102 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

Why has race mattered in so manytimes and places Why does it still mat-ter Put more precisely why has therebeen such a pervasive tendency to applythe category of race and to regard peopleof different races as essentially differentkinds of people Call this the lsquofrac12rst ques-tionrsquo Of course there are many morequestions that one must also ask Whyhas racial oppression been so ubiqui-tous Why racial exploitation Why ra-cial slavery Perhaps we tend to think ofraces as essentially different just becausewe want to excuse or to justify the domi-nation of one race by another

I shall proceed with the frac12rst questionby canvassing frac12ve possible answers to itthat variously invoke nature genealogy (inthe sense of Michel Foucault) cognitivescience empire and pollution rules

One frac12nal preliminary remark is inorder Most parts of this essay couldhave been written last year or next yearbut the discussion of naturalism medi-cine and race could only have been writ-ten in November of 2004 and may wellbe out of date by the time this piece isprinted

Why has the category of race been sopervasive One answer says that the dis-tinction is just there in the world for allto see Superfrac12cial differences betweenraces do exist in nature and these arereadily recognized

The naturalist agrees at once that thedistinctions are less in the nature ofthings than they once were thanks to in-terbreeding among people whose ances-tors have come from geographically dis-tinct blocks Racial distinctions are par-ticularly blurred where one populationhas been translated by force to live in themidst of another population and yet hasnot been assimilatedndashslaves taken fromWest Africa and planted in the SouthernUnited States for example The natural-ist notes that traditional racial distinc-tions are less and less viable the morechildren are born to parents whose geo-graphical origins are very different

Sensible naturalists stop there Thebelief that racial differences are anything

Ian Hacking

Why race still matters

Ian Hacking a Fellow of the American Academysince 1991 holds the chair of Philosophy and History of Scientifrac12c Concepts at the Collegravege deFrance His work spans the philosophy of sciencethe philosophy of language the theory of proba-bility and statistical inference and the socio-his-torical examination of the rise and fall of disci-plines and theories His most recent books areldquoMad Travellersrdquo (1998) ldquoThe Social Construc-tion of Whatrdquo (1999) and ldquoHistorical Ontol-ogyrdquo (2004)

copy 2005 by the American Academy of Arts amp Sciences

more than superfrac12cial is a repugnanterror John Stuart Mill was the wisestspokesman for this position

Here in modern terminology is hisdoctrine (1) Nature makes differencesbetween individuals These differencesare real not constructed (2) We classifythings according to differences we ob-serve Classifrac12cations are made by peopleand encoded in social practices institu-tions and language (3) Some classes aresuch that their members have little incommon except the marks by which wesort them into those classesndashcall thosesuperfrac12cial kinds (4) Other classes havemembers with a great many things incommon that do not follow from themarks by which we sort them into class-es These are ldquoreal Kindsrdquo1

Examples ldquoWhite thingsrdquo he wrotereferring not to race but to the color it-self ldquoare not distinguished by any com-mon properties except whiteness or ifthey are it is only by such as are in someway dependent on or connected withwhitenessrdquo But horses to use one of hisother examples have endless properties

in common over and above whatevermarks we use to distinguish them fromother animals or other kinds of thingsHorses form a real Kind but the class ofwhite things is a superfrac12cial kind

The contemporary philosophical con-cept of a lsquonatural kindrsquo is a descendentof Millrsquos notion Nonphilosophers whohave come across this phrase may sup-pose it refers to a well worked out tech-nical and stable concept I argue else-where that it does not2

Mill himself was as notable a profemi-nist and antiracist as can be claimed for a white nineteenth-century man Al-though he argued that real Kinds existhe at once went on to ask whether theraces and sexes are real Kinds or if theyare merely superfrac12cial like the classifrac12ca-tions ldquoChristian Jew Musselman andPaganrdquo The religious confessions arenot real Kinds he argued because thereis no property that Christians have andMuslims lack or vice versa except what-ever follows from their faiths

What about race Most anthropolo-gists of Millrsquos day held that there werefrac12ve races named geographically but rec-ognized by color Caucasian EthiopianMongolian American and MalayanAccording to Mill color and certainother physiological traits are the marksby which we distinguish members ofthe different races Races would be realKinds if there were endlessly many otherdifferences between the races that didnot follow from the marks by which wedistinguish them Are there endlesslymany such differences

Well you cannot rule that out a prioriMill thought ldquoThe various races andtemperaments the two sexes and eventhe various ages may be differences ofKind within our meaning of the term I

Why race still matters

1 His own words are old-fashioned but lovelyThe differences between members of classesldquoare made by nature while the recognitionof those differences as grounds for classifrac12cationand of naming is the act of manrdquo Howeverldquowe frac12nd a very remarkable diversity be-tween some classes and othersrdquo Only super-frac12cial resemblances link members of one type of class while members of classes of the othertype have a vast number (he said an endlessnumber) of properties they share Those thatshare an almost endless number of propertiesare his real Kinds From John Stuart Mill ASystem of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive frac12rstpublished in 1843 The discussion of racial clas-sifrac12cation is found in bk 1 chap 7 sec 4 Thechanges Mill made in later editions of the bookinvolved sex not racendashdoubtless because Millhoped to get the questions about sex exactlyright for Harriett Taylor See chap 7 on Millonclassifrac12cation in my forthcoming book TheTradition of Natural Kinds (Cambridge Univer-sity Press)

2 This is one of the conclusions urged in mybook The Tradition of Natural Kinds

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 103

104 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

say they may be I do not say they arerdquoMill believed that only empirical sciencecould determine whether the variousraces as distinguished by color and afew other features pick out classes thatare distinct in a great many unrelatedways ldquoIf their differences can all betraced to climate and habits [or headded in later editions to some one or a few special differences in structure]they are not in the logicianrsquos view spe-cifrac12cally distinctrdquo He would have beenpleased by Anthony Appiahrsquos careful dis-cussion of very much the same questionusing more recent terminology Sciencemight have revealed an endless numberof differences between the races that arenot consequences of the marks by whichwe distinguish them namely color andphysiognomy But science has not doneso and almost certainly will not Milllike Appiah thus concludes that theraces are not real Kinds

This conclusion however does notanswer or aim at answering the specifrac12cquestion I raised at the outset of whythere is such a pervasive tendency toapply the category of race Maybe Millthought the answer was obvious Thedesire of one racial group to dominateexploit or enslave another demands le-gitimacy in societies that like modernEurope and America are committed toversions of egalitarianism Race scienceswere devised to discover a lot of differ-ences between races that do not followfrom the marks of color and structure bywhich we distinguish them You do nothave to treat people equally if they aresuffrac12ciently different

Although it takes us some distancefrom the lsquofrac12rst questionrsquo some recentevents force us to clarify the naturalistposition on race In an important edito-rial on the US census published in theyear 2000 Nature Genetics stated ldquoThat

race in this context is not a scientifrac12cterm is generally acknowledged by sci-entistsndashand a message that cannot berepeated enoughrdquo An editorial in 2001observed that ldquoscientists have long beensaying that at the genetic level there ismore variation between two individualsin the same population than betweenpopulations and that there is no biologi-cal basis for lsquoracersquordquo3 Nowndashin Novem-ber of 2004ndashthis selfsame journal hasproduced a special supplement on themedical and genetic uses of racial andethnic classifrac12cation And the November11 issue of The New England Journal ofMedicine highlights the news of the lsquorace-basedrsquo drug targeted at African Ameri-cans suffering from certain types ofheart failure All this is breaking newsHence what follows cannot be defrac12ni-tive but one may hope that a perspectivesomewhat distanced from media discus-sion can be useful even in the midst of it

We must frac12rst update Mill with a littlelogic When he wrote about differencesbetween classes he had in mind proper-ties that serve to distinguish members ofone class from another in a uniform wayA uniform difference between cows andhorses is something that is true in themain of any cow but not true in the main of any horsendashdigestion by rumi-nation for example There are ever somany such differences between horsesand cows hence they are real Kinds Call them uniform differences There are agreat many uniform differences that dis-tinguish horses from other kinds of ani-mals but almost no uniform differencesthat distinguish white things from greenthings except their color or Muslimsfrom Christians except their faith

Writing in 1843 Mill had little occa-sion to think about statistical differ-

3 ldquoCensus Race and Sciencerdquo Nature Genetics24 (2000) 97 ldquoGenes Drugs and Racerdquo NatureGenetics 29 (2001) 239

more than superfrac12cial is a repugnanterror John Stuart Mill was the wisestspokesman for this position

Here in modern terminology is hisdoctrine (1) Nature makes differencesbetween individuals These differencesare real not constructed (2) We classifythings according to differences we ob-serve Classifrac12cations are made by peopleand encoded in social practices institu-tions and language (3) Some classes aresuch that their members have little incommon except the marks by which wesort them into those classesndashcall thosesuperfrac12cial kinds (4) Other classes havemembers with a great many things incommon that do not follow from themarks by which we sort them into class-es These are ldquoreal Kindsrdquo1

Examples ldquoWhite thingsrdquo he wrotereferring not to race but to the color it-self ldquoare not distinguished by any com-mon properties except whiteness or ifthey are it is only by such as are in someway dependent on or connected withwhitenessrdquo But horses to use one of hisother examples have endless properties

in common over and above whatevermarks we use to distinguish them fromother animals or other kinds of thingsHorses form a real Kind but the class ofwhite things is a superfrac12cial kind

The contemporary philosophical con-cept of a lsquonatural kindrsquo is a descendentof Millrsquos notion Nonphilosophers whohave come across this phrase may sup-pose it refers to a well worked out tech-nical and stable concept I argue else-where that it does not2

Mill himself was as notable a profemi-nist and antiracist as can be claimed for a white nineteenth-century man Al-though he argued that real Kinds existhe at once went on to ask whether theraces and sexes are real Kinds or if theyare merely superfrac12cial like the classifrac12ca-tions ldquoChristian Jew Musselman andPaganrdquo The religious confessions arenot real Kinds he argued because thereis no property that Christians have andMuslims lack or vice versa except what-ever follows from their faiths

What about race Most anthropolo-gists of Millrsquos day held that there werefrac12ve races named geographically but rec-ognized by color Caucasian EthiopianMongolian American and MalayanAccording to Mill color and certainother physiological traits are the marksby which we distinguish members ofthe different races Races would be realKinds if there were endlessly many otherdifferences between the races that didnot follow from the marks by which wedistinguish them Are there endlesslymany such differences

Well you cannot rule that out a prioriMill thought ldquoThe various races andtemperaments the two sexes and eventhe various ages may be differences ofKind within our meaning of the term I

Why race still matters

1 His own words are old-fashioned but lovelyThe differences between members of classesldquoare made by nature while the recognitionof those differences as grounds for classifrac12cationand of naming is the act of manrdquo Howeverldquowe frac12nd a very remarkable diversity be-tween some classes and othersrdquo Only super-frac12cial resemblances link members of one type of class while members of classes of the othertype have a vast number (he said an endlessnumber) of properties they share Those thatshare an almost endless number of propertiesare his real Kinds From John Stuart Mill ASystem of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive frac12rstpublished in 1843 The discussion of racial clas-sifrac12cation is found in bk 1 chap 7 sec 4 Thechanges Mill made in later editions of the bookinvolved sex not racendashdoubtless because Millhoped to get the questions about sex exactlyright for Harriett Taylor See chap 7 on Millonclassifrac12cation in my forthcoming book TheTradition of Natural Kinds (Cambridge Univer-sity Press)

