The concept of socialrace

The concept of socialrace

Implicitly if not explicitly, the concept of socialrace has been in circulation for more than 20 years. ¹ Although the phenomenon of socialrace has received extensive investigation, the concept has not. My aim in this article is to correct this situation.

1 What the concept is

The concept socialrace variously refers to ²

a social group that is taken to be a racialist race

Socialrace thus picks out three different but related social kinds – a kind of social group, position and system. ⁴

To say that a socialrace is a social group is to say that it is a group that is social-rather-than-biological. Social groups are groups that are not constituted by biological relations or defined by biological properties. ⁵ Examples of social groups are: a peer group, a mob, the members of Congress. I treat the notion of social group as intuitive. ⁶ A socialrace is a social group that is taken or thought to be a biological group of a particular kind, namely a racialist race. Analogously, a socialwitch is a human being who is taken or thought to be endowed with supernatural powers, who is taken or thought to be a witch.

The idea of a racialist race is the idea of a group that satisfies the conditions of the racialist concept of race. ⁷ This is the familiar essentialist and hierarchical race concept commonly misidentified as the concept of race. It posits a correlation between visible physical features such as skin color, eye shape and hair form, and humanly important characteristics such as intelligence, sexuality and fitness for self-government. It is now generally recognized to be vacuous. ⁸

The concept racialist race does not pick out a biological kind. Because of this, its being a biological concept is sometimes denied, and in one sense it is not. But there is another sense in which it is a biological concept: namely, it purports to pick out a (putative) biological kind. Racialist race can be said to be a failed candidate biological kind in just the sense that phlogiston can be said to be a failed chemical kind. To represent a group G as a racialist race is to falsely represent G as a biological group. Socialraces are by definition social groups that are falsely or wrongly taken to be racialist races. To understand what socialraces are (and to understand what the concept socialrace is) one must understand that socialraces are not racialist races and indeed – to fully understand the phenomenon and concept – one must understand that there are no racialist races.

The ‘taking to be’ that makes a social group a socialrace is first of all a matter of belief. Socialraces are social groups that are generally believed to be racialist races. This belief may be implicit, need not be acknowledged and may be disavowed. ⁹ Members of a socialrace are thought to have features common and specific to the racialist race to which they are thought to belong. Inasmuch as socialraces are social groups that are viewed as racialist races, the phenomenon of socialrace contains an essential intensional (with an ‘s’) element. Now the ‘taking’ that makes a group a socialrace is also practical. ¹⁰ It is not simply a matter of what is in people’s heads. It consists in race-based social practices that assign members of S to specific race-related social positions and in society’s treating S’s members in determinate ways specified by race-based social norms. Thus W. E. B. Dubois’ famous remark that ‘[t]he black man is the person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia’. ¹¹ The ‘must’ is practical. The relevant norms and practices are ‘race-based’ not in the sense that they are explained by features of racialist race but in the sense that they are legitimated and stabilized by reference to characteristics associated with racialist race.

Socialrace (the phenomenon) is social in something like the sense in which money and marital status are social. Without the requisite social practices, there would be no money, no marriage and no socialrace. ¹² Socialrace differs from these other straightforwardly social institutions, however, in that its sociality is disguised. Socialrace represents socialraces as social groups whose sociality is hidden – not from the critical theorist already in possession of the concept socialrace, of course, but from the ordinary individual in society. ¹³ Socialraces are social groups that appear to be biological. The fact that they are social races generally goes unseen.

It is essential to keep in mind the distinction between socialrace, the phenomenon, and socialrace, the concept. ¹⁴ One is a social phenomenon (a set of social practices and relations), the other is a concept (a thought content). The concept socialrace has the discursive function of unmasking the sociality of the phenomenon of socialrace that the institution of socialrace has the social function of hiding. Socialrace reveals the role that the concept racialist race plays in the constitution of socialraces. It shows that racialist race legitimates and stabilizes the social hierarchy of socialrace by representing its social arrangements as something given in nature and hence fixed and inalterable by human will. ¹⁵ In virtue of serving this revelatory function, socialrace counts as an emancipatory concept. ¹⁶

It is also essential to avoid confusing the concept socialrace with the concept racialist race. Such confusion is unlikely when the concepts are tagged by the labels ‘socialrace’ and ‘racialist race’. But when, as sometimes happens, the two concepts are expressed using the word ‘race’, the concepts can be easily confused. racialist race ‘continues to play a fundamental role in structuring and representing the social world’. ¹⁷ socialrace does not. socialrace describes the way the social world is structured (around the concept of racialist race) but the concept does not itself figure in its structures. Structures of socialrace, on the other hand (social realities such as socialraces themselves, patterns of discrimination), do figure in the constitution of the social world.

