To highlight the cogency of the question, Mills invites us to “compare another kind of physical transformation, that of bodily physique and strength.” Enter the Schwarzenegger machine.
If a machine were invented (call this the Schwarzenegger machine) that could transform 98-pound weaklings into massively muscled supermen capable of pressing hundreds of pounds without the tedium of special diets and weight training, would we say that the person only looked strong but had not really become strong? Obviously not. His new body, new physique, new strength are real.18
Most people would affirm that the man emerging from the Schuyler machine is still really black, but would deny that the muscleman emerging from the Schwarzenegger machine is still really weak. This difference demands an explanation. I think that the answer lies in the fact that we tend to think—perhaps in spite of ourselves—that black people constitute a natural kind, whereas weak people don’t: we’re intuitive essentialists about race, but not about muscles. This dichotomy is suggested by the way that we customarily talk about these characteristics. We say that a person has large muscles, but we say that they are of a certain race (as the economist and race theorist William Z. Ripley put it in 1899, “Race denotes what man is; all … other things denote what he does”).19 A person can gain or lose muscle while remaining the same person, but we tend to think that if they were to change their race, it would amount to their becoming an entirely different person.
ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCES
Mills’s thought experiment suggests that we tend to intuitively conceive of a person’s race as necessary to their identity, whereas body build is thought to be contingent—merely a matter of appearance. Philosophers often describe necessity using the jargon of possible worlds. Possible world talk can sound a bit odd at first, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes a very useful tool for capturing what are called modal intuitions—ideas about what is possible, impossible, necessary, or contingent.
Here’s how it works. Imagine that there is a world corresponding to every way that the actual world could be. In other words, instead of saying “so-and-so is possible,” we say “there is a world at which so-and-so.” For example, porcupines might have been pink, instead of their standard grayish hue. This can be described in possible world lingo by the sentence, “There is a world at which porcupines are pink.” Now, think of the sentence, “All circles are round.” This is what philosophers call a necessary truth, which means that it has to be true—there’s just no way for a circle to be square or hexagonal or any shape other than round, because roundness is part of what it is to be a circle. We can use possible world jargon to express this by saying, “Circles are round at every world”—we simply can’t conceive of a world where circles aren’t round.
Now, let’s apply this way of thinking to the notion of race.
If a person’s race is part of their essence—if they couldn’t be a different race while remaining the same person—we can express this by saying that a person’s race remains the same at every world where that person exists. Mills comes close to this formulation, stating, “For racial realists, people characterizable by their phenotype in our world, with its peculiar history, as belonging to a particular ‘race’ will continue to have the same ‘racial’ intellectual and characterological traits in another world with a radically different history.”20 However, Mills’s formulation contains a serious flaw. We’ve seen from the fictional case of Mr. Oreo—as well as the real-life case of Janie—that phenotypic traits (a biological term for observable, physical traits) are only contingently associated with race. It’s possible to be “black” without having dark skin, because skin color isn’t an essential feature of “blackness” (in possible world talk, there’s at least one world where black people have pale skin). Although a person’s race remains the same at every world where they exist, their skin color and other phenotypic traits don’t. There are numerous cases of “black” people “passing” as white—and even people being classified as “black” at birth but “white” at death. Lawrence Hirschfeld explains that “historical and experimental research has revealed that visual differences in appearance do not map well onto racial categories.”
The same individual’s race would be quite different depending on whether he or she were born in Brazil, the United States, or South Africa, or whether he or she were born in the United States in 2001 or 1901. Within a single system of classification, race is permeable. The historian Linda Gordon … documented an intriguing account of the racial transformation of a group of children in the early twentieth century who were not White when they left New York, but who were White when they arrived in Arizona one week later. Hahn, Mulinare, and Teutsch … examined race identification of all infants who died before their first birthday in St. Louis between 1983 and 1985. Despite the fact that these were the same infants, they found that significantly more were Black when they were born than when they died.
How is this possible? The likely answer turns on the contrast between presumed essence and actual appearance.