2 This is one of the conclusions urged in mybook The Tradition of Natural Kinds

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 103

104 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

say they may be I do not say they arerdquoMill believed that only empirical sciencecould determine whether the variousraces as distinguished by color and afew other features pick out classes thatare distinct in a great many unrelatedways ldquoIf their differences can all betraced to climate and habits [or headded in later editions to some one or a few special differences in structure]they are not in the logicianrsquos view spe-cifrac12cally distinctrdquo He would have beenpleased by Anthony Appiahrsquos careful dis-cussion of very much the same questionusing more recent terminology Sciencemight have revealed an endless numberof differences between the races that arenot consequences of the marks by whichwe distinguish them namely color andphysiognomy But science has not doneso and almost certainly will not Milllike Appiah thus concludes that theraces are not real Kinds

This conclusion however does notanswer or aim at answering the specifrac12cquestion I raised at the outset of whythere is such a pervasive tendency toapply the category of race Maybe Millthought the answer was obvious Thedesire of one racial group to dominateexploit or enslave another demands le-gitimacy in societies that like modernEurope and America are committed toversions of egalitarianism Race scienceswere devised to discover a lot of differ-ences between races that do not followfrom the marks of color and structure bywhich we distinguish them You do nothave to treat people equally if they aresuffrac12ciently different

Although it takes us some distancefrom the lsquofrac12rst questionrsquo some recentevents force us to clarify the naturalistposition on race In an important edito-rial on the US census published in theyear 2000 Nature Genetics stated ldquoThat

race in this context is not a scientifrac12cterm is generally acknowledged by sci-entistsndashand a message that cannot berepeated enoughrdquo An editorial in 2001observed that ldquoscientists have long beensaying that at the genetic level there ismore variation between two individualsin the same population than betweenpopulations and that there is no biologi-cal basis for lsquoracersquordquo3 Nowndashin Novem-ber of 2004ndashthis selfsame journal hasproduced a special supplement on themedical and genetic uses of racial andethnic classifrac12cation And the November11 issue of The New England Journal ofMedicine highlights the news of the lsquorace-basedrsquo drug targeted at African Ameri-cans suffering from certain types ofheart failure All this is breaking newsHence what follows cannot be defrac12ni-tive but one may hope that a perspectivesomewhat distanced from media discus-sion can be useful even in the midst of it

We must frac12rst update Mill with a littlelogic When he wrote about differencesbetween classes he had in mind proper-ties that serve to distinguish members ofone class from another in a uniform wayA uniform difference between cows andhorses is something that is true in themain of any cow but not true in the main of any horsendashdigestion by rumi-nation for example There are ever somany such differences between horsesand cows hence they are real Kinds Call them uniform differences There are agreat many uniform differences that dis-tinguish horses from other kinds of ani-mals but almost no uniform differencesthat distinguish white things from greenthings except their color or Muslimsfrom Christians except their faith

Writing in 1843 Mill had little occa-sion to think about statistical differ-

3 ldquoCensus Race and Sciencerdquo Nature Genetics24 (2000) 97 ldquoGenes Drugs and Racerdquo NatureGenetics 29 (2001) 239

104 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

say they may be I do not say they arerdquoMill believed that only empirical sciencecould determine whether the variousraces as distinguished by color and afew other features pick out classes thatare distinct in a great many unrelatedways ldquoIf their differences can all betraced to climate and habits [or headded in later editions to some one or a few special differences in structure]they are not in the logicianrsquos view spe-cifrac12cally distinctrdquo He would have beenpleased by Anthony Appiahrsquos careful dis-cussion of very much the same questionusing more recent terminology Sciencemight have revealed an endless numberof differences between the races that arenot consequences of the marks by whichwe distinguish them namely color andphysiognomy But science has not doneso and almost certainly will not Milllike Appiah thus concludes that theraces are not real Kinds

This conclusion however does notanswer or aim at answering the specifrac12cquestion I raised at the outset of whythere is such a pervasive tendency toapply the category of race Maybe Millthought the answer was obvious Thedesire of one racial group to dominateexploit or enslave another demands le-gitimacy in societies that like modernEurope and America are committed toversions of egalitarianism Race scienceswere devised to discover a lot of differ-ences between races that do not followfrom the marks of color and structure bywhich we distinguish them You do nothave to treat people equally if they aresuffrac12ciently different

Although it takes us some distancefrom the lsquofrac12rst questionrsquo some recentevents force us to clarify the naturalistposition on race In an important edito-rial on the US census published in theyear 2000 Nature Genetics stated ldquoThat

race in this context is not a scientifrac12cterm is generally acknowledged by sci-entistsndashand a message that cannot berepeated enoughrdquo An editorial in 2001observed that ldquoscientists have long beensaying that at the genetic level there ismore variation between two individualsin the same population than betweenpopulations and that there is no biologi-cal basis for lsquoracersquordquo3 Nowndashin Novem-ber of 2004ndashthis selfsame journal hasproduced a special supplement on themedical and genetic uses of racial andethnic classifrac12cation And the November11 issue of The New England Journal ofMedicine highlights the news of the lsquorace-basedrsquo drug targeted at African Ameri-cans suffering from certain types ofheart failure All this is breaking newsHence what follows cannot be defrac12ni-tive but one may hope that a perspectivesomewhat distanced from media discus-sion can be useful even in the midst of it

We must frac12rst update Mill with a littlelogic When he wrote about differencesbetween classes he had in mind proper-ties that serve to distinguish members ofone class from another in a uniform wayA uniform difference between cows andhorses is something that is true in themain of any cow but not true in the main of any horsendashdigestion by rumi-nation for example There are ever somany such differences between horsesand cows hence they are real Kinds Call them uniform differences There are agreat many uniform differences that dis-tinguish horses from other kinds of ani-mals but almost no uniform differencesthat distinguish white things from greenthings except their color or Muslimsfrom Christians except their faith

Writing in 1843 Mill had little occa-sion to think about statistical differ-

3 ldquoCensus Race and Sciencerdquo Nature Genetics24 (2000) 97 ldquoGenes Drugs and Racerdquo NatureGenetics 29 (2001) 239

ences which were only just beginning to loom large on the scientifrac12c horizonWe need some new concepts I will usethe words lsquosignifrac12cantrsquo lsquomeaningfulrsquoand lsquousefulrsquo All three go with the dreadword lsquostatisticalrsquo Since we are amongother things talking about so-calledraces namely geographically and histor-ically identifrac12ed groups of people we aretalking about populations And we aretalking about some characteristic orproperty of some but not all members of a population

lsquoSignifrac12cancersquo was preempted by sta-tistics early in the twentieth century It is completely entrenched there Here Iuse it for any major difference detectedby a well-understood statistical analysisA characteristic is statistically signifrac12cantif its distribution in one population issignifrac12cantly different from that in acomparable population Let us say that a characteristic is statistically meaningfulif there is some understanding in termsof causes of why the difference is sig-nifrac12cant For example in the early daysno one knew why smoking was associat-ed with lung cancer but now we un-derstand that quite well although notcompletely The correlation used to bemerely signifrac12cant but now it is mean-ingful

Finally a characteristic is statisticallyuseful if it can be used as an indicator ofsomething of interest in some fairly im-mediate practical concern Take an ex-ample from another topic nowadaysmuch discussed A body mass index(bmi) over 31 is a statistically useful in-dicator of the risk of type 2 diabetes andis therefore useful in epidemiology andpreventive medicine (There are muchbetter indicators involving the distribu-tion of mass and muscle in the body butat present such indicators are expensiveto measure while bmi measurementcosts almost nothing)

Classes that are statistically signifrac12-cant meaningful or useful are not there-by real Kinds There is no reason to be-lieve that there are a great many inde-pendent and uniform differences thatdistinguish obese persons from thosewhose bmi is in the recommendedrange of 18 to 25

lsquoSignifrac12cantrsquo in the end relies on tech-nical notions in applied probability the-ory lsquoMeaningfulrsquo has no resort to viabletechnical notions in any discipline (allclaims to the contrary are spurious)There do exist clear although oftenabused criteria of statistical signifrac12-cance There are no clear criteria forbeing statistically meaningful In prac-tice the distinction is often easily madeFor a long time the class of people whosmoke was known only to be statisticallysignifrac12cant with respect to lung cancerOne had no idea of the causal mecha-nisms underlying the correlation Nowwe think we understand the connectionsbetween nicotine and death althoughthese connections are still merely proba-ble We cannot say of a young man be-ginning to smoke that if he continueswith his vice he will succumb to lungcancer if nothing else gets him frac12rst But we can say that many such youngmen will die of lung cancer and oncolo-gists know enough to be able to explainwhy

Unlike statistical signifrac12cance the idea of being statistically meaningful is a hand-waving concept that points at the idea of an explanation or a causeImprecise hand-waving concepts aredangerous when they are given fancynames They can be put to wholly evilends But if we do not give them phonynames and are well aware of their im-perfections they can be useful when weneed them

We do need this concept Many peo-plendashas evidenced by debates going on

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 105

Why race still matters

106 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

at the time of this writing in Novemberof 2004ndashare scared of the idea that thetraditional list of races employed by tra-ditional racists might be statistically sig-nifrac12cant classes With good reason

Ten years ago The Bell Curve by RichardHerrnstein and Charles Murray attracteda great deal of attention The authorsclaimed that the Gaussian distributionsof iq scores establish a natural distinc-tion of some importance between differ-ent races They forcefully argued that theclass of African Americans is a statisti-cally signifrac12cant classndashsignifrac12cant withrespect to a property they called intelli-gence and which they measured with iqtests

They did not imply that the races arereal Kinds That is they did not statethat there is a host of uniform differ-ences between Caucasian Americans andAfrican Americans Readers not unrea-sonably assumed however that the au-thors meant exactly that At any rate theauthors clearly were not talking aboutmere correlations namely disparitiesbetween iq scores within different racialgroups But they did not establish thatthese disparities are statistically mean-ingful to any biological understanding

About the same time that The BellCurve was published ogre naturalistssuch as Philippe Rushton in Race Evolu-tion and Behavior made more sweepingclaims to biologically grounded racialdifferences They claimed that the racesare distinguished by many propertiesrightly prized or feared for differentstrengths and weaknesses If that weretrue then races would exactly frac12t Millrsquosdefrac12nition of a real Kind

One deplores both Rushton and TheBell Curve but there is an absolutely fun-damental logical difference betweenwhat the two assert Rushton claimedthat the races are real Kinds One imag-

ines that Herrnstein and Murray thoughtso too but what they claimed was thatthe races are statistically signifrac12cantclasses And they implied that this is sta-tistically meaningful

Despite the fact that his doctrines havea centuries-old pedigree we can dismissthe egregious Rushton We can also re-fute Murray and Herrnstein4 Millrsquos type of naturalism has contempt forboth doctrines Loathing of these quiterecent doctrines and their predecessorshas not surprisingly produced revul-sion against any sort of naturalism aboutrace Today there is some consternationover the appearance of what is calledrace-based medicine

The science of medicine was for quite a long time the science of the Europeanmale body with footnotes for non-European or female bodies All that haschanged those footnotes are now chap-ters But the current situations for thegroups that had been relegated to thefootnotes are quite different Many medical differences between males andfemales are uniform but medical differ-ences between races are almost alwaysonly statistical

We have long known that some ail-ments are restricted to some gene poolsTay-Sachs is a hereditary disease (inwhich an enzyme defrac12ciency leads to theaccumulation of certain harmful resi-dues in the brain and nerve tissue oftenresulting in mental retardation convul-sions blindness and ultimately death)that almost exclusively affects youngchildren of eastern European Jewish de-

