Racial discrimination: How not to do it
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.
Section snippets
Why forensic anthropologists are so good at identifying social constructs
The problem forensic anthropology presents to social constructionism about race is simple. Forensic anthropologists are very good at assigning human remains to the racialised group with which the deceased would have been identified when he or she was alive. Social constructionists, on the other hand, argue that racial categories are poor proxies for biological (in this case morphological) diversity. The facts of forensic anthropology and the theory of social constructionism seem to be at odds.
Genetic clustering and the illusion of biological race
The resurgence of racial naturalism over the last decade is due not so much to forensic anthropology, but rather to genetic anthropology. Until recently, genetic diversity studies seemed to provide unambiguous support for social constructionism about race. Most famous is Lewontin’s (1972) article The Apportionment of Human Diversity in which he demonstrated that, on a locus-by-locus basis, around 85.4% of the overall human genetic diversity resides within any given continental population, so
A field-guide for traversing the rhetorical landscape of racial naturalism
It is one of the main contentions of this paper that Sesardic oscillates between two versions of racial naturalism; one which is strong but not supported by the science, and another which is so weak that it does not contradict social constructionism about race. The strong version claims that race is a privileged, objective, scientific representation of human biological diversity, and that there are a handful of geographically defined races. This is the racial naturalism that I have been
Conclusion
Social constructionists about race can no longer simply cite Lewontin’s (1972) in defence of their view. The debate has moved on. Yet recent attempts to revive race as a biological category—among which Sesardic’s (2010) has been one of the most sophisticated and forceful—fail to stand up to critical scrutiny. Race offers a poor, misleading representation of human biological diversity. Does this mean that race is biologically meaningless? Well, it depends on what one means by that. If it means
Acknowledgments
This paper has benefited greatly from helpful comments by Paul Griffiths, Maureen O’Malley and Karola Stotz. I would like to thank participants of the 2012 Postgenomic Perspectives on Human Diversity workshop and the 2012 AAHPSSS conference for their useful feedback. I am also grateful to Pierrick Bourrat, David Braddon-Mitchell, Kristie Miller, Dominic Murphy, Frances Olive, Karl Rollings, Isobel Ronai, Luke Russell, Elena Walsh and John Wilkins for their valued comments on earlier versions of
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