World Order/Series2/Volume 33/Issue 1/Text

←Volume 32 Index

World Order, Series 2 Volume 33 - Issue 1

Issue 2→

Return to PDF view Proofread once

[Page -1]

FALL 2001

World Order

DOES RACE EXIST?

SEIZING THE MOMENT
FOR ACHIEVING UNITY
EDITORIAL

RACE: NEITHER BIOLOGICAL FACT
NOR SOCIAL FICTION
ALGERNON AUSTIN

ETHNICITY, RACE,
AND A POSSIBLE HUMANITY
ARASH ABIZADEH

CHILDREN AND RACISM:
THE COMPLEXITIES OF
CULTURE AND COGNITION
DAVID DIEHL AND ELIZABETH ANSEL KIRSCH

[Page 0]

World Order

VOLUME 33, NUMBER 1

WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE, AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN
THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY
RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY

Editorial Board:
BETTY J. FISHER
ARASH ABIZADEH
MONIREH KAZEMZADEH
DIANNE LOTFI
KEVIN A. MORRISON
ROBERT H. STOCKMAN
JIM STOKES

Consultant in Poetry:
HERBERT WOODWARD MARTIN

WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, 536 Sheridan Road, Wilmette, IL 60091-1811. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher or of the Editorial Board.

Manuscripts and editorial correspondence: Manuscripts can be typewritten or computer generated. They should be double spaced throughout, with the footnotes at the end and not attached electronically to the text. The contributor should retain a copy. Return postage should be included. Send editorial correspondence to WORLD ORDER, 4516 Randolph Road, Apt. 99, Charlotte, NC 28211; E-mail: <worldorder@usbnc.org>.

Subscription rates: U.S.A. and surface to all other countries, 1 year, $19USD; 2 years, $36USD; single copies, $5USD. Airmail to all other countries, 1 year, $24USD; 2 years, $46USD. Make checks and money orders payable to Bahá’í Distribution Service. Send address changes to and order subscriptions from Bahá’í Distribution and Subscriber Service, 4703 Fulton Industrial Boulevard, Atlanta, GA 30336-2017. Telephone: 1-800-999-9019, United States and Canada; 404-472-9019, all other countries; E-mail: <subscription@usbnc.org>.

WORLD ORDER is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office.

Copyright © 2002, National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
ISSN 0043-8804

IN THIS ISSUE

2   Seizing the Moment for Achieving Unity

Editorial

4   Interchange: Letters From and to the Editor

7   Day to Day

poem by Druzelle Cederquist

7   Invitation

poem by Druzelle Cederquist

9   Race: Neither Biological Fact nor Social Fiction

by Algernon Austin

21   The Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Sartre

poem by Michael Fitzgerald

23   Ethnicity, Race, and a Possible Humanity

by Arash Abizadeh

35   Metastasis

poem by Cynthia Sheperd Jaskwhich

37   Children and Racism: The Complexities of

Culture And Cognition

by David Diehl and Elizabeth Ansel Kirsch

Inside back cover: Authors and Artists in This Issue and

Forthcoming

[Page 1]

[Page 2]

Seizing the Moment
for Achieving Unity

IN THE aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, amidst their pain, anguish, and fear, the American people have experienced feelings of solidarity, of being united in a common cause or for a common purpose. The feeling of national unity, with its expression in increased numbers of social gatherings, family meetings, community activities, and the like, is laudable. Unfortunately, merely saying that we are united, even feeling united for one moment and one particular purpose, does not mean that our entire nation is, indeed, joined in true and lasting unity, in which the same standard of human rights and responsibilities, of human dignity and opportunity, applies to all.

Solidarity based on a common reaction to an outside threat tends to be temporary and illusory. People may come together for a particular purpose, but when the immediate danger has dissipated, what then? Once a crisis has passed, people tend to revert to their old habits and old ways of thinking. In the United States deep divisions still exist— divisions along the lines of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and more. Based on prejudice and stereotypes, these divisions prevent our society from reaching its full human potential. Failure to eliminate prejudice and achieve true unity, whereby everyone feels part of the same human family, while respecting the diversity among its members, will only ensure that our current problems—such as violence, crime, economic injustice—continue and, indeed, worsen.

In describing the horrors of the First World War, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá observed that “the breeding-ground of all these tragedies is prejudice: prejudice of race and nation, of religion, of political opinion; and the root cause of prejudice is blind imitation of the past—imitation in religion, in racial attitudes, in national bias, in politics.” His statement is equally applicable today. We continue to perpetuate the patterns of the past. We see “others” among us as different because our parents or grandparents or ancestors did so or because we have heard from others that it is so. Those who launched the September 2001 attacks were driven by a vision of humanity that fragments the world into camps of “us” and “them,” of “infidels” and “the saved,” and is fueled by concomitant anger and hatred that necessarily flow from that limited vision. The ultimate protection for the entire world is to [Page 3] develop a vision of humanity that transcends and eclipses older, outmoded world views and that is accompanied by actions that will show the world a new and better way of living permanently and peacefully as one human family.

In our present moment of apparent unity, we run the risk of missing an opportunity—to resolve our differences, to remedy our ingrained habits of categorizing our fellow citizens and fellow humans into groups of “us” and “them.” The only way to eliminate the divisions among us is to transform people’s hearts and souls. The Bahá’í scriptures stress the core belief that humanity is one family: “regard ye not one another as strangers. Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch.” It is only this belief that will create a lasting unity.

[Page 4]

Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR

More than one hundred fifty years ago Bahá’u’lláh made the elimination of racial prejudice and the oneness of humanity principles of His religion. But as one of our authors remarks in this issue, “The twentieth century is over, and race is still with us.”

The starkness of the fact confronts us almost every place we look: in our schools; in our workplaces (“Racial divide still exists in workplace perceptions,” reads a recent newspaper headline); in the media, even on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the eye-opening television premiere of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel Roots; and on and on.

Between 1966, when we published one of the first reviews of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and this issue, World Order has published twenty-eight editorials, articles, book excerpts, and reviews on race. Yet we find ourselves returning to a topic that demands that we reexamine it, for our understandings change as we continue to grapple with what race means (or doesn’t mean) and how we can work to eliminate it.

The challenge the editors put to our authors was a question: “Does race exist?” They have answered by exploring misunderstandings about the terms “race” and “ethnicity,” questioning whether we have understood adequately the process through which a racist society develops and becomes self-perpetuating. Their open-ended explorations invite readers to delve more deeply into the problems and the solutions.

Algernon Austin, in “Race: Neither Biological Fact nor Social Fiction,” attempts, as he has said in correspondence with the editors, “to address important issues [about race] and especially important common misunderstandings in thinking about the meaning of race.” He goes on to examine “the arbitrariness of racial categories,” noting that, “in understanding that race is socially constructed,” it is important “to realize that human beings decide the [racial] categories and not nature.” While race is not a biological fact, beliefs can and do “produce a social reality.” Hence “race is real and not a social fiction.” In the final section on race and class, Austin deals with the fact that “any attempt to understand racial dynamics divorced from issues of political economy . . . is fundamentally flawed.” The unspoken challenge to the reader is to use the provocative conceptions and misconceptions about race to reevaluate one’s own ideas about the topic.

Arash Abizadeh’s “Ethnicity, Race, and a Possible Humanity” provides a companion [Page 5] piece to Austin’s article. Like Austin, Abizadeh exposes the faulty logic inherent in commonly accepted beliefs about ethnicity, race, genealogy, and phenotype. But Abizadeh then explores a spiritualized vision on the part of states, social institutions, and individuals as a way out of the prison of race, though with the caveat that the principles of the elimination of racial prejudice and the oneness of humanity will always be just beyond our ever-changing understandings of them.

In “Children and Racism: The Complexities of Culture and Cognition,” David Diehl and Elizabeth Kirsch, a mother-and-son writing team, examine current scientific findings about how race is understood and the implications of the findings for education —for children, teachers, and adults. Rather than providing answers, the authors seek to raise questions that will be a catalyst “for the vitally important discussion of how we can help children break free from the blind imitations of the past.”

Race may still be with us in the new century. But our four authors challenge us to keep assessing old (comfortable?) ideas in the light of new scientific, sociological, and spiritual understandings. The editors invite you, World Order’s readers, to share with us your thoughts prompted by the articles in this issue or by your own experiences. World Order’s e-mail address is <worldorder@usbnc.org>; its mailing address is 4516 Randolph Road, Apt. 99, Charlotte, NC 28211-2933. We would love to hear from you.

* * *

Our authors and editors have been up to some interesting things that we would like to share with you. William P. Collins was honored, along with several colleagues, by being featured in the Fourth Library of Congress Professional Association Showcase of Talent. The LCPA, in its biennial Showcase, recognized, from May 10 through June 22, 2001, the diversity of interests of its Library of Congress employees and retirees by exhibiting (in addition to books authored and edited and recordings produced) articles published in scholarly and trade journals. Collins submitted “Freedom of Religion in the U.S. Bill of Rights: A Bahá’í Perspective,” published in World Order in Spring 1997; “Millennialism, the Millerites, and Historicism,” published in Fall 1998; and “Bahá’í Interpretation of Biblical Time Prophecy,” published in World Order’s Winter 1998-99 issue.

In June 2001, Firuz Kazemzadeh was appointed by the U.S. Senate Majority [Page 6] Leader, Thomas Daschle, to a second two-year term on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. An Editor and Editor Emeritus of World Order since 1966, and the Commission’s outgoing Vice-Chairman, Commissioner Kazemzadeh is a senior adviser for the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and a Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University. He has authored two books and many articles relating to Russia and Central Asia. His articles and reviews in World Order are too numerous to mention. His most recent contribution was a review of Century of Light in the Summer 2001 issue. In a press release Kazemzadeh commented: “I am pleased to have been appointed to a second term on the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom that defends an essential human right that is only too frequently violated. The Commission’s mandate to monitor the status of religious freedom throughout the world and to advise the President and Congress raises the level of concern with religious freedom. The struggle for religious freedom, like the struggle for the abolition of slavery or the exploitation of child labor will be a long and difficult one, but the principles embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will triumph, and the Commission will contribute to their eventual triumph.”

* * *

After the Summer 2001 issue went to press, Jeffrey S. Gruber, author of “The Movement Toward a World Language: Indigenization and Universalization” (pages 21-27) asked that we add the following sentence to his acknowledgments: “I also thank Gregory P. Meyjes for comments on the text and the World Order editorial staff for their tireless attentions.”

For William P. Collins’ poem “The Point,” published on page 19 in our Summer 2001 issue, we have a correction. In line 6 “gladen” should be “gladden.” Thank you, Bill, for calling the error to our attention.

[Page 7]

Day to Day

The trees stand graciously and bear

the vasts of common sky and air,

while filtering through their leafy greens

infinity slips in between.

—Druzelle Cederquist

Copyright © 2002 by Druzelle Cederquist

Invitation

Let us condense eternity

into a proffered cup of tea

and the steam that rises slowly

between friends.

—Druzelle Cederquist

Copyright © 2002 by Druzelle Cederquist

[Page 8]

[Page 9]

Race: Neither Biological Fact
nor Social Fiction

BY ALGERNON AUSTIN

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.

—W. E. B. Du Bois

The Souls of Black Folks

Copyright © 2002 by Algernon Austin. Footnotes appear at the end of the essay.

THE twentieth century is over, and race is still with us. From racial profiling to debates over immigrants and immigration policies to calls for reparations for slavery to a multiracial option in the U.S. Census to the 2001 United Nations World Conference against Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance to continuing debates over affirmative action, race is still with us. Race appears in old and new places and in old and new ways. Race promises to be a major problem of the twenty-first century.