4 There is a tendency among proper-thinkingpeople to dismiss The Bell Curve cavalierly asboth wrong-headed and refuted without actu-ally saying why Many things wrong and onehas an obligation to say what My own lsquogenea-logicalrsquo objections are stated in a piece in TheLondon Review of Books January 26 1995

scent lsquoAshkenazirsquo is a valuable geo-graphical historical and social classifrac12-cation It is geographical because it indi-cates where members of this class ortheir near ancestors came from namelyeastern Europe It makes a contrast with Sephardic Jews whose roots are in Spain In modern Europe and NorthAmerica social differences between theAshkenazi and Sephardic hardly matterto most people but they remain signifrac12-cant in North Africa and West Asia Un-til further interbreeding makes it totallyobsolete Ashkenazi is a statistically sig-nifrac12cant and a statistically meaningfulclass with respect to Tay-Sachs disease

There are similar geographical-histor-ical indicators for lactose intoleranceand for an inability to digest fava beansWest African ancestry is an indicator forbeing a carrier of the sickle-cell anemiatrait which confers some immunityagainst malaria This trait was often stigmatized as simply lsquoblackrsquo In fact it is primarily West African although itshows up in Mediterranean populationswhere malaria was a major selector forsurvival The indicator was abused forracial reasons in widespread screening

ldquoDrug approved for Heart Failure inAfrican Americansrdquondashheadline on thefrac12rst business page of The New York TimesJuly 20 2004 Here we go again Quitepossibly ldquoThe peculiar history [of thisdrug] on the road to the market presentsa wide array of troubling and importantissues concerning the future status ofrace as a category for constructing andunderstanding health disparities inAmerican societyrdquo5 For a stark remind-er of the commerce the Times reportedthat the previous day the stock of thedrugrsquos maker NitroMed rose from $431

to $1021 and had reached $16 at middayThis story has been ongoing for a decadein medical commercial and regulatorycircles

There are real problems about the ra-cially targeted heart drug BiDil is a mix-ture of two well-known heart medica-tions Scientifrac12c papers assert frac12rst thatother medicines are not as good for Afri-can Americans with heart failure as theyare for other Americans with this prob-lem and second that BiDil works betterfor African Americans with certain spe-cifrac12cs than any other drug on the mar-ket6 In fact randomized trials were dis-continued because the drug was mani-festly effective on black patients No-body well understands why The reasonscould be at least in part social and eco-nomic (including dietary) rather thanhereditary The correlation is stronglysignifrac12cant but it is not statisticallymeaningful at present from a geneticor other biological point of view

Even if one is a complete skepticabout for example a genetic basis forthe differential effrac12cacy of the drug thedrug does appear to be statistically usefulin treating the designated class of pa-tients That means that race may be auseful indicator to a physician of the po-tential effectiveness of this rather thananother drugndashunder present social andhistorical conditions

Now turn to leukemia Bone marrowtransplants help an important class ofpatients Donors and recipients musthave matching human leukocyte anti-gens (hlas) at present doctors try tomatch six different types of them If apatient has no relative to serve as a do-nor matches are hard to come by The

5 Frederick Kahn ldquoHow a Drug Becomes lsquoEth-nicrsquo Law Commerce and the Production ofRacial Categories in Medicinerdquo Yale Journal ofHealth Policy Law and Ethics 4 (2004) 46

6 Anne L Taylor ldquoCombination of IsosorbideDinitrate and Hydralazine in Blacks with HeartFailurerdquo New England Journal of Medicine 351(2004) 2049ndash2057

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 107

Why race still matters

106 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

at the time of this writing in Novemberof 2004ndashare scared of the idea that thetraditional list of races employed by tra-ditional racists might be statistically sig-nifrac12cant classes With good reason

Ten years ago The Bell Curve by RichardHerrnstein and Charles Murray attracteda great deal of attention The authorsclaimed that the Gaussian distributionsof iq scores establish a natural distinc-tion of some importance between differ-ent races They forcefully argued that theclass of African Americans is a statisti-cally signifrac12cant classndashsignifrac12cant withrespect to a property they called intelli-gence and which they measured with iqtests

They did not imply that the races arereal Kinds That is they did not statethat there is a host of uniform differ-ences between Caucasian Americans andAfrican Americans Readers not unrea-sonably assumed however that the au-thors meant exactly that At any rate theauthors clearly were not talking aboutmere correlations namely disparitiesbetween iq scores within different racialgroups But they did not establish thatthese disparities are statistically mean-ingful to any biological understanding

About the same time that The BellCurve was published ogre naturalistssuch as Philippe Rushton in Race Evolu-tion and Behavior made more sweepingclaims to biologically grounded racialdifferences They claimed that the racesare distinguished by many propertiesrightly prized or feared for differentstrengths and weaknesses If that weretrue then races would exactly frac12t Millrsquosdefrac12nition of a real Kind

One deplores both Rushton and TheBell Curve but there is an absolutely fun-damental logical difference betweenwhat the two assert Rushton claimedthat the races are real Kinds One imag-

ines that Herrnstein and Murray thoughtso too but what they claimed was thatthe races are statistically signifrac12cantclasses And they implied that this is sta-tistically meaningful

Despite the fact that his doctrines havea centuries-old pedigree we can dismissthe egregious Rushton We can also re-fute Murray and Herrnstein4 Millrsquos type of naturalism has contempt forboth doctrines Loathing of these quiterecent doctrines and their predecessorshas not surprisingly produced revul-sion against any sort of naturalism aboutrace Today there is some consternationover the appearance of what is calledrace-based medicine

The science of medicine was for quite a long time the science of the Europeanmale body with footnotes for non-European or female bodies All that haschanged those footnotes are now chap-ters But the current situations for thegroups that had been relegated to thefootnotes are quite different Many medical differences between males andfemales are uniform but medical differ-ences between races are almost alwaysonly statistical

We have long known that some ail-ments are restricted to some gene poolsTay-Sachs is a hereditary disease (inwhich an enzyme defrac12ciency leads to theaccumulation of certain harmful resi-dues in the brain and nerve tissue oftenresulting in mental retardation convul-sions blindness and ultimately death)that almost exclusively affects youngchildren of eastern European Jewish de-

4 There is a tendency among proper-thinkingpeople to dismiss The Bell Curve cavalierly asboth wrong-headed and refuted without actu-ally saying why Many things wrong and onehas an obligation to say what My own lsquogenea-logicalrsquo objections are stated in a piece in TheLondon Review of Books January 26 1995

scent lsquoAshkenazirsquo is a valuable geo-graphical historical and social classifrac12-cation It is geographical because it indi-cates where members of this class ortheir near ancestors came from namelyeastern Europe It makes a contrast with Sephardic Jews whose roots are in Spain In modern Europe and NorthAmerica social differences between theAshkenazi and Sephardic hardly matterto most people but they remain signifrac12-cant in North Africa and West Asia Un-til further interbreeding makes it totallyobsolete Ashkenazi is a statistically sig-nifrac12cant and a statistically meaningfulclass with respect to Tay-Sachs disease

There are similar geographical-histor-ical indicators for lactose intoleranceand for an inability to digest fava beansWest African ancestry is an indicator forbeing a carrier of the sickle-cell anemiatrait which confers some immunityagainst malaria This trait was often stigmatized as simply lsquoblackrsquo In fact it is primarily West African although itshows up in Mediterranean populationswhere malaria was a major selector forsurvival The indicator was abused forracial reasons in widespread screening

ldquoDrug approved for Heart Failure inAfrican Americansrdquondashheadline on thefrac12rst business page of The New York TimesJuly 20 2004 Here we go again Quitepossibly ldquoThe peculiar history [of thisdrug] on the road to the market presentsa wide array of troubling and importantissues concerning the future status ofrace as a category for constructing andunderstanding health disparities inAmerican societyrdquo5 For a stark remind-er of the commerce the Times reportedthat the previous day the stock of thedrugrsquos maker NitroMed rose from $431

to $1021 and had reached $16 at middayThis story has been ongoing for a decadein medical commercial and regulatorycircles

There are real problems about the ra-cially targeted heart drug BiDil is a mix-ture of two well-known heart medica-tions Scientifrac12c papers assert frac12rst thatother medicines are not as good for Afri-can Americans with heart failure as theyare for other Americans with this prob-lem and second that BiDil works betterfor African Americans with certain spe-cifrac12cs than any other drug on the mar-ket6 In fact randomized trials were dis-continued because the drug was mani-festly effective on black patients No-body well understands why The reasonscould be at least in part social and eco-nomic (including dietary) rather thanhereditary The correlation is stronglysignifrac12cant but it is not statisticallymeaningful at present from a geneticor other biological point of view

Even if one is a complete skepticabout for example a genetic basis forthe differential effrac12cacy of the drug thedrug does appear to be statistically usefulin treating the designated class of pa-tients That means that race may be auseful indicator to a physician of the po-tential effectiveness of this rather thananother drugndashunder present social andhistorical conditions

Now turn to leukemia Bone marrowtransplants help an important class ofpatients Donors and recipients musthave matching human leukocyte anti-gens (hlas) at present doctors try tomatch six different types of them If apatient has no relative to serve as a do-nor matches are hard to come by The

5 Frederick Kahn ldquoHow a Drug Becomes lsquoEth-nicrsquo Law Commerce and the Production ofRacial Categories in Medicinerdquo Yale Journal ofHealth Policy Law and Ethics 4 (2004) 46

6 Anne L Taylor ldquoCombination of IsosorbideDinitrate and Hydralazine in Blacks with HeartFailurerdquo New England Journal of Medicine 351(2004) 2049ndash2057

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 107

Why race still matters

scent lsquoAshkenazirsquo is a valuable geo-graphical historical and social classifrac12-cation It is geographical because it indi-cates where members of this class ortheir near ancestors came from namelyeastern Europe It makes a contrast with Sephardic Jews whose roots are in Spain In modern Europe and NorthAmerica social differences between theAshkenazi and Sephardic hardly matterto most people but they remain signifrac12-cant in North Africa and West Asia Un-til further interbreeding makes it totallyobsolete Ashkenazi is a statistically sig-nifrac12cant and a statistically meaningfulclass with respect to Tay-Sachs disease

There are similar geographical-histor-ical indicators for lactose intoleranceand for an inability to digest fava beansWest African ancestry is an indicator forbeing a carrier of the sickle-cell anemiatrait which confers some immunityagainst malaria This trait was often stigmatized as simply lsquoblackrsquo In fact it is primarily West African although itshows up in Mediterranean populationswhere malaria was a major selector forsurvival The indicator was abused forracial reasons in widespread screening

ldquoDrug approved for Heart Failure inAfrican Americansrdquondashheadline on thefrac12rst business page of The New York TimesJuly 20 2004 Here we go again Quitepossibly ldquoThe peculiar history [of thisdrug] on the road to the market presentsa wide array of troubling and importantissues concerning the future status ofrace as a category for constructing andunderstanding health disparities inAmerican societyrdquo5 For a stark remind-er of the commerce the Times reportedthat the previous day the stock of thedrugrsquos maker NitroMed rose from $431

to $1021 and had reached $16 at middayThis story has been ongoing for a decadein medical commercial and regulatorycircles

There are real problems about the ra-cially targeted heart drug BiDil is a mix-ture of two well-known heart medica-tions Scientifrac12c papers assert frac12rst thatother medicines are not as good for Afri-can Americans with heart failure as theyare for other Americans with this prob-lem and second that BiDil works betterfor African Americans with certain spe-cifrac12cs than any other drug on the mar-ket6 In fact randomized trials were dis-continued because the drug was mani-festly effective on black patients No-body well understands why The reasonscould be at least in part social and eco-nomic (including dietary) rather thanhereditary The correlation is stronglysignifrac12cant but it is not statisticallymeaningful at present from a geneticor other biological point of view