The circumstance of structures of socialrace figuring in the organization of the social world can be called ‘institutional racism’. ¹⁸ Institutional racism, thus understood, obtains when and where socialrace obtains. This sense of ‘institutional racism’ is distinct from the narrower sense of the term, the reference of which is restricted to ‘racial inferiorizing or antipathy perpetrated by specific social institutions such as schools, corporations, hospitals, or the criminal justice system as a totality’. ¹⁹ Institutional racism in the sense of socialrace can pervade society as a whole. ²⁰

The institution of socialrace is by its nature hierarchical. ²¹ Some socialraces are dominant; others subordinate. Members of dominant socialraces have the power to repress or enforce frustrations of some preferences of members of subordinate socialraces. ²² Socialrace is inter alia a relation of power. The institution is also characterized by the unequal distribution of such social goods as liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect. Socialrace is a system of advantages (purportedly) based on racialist race. ²³ This unequal distribution of goods is a function of the unequal distribution of power. Each particular socialrace has its own specific statistical profile with respect to such matters as marital status, housing, education, employment, criminal arrest and conviction, access to healthcare and exposure to environmental hazards. ²⁴ Differences in socialrace are associated with significant differences in the life-prospects of individuals. It is because of these differences that socialrace matters.

Our specification of socialrace respects Bernard Boxill’s principle that ‘the belief that people are members of a biological race…is essential to the social construction of races’. ²⁵ Socialrace records the application of a biological concept – the racialist concept of race – in the societies in which socialraces are found. The fact that the biological concept racialist race is a discursive element of the content of a concept included in the content of socialrace does not, however, make the concept socialrace biological. Socialrace (the concept) captures the biological pretensions of socialrace (the phenomenon) without sharing them.

Socialrace is strongly non-biological. It is logically possible that socialraces could be found in a world in which the apparent differences in human skin color were actually the result of the nocturnal activity of race fairies, spray-painting hues of black, brown, yellow, red and pink on to the skin of sleeping souls in the dead of night. What make a person a member of a socialrace are social practices (which include the local application of specific criteria for individual racial classifications), not the possession of biological features. ²⁶ The concept socialrace is free of any conceptual implication that there are even partially biological races. ²⁷ It does not represent socialrace as a ‘social-natural’ kind, ²⁸ representing it instead as a social-kind-that-falsely-purports-to-be-a-biological-kind.

Now it is true and uncontroversial that socialraces – some of them at least – exhibit visible physical differences that have a biological ground (e.g. skin color). The structures of socialrace ‘conscript’ (to use Outlaw’s felicitous term) these differences into service as identifiers of racialist race. ²⁹ Socialrace does not, however, deny (or affirm) the existence of real physical differences. A matter I leave open concerns the degree to which the actual existence of socialraces is conditioned by the existence of visible physical differences between those groups. Matthew Frye Jacobson’s observation that the ‘whiteness’ of the Irish, Jews, Poles and Italians came to be regarded in the United States between 1840 and 1924 as ‘inconclusive’, ‘provisional’, or ‘probationary’, raises the possibility that merely imagined differences of visible physical difference might be sufficient. ³⁰

It should be clear that I think there is no conflict between biological racial eliminativism and the concept of socialrace. Socialrace presupposes the non-existence of racialist races and is agnostic on the question concerning the existence of non-racialist biological races. Socialrace could in principle apply to social groups even if there were no biological basis for race-related traits (such as differences in skin color) that most people take to be biological. Now my impression is that arch-eliminativists about race, such as Naomi Zack, who are disposed to deny the existence of race in any sense, would be hostile to the idea of socialrace or in any case the idea that socialraces exist. ³¹ What is less clear to me is what arguments are available to them. The concept socialrace is a non-biological concept. Socialraces are non-biological groups. Arguments against the existence of biological races have no force against the existence of socialraces. It may help to note that there can be no science of socialrace. There can at most be a critical theory of socialrace.