However we choose to respond to racial issues, our response will be shaped by our understanding of them. Hence it is useful to reexamine some of the basic issues around our perceptions of what race is (and is not) and how we then interpret the dynamics of racial relations. Human beings have created racialized societies. Unmaking race is by no means easy, but the extent to which we understand, or misunderstand, racial relations will determine how far into the future race remains with us.

To state that people have made race and have the potential to unmake it is to take a social-constructionist position on race. Although most scholars now argue that race is socially constructed, what socially constructed means as applied to race is not clear, for various scholars have different ideas about what the concept means for race. The fact that two scholars take similar social-constructionist positions on race does not prevent them from arguing over the meaning of race.

A basic source of confusion is whether social constructionism is an intellectual framework, a political ideology, or a basic description of social reality. The literary theorist Diana Fuss presents social constructionism as an intellectual framework for understanding both literary texts and the social world. She suggests that scholars need to find a balance between essentialism—seeing race as fixed, permanent, and unchanging through human history—and social constructionism. For the historian David R. Roediger social constructionism is a political tool for ending racial oppression. He argues that scholars need to refocus social constructionism toward “the abolition of whiteness.” Both Fuss and Roediger understand social constructionism as a relatively new idea developed out of postmodern or poststructuralist theory. A third understanding of social constructionism grounded in fairly traditional sociological [Page 10] approaches to understanding the social world can be found in the work of sociologist Oliver C. Cox.

As early as 1948, Cox approached the study of racial relations from a social-constructionist position that was grounded in the fundamentals of sociology. Cox began his analysis by recognizing that social categories are defined by human beings, not by biology:

there is no universally accepted definition of race. The biologist and the physical anthropologist may indeed have considerable difficulty with this, but for the sociologist a race may be thought of as simply any group of people that is generally believed to be, and generally accepted as, a race in any given area of ethnic competition. Here is detail enough, since the sociologist is interested in social interaction. Thus, if a man looks white, although, say in America, he is everywhere called a Negro, he is, then, a Negro American. If, on the other hand, a man of identical physical appearance is recognized in Cuba as a white man, then he is a white Cuban. The sociologist is interested in what meanings and definitions a society gives to certain social phenomena and situations.

To continue Cox’s argument, if there is a difference in terms of access to social, political, and economic resources depending on whether one is classified as black or white, racial classification has very real social consequences. In this way social practices construct race.

Confusion over the meaning of race stems from confusion over the meaning of social constructionism. Some scholars take a social-constructionist position and attempt to hold on simultaneously to a biological understanding of race. Other scholars understand social constructionism as rejecting any biological conceptions of race. Some scholars worry that social constructionism cannot address their concerns about racial inequality and oppression. Other scholars argue that so long as people deny that race is socially constructed, human beings will inevitably recreate racial inequality and oppression.

With arguments grounded in my understanding of social constructionism that come out of an old-fashioned sociological approach, I will try to answer some of the fundamental questions about the meaning of race.

Is Race a Biological Fact?

MOST people in the United States can quite easily distinguish the average black person from the average white person from the average Asian person by their physical appearance. Medical researchers and forensic scientists routinely classify people into races based on physical characteristics. Should we conclude, then, that race is a biological fact?

While people often use physical features to classify people as members of racial groups, there is nothing natural about race or racial categorization. The relationship of racial categorization to biology is tenuous at best, and in many instances no relationship whatsoever exists. A good way to begin examining the biology of race is to ask the following question: How many races are there?

Racial Categories according to Carolus Linnaeus. One of the early scientists to attempt to classify humankind into varieties was Carolus Linnaeus (Carl von Linné). In 1735 he published his System of Nature in which he attempted to classify all living things. We should note that, although at this time scientists were beginning to attempt to develop a scientific understanding of race, American colonists, for two centuries, had been using the concept of race to organize forced labor. In other words, the race concept was a popular concept that was adopted by scientists and not a scientific concept that was popularized.

Linnaeus determined that there were seven varieties of humankind. Four of his varieties are familiar to us in the twenty-first century: American Indians (Homo Americanus), whites [Page 11] (Homo Europeanus), Asians (Homo Asiaticus), and blacks (Homo Africanus). His description of these groups was not limited to physical features. For example, he described American Indians in the following manner: “reddish, choleric, and erect; hair black, straight, thick; wide nostrils, scanty beard; obstinate, merry, free; paints himself with fine red lines; regulated by customs.” He described Asians as “melancholy, . . . severe, haughty, avaricious; covered with loose garments; ruled by opinions.” For Linnaeus these varieties of humankind did not only have specific physical characteristics but also clear psychological and cultural dispositions.

The remaining three of Linnaeus’ categories are difficult to reconcile with contemporary ideas. One category was “Homo ferus”— wild men who are four footed, hairy, and mute. Another category was “Homo Monstrosus,” which was composed of several different types: a Cyclops-type being, satyrs, “dwarfs,” and others. The last category was “Homo sylvestris orang outang.” Linnaeus’ classifications were not free from mythology.

Linnaeus, then, is not a good source for determining the number of races. He tells us that there are four races but only if we “forget” that he actually provided seven categories, though seven is also not correct because he lists several different “monsters.” However, Linnaeus provides two lessons: (1) racial categories are often intertwined with ideas about psychological and cultural dispositions and with mythical beliefs, and (2) the concept of race predates the attempts of scientists to specify it.

Racial Categories according to the U.S. Census. Linnaeus cannot tell us how many races there are because he did not have the benefit of modern notions of scientific rigor and objectivity. The U.S. Census Bureau, however, is committed to providing accurate information, though not scientific, to the rest of the government and to the general public. According to the 2000 Census categories there are either five, seven, sixty-three, or an indeterminate number of races.

The five “simple” categories are “American Indian and Alaska Native,” “Asian,” “Black or African American,” “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander,” and “White.” Presumably these categories mean that American Indians are the same race as Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians are the same race as “Other Pacific Islanders.“ These are important assumptions if we realize that these categories are not the same “simple” categories used in the 1990 census. The 1990 census had four “simple” categories because “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders” were then classified as Asian.

Another new racial group appeared in the U.S. 2000 Census: “Two or more races.” This new category allows, for example, the biological child of a black parent and a white parent to be black and white. (Of course, this has not always been U.S. custom. For most of U.S. history, individuals with black and white parents were black by law and by social practice.) Therefore, all of the possible racial parental combinations produce children in different racial groups. In other words, a Child with black and white parents is of a different race from a child with Asian and American Indian parents. The Census places both of these children in the same “racial” category: “Two or more races.” The Census treats all of the differing multiracial people as one racial category, when they actually represent many different categories. The number of potential multiracial categories grows larger the more ancestors one includes.

The seventh racial category of the 2000 U.S. Census Bureau is “Some other race.” It is not clear whether this means one additional race or all races that are not counted by the five simple categories. The Census Bureau claims to have sixty-three racial categories, when all possible combinations of the seven categories are considered. But if we believe that “Two or more races” and [Page 12] “Some other race” are not single categories, the number of races is much greater than sixty-three-some very large but indeterminate number.

Constructing Racial Categories. One reason for the problem in determining the number of races is that the challenge is somewhat like determining the number of different heights in humankind. (This example is more relevant than it may at first appear; for example, the racial ideology dividing Hutus and Tutsis in Central Africa claims, among other things, that the groups differ in height.) The most accurate answer approaches the number of people on the planet. But that is too unwieldy a number. We could divide the world into people who are less than 5 foot 10 inches (my height)—“short people”—and people who are 5 foot 10 inches or taller—“tall people.“ In this scheme, humankind comes in two heights. Or we could divide humans into foot-long categories: 0-12 inches, 12.01-24 inches, 24.01-36 inches, and so on. In this scheme, adult humans come in maybe six or seven heights. If I were more familiar with the metric system, I could develop a different scheme using metric units, yielding different dividing lines and a different number of categories. Because variations in physical characteristics, like variations in height, occur more or less continuously, the number of physical groupings depends on the number of categories that a society decides to make. In this sense, race is not natural but created by human beings. Moreover, human beings also create race in different ways in different times and places.

The conclusion might be that we should not try to divide humankind into height-based quasi-races. It is possible to notice that people come in various heights but not feel that it has much significance. Indeed, there was a time before race. The worlds of the ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, provide no evidence of a racial concept. Archaeological findings in ancient Central Asia also suggest that whites and Asians interacted without a concept of race. Before the adoption of European racial ideas, American Indians interacted with Africans and Europeans without racial distinctions. Even in the early settlement of North America by Europeans, the race concept was something that whites developed over time. The ability to see races and to think in terms of race requires social learning; it is not an automatic event in human interaction.

I emphasized that the height example is somewhat like race because racial categorization is much more complex than height. One difference is that racial categorization is never dependent on one physical characteristic. In the United States we may use “skin color” as a synonym for “race,” but that is just U.S. racial ideology. For example, Thomas Jefferson’s children with the enslaved Sally Hemmings were “seven-eighths white.” (Hemmings’ mother was a mulatto and her father was Jefferson’s father-in-law.) In the United States, being “white” in appearance has never prevented someone from being classified as black. This construction of racial classification by lineage is not unique to black Americans. For example, people legally classified as American Indian in the United States range in stereotypical appearance from “American Indian” to “white” to “black.” What makes people from India and people from Japan both Asian has nothing to do with their appearance. All racial categories involve much more than physical appearance.

Race and Disease. We have seen that there are no rationally occurring racial categories in “surface biology.” But what happens when we look “under the skin”? If race is biologically arbitrary, what about the fact that diseases are correlated to race? And what about the use of race in forensic science?

To the extent that racial categories are correlated to physical features and to populations that share some details in their evolutionary history, racial categories can tap [Page 13] into biological characteristics. The first point here is merely to restate where the argument began: Based on physical appearance, it is often quite easy to distinguish the average black person from the average white person from the average Asian person. But just as real physical differences exist in “height races,” the categories were clearly made by the author, not by nature. The physical appearance stereotypical of any racial category is similarly connected arbitrarily to biology. Social definitions create them, not nature.

In the United States sickle-cell anemia is an example of a false relationship between a racial category and a disease. While sickle-cell anemia does disproportionately affect black Americans, it has been falsely understood as a “black disease.” Sickle-cell anemia is actually an evolutionary response to malaria. It is, therefore, found not only among Africans and their descendants but also in Mediterranean, Arabian, and South Asian peoples who were also exposed to malaria over many generations. Other anti-malarial anemias are also found in these geographical areas. Sickle-cell anemia became a “black disease” in the United States only because people were not aware of its occurrence among other peoples.

In the United States a true association between blackness and sickle-cell anemia does exist, albeit for reasons of geographic descent rather than skin color, but medical researchers have also had ideas about blacks and disease that are completely false. Medical researchers have claimed that for some biological reason blacks have higher rates of hypertension than whites. Some researchers put this issue to the test by comparing the rates of hypertension among black Americans and West Africans, the source of most of black Americans’ ancestry. They found that West Africans have among the lowest rates of hypertension in the world. Researchers now believe that social factors such as racial discrimination may explain black Americans’ high rate of hypertension. Medical scientists believed that there was a biological basis to the low birth weight of babies born to black Americans. When this idea was tested, again, as in the hypertension studies, no support for a biological explanation was found. Black African babies were closer in average birth weight to white American babies than they were to black American babies. Unfortunately, these are not the only false claims about “black diseases” and “non-black diseases.” Medical researchers are still instructing doctors about racial correlations to diseases that are likely false. In this way, racial categorization directly impacts the health care of black Americans because false racial ideas lead doctors to misdiagnose and mistreat black Americans.