Even if one is a complete skepticabout for example a genetic basis forthe differential effrac12cacy of the drug thedrug does appear to be statistically usefulin treating the designated class of pa-tients That means that race may be auseful indicator to a physician of the po-tential effectiveness of this rather thananother drugndashunder present social andhistorical conditions

Now turn to leukemia Bone marrowtransplants help an important class ofpatients Donors and recipients musthave matching human leukocyte anti-gens (hlas) at present doctors try tomatch six different types of them If apatient has no relative to serve as a do-nor matches are hard to come by The

5 Frederick Kahn ldquoHow a Drug Becomes lsquoEth-nicrsquo Law Commerce and the Production ofRacial Categories in Medicinerdquo Yale Journal ofHealth Policy Law and Ethics 4 (2004) 46

6 Anne L Taylor ldquoCombination of IsosorbideDinitrate and Hydralazine in Blacks with HeartFailurerdquo New England Journal of Medicine 351(2004) 2049ndash2057

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 107

Why race still matters

108 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

relevant antigens are unevenly distrib-uted among ethnic and racial groups7There exist registries of possible donors ndashtruly generous persons for at presentdonation of bone marrow is quite har-rowing Happily free-floating stem cellsin the blood also help but the donormust take a lot of drugs to boost thosestem cells Another source of cells is um-bilical cord blood But this like all theother options requires antigen match-ing

In the United States the NationalBone Marrow Program maintains themaster registry Most people in existingregistries have tended to be middle-agedand white which means that whiteshave a good chance of frac12nding a matchHence there have been racially targetedprograms for Asian and African Ameri-cans In the United States and Canadathere is also the Aboriginal Bone Mar-row Registries Association and in theUnited Kingdom there is the AfricanCaribbean Leukemia Trust Asians forMiracle Marrow Matches has been verysuccessful especially in the Los Angelesregion The African Americans Unitingfor Life campaign has been less success-ful for all sorts of historical reasons AnAfrican American with leukemia has afar worse chance of frac12nding a match intime than members of other populationshave That is a social fact but there isalso a biological fact there is far greaterheterogeneity in the human leukemiaantigen in persons of African originsthan in other populations8 (This factfrac12ts well with the hypothesis that all

races are descendants of only one ofmany African populations that existed atthe time that human emigration beganout of Africandashpopulations whose char-acteristics have continued to be distrib-uted among Africans today)

If you go to the websites for the organ-izations that maintain the registries youwill see they do not shilly-shally in somedance of euphemistic political correct-ness about race For them it is a matterof life and death Without the Asian reg-istries there would have been manymore dead Asian Americans in the pastdecade For lack of more African Ameri-cans on the registries there will be moredead African Americans in the next fewyears than there need be

We certainly lack a complete under-standing of the distribution of humanleukemia antigens in different geograph-ically identifrac12ed populations But we dohave some biological understanding ofthe underlying causal differences Andrace is a very useful quick indicator ofwhere to look for matches just as thebmi is a useful quick indicator of poten-tial health problems

So when if ever is it useful to speak in terms of the category of race on thegrounds that the races in some contextsare not only statistically signifrac12cant butalso statistically useful classes To an-swer this question we can use our dis-tinctionsbull The Bell Curve may show that iq is a

statistically signifrac12cant characteristic

7 This also matters to renal transplants SeePauline C Creemers and Delawir Kahn ldquoAUnique African hla Haplotype May Identify aPopulation at Increased Risk for Kidney GraftRejectionrdquo Transplantation 65 (1998) 285ndash288

8 For hla differentiation see T D Lee A Leeand W X Shi ldquohla-a -b -d and -dq Antigens

in Black North Americansrdquo Tissue Antigens(1991) 79ndash83 For maps see for example one of the essays in the November NatureGenetics issue referenced in the text Sarah ATishkoff and Kenneth K Kidd ldquoImplicationsof Biogeography of Human Populations forlsquoRacersquo and Medicinerdquo Nature Genetics Supple-ment 36 (2004) 521ndash527

of some American subpopulations butit is neither meaningful from a biologi-cal point of view nor useful for anywell-defrac12ned purpose

bull Some medications may be less effec-tive and BiDil may be more effectivefor African Americans with certaintypes of heart failure If so this is sta-tistically signifrac12cant and statisticallyuseful for helping patients but (in myopinion) it is at present not statisticallymeaningful

bull The relationships between humanleukemia antigens and race are statis-tically signifrac12cant statistically mean-ingful for a biological understandingand statistically useful in making mar-row matches possible for minoritygroupsIt is not a good idea in my opinion to

speak of BiDil as a race-based medicineas do The New York Times and othermedia The drug is not in the least basedon race It is quite possible that the rea-son it is more useful for African Ameri-cans than for other large and looselycharacterized groups has less to do withthe inherent constitution of their cardio-vascular systems than with a mixture ofsocial factors If we had reliable data onthe relevance of diets shared by a sub-class of white and black Americans wemight be able to help whites with similardiets The drug would not then be lsquodiet-basedrsquo but lsquodiet-targetedrsquo If you frac12nd ituseful to use the word lsquoracersquo say lsquorace-targetedrsquo medicine

I should have thought that the differ-ential distribution of human leukocyteantigens would be esoteric enough toescape notice Not so The StormfrontWhite Nationalist Community whosebest-known frac12gure is the neo-Nazi Da-vid Duke is having a good time on onebranch of its website discussing hladiversity In my opinion the correct

strategy is not to play down the differen-tial distribution of hla but to make itcommon knowledge that specifrac12c differ-ences among peoples may be used inhelping themndashin much the same waythat white Australians given their so-cially induced tendency to overexposethemselves to the sun should be target-ed to cut down on the rate of death dueto skin cancer

I have introduced these remarks tomake plain that naturalism about racefar from being an atavistic throwback toan era well left behind is a topic for to-day one about which we have to becomeclearer Not because the races are realKinds denoting essentially differentkinds of people But because already weknow that the races are not only statisti-cally signifrac12cant classes for some dis-eases but also statistically useful Somecorrelations are statistically meaningfulThere is every reason to believe thatmore statistically meaningful correla-tions will be discovered

Every time such a phenomenon isfound useful the racists will try to ex-ploit the racial difference witness theneo-Nazi use of differential antigensHence we need to be fully aware of whatis involved

A historian may well despise the com-placency of naturalism Differences be-tween the races have seemed inevitablein the West it will be argued because ofa framework of thought whose originscan be unmasked only by a genealogyClassifrac12cation and judgment are seldomseparable Racial classifrac12cation is evalua-tion Strong ascriptions of comparativemerit were built into European racialclassifrac12cation and into evaluations ofhuman beauty from the beginning Andso the Caucasian face and form weredeemed closest to perfect beauty

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 109

Why race still matters

110 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

That is the vein in which Cornel Westhas sketched a genealogy of modern ra-cism9 Though his is not exactly a deepgenealogy in the spirit of Nietzsche andFoucault it is an excellent reacutesumeacute ofevents I wish only to comment on hisstarting point less to correct it than toencourage rethinking the connection be-tween race and geography

According to West ldquothe category ofracendashdenoting primarily skin colorndashwas frac12rst employed as a means of classi-fying human bodies by Franccedilois Berniera French physician in 1684 He dividedhumankind into four races EuropeansAfricans Orientals and Lappsrdquo Notethat none of these is named by color and that the frac12rst three are identifrac12ed bywhere they live or come from It hardlymatters now but the fourth nameldquoLapprdquo (probably derived from a wordmeaning simpleton) for the people whocall themselves Sami is about as racist adesignation as there is Bernier seems tohave met only two Lapps and he foundthem loathsome and he simply reportsthat other unnamed travelers told himthat the inhabitants of Laponia wereldquovile animalsrdquo10

There are certain emendations to bemade in Cornel Westrsquos account Bernierdid not designate a race restricted to Eu-ropeans What he called the ldquofrac12rst race[sic]rdquo included Europeans (the disgust-ing Lapps aside) North Africans andthe peoples of West and South Asia

With some hesitation he also includedNative Americans of both hemispheresin that category

He did not classify by color but mostlyby facial features Although he countedMongols Chinese and Japanese aswhite (veacuteritablement blanc) he felt theyhad such differently shaped faces andbodies that they constituted a differentrace Indigenous Americans were alsowhite South Asians were less white (oli-vacirctre) he thought because of the torridclimate When his categories (minus theLapps) were expressed in terms of colorduring the next century they becamelsquowhitersquo lsquoyellowrsquo and lsquoblackrsquondashcategoriesstill going strong in Millrsquos day It maycome as some surprise that for high-brow race science whites includedArabs Turks everyone on the Indiansubcontinent and maybe Americansthat is the indigenous ones

Bernier does discuss color but mostlywhen noting the existing hierarchy inthe Indian subcontinent where thelighter skin of the Moghul elite putsthem ahead of the browner Hindus Ber-nierrsquos observations of Africans seemedto be based almost entirely on Africanslaves especially at Turkish or Arabslave markets (where of course he sawwhite mostly female slaves too) Yes(sub-Saharan) Africans were black butthey contrasted with the frac12rst race chieflyin other aspects of the body especiallythe hair and lips ldquoHere Bernierrdquo SiepStuurman writes ldquosurely anticipates lat-er racial discourserdquo11

In 1685 the year after Bernier pub-lished both his classifrac12cation of races andhis abridgement of Gassendi Louis XIVpromulgated the rules of the Transat-lantic slave trade the Code noir makingthe effective identity of blackness and

9 Cornel West ldquoA Genealogy of Modern Ra-cismrdquo in West Prophesy Deliverance An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadel-phia The Westminster Press 1982) 47ndash65

10 Franccedilois Bernier ldquoNouvelle division de laterrerdquo Journal des Sccedilavans (April 24 1684) 148 ndash155 A defrac12nitive account of this paper is SiepStuurman ldquoFranccedilois Bernier and the Inventionof Racial Classifrac12cationrdquo History Workshop Jour-nal 50 (2000) 1ndash21

11 Stuurman ldquoFranccedilois Bernier and the Inven-tion of Racial Classifrac12cationrdquo 4

110 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

That is the vein in which Cornel Westhas sketched a genealogy of modern ra-cism9 Though his is not exactly a deepgenealogy in the spirit of Nietzsche andFoucault it is an excellent reacutesumeacute ofevents I wish only to comment on hisstarting point less to correct it than toencourage rethinking the connection be-tween race and geography

According to West ldquothe category ofracendashdenoting primarily skin colorndashwas frac12rst employed as a means of classi-fying human bodies by Franccedilois Berniera French physician in 1684 He dividedhumankind into four races EuropeansAfricans Orientals and Lappsrdquo Notethat none of these is named by color and that the frac12rst three are identifrac12ed bywhere they live or come from It hardlymatters now but the fourth nameldquoLapprdquo (probably derived from a wordmeaning simpleton) for the people whocall themselves Sami is about as racist adesignation as there is Bernier seems tohave met only two Lapps and he foundthem loathsome and he simply reportsthat other unnamed travelers told himthat the inhabitants of Laponia wereldquovile animalsrdquo10

There are certain emendations to bemade in Cornel Westrsquos account Bernierdid not designate a race restricted to Eu-ropeans What he called the ldquofrac12rst race[sic]rdquo included Europeans (the disgust-ing Lapps aside) North Africans andthe peoples of West and South Asia

With some hesitation he also includedNative Americans of both hemispheresin that category

