hackingrace.pdf

8/11/2019 hackingrace.pdf

1/15

102 Ddalus 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 rst ques-

tion. 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 rst questionby canvassing ve possible answers to itthat variously invoke nature,genealogy (inthe sense of Michel Foucault), cognitive

science, empire, andpollution rules.

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the discussion of naturalism, medi-cine, and race could only have been writ-ten in November of 2004, and may wellbe out of date by the time this piece is

printed.

Why has the category of race been sopervasive? One answer says that the dis-tinction is just there, in the world for allto see. Supercial 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 has

not been assimilatedslaves 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 Academy

since 1991, holds the chair of Philosophy and

History of Scientic Concepts at the Collge de

France. His work spans the philosophy of science,the 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 are

Mad Travellers (1998), The Social Construc-

tion of What (1999), and Historical Ontol-

ogy (2004).

2005 by the American Academy of Arts& Sciences


2/15

more than supercial 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. Classications are made by peopleand encoded in social practices, institu-tions, and language. (3) Some classes aresuch that their members have little in

common except the marks by which wesort them into those classescall thosesupercial 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 real Kinds.1

Examples? White things, he wrote,

referring not to race but to the color it-self, are 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 with,whiteness. 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 things.

Horses form a real Kind, but the class ofwhite things is a supercial kind.The contemporary philosophical con-

cept of a natural kind is a descendentof Mills 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 not.2

Mill himself was as notable a profemi-nist and antiracist as can be claimed fora white nineteenth-century man. Al-though he argued that real Kinds exist,he at once went on to ask whether theraces and sexes are real Kinds, or if theyare merely supercial, like the classica-tions Christian, Jew, Musselman, and

Pagan. 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 Mills day held that there wereve races, named geographically but rec-ognized by color: Caucasian, Ethiopian,

Mongolian, American, and Malayan.According 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 priori,Mill thought. The various races andtemperaments, the two sexes, and eventhe various ages, may be differences ofKind, within our meaning of the term. I

Why racestill matters

1 His own words are old-fashioned but lovely.The differences between members of classesare made by nature . . . while the recognitionof those differences as grounds for classicationand of naming is . . . the act of man. However,we nd a very remarkable diversity . . . be-tween some classes and others. Only super-cial resemblances link members of one typeof 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 properties

are his real Kinds. From John Stuart Mill, ASystem of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, rstpublished in 1843. The discussion of racial clas-sication is found in bk. 1, chap. 7, sec. 4. Thechanges Mill made in later editions of the bookinvolved sex, not racedoubtless because Millhoped to get the questions about sex exactlyright for Harriett Taylor. See chap. 7, on Millonclassication, in my forthcoming book, TheTradition of Natural Kinds (Cambridge Univer-

sity Press).

2 This is one of the conclusions urged in my

book The Tradition of Natural Kinds.

Ddalus Winter 2005 103


3/15


IanHackingonrace

say they may be; I do not say they are.Mill believed that only empirical sciencecould determine whether the various

races, as distinguished by color and afew other features, pick out classes thatare distinct in a great many unrelatedways. If their differences can all betraced to climate and habits [or, headded in later editions, to some one ora few special differences in structure],they are not, in the logicians view, spe-cically distinct. He would have been

pleased by Anthony Appiahs 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 done

so, and almost certainly will not. Mill,like Appiah, thus concludes that theraces are not real Kinds.

This conclusion, however, does notanswer, or aim at answering, the specicquestion I raised at the outset, of whythere is such a pervasive tendency toapply the category of race. Maybe Millthought the answer was obvious. The

desire of one racial group to dominate,exploit, 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 aresufciently different.