Tay-Sachs is one of a few examples of a genuine biological relationship between a potential racial category and a disease. But the relationship of race to disease both is and is not there. Tay-Sachs occurs among Jews whose ancestry goes back through Central and Eastern Europe—Ashkenazi Jews, about 4 percent of whom are carriers of the Tay-Sachs gene. Among non-Jews the gene occurs at a rate of 0.2 percent. About 1 in 2,500 Ashkenazi Jewish infants is afflicted with the disease compared to 1 in 360,000 non-Jewish infants.

The correlation of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry with the occurrence of this disease is real. The children of Ashkenazi Jews are more than fourteen times more likely to be born with this disease. The disease is incurable and results in the death of infants. The seriousness of the issue and the strong correlation between ancestry and the disease have led some to recommend the genetic screening of heterosexual couples of Ashkenazi descent.

Although the disease-ancestry correlation is real, there is no way that we can conclude that this gene defines Jews. First, the correlation only applies to Ashkenazi Jews, not all Jews. Second, only 4 percent of people of Ashkenazi descent are carriers. Although the [Page 14] percent of carriers who are not of Ashkenazi descent is only 0.2 percent, the absolute number of non-Jewish carriers exceeds the Jewish carriers because the number of non-Jews in the United States (and in the world) greatly exceeds the Ashkenazi population. Thus, if we were to build a category of people from the Tay-Sachs gene, the category would contain more non-Jews than Jews. Also, the majority of Jews would be in the non-Tay-Sachs-gene group.

Moreover, it is likely that the rate of the occurrence of the Tay-Sachs gene in the population of everyone of Ashkenazi descent in the United States will decline over many generations. Currently, in the United States about a third of Jews marry non-Jews. The children of this group are partly of Ashkenazi descent, but they are less likely than their Jewish parent to have the Tay-Sachs gene. If these children were to maintain an Ashkenazi Jewish identity (many, however, do not), the numbers of Ashkenazi Jews could be maintained while the percentage of Ashkenazi carriers for the Tay-Sachs disease declines. Hence the social category—Ashkenazi Jew— is not timelessly fixed to any genetic characteristics. (We have already seen a dramatic example of this in the fact that Thomas Jefferson’s children with the enslaved Sally Hemmings were socially defined as black although they were “seven-eighths white”) Gene frequencies can change without affecting social categories because the social categories are not fundamentally defined by genes or biology.

Understanding the use of race in forensic science rests upon the same principles—gene frequencies can change without affecting social categories because genes and biology do not define social categories. The “old” forensic science used measurements and statistics to make an educated guess about the race of human remains in criminal cases. The “new” forensic science uses genetic markers. Ultimately, they both are likely to become less reliable over time because racial categories are not defined by the biology that forensic scientists measure. For example, scientists can distinguish the skulls of white men born in the nineteenth century from white men born in the twentieth century with about 90 percent accuracy. The biology of “white” skulls, therefore, is not stable over time. The “new,” more DNA-based forensic science can only be reliable if it is continually recalibrated to changing social definitions and to the changing genetic characteristics of these socially defined populations. Forensic science, therefore, does not point us to an underlying biology of race but back to social definitions.

What Rate Is. Race is not, fundamentally, about biology. People have somewhat arbitrarily placed humankind into different categories. The fact that different people come up with different categories in different times and places shows the arbitrariness of race.

The concept of race can be defined as false beliefs that various categories of people have different essences. We can think of essential differences as differences in inner and often mystical qualities of people—their psychology, their soul, their “blood,” and so on. Essentialist discourse can sometimes be about genes, but this is only one of many possibilities. Essential differences are often discussed in terms of “culture” but a quasi-biological culture that is passed on by ancestry, not by learning cultural beliefs and practices.

For example, Jews were a racial group in Nazi Germany because the Nazi regime felt that Jews had essential characteristics that were different from non-Jews. As much as the Nazi racial ideology may have idealized blond-blue-eyed-ness, these physical criteria were not the basis for determining persecution; Jewish ancestry was. (If the division were truly between blue-eyed blonds and others, Adolf Hitler and many other “Aryans” would have had to go in the “other” category. There would [Page 15] have also been Jews in the blue-eyed-blond category) The logic of Nazi racism meant that through Jewish ancestors one obtained a Jewish essence and became a Jew. One did not have to practice Judaism to be a Jew. For some, it was only because of persecution by Nazis that they found out about a Jewish ancestor. In Nazi Germany, Jewishness ultimately resided in one’s “blood,” not in any physical features or observable cultural practices. It is by this same logic that people who are “white” in appearance can be black in the United States or that people who are “black” in appearance can be legally defined as American Indian. Because race is fundamentally about false beliefs of essential differences and the racial stereotypes that follow from them, ideas about race referring to physical appearance are ultimately misleading.

Is Race a Fiction? IF WE accept that the link of race to biology is in the strongest cases arbitrary, weak, and superficial and in the weakest cases nonexistent, should we conclude that race is a “myth,” a “fallacy,” or a “fiction,” as scholars often argue?

Race is very real. It is the product, not of biological reality, but of a social reality. A good way to understand this is by reviewing a classic sociological study by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson that examines the effect of teacher expectations on students. Rosenthal and Jacobson convinced teachers that some of their students would advance a great deal during the school year based on the students’ performance on a fictitious “Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition.” In fact, although all students were given a verbal and nonverbal intelligence test, Rosenthal and Jacobson had randomly selected the “special” students who were expected to improve. The teachers were instructed not to inform the “special” students or their parents of the “special” students’ abilities. At the end of the school year the “special” students had, in fact, on average, made greater gains in their scores on the intelligence test than “normal” students. Because the teachers believed the “special” students could learn more, in some subtle way they treated the “special” students differently and made their beliefs come true. In addition, the teachers assessed the “special” students much more favorably in terms of their social skills than “normal” students who had made equivalent gains on the intelligence test. This phenomenon was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The teachers’ beliefs produced a reality that could be objectively observed in the “special” students’ test scores and in their teacher evaluations.

Based on the Rosenthal and Jacobsen study, it is easy to imagine that some teachers may believe white students have intellectual potential superior to that of non-white students. Indeed, The Rosenthal and Jacobson study provides some evidence about how racial beliefs may impact students’ academic performance. One-sixth of the students in the school Rosenthal and Jacobson studied were of Mexican descent. The researchers found that “special” Mexican students had greater gains in test scores than non-Mexican “special” students. The relationship was strongest for the students who looked the most “Mexican.” If teachers had very low expectations of what “Mexican”-looking students could achieve, this fact might explain the large gains of “Mexican”-looking students. Furthermore, although Mexican students had the largest gains in test scores of the “special” students, teachers still rated the Mexican students as less intellectually curious than non-Mexican students.

The dynamic between racial beliefs and academic achievement also works from the student end. Students can be affected by stereotypes about their racial group’s relative intellectual abilities. Black students, for example, [Page 16] who worry about whether they will confirm stereotypes of black intellectual inferiority end up doing worse on exams than black students who do not have these worries. Race may, in a sense, begin as myth, fallacy, and fiction, but these mere ideas have very real consequences in social life.

While studies confirm the dynamic between racial beliefs and academic achievement, it should be clear that the same dynamics can be present in all types of social interaction. The success or failure of racial minorities in the workplace could be subject to dynamics similar to those in the Rosenthal and Jacobsen study. In all aspects of the criminal justice system racial ideas produce cruel realities. Racial phenomena are society-wide.

To argue that race is a “myth,” a “fallacy,” or a “fiction” is misleading because it suggests that race has no real consequences. Such conceptions of race also lead frequently to overly simple solutions. Some who understand race as a “myth” argue that the U.S. government should not use race as a category for statistics or for social policies. The problem with arguing that race is a myth can be illustrated by the situation in France, where it is illegal to collect racial statistics. Racial discrimination nonetheless exists in France. The state can be an important factor in the development and maintenance of racial ideologies, but it is not the only source of racial ideologies. Eliminating racial statistics in the United States could just as easily worsen racial relations as improve them. Without racial statistics, it may be easier to discriminate and then deny discrimination based on race. This situation would create more discrimination by reducing the negative costs. We can imagine a future where the United States looks more like Brazil, where, in spite of a long history of racial inequality, minorities have not had the type of racial terms and racial identities necessary to confront it. It is much more difficult to remove myths, fallacies, and fictions from a society than many reformers imagine. Even if we could eliminate all racial ideas, if we do not transform the material basis of racial relations, we may never move beyond race.

Race and Class. Another factor making it difficult to eliminate racial prejudice and discrimination is the interrelationship of race and class; The United States as a society cannot adequately address race without, at the very least, facing the reality of class. Racial fears, stereotypes, prejudices, and conflicts are aided and abetted by the economic disparities between groups.

Racial conflicts over access to schools, jobs, neighborhoods, and even for equal respect are to some degree class struggles. Schools and jobs are mechanisms to improved socioeconomic standing. Neighborhoods are a means to better schools and other community resources. Safer neighborhoods also allow more security with regard to life, health, property, and home (which is a major economic investment and source of wealth). In a class society, one of the things money buys is better treatment and respect. One of the things the black middle class resents deeply is the fact that it is frequently not accorded treatment commensurate with its income.

Concerns by whites about disproportionate minority crime, depressed property values, affirmative action, and school quality are also class issues. People who are unemployed are more likely to engage in street crime. If racial minorities have greater rates of unemployment, there is an association of race to crime. If a minority presence in a neighborhood produces white flight and more minority neighbors, homes depreciate. If affirmative action for minorities lowers the odds that a white person obtains a place in an elite school or a job, affirmative action for minorities is an impediment to white socioeconomic mobility. If poor schools tend to be minority schools, white schools will help one’s children advance. With such issues, the “if’s” are [Page 17] important. In these dynamics, false white beliefs may be the only thing creating the reality. But, again, false beliefs can produce brutally real effects.

The median white family income is more than one and one-half times larger than the black median. For the past thirty years, the black unemployment rate has been about two times higher than the white unemployment rate. For the past thirty years, the black poverty rate has been three times larger than the white poverty rate. The average black family has a net worth (wealth) of $24,000; the average white family, a net worth of $96,000. Family wealth is an important factor in the upward social mobility of children.

Although the black middle class has increased significantly in size, being black and middle class is not the same as being white and middle class. The average black middle-class family earns about 80 percent of what the average white middle-class family does. More important, in terms of wealth the average black middle-class family has less than 20 percent of what the average white middle-class family has. Any significant financial crisis in the average black middle-class family would move that family out of the middle class. Because the black middle class is so poor in terms of wealth, black families are much less able to ensure that their children remain in the black middle class.

The United States is a class society (and one with greater class inequality than most Western industrialized nations). If racial prejudice and discrimination ended today, the economic basis for conflicts between blacks and whites would remain. For example, one study of factors that would lead to children’s socioeconomic mobility found that children from poor neighborhoods were only one-third as likely as middle class children to be successful in school, socially involved, confident in their abilities, and not involved in problem behavior. To put the problem another way, an average poor family has to work three times as hard or be three times as lucky as an average middle-class family for its children to be upwardly mobile. The children from the middle-class families with the best family and neighborhood resources were fourteen times more likely to be successful than those children with the least family and neighborhood resources. These are some of the factors that would maintain class differences between blacks and whites in a world without race. It is, in part, from these differences that new racial conflicts would emerge.

