Less Than Human

by Smith, David Livingstone

  “Because,” Mother said gently, “Janie is a little colored girl.”

  “But she’s white!”

  “We were mistaken. She is colored.”

  “But she looks—”

  “She is colored. Please don’t argue!”

  “What does it mean?” I whispered.

  “It means,” Mother said slowly, “that she has to live in Colored Town with colored people.”

  In befriending Janie, Lillian transgressed an ironclad social taboo, the incoherence of which made it no less absolute, and she was consequently wracked with guilt.

  I was white. She was colored. We must not be together. It was bad to be together. Though you ate with your nurse when you were little, it was bad to eat with any colored person after that. It was bad just as other things were bad that your mother had told you. It was bad that she was to sleep in the room with me that night. It was bad.…4

  What, if anything, made Janie black?

  There are two possibilities here. One is to say that Janie wasn’t black, or white, or anything else. According to this skeptical approach, racial categories are both false and dangerous, and should be expunged from our vocabulary. The other option is to say that Janie was indeed black, but her blackness was a social fact rather than a biological one. According to this view, which is known as social constructionism, races are real, but they are artifacts of social classification. Janie was black just because she was classified as black. Nowadays, social constructionism is the prevailing orthodoxy in the study of race.5

  Although skeptics and constructionists are fundamentally at odds about the concept of race, this shouldn’t obscure the fact that they also share a lot of common ground. They both agree that racial classification is a real and powerful force, and hold that racial categories don’t drop out of the blue, but are ideological constructions that depend on particular cultural and historical circumstances. The difference between the two views turns on the question of whether racial categories should be given any credence.6

  The fact that racial classifications are ideological explains how and why they change over time. The history of racial taxonomy in the United States provides some revealing examples. Today, there are six officially recognized races: White, American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian, and Other Pacific Islander (although being Hispanic is considered an “ethnicity” rather than a race in government documents, we will shortly see that this is a distinction without a difference). The racial spectrum was very different early in the twentieth century. At that time, Jews, Irish, Slavs, Italians, and a ragbag of others were classified as separate races, and these races were thought to pose a serious threat to “white” hegemony. MIT president Francis A. Walker, writing in 1896, described these groups as “beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence” and emphasized that they “have none of the ideas and aptitudes that fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government.” Walker was just one voice in a panicky nativist chorus calling for restrictions on European immigration, lest racially inferior specimens of humanity overrun the country.7

  Why have our notions of race changed so dramatically over the last hundred years or so? It’s not because we’ve discovered any new biological facts about which groups are really races and which ones aren’t. No white-coated geneticist has emerged from the lab to proclaim, with the authority of science behind him, that Italians are white and Nigerians are black. What’s occurred is a conceptual shift, caused by sociopolitical changes.

  Changes in the racial classification of Native Americans between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries provide an especially compelling example of the ideological function of race. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when English settlers were on relatively good terms with Native Americans, they described the latter as white (their “olive” or “tawny” appearance was attributed to exposure to the sun or to ointments that they applied to their bodies). However, as tensions mounted, and episodes of violence became more frequent and sustained, settlers began to describe Indians as “copper colored” or “red” rather than fair skinned. At the same time, colonists amplified Native Americans’ alterity in other ways. New legislation placed Indians in the same category as blacks and mulattos—that is, as racially “other”—and forbade intermarriage of settlers and Native Americans, defining it as a form of miscegenation. By the early eighteenth century, Indians had undergone an astonishing metamorphosis. They were no longer white, but red. According to historian A. T. Vaughan, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, “the stereotypical color carried a host of unfavorable connotations that prevented the Indians’ full assimilation into the Anglo-American community and simultaneously precluded their acceptance as a separate and equal people.”

  Although a few dissenters resisted the prevailing color taxonomy and its correlative racial policies, the surviving literature, both factual and fictional, shows that the Indian was no longer considered a member of the same race; he remained forever distinct in color and character. Even relatively sympathetic spokesmen now believed the Indians to be permanently different.8

  BEYOND IDEOLOGY

  I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here that we are a race of beings, who … have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and scarcely capable of mental endowments.