Although it takes us some distancefrom the rst question, some recentevents force us to clarify the naturalistposition on race. In an important edito-rial on the U.S. census published in the

year 2000,Nature Genetics stated: That

race in this context is not a scienticterm is generally acknowledged by sci-entistsand a message that cannot be

repeated enough. An editorial in 2001observed that scientists 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 race.3 Nowin Novem-ber of 2004this selfsame journal hasproduced a special supplement on the

medical and genetic uses of racial andethnic classication. And the November11 issue ofThe New England Journal of

Medicine highlights the news of the race-based drug targeted at African Ameri-cans suffering from certain types ofheart failure. All this is breaking news.Hence what follows cannot be deni-

tive, but one may hope that a perspectivesomewhat distanced from media discus-sion can be useful even in the midst of it.

We must rst 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 way.A uniform difference between cows and

horses is something that is true in themain of any cow but not true in themain of any horsedigestion 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 Census, Race and Science, Nature Genetics24 (2000): 97; Genes, Drugs and Race, Nature

Genetics 29 (2001): 239.


4/15

ences, which were only just beginningto loom large on the scientic horizon.We need some new concepts: I will use

the words signicant, meaningful,and useful. All three go with the dreadword statistical. Since we are amongother things talking about so-calledraces, namely, geographically and histor-ically identied groups of people, we aretalking about populations. And we aretalking about some characteristic orproperty of some but not all members

of a population.Signicance was preempted by sta-

tistics early in the twentieth century. Itis completely entrenched there. Here Iuse it for any major difference detectedby a well-understood statistical analysis.A characteristic isstatistically signicantif its distribution in one population is

signicantly different from that in acomparable population. Let us say thata characteristic isstatistically meaningfulif there is some understanding, in termsof causes, of why the difference is sig-nicant. 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 not

completely. The correlation used to bemerely signicant, but now it is mean-ingful.

Finally, a characteristic isstatisticallyuseful 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 measurement

costs almost nothing.)

Classes that are statistically signi-cant, meaningful, or useful are notthere-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.

Signicant in the end relies on tech-nical notions in applied probability the-ory. Meaningful has no resort to viabletechnical notions in any discipline (all

claims to the contrary are spurious).There do exist clear, although oftenabused, criteria of statistical signi-cance. There are no clear criteria forbeing statistically meaningful. In prac-tice the distinction is often easily made.For a long time, the class of people whosmoke was known only to be statistically

signicant with respect to lung cancer.One 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 lung

cancer if nothing else gets him rst.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 signicance, theidea of being statistically meaningful isa hand-waving concept that points atthe idea of an explanation or a cause.Imprecise 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-

pleas evidenced by debates going on




5/15


IanHackingonrace

at the time of this writing, in Novemberof 2004are scared of the idea that thetraditional list of races employed by tra-

ditional racists might be statistically sig-nicant 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 distributionsofiqscores establish a natural distinc-tion of some importance between differ-

ent races. They forcefully argued that theclass of African Americans is a statisti-cally signicant classsignicant 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 state

that 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 iqscores within different racialgroups. But they did not establish that

these disparities are statistically mean-ingful to any biological understanding.

About the same time that The BellCurve was published, ogre naturalists,such as Philippe Rushton inRace, 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 t Millsdenition 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 claimed

that the races are real Kinds. One imag-

ines that Herrnstein and Murray thoughtso too, but what they claimed was thatthe races are statistically signicant

classes. And they implied that this is sta-tistically meaningful.Despite the fact that his doctrines have

a centuries-old pedigree, we can dismissthe egregious Rushton. We can also re-fute Murray and Herrnstein.4 Millstype of naturalism has contempt forboth doctrines. Loathing of these quiterecent doctrines and their predecessors

has, 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 quitea long time the science of the European

male 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. Manymedical differences between males andfemales are uniform, but medical differ-ences between races are almost always

only statistical.We have long known that some ail-

ments are restricted to some gene pools.Tay-Sachs is a hereditary disease (inwhich an enzyme deciency 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 genea-logical objections are stated in a piece in The

London Review of Books, January 26, 1995.


