The Racialist Politics of Concepts, or is It the Racialist Concepts of Politics?

Author(s): Virginia R. Dominguez

Source: Ethos, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 93-100
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/640459
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mlfi I il W RI I .1El *iTT Trl mfK I I

The Racialist Politics of Concepts,

or Is It the Racialist Concepts of

Politcs?

VIRGINIA R. DOMINGUEZ

s my title suggests, I am quite interested in what Larry

Hirschfeld attempts to do in his article ("The Conceptual

Politics of Race: Lessons From Our Children," published in

this issue), the intellectual project to which he is committed,

and the logical and empirical grounds on which he stands. I

am convinced he is correct in linking-as his title does explicitly-the

conceptual and the political with the racial. But as my comments will

demonstrate, he and I probably disagree on how those are linked and

which, if any of those, to privilege analytically and ontologically.

Let me begin with a key point in Larry Hirschfeld's article that I find,

intellectually, scientifically, and socially significant. Hirschfeld is inter-

ested in exploring human beings' "ontological commitment to groups as

atoms of social experience" (p. 75). Ontological here refers to perceptions

of "things"-what Richard Handler has called "entitivity" (1988), or what

I more frequently refer to when I write as "objectification" (see, for

example, 1989). The ontology of "race" refers to the claims, premises,

habits of thought, and other socially learned cognitive operations that

support and underwrite the objectification of "race," that is, the often

unconscious learned habit of treating "race" as a thing in the world.

Hirschfeld's interest in ontological commitment makes the issue of ontol-

ogy less abstract and more concretely tied to questions of individual

motivation, psychological investment, and social mobilization. As he tries

to articulate a position that is simultaneously cognitivist and sociopoliti-

cal, he is doing something worthwhile by advocating a switch in focus

from ontology-spatiotemporally contextualized or ahistorical and de-

contextualized-to attachment, commitment, or investment.

Virginia R. Dominguez is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for International and Comparative

Studies at the University of Iowa.

Ethos 25(1):93-100. Copyright ?1997, American Anthropological Association.

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94 * ETHOS

This has potentially eye-opening consequences, although I believe it

may contradict some of Larry Hirschfeld's own analytical investments.

For example, if the truly interesting questions turned out to be what kind

of attachment, commitment, or investment particular individuals and

groups of individuals have in "race," it would not be methodologically

appropriate to predetermine the outcome of research by conceptualizing

racialism and racism as "two distinct cultural practices" (p. 63). Commit-

ment, attachment, and investment are all likely to be a matter of degree,

not either/or possibilities. And they all suggest the mutual implication and

interdependence of "ideas" and "forms of mobilization"-and not a case

of linear (logical or historical) causality.

Larry Hirschfeld should be commended for trying to relate simulta-

neously to scholarly communities that at best pass each other in the night,

even though they share a common concern with "race" and with forms

of inequality long structured in terms of "race." Yet his effort has slips

and cracks that call into question-at the core-the very viability of a

transcendent position or, for that matter, of an "intermediate" or recon-

ciliatory or genuinely mutually acceptable "third" position. Hirschfeld

says that "we need simply to turn each approach on its head" (p. 64), but

that implies maintaining a link to "each approach," still relating to "each

approach," and still drawing on "each approach." Like Marshall Sahlins's

wonderfully ambitious book, Culture and Practical Reason (1976), which

sought, critics argued, unsuccessfully to transcend a historical antinomy

between "idealism" and "materialism" (or transcendental philosophy and

empiricism) in social theory, Hirschfeld's effort here seeks to transcend

a particular philosophical divide. But, as I will show, Hirschfeld, like

Sahlins, ends up effectively staying on one side of the divide.

This reading may surprise Larry Hirschfeld, but I rely heavily on his

own words at key moments in his article. For example, at the end of the

introductory section of the article (where he frames, sets up, and arguably

summarizes his position), he writes:

In short, race is not a category of mind because it is a category of power, nor is it a

category of power because it is a general category of mind. Instead, race is a category

of power because it is a singular, unique category of mind. [p. 64]

Having set up an opposition between two camps-putting "psychologists"

in one camp and "anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and political

scientists" in a different and oppositional camp, Hirschfeld argues that

the former view race "as a category of power because it is a category of

mind," whereas the latter view race as "a category of mind because it is

a category of (certain) power relations" (p. 63). Memorable and distinctive

as these phrases may be, their messages may be clearer if articulated

differently. In both cases, Hirschfeld is positing a cause and effect rela-

tionship, and arguing that there are two identifiable sets of scholars,

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The Racialst Politics of Concepts ? 95

differentiated by discipline, that differ radically-indeed he believes are

diametrically opposed-because they have the causal arrow pointing in

opposite directions. And in both cases Hirschfeld believes one thing gets

treated as cause, hence as privileged force. If then the point is that

psychologists privilege race as "a category of mind" whereas social

scientists (anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and political scien-

tists) privilege race as " a category of power," it is clear that Hirschfeld

himself remains within the psychologists' camp he names by conceptual-

izing race first and foremost as "a singular, unique category of mind" (p.

64, emphasis added).