Hahn et al. attributed the inconsistency to differences in the way that race is determined at birth and death: At birth race is identified by parents, at death by a physician. Self-identification is based on genealogy, whereas other-identification is based on appearance.21
We’ve already seen that natural kind categories are supposed to provide inferential leverage. Just knowing that something is a member of a certain natural kind is supposed to provide a key to inferring various other facts about it. This is certainly true of ordinary beliefs about race. People tend to assume that knowing that someone belongs to a certain race opens the door to lots more information about them. This assumption lies at the root of racial profiling.
Here’s an example of the sorts of inferences that racial categorization licenses. During the late Middle Ages many European Christians believed that Jewish men menstruated. For example, the thirteenth-century writer Jacques de Vitry wrote in his History of Jerusalem that Jews “have become unwarlike and weak even as women, and it is said that they have a flux of blood every month,” because “… God has smitten them in their hinder parts, and put them in perpetual opprobrium” as punishment for the murder of Christ.22 The unfortunate condition of these men’s “hinder parts” was completed by excruciating menstrual cramps that could only be relieved by drinking the blood of butchered Christian children. So, the myth of Jewish male menstruation was bound up with another widespread Christian belief—the “blood libel” that Jews first torture and then kill Christian children, and use their blood to make matzos for the Passover meal.
This theme of male menstruation appears in Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel The Fixer, which is based on the arrest and trial of a Ukrainian Jew named Menachem Mendel Beilis on charges of ritual murder in 1913. The protagonist, a Jewish handyman named Yakov Bok, is arrested on the charge of having ritually slaughtered a Christian child. Bok’s persecutors expect him to menstruate while imprisoned and awaiting trial. We can use this fictional account to explore the belief that knowing a person’s race gives us additional information about them. Malamud writes:
The days were passing and the Russian officials were waiting impatiently for his menstrual period to begin. Grubeshov and the army general often consulted the calendar. If it didn’t start soon they threatened to pump blood out of his penis with a machine they had for that purpose. The machine was a pump made of iron with a red indicator to show how much blood was being drained out. The danger of it was that it didn’t always work right and sometimes sucked every drop of blood out of the body. It was used exclusively on Jews; only their penises fitted it.23
Suppose that the authorities had administered the pump, and caused Bok’s penis to hemorrhage. If they had done this, they wouldn’t have been confronted with any evidence to contradict their peculiar supposition about Jewish men. But suppose they didn’t use the pump, and had carefully observed Bok, and seen that he didn’t menstruate. Would this have caused them to abandon thei
r belief that Jewish men menstruate? I doubt it very much; let me explain why.
Essences aren’t observable, and their unobserveability is a logical consequence of their explanatory role (they’re supposed to “lie behind” observable attributes). Essences are supposed to be responsible for the observable attributes that a thing displays—at least those attributes that are typical of its kind. For example, the typical attributes of an apple tree (its size, shape, the configuration of its leaves, its fruit-bearing capacity, and so on), all of which we can see, are imagined to be effects of its essence, which we can’t see.
An apple tree that has all of these features is, so to speak, true to its kind. But what about an atypical apple tree: one that isn’t true to its kind? A seedling apple tree may never reach full size if it is deprived of the sunlight, water, and nutrients that it needs to grow. When this occurs, it is natural to think of the tree as having failed to realize its essential nature. The stunted plant hasn’t stopped being an apple tree, but it’s an anomalous or malformed specimen, rather than a normal or stereotypical one. This pattern of thinking is typical of folk biology. As cognitive scientist Dan Sperber aptly notes, we reason about animals in quite a different way than we reason about manufactured items like furniture. We tend to imagine that the typical features of the kind are somehow contained in the members of that kind, even if they’re not expressed. “If an animal does not actually possess a feature ascribed to it by its definition,” he writes, “then it possesses it virtually: not in its appearance but in its nature.” Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, adds:
This is more than a grammatical point: we can say of a tiger born without legs that it didn’t ever get its legs, but not of a bean-bag chair that it didn’t ever get its. Sperber further implies that, say, a plucked bird is still thought to have its feathers “virtually” just as a coneless pine “virtually” has its cones.24
Racial thinking follows more or less the same path. This is why Bok’s failing to menstruate is simply irrelevant to the belief that Jewish men menstruate. According to the peculiar logic of race, Bok could be seen as a deviant or defective specimen of Jewry who doesn’t menstruate but nevertheless has it “in him” to do so.