  —BENJAMIN BANNEKER TO THOMAS JEFFERSON, AUGUST 19, 17919

  Social constructionism accounts for the fluidity and historical specificity of beliefs about race. But it also has limitations. Its chief shortcoming, as a comprehensive theory of race, lies in what it doesn’t address. Constructionism does a good job explaining the content of racial thinking, but lacks the resources for explaining its distinctive form. The practice of segregating the human species into races reflects a certain style of thinking. Social constructionism explains why we classify certain groups as races, but it has nothing to say about why the very concept of race is so widespread and historically persistent, and it does not address the question of why it is that the racial concepts deployed by culturally and historically diverse societies have so much in common.10

  Some social constructionists claim that the very notion of race is an ideological invention tied to a particular historical epoch. Some argue that it originated in the fifteenth century, with the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and the imposition of “purity of blood” laws. Others believe that it began in the sixteenth century, as an offshoot of European colonialism. Some locate it in the consolidation of European class relations and the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade during the seventeenth century. Yet others claim that it originated in nineteenth-century biology and anthropology.11 All of these theorists hold that prior to the comparatively recent “construction” of race, racialism did not exist, but the sheer lack of convergence on a single historical epoch when the notion of race was supposedly “constructed” ought to make us suspicious that they are barking up the wrong tree. I’ve already presented evidence against the extreme version of the constructionist position in my discussion of slavery, so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say that this version of social constructionism confuses historically specific manifestations of racism with the deeper phenomenon that they are all manifestations of. It is certainly correct to say that there are many socially constructed concepts of race, but they are all variations on an underlying theme. Social constructions of race are constrained by the psychology of racial thinking—after all, they weren’t constructed ex nihilo. To fail to grasp this is to fail to understand the concept of race and the prevalence of racial beliefs.

  Over the past twenty years or so, a new cognitive-evolutionary approach to the study of race has emerged.12 Theorists in this camp accept that racial categories don’t have any scientific justification, and allow that social forces fill out the content of racial categories. But they go beyond the social constructionists, arguing that the near-u
niversality of the concept of race suggests that it reflects something about how the human mind works. If this is right, then it has serious social implications. Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, an anthropologist at New York’s New School of Social Research who is one of the foremost researchers into the psychology of race, tells us why. “After almost fifteen years of working on the mental representation of race,” he comments, “the conclusions that I’ve come to are in many respects disquieting.…”

  Race is not simply a bad idea; it is a deeply rooted bad idea. This is not an appealing thought. It implies that race may be as firmly grounded in our minds as it is in the politics of our day.… Many prefer to believe that race is an accident of how we happen to categorize the world. I suppose that this preference alone accounts for why so many people continue to believe that race is not only a bad idea, but a superficial one—one that could be “set straight” by simply correcting the misinformation that we receive as children, by extolling the virtues of our diverse world.

  But this is not the case. In fact, Hirschfeld’s work, which focuses on children’s concepts of race, demonstrates that “children … are more than aware of diversity; they are driven by an endogenous curiosity to uncover it.”

  Children … do not believe race to be a superficial quality of the world. Multicultural curricula aside, few people believe that race is only skin deep. Certainly few three-year-olds do. They believe that race is an intrinsic, immutable, and essential aspect of a person’s identity. Moreover, they seem to come to this conclusion on their own. They do not need to be taught that race is a deep property, they know it themselves already.13

  This doesn’t mean that the idea of race is innate or inevitable. We are not condemned to be racialists. However, as Hirschfeld aptly points out, it does imply that we’re all susceptible to it. The analogy to disease is quite a telling one. We are vulnerable to certain diseases because of our biological design. This explains why it is that certain kinds of microorganisms can gain a foothold inside our bodies if we’re exposed to them. By the same token, our mind design makes us vulnerable to the racial beliefs that that we are exposed to by our culture.

  PLATO’S JOINTS

  No wonder St. Patrick drove all the venomous vermin out of Ireland! Its biped mammals supply that island its full average share of creatures that crawl and eat dirt and poison every community that they infest.

  —GEORGE TEMPLETON STRONG, IN GEORGE TEMPLETON STRONG’S DIARY OF THE CIVIL WAR 1860–1865 14

  Although racial beliefs can be very diverse, there are features that they all have in common. Think of these as components of a template that determines the form of our beliefs about race.

  The first component is so obvious that it is easy to take for granted. Races are conceived as human kinds (or, when they are dehumanized, quasi-human kinds). But they are special sorts of human kinds, for not every human kind is thought of as a race. Firemen are a human kind. So are people who root for the Red Sox, or who have more than two children. But nobody thinks of these groups as races. So, being a human kind is necessary but not sufficient for being a race.

  We think of races as natural human kinds. I’ve already visited the notion of natural kinds in Chapter Three. There is a sprawling and often highly technical philosophical literature on this subject. Much of this literature is concerned with the question of how scientists and philosophers ought to think of natural kinds. In this book, I am not concerned with this sort of question. Instead, my project is a descriptive one. I want to focus on the role that natural kinds actually play in our everyday, pretheoretical thinking. To understand dehumanization, we need to focus on thinking in terms of natural kinds as a psychological phenomenon, rather than as a scientific or philosophical practice.

  With this in mind, let’s revisit the concept of natural kinds.