Socialraces are social groups that appear to be racialist races. That they have this appearance is essential for their maintenance and reproduction. ³² The appearance that they are racialist races plays an critical role in legitimating and stabilizing them.

Now this appearance is an illusion. Racialist race (the existence of racialist races) is an illusion. There are no racialist races. Racialist race should not be seen as ‘a dimension of human representation rather than illusion’ (emphases added). ³³ Racialist race is a dimension of human representation that is an illusion. One advantage of the distinction between socialrace and racialist race is that it makes it possible to see that the one (racialist race) is an illusion while the other (socialrace) is not.

In contrast to racialist races, socialraces are real. Their reality is illustrated by the fact that socialrace can figure in veridical social explanations, e.g. of why members of socialrace SR constitute a certain percentage of the total prison population. ³⁴ As Joshua Glasgow notes, one can ‘point to the role that race [that is, socialrace] plays in our lives – in marital status, housing, education…and so on – as evidence that race [that is, social race] is as socially real as any other social category, such as wife or student or journalist’. ³⁵ The concept socialrace facilitates recognition of this reality by giving it a name.

Although real, socialrace depends for its existence on the illusion of racialist race. Real things (e.g. economic bubbles) can depend on illusions. Still socialrace’s dependence on illusion might be thought to constitute grounds for thinking it unreal. Socialrace is unreal in the sense that it depends for its existence on illusion. But this dependence in no way undercuts the causal power of its structures. This is the decisive point. As a structure with real causal powers – e.g. to make someone dead – socialrace is fully entitled to the status real. Assigning it the status ‘real’ is a way of acknowledging its causal powers.

Instead of making the phenomenon of socialrace unreal, the fact that socialrace depends on an illusion shows its ideological nature: its dependence on ‘false consciousness’ ³⁶ (the belief that racialist races exist). One might object to calling socialrace ‘real’ on the grounds that this amounts to reifying it. But to call socialrace real (in the intended, causal, sense of ‘real’) is not to ‘reify’ it (in the pernicious sense): one does not thereby represent it as a human-agency-independent res. To represent socialrace as socialrace is, on the contrary, precisely to represent it as a reality that is the product of human agency. That socialrace depends for its existence on human agency is built into the concept socialrace.

2 Constructivisms

Our account of the concept of socialrace is constructivist about socialrace. It represents socialrace as the concept of something that is both socially constructed and real. It differs from more familiar constructivist accounts in that it is not a social constructivism about race. It is not an account of the ordinary concept of race (or of the putative subject matter of the ordinary concept of race). It does not represent the putative subject matter of the ordinary concept of race as a social construction or social kind. ‘Socialrace’ is a term of art expressing a concept distinct from the ordinary concept of race. The social kind it picks out must be sharply distinguished from the biological kind the ordinary concept of race purports to pick out.

I have argued elsewhere that the ordinary concept of race, which corresponds to the primary and most central way in which the ordinary word ‘race’ is used, can be characterized as having a ‘logical core’. ³⁷

3 Is socialrace a race concept?

The word ‘socialrace’ suggests that the concept it expresses is a race concept. But there are reasons to think that socialrace is not a race concept. Its discursive status is problematic. Is it a race concept or is it not? I propose to approach this issue from two angles: first, from the vantage of the ordinary concept of race; and then from the standpoint of the secondary sense of the word ‘race’.

A concept that includes all three elements of the ordinary concept of race’s logical core in a committal way counts as a race concept proper. A race concept proper may also contain elements in addition to the three basic conditions. So the racialist concept of race, in which the three basic conditions figure in a committal way, counts as a race concept proper.

The three basic conditions of the LC are included in the content of socialrace in the sense that they are contained within the content of a concept (racialist race) that is contained within the content of socialrace. This is one reason to call it a race concept. But the three basic conditions do not figure in socialrace’s content in a committal way. So socialrace is not a race concept proper.