Of course, we live in a society where class and race exist simultaneously. It is useful to be able to understand some of the class and race patterns concerning more recent immigrant groups. Stereotypes of model minorities emerge and are sustained by a failure to understand the class basis of immigration. Immigrants rarely provide a random sample of people from a particular country; rather, they often come from a particular class background. For example, facing the expropriation of their wealth during the Cuban Revolution, the Cubans who fled to the United States at that time were from the upper classes. These Cuban Americans have been successful in the United States because they have skills and resources that enable them to prosper. However, the Mexican elite is doing well in Mexico, and the Mexican immigrants to the United States, generally, come more from the lower classes. The prospects for these poorer Mexicans, with limited skills and resources, are not as auspicious as were those for the Cubans fleeing the Revolution. The overall economic success of an immigrant group is strongly influenced by whether it has skills that the United States needs and values and by other resources that it brings with it. These relationships tend to mean that immigrants from the upper class of a country tend to move into the middle and upper classes and that immigrants from the lower classes tend to move into the lower classes. However, in a society where people [Page 18] are used to racial thinking, people are inclined to see the differences among immigrant groups as a reflection of racial characteristics.

Conclusion

RACE is socially constructed. Race can be understood as a fallacious ideology of essential differences. Because race “begins” and thrives in false beliefs, that does not mean that race is not real. Race is real because the belief in race affects human behavior. Race, therefore, has genuine consequences throughout society. Race is not a fact of biology nor a social fiction. Race is a product of human action and part of social reality. Race is, therefore, a social fact.

We are not likely to end race simply by trying to have people stop thinking in racial terms, a strategy that avoids the political and economic realities of racial inequality. Only by eliminating the real social costs of race and class is it likely that we will be able to move beyond race. It is difficult for Americans to confront racial inequality. But it may be even more difficult for Americans to confront class inequality. In American society, it is not possible to address one inequality without also addressing the other.

[Page 19] [Page 20] [Page 21]

The Holocaust, Hiroshima,
and Sartre

Usual anomie, dealt

the expected diet

of Holocaust, Hiroshima,

and Sartre. Of course,

this usual is excruciating.

It is a kind of destruction

to face it at all.

You conjure some solutions,

some positivity made

of gossamer, or at least

silver. But these paltry

nothings fall on the ground,

spent leaves falling mid-year

from disease. No solutions,

no answers, no guarantees.

Facing it, letting it enter

your mind-heart, this, and

allowing it to drive your work,

may be the only redemption.

In Jerusalem, you walk away

from Yad Vashem, stunned

with pictures of the brutalized

and the doomed.

—Michael Fitzgerald

Copyright © 2002 by Michael Fitzgerald

[Page 22]

[Page 23]

Ethnicity, Race, and a
Possible Humanity

BY ARASH ABIZADEH

Copyright © 2002 by Arash Abizadeh.

A CERTAIN delight of recognition forces me to smile every time I am reminded of the mother whom I saw on television not so long ago. She was recounting how her daughter—one of her several adopted children of various colors and complexions —had expressed her bewilderment at the sight before her. “Mum, look at that weird family,” she had exclaimed. “Their kids all look the same!” The child’s puzzlement is delightful because it punctures the taken-for-granted facade of naturalness that many of us, relying on experiences vastly different from hers, have built around our culturally particular ways of organizing family and kinship. The world she inhabited was a world without race—though no doubt she has since been confronted with, and perhaps even forced to join, our “raced” social world.

Of course, ours is a world from whose taken-for-granted, commonsensical perspective the nonexistence of race seems patently nonsensical. After all, to deny the existence of race is, it seems, to deny the existence of a biological fact. We could imagine a world—like the girl’s—in which we were unaware of the biological realities, but the biological realities would not thereby disappear. It would be a world somewhat analogous to one in which humans had not discovered that there are fish in the ocean. The fish would still be there.

Or would they? Is this bit of our world’s common sense right? Is race something like a fish, something that exists out there for the discovering? Precisely this bit of our world’s common sense is what the girl helps us to call into question. Perhaps race is not a fish. It is worth subjecting to critical scrutiny the two related notions of “ethnicity” and “race” and asking whether a world beyond race is possible.

Ethnic Ambiguities

LET US begin with the facts. I am six feet tall, have dark olive skin, round brown eyes, and wavy black hair and facial hair to match. But the facts of my appearance have never been enough to ensure uniform guesses about my “ethnicity.” I have been asked by a friend’s Indian parents from which part of India I come. In Morocco, walking around with a blonde friend, I was asked how long ago my family had emigrated. But when I walked through the Moroccan ‘súq’ with my Andalucian friend, with her olive skin and black hair, pedlars barraged me, trying to make a sale to “Juan! Juan! Juan!” in Spanish. In Nice, near France’s border with Italy, my efforts to speak to the locals in my accented French were greeted with obliging [Page 24] responses in a language of which I knew only enough to be able to tell that I was being taken for a visitor from across the border. In Berlin I would not infrequently be accosted by lost but overly optimistic old ladies hoping that I could give them directions in Turkish. My own inquiries for directions in Israel I prefaced with the hopeful “Do you speak English?”; the usually puzzled look I would receive was best put into words by the fellow who responded, “Yes, and congratulations, apparently you do too!” The others, too surprised to make a joke, simply queried, “But are you not Israeli?” In Vienna my German proved to be so fumbling at the cash register that the hurried cashier risked the potentially helpful “Shumá Írání hastín?” [“Are you Iranian?”]. In Bolivia the locals’ guesses about the fellow who stood head and shoulders above the five-foot crowd coalesced around Brazil.

But what are the facts? You want to know, presumably, not what ethnicity people guess when they see me but the genealogical facts. From whom am I descended? After all, like race, the concept of ethnicity is wrapped up with the notion of descent or genealogy. Whereas the guesses people might hazard based on physical appearance may be colored by my clothing, gait, accent, companions, location, or other contextual circumstances and filtered by the sociocultural categories through which the observer sees the world, the fact of genealogy can be, at least in principle, objectively established.

Or can it? If people are of the same ethnicity, if and only if they are descended from common ancestors—that is, have a common genealogy—humanity must be a single ethnic group. That, of course, is not how the term “ethnicity” is used. Presumably the ancestors in question must be ones who lived sometime later than the first Homo sapiens. The question is, How much later? The answer to this question is, in part, arbitrary.

Let us return to the facts. One is that I live in the United States. Surely this fact does not help the inquirer after my ethnicity. Another fact is that I am from Canada. If I were ever to become a United States citizen, I would become an American of Canadian background. But presumably this still does not answer the ethnicity question. Canadians are descended from common ancestors only in the sense in which all humans are descended from the first Homo sapiens. Yet another fact is that I am born of Iranian parents. Surely this is the relevant fact. I am descended from Iranians, and so we might confidently conclude that my ethnic background is Iranian. The problem with this answer is that Iranians themselves do not seem to think that they all share common ancestors. My parents are Iranian, to be sure; but they are of Jewish descent—not Kurdish, not Baluchi, not Qashqai, not Persian, not Turkmen, not Armenian. Is, then, my ethnic background Jewish-Iranian? Perhaps we should simply say that my ethnicity is Jewish, or Hebrew, a descendant of the twelve tribes of Israel? But if we have gone back that far, why not push a little further? Is my ethnic background simply Semitic, in common with Jews but also with Arabs? Why not push even further, to the first Homo sapiens? The choice of “how far back” begins to verge on the arbitrary.

It is not just the “how-far-back” question that introduces arbitrariness. One could also ask questions about which genealogical line is to be considered decisive. One generation back, we have two choices—mother and father. Two generations back, we have four. Three generations back, we have eight, and soon the numbers become unimaginable. Perhaps I do, indeed, have an ancestor among the twelve tribes. But of the thousands of my ancestors who lived that far [Page 25] back, many of them also are, in fact, through some genealogical line or another, ancestors of thousands, if not millions, of humans alive today who do not think of themselves as being of my “blood.” But why this line rather than that?

It is in part for these reasons that many scholars have begun to define ethnicity as constituted by myths of common descent. A people share a common ethnicity insofar as they share a myth of common descent— that is, insofar as they believe themselves to be descended from common ancestors. Ethnicity is based on mythical beliefs about the genealogical facts, not the genealogical facts themselves. It is the myths that answer the “how-far-back” and the “which-line” questions—but the myths themselves can often be based on historically inaccurate beliefs. This, of course, does not mean that ethnicity itself does not exist. Rather, it simply means that when it exists, it exists as a socially constructed category contingent on beliefs. The “facts” of genealogy are themselves an insufficient basis for dividing humanity up ethnically. Unlike a fish, ethnicity’s very existence is dependent on beliefs about its existence.

Racy Looks

PERHAPS the concept of “race” enjoys an advantage over ethnicity. For “race” can be thought of as a concept that combines two ideas. It supplements the notion of genealogy with the notion of some innate traits that are genealogically transmitted. Thus, for example, members of the same race could be defined as humans who share common ancestors from whom they have inherited some innate traits, such as phenotype (physical appearance). The “how-far-back” question can then be answered “objectively” by referring to the relevant traits—for example, the point in time when a certain set of phenotypic traits, such as pale skin, straight hair, and so on, came to distinguish one group of humans physically from others groups. The “which-line” question can also be similarly answered. One traces race along the line that determines the inheritance of the relevant innate racially marked qualities. By supplementing the ethnic criterion of genealogy, the second criterion—the inherited innate traits—is supposed to provide “race” with an objective (and in the case of phenotype, a biological) ground. Race, like a fish, could then be said to exist independently of any beliefs about it.

The assumption embedded in such a conception of race is, of course, that its two constitutive criteria—genealogy and inherited innate traits such as phenotype— are compatible. In other words, the assumption [Page 26] is that, when attempting to determine someone’s race, examining his or her phenotype provides answers that supplement rather than undermine answers to questions about genealogy. The ostensible advantage of “race” over ethnicity is that the additional question about distinctive innate traits passed on through descent would serve to wrestle the concept away from myth and deliver it to the objectivity of sciences such as biology.

The problem is that, in fact, the two questions about genealogy and innate traits such as phenotype often provide contradictory answers. The commonly accepted advantage turns out to be a liability. Consider the American context. In the United States a person of “black” race is understood to be someone of sub-Saharan African ancestry who, as a result of that ancestry, has inherited certain phenotypic traits (dark skin, kinky hair, and so on). Hence there are two ways to determine if someone is “black”: to ask about the person’s ancestry and to see what he or she “looks” like. (Both questions are supposed to yield the same answer.) With respect to the “which-line” question, the United States answers with its infamous “one-drop” rule. If one has but a single black African ancestor, in the American context one has traditionally been deemed to be of “black” race. But consider the case of Susie Phipps. Along with her siblings, some of whom were blue-eyed blondes, she had lived socially as “white” in Louisiana by virtue of her phenotype. When she checked white on her application, however, Phipps was denied a passport because the state considered her “colored” by virtue of her genealogy. She then sued to be officially classified as white. She lost, but the lawsuit was made possible by the fact that the two categories—phenotype and genealogy—of race need not coincide.

But, perhaps, it will be objected, the problem is not with the category of race per se but with the peculiar way that Americans answer the “which-line” question. Instead of monolithic racial categories that are preserved by always tracing race along the “black” line, one might argue for allowing for “racial mixture.” Having ostensibly established the existence of different races by reference to genealogy and phenotype, one could then speak of people of “mixed race.” But here again the two questions can pull in different directions. Consider Phipps again. The genealogical answer is that she is of “mixed race,” while the phenotypic answer is that she is “white.” The discrepancy has not been erased by this refinement.