I chose the example of male menstruation because it is patently absurd. However, we often think about race in much the same way without noticing the weirdness of it—we think that there are “typical” blacks, “typical” Jews, “typical” Asians, and so on. Individuals that depart from the stereotype are considered deviant specimens of their race. A Jewish farmer is (in Europe and the United States, anyway) seen as “less Jewish” than a Jewish accountant—and an African-American philosopher is thought of as “less black” than an African-American athlete.
Because of our psychological makeup, it’s all too easy to assume that for any putative natural kind, including racial kinds, certain observable features—those regarded as typical of the kind—are brought into being by the flowering of the kind’s essence, and atypical features are imagined to be an effect of some obstruction that prevents the essence from expressing itself in a “pure” form.
Once we come to recognize how all this works, it becomes clear why Janie was considered black even though she looked white, and why Mr. Oreo is still considered black after the Schuyler treatment. We imagine that in these cases the racial essence was present but failed to manifest. Mr. Oreo concealed his essence by cultivating a misleading appearance, and Janie’s essence—her “blackness”—was never fully expressed, but it was assumed that, beneath the surface, they were both really black, and that this was a permanent condition.
There are also folk-theories about how racial essences are carried and transmitted from parents to their offspring. Sometimes, people are uncommitted to one or another theory of racial transmission, but have “an intuitive belief that an essence exists, even if its details have not yet been revealed.”25 But this is by no means always, or even mostly, the case. Yale University psychologists George E. Newman and Frank C. Keil have found that during their earliest years, children assume that the essence of a thing is found in its center. Later on—around the age of ten—they transition to the view that a thing’s essence is distributed throughout its body. Newman and Keil inform us that:
Children, as young as 6 years old, do not seem to be agnostic about the physical nature of essence. However, these younger children, contrary to adults, favor the view that essences are localized to the center of objects—not only for animals, but for minerals as well. Around second grade, children begin to shift away from this Localist view to recognize that for minerals at least, essential features are distributed throughout. By fourth grade, children, like adults, recognize that for both minerals and animals, essential features are distributed—a view which they apply to natural kinds, but not to artifacts.26
Although most older children and adults embrace a folk-theory that biological essences are distributed throughout an animal’s body, they also retain a residue of the localist theory. The individual essence of a thing (that which makes you the individual person that you are, rather than a member of the human kind) is typically pictured as a “soul” located in the body—usually in the head just behind the eyes, or in the heart.
The idea that essences are distributed throughout the body flows naturally into the near-universal view that racial essences are carried by bodily fluids. The most popular belief of this sort, which I discussed briefly in Chapter Five, is that they are carried in a person’s blood and transmitted down their “bloodline.” This theory that a person’s racial essence is contained in their blood was invoked by the “purity of blood” laws in fifteenth-century Spain and Germans of the Third Reich, and it’s also a feature of numerous traditional belief-systems (for example, the Jívaro of the Andes foothills of Ecuador believe that a living person’s true soul is located in their blood, and that bleeding is therefore a loss of soul). Even today, in the developed world, it’s not unusual for educated people to assert that they have “African blood” or “Native American blood,” that they are a “full-blooded” member of some race or ethnic group, or that certain characteristics are “in their blood.”27
The notion that race is somehow in the blood has sometimes led to anxieties about the consequences of mixing blood, and not just in the context of antimiscegenation laws. When blood transfusion first became available during World War II, efforts were made to ensure that “black blood” was not given to white servicemen.
