach to race that shapes this place and defines this perspective has been fundamentally shaped by certain originally and distinctively English ideas about human difference. These ideas involved depicting other peoples as innately savage and inferior, and they count as English rather than as British because they got their start in English assaults, literal and symbolic, on the Welsh, Irish, and Scots. (Sadly, there’s no room for that story here.)4 I’ll focus in what follows on this Anglo-American model of race-thinking, not because it is the only or the most important one, but because it is one of the more important ones, because it’s the one with which I’m most familiar, and because I can use it to make broader points about race-thinking in general.
In the same spirit of self-excavation, I have to say that in certain ways I will rely heavily on the sense of race that I’ve developed as a black estadounidense – or, as I will still say, in deference both to established practices and to the demands of expository convenience, as an African American. My version of “the black experience,” and my ideas about how to access and use it, will shape my choices regarding how to populate the fiction world that my little framing narratives disclose, and regarding the historical examples that I’ll sometimes use. But this book is specifically not another book that purports to be about race while really being about black folks and white folks. At least, I hope it isn’t that sort of book. My aim is to tell a story about race by focusing on Anglo-American practices of racial identification, which I’ve come to see and understand, and which I’ll sometimes describe, from a black perspective.
A declared focus on Anglo-American race-thinking might seem likely to frustrate, or at least to be in tension with, the aspiration toward a more general exploration of the subject of race. But the tension disappears when we introduce a distinction between race and races. Race doesn’t travel in the sense that the same person might belong to different racial groups in different places and times, or in the sense that different cultures determine race membership in different ways. The terms in a racial vocabulary – “black” and “white” and so on – pick out people here that they wouldn’t pick out there, which is to say that the races, with their specific constituents and conditions of entry, don’t travel. But if a culture distinguishes and categorizes people using methods that appeal in part to such things as the way people look, then we might say of that culture that it has a concept of race. And exploring our uses of this concept might tell us something about what it means to think racially, whatever the categories and membership criteria happen to be. In this sense, race, as a principle of social differentiation, does travel.
1.3 Taking race seriously
If I’m right, focusing on the Anglo-American model of race-thinking doesn’t have to get in the way of telling a more global story about race. Unfortunately, the narrower focus may have its own internal difficulties. I’ve already said that we use race-talk in unclear and inconsistent ways, so how do I propose to reduce that semantic diversity to a single model?
Using the same words in unclear and inconsistent ways is not a problem that’s unique to race-talk. The elements of language are tools, and like any other tools, they can play roles beyond the ones for which they were originally created. Just as some people use irons not just to remove wrinkles from their clothes but also to make grilled cheese sandwiches, sometimes people repurpose words in ways that give them strikingly new meanings. Think of the way names like “Karen” and “Becky” have come to stand in for objectionable personality types. (In current vernacular usage, “Karen” refers to “women, usually white, who commit acts that are perceived to be bullying and sometimes racist,” as in the “Central Park Karen” incident from May 2020.)5
The variability and flexibility of language notwithstanding, the fact that we can use it reliably to communicate and solve problems means that there is some unity amid the variety. The divergent evolution of linguistic elements brings slang into being, but then slang does its work in part because it exists in a productive tension with established, standard usage. A comprehensive sociological report of language habits is bound to turn up an array of uses for any particular word or phrase. Still, there will be core uses, uses encouraged by the long period of socialization during which we train people, both formally and informally,