  We think of the world as divided into types of things, and we give these types names. Some of these conceptual divisions are thought to correspond to the structure of the world, carving nature at its joints, as Plato famously put it, while others are products of human artifice, gerrymandered to suit our needs. The former are natural kinds and the latter are artificial kinds.15 You probably take it for granted that apple trees are a natural kind, but things that cost seventy-nine cents a pound aren’t. Why? Well, one striking difference between the two categories has to do with what philosophers call their “inferential potentials.” Knowing that something is an apple tree gives you a lot of information about it. If you know that something is an apple tree, you can infer that it has alternately arranged oval leaves, produces pinkish-white blossoms in the spring, bears fruit with a certain appearance and taste that ripen in the fall, grows from seeds, is unlikely to grow more than forty feet tall, and so on. In contrast, knowing that something costs seventy-nine cents a pound tells you nothing about it apart from its price. It’s an inferentially anemic category. Similarly, identifying an animal as a porcupine provides a wealth of information about its anatomy, physiology, mating behavior, life cycle, and diet. Correctly classifying a piece of jewelry—say, a ring—as gold allows you to predict that it will react to aqua regia to form chloroauric acid, that it will melt if heated to 1947.52 degrees Fahrenheit, that it has a tensile strength of 120 megapascals, and so on, while correctly classifying it as a ring tells you precious little about it. Of course, you need to have specialized knowledge about apple trees, porcupines, and gold to make the sorts of inferences that I’ve described. But the point is that if you had this knowledge then you could make those inferences. You could in principle make them, even though you may be unable to in practice. Compare this with things that cost seventy-nine cents a pound, and things that are rings. There just isn’t enough to know about these things to allow anyone to make comparably rich inferences about them.

  What is it that makes these inferences possible? Remember, our focus is on the psychology of natural kinds, so we’re concerned with what people imagine it is that makes natural kind concepts so inferentially potent, rather than what scientists and philosophers say about the issue. As it happens, there’s been quite a bit of research into this question over the past few decades, and most of it converges on the same conclusion. We are strongly inclined to imagine that natural kinds have a hidden essence, and this essence is supposed to explain observable similarities that hold between all members of the kind. The relationship between natural kinds and essences goes the other way around, too: if something is believed to have an essence, then it’s thought to be a member of a natural kind. So, people tend to assume that having an essence is a necessary and sufficient condition for something to be a member of a natural kind.16

  Let’s use this notion to explore the question of race. At a first approximation, the concept of a race is the concept of a human natural kind. The members of a race are imagined to possess a common racial essence, an essence that is unique to them and which makes them the kind of people that they are. This general idea is elegantly captured by a provocative thought experiment devised by Northwestern University philosopher Charles W. Mills. Mills’s thought experiment concerns a man named Mr. Oreo, who “cannot even think of passing [as white], being quite dark with clearly black African features and with known black ancestry.” But Mr. Oreo “is unhappy with his racial designation, so he fills in ‘white’ on bureaucratic forms, identifies himself as white, and rejects black culture.”17

  Do Mr. Oreo’s attitudes and actions make him white?

  Mills points out, correctly in my view, that most people would say that Mr. Oreo is really black. He’s just pretending to be white, or has a false belief that he is white, or is confused about his race, but he’s really black. As a modest, and admittedly unscientific experiment, I’ve run this scenario past my students countless times, and on each occasion, they have insisted univocally that Mr. Oreo is black, no matter what he says or believes about himself. If you share this intuition, then you are committed to a certain view of what race consists of. Clearly, if you believe that Mr. Oreo is black you mu
st reject the idea that race is a matter of one’s subjective “identity,” and you must believe that being a member of one or another race is a fact about a person. This might be either a biological fact or a social fact, but it’s a fact.

  Next, Mills revs the experiment up a notch by introducing the Schuyler machine. The Schuyler machine is a fictional contraption that modifies black people’s appearance in such a way as to make them indistinguishable from white people (a conceit borrowed from George Schuyler’s fiercely satirical novel Black No More). Suppose that Mr. Oreo undergoes the Schuyler treatment, and emerges with a stereotypically Caucasian appearance: pale skin, straight blond hair, steely blue eyes, thin lips, an aquiline nose, and narrow nostrils.

  Has he become white?

  Bear in mind that we’re not looking for the facts about Mr. Oreo’s race. The story is just a way for us to get access to our intuitions. You’re probably drawn to some belief or other about whether Mr. Oreo is black or white after the treatment.

  Which is it?

  It’s hard to resist the feeling that even after the Schuyler treatment Mr. Oreo remains a black man. As we’ve already seen, this conclusion has nothing to do with his subjective sense of identity (remember, he doesn’t regard himself as black). It seems natural to think that, after emerging from the Schuyler machine, Mr. Oreo only looked white but hadn’t really become white. At first glance, this conclusion seems puzzling. After all, he’s now indistinguishable from a white man. In other contexts we’re happy to follow the adage that if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it’s a duck. Why not when it comes to race?