At first the Red Cross announced in November 1941 a policy of excluding black donors, but after the outcry that ensued, it compromised by agreeing to accept blood from black people on the condition that it be kept segregated from the blood of whites. Scientists knew conclusively that this was not necessary, but the surgeons general of the Army and Navy and officials of the Red Cross believed that the program would not work otherwise. Too many white soldiers believed that skin color and “racial traits” could be transmitted through the blood.…28
And according to Bertrand Russell, Nazi soldiers were terrified of the possibility of receiving transfusions of blood that had been taken from Jews, writing that careful steps were taken to prevent this from occurring.29
Another variant on the theory is the idea that racial essences are distributed in breast milk. In many cultures, breast milk is believed to be formed from a woman’s blood, so drinking it amounts to sharing her blood, and establishing kinship in a “horizontal” fashion. “In Islam,” writes anthropologist Aparna Rao, “the kinship of milk (rida’a), like that of blood, restricts marriage between certain persons; by the same token it also functions, as blood does, to broaden bonds between individuals and groups and draw these all into one big family.”30 Rutgers University medical historian Janet Lynne Golden points out that in nineteenth-century America:
Some believed that children literally drank up their wet nurses’ moral and physical imperfections.… Mary Terhune narrated the story of a girl said to be �
��remarkably dissimilar” from other members of her family with “rough skin, corpulent frame, harsh voice, and loud laugh,” and vulgar traits such as “a liking for tobacco and spirits, and a relish for broad wit and low company.” Her relatives and acquaintances whispered that as an infant she had been “put to nurse by a fat Irish woman.” In a similar vein, physician Joseph Edcil Winters explained the “secretive disposition” of one youngster with reference to an Italian wet nurse. He … [also] reported that a medical student had told him that one of his brothers had been nursed by an Irish woman and exhibited “very decided Irish traits, which are so marked that they are noticed by all the friends of the family.”31
A more scientific-sounding version of the same idea is that essences are located in one’s DNA (a notion helped along, no doubt, by the folk-theory that racial essences are transmitted in seminal fluid). Although it has a veneer of scientific respectability, this DNA theory is only marginally less baseless than the theories about blood and milk, for, as we have seen, conventional racial categories are folk categories rather than scientific ones, and don’t have any genetic justification.
Finally, there are more mystical explanations of the racial essence, framed in terms of the “spirit” or “soul” of a people—a nonphysical substance that somehow permeates them. I mentioned in Chapter Five that Hitler believed that races are “spiritual” rather than biological groups. However, irrespective of whether imagined as carried by blood, by genes, or by some spooky spiritual stuff, race is supposedly passed down from parents to their children. Recall the problem that confronted the Nazis, who were unable to find a surefire way to distinguish between Jews and Aryans. It was impossible to tell Jews from Germans just by looking at them, or by measuring their facial features, or by analyzing their blood chemistry. So, the guardians of racial purity decided to determine race by descent. A similar, albeit more extreme, criterion was used by whites in the southern United States to determine who was black. According to the “one-drop rule,” a fair-skinned, blue-eyed blond could be considered “black” if they had even a single “drop” of “black blood” coursing through their veins, as determined by their ancestry.32 In Brazil, the one-drop rule applies in reverse. A person can have dark skin, but if they have European ancestors, they may be considered “white.” Racially mixed parentage creates a problem, because it’s part of the logic of essences that they’re all-or-nothing: they don’t come in degrees. An object can’t be only somewhat gold—it must be either gold, not gold, or gold combined with something else. By the same token, within a racially essentialist framework the offspring of mixed race parents are often conceived as a mixture, but not a compound, of the parental races (in this respect, the fact that we use the term “mixed race” rather than, say, “blended race,” is quite revealing). This was the rationale for the one-drop rule that black trumps white (even today in the United States, a person with one dark-skinned parent is often described as “black”). Alternatively, the two essences may be imagined to vie with one another in a single person, producing a tragically divided or degenerate being.33
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