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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind John L. Jackson Jr.

The Racial Impasse

I remember speaking to an auditorium full of 7th and 8th graders at a junior high school in Central Florida a couple of years ago. I was attempting to explain to them just what anthropologists do for a living, and I was having the hardest time.

I’d been brought down to lecture at a local university only a few miles away, and the person who invited me, a minister and activist in the community, wanted to make sure that I got a chance to learn about the local area, especially from residents of the all-black town a stone’s throw from campus. I’m used to speaking to academic audiences about my work (undergraduates, graduate students, and colleagues), but addressing an auditorium full of pre-teens and teens was a major challenge.

I decided to start off with an invocation of Indiana Jones, which felt a little bit like cheating (or just pandering), but I thought that they’d at least have heard of the pop-culture icon. Of course, that might have already been a bad jumping-off point, since some of the kids weren’t even born when the third installment of the motion-picture franchise was released — and there wasn’t buzz in the air yet about Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg gearing up for this summer’s fourth installment. Even so, they seemed to listen, probably because any “special assembly” in the auditorium probably beats class-as-usual for most teenagers.

I wanted to give them their money’s worth and to make sure that they didn’t feel like I was speaking above their heads. I bounced around the stage like a prize fighter, making eye contact with kids, telling the worst jokes you could imagine, even singing a bar or two from some popular songs to help punctuate points — just hoping that my physical energy and inadequate grasp of contemporary teen culture might translate into something exciting and engaging to a few of them.

I then moved from a discussion about all of anthropology (in about five minutes) to a longer description of my work, ethnographic research on race and class in America. I asked them what they knew about “race” and how they’d define it. Some students defined it as “what you look like” or “people that look the same.” Others blurted out that it had to do with “your family being related to other families from before.” Still other kids declared that it had to do with “blood and stuff.” But the talk of “blood” was met with a series of hoots, with vocal objections and dismissals.

“It isn’t blood,” one girl said. “We all have the same blood.” Her friend, a chubby-cheeked young boy, nodded his head in agreement. Several rows behind them, another student added, “race is just made up.” Many of the students shook their heads to second that conclusion, even as some of those same students seemed unconvinced of their own position, scrunching their eyebrows quizzically and pursing their lips in disbelief at their own arguments about how race should be defined.

Most students, even junior high school students, have gotten the memo about “race” not being simplistically biological. They know to say that race is at least partially about culture, not just biology, even if they can’t necessarily marshal the specific evidence scholars use to challenge assumptions about race’s biological grounding. To say that race is “cultural” is usually to say that it doesn’t have the inflexible imprimatur of nature behind it. But the stamp of culture can feel just as
intractable.

There are at least two racial camps in the academy right now. One consists of biologists, geneticists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and medical doctors who declare that “race” is not biologically based at all — and never has been. These are the social and cultural constructionists. They say that race is hardly reducible to biology. It is about power and exploitation, a way we fool ourselves into thinking there are natural justifications for the kinds of inequalities that plague us.

There is another group of biologists, geneticists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and medical doctors who dispute that claim. They think that there is a kind of academic conspiracy afoot to pretend that race isn’t real when it is — a move to treat the biology of race as a taboo subject, too politically sensitive to analyze. Instead of taking it seriously, they say, the folks in the former camp use dogma and charges of racism to keep contrary scientists (still interested in thinking about the physical realities of race) in line.

Each camp sets the other one up as being more powerful — and dangerous. They make accusations about one another’s intentions and morality. And they both imagine the other to be a serious problem to the future of scholarship.

There is even a growing third category of scholars, mostly nonscientists, who argue that race isn’t real (the first group is right) but that even the people in that camp use race in ways that are similar to their rivals. In one of its strongest versions, scholars claim that the “culture” of cultural constructionism is really just a smoke-and-mirror trick that allows academics to have their racial cake and eat it, too — by just renaming that race “culture.” (Literary critic Walter Benn Michaels has made this claim most forcefully.)

Race’s complicated relationship to reality (real vs. unreal, there vs. not there) is exactly what has everyone so preoccupied. Of course, just as those junior high school kids in Florida could imagine that race is and isn’t biological at the same time, a little of both and a little of neither, racial experts are caught in the same quicksand — of accusation and innuendo, of charges and countercharges. Race is a social construction, but it is also more than that, and this complicated, contradictory notion of race is exactly what makes racism so tenacious, perched right atop the electrified fence between those racial camps.

Posted at 11:59:47 AM on May 14, 2008 | All postings by John L. Jackson Jr.

Comments

  1. Welcome, Professor Jackson! And thank you for this posting.

    I guess it took the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama for the CHE to notice the decided need for a scholar with your research background and specializations on the “Brainstorm” blogging team.

    It’s about time! I don’t know where the announcement of your arrival is located on the CHE Website (putting your name and the word Brainstorm into the search box yields nothing). But we look forward to a more widespread presentation of your formal participation.