What happens if one allows the phenotypic answer to trump the genealogical one? (“For all intents and purposes,” it might be said, “the woman is biologically white.”) This would mean that phenotype is also decisively answering the genealogy questions, such as “which line” or “how far back.” But then phenotype seems to be doing all the work, whereas the discussion of ethnicity attempted to show why phenotype could not be sufficient grounds for an objective “biological” distinction.

How does the insufficiency problem work in the context of race? The attempt to determine race biologically by reference to some phenotypic qualities faces at least [Page 27] two problems. First, phenotypic differences are matters of degree. Exactly where one should draw the racial boundary cannot be determined on purely biological grounds. As a result, a person deemed to be phenotypically “black” in the United States may be deemed phenotypically “white” in Jamaica. Second, humans vary in a multitude of ways—from hair color to hand size to nail shape. Which of these traits is deemed to be a relevant marker of distinction will be contingent upon the particular society in which the distinction is made.

For these reasons, among others, it has now become a commonplace among academic scholars that “race” is a social construct —that it is not determined by biology. The implication is that “race” in U.S. society may be entirely different from “race” in Brazilian or Moroccan society. Another implication is that “race” does not exist independent of social beliefs about race.

The no-nonsense commonsense response to the academy’s (majority) view would be, no doubt, to point to some obvious biological facts. I may have been variously taken for Indian, Italian, Latino, Arab, Israeli, and so on, but I have never been mistaken for Japanese. Surely race cannot be completely independent of the biological “facts”? Of course, there is a kernel of truth to this bit of common sense. Race may be socially constructed, but it is socially constructed by reference to biological facts that provide it with raw materials. The point is that race may be used to categorize people socially according to some phenotypic traits, but which traits are used as markers of difference and how those traits are perceived depends on the social context. Hence, on the one hand, race’s relation to biology is not wholly arbitrary. Its construction does make reference to some biological facts. That is why, for example, I have never been taken for Japanese. Race is not just “made up” independent of any reference to biological traits. On the other hand, race is not wholly determined by biology. Its social construction is dependent upon arbitrarily selecting some traits, rather than others, for special treatment. For example, while skin color is often thought of as a racial marker, different humans may have also inherited blonde, brown, red, or black hair, without their hair color being thought of as a racial marker. Humans vary not just in skin color but also in height, hirsuteness, left-handedness, finger-nail shape, foot size, and so on. These are all inherited biological traits. Whether they are socially thought of as relevant for categorizing human groups depends on the context. (A society that viewed its small-footed individuals as an inferior breed of some sort is no less absurd than South African apartheid.) A society in which phenotypic traits such as skin color were deemed to be just as irrelevant to grouping humans as left-handedness is in our world would be a society without “race” as we understand it. Race—like ethnicity—is rather unlike a fish.

The insight that race is socially constructed is what lies behind contemporary race theory’s reversal of the assumptions [Page 28] that were used to justify the American practice of slavery. Whereas for generations racial difference was cited in America as the basis and justification for slavery, contemporary theory suggests that it was rather the practice of slavery itself that created race in America as we know it. The result is this: Despite race’s dependence upon beliefs, a person cannot simply “think” it away. The reason is that the existence of race is not dependent upon subjective beliefs (that is, beliefs held by an individual). Rather, it depends on intersubjective beliefs and meanings embedded within social practices that continually reproduce race (that is, beliefs and meanings embodied and reflected in shared social practices, just as the belief in certain kinds of rights are embedded in American practices).

The result is that race is a social fact. A de-racialized world would require not just a transformation of people’s beliefs but also a transformation of the social practices that sustain those beliefs—practices implicated in a web of material and symbolic relations of power.

Reproducing Race

TO IMAGINE a world beyond racial oppression and injustice is not, definitionally, to imagine a world beyond race. But it is difficult to see how racial differentiation could in practice be sustained without the attending oppressions and injustices. This is in part because, for race to exist, it must be sustained by social practices that police —and enforce—its collective boundaries that distinguish “us” from “them.” Since biology is itself an insufficient basis for racial categorization and identity, race and racial identity depend upon social practices that supplement biology by contingently choosing some traits, such as skin color or forehead size, as distinguishing marks of racial difference. As a result, we need to shift our focus from the conceptual realm of defining race to analyzing the social realm in which race is institutionalized in social practices. It then becomes evident that reproducing race as the basis for collective identities depends on the (often coercive) enforcement of racial boundaries that distinguish one group from another, along with the racialized modes of behavior associated with each group.

It may be helpful to distinguish three [Page 29] levels of analysis relevant to reproducing racial identity. First, there is the politico-legal sphere of the state, which the sociologist Max Weber defined as the set of institutions “that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Second, there is the sphere of society, including (a) the economic sphere of the production, exchange, and distribution of goods and services, (b) the public sphere, in which individuals who do not personally know one another interact on a communicative basis, and (c) the intimate or private sphere of the family and interpersonal relations. Finally, there is the subjective sphere of the individual (which encompasses the psychological processes of personality- and ego- formation). It should be emphasized that the public sphere operates through cultural and social sttuctures—including secondary associations, such as professional associations, sports teams, religious communities, universities, and so on, that as a whole make up civil society. All three spheres help reproduce race, but in this exploration I focus on the first two—the state and society.

One of the most obvious underpinnings of the social practices that help sustain and reproduce a “raced” world is the legal apparatus of the state. When race is institutionalized at the level of the state—as it overtly and oppressively was in apartheid and in the pre-civil rights era in the United States—the state itself becomes a key player in the (re)production of race and racial identities. In the face of overt state-sanctioned racial oppression, an obvious political strategy for achieving racial justice is to attempt to transform the political and legal system so that the state treats all individuals as equal before the law irrespective of racial categorization—in other words, to render it “color-blind.” The limit to this approach is, of course, that the state is not the only source of race and racial oppression. However color-blind the state may be, discriminatory and oppressive practices may continue to emanate from society.

Hence we must consider not just the state’s role in the production of race but also the oppressive structures within society itself. Here again there is a partial political remedy. The legal apparatus of the state may be deployed to sanction discriminatory social practices—for example, through the enforcement of a set of antidiscrimination rights. The limit to this approach stems from the fact that the overt racial discrimination that is susceptible to state action through the protection of individual rights is not the only social source [Page 30] of racial oppression and inequality. For society also has a material economic aspect, and even if individual rights were protected, once class and race have become intertwined, unequal class structures may serve to perpetuate racial inequalities as well (and vice versa). The point is that class conflicts and inequalities are often an important source for the social (re)production of race, and state protection of classic liberal rights can often do little to alleviate them. There may be, for example, laws against racial discrimination in university admissions, but if some individuals cannot afford to pay high tuition rates, or if their impoverished background has interfered with academic excellence in secondary school, these individuals may still be effectively barred from the sort of higher education necessary to enter certain professions.

Again, there is a potential political remedy. The state may be called upon to undo the correlation between class and race, for example through affirmative-action policies and economic redistribution. But however effective or necessary such policies may be, they have their own inevitable pathology. In the state’s attempt to undo the correlation between class and race—and thus to undercut the economic reproduction of race—the state paradoxically ends up reproducing race politically. For the state’s interventions in society are mediated through a bureaucracy that must make use of, and thus mobilize and institutionalize, the very category it seeks to undercut. The result is that once it has already been institutionalized in society, the problem of race calls for a more fundamental assessment than the solely political or economic. We must consider not just the oppressive political and material sources of the production of race but also the nature of the spiritual aspiration to human dignity that modern society itself cultivates among its members, even as its oppressive social structures continue to offend it.

It might be objected that a distinction needs to be made between the oppressive reproduction of race and the reproduction of race as such. However, as noted earlier, the two may be inextricably linked in practice. We can see how the production of race is linked to oppression rather clearly when outsiders, whether the state or other social actors, impose a racial identity on their victims through racial discrimination and exclusion. But the link to oppression is no less important for racial identities sustained by practices of social control within the group itself. These two modes of reproducing identity—internal and external— often reinforce each other. Since our individual and collective identities are always shaped through our interactions with other human beings, and since societies have often denied equal dignity to some human beings on the basis of racially marked characteristics, it is no surprise that these human beings have found such characteristics central, even if negatively so, to their identities. With much compassion, the philosopher K. Anthony Appiah notes how this external imposition is often complemented by the second, internal mode of reproduction. One way to affirm one’s equal dignity as a human being is to revalue socially enforced collective identities, not [Page 31] as sources of humiliation and insult, but as valuable sources central to one’s identity —indeed, the very source of one’s dignity:

In order to construct a life with dignity, it seems natural to take the collective identity and construct positive life-scripts instead. . . . In this context, . . . [it] will not even be enough to require being treated with equal dignity despite being Black, for that will require a concession that being Black counts naturally or to some degree against one’s dignity. And so one will end up asking to be respected as a Black.

But now the victims of oppression themselves appear caught in a dilemma that parallels the state’s attempts at intervention. The state’s attempts to combat racial inequality paradoxically end up reifying the category of race—in other words, they end up treating a socially constructed category as if it were simply natural—and imposing upon individual human beings a bureaucratically defined racial identity. Similarly, the victims’ attempt to take collective control of the racial identity and appropriate it for their own collective empowerment ends up having to reify the very category (that is, race) originally used as the tool of oppression. To reify race in this way—to treat it as natural or essential —is simply to fiddle with the straightjacket, loosening it at best. As Appiah notes, on the one hand, it may be historically and strategically necessary for collective identities to develop in this manner; on the other hand, it is necessary to move on to the next step. The problem is that demanding respect for people “as blacks” requires that there be “scripts” that identify the proper ways of being black: “there will be expectations to be met, demands will be made. It is at this point that someone who takes autonomy seriously will ask whether we have not replaced one kind of tyranny with another.” The dilemma is exacerbated by the circumstance that race links biology to social practices. The demand for dignity and recognition as a member of a particular race ends up requiring one to identify the “biological” object of recognition with a sociocultural “way of being.” This superimposition of a set of contingent sociocultural practices on an ostensibly biological category ends up reifying race and the sociocultural practices that reproduce and [Page 32] depend on it. The reproduction of the social fact of race, lacking as it does biological foundations, depends upon social practices that police and enforce its constructed boundaries—boundaries that determine which individuals belong to which race.

The Race Beyond

I HAVE so far advanced three broad claims. First, race is a social construct, not a biological fact. Second, the social reproduction of race is effected by social practices dependent on relations of power sustained by economics and politics. Third, this reproduction is made possible only by oppressive social practices that are an offense to human dignity. To conclude, I would like to outline, in however preliminary a fashion, an approach I see as integral to the attempt to transcend the social reproduction of race.

The approach can be encapsulated in four theses. First, the transformation of the social practices that reproduce race requires a positive anticipatory-visionary undertaking that goes beyond simply fighting the evils of racial inequality and oppression in a reactive fashion. Second, such a visionary undertaking must tackle not only the political and economic aspects of the question but also the spiritual aspect. Third, attention to the spiritual dimension cannot be confined to the level of individual beliefs and action but must also address the intersubjective level of shared norms and principles embedded in social and state practices and institutions. Fourth, this positive, spiritually grounded undertaking requires the fostering of social practices and institutions the animating anticipatory vision of which is that of the oneness of humanity. I understand these four theses to represent a theoretical articulation of the premises underlying contemporary Bahá’í practice, inspired by principles found in the Bahá’í writings, in relation to the question of race. While I cannot fully defend these theses here, I hope at least to explain them and suggest their plausibility, in however preliminary a fashion.