He did not classify by color but mostlyby facial features Although he countedMongols Chinese and Japanese aswhite (veacuteritablement blanc) he felt theyhad such differently shaped faces andbodies that they constituted a differentrace Indigenous Americans were alsowhite South Asians were less white (oli-vacirctre) he thought because of the torridclimate When his categories (minus theLapps) were expressed in terms of colorduring the next century they becamelsquowhitersquo lsquoyellowrsquo and lsquoblackrsquondashcategoriesstill going strong in Millrsquos day It maycome as some surprise that for high-brow race science whites includedArabs Turks everyone on the Indiansubcontinent and maybe Americansthat is the indigenous ones

Bernier does discuss color but mostlywhen noting the existing hierarchy inthe Indian subcontinent where thelighter skin of the Moghul elite putsthem ahead of the browner Hindus Ber-nierrsquos observations of Africans seemedto be based almost entirely on Africanslaves especially at Turkish or Arabslave markets (where of course he sawwhite mostly female slaves too) Yes(sub-Saharan) Africans were black butthey contrasted with the frac12rst race chieflyin other aspects of the body especiallythe hair and lips ldquoHere Bernierrdquo SiepStuurman writes ldquosurely anticipates lat-er racial discourserdquo11

In 1685 the year after Bernier pub-lished both his classifrac12cation of races andhis abridgement of Gassendi Louis XIVpromulgated the rules of the Transat-lantic slave trade the Code noir makingthe effective identity of blackness and

9 Cornel West ldquoA Genealogy of Modern Ra-cismrdquo in West Prophesy Deliverance An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadel-phia The Westminster Press 1982) 47ndash65

10 Franccedilois Bernier ldquoNouvelle division de laterrerdquo Journal des Sccedilavans (April 24 1684) 148 ndash155 A defrac12nitive account of this paper is SiepStuurman ldquoFranccedilois Bernier and the Inventionof Racial Classifrac12cationrdquo History Workshop Jour-nal 50 (2000) 1ndash21

11 Stuurman ldquoFranccedilois Bernier and the Inven-tion of Racial Classifrac12cationrdquo 4

slavery a point of law in no need of anyrace science to legitimate it12

In Westrsquos important subthesis aboutaesthetics and human beauty he showsthat Bernierrsquos conception was not simplythat black Africans were uglier than thefrac12rst race There was also the element ofsexual exoticism Bernier raved aboutAfrican women on display for sale inTurkey naked He regretted only thatthey cost so much

West wanted to write a genealogy inpart because he had the insight to ad-dress an intellectual problem that is sel-dom stated The oceanic empires of Eu-rope chiefly France and Britain and theUnited States in their wake are uniquein world history in that the dominanttendency of their moral and politicalphilosophy from the start emphasizedequality Backsliding and self-interestare apparent beyond exaggeration butthe propensity for egalitarianism hasbeen permanent and progressive At thesame time West cites numerous cele-brated egalitarians and reminds us oftheir persistent racism In justice Millhimself does not escape criticism

How can racism and egalitarianismcoexist Because equality is amongthose who are essentially the same Ifraces are essentially different they neednot be treated alike The framework forthis alliance was established at the be-ginning West urges and became en-trenched as Western thought passedfrom the frac12rst stage described in his ge-nealogy to the second One can envisagebroadening Westrsquos analysis into some-thing with the same form as Michel Fou-caultrsquos A History of Insanity in the Age ofReasonndasha history of racism in the age ofequality Stuurman whom I have citedas the authority on Bernier has impor-

tantly contributed on the other side inhis newly published Franccedilois Poulain andthe Invention of Equality

Now we turn to the universalist ap-proach favored in the cognitive sciencesIt is proposed that human beings areborn with an innate capacity not only tosort other people along racial lines butalso to act as if the differences distin-guished are essential characteristics of people This capacity is lsquoprepro-grammedrsquo by a genetic inheritance andmatures and becomes operational earlysay at three or four years of age A fur-ther proposal is that children are bornnot only with an ability to sort itemsinto specifrac12c types of classes but alsowith a predisposition to identify certainproperties as essential to specifrac12c classes

Lawrence Hirschfeld is an anthropolo-gist who works at the intersection ofcognitive science and developmentalpsychologyndashto use proper names the improbable intersection of NoamChomsky and Jean Piaget13 Hirschfelddraws on the work of psychologistschild-development experts anthropolo-gists linguists philosophers neurosci-entists and others to postulate the dis-tinct innate cognitive modules withwhich all of us are born These modules

13 Lawrence Hirschfeld ldquoThe Conceptual Poli-tics of Race Lessons from our Childrenrdquo Ethos25 (1997) 63ndash92 See also his book Race in theMaking Cognition Culture and the Childrsquos Con-ception of Human Kinds (Cambridge Mass mitPress 1996) The expression lsquohuman kindrsquo isobviously derived from lsquonatural kindrsquo I regretthat it was I who put the phrase into circulationwith this use in Paris in 1992 at a conferenceon culture and cognition attended by Hirsch-feld Ian Hacking ldquoThe Looping Effects of Hu-man Kindsrdquo in Dan Sperber David Premackand Ann James Premack eds Causal CognitionA Multidisciplinary Approach (Oxford OxfordUniversity Press 1995) 351ndash383 I have aban-doned this terminology partly and only partlybecause it was modeled on the unsatisfactoryidea of a natural kind

12 Louis Sala-Molins Le Code noir ou le calvairede Canaan (Paris Presses Universitaires deFrance 1987)

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 111

Why race still matters

112 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

enable infants to acquire specifrac12c abili-ties There is not just an all-purposemodule for sorting things according to their resemblances but specifrac12c mod-ules for classifying living things formaking judgments of number for sort-ing according to motion and so forth

Where does race enter Hirschfeldproposes a module that enables childrento distinguish different kinds of peopleSome of the earliest distinctions chil-dren make using this module involve ra-cial traits primarily stereotypical skincolor and a few facial characteristicsThere is the further proposition that due to an innate disposition the raceslike any classes recognized using thismodule are treated as if they were es-sential characteristics of people Experi-ments show that children believe thatchanging a personrsquos race as marked bystereotypical features such as colorwould change the kind of person thatthat individual is In these frac12rst experi-ments children were asked only aboutblack and white individuals illustratedby simple cartoon representationsHirschfeldrsquos initial data were drawnfrom experiments on school children in Ann Arbor Michigan but they nowappear to be confrac12rmed in results frommore diverse groups

This cognitive theory proposes thatthe tendency to regard racial classifrac12ca-tions as essential is a corollary of a devel-opmental fact about the human mindWe have a phenomenon on the order ofthe cognitive fallacies known from Tver-sky and Kahnemanrsquos studies of decisionunder uncertainty Whatever evolution-ary value our human kind module mighthave had it made disastrous racist prac-tices all too easy But this proposalstands wholly apart from ogre natural-istsrsquo claim that the alleged differencesbetween the races are grounds for mak-ing social arrangements that discrimi-

nate between the races The cognitivescientists will say their results show howhard we must frac12ght to control our innatetendencies to frac12nd essential differencesbetween races

Hirschfeldrsquos analysis may be queriedon grounds specifrac12c to race Experiment-ers are vigilant not to confuse culturalfrom cognitive input They highlight theissue in titles such as Culture and Cogni-tion which is the present approved wayto express the nature-nurture debate Yetone cannot but suspect that they under-estimate how quickly very young chil-dren catch on to what is wanted of themOne might say with a whiff of ironythat children have an innate ability tofrac12gure out what adults are up to andhence to psych out the experimenters

In any event nurture has prepro-grammed very young Americans to at-tend to race Well-intentioned televisionprogramming for children constantlyemphasizes that the characters even ifthey are not human are of differentraces From infancy children watch tele-vision cartoons that show for instance ahappy black family playing with a happywhite family The intended message isthat we can all get on well together Thesubtext is that we are racially differentbut should ignore it Experimenters dis-cover that small children expect parentsof any color to have children of the samecolor Is that proof of innate essentialismor of the effrac12cacy of television

It is time to turn away from cognitionand back to institutions and history

Categories become institutionalizedespecially by censuses and other types of offrac12cial tagging It is important to re-member that the frac12rst working Europeancensuses were carried out in coloniesndashQuebec New Spain Virginia and Ice-land Categorization census and em-pire that is an important nexus

I turn to empire in part for personalreasons Race as a category has its ownmanifest meanings in the United StatesFor me race has of course the Americanconnotations but other ones as wellThe primal racial curse for me as a Cana-dian is my countryrsquos history of relationswith the native peoples Now I work inFrance where the chief racial issue con-cerns people of North African descentDespite all their differences the Canadi-an French and American racial obses-sions have a single historical sourceEmpire Conquest and controlndashwhetherof North Africans West Africans or thefrac12rst nations of North America

On Websterrsquos defrac12nition empirendashldquoastate that has a great extent of territoryand a great variety of peoples under onerulerdquondashis about the conquest of peoplesWith it comes an imperial imperative toclassify and enumerate the conqueredpeoples Thus the words cast in stonethree timesndashin Old Persian Elamiteand Babylonian hieroglyphicsndashon theGreat Staircase of Persepolis at the hey-day of the Persian Empire

A great God is Ahuramazda who createdthis earth who created yonder heavenwho created man who created welfare forman who made Xerxes king one king ofmany one lord of many I am Xerxes thegreat King King of Kings King of thecountries having many kinds of peopleKing of this great earth far and wide theson of Darius the King the Achaeme-nian14

Xerxes (519ndash465 bce) inherited thePersian Empire in 485 The lapidary in-vocation to his power thought to datefrom the beginning of his reign includescarved processions of the many peoples

he ruled First come the Medes bearingvessels daggers bracelets coats andtrousers Then twenty more stereotypesof peoples each similarly accompaniedby their characteristic tribute Theyprocess in the following pecking orderMedes Elates Parathions SogdiansEgyptians Bactrians Armenians Baby-lonians Cilicians Scythians ThraciansAssyrians Phoenicians CappadociansLydians Afghans Indians Macedo-nians Arabs Somalis and EthiopiansSurprise surprise the blackest comelast

Empires have a penchant for classify-ing their subjects Doubtless there areadministrative reasons some conqueredsocieties furnish goods some furnishsoldiers But over and above practicalexigencies there seems to be an impera-tive to classify subject peoples almost asan end in itself Or rather the end is tomagnify the exploits glory and power ofthe ruler Classifrac12cation as an imperialimperative invites stereotyping

Persepolis has seen other empiresother conquests a fact to which graffrac12tion the remaining walls of the city (ren-dered mostly by bored British soldiersfrom the eighteen and early nineteenthcenturies who identify themselves bytheir names dates and regiments)attests There is only one inscription torival Xerxesrsquo own an enormous dia-mond carved into the side of the onlystanding entrance door of the royal gateIt is inscribed

stanleynew york herald

1870

In the unvarnished words that describeHenry Morton Stanley in the 1911 editionof The Encyclopaedia Britannica ldquoIn geo-graphical discoveries Stanley accom-plished more than any other explorer ofAfrica with which continent his name is

14 Ali Sami Persepolis (Takht-Jamshid) 9th edtrans R Sharp (Shiraz Musavi Printing Offrac12ce1977) 35

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 113

Why race still matters

114 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

indissolubly connected Notwithstand-ing his frequent conflicts with Arabs andNegroes he possessed in extraordinarydegree the power of managing nativeraces he was absolutely fearless andever ready to sacrifrac12ce either himself orothers to achieve his objectrdquo This is the man who made the Congo BelgianManaging native races was the name ofthe game for Stanley and for Xerxesrsquo im-perial staff

The category of race may be found inall empires The Chinese for sure evenin the era of the Peoplersquos Republic Thefrac12ve stars on the flag denote the frac12ve peo-ples of the Republic whose equality wasconstitutionally enshrined after 1949The Han are only one of the frac12ve starsTell that to the inhabitants of the west-ern provinces whose equality ends at astar on a flag