    Thank you for joining the team.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 14, 01:13 PM · #

  2. It’s all about culture (lower case) and very little else.

    — James · May 14, 02:13 PM · #

  3. Welcome. Your contributions will be appreciated.

    I’m a biologist with very little interest in people. Frogs and birds are far more appealing to me. Many of the things I’ve read about “race” in the general academic literature have always struck me as mind-bogglingly parochial. (Like reading some 18th-century theological debate between infralapsarians and supralapsarians.)

    Human beings are animals. All animals exhibit geographical variation. If you start on the east coast of the US and head west, looking at Flickers as you go, you’ll see that they start out really yellow, and then as you make it to the midwest they have a somewhat pinkish cast, and then by the time you get to the Rockies they’re really red. If you start in northern Europe and head south, looking at people along the way, you find that they start out being really light colored, and then get darker as you move south. There is nothing special about us with respect to “racial” variation in this sense — every species has it, and we are no different.

    Now are there “cultural” ways that this biological fact has been understood, interpreted, used, etc.? Of course. Duh. Are the categories fixed? Of course not. Duh. Population biologists invented statistics and have been pioneers of anti-essentialism specifically because they deal with this reality.

    People hung up on “race” definitions and categories as they apply to human beings could benefit from stepping out of their species for a while and learning how the rest of the animal and plant kingdom varies. It might add a measure of clarity to their arguments (beyond “Means this!” “Does not!” “Does too!”).

    — birdwatcher · May 14, 03:00 PM · #

  4. Thanks for the early responses to my first post. It is great to be a part of these ongoing conversations with you all!

    — John Jackson · May 15, 08:42 AM · #

  5. Too much emphasis is placed on race, whatever its definition. As humans, with our supposed level of intelligence, it shouldn’t matter. Why do we make it an issue? Most of us are against discrimination and yet, so many questionnaires still include a question asking us to indicate our race. I always answer “human.” By now, we humans are made up of a variety of races, and it is my hope that one day we will all be so “mixed” that one cannot discern who is of what “race,” when the only things distinguishing us from one another will be gender and culture, with respect for those of another gender and culture.

    — Leslie · May 15, 08:56 AM · #

  6. I find Dr. Jackson’s post to be provocative only because despite the musings of science towards logical conclusions about the biological underpinnings of what we consider “race” to be there are still plenty of us inside and outside the academy who suffer under the burden of misinformed persons. We are dealt with in a less than equitable or more favorable manner in our schools and on our jobs because we are unscientifically perceived to be a member of one racial group or another especially by the so-called liberal elite who overtly profess multiculturalism and diversity and covertly practice 19th century racism.
    REJ

    — Dr. Raymond E. Janifer · May 15, 09:23 AM · #

  7. I cannot adequately express to you how encouraged I am by the common sense attitudes of the current generation of American youth on race—attitudes I witness everyday in the classroom. In my opinion, these students are, perhaps, the first generation of Americans able to make a truly informed assessment of the divisive role of the racial construct—they even more so than my generation that came of age in the mid to late seventies. I believe this generation, as a result of their ability to “interact” instantaneously with people around the world via the internet, is in a unique position—a heretofore unimaginable position—that allows them to understand how “race” has been used to empower “some” at the expense of “others.” I look forward to reading your comments in the future.

    — ShermanC · May 15, 09:37 AM · #

  8. Although science tells us rather convincingly that race is nothing more than minor genetic variations in human beings that happen to result, mostly, in differences in physical appearance, race is a pretty large fact of life on the street. While it may be that a species of bird harmlessly changes color according to locale, they don’t make war on each other (from criminal behavior to massive invasions) the ways that humans do. Couple that with the fact that human beings, who’ve evolved into different-looking people according to geography, construct cultures that have developed quite differently in the desert, on islands, in the forests, in the mountains, etc., and you get racial and—more fine-tuned—ethnic animosity as one of the near-universals in human life on this planet. In the words of the old Kingston Trio song (imperfectly quoted from memory here) “The French hate the English / the Germans hate the Dutch / and I don’t like anybody / very much.”

    Which is to all that all the above-it-all, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-scientific-mouth pronouncements by biologists don’t change the fact that a black man has a very difficult time hailing a cab after midnight.

    Footnote: the use of “duh” in academic blogging is hereby outlawed. (Duh.)

    — LuckyJim · May 15, 10:28 AM · #

  9. “Which is to SAY that…”

    Sorry. White Men Can’t Type.

    — LuckyJim · May 15, 10:32 AM · #

  10. “Race” stopped being a germane issue when white males found out they could no longer profit from it and hold people down with the notion of race superiority without having to pay a penalty for it.

    — Liz Desnoyers-colas · May 15, 11:11 AM · #

  11. As a proxy variable, skin color has been used to explain variance among human groups in formal and colloquial assessments for millennia. The phenomena underlying differences are complex, and race makes generalizations about behavior easier. When groups were geographically isolated, propositions about “essential” differences were superficially plausible.

