Race,Ethnicity,and Technologies of Belonging

What is this thing called race? Among all the discourses and technologies of belonging that exist, above all in the domain of science, what is a specifically racial discourse and technology? It is valuable to place emphasis on how race is made in practice, as M’charek, Schramm, and Skinner argue in this volume, but how do we recognize that what is being produced is something we can usefully call race? The distinctions of human diversity that are being made in current genetic research are often explicitly distanced by scientists from older ideas of race (e.g., eugenic ideas), but if we want to argue that such distinctions are “racialized,” then this assumes we recognize the “race” in “racialization.” We might agree that race is a technology for apportioning individuals to categorical belongings, using biological markers in the most general sense, yet we must concede that some biological markers are not racial—for example, those used to produce distinctions of gender and sex. So when does the use of biology become racial?

The history of the race concept does not help us in this search for clarity. There is some variation in thinking about when race fully emerges as a concept. Science has been seen as central to the race concept, given the interest of natural historians and scientists in classifying human diversity. The centrality of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life sciences in developing the concept of race has often meant close scholarly attention to these periods. Yet the word emerged in European languages from the fourteenth century and different arguments have been used by humanities scholars to pinpoint the pre-modern era and the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries as the defining epochs for race (Hirschfeld 1996, 33-34). The meaning of race has changed over time, as it has circulated through the interconnected domains of science, politics, and everyday life, but is there anything that connects all these different usages? I argue that, if we trace the changing usage of race and race-like categories (such as ethnicity or even culture, which can be deployed in racialized ways), we can see underlying continuities, which allow us to construct race as an analytic term, with its own particular features, and thus also to detect when a discourse or practice that is not explicitly racial acts in a racializing way.

The situation is made more complex because, since Nazism, and reinforced by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) statements on race in the early 1950s, the use of the term race has become restricted in many contexts, although usage differs according to social domain, so that the term may be less used in certain circles (official discourse) than in others (everyday discourse) and more in some places than others. In science, the term remains contested, with some scientists rejecting the concept (Brown and Armelagos 2001), and others continuing to use it to talk about human population diversity (Bliss 2012; Reardon 2005). Academic and public discourses of belonging began to use terms such as ethnicity and to talk in terms of cultural difference. Still, some scholars have identified racial connotations lurking in these discourses of culture (Balibar 1991; Bonilla-Silva 2003). Goldberg argues that neoliberal regimes have buried race alive: the call to abandon the concept of race as a valid biological category has led to the submergence of an explicit discourse of race, while racialized exclusions continue as part of neoliberal regimes of inequality. This is a situation of “neoliberal raceless racism” (Goldberg 2008, 237).

In Latin America, the “cultural turn” began earlier than in Europe, partly as a reaction against biologically determinist Anglo-Saxon forms of eugenics that condemned racially mixed populations as degenerate: the term race was avoided or tended to be understood as a cultural as much as a biological entity. Yet scholars have seen persistent racialized elements in these cultural discourses (De la Cadena 2000; Stepan 1991). In the United States, and to some extent in the United Kingdom, explicit reference to race has remained common, yet both areas show evidence of this culturalist shift. Discourses about the “culture of poverty” in the United States, which attribute social inequality to deep-seated cultural traits of poor people, or rhetoric about “alien” immigrant cultures swamping the British nation, have been identified as having racial dimensions (Gilroy 1987; Goldberg 1993, 170). The cultural turn has been pronounced in much of continental Europe (Banton 1987; Stolcke 1995). In countries such as France, Germany, and Norway, the term race has been difficult to use in politics or social science and the idea of race only makes an appearance as a corollary of racism. Yet the acknowledged persistence of racism suggests that, as social scientists, we are still able to identify race when we see it, so that we can distinguish racism from nationalism, xenophobia, classism, or ethnocentrism. Admittedly, these phenomena all overlap (Alonso 1994), but scholars still retain the idea that race and racism have particular features, without always specifying what these are. So, how do we know that such situations involve something recognizable as race?

We understand that race changes and that what is invoked by the concept now is not the same as 50, 100, or 500 years ago: Banton (1987) traces the changes in the underlying meaning of race from lineage, through type to subspecies or population; other scholars have identified post World War II “neo-racism” (Balibar 1991). We also understand that what a geneticist means if he or she talks of race is not necessarily the same as what a nongeneticist might mean; and that social scientists may disagree on whether a given situation involves race or not, or whether to use the term/concept at all. Yet it appears that as scholars we often proceed with a taken-for-granted notion of what race is. We need to make that taken-for-granted notion more explicit. This is not a question of producing a rigid definition of what race really is, but of grouping together a range of varied phenomena, which can be seen as belonging together in a way that is analytically productive.