Consider other versions of the causality built into Hirschfeld's argu-

ment and what he actually privileges. On page 73, he summarizes that he

"would like to go further and propose that racial essentialism is not only

a property of mind; it is a domain-specific property of mind." A few lines

later, we find, "it is precisely because race is essentialized that it serves

systems of power and authority so well." Or, in the conclusion, though he

cites Stuart Hall's remark that race "naturally" naturalizes (1980),

Hirschfeld does so in order to take it in a particular direction that I

strongly doubt Hall would accept. He writes:

[Race] has in it-in its psychological core-a naturalizing and essentializing potency

that makes it a particularly powerful political trope. Instead of seeing this potency as

derived from the political economic environment, as comparativists have typically

done, it makes more sense to argue that the political environment recruits a particular

way of viewing and reasoning about human difference, because this particular way of

viewing the world has important consequences for how readily a system of power and

domination can be implemented. [p. 86, emphasis added]

To ensure the proper reading of these sentences, Hirschfeld himself

adds, and ends the paragraph, with the statement "race is a category of

power because it is a peculiar category of mind." This makes sense when

we qualify "category of mind" by saying "a very specific category of mind."

And in his conclusion, "systems of power continue to make contact with

and recruit race because it is easy to think. In doing so, our cognitive

architecture makes a political architecture possible" (p. 87). Hence, after

all is said and done, to Hirschfeld "race" is a category of mind (logically?

autobiographically? historically?) before it is a category of power. His is

indeed a critique of much of the literature that he sorts into two camps,

but it is a friendlier critique of the "psychologists" than it is of the social

scientists he labels comparativists.

Tied to this position are two analytic concepts he works with that can

offer clarity and utility. One is his proposition about "human kinds," the

other about underdetermination. But also tied to this position are two

premises, specifically about race, that I find problematic and are probably

based on underestimating how spatiotemporally and societally specific

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96 * ETHOS

racial thinking is: (1) that "race" is easy to learn, and (2) that race is

fundamentally predicated on the visible.

Hirschfeld repeatedly and consistently states that race is not a

natural category of mind (p. 74, for example), and it is clear that he means

that it is not necessary, not the only, and not a cognitively inevitable way

of reducing human complexity through a simplifying, sorting mechanism.

In many ways I believe the argument he is making is Ldvi-Straussian (for

example, see Levi-Strauss 1966), for it is not the specific principle of

sorting and classifying he is claiming as inevitable and universal but,

rather, the abstract principles that produce sorting/classifying systems

like systems of racial classification. Hirschfeld is more specific than

L6vi-Strauss in his claims, for he is suggesting that there is a special

interest in-indeed a special investment human beings have in-sorting,

classifying, ordering, and otherwise grouping the human world. A cogni-

tive or semiological argument is only part of the picture, if Hirschfeld is

correct. As he writes on page 78, there is also a special level of "ontological

commitment" shared by human beings in the typing/sorting/class-

ifying/grouping of "the human world."

I have my suspicions that this may not be a verifiable scientific claim,

but I believe, nonetheless, that articulating such a claim enables an

important distinction to be made: a distinction between what Hirschfeld

calls "the human kind competence" (p. 75) and the historically, politi-

cally, societally specific forms it takes. This distinction then enables us

to see that systems of racial classification are clearly underdetermined-a

point Hirschfeld makes that I am happy to echo. To wit, "the readiness

to categorize humans into human kinds would necessarily underdeter-

mine any particular system of social referencing. Social belief does not

spring from a human kind module, it is enabled and guided by it. In order

to produce a system of social belief, the human kind module must make

contact with a cultural environment" (p. 78).

But so deeply naturalized is race in the contemporary Anglo-Ameri-

can context (especially in the United States) that Hirschfeld misses a

wonderful opportunity to further undermine the ontological grounds of

raci(ali)sm when he discusses underdetermination but fails to reiterate a

crucial logical step at that point in his argument. If there is indeed a

human-kind creating competence (and I have always suspected there was

something of the sort), it produces "a range of human kinds," as Hirschfeld

acknowledges earlier in the paper on page 75. In other words, it produces

variation in systems of social classification, only one of which is a system

of racial classification. It does not just produce a variety of systems of

racial classification. The point can be culled from other parts of Larry

Hirschfeld's paper, but really needs to be clearly made in his discussion

of how underdetermined systems of racial classifications are.

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The Racialist Politics of Concepts ? 97

But how underdetermined racial classification is remains a likely

point of contention. Hirschfeld acknowledges that race is underdeter-

mined but clearly believes that it is extremely recurrent, if not necessarily

universal. The particular argument about its commonality appears in the

text without serious reference to spatiotemporally developed conditions

of political and economic inequality or the hegemonic power of racial

thinking that accompanied modern and modernist European imperial

expansion as it occurred and imposed itself on large parts of the world

over the past few centuries. Acknowledgment of these historical circum-

stances is there in the paper but largely in his description of points made

by "the comparativists," or in his general statements about cultural and

political environments that he appears to treat as important but "exoge-

nous" to the formation of racial thinking. (For example, see the implicit

contrast made on p. 79 to presumed "innately guided strategies for

acquiring knowledge of human kinds.") When Hirschfeld discusses "race"

as highly recurrent or common, even if not universal, he does it by

referring to seemingly ahistorical properties that presumably explain its

widespread nature-most prominently, that it is a way of partitioning the

social world that is "easy" to learn.