The first thesis—about the necessity of a positive visionary undertaking—is in part supported by the predicament noted earlier: that is, the pathologies that accompany efforts to combat reactively the evils of racial inequality and oppression. By directly focusing on and using (and thus presupposing) the category of race, such efforts invariably end up reifying their object. This is not to deny that such efforts are necessary—they are. But they are also insufficient. Transcending the social reproduction of oppressive racial structures requires the social articulation of an alternative positive vision of human relations. To put the matter in this way is already to suggest why (as the second thesis claims) a focus on economics and politics must be supplemented by a focus on the spiritual aspect of the question: For the social articulation of an alternative vision of human relations presupposes a vision of human possibilities and the principles that might underlie them. The emphasis of the third thesis on collective social practices stems from the fact that race—like social phenomena in general— is not simply a matter of subjective beliefs but is itself reproduced by intersubjective social practices and institutions. Thus the alternative vision must be socially articulated as well—that is, it must be embodied in social practices and institutions.

[Page 33] Several consequences follow from focusing on the oneness of humanity as a positive, anticipatory, spiritual vision that must be articulated socially. To say that the anticipatory vision must be socially articulated is to say that those committed to transcending a “raced” world must be prepared to cultivate alternative social practices that operate on the basis of “de-raced” categories. One cannot simply decide to think race away in one’s daily life when that life is conducted in a social context where race clearly does exist; falsely supposing that race is a subjective phenomenon, one might very well leave the racial status quo intact. Rather, one must develop and participate in new social practices that operate on an alternative “de-raced” basis. An ethic of the oneness of humanity must be put into practice structurally. This is not solely the realm of the individual but also the realm of society. The principle of the oneness of humanity must be institutionalized at this level. If organized religion is to be a positive force in society, at the very least it must provide a social setting in which alternative social possibilities can be practiced and institutionalized.

To say—as the fourth thesis does—that alternative social practices must be animated by an anticipatory vision of the oneness of humanity is, in part, to say that these social practices must recognize and respect the dignity owed to each individual by virtue of his or her humanity as such. But the principle of the oneness of humanity is not solely a matter of the recognition of the dignity of the individual as a human being. It is also a matter of situating that dignity within the context of what unites each human being with his or her fellows. A spiritual understanding of the oneness of humanity does not stop, for example, with the formal recognition of human rights due to each individual (backed by the exercise of force by the institutionalized apparatus of the state); it supplements the defense of rights with a commitment to cultivating virtues such as detachment, love, and sacrifice that must also find a place in human relations. Such virtues are not susceptible to formal codification and institutionalization (as a set of laws, for example); they must find their way into social practices in a different way, more dependent upon the conscious exercise of individual choice and will. In this respect, the actors of civil society, such as religious communities, universities, community groups, and so on, are supremely relevant. But the state itself may play a positive role as well. For other than its direct use of its legal apparatus and its regulatory economic functions, the state typically also regulates the public education system, which is, together with the family structure, one of the most important settings for the formative processes of socialization. Thus the state can indirectly play an important role in the cultivation of the individual virtues necessary to sustain social practices expressive of the principle of the oneness of humanity.

On the one hand, the fact that the vision of the oneness of humanity must be socially articulated and institutionalized means that the concept of “humanity,” which serves to organize our thoughts and actions, may require being mediated by the more particularistic identities that are current within our social world as it is. One might find oneself committed to “humanity” as an African-American, or as an American, or as a Bahá’í. This was the argument of philosopher Alaine Locke for whom the oneness of humanity does not imply sameness. [Page 34] On the other hand, as Locke himself acknowledged, the appeal to particularistic identities must always remain partial. While struggles to establish a world beyond race in the United States can make strategic use of, for example, a common American identity and American traditions that provide alternatives to racist structures, ultimately such struggles must reach beyond American identity and tradition. For American traditions include not just the civil-rights movement and the declaration that “all men are created equal” but also the KKK and the Japanese internment. To pick some elements but not others as representing the tradition at its best requires implicitly referring to some criterion beyond the tradition itself, since mining the tradition itself for such a criterion begs the question.

The anticipatory aspect of the oneness of humanity suggests that the concept of “humanity” points to a forever-unattainable critical universal principle that guides our actions. Any particular social articulation of the universal principle remains partial, limited, and contingent and, thus, subject to critique and revision. What the universal is can never be fully articulated or realized. Rather, like an unattainable horizon that is always within sight but that recedes with each advancing step, it is simultaneously a standard that is articulated, applied, and embodied (and so limited) by our current social practices and moral imagination and that serves to expose the limitations of these practices and our imagination. As philosopher and literary theorist Judith Butler has put it:

To claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist that the “not yet” is proper to an understanding of the universal itself: that which remains “unrealized” by the universal constitutes it essentially. The universal begins to become articulated precisely through challenges to its existing formulations and this challenge emerges from those who are not covered by it. . . . the universal, far from being commensurate with its conventional formulation, emerges as a postulated and open-ended ideal that has not been adequately encoded by any given set of legal conventions. . . . A universality that is yet to be articulated might well defy or confound the existing conventions that govern our anticipatory imaginings.

The universalist aspirations of the principle of the oneness of humanity imply that such a vision can never be defined and socially articulated once and for all. Its universalist aspirations also point to its own moral limitations as an approximation of the universal, prompting us to see the oneness of humanity as but one more finite step along a moral journey whose uncharted road ahead is built and rebuilt with each attempt to go forward.

[Page 35]

Metastasis

She listens to his breathing

syncopate with the ocean’s.

Every seventh wave crashes

with more sibilance

than the preceding six,

and with this seventh,

she hears him sigh in his bedroom.

She rolls over to the sudden dawn

and the recollection

that soon they must rise

to face the appointment he has today.

Hour upon hour

in the hospital waiting room

Clocks click while

TV airwaves spawn disorders

that randomly multiply.

Then surprisingly, she’s alone.

She cuts off the sets.

The receptionist steps over and turns on

“The Young and the Restless.”

Others filter in from a smoke break,

cups of coffee. Three other channels

are tuned in to a steady dose.

An amoebic mind engulfs her.

The emotional charge amplifies

each time a surgeon enters this room

of people named in the space:

Notify in Emergency.

In time, the doctor she’s waiting for

is sitting next to her.

Her picture of him flickers

as his voice ruptures

the membrane of white noise.

He carries her with him,

ebbing and flowing,

in an ocean that breaks,

spreading, spreading

upon a distant and future shore.

—Cynthia Sheperd Jaskwhich

Copyright © 2002 by Cynthia Sheperd Jaskwhich

[Page 36]

[Page 37]

Children and Racism:
The Complexities of Culture
and Cognition

BY DAVID DIEHL AND ELIZABETH ANSEL KIRSCH

Copyright © 2002 by David Diehl and Elizabeth Ansel Kirsch.

IN ITS 1991 statement The Vision of Race Unity: America’s Most Challenging Issue, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, the national governing body of the Bahá’ís in the forty-eight contiguous United States, wrote:

Notwithstanding the efforts already expended for its elimination, racism continues to work its evil upon this nation. Progress toward tolerance, mutual respect, and unity has been painfully slow and marked with repeated setbacks . . . To ignore the problem is to expose the country to physical, moral, and spiritual danger.

The National Spiritual Assembly stressed not only the insidious nature of racism but also the sense of urgency that should mark our efforts, appealing “to all people of goodwill to arise without further delay to resolve” America’s “fundamental social problem.” To understand why progress has been “painfully slow,” we must examine the findings of current science about how race is understood and the implications this process has for education, since it is through education that our best hope lies for eradicating prejudice, and it is in the field of education that we can study current progress. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the son of Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, and the appointed interpreter of His father’s writings, is reported to have expressed His wish that teachers be “well-grounded in the science of pedagogy and familiar with child psychology,” two areas key to raising a prejudice-free generation.

Raising a Prejudice-Free Generation. The Bahá’í writings clearly argue for the education of children as a means of eradicating racism. But many Bahá’ís, like many others interested in the challenge, have approached the task influenced by several commonsense beliefs about the acquisition and reduction of prejudice. Recent research has raised serious doubts about such commonsense notions, as study after study has cast uncertainty on seemingly axiomatic beliefs about prejudice. For example, research suggests that there is little correlation between children’s beliefs about race and the racial beliefs of their parents and friends. Moreover, little evidence exists to suggest that multicultural [Page 38] education reduces prejudice, even in the short term; in fact, there is evidence that some educational programs aimed at reducing prejudice actually increase it.

If progress in the arena of racial equality has been slow, part of the blame may lie in naive beliefs that posit children as passive absorbers of racial information from the social environment. Research unambiguously tells us, however, that children cannot be viewed as inactive recipients of adult attitudes, be they positive or negative. What is called for, then, is a critical examination of our current beliefs and practices around both acquiring prejudice and reducing prejudice and a commensurate recognition that the processes are far more complex than we may have imagined. This exploration is neither exhaustive in its review of literature nor comprehensive in its treatment of how children learn about race. Rather than answer questions, it primarily seeks to raise them, hoping they will be a catalyst for the vitally important discussion of how we can help children break free from the blind imitations of the past.

How Race Comes To Be Known

COMMONSENSE Beliefs about Racial Awareness. Although some adults may believe that children are color-blind, even children as young as five exhibit high levels of prejudice and are aware of race even before that age. Commonsense belief generally views such prejudice in children as an imitation of adult or adolescent attitudes; in essence, this belief posits that children first develop a neutral awareness of physical differences among people and only later develop attitudes about them. Prejudice, in this belief, is the result of children’s adopting attitudes about perceptual differences that are based on misinformation or distortion. When children exhibit prejudicial behaviors or attitudes, it is generally assumed that they are naively mirroring adults or peers and are incapable of understanding their actions. This romantic view of children as innocents, unable to make sense of complex aspects of the social world, is an important part of commonsense belief and has major implications for how adults interact with children. It implies that prejudice in children is not a sign of malice but is a relatively blameless parroting of adult behavior. Since prejudice is viewed as the mimicking of inaccurate or distorted views of a group of people, it, theoretically, can be corrected by the presentation of more accurate information by an adult whom the child has accepted as a model.

However, studies have shown that with young children there is a weak relationship between racial attitudes and behaviors. One indicator of this is the finding that the highly prejudiced beliefs of children are not related to their choice in playmates, although some evidence exists that this may change as children grow older. It has largely been assumed that what children say and think about race is intimately connected to their behavior, but [Page 39] this connection is not fully supported by evidence.

While commonsense beliefs about how children first come to understand race are inadequate, turning to the formal scholarship of race is also problematic. Research on how humans acquire racial beliefs has come from a wide range of disciplines—anthropology, biology, history, literary criticism, philosophy, political science, and sociology—but, despite such diversity, almost all the scholarship falls into one of two approaches. One approach, adopted primarily by psychologists, seeks to explain how we understand race by studying underlying mental processes. In this approach race is understood as largely, if not entirely, a psychological phenomenon. The second approach— preferred in the comparative and interpretive disciplines such as history, anthropology, and philosophy—tries to explain our contemporary understandings of race as the product of social and historical forces.

The Psychological Perspective. The psychological perspective argues that racial thinking is a result of how we organize and process information from the physical environment and that the primary way in which we do so is by creating categories. This ability to take information from the natural environment and create category-based knowledge is fundamental to our ability to make sense of the world. Because we take in large amounts of information, far too much to process, we make categories as a necessary mental shortcut.