Strikingly (and perhaps paradoxically) one cannot provide a complete account of everything we refer to as ‘race’ without the concept socialrace. Yet socialrace does not belong to the family of race concepts united by the fact that the three basic conditions are included in their content in a committal way. The general conclusion to be drawn is that, in an important and interesting sense,

‘race’ is not one thing.

4 Interim summary

So far I hope to have made good on two claims:

the word ‘socialrace’ expresses a distinctive ‘race’ concept;

Ad (1): there are really two points here. (1a) ‘Socialrace’ expresses a distinctive ‘race’ concept. As we have seen, socialrace is distinct from both the ordinary and the racialist concept of race. (1b) ‘Socialrace’ expresses a race concept. Socialrace counts as a genuine concept because it provides a unified way of thinking about (a) social groups that are taken to be races, (b) the social positions those social groups occupy, and (c) the system of social structures of which those positions are parts – a way of thinking of these items as a unity. Full possession of the concept of socialrace requires grasping these elements as a unity – the unity articulated in the preceding exhibition of the concept. One can have the thought of a social group that is taken to be a race and have the thought of the social position those groups occupy and have the thought of these social positions as forming a position – and yet lack the concept socialrace – if one fails to grasp these elements in the requisite unified way.

Now I take it to be obvious that writers who have discussed the phenomenon of socialrace must have possessed – at least implicitly – the concept socialrace or something much like it. ⁴⁵ How else could they have grasped the phenomenon of socialrace?

Thus, for example, Michael Omi and Howard Winant clearly see the need for a concept like the concept of socialrace and furthermore think that such a concept has been found. They write: ‘It has taken scholars more than a century to reject biologistic notions of race in favor of an approach which regards race as a social concept.’ ⁴⁶ The force of the first part of this statement is that it has taken scholars more than a century to reject racialist conceptions of race. The force of its second part is that it has taken scholars more than a century to arrive at an approach which regards race as a social phenomenon – an approach which deploys a social concept of race. The idea of a social system based on racialist conceptions of race is the idea of socialrace. And the idea of a concept that represents social systems based on racialist conceptions of race as such is the idea of the concept of socialrace. So Omi and Winant have the idea of the phenomenon and the idea of the concept of socialrace. They say explicitly that there is a social concept of race. But they do not tell us what this concept is. They do not articulate the concept they have in mind. They do not present the concept or make the concept explicit. ⁴⁷

Ad (2): the need for the concept socialrace. If the phenomenon of socialrace exists, the concept socialrace (or some such concept) is needed to represent it. Such a concept is needed both for epistemic reason (to grasp reality) and for normative/political reasons (to address the harms wrought by socialrace). Socialrace satisfies our need for a socialrace-like concept.

5 What word should we use to express the concept socialrace?

It is one thing to say we need a concept like socialrace, another to determine the linguistic vehicle that is best suited to its expression. I have already opted for ‘socialrace’, but it is worth considering why.

One could simply use the word ‘race’. This is what Omi and Winant do. This choice avoids the inconvenience of introducing a new term and the ugliness of neologism, and takes advantage of a semantic development already underway. But the word ‘race’ continues to have the meaning that corresponds to what I am calling ‘the ordinary concept of race’ and continues to be used to express the racialist concept of race. Were this not the case, there would be little risk that socialrace-expressing uses of ‘race’ might be mistaken for ordinary- or racialist-race-concept-expressing uses. But as things stand, the risk that the socialrace-expressing use of ‘race’ will butt heads with the ordinary and racialist race-expressing uses of ‘race’ is great.

Now I am supposing that the introduction of the concept socialrace is not going to drive the use of race to express what I am calling the ordinary concept of race out of business. This supposition seems plausible. I see no sign that the use of the word ‘race’ to express biological concepts of race is coming to an end. Nor is this outcome something to be wished. The ordinary concept of race and the concept of socialrace serve two very different functions. Whether or not there is a biological kind race, we need and will continue to need a concept to express the idea of race as a biological kind. It is worth mentioning in this connection that even though racialist race is a concept we should not use, we will continue to need to retain it as an item in our Archive of Discredited Ideas. ⁴⁸ Were it to be eliminated from conceptual vocabulary altogether, we could not understand the phenomenon of socialrace.

