Racial discrimination: How not to do it

Highlights

• A refutation of Sesardic’s recent attempt to revive racial naturalism.

• Sesardic equivocates between two versions of racial naturalism.

• One version is strong, but is not supported by the relevant science.

• The other version is weak, but does not contrast properly with social constructionism about race.

• The weak view confers racial naturalism an illusion of plausibility.

Abstract

The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social constructionism has always had its critics. Sesardic (2010) has compiled these criticisms into one of the strongest defences of racial naturalism in recent times. In this paper I argue that Sesardic equivocates between two versions of racial naturalism: a weak version and a strong version. As I shall argue, the strong version is not supported by the relevant science. The weak version, on the other hand, does not contrast properly with what social constructionists think about ‘race’. By leaning on this weak view Sesardic’s racial naturalism intermittently gains an appearance of plausibility, but this view is too weak to revive racial naturalism. As Sesardic demonstrates, there are new arguments for racial naturalism post-Human Genome Diversity Project. The positive message behind my critique is how to be a social constructionist about race in the post-genomic era.

Introduction

In his recent article Race: a social destruction of a biological concept, Sesardic argues that social constructionists have been ‘refuting’ a straw-man characterisation of racial naturalism, the view that ‘race’ is a legitimate biological category (Sesardic, 2010). Social constructionists have burdened the concept of race, he claims, with clearly unacceptable essentialist connotations; all with the aim of dismissing it outright. In light of the modern synthesis, with its rejection of species essentialism, we are committed to the rejection of racial essentialism. The task for race naturalists, then, is to develop a “biologically informed but non-essentialist concept of race” (Sesardic, 2010, p. 146).

But what are race naturalists made of, if not straw? In this paper I ask whether Sesardic’s attempt at rehabilitating a biological concept of race is successful. My answer is firmly negative. Sesardic equivocates between two versions of racial naturalism. One of these is so weak that it does not properly contrast with any plausible version of social constructionism about race, the view that racial categories are arbitrary with respect to the (relatively meagre) biological diversity that they seek to describe, reflecting social practice, and social prejudice, more effectively than biological difference. The other version of racial naturalism is much stronger, but it is not supported by studies of human biological diversity. This paper offers a rebuttal of Sesardic’s argument; one that is complementary to, and expands upon, that offered by Taylor (2011) in his short discussion note on the same article. Underlying the critical argument is a positive message: how to be a social constructionist about race in the post-genomic era.

Sesardic’s article can be seen as a three-pronged attack on social constructionism about race. The first prong is an argument from forensic anthropology. The second prong is an argument from genetic clustering studies. The third prong is not really an argument at all. This is Sesardic’s intimation that there might be genetically determined psychological and moral differences between the so-called ‘races’. His claim is not so much that there are such differences, but rather that there are not not such differences. He does not describe any empirical studies that suggest that there are genetically determined psychological or moral differences between racialised groups, focusing instead on what he sees as the poor quality of argument against this position.

For the purposes of this paper I will ignore the third prong. I cannot image anyone unpersuaded by Sesardic’s main argument—that the human species is divisible into a small number of subspecies, or races—being convinced on the basis of this part of his article. While claims of moral and intellectual superiority should be opposed, the focus of the present paper is to challenge the racialist underpinning Sesardic attempts to legitimise them with. The third prong is a particularly pungent red herring, but my focus will be on critiquing Sesardic’s central arguments for racial naturalism.

In the two following sections I question the evidentiary basis of Sesardic’s attempted revival of a biological concept of race, taking on the arguments from forensic anthropology and genetic anthropology in turn. In the final section before the conclusion I map out the rhetorical terrain of Sesardic’s racial naturalism, with an emphasis on the role flip-flopping between a weak and a strong position plays in his argumentation. Oyama (2000, p. 31) famously compared disputing genetic determinism to fighting the undead. Racial naturalism also has this tendency to rise from the grave. If there is to be a “stake in the heart move” in the race debate it is not going to be based on biological facts alone.