Some of the information that we acquire is information about other people. We create categories of people based on numerous characteristics, stable and transient, physical and mental. When we encounter new people, we unconsciously attempt to put them into these categories, thereby allowing us to choose our actions based on previous experience. We know what angry people are like and how they tend to behave. As soon as we categorize someone we have just met as being angry, we have a better understanding of how to deal with that person.

Sex and race are the two “appearance” categories that have attracted the most attention from researchers, largely because they appear to be the most salient. This saliency is usually attributed to the fact that we most easily create categories based on physical similarities and that sex and race both have obvious physical correlates. Like all mental categories, sex and race categories allow us to make cognitive simplifications, often called stereotypes. While stereotypes are a necessary, and usually benign, means of making sense of the vast amounts of information we encounter daily, stereotypes derived from sex and race categories often result in undesirable patterns of action and belief. Exactly how these typically benign mental processes become distorted is unclear, but in attempting to understand how it happens in children, no person has been more influential than the French philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget.

The Piagetian Perspective. Piaget proposed a theory of cognitive capability that divides the development of humans into distinct stages through which they move sequentially. He argued that children’s thinking is fundamentally different from adults’ thinking and viewed children’s lives as movement through a series of increasingly more complex stages of cognitive development that eventually ends with adult levels of thought. Piaget argued that cognitive development, at its most basic level, moves from the concrete to the abstract, a view that has had an enormous impact on the study of how children develop and, by extension, on how they develop racial awareness. [Page 40] By assuming that young children cannot understand abstract social categories such as race, Piaget seems to imply that they can only understand race perceptually and that their expressions of abstract thought are imitations of adult thought, not reflections of the children’s realities. Much of the work on racial awareness within developmental psychology employs basic Piagetian principles, especially the movement from concrete to abstract, and seeks to explain racial understanding in terms of cognitive development. Steven M. Quintana, a contemporary developmental psychologist, offers one such cognitive-developmental model.

Developmental Model. Quintana’s four-stage model posits that children move, in general terms, from concrete and literal to more abstract understandings of race and ethnicity and from passively received to actively constructed notions of personal ethnic identity. The assumption underlying Quintana’s model, and most of the developmental work on children’s racial understanding, is that the movement from literal to abstract thought happens in all areas of children’s thinking.

Quintana illustrates the movement from literal to abstract when he describes the responses that children in different modes of thought gave to the question “How can a person become ‘more Mexican-American’?” Physically minded three to six year olds said that a person could only become more Mexican-American by switching bodies. Six to ten year olds said it could be accomplished by learning Spanish or eating more Mexican food. Preadolescents, more aware of the nonobservable aspects of ethnicity, said that, to be more Mexican-American, a person should hang around Mexican-Americans. These answers represented what Quintana called the movement from physical to literal to social descriptions of ethnicity. Like Piaget, Quintana views a child’s movement from one level to the next as a result of an increase in cognitive ability. Also like Piaget, Quintana sees a child’s development as synonymous with the change from concrete and less complex thinking to abstract and more complex “adult thinking.”

Critique of the Psychological Perspective. The psychological view alone cannot, however, adequately account for the process of racialist thinking. More important, psychologists do not have a theory specific to the development of racialist thinking. Rather, they elaborate other theories about mental processing that produces beliefs about categories (for example, Quintana’s model).

Moreover, because of the general reliance on Piagetian developmental models, the psychological perspective is open to all of the typical criticism leveled at Piaget. There is strong evidence that children are capable, in at least some areas, of thinking abstractly before Piagetian theory would allow them to. Piaget focused primarily on cognitive development and did not formally study behavioral and affective contributions to cognitive development. Empirical testing of Piagetian theory has usually consisted only of attitudinal and psychological research, but, as mentioned earlier, racialized attitudes and behaviors seem weakly correlated. The assumption that underlies this approach, as seen in Quintana, is that children’s racial understanding is primarily located in the cognitive area and develops in a sequential fashion from concrete to abstract, from childlike [Page 41] to adultlike. Again, research seems to belie this view because it discounts the complex, nonlinear nature of thinking as well as the contribution of behavioral and affective components to understandings and interpretations about race and ethnicity.

The second major criticism of Piagetian theory is that it vastly underestimates the effect of culture on children’s thinking and cognitive development. Piaget paid little attention to how social institutions, such as families and schools, and social tools, such as language, influence children’s development. He viewed intellectual growth as being governed by the same laws as biological growth, as a naturally unfolding process only tangentially affected by culture. Hence, even when reading the work of authors such as Quintana who seek to employ Piagetian developmentalism in understanding processes deeply rooted in culture and social history, one must remember that the focus of Piagetian theory is primarily on the intellectual development of the individual.

The Sociocultural Perspective. In contrast to the psychological perspective, the sociocultural perspective of racialist thinking argues that race is an invented phenomenon, a result of, among other things, the desire of certain groups to practice control over others. In this view, although humans have always understood physical differences, current racial thinking is a unique phenomenon of Western colonization. In fact, some proponents of this view argue that racial thinking was virtually nonexistent before Europe’s colonization of Africa and the Western Hemisphere. This claim, which taken at face value seems to fly in the face of thousands of years of slavery and ethnic fighting, is based on a distinction between ethnocentrism and tribalism, on one hand, and racism, on the other. For many in the social sciences ethnocentrism and tribalism represent preferences for one’s own group and can be found throughout recorded history. Racism, however, is a modern ideology based on the belief that humans can be hierarchically ranked based on biological differences. It is this belief that race represents biological differences that is uniquely modern and, for the advocates of the sociocultural perspective, the defining feature of modern racial thought.

Advocates of the sociocultural perspective do not necessarily believe, however, that this five-hundred-year-old phenomenon of viewing race as a biological category has been the cause of racism. In fact, many see the relationship going in the opposite direction. For these scholars, racist ideology did not result in slavery but proceeded from it as a justification. Marxist scholar Eugene Genovese represents this view well when he writes that “Race relations did not determine the patterns of slavery in the world; the patterns of slavery . . . determined race relations.”

Critique of the Sociocultural Perspective. The sociocultural perspective, taking many of its cues from the Marxist and post-Marxist thought of scholars such as Genovese, views racism largely in terms of institutions and power. While in the psychological perspective the essential task can be seen as trying to break out of mental structures inherent in human development and thinking, in the sociocultural perspective the essential task is to break out of corrupt social structures. Too often, however, advocates of the sociocultural perspective fail to account for, adequately, [Page 42] the individual mental processes of people operating within these social structures.

Neither the psychological nor the sociocultural view fully captures the complexity of racial thinking. A more promising model is a dynamic interaction between the developing cognitive capacities of the child and the sociostructural environment.

Creating a New Paradigm: The Contributions of Lawrence Hirschfeld. Since the 1980s many scholars have posited models of the development of racialized thinking that seek to incorporate both the propensities of the mind and the particulars of culture. Some of these scholars do so by arguing that racial prejudice and stereotyping are conceptually distinct. They see stereotyping as an inherent cognitive classification system and prejudice as a combination of this system with negative affective variables. These scholars offer, in other words, explanations of racial awareness that posit racism as a distortion of a natural cognitive process.

In Race In the Making, Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, a cultural anthropologist from the University of Michigan, offers one such explanation of how children become aware of race. Hirschfeld argues that the psychological and sociocultural perspectives fall short in two ways. First, each underestimates the importance of the other; they fail to acknowledge that historical and cultural conditions and mental processes are equally important. Second, they fail to recognize that racial categories are not a result of placing together people who look alike so much as it is a result of placing together people who are perceived to have similar internal characteristics, such as honesty or intelligence, or who engage in similar activities. Thus Hirschfeld’s thesis is that racial awareness is a conceptual rather than perceptual matter.

The conceptual versus perceptual distinction is extremely important. Most research in the area of how children become aware of race, drawing on Piagetian developmental theory, has assumed that children come to understand race perceptually, that they create categories based on skin color and other visual cues. Only later, when they have become more cognitively developed, are they able to create more abstract categories. Hirschfeld proposes that children have a more complex understanding of race than this and that even at an early age they can organize concepts around nonobvious, nonperceptual, and nonsurface cues. He proposes that emerging racial beliefs are not based so much on the appearance of others as on conceptualizations about the kinds of people they are and the labels language gives to them. He does not deny the importance of perceptual cues but rather sees them as also interacting with conceptual cues. Ultimately he is arguing that “racial concepts give rise to perceptual awareness rather than perceptual awareness giving rise to racial concepts.” In contrast to the accepted belief that children’s initial racial categories are based on perceptual, obvious clues about differences, Hirschfeld argues that children seek to make conceptual categories about “kinds” of people.

The argument, then, is something like this: The mind seeks to organize and understand the social world by making categories about the “kinds” of people in it, and culture leads children to believe that race represents [Page 43] an especially important set of categorical “kinds.” It is not, however, arbitrary that race so easily becomes an important category in children’s attempts to make sense of their social worlds.

It is the perceptual nature of race (its ability to be “seen”) that allows it to be so easily grasped by the mind and that accounts for part of the tendency of racial thinking to assume that a person’s race identifies essential and intrinsic aspects of that person. Class, in contrast, is also important in understanding power relations. But, because class cannot be easily represented perceptually (that is, it is much more difficult to place people in class categories than racial categories simply by looking at them), we tend not, at least in the United States, to think of a person’s class as being biologically determined in the way we think of a person’s membership in a racial group as being so determined. Hirschfeld argues that the result of this is that thinking about race easily lends itself to naive beliefs about people’s essential nature, a process he calls the “recasting of relations of power in terms of the more palpable and palatable relations of blood.”

Hirschfeld also argues that we interpret information about others as being either essential or incidental to who they are because we discern between two types of categories of people. The first represents intrinsic, or essential, aspects of a person. Race and gender are two such categories. The second involves things in which people engage. We tend to think that people who engage in camping share certain qualities (for example, a love of nature), but we do not assume such qualities to be intrinsic or essential. Jean-Paul Sartre, the twentieth-century existentialist philosopher, offered an interesting story that demonstrates this distinction. He met an anti-Semitic woman and asked her why she hated Jews. She explained that her bitter feelings were the result of a bad experience she had had with a Jewish furrier. Why is it, Sartre then wondered, that the woman grew to hate Jews and not furriers? The story is, of course, intentional in its use of such a benign occupation, but its essential point is trenchant. The woman assumed that being a Jew implied certain intrinsic characteristics while being a furrier was simply incidental. Why the woman would develop a hatred for Jews and not furriers plays a central role in understanding the mediation of the tendencies of the mind and the specifics of society to create a system of racialist thinking in children. As sociologists Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin recently pointed out, however, how racialist thinking develops is only one part of the larger question of how prejudice can be eliminated.

How Prejudice Is Reduced

EDUCATIONAL Approaches. Current understanding of the development of racial awareness clearly states that educational approaches and techniques must be sensitive to children’s developmental processes and must offer children ample opportunities to practice what they learn. The assumption underlying most books, curricula, and programs is, however, that information alone reduces prejudice. But this commonsense belief is only weakly supported. Thus current multicultural and antiracist curricula alone have rarely been successful in effecting even short-term changes in attitude change. Rebecca S. Bigler, a psychologist [Page 44] at the University of Texas at Austin, argues this is so because little of the work grounded in developmental theory takes into account the sociocultural contributions to racial understanding. Rather, most work has been based on traditional learning theory, relying on the notion of “counterconditioning,” which assumes that repeated pairings of positive characteristics with ethnic minorities will, in the future, result in a positive response to members of those groups.