One could use the open compound ‘social race’ to express a concept like socialrace. This has the advantage of not being a neologism. A disadvantage is that some writers use the open compound to refer to putative racialist races, while others use it to express something like the concept socialrace and still others confuse these two uses. The word ‘socialrace’ can serve as a term dedicated to the expression of socialrace that avoids confusion. This brings us to the advantages of ‘socialrace’. Its peculiar orthography flags the word’s special character. Being manifestly distinct from the word form ‘race’, it does not invite confusion with the ordinary or racialist concept of race. The ‘social’ in ‘socialrace’ places the concept’s sociality on the word’s sleeve. The word suggests the concept it expresses. And unlike ‘shmace’, the word looks and sounds like a real word. ‘Socialrace’ is a clarifying term that could catch on.

6 Desiderata for a conception of socialrace-like concept

I would like to step back to present some desiderata. This will do the double duty of providing a perspective on the account just laid out and setting the stage for the forthcoming discussion of alternative conceptions or near-conceptions of socialrace.

The first desideratum is the obvious one of subject specificity. An account of a concept such as socialrace should be an account of a socialrace-like concept and not something else.

It follows immediately that it should not be an account of some other, non-socialrace-like concept, such as the ordinary or racialist concepts of race. It also follows that it should not be an account of ethnicity. The concept ethnicity, which is understood in different ways, is generally taken to have to do with such matters as culture, nationality, language and religion. The specification of socialrace’s content makes no mention of these factors. Socialrace is not a cultural concept. Two members of the same socialrace, e.g. an Afro-Cuban and West Indian (members of the socialrace Black), may belong to different ethnic groups. ⁴⁹ An individual member of socialrace SR may not share in the culture associated with SR.

An ethnicity can be ‘racialized’ – i.e. treated as a racialist race. ⁵⁰ Hispanics/Latinos are a incompletely racialized panethnic group in the United States. ⁵¹ They count as a panethnic group because they comprise a range of different ethnicities (for example, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican) and as an (incompletely) racialized group because ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ are sometimes treated as racial labels and Hispanics/Latinos are sometimes treated collectively as being racially ‘other’ (in a racialist sense) from ‘non-Hispanic whites’ – even though they are generally not regarded as constituting a full-fledged race in their own right. To the extent that they are regarded as a racialized group, they also have the standing of a socialrace. So the extensions of the concepts socialrace and ethnicity can overlap. But the concepts are distinct nonetheless.

Ethnicity also differs from socialrace in making no essential reference to differences in visible physical appearance. Members of a particular ethnic group may be distinguished or be thought to be distinguished from members of another ethnic group in virtue of differences in skin color, eye shape, hair form, etc. but this is not a requirement of the concept. The concept socialrace, on the other hand, requires that members of different socialraces be thought to differ with respect to visible physical features since it requires that they be thought to be members of different racialist races.

Just as an account of the concept socialrace should not be an account of the concept ethnicity, so it should not be an account of the concept ethnorace. Here again the two concepts are distinct. Ethnorace, the suggestive concept introduced by David Goldberg, is helpfully characterized by Sally Haslanger as the concept ‘of a group of people who have been “marked” as of the same race, who share some common cultural elements and are collectively involved in the constitution of their shared identity’. ⁵² Socialrace differs from ethnorace in that it does not require shared cultural elements, self-constitution, or a shared subjectively embraced identity. Socialrace is intended to be an analytical concept that abstracts from (does not mention, require, or deny) commonalities of culture and purpose. It picks out a social kind, and identifies an existing system of social positions without regard to whether the grouping formed within those social positions can serve as objects of solidarity or grounds for positive self-affirmation. Ethnorace has the aspiration of representing ‘race’ as a socio-cultural kind. It is intended to capture the possible commonalities of culture and purpose associated with socialrace, to represent the groupings formed under regimes of socialrace as possible objects of solidarity, and to present membership in these groupings as possible grounds for self-affirmation and possible bases for identity formation. It, unlike socialrace, is intended to be a tool that facilitates solidarity, group self-affirmation and collective identity formation. Socialrace emphasizes the external imposition of socialrace membership. Ethnorace helpfully points to the fact that racialized individuals and groups need not be mere passive recipients of externally imposed identities but can take existing racialist categories, reinterpret their meaning and take the now-differently-understood groupings as objects of solidarity, grounds for collective self-affirmation and bases for affirmative social identities. Socialrace is not defective because it does not emphasize this point. It is constructed to serve a different function.