But race is, in fact, not easy to learn. Which system of racial

classification is he referring to when he makes such a claim? There is not

one system of racial classification, one system of racial nomenclature, or

one set of differentiating principles by which racial categories are consti-

tuted. There are several, and they coexist sometimes even in one society,

state, or region (cf. Appiah 1990; Crapanzano 1985; Dominguez 1986,

1995; Labelle 1978; Wade 1993). Adults exposed to racial thinking

through conquest or migration are often puzzled and "misread" the signs.

Biologists, physical anthropologists, and geneticists have never even

agreed on how many different "races of mankind" there are, nor what

criteria of classification to use. The debates have focused both on the

general criteria for classification and on the specific classification of some

named grouping of human beings as one or another "race." Official U.S.

censuses have never agreed either, even in the context of the United

States alone. Who, then, thinks that "race" is easy to learn?

"Race" involves knowing when and how much to rely on phenotypic

criteria, which ones to rely on more and which less when they coexist

and seem to point in different directions, and how presumably different

"race" is from "ethnicity" or "culture" or "class" or "region" or "nation-

ality" or "religion." "Race" involves knowing what is "racial" and what is

not, as well as when to stop racializing some named population and when

to racialize another.

Research on children is a great idea, and I am delighted that Larry

Hirschfeld and some of his colleagues are committed to this kind of

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98 * ETHOS

research. But I disagree that the data he has included in this article

support the view that "race is easy to learn." The short descriptions

offered about the actual design of the two research projects discussed, of

course, do not allow a proper evaluation of the legitimacy of the inferences

drawn. Yet a number of the details concerning research design that are

offered in the article suggest that more modest claims and inferences are

appropriate than those Hirschfeld proposes.

Consider the following. For probably operational reasons, Hirschfeld

employs a very narrow notion of what politics is in these studies he cites.

While elsewhere in his broader work he makes reference to hegemonic

processes and their impact, little of that broader understanding of politics

and power surfaces here in what he takes as evidence of "politics" playing

a role in children's lives. I believe him and his research when he explains

what he does mean-that is, "that race plays little role in shaping

children's choice of association and little role in determining how re-

sources under children's control are distributed" (p. 81). But this says

little about the political significance and valence, to use Hirschfeld's term,

of "race" in children's lives. In a society in which life chances are deeply

patterned by racial classification and differential access to resources, race

plays a huge role in shaping children's access to choice of associates, in

determining what resources children may have under their control, and

in determining who participates in distributory games and practices, with

what habits learned at home, what fears and what privileges those same

children encounter outside the immediate interpersonal situation of play

or exchange. As a hegemonic notion, "race" is, after all, intrinsically a

system of sociopolitical ordering and, hence, inherently political.

That Hirschfeld's own research shows, contrary to some concurrent

and earlier psychological research, that children as young as three in the

contemporary United States already seem to essentialize "race" is most

interesting, but it warrants careful and further research and not yet the

kinds of claims Hirschfeld makes here about race as common and recur-

rent in the world because it is "easy to learn." The studies he refers to

apparently begin with the assumption that there are "blacks" and

"whites," and that they are easily and readily identifiable. We are not told

what pictures the children were shown, but I suspect they were pictures

that exaggerate physical differences between "blacks" and "whites." The

studies did not include presumed representatives of any of the other

currently "racialized" populations in the United States, thereby greatly

simplifying (and arguably overdetermining) the task required of partici-

pating children. Moreover, as footnote six explains, "children were drawn

from preschools in the Ann Arbor area. Ann Arbor is an overwhelmingly

white and middle-class community, and there was no indication that the

racial distribution of children who participated in the study differed from

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The Racialist Politics of Concepts ? 99

that of the community at large" (p. 88). Hence, these were studies done

on children growing up in highly educated, overwhelming white Ameri-

can, middle-class families and public institutions.

To put it differently, from the results of the study I might consider it

justifiable to hypothesize that privileged "white" children growing up in

a somewhat-to-very liberal community in the United States in the 1990s

have indeed by age three learned (1) that there are these human kinds

called "black" and "white," (2) that these human kinds are visibly quite

distinct from each other, (3) that "black" and "white" are obvious refer-

ences to the lightness or darkness of skin color, (4) that in other respects

children are all very much alike, and (5) that it is wrong to think that

"blacks" are inferior. If I am correct, then, the studies say a fair amount

about social and political and class relations in the contemporary United

States, especially among middle- and upper-middle-class "white" Ameri-

cans. They also say a great deal about how much the children have yet to

learn about "race."

The point is that "race" may appear to some people to be "easy to

learn" and in certain periods and regions also "predicated on the visible."

But those appearances-so contrary to all the evidence we do have that

"race" is, in fact, hard to learn-are themselves data we should subject

to careful scrutiny.

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100 ? ETHOS

Sahlins, Marshall

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Wade, Peter

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Columbia. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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