In my view, there are two features—themselves changing historical phenomena—that characterize the family of phenomena usefully seen as racial. These features already underlie a great deal of current analytic usage, without always being explicitly articulated together. First is the idea that race involves some reference to the realm of nature, especially human nature, and more specifically to the realm of heredity, mediated through kinship, and the way heredity is expressed in physical appearance and behavior. The concepts of (human) nature, heredity, and kinship are not subject to simple definition, because they are themselves historically and culturally variable and have been shaped powerfully by changing philosophical and scientific understandings of how these realms function (López Beltrán 2004; Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2007; Wade 2002). Reference to the realm of nature invokes something thought in principle to exist without the intervention of human artifice, but because humans are thought to constantly intervene in practice into this realm, such a reference is already complex—nowhere more than in relation to “human nature,” which has been the subject of highly variable ideas about what is given (by God, the stars, the environment, heredity, etc.), and what is open to intervention, with the given and the artificial always overlapping a blurred boundary (Wade 2002).

In any case, nature and human nature involve more than biology. When social scientists say that racial discourse involves “naturalization,” they sometimes restrict this to “biologization,” thus tending to conflate the two (e.g., Yanagisako and Delaney 1995, 20), but naturalizing arguments are a broader category than biologizing ones. The idea of human nature as a kind of fixed biological substratum, on top of which culture lies, is most characteristic of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Apart from this particular version of the biology-culture dichotomy, human nature has been understood in broader terms in Euro-American thought: it has been seen as in a dynamic relation to the environment—social and natural—and to involve both the physical body and behavior (aspects that modern Western thought tends to divide into biology and culture; Wade 2002). Thus, in stating that race makes reference to nature, it is necessary to avoid assuming that nature means simply a fixed substratum of human biology or that race is discourse of naturalizing power based on a “system of social categories constructed in terms of biological difference” (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995, 20, italics in original). This limits our understanding of what a racial discourse does when it invokes nature and what kind of belonging is at issue.

This emphasis on nature takes us back to the appearance of the term race (razza, race, raza, etc.) in Europe in the fourteenth century. As befits the slipperiness of the concept, the etymology of the word is unclear. Some accounts derive it from Latin words meaning “root” or “generation,” or other Latin words meaning type or kind; others from an old German word meaning “line”; yet others from an Arabic word meaning “head” and derivatives related to horse-breeding (Liberman 2009; Voegelin and Vondung [1933] 1998). Yet a common thread is the idea of lineage or stock (Banton 1987). I would argue that this same idea underlies subsequent concepts of race. This is not to argue that concepts of race in early modern Europe were basically the same as in nineteenth-century Europe. They were very different—so different that some scholars would argue that race does not really emerge as a concept until the eighteenth century (Smedley 1993). It is a means of identifying a common thread that emphasizes how people are linked through ties of what Goldberg (2008, chap. 1) calls “presumptive filiation,” a belonging transmitted through mechanisms of reproduction and descent understood as natural—that is, seen as inherent in people by virtue of their physical humanity—which expresses itself in appearance and behavior.

The second feature that holds together the family of racial concepts is rooted in specific historical and geographical facts. This feature is necessary because the emphasis on lineage, heredity, and human nature is not specific enough. There was plenty of interest in such things in ancient Greece—and plenty of interest in human diversity—but I would not argue that a concept of race existed then (Hannaford 1996; Snowden 1983). Race starts to emerge at the historical moment when Europeans encounter and colonize other geographical areas of the world. Specific regions of the globe—the Americas, Africa, Asia—figure in the European scientific and political imagination as the natural home of particular kinds of people, who have, or are coming to have, a particular place in the emerging colonial world order that is being constructed and dominated by European powers. This world order was also conceptually organized in accordance with European notions of who was civilized (and Christian) and who was savage (and pagan or infidel), notions that later developed into theories about human evolution, in which European societies figured as superior (Hodgen 1964). In the process of this classification, Europeans brought to bear existing ideas about human differences in appearance and character, seen as having been passed on through natural means (including environmental ones, involving physical and social milieu). It is through these processes of colonial world ordering that a specific set of racial categories began to be developed by intellectuals (e.g., theologians and natural historians), administrators (e.g., governors and census-takers), and economic colonists (e.g., ranchers, miners, and planters). Key categories included European/white, African/black, “Indian” (i.e., native American), and Asian. Many other categories and subclassifications emerged over time, but some of these key ones have remained important to the present day.