A critical question concerning ethnorace’s value is how (i.e. whether) it can accommodate the fact that a single socialrace can include different ethnicities. It is clear how Afro-Cubans, West Indians and Afro-Brazilians can be counted as members of the same socialrace, Black. The fact that this racial grouping may, in Allcoff’s words, counter their ‘own sense of identity or primary group alliances’ puts no pressure on the idea that they belong to one and the same socialrace. ⁵³ But do Afro-Cubans, West Indians and Afro-Brazilians belong to one ethnorace? Presumably not. They are culturally distinct. Do they count as three distinct ethnoraces? Well, maybe. The concept ethnorace has not been specified with sufficient determinacy to provide a clear answer to questions of this sort. A more fundamental difficulty with the concept is that it is not clear that ethnicity and socialrace generally combine into the type of integral socio-cultural unity suggested by the term.

The constraint of subject specificity also has the consequence that an account of the concept socialrace should not be an account of the concept racial identity. The two concepts are distinct. Whether a group is a socialrace is a matter of how its members are treated by the larger society. ⁵⁴ Members of a given socialrace may go on to adopt their group membership as a subjectively recognized identity or they may not. ⁵⁵

Racial identity as understood by K. Anthony Appiah involves (1) the ascription of a race membership (e.g. black, white, Asian) through the application of a ‘race label’ (‘black’, ‘white’, ‘Asian’) and the correlative imposition of a set of expectations (or ‘scripts’) concerning how a bearer of the label ought to speak, act and look, and (2) identification of an individual who has been assigned to a racialist race with the racialist race to which he or she has been assigned, where ‘identification’ involves (a) acceptance of the label as a significant self-designation and (b) a disposition to act in accordance with the behavioral expectations (or script) associated with the race label that has been imposed. ⁵⁶

Membership in socialrace (ascriptive socialrace identity) is not contingent upon subjective identification with the racialist race to which one is assigned or acting in accordance with the behavioral norms associated with that putative race (subjective socialrace identity). One is ‘properly’ counted as a member of a socialrace SR if one in fact satisfies the socially accepted criteria for membership in the correlative putative racialist race R. Thus, for example, a person traditionally belongs to the socialrace Black (in the United States) if he or she has any identifiable recent sub-Saharan ancestry simply because he or she then satisfies the accepted US criteria for being a member of the racialist race black. To ‘pass’ (e.g. for white) in a system of socialrace is to be taken to be white (to satisfy the socially accepted criteria for whiteness) despite the fact that one does not satisfy those criteria (e.g. in virtue of possession of ‘one drop’ of ‘black blood’). ⁵⁷

The possibility of ‘passing’ points to an important variable in the practical significance of social race membership. An individual counts as a member of a socialrace simply in virtue of satisfying the social criteria for membership in the corresponding racialist race. Socialrace membership is itself a real social status with real social consequences. In the case of the socialrace Black, it makes one a logically apt target of anti-black racism such that subjection to anti-black racism is a standing possibility. But the practical significance of membership in a socialrace will vary with the degree to which the individual is subject to the norms associated with the racialist race to which the individual is taken to belong. ⁵⁸ This may vary with the individual’s physical appearance.

Explaining what it is like to be a member of a socialrace does not belong to the central tasks of an account of the concept socialrace. Nonetheless the account recognizes that being a member of a particular socialrace will normally have profound effects on individual identity and subjectivity. To be a member of a socialrace is to be subject to the norms for behavior associated with ascribed membership in the associated racialist race. ⁵⁹ How precisely one deals with these pressures – what one takes their content to be, whether one embraces, accepts, or rejects the relevant norms, how one interprets them, whether one reinterprets them in such as way as to allow for affirmation of one’s socialrace membership – involves a non-trivial element of (constrained) choice. Morphologically typical individuals, however, have no choice about the brute fact of being subjected to those norms.

Our account of the concept of socialrace also recognizes that the effects of social race membership on overall life-prospects – with respect to such matters as marital status, housing, education, employment, criminal arrest and conviction, access to healthcare and exposure to environmental hazards – can be significant.