6/15


7/15


IanHackingonrace

relevant antigens are unevenly distrib-uted among ethnic and racial groups.7

There exist registries of possible donors

truly 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 nding a match.Hence 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 nding 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 populations.8 (This factts well with the hypothesis that all

races are descendants of only one ofmany African populations that existed atthe time that human emigration began

out of Africapopulations 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 identied 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 speakin terms of the category of race, on thegrounds that the races in some contextsare not only statistically signicant butalso statistically useful classes? To an-swer this question, we can use our dis-tinctions:

The Bell Curve may show that iqis a

statistically signicant characteristic

7 This also matters to renal transplants. SeePauline C. Creemers and Delawir Kahn, AUnique African hla Haplotype May Identify aPopulation at Increased Risk for Kidney GraftRejection, Transplantation 65 (1998): 285288.

8 For hla differentiation, see T. D. Lee, A. Lee,

and W. X. Shi, hla-a, -b, -d and -dqAntigens

in Black North Americans, Tissue Antigens(1991): 7983. For maps, see, for example,one of the essays in the November NatureGenetics issue referenced in the text: Sarah A.Tishkoff and Kenneth K. Kidd, Implicationsof Biogeography of Human Populations forRace and Medicine, Nature Genetics Supple-

ment 36 (2004): 521527.


8/15

of some American subpopulations, butit is neither meaningful from a biologi-cal point of view nor useful for any

well-dened purpose. Some medications may be less effec-

tive, and BiDil may be more effective,for African Americans with certaintypes of heart failure. If so, this is sta-tistically signicant and statisticallyuseful for helping patients, but (in myopinion) it is at present not statisticallymeaningful.

The relationships between humanleukemia antigens and race are statis-tically signicant, statistically mean-ingful for a biological understanding,and statistically useful in making mar-row matches possible for minoritygroups.

It is not a good idea, in my opinion, tospeak of BiDil as a race-based medicine,as 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 diet-based but diet-targeted. If you nd ituseful to use the word race, say race-targeted 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 gure is the neo-Nazi Da-vid Duke, is having a good time on onebranch of its website discussing hla

diversity. In my opinion, the correct

strategy is not to play down the differen-tial distribution ofhla, but to make itcommon knowledge that specic differ-

ences among peoples may be used inhelping themin 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 race,

far 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 signicant classes for some dis-eases, but also statistically useful. Somecorrelations are statistically meaningful.There 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 antigens.

Hence 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 genealogy.Classication and judgment are seldomseparable. Racial classication is evalua-tion. Strong ascriptions of comparativemerit were built into European racialclassication and into evaluations ofhuman beauty from the beginning. Andso the Caucasian face and form weredeemed closest to perfect beauty.




9/15


IanHackingonrace

That is the vein in which Cornel Westhas sketched a genealogy of modern ra-cism.9 Though his is not exactly a deep

genealogy in the spirit of Nietzsche andFoucault, it is an excellent rsum 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, the category ofracedenoting primarily skin colorwas rst employed as a means of classi-

fying human bodies by Franois Bernier,a French physician, in 1684. He dividedhumankind into four races: Europeans,Africans, Orientals and Lapps. Notethat none of these is named by colorand that the rst three are identied bywhere they live or come from. It hardlymatters now, but the fourth name,Lapp (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 werevile animals.10

There are certain emendations to bemade in Cornel Wests account. Bernierdid not designate a race restricted to Eu-ropeans. What he called the rst race[sic] 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 (vritablement blanc), he felt theyhad such differently shaped faces andbodies that they constituted a differentrace. Indigenous Americans were alsowhite. South Asians were less white (oli-

vtre), he thought, because of the torrid

climate. When his categories (minus theLapps) were expressed in terms of colorduring the next century, they becamewhite, yellow, and blackcategoriesstill going strong in Mills day. It maycome as some surprise that for high-brow race science, whites includedArabs, Turks, everyone on the Indiansubcontinent, and maybe Americans,that 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-niers observations of Africans seemedto be based almost entirely on African

slaves, 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 rst race chieflyin other aspects of the body, especiallythe hair and lips. Here Bernier, SiepStuurman writes, surely anticipates lat-er racial discourse.11

In 1685, the year after Bernier pub-lished both his classication 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, A Genealogy of Modern Ra-cism, in West,Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-

American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadel-phia: The Westminster Press, 1982), 4765.