Bigler also contends the failure is at least partly due to four faulty assumptions that underlie most attempts to modify behavior. First is the assumption, already discussed, that children are passive absorbers of environmental messages about race, including messages from programs aimed at reducing prejudice. It is clear, however, that children do not always absorb what adults intended. They often distort, rationalize, or simply ignore much information. Bigler and Lynn S. Liben, also a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, found that, when read a story about a “nice” African-American boy and a “mean” European-American boy, children often, when asked to recall the story, reported it was the African-American boy who was “mean.”

The second faulty assumption, according to Bigler, is that mechanisms involved in attitude formation and change are the same across all ages. This ignores the developmental and logical constraints on thinking. Bigler reports that, when young children are exposed to many types of multicultural stories, they often endorse simplistic stereotypes in response. If children are not cognitively capable of attuning to the complexities of culture and history, they may create simple and stereotypical categories based on these stories. As children develop cognitively, so, too, does their ability to remember counterstereotypic information.

The third assumption, Bigler says, is that children are motivated to adopt and internalize the messages presented to them. They may, however, have reason to resist them. Stereotypes have emotional and motivational as well as cognitive and behavioral aspects. Little research has focused on these aspects of children’s racial understanding, but they may help explain the difference in the beliefs of children and parents. Since stereotypes are often accompanied by emotional aspects, children may unconsciously defend them against contradictory information, even if it comes from their parents. It seems as though children do not so much internalize adult beliefs as they choose from among the beliefs that are available to them, whether, for example, from parents, peers, the larger community, or the media.

The fourth assumption, according to Bigler, posits a unifactoral or one-dimensional model of racial beliefs and behavior (that is, that belief and behavior development are directly related). As mentioned before, however, attitudes and behavior are only weakly correlated. For example, Lawrence Kohlberg, a developmental psychologist who was strongly influenced by Piaget’s work, found that, although children and adolescents could reason at a sophisticated moral level, their behavior did not always reflect that reasoning. He hypothesized that this discrepancy was [Page 45] because of the many other factors such as peer influence, societal influence, and fear of punishment that also exert strong influences on behavior. Racial belief and behavior are wide in scope and cut across numerous areas. Evidence exists that a change in racial attitudes in one area may not necessarily affect attitudes or behaviors in other areas. Therefore, approaches to creating racial unity must be broad in scope, focusing on beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors in many aspects of life.

Bigler’s four assumptions that inform most work aimed at reducing prejudice are highly informative and useful. We feel, however, that she has missed a vitally important fifth assumption—that concerning adult beliefs. In the same way that we are increasingly recognizing the complexity of children’s understandings of race, we see that the same complexity is true for adults. Research has heightened awareness of the influence that adults’ implicit and tacit beliefs about race and racism have on the way they teach children. Related to the fifth assumption is the belief held by those who are committed to reducing prejudice that there is a consensus about the nature of racism, about its scope and urgency, and about what reducing prejudice is supposed to accomplish. This is, however, not necessarily the case. Patricia Calderwood, a contemporary educator and theorist, for example, found in her work in schools that groups that share important core beliefs tend to generalize this concord and make unsubstantiated assumptions about how strong consensus is. It is possible, therefore, that adult beliefs about race may not harmonize with the content or purpose of the curriculum they are teaching. We need to ask ourselves, then, to what degree does our commitment to race unity mask contradictory beliefs about the nature of race, the scope and causes of racism, and the needed actions and barriers to achieving race unity.

Fostering Interdependence. What else is known about the process of reducing prejudice? One contribution to our understanding comes from Gordon Allport, a social psychologist who, in the 1960s, developed what is known as “contact theory,” a theory outlining some of the necessary factors for reducing prejudice. Earlier work had demonstrated that increasing contact between children of various ethnic groups did not alone reduce prejudice (and, indeed, often exasperated it). Allport identified four conditions necessary for reducing prejudice: (1) social and institutional support; (2) contact that is sufficiently long and close; (3) equal status of participants; and (4) opportunities for cooperation. In the decades since, the first three factors have been found to be mildly associated with reducing prejudice.

However, the fourth condition—the essential task of cooperation—has been clearly linked to reducing prejudice when it is marked by interdependence and a high level of student-student interaction (as opposed to the typical teacher-student interactions found in most classrooms). Yet it is clear that cooperative situations must be deliberately structured. [Page 46] For doing so, there are three theoretical paradigms of group cooperation.

Allport’s conditions for reducing prejudice carry with them explicit and implicit beliefs concerning assimilation and pluralism of which their advocates may not be aware but which affect their eventual utility. The first approach of group cooperation is that of “decategorization,” which emphasizes the slow elimination of categories. Students are encouraged to cease viewing themselves as members of an ethnic group and simply see themselves as individuals. The second approach is that of “recategorization,” or the creation of superordinate categories that encompass previous categories. Here students are encouraged to see everyone as members of a large, all-encompassing category, such as “human.” The third approach to group cooperation seeks to maintain the salience of different ethnic groups and to foster between-group cooperation.

The first two approaches of group cooperation ask children to disconnect themselves from their own ethnic identity, a task both cognitively dubious and possibly socially harmful. Since both the mind and society provide a strong inclination to see race, success seems more likely with approaches that emphasize unity in diversity than with those that emphasize uniformity or color blindness. Using Allport’s conditions, a combination of approaches two and three suggest a way to foster unity in diversity and cooperation among groups while still acknowledging one’s membership in a larger community.

Implications

CURRENT educational practice must be reevaluated with the knowledge that positive group interaction is a key aspect of the development of positive racial attitudes. Children must be given ample opportunity to work authentically and interdependently with children of other ethnic backgrounds and to have a forum for honest and frank discussions about race. Too often children are given neither. While many parents seek racially diverse schools for their children, diversity is only a virtue to the degree that children are able to interact with other students in purposeful and meaningful ways. Likewise, if students are not given opportunities to discuss controversial aspects of race, simply being in a racially diverse environment may act to reinforce already held prejudices. While an evaluation of current teaching practice is well beyond the scope of this exploration, it must be noted that more traditional forms of teacher-centered pedagogy, such as lecturing or independent work, offer little opportunity for student-student interactions. To the extent that classes can be socially interactive and make use of pedagogies such as cooperative learning, project-based learning, and other group techniques, the likelihood of interdependent work—and the reduction of prejudice —is heightened.

Increasingly, strategies used in schools to reduce prejudice are designed in ways that recognize the impact of the beliefs of teachers on how students learn. One such strategy, for example, designed by well-known multicultural educators Beverly Tatum and Sandra M. Lawrence, includes not only training on how to teach children about racism but also a four-month staff development section in which teachers define racism, explore how educators and children manifest it, and receive tips for handling it in schools.

Community as Classroom/Classroom as Community. There is a strong belief among contemporary educators that one way to enhance [Page 47] learning is to create a sense of community in the classroom, both for children and adults. In a classroom community the students consult with one another, solve problems, work cooperatively, and learn to work successfully both academically and socially. Creating such an environment is the active responsibility of both the teacher and the student.

Cooperation and interdependence, the variables that seem to be most successfully associated with reducing prejudice, are central aspects of this type of academic community. These are also central values in the Bahá’í community. How these dimensions of community life and their expressions can be exploited to foster the foundations of racial unity need to be considered further by educators, from those who work with young children to those whose primary interest is adult education.

Paradoxically, in light of the discussion on how racialist thinking is developed, a community’s focus on racial unity may actually present a special problem. Children are frequently exposed to ideas and language of racial unity but rarely are provided forums for discussing or investigating aspects of reality that seem to contradict these claims. In their social lives, for example, children may accumulate much evidence that belies the claim of racial unity, and such evidence must be weighed carefully and given a legitimate forum for discussion.

Parents, teachers, and other adults who interact with children must recognize that even young children can have complex and abstract notions about race. Racial statements by children may not be the simple mimicking of adult culture but their own attempts to theorize about, and make sense of, the social world. The commonsense view that children are naive about race has had several negative consequences. Well-meaning parents, teachers, and other role models can fall into the error of not discussing race with children; when children make possibly offensive remarks, adults may quickly silence them. Young children implicitly learn that race is a taboo topic; and when it is discussed, it is done so in sanitized language. Drawing on discussions with hundreds of children, Diane Hughes, a psychologist at New York University, concluded that “children think race but believe they should not.”

Conclusion

THIS exploration was not intended to be an exhaustive review of the inter- and cross-disciplinary work on how children develop racial understanding nor on how to ameliorate or eliminate racial and ethnic prejudice. Rather, it is an attempt to review some of the new scientific contributions to the issues discussed and to begin to think about how these understandings might be reflected in both contemporary education and in Bahá’í community life. Although the exact processes that give rise to prejudice are still unclear, we have begun to accumulate a good deal of scientific knowledge about them. We have also learned much about what strategies for reducing prejudice do and do not work. What we have not learned, it seems, is how to apply this knowledge systematically. Our best intentions and sincerest efforts will not be fruitful if they are not informed by our current understandings [Page 48] of how children and adults think, especially about race. Likewise, simply understanding the science will also fail to yield results because the science makes extraordinary claims on us. What science tells us must be done—fundamentally restructuring social patterns, reexamining cherished beliefs, calling our own thinking into account —requires an enormous commitment. It is the combination of good will and informed action that will best help our children create a prejudice-free society and help accelerate the “painfully slow” process of solving America’s “fundamental social problem.”

[Page 49]

Authors & Artists

ARASH ABIZADEH is an assistant professor at Wesleyan University, where he teaches contemporary political theory and the history of political philosophy. He received his M.Phil. from Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar in 1994 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2001. His publications include articles in Political Theory, Rationality and Society, and Bahá’í Studies Review.

ALGERNON AUSTIN, who received both his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University, is an assistant professor in the sociology department at Wesleyan University. He has published review essays and articles in Qualitative Sociology and Race, Gender, & Class.

DRUZELLE CEDERQUIST holds a Master’s degree from the University of Texas in bicultural studies with a concentration in teaching English as a second language.

DAVID DIEHL will receive his M.Ed. from Lesley University in May 2002. He is currently an assistant teacher at the Mission Hill Elementary School in Boston, Massachusetts. His scholarly interests include the philosophy of education.

MICHAEL FITZGERALD has published twelve books of poetry, nonfiction, and children’s literature. His interests include jazz, classical music, and public policy.

CYNTHIA SHEPERD JASKWHICH freelances full time as a poet-in-residence through the South Carolina Arts Commission’s Artists in Education program.

ELIZABETH ANSEL KIRSCH has just been awarded her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Michigan State University. She also holds two Master’s degrees—an M.A. in early childhood education from Indiana University and an M.S. in clinical psychology from Eastern Michigan University. She has both extensive clinical and teaching experience and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University.

ART CREDITS: Cover design, Jon Solarz, cover photograph, Steve Garrigues; p. 1, Steve Garrigues; p. 8, Simintaj Soroushazri; pp. 22, 36, Steve Garrigues; p. 48, Darius Himes.

FORTHCOMING

Exploring topics of broad social concern at the dawn of a new century and a new millennium, a series of articles on gender—

• Erin Murphy-Graham explores why the education of women is not enough
• Jeanne Gazel examines racially inclusive historiography
• Ja-Yi Cheng-Levine scopes out Dangerous Intersections
• Eric Horton reviews Gregory Nava’s El Norte

[Page 50]