Appiah correctly points out that racial identities have a tendency to be confused with cultural identities, to be too tightly scripted, and to ‘go imperial’. ⁶⁰ The concept socialrace is free of these tendencies (even if the phenomenon is not). There is nothing in the concept’s content that would incline someone who acknowledged membership in a particular socialrace to think that socialrace is in and of itself a cultural identity, to feel bound by the excessively tight script of a particular racial identity associated with that socialrace or to let the norms associated her or his socialrace dominate the whole of her or his life. One of socialrace’s advantages is that it encourages a certain detachment from the norms associated with socialrace by bringing their association with the concept of racialist race into clear view. It may be uncomfortable for members of dominant socialraces to acknowledge their membership in such, but there is nothing inherently divisive about such acknowledgment. Recognition of socialrace identity carries none of the baggage – ‘of false homogeneity, exaggerated differentness among races, inherency and unchangeability of characteristic, and the like’ – Lawrence Blum thinks inevitably accompanies Appian racial identities. ⁶¹

2. A second desideratum of an account of the socialrace-like concept is explicitness.

It is to be desired that an account explicitly recognizes such a concept as the concept it is, which involves inter alia explicitly distinguishing it from the ordinary and racialist concepts of race.

3. A third desideratum is that an account of a socialrace-like concept is one that makes the concept critical.

Our account of socialrace satisfies this desideratum because the concept exposes the hidden sociality of socialrace and reveals the insidious ideological role that racialist race plays in the constitution of the phenomenon of socialrace.

7 Alternative conceptions and near-conceptions of the concept socialrace

I am not aware of another account that explicitly represents the concept of socialrace as such. Nonetheless there are clearly any number of conceptions that can be regarded as alternative conceptions of the still more generic concept we can express using the term ‘socialrace*’ or, in any case, as conceptions that belong the same discursive ballpark as the concept socialrace. It may be illuminating to consider a few.

We have already considered Omi and Winant’s idea of a social concept of race. They have the idea of a social concept of race but do not tell us what the concept is. Glasgow’s proposal for reconstructing our racial discourse can be read as a recommendation to introduce a race concept that could quite naturally be regarded as a concept of socialrace. His proposal is to attach ‘new meanings to existing words and practices’ ⁶² such that ‘by “race” we will, postreconstruction, intend only to refer to social kinds, and we will get rid of any conceptual implication that there are even partially biological races’. ⁶³ If, as seems to be the case, races* (to adopt his add-star convention) are social kinds, the concept race* is (broadly speaking) a concept of socialrace.

Now race* is intended to pick out social groups that are taken to be racialist races in our society – i.e. socialraces – but certain crucial features of socialraces are omitted from its characterization. It is not part of this concept that races* are social groups masquerading as biological groups. Yet one crucial fact about socialraces is that they are such groups. There is nothing inherently hierarchical about race* nor is race* by its nature a relation of domination. Consequently race* fails to capture the hierarchical aspects of real existing socialrace and the fact that socialrace is by its nature an unequal power relation. In sum, the concept race* is uncritical.

Curiously Glasgow regards race*’s lack of a critical dimension as a plus. Speaking of Blum’s concept of a racialized group (to which we will turn next), he suggests that it is a defect of that concept that it has the consequence that the racial identities of members of an existing socialrace ‘are in some sense fraudulent’. ⁶⁴ But existing socialrace identities are in some sense fraudulent. They are based on the false idea that members of a socialrace are members of racialist races. This is not to deny the possibility or desirability of constructing a genuinely affirmative conception of racial identity that does not rest on false ideas. Nor is it to say that socialrace does not provide materials for the construction of a legitimate racial identity. But it is to say that socialrace identities as they present themselves in society (under the auspices of the dominant socialraces) are not yet legitimate identities. To be a member of a socialrace is to have been erroneously classified as a member as a racialist race. Authenticity requires that this circumstance be acknowledged.