What allows scholars to know when they are encountering something called race is a combination of these two features: a reference to a specific set of categories, located in a changing colonial history and geography, and an idiom of nature (bearing in mind the variable character of that concept) and more specifically ideas of heredity and transmission (bearing in mind these are historically relative).

To take one example, geneticists often reject race as a valid way of describing human biological diversity, preferring to talk in terms of populations and frequencies of genetic variants. ¹ Yet something science studies scholars identify as race seems to reappear in genetic research (Koenig, Lee, and Richardson 2008; M'charek 2005a; Whitmarsh and Jones 2010). The units geneticists refer to when talking about human diversity—“populations”—end up looking a bit like races. This happens largely because human diversity is understood to have developed through evolutionary and demographic histories that give geographically located populations particular ancestral genetic profiles (usually in terms of the frequency with which genetic variants occur): there is a “genome geography” at work (Fujimura and Rajagopalan 2011), in which individuals are seen to belong to populations, which in turn belong to certain geographical locations. This combines ideas about human biology and heredity transmission with a geography that, at times, not only resonates with familiar racial categories, by referring to Africans, Europeans, and Amerindians, but also seems to give these a biological basis.

Some geneticists insist that a sample belongs to a particular area/people in Africa—such as Yoruba in Ibadan—and should not be generalized (The International HapMap Consortium 2003). But in another context the sample ends up as a proxy for “African ancestry” in general (Bliss 2009; Reardon 2008). Some geneticists in Latin America calculate the amount of African ancestry in the DNA of given sample of “mestizos” (people of mixed European, Amerindian, and/or African descent) by using the Yoruba sample, made available by the International HapMap Consortium (Silva-Zolezzi et al. 2009). They do so because globalizing processes of standardization (M'charek 2005b) make the Yoruba sample accessible and viable as a working proxy for African ancestry in the context of Latin American genomics. The important thing for the geneticists, when comparing different mestizo populations, is to use the same set of samples to stand in for the parental populations in order to ensure comparability across the mestizo samples. Distinctions among African populations are less important than the differences between the European, Amerindian, and African ancestries that the geneticists identify in quantifying proportions of admixture in mestizo populations. Thus while geneticists reject race as a valid biological concept, they use concepts that are very reminiscent of familiar categories. We can recognize these as racial because they refer to biological heredity and they parallel some classic racial categories of belonging.

But why wouldn’t this be called a process of ethnicization, rather than racialization? There is no clear distinction between race and ethnicity. Like race, the term ethnic has a history embedded in othering, as it was used in English from the fifteenth century to mean pagan or non-Christian; it was also used as a synonym of race in the nineteenth century. It was only from about the 1930s that the term was developed as an alternative to race, by then beginning to be seen as tarnished. It referred to culture rather than biology and fitted in with the increasing division between these two in anthropological and other intellectual currents (Barkan 1992). However, ethnicity can overlap strongly with race (Alonso 1994) and antiracist legislation, such as the UK Race Relations Act, tends to include race and ethnicity as equivalent (along with nation, creed, color, etc.). “Ethnic” may be used to refer euphemistically to the classic categories familiar in racial discourse (black/African, white/European, etc.); it may invoke culture as engrained and heritable in ways that draw it close to racial ways of conceiving heredity in human nature (as both biological and cultural). The difference is that it does not necessarily do either: ethnicity can be deployed without either implication. In many European contexts, the term is typically used to refer obliquely to differences that might otherwise be referred to as racial, while eliding them with nonracialized differences: thus the position of black British people is elided with that of Eastern European immigrants, both characterized as ethnic (cultural) difference. Yet ethnicity tends to stand in for race: the standard UK ethnic self-classification form (used for monitoring job applications, health service delivery, etc.) has many subcategories, but major ones are white European, Asian, and Black.

The idea of race that hides in racialized concepts of ethnicity is identifiable as such for two reasons. First, while the overt reference is made to culture and ethnic groups, the categories that are at issue are the familiar ones—black, white European, Asian, and so on—rooted in colonial histories. Second, the discourse of racialized ethnicity parses culture as a natural–cultural hybrid, a second nature of habit and collective consciousness, in which a culture belongs to people and individuals belong to their culture in a relationship of naturalized belonging. ²

Race and ethnicity are discourses and practices that deploy technologies that classify people and trace connections of natural–cultural belonging. In my view, it is worth having a clear idea of what we take to constitute the particularity of a racial technology of belonging: this helps us to see the historical continuities that connect very different concepts of race and allows us more analytic clarity in identifying practices and technologies of race.