    The prejudice learned over time from the crude measure of skin color would disappear if it held no predictive power. Two factors point toward this eventuality. Economic disruption caused by globalization and ecological catastrophe has resulted in global migration on an unprecedented scale. Groups formerly inhabiting equatorial, largely rural regions have moved into cities of the temperate zones – rapidly adopting the culture of their new homes. Second, social scientists and geneticists have developed better tools to measure differences among individuals – removing more and more unexplained variance from the skin color proxy variable.

    School children in ethnically mixed neighborhoods are rightly puzzled over the rigid categories and preconceptions about race they confront in institutions (and the academy). Overly simple theory and policy based upon perceived racial differences of the past would seem anachronistic. Everyday experience of human diversity in many cities allows children to develop a more nuanced view of individuality that their parents never possessed.

    The need to belong to exclusive groups based upon something “essential” still exists. Smaller and smaller differences among persons are being exploited to divide individuals into groups. The increasingly restrictive criteria for belonging to Native American tribes are examples of this phenomenon. Eventually genetic markers may be used for this purpose – genetic markers that are probabilistically distributed among all groups, yet are most frequently found in certain groups.

    Demographic change and genetic information will explode currently existing categories of race. However, I believe that the result will not be an inclusive racial utopia, rather an even more fractured social landscape with ever finer methods of exclusion.

    — Dystopian · May 15, 01:33 PM · #

  12. A lingering bias that “Brainstorm” could do something about, though, is the subtlely pervasive prejudice is that the Eastern Seaboard is where all the higher ed that counts takes place. UConn, Emory, Hofstra, Princeton, George Washington and Penn (twice), with only Marc Bosquet, out there in Santa Clara, west of the Mississippi. Might we have a voice or two from the South, the Midwest, the Great Plains, the Southwest, or the Pacific Northwest?

    — LuckyJim · May 15, 03:58 PM · #

  13. If there is any biological basis to “race culture”, it would seem to be a human tendency to fear outsiders. Whether this social phenomenon has some biological basis, I cannot tell. As Dystopian notes, school children do not naturally use “race” as a criterion for judging membership in the group. You can bet your bottom dollar they have other methods, though. I observe a strong tendency to delineate “us” and “them”, although historical circumstances will change how this process of definition works. So while “race” may not be real, it seems to me the processes behind racism are very real indeed. I don’t think this is the same thing as renaming race as culture, but I am willing hear other opinions on this.

    — Bible Spice · May 16, 07:53 AM · #

  14. Jackson’s de-solid-ifying the concept race is useful as the bad-minded people who would hurt others because of their race, if confronted, enough with the vagaries of, in-solid-ities of, what they base their evil upon, would find themselves “opposing” something wholly other than what they thought they were opposing. It is sort of like bank robbers—their average income is somewhere around $7000 a year in the US—a poor career choice if there ever was one; racists are deeply opposed to some particular race, only they do not have the foggiest idea what it is, exactly, that they are opposing. In truth it is an idea they invented in their mind that does not map onto reality, as Jackson shows. Stupid people tend to be stupid in multiple dimensions. Since recent research has shown, rather convincingly, that people like me are as racist as just about anybody else, in pre-conscious commitments and choices and preferences and expectations, the ugliness of me and my racisms, unwitting though they be, means I have been infected with a conceptually invalid map of human kinds and made bad choices baded on that infection. From a policy perspective, it is this infection of us all by this bad conceptualization of “race” that must be defeated.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · May 16, 09:20 AM · #

  15. I agree with those who, like post #13, note that whether or not race has any scientific basis, the applied concept of race has a genuine impact on the lives of individuals. That impact can be positive or negative depending on the social status accorded to the specific racial category or group.

    Since, as human beings, we have an innate drive to organize the voluminous information to which we are exposed into more manageable categories so that we can act on that information, racial categories, by whatever name, will always exist. Race, it seems to me, is one of a number of proxies for creating in-group/out-group categories (religion, for example, has served that purpose equally well) that are then used to make decisions about who has access to resources and who is denied access to resources (e.g., food, education, shelter, etc.)

    So, this issues raises the question: how do we educate or train ourselves to act with justice towards all categories or groups of people rather than try to act as if those categories or groups do not exist, or do not have real consequences if they do exist, or are simply a sad fact of our past but not our present? The question of race really forces us to consider how we, as a human species, act in socially just and unjust ways towards each other based on something that we really aren’t able to define clearly (race.)

    — Rick · May 16, 02:00 PM · #

  16. OK, noble purpose in #16, but c’mon, a whole essay, with bibliography, as a comment on a blog? How about just the abstract and a link to the website?

    — LuckyJim · May 19, 02:34 PM · #

  17. I think American academics and intellectuals could learn a lot from the student who said that race had to do with “your family being related to other families from before.” The genealogical aspect of race is too often ignored, leading to needless confusion.

    I’ve long found that the most broadly useful definition of a racial group is “a partly inbred extended family.” Conversely, I define an “ethnic group” as “a group of people who share traits — such as language, surnames, religion, cuisine, legends, and so forth — that are frequently passed down within biological families, but don’t have to be.”

    These two definitions fit nicely how the U.S. Census Bureau uses the two terms.

    — Steve Sailer · May 23, 03:00 AM · #

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