10 Franois Bernier, Nouvelle division de laterre,Journal des Savans (April 24, 1684): 148155. A denitive account of this paper is SiepStuurman, Franois Bernier and the Inventionof Racial Classication, History Workshop Jour-

nal 50 (2000): 121.

11 Stuurman, Franois Bernier and the Inven-

tion of Racial Classication, 4.


10/15

slavery a point of law, in no need of anyrace science to legitimate it.12

In Wests important subthesis about

aesthetics and human beauty, he showsthat Berniers conception was not simplythat black Africans were uglier than therst 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 in

part 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 egalitarianism

coexist? 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 rst stage described in his ge-nealogy to the second. One can envisage

broadening Wests analysis into some-thing with the same form as Michel Fou-caultsA History of Insanity in the Age of

Reasona 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 publishedFranois Poulain andthe Invention of Equality.

Now we turn to the universalist ap-proach favored in the cognitive sciences.It 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 characteristicsof people. This capacity is prepro-

grammed by a genetic inheritance andmatures and becomes operational early,say, at three or four years of age. A fur-ther proposal is that children are bornnot only with an ability to sort itemsinto specic types of classes, but alsowith a predisposition to identify certainproperties as essential to specic classes.

Lawrence Hirschfeld is an anthropolo-gist who works at the intersection ofcognitive science and developmentalpsychologyto use proper names,the improbable intersection of NoamChomsky and Jean Piaget.13 Hirschfelddraws on the work of psychologists,child-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, The Conceptual Poli-tics of Race: Lessons from our Children, Ethos25 (1997): 6392. See also his bookRace in theMaking: Cognition, Culture, and the Childs Con-ception of Human Kinds (Cambridge, Mass.: mitPress, 1996). The expression human kind is

obviously derived from natural kind. 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, The Looping Effects of Hu-man Kinds, in Dan Sperber, David Premack,and Ann James Premack, eds., Causal Cognition:

A Multidisciplinary Approach (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1995), 351383. I have aban-doned this terminology, partly, and only partly,because 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).




11/15


IanHackingonrace

enable infants to acquire specic abili-ties. There is not just an all-purposemodule for sorting things according

to their resemblances, but specic 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 people.Some of the earliest distinctions chil-dren make using this module involve ra-

cial traits, primarily stereotypical skincolor and a few facial characteristics.There is the further proposition thatdue to an innate disposition, the races,like any classes recognized using thismodule, are treated as if they were es-sential characteristics of people. Experi-ments show that children believe thatchanging a persons race, as marked bystereotypical features such as color,would change the kind of person thatthat individual is. In these rst experi-ments, children were asked only aboutblack and white individuals, illustratedby simple cartoon representations.Hirschfelds initial data were drawnfrom experiments on school children

in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but they nowappear to be conrmed in results frommore diverse groups.

This cognitive theory proposes thatthe tendency to regard racial classica-tions as essential is a corollary of a devel-opmental fact about the human mind.We have a phenomenon on the order ofthe cognitive fallacies known from Tver-

sky and Kahnemans 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-ists 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 ght to control our innate

tendencies to nd essential differencesbetween races.Hirschfelds analysis may be queried

on grounds specic 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. Yet

one cannot but suspect that they under-estimate how quickly very young chil-dren catch on to what is wanted of them.One might say, with a whiff of irony,that children have an innate ability togure 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 is

that we can all get on well together. Thesubtext is that we are racially different,but 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 efcacy of television?