Here we have another answer to thelsquofrac12rst questionrsquo about the pervasive ten-dency to regard people of different racesas essentially different kinds of peopleThat tendency is produced by the impe-rial imperative the instinct of empiresto classify people in order to control ex-ploit dominate and enslave The racialconcepts of the Western world are ascontingent as those of the Persian Em-pire but both are the products of thesame imperative

Empire helps create stereotypical lsquooth-ersrsquo but by defrac12nition any group of any-thing has items outside itself Everyform of human life is social People livein groups Groups need internal bondsto keep them together as well as exter-nal boundaries for group identity Theinternal bonds are furnished by the prac-tices that maintain ties among individu-als and subgroups In many cases theexternal boundaries are furnished bywhat Mary Douglas aptly identifrac12es aspollution Rules of pollution defrac12ne who

one is not and hence provide a sense ofself-identity and self-worth we who arenot polluted Every stable group has pollu-tion rules

So as not to offend others I shall givemy own example The most importantgroup boundary for English-speakingCanada is with the United States Atpresent our central pollution rule has todo with the social net We are gentle andcaring you Americans are indifferent tothe sufferings of the poor We have uni-versal health care x percent of Ameri-cans have no health-care plan at all (Weproduce all sorts of large numbers forxndashthis is part of our folklore not ourscience) We make peace you make pre-emptive war Et cetera guns crimendashthelist of pollutants goes on

This conception of the defrac12ling other is a sociological universal One wondersif in the titanic duel between Homo sapi-ens and Neanderthals the two groupswere suffrac12ciently similar that the futurehuman race needed pollution rules tokeep each separate from the other lot Ihave heard it suggested that one of theearly evolutionary advantages to lan-guage was that different groups of peo-ple could use a lsquobadrsquo ie differentaccent to avoid mingling

Evolutionary psychologists may pro-pose some sort of just-so story for thesurvival value of pollution rules Betterto consult the foremost expert CharlesDarwin himself in The Descent of Man Itis truly a humbling read the wealth ofinformation the variety of considera-tions the caution about conclusionsndashthe imaginative framing of tentative hy-potheses overshadows anything writtensince about his topics including race Hecanvasses many explanations for racialvariety but in the end favors sexual se-lection of among other elements likefor like It is still an open question inad-equately considered whether for exam-

ple sexual selection trumps pollutionrules or vice versa

How much more powerful pollutionand the imperial imperative becomewhen history puts them together Pollu-tion rules are important for maintainingthe imperial group intact As soon aspollution rules break down men of themaster group sire children with womenfrom subjugated groups and a new kindof personndashthe half-breedndashemergesThe etymology of words such as lsquoEur-asianrsquo embodies this phenomenon Welearn from the trusty 1911 Encyclopaediathat lsquoEurasianrsquo was ldquooriginally used todenote children born to Hindu mothersand European (especially Portuguese)fathersrdquo There are pecking orders be-tween conquerors as well as among theconqueredndashand this British word was aput-down meant to keep the Portuguesein Goa in their place Note also the dom-inance order between the sexes a Hindufather and a European woman wouldyield at least in the offrac12cial reckoning a Hindu not a Eurasian

The French noun meacutetis derived from a Portuguese word originally used forEurasians dates back to 1615 In FrenchCanada it signifrac12ed the children of whitefathers and native mothers Early in thenineteenth century it was adopted inEnglish to denote the offspring ofFrench Canadian men originally trap-pertraders and native women In otherwords lsquoEurasianrsquo and meacutetis alike meantthe children of males from conqueringgroups of lower status and females fromthe totally subjugated groupsndashand thenthe offspring of any of those children

For a few generations one can be pre-cise in measuring degrees of pollutionAt that the Spanish and Portuguese Em-pires excelled First came lsquomulattoesrsquothe children of Spanish or Portuguesemen and South American Indian wom-en With the importation of black slavesfrom West Africa the label was trans-

ferred to the children of white mastersand black slaves and then to mixed racein general The oed says it all the Eng-lish word is derived from Portugueseand Spanish ldquomulato young mule henceone of mixed racerdquo

The Spanish cuarteron became the Eng-lish lsquoquadroonrsquo the child of a white per-son and a mulatto The few quotationsgiven in the oed are a record of colo-nial history Here is the frac12rst dated 1707ldquoThe inhabitants of Jamaica are for themost part Europeans who are theMasters and Indians Negroes MulatosAlcatrazes Mestises Quarterons ampcwho are the slavesrdquo The next quotationin the list is from Thomas Jefferson

And so on from Spanish the Englishlanguage acquired lsquoquintroonrsquo meaningone who is one-sixteenth of Negro de-scent The 1797 Encyclopaedia Britannicahas it that ldquoThe children of a white and aquintroon consider themselves free ofall taint of the negro racerdquo More impor-tantly from an 1835 oed citation ldquolsquoThechild of a Quintroon by a white father isfree by lawrsquo Such was recently the West-Indian slave coderdquo Better to have awhite father than a white mother

In real life interbreeding was endem-ic so such classifrac12cations were bound tobecome haphazard Only one option wasleft The American solution was defrac12ni-tive One drop of Negro blood suffrac12cedto make one Negro Which in turn im-plied that many Americans could make a cultural choice to be black or not achoice turned into literature in ToniMorrisonrsquos Jazz and more recently inPhilip Rothrsquos The Human Stain The onedrop of blood rule perfectly harmonizesthe imperial imperative and the preser-vation of group identity by pollutionprohibitions

Why is there such a widespread ten-dency to regard people of different races

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 115

Why race still matters

as essentially different kinds of peopleThat was our frac12rst question

I have argued that naturalism of thesort taken for granted by John StuartMill has more going for it than is com-monly supposed and I have also ex-plained why it may make sense in thecontext of medicine to regard races asstatistically signifrac12cant and also statisti-cally useful classes But neither of theseforms of naturalism explains the wide-spread tendency to regard people of dif-ferent races as essentially different

There is the cognitive answer that es-sential distinction by race is the result of a universal human kind module Ihave discounted that and have also dismissed what I call ogre naturalismwhich claims that races are real KindsNote however that if there is any ves-tige of truth in any type of naturalismthat could only reinforce the effect ofother considerations

We are left with Cornel Westrsquos geneal-ogy of modern racism pollution rulesand the imperial imperative Togetherthey describe the foundation of the ra-cial predicament of the Western worldThe imperial imperative employs a par-ticular type of pollution rule to reinforcecaste distinctions and degrees of subjec-tion within an empire The racial essen-tialism of the European empires andtheir American continuation are to beregarded as a special case of the imperialimperative

One specifrac12c feature of modern racism ndashrace sciencendashresults from a central as-pect of modern European history Froma world-historical point of view onlyone feature of early modern Europestands out It is the coming into being of modern science The frac12rst stage ofWestrsquos genealogy of modern racism iswholly embedded in that period whenearly modern science developed As biol-ogy emerged in the second stage around

1800 so did race science that strangeblend of evolutionary biology and statis-tical anthropology In the heyday of pos-itivism race science repainted old pollu-tion rules the ones selected as suitingthe imperial imperative with a veneer of objective fact

There are two strands of thought inthe human sciences the one universal-ist the other emphasizing contingen-cies They seldom harmonize Here theydo Westrsquos genealogy is a wholly contin-gent account of the reasons for the per-vasive tendency to regard racial distinc-tions as essential In contrast the use ofpollution rules is a universal techniquefor self-stabilizing a human group Clas-sifrac12cation of peoples by a category ofrace is an integral part of the controlnecessary to organize and maintain anempire and it employs pollution rulesThese observations suggest a fruitfulway to combine contingent and univer-sal theories that help to explain why thecategory of race remains so pervasive

116 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

I turn to empire in part for personalreasons Race as a category has its ownmanifest meanings in the United StatesFor me race has of course the Americanconnotations but other ones as wellThe primal racial curse for me as a Cana-dian is my countryrsquos history of relationswith the native peoples Now I work inFrance where the chief racial issue con-cerns people of North African descentDespite all their differences the Canadi-an French and American racial obses-sions have a single historical sourceEmpire Conquest and controlndashwhetherof North Africans West Africans or thefrac12rst nations of North America

On Websterrsquos defrac12nition empirendashldquoastate that has a great extent of territoryand a great variety of peoples under onerulerdquondashis about the conquest of peoplesWith it comes an imperial imperative toclassify and enumerate the conqueredpeoples Thus the words cast in stonethree timesndashin Old Persian Elamiteand Babylonian hieroglyphicsndashon theGreat Staircase of Persepolis at the hey-day of the Persian Empire

A great God is Ahuramazda who createdthis earth who created yonder heavenwho created man who created welfare forman who made Xerxes king one king ofmany one lord of many I am Xerxes thegreat King King of Kings King of thecountries having many kinds of peopleKing of this great earth far and wide theson of Darius the King the Achaeme-nian14

Xerxes (519ndash465 bce) inherited thePersian Empire in 485 The lapidary in-vocation to his power thought to datefrom the beginning of his reign includescarved processions of the many peoples

he ruled First come the Medes bearingvessels daggers bracelets coats andtrousers Then twenty more stereotypesof peoples each similarly accompaniedby their characteristic tribute Theyprocess in the following pecking orderMedes Elates Parathions SogdiansEgyptians Bactrians Armenians Baby-lonians Cilicians Scythians ThraciansAssyrians Phoenicians CappadociansLydians Afghans Indians Macedo-nians Arabs Somalis and EthiopiansSurprise surprise the blackest comelast

Empires have a penchant for classify-ing their subjects Doubtless there areadministrative reasons some conqueredsocieties furnish goods some furnishsoldiers But over and above practicalexigencies there seems to be an impera-tive to classify subject peoples almost asan end in itself Or rather the end is tomagnify the exploits glory and power ofthe ruler Classifrac12cation as an imperialimperative invites stereotyping

Persepolis has seen other empiresother conquests a fact to which graffrac12tion the remaining walls of the city (ren-dered mostly by bored British soldiersfrom the eighteen and early nineteenthcenturies who identify themselves bytheir names dates and regiments)attests There is only one inscription torival Xerxesrsquo own an enormous dia-mond carved into the side of the onlystanding entrance door of the royal gateIt is inscribed

stanleynew york herald

1870

In the unvarnished words that describeHenry Morton Stanley in the 1911 editionof The Encyclopaedia Britannica ldquoIn geo-graphical discoveries Stanley accom-plished more than any other explorer ofAfrica with which continent his name is

14 Ali Sami Persepolis (Takht-Jamshid) 9th edtrans R Sharp (Shiraz Musavi Printing Offrac12ce1977) 35

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 113

Why race still matters

114 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

indissolubly connected Notwithstand-ing his frequent conflicts with Arabs andNegroes he possessed in extraordinarydegree the power of managing nativeraces he was absolutely fearless andever ready to sacrifrac12ce either himself orothers to achieve his objectrdquo This is the man who made the Congo BelgianManaging native races was the name ofthe game for Stanley and for Xerxesrsquo im-perial staff

The category of race may be found inall empires The Chinese for sure evenin the era of the Peoplersquos Republic Thefrac12ve stars on the flag denote the frac12ve peo-ples of the Republic whose equality wasconstitutionally enshrined after 1949The Han are only one of the frac12ve starsTell that to the inhabitants of the west-ern provinces whose equality ends at astar on a flag

Here we have another answer to thelsquofrac12rst questionrsquo about the pervasive ten-dency to regard people of different racesas essentially different kinds of peopleThat tendency is produced by the impe-rial imperative the instinct of empiresto classify people in order to control ex-ploit dominate and enslave The racialconcepts of the Western world are ascontingent as those of the Persian Em-pire but both are the products of thesame imperative