It is time to turn away from cognition,

and back to institutions and history.Categories become institutionalized,

especially by censuses and other typesof ofcial tagging. It is important to re-member that the rst working Europeancensuses were carried out in coloniesQuebec, New Spain, Virginia, and Ice-land. Categorization, census, and em-

pire: that is an important nexus.


12/15

I turn to empire in part for personalreasons. Race, as a category, has its ownmanifest meanings in the United States.

For me, race has of course the Americanconnotations, but other ones as well.The primal racial curse for me as a Cana-dian is my countrys history of relationswith the native peoples. Now I work inFrance, where the chief racial issue con-cerns people of North African descent.Despite all their differences, the Canadi-an, French, and American racial obses-

sions have a single historical source:Empire. Conquest and controlwhetherof North Africans, West Africans, or therst nations of North America.

On Websters denition, empireastate that has a great extent of territoryand a great variety of peoples under oneruleis about the conquest of peoples.With it comes an imperial imperative toclassify and enumerate the conqueredpeoples. Thus the words cast in stonethree timesin Old Persian, Elamite,and Babylonian hieroglyphicson theGreat Staircase of Persepolis at the hey-day of the Persian Empire:

A great God is Ahuramazda, who created

this earth, who created yonder heaven,

who created man, who created welfare for

man, who made Xerxes king, one king of

many, one lord of many. I am Xerxes the

great King, King of Kings, King of the

countries having many kinds of people,

King of this great earth far and wide, the

son of Darius the King, the Achaeme-

nian.14

Xerxes (?519465 b.c.e.) 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 stereotypes

of peoples, each similarly accompaniedby their characteristic tribute. Theyprocess in the following pecking order:Medes, Elates, Parathions, Sogdians,Egyptians, Bactrians, Armenians, Baby-lonians, Cilicians, Scythians, Thracians,Assyrians, Phoenicians, Cappadocians,Lydians, Afghans, Indians, Macedo-nians, Arabs, Somalis, and Ethiopians.

Surprise, 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. Classication, as an imperialimperative, invites stereotyping.

Persepolis has seen other empires,other conquests, a fact to which graftion the remaining walls of the city (ren-dered mostly by bored British soldiers

from the eighteen and early nineteenthcenturies who identify themselves bytheir names, dates, and regiments)attests. There is only one inscription torival Xerxes own: an enormous dia-mond carved into the side of the onlystanding entrance door of the royal gate.It is inscribed,

stanleynew york herald

1870

In the unvarnished words that describeHenry Morton Stanley in the 1911 editionofThe Encyclopaedia Britannica, In geo-graphical discoveries Stanley accom-plished more than any other explorer of

Africa, with which continent his name is

14 Ali Sami,Persepolis (Takht-Jamshid), 9th ed.,trans. R. Sharp (Shiraz: Musavi Printing Ofce,

1977), 35.




13/15


IanHackingonrace

indissolubly connected. Notwithstand-ing his frequent conflicts with Arabs andNegroes, he possessed in extraordinary

degree the power of managing nativeraces; he was absolutely fearless andever ready to sacrice either himself orothers to achieve his object. This isthe man who made the Congo Belgian.Managing native races was the name ofthe game for Stanley and for Xerxes im-perial staff.

The category of race may be found in

all empires. The Chinese, for sure, evenin the era of the Peoples Republic. Theve stars on the flag denote the ve peo-ples of the Republic, whose equality wasconstitutionally enshrined after 1949.The Han are only one of the ve stars.Tell that to the inhabitants of the west-ern provinces, whose equality ends at astar on a flag.