Empire helps create stereotypical lsquooth-ersrsquo but by defrac12nition any group of any-thing has items outside itself Everyform of human life is social People livein groups Groups need internal bondsto keep them together as well as exter-nal boundaries for group identity Theinternal bonds are furnished by the prac-tices that maintain ties among individu-als and subgroups In many cases theexternal boundaries are furnished bywhat Mary Douglas aptly identifrac12es aspollution Rules of pollution defrac12ne who

one is not and hence provide a sense ofself-identity and self-worth we who arenot polluted Every stable group has pollu-tion rules

So as not to offend others I shall givemy own example The most importantgroup boundary for English-speakingCanada is with the United States Atpresent our central pollution rule has todo with the social net We are gentle andcaring you Americans are indifferent tothe sufferings of the poor We have uni-versal health care x percent of Ameri-cans have no health-care plan at all (Weproduce all sorts of large numbers forxndashthis is part of our folklore not ourscience) We make peace you make pre-emptive war Et cetera guns crimendashthelist of pollutants goes on

This conception of the defrac12ling other is a sociological universal One wondersif in the titanic duel between Homo sapi-ens and Neanderthals the two groupswere suffrac12ciently similar that the futurehuman race needed pollution rules tokeep each separate from the other lot Ihave heard it suggested that one of theearly evolutionary advantages to lan-guage was that different groups of peo-ple could use a lsquobadrsquo ie differentaccent to avoid mingling

Evolutionary psychologists may pro-pose some sort of just-so story for thesurvival value of pollution rules Betterto consult the foremost expert CharlesDarwin himself in The Descent of Man Itis truly a humbling read the wealth ofinformation the variety of considera-tions the caution about conclusionsndashthe imaginative framing of tentative hy-potheses overshadows anything writtensince about his topics including race Hecanvasses many explanations for racialvariety but in the end favors sexual se-lection of among other elements likefor like It is still an open question inad-equately considered whether for exam-

ple sexual selection trumps pollutionrules or vice versa

How much more powerful pollutionand the imperial imperative becomewhen history puts them together Pollu-tion rules are important for maintainingthe imperial group intact As soon aspollution rules break down men of themaster group sire children with womenfrom subjugated groups and a new kindof personndashthe half-breedndashemergesThe etymology of words such as lsquoEur-asianrsquo embodies this phenomenon Welearn from the trusty 1911 Encyclopaediathat lsquoEurasianrsquo was ldquooriginally used todenote children born to Hindu mothersand European (especially Portuguese)fathersrdquo There are pecking orders be-tween conquerors as well as among theconqueredndashand this British word was aput-down meant to keep the Portuguesein Goa in their place Note also the dom-inance order between the sexes a Hindufather and a European woman wouldyield at least in the offrac12cial reckoning a Hindu not a Eurasian

The French noun meacutetis derived from a Portuguese word originally used forEurasians dates back to 1615 In FrenchCanada it signifrac12ed the children of whitefathers and native mothers Early in thenineteenth century it was adopted inEnglish to denote the offspring ofFrench Canadian men originally trap-pertraders and native women In otherwords lsquoEurasianrsquo and meacutetis alike meantthe children of males from conqueringgroups of lower status and females fromthe totally subjugated groupsndashand thenthe offspring of any of those children

For a few generations one can be pre-cise in measuring degrees of pollutionAt that the Spanish and Portuguese Em-pires excelled First came lsquomulattoesrsquothe children of Spanish or Portuguesemen and South American Indian wom-en With the importation of black slavesfrom West Africa the label was trans-

ferred to the children of white mastersand black slaves and then to mixed racein general The oed says it all the Eng-lish word is derived from Portugueseand Spanish ldquomulato young mule henceone of mixed racerdquo

The Spanish cuarteron became the Eng-lish lsquoquadroonrsquo the child of a white per-son and a mulatto The few quotationsgiven in the oed are a record of colo-nial history Here is the frac12rst dated 1707ldquoThe inhabitants of Jamaica are for themost part Europeans who are theMasters and Indians Negroes MulatosAlcatrazes Mestises Quarterons ampcwho are the slavesrdquo The next quotationin the list is from Thomas Jefferson

And so on from Spanish the Englishlanguage acquired lsquoquintroonrsquo meaningone who is one-sixteenth of Negro de-scent The 1797 Encyclopaedia Britannicahas it that ldquoThe children of a white and aquintroon consider themselves free ofall taint of the negro racerdquo More impor-tantly from an 1835 oed citation ldquolsquoThechild of a Quintroon by a white father isfree by lawrsquo Such was recently the West-Indian slave coderdquo Better to have awhite father than a white mother

In real life interbreeding was endem-ic so such classifrac12cations were bound tobecome haphazard Only one option wasleft The American solution was defrac12ni-tive One drop of Negro blood suffrac12cedto make one Negro Which in turn im-plied that many Americans could make a cultural choice to be black or not achoice turned into literature in ToniMorrisonrsquos Jazz and more recently inPhilip Rothrsquos The Human Stain The onedrop of blood rule perfectly harmonizesthe imperial imperative and the preser-vation of group identity by pollutionprohibitions

Why is there such a widespread ten-dency to regard people of different races

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 115

Why race still matters

as essentially different kinds of peopleThat was our frac12rst question

I have argued that naturalism of thesort taken for granted by John StuartMill has more going for it than is com-monly supposed and I have also ex-plained why it may make sense in thecontext of medicine to regard races asstatistically signifrac12cant and also statisti-cally useful classes But neither of theseforms of naturalism explains the wide-spread tendency to regard people of dif-ferent races as essentially different

There is the cognitive answer that es-sential distinction by race is the result of a universal human kind module Ihave discounted that and have also dismissed what I call ogre naturalismwhich claims that races are real KindsNote however that if there is any ves-tige of truth in any type of naturalismthat could only reinforce the effect ofother considerations

We are left with Cornel Westrsquos geneal-ogy of modern racism pollution rulesand the imperial imperative Togetherthey describe the foundation of the ra-cial predicament of the Western worldThe imperial imperative employs a par-ticular type of pollution rule to reinforcecaste distinctions and degrees of subjec-tion within an empire The racial essen-tialism of the European empires andtheir American continuation are to beregarded as a special case of the imperialimperative

One specifrac12c feature of modern racism ndashrace sciencendashresults from a central as-pect of modern European history Froma world-historical point of view onlyone feature of early modern Europestands out It is the coming into being of modern science The frac12rst stage ofWestrsquos genealogy of modern racism iswholly embedded in that period whenearly modern science developed As biol-ogy emerged in the second stage around

1800 so did race science that strangeblend of evolutionary biology and statis-tical anthropology In the heyday of pos-itivism race science repainted old pollu-tion rules the ones selected as suitingthe imperial imperative with a veneer of objective fact

There are two strands of thought inthe human sciences the one universal-ist the other emphasizing contingen-cies They seldom harmonize Here theydo Westrsquos genealogy is a wholly contin-gent account of the reasons for the per-vasive tendency to regard racial distinc-tions as essential In contrast the use ofpollution rules is a universal techniquefor self-stabilizing a human group Clas-sifrac12cation of peoples by a category ofrace is an integral part of the controlnecessary to organize and maintain anempire and it employs pollution rulesThese observations suggest a fruitfulway to combine contingent and univer-sal theories that help to explain why thecategory of race remains so pervasive

116 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

114 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

indissolubly connected Notwithstand-ing his frequent conflicts with Arabs andNegroes he possessed in extraordinarydegree the power of managing nativeraces he was absolutely fearless andever ready to sacrifrac12ce either himself orothers to achieve his objectrdquo This is the man who made the Congo BelgianManaging native races was the name ofthe game for Stanley and for Xerxesrsquo im-perial staff

The category of race may be found inall empires The Chinese for sure evenin the era of the Peoplersquos Republic Thefrac12ve stars on the flag denote the frac12ve peo-ples of the Republic whose equality wasconstitutionally enshrined after 1949The Han are only one of the frac12ve starsTell that to the inhabitants of the west-ern provinces whose equality ends at astar on a flag

Here we have another answer to thelsquofrac12rst questionrsquo about the pervasive ten-dency to regard people of different racesas essentially different kinds of peopleThat tendency is produced by the impe-rial imperative the instinct of empiresto classify people in order to control ex-ploit dominate and enslave The racialconcepts of the Western world are ascontingent as those of the Persian Em-pire but both are the products of thesame imperative

Empire helps create stereotypical lsquooth-ersrsquo but by defrac12nition any group of any-thing has items outside itself Everyform of human life is social People livein groups Groups need internal bondsto keep them together as well as exter-nal boundaries for group identity Theinternal bonds are furnished by the prac-tices that maintain ties among individu-als and subgroups In many cases theexternal boundaries are furnished bywhat Mary Douglas aptly identifrac12es aspollution Rules of pollution defrac12ne who

one is not and hence provide a sense ofself-identity and self-worth we who arenot polluted Every stable group has pollu-tion rules

So as not to offend others I shall givemy own example The most importantgroup boundary for English-speakingCanada is with the United States Atpresent our central pollution rule has todo with the social net We are gentle andcaring you Americans are indifferent tothe sufferings of the poor We have uni-versal health care x percent of Ameri-cans have no health-care plan at all (Weproduce all sorts of large numbers forxndashthis is part of our folklore not ourscience) We make peace you make pre-emptive war Et cetera guns crimendashthelist of pollutants goes on

This conception of the defrac12ling other is a sociological universal One wondersif in the titanic duel between Homo sapi-ens and Neanderthals the two groupswere suffrac12ciently similar that the futurehuman race needed pollution rules tokeep each separate from the other lot Ihave heard it suggested that one of theearly evolutionary advantages to lan-guage was that different groups of peo-ple could use a lsquobadrsquo ie differentaccent to avoid mingling

Evolutionary psychologists may pro-pose some sort of just-so story for thesurvival value of pollution rules Betterto consult the foremost expert CharlesDarwin himself in The Descent of Man Itis truly a humbling read the wealth ofinformation the variety of considera-tions the caution about conclusionsndashthe imaginative framing of tentative hy-potheses overshadows anything writtensince about his topics including race Hecanvasses many explanations for racialvariety but in the end favors sexual se-lection of among other elements likefor like It is still an open question inad-equately considered whether for exam-

ple sexual selection trumps pollutionrules or vice versa

How much more powerful pollutionand the imperial imperative becomewhen history puts them together Pollu-tion rules are important for maintainingthe imperial group intact As soon aspollution rules break down men of themaster group sire children with womenfrom subjugated groups and a new kindof personndashthe half-breedndashemergesThe etymology of words such as lsquoEur-asianrsquo embodies this phenomenon Welearn from the trusty 1911 Encyclopaediathat lsquoEurasianrsquo was ldquooriginally used todenote children born to Hindu mothersand European (especially Portuguese)fathersrdquo There are pecking orders be-tween conquerors as well as among theconqueredndashand this British word was aput-down meant to keep the Portuguesein Goa in their place Note also the dom-inance order between the sexes a Hindufather and a European woman wouldyield at least in the offrac12cial reckoning a Hindu not a Eurasian

The French noun meacutetis derived from a Portuguese word originally used forEurasians dates back to 1615 In FrenchCanada it signifrac12ed the children of whitefathers and native mothers Early in thenineteenth century it was adopted inEnglish to denote the offspring ofFrench Canadian men originally trap-pertraders and native women In otherwords lsquoEurasianrsquo and meacutetis alike meantthe children of males from conqueringgroups of lower status and females fromthe totally subjugated groupsndashand thenthe offspring of any of those children

For a few generations one can be pre-cise in measuring degrees of pollutionAt that the Spanish and Portuguese Em-pires excelled First came lsquomulattoesrsquothe children of Spanish or Portuguesemen and South American Indian wom-en With the importation of black slavesfrom West Africa the label was trans-

ferred to the children of white mastersand black slaves and then to mixed racein general The oed says it all the Eng-lish word is derived from Portugueseand Spanish ldquomulato young mule henceone of mixed racerdquo

The Spanish cuarteron became the Eng-lish lsquoquadroonrsquo the child of a white per-son and a mulatto The few quotationsgiven in the oed are a record of colo-nial history Here is the frac12rst dated 1707ldquoThe inhabitants of Jamaica are for themost part Europeans who are theMasters and Indians Negroes MulatosAlcatrazes Mestises Quarterons ampcwho are the slavesrdquo The next quotationin the list is from Thomas Jefferson

And so on from Spanish the Englishlanguage acquired lsquoquintroonrsquo meaningone who is one-sixteenth of Negro de-scent The 1797 Encyclopaedia Britannicahas it that ldquoThe children of a white and aquintroon consider themselves free ofall taint of the negro racerdquo More impor-tantly from an 1835 oed citation ldquolsquoThechild of a Quintroon by a white father isfree by lawrsquo Such was recently the West-Indian slave coderdquo Better to have awhite father than a white mother

In real life interbreeding was endem-ic so such classifrac12cations were bound tobecome haphazard Only one option wasleft The American solution was defrac12ni-tive One drop of Negro blood suffrac12cedto make one Negro Which in turn im-plied that many Americans could make a cultural choice to be black or not achoice turned into literature in ToniMorrisonrsquos Jazz and more recently inPhilip Rothrsquos The Human Stain The onedrop of blood rule perfectly harmonizesthe imperial imperative and the preser-vation of group identity by pollutionprohibitions

Why is there such a widespread ten-dency to regard people of different races

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 115

Why race still matters

as essentially different kinds of peopleThat was our frac12rst question

I have argued that naturalism of thesort taken for granted by John StuartMill has more going for it than is com-monly supposed and I have also ex-plained why it may make sense in thecontext of medicine to regard races asstatistically signifrac12cant and also statisti-cally useful classes But neither of theseforms of naturalism explains the wide-spread tendency to regard people of dif-ferent races as essentially different

There is the cognitive answer that es-sential distinction by race is the result of a universal human kind module Ihave discounted that and have also dismissed what I call ogre naturalismwhich claims that races are real KindsNote however that if there is any ves-tige of truth in any type of naturalismthat could only reinforce the effect ofother considerations

We are left with Cornel Westrsquos geneal-ogy of modern racism pollution rulesand the imperial imperative Togetherthey describe the foundation of the ra-cial predicament of the Western worldThe imperial imperative employs a par-ticular type of pollution rule to reinforcecaste distinctions and degrees of subjec-tion within an empire The racial essen-tialism of the European empires andtheir American continuation are to beregarded as a special case of the imperialimperative

One specifrac12c feature of modern racism ndashrace sciencendashresults from a central as-pect of modern European history Froma world-historical point of view onlyone feature of early modern Europestands out It is the coming into being of modern science The frac12rst stage ofWestrsquos genealogy of modern racism iswholly embedded in that period whenearly modern science developed As biol-ogy emerged in the second stage around

1800 so did race science that strangeblend of evolutionary biology and statis-tical anthropology In the heyday of pos-itivism race science repainted old pollu-tion rules the ones selected as suitingthe imperial imperative with a veneer of objective fact

There are two strands of thought inthe human sciences the one universal-ist the other emphasizing contingen-cies They seldom harmonize Here theydo Westrsquos genealogy is a wholly contin-gent account of the reasons for the per-vasive tendency to regard racial distinc-tions as essential In contrast the use ofpollution rules is a universal techniquefor self-stabilizing a human group Clas-sifrac12cation of peoples by a category ofrace is an integral part of the controlnecessary to organize and maintain anempire and it employs pollution rulesThese observations suggest a fruitfulway to combine contingent and univer-sal theories that help to explain why thecategory of race remains so pervasive

116 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

ple sexual selection trumps pollutionrules or vice versa

How much more powerful pollutionand the imperial imperative becomewhen history puts them together Pollu-tion rules are important for maintainingthe imperial group intact As soon aspollution rules break down men of themaster group sire children with womenfrom subjugated groups and a new kindof personndashthe half-breedndashemergesThe etymology of words such as lsquoEur-asianrsquo embodies this phenomenon Welearn from the trusty 1911 Encyclopaediathat lsquoEurasianrsquo was ldquooriginally used todenote children born to Hindu mothersand European (especially Portuguese)fathersrdquo There are pecking orders be-tween conquerors as well as among theconqueredndashand this British word was aput-down meant to keep the Portuguesein Goa in their place Note also the dom-inance order between the sexes a Hindufather and a European woman wouldyield at least in the offrac12cial reckoning a Hindu not a Eurasian

The French noun meacutetis derived from a Portuguese word originally used forEurasians dates back to 1615 In FrenchCanada it signifrac12ed the children of whitefathers and native mothers Early in thenineteenth century it was adopted inEnglish to denote the offspring ofFrench Canadian men originally trap-pertraders and native women In otherwords lsquoEurasianrsquo and meacutetis alike meantthe children of males from conqueringgroups of lower status and females fromthe totally subjugated groupsndashand thenthe offspring of any of those children

For a few generations one can be pre-cise in measuring degrees of pollutionAt that the Spanish and Portuguese Em-pires excelled First came lsquomulattoesrsquothe children of Spanish or Portuguesemen and South American Indian wom-en With the importation of black slavesfrom West Africa the label was trans-

ferred to the children of white mastersand black slaves and then to mixed racein general The oed says it all the Eng-lish word is derived from Portugueseand Spanish ldquomulato young mule henceone of mixed racerdquo

The Spanish cuarteron became the Eng-lish lsquoquadroonrsquo the child of a white per-son and a mulatto The few quotationsgiven in the oed are a record of colo-nial history Here is the frac12rst dated 1707ldquoThe inhabitants of Jamaica are for themost part Europeans who are theMasters and Indians Negroes MulatosAlcatrazes Mestises Quarterons ampcwho are the slavesrdquo The next quotationin the list is from Thomas Jefferson

And so on from Spanish the Englishlanguage acquired lsquoquintroonrsquo meaningone who is one-sixteenth of Negro de-scent The 1797 Encyclopaedia Britannicahas it that ldquoThe children of a white and aquintroon consider themselves free ofall taint of the negro racerdquo More impor-tantly from an 1835 oed citation ldquolsquoThechild of a Quintroon by a white father isfree by lawrsquo Such was recently the West-Indian slave coderdquo Better to have awhite father than a white mother

In real life interbreeding was endem-ic so such classifrac12cations were bound tobecome haphazard Only one option wasleft The American solution was defrac12ni-tive One drop of Negro blood suffrac12cedto make one Negro Which in turn im-plied that many Americans could make a cultural choice to be black or not achoice turned into literature in ToniMorrisonrsquos Jazz and more recently inPhilip Rothrsquos The Human Stain The onedrop of blood rule perfectly harmonizesthe imperial imperative and the preser-vation of group identity by pollutionprohibitions

Why is there such a widespread ten-dency to regard people of different races

Daeligdalus Winter 2005 115

Why race still matters

as essentially different kinds of peopleThat was our frac12rst question

I have argued that naturalism of thesort taken for granted by John StuartMill has more going for it than is com-monly supposed and I have also ex-plained why it may make sense in thecontext of medicine to regard races asstatistically signifrac12cant and also statisti-cally useful classes But neither of theseforms of naturalism explains the wide-spread tendency to regard people of dif-ferent races as essentially different

There is the cognitive answer that es-sential distinction by race is the result of a universal human kind module Ihave discounted that and have also dismissed what I call ogre naturalismwhich claims that races are real KindsNote however that if there is any ves-tige of truth in any type of naturalismthat could only reinforce the effect ofother considerations

We are left with Cornel Westrsquos geneal-ogy of modern racism pollution rulesand the imperial imperative Togetherthey describe the foundation of the ra-cial predicament of the Western worldThe imperial imperative employs a par-ticular type of pollution rule to reinforcecaste distinctions and degrees of subjec-tion within an empire The racial essen-tialism of the European empires andtheir American continuation are to beregarded as a special case of the imperialimperative

One specifrac12c feature of modern racism ndashrace sciencendashresults from a central as-pect of modern European history Froma world-historical point of view onlyone feature of early modern Europestands out It is the coming into being of modern science The frac12rst stage ofWestrsquos genealogy of modern racism iswholly embedded in that period whenearly modern science developed As biol-ogy emerged in the second stage around

1800 so did race science that strangeblend of evolutionary biology and statis-tical anthropology In the heyday of pos-itivism race science repainted old pollu-tion rules the ones selected as suitingthe imperial imperative with a veneer of objective fact

There are two strands of thought inthe human sciences the one universal-ist the other emphasizing contingen-cies They seldom harmonize Here theydo Westrsquos genealogy is a wholly contin-gent account of the reasons for the per-vasive tendency to regard racial distinc-tions as essential In contrast the use ofpollution rules is a universal techniquefor self-stabilizing a human group Clas-sifrac12cation of peoples by a category ofrace is an integral part of the controlnecessary to organize and maintain anempire and it employs pollution rulesThese observations suggest a fruitfulway to combine contingent and univer-sal theories that help to explain why thecategory of race remains so pervasive

116 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race

as essentially different kinds of peopleThat was our frac12rst question

I have argued that naturalism of thesort taken for granted by John StuartMill has more going for it than is com-monly supposed and I have also ex-plained why it may make sense in thecontext of medicine to regard races asstatistically signifrac12cant and also statisti-cally useful classes But neither of theseforms of naturalism explains the wide-spread tendency to regard people of dif-ferent races as essentially different

There is the cognitive answer that es-sential distinction by race is the result of a universal human kind module Ihave discounted that and have also dismissed what I call ogre naturalismwhich claims that races are real KindsNote however that if there is any ves-tige of truth in any type of naturalismthat could only reinforce the effect ofother considerations

We are left with Cornel Westrsquos geneal-ogy of modern racism pollution rulesand the imperial imperative Togetherthey describe the foundation of the ra-cial predicament of the Western worldThe imperial imperative employs a par-ticular type of pollution rule to reinforcecaste distinctions and degrees of subjec-tion within an empire The racial essen-tialism of the European empires andtheir American continuation are to beregarded as a special case of the imperialimperative

One specifrac12c feature of modern racism ndashrace sciencendashresults from a central as-pect of modern European history Froma world-historical point of view onlyone feature of early modern Europestands out It is the coming into being of modern science The frac12rst stage ofWestrsquos genealogy of modern racism iswholly embedded in that period whenearly modern science developed As biol-ogy emerged in the second stage around

1800 so did race science that strangeblend of evolutionary biology and statis-tical anthropology In the heyday of pos-itivism race science repainted old pollu-tion rules the ones selected as suitingthe imperial imperative with a veneer of objective fact

There are two strands of thought inthe human sciences the one universal-ist the other emphasizing contingen-cies They seldom harmonize Here theydo Westrsquos genealogy is a wholly contin-gent account of the reasons for the per-vasive tendency to regard racial distinc-tions as essential In contrast the use ofpollution rules is a universal techniquefor self-stabilizing a human group Clas-sifrac12cation of peoples by a category ofrace is an integral part of the controlnecessary to organize and maintain anempire and it employs pollution rulesThese observations suggest a fruitfulway to combine contingent and univer-sal theories that help to explain why thecategory of race remains so pervasive

116 Daeligdalus Winter 2005

IanHackingon race