Here we have another answer to therst question, about the pervasive ten-dency to regard people of different racesas essentially different kinds of people.That tendency is produced by the impe-rial imperative, the instinct of empiresto classify people in order to control, ex-ploit, dominate, and enslave. The racial

concepts 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 oth-ers, but by denition any group of any-thing has items outside itself. Everyform of human life is social. People live

in 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 identies as

pollution. Rules of pollution dene 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 forxthis is part of our folklore, not ourscience.) We make peace; you make pre-emptive war. Et cetera, guns, crimethelist of pollutants goes on.

This conception of the deling otheris a sociological universal. One wondersif in the titanic duel betweenHomo sapi-ens and Neanderthals the two groupswere sufciently 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 bad, i.e., different,accent 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 conclusionsthe 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-


14/15

ple, sexual selection trumps pollutionrules, or vice versa.

How much more powerful pollution

and 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 personthe half-breedemerges.The etymology of words such as Eur-

asian embodies this phenomenon. Welearn from the trusty 1911Encyclopaediathat Eurasian was originally used todenote children born to Hindu mothersand European (especially Portuguese)fathers. There are pecking orders be-tween conquerors, as well as among theconqueredand 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 ofcial reckoning,a Hindu, not a Eurasian.

The French noun mtis, derived froma Portuguese word originally used forEurasians, dates back to 1615. In French

Canada it signied the children of whitefathers and native mothers. Early in thenineteenth century it was adopted inEnglish to denote the offspring ofFrench Canadian men, originally trap-per/traders, and native women. In otherwords, Eurasian and mtis alike meantthe children of males from conqueringgroups of lower status and females from

the totally subjugated groupsand thenthe offspring of any of those children.

For a few generations, one can be pre-cise in measuring degrees of pollution.At that the Spanish and Portuguese Em-pires excelled. First came mulattoes,the 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 oedsays it all: the Eng-

lish word is derived from Portugueseand Spanish, mulato, young mule, henceone of mixed race.

The Spanish cuarteron became the Eng-lish quadroon, the child of a white per-son and a mulatto. The few quotationsgiven in the oedare a record of colo-nial history. Here is the rst, dated 1707:The inhabitants of Jamaica are for the

most part Europeans . . . who are theMasters, and Indians, Negroes, Mulatos,Alcatrazes, Mestises, Quarterons, &c.who are the slaves. The next quotationin the list is from Thomas Jefferson.

And so on: from Spanish the Englishlanguage acquired quintroon, meaningone who is one-sixteenth of Negro de-scent. The 1797Encyclopaedia Britannicahas it that The children of a white and aquintroon consider themselves free ofall taint of the negro race. More impor-tantly, from an 1835 oedcitation, Thechild of a Quintroon by a white father isfree by law. Such was recently the West-Indian slave code. Better to have awhite father than a white mother.

In real life, interbreeding was endem-ic, so such classications were bound tobecome haphazard. Only one option wasleft. The American solution was deni-tive. One drop of Negro blood sufcedto make one Negro. Which in turn im-plied that many Americans could makea cultural choice to be black or not, achoice turned into literature in Toni

MorrisonsJazz and, more recently, inPhilip Roths 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




15/15

as essentially different kinds of people?That was our rst question.

I have argued that naturalism of the

sort 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 signicant 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 resultof a universal human kind module. Ihave discounted that, and have alsodismissed what I call ogre naturalism,which claims that races are real Kinds.Note, however, that if there is any ves-tige of truth in any type of naturalism,that could only reinforce the effect ofother considerations.

We are left with Cornel Wests geneal-ogy of modern racism, pollution rules,and the imperial imperative. Togetherthey describe the foundation of the ra-cial predicament of the Western world.The 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 specic feature of modern racismrace scienceresults 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 beingof modern science. The rst stage ofWests 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 veneerof 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. Wests 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-sication of peoples by a category ofrace is an integral part of the controlnecessary to organize and maintain anempire, and it employs pollution rules.These observations suggest a fruitfulway to combine contingent and univer-sal theories that help to explain why thecategory of race remains so pervasive.


IanHackingonrace

hackingrace.pdf

Documents