In contrast to Glasgow’s concept of a race*, Lawrence Blum’s concept of a racialized group has a critical edge. He defines a racialized group as a group that is treated by the larger society as if there were inherent and immutable differences between them; as if certain somatic characteristics marked the presence of significant characteristics of mind, emotion and character; and as if some were of greater worth than others. ⁶⁵

The ‘as if’ gives the concept its bite. Blum has in effect defined a racialized group as a group that is falsely taken to be a racialist race. Inasmuch as this characterization could be offered as a specification of what it is to be a socialrace, it would be churlish to deny Blum possession of the concept socialrace. Nonetheless the concept racialized group is not identical to the concept socialrace. How can this be? Every racialized group is a socialrace but the two concepts are distinct. Every drop of quicksilver is a drop of mercury but the concepts quicksilver and mercury are not the same. ⁶⁶ To say that a social group is a socialrace is to say more than that it is taken to be a racialist race. It is to say that it is constituted as a particular kind of social reality by virtue of its members being treated as if they were members of a racialist race. It is to say that it is a social position in the structure of the society and that there is a hierarchical network of interrelated social positions in that society within which it is located. The idea of socialrace as a social reality seems to be an idea Blum neither has nor wants. His story ends by noting the illusory character of socialraces without going on to recognize the social reality constituted by those illusions.

One reason Blum finds it difficult to recognize the reality of socialrace is that he lacks a distinctive term for referring to it. ‘Race’ cannot do the job because, as he understands it, the word inevitably expresses the racialist concept of race. ⁶⁷ ‘Racialized’ group cannot do the job because, as he has defined it, it is not a race term at all. Blum seems to be opposed in principle to the idea of recognizing the reality of anything that could be appropriately designated by any use of ‘race’. He contends that ‘[a]t this point in our history any conferring of reality on “race” is likely to carry [the] false and invidious associations [of racialist race]’’ (original emphasis). ⁶⁸ However, the idea that ‘socialrace’ is likely to carry such false and invidious associations seems incorrect. To understand the word is to understand that a socialrace is a social group that is erroneously taken to be a racialist race.

Sally Haslanger does not use the term ‘socialrace’ or tag the concept socialrace with a distinctive term, but she possesses the concept socialrace. She expresses it using the word ‘race’ in what she recognizes is a non-standard way.

A group is racialized (in context C) iff_df its members are socially positioned as subordinate or privileged along some dimension (economic, legal, social, etc.) (in C), and the group is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographical region. ⁶⁹

This definition of a racialized group could, with the substitution of ‘socialrace’ for ‘racialized group’, serve equally as a definition of a socialrace. A more elaborate version of the definition makes clear that racialized groups stand in hierarchical relations. ⁷⁰ It also brings the idea of racialist race into view. A racialized group is said to be such that its members have or are taken to have bodily features presumed in C to be evidence of ancestral links to a certain region (or regions) which ‘mark them within the context of the background ideology in C as appropriately occupying certain kinds of social positions that are in fact either subordinate or privileged (and so motivates and justifies their occupying such a position)’. ⁷¹

The ‘background ideology’ is pesumably the ideology of racialist race: the idea that members of racialized groups are in fact members of racialist races and that the humanly important putatively qualities associated with their membership in a racialist race, which allegedly correlate with ‘‘the bodily features’ presumed in C to be evidence of ancestral links” “motivat[e] and justif[y]” their occupying ‘certain kinds of social positions that are in fact either subordinate or privileged’.

Haslanger escapes the trap of presenting her technical concept ‘race’ as a representation of the ordinary concept of race and makes it clear that her concern is with ‘how we might usefully revise what we mean for certain theoretical and political purposes’. ⁷² Given this, I have no substantive objection to Haslanger’s account of socialrace. I do, however, think her use of ‘race’ as the tag for this concept is unfortunate for reasons outlined above. I also think her account suffers from a failure to place its discussion of ‘race’ (aka socialrace) in the context of a larger account of both the ordinary and the racialist concepts of race.

Paul Taylor also has the concept socialrace, and he too uses the word ‘race’ to express it. He believes that the meaning of ‘race’ has already been redefined to correspond or be identical to the concept socialrace. ⁷³ He implicitly defines socialraces as ‘probabilistically defined populations that result from the white supremacist determination to link appearance and ancestry to social location and life chances’. ⁷⁴ The idea is that socialraces (his ‘races’) come into being when there are social mechanisms or forces that assign probabilities to the likelihood that individual members of populations characterized by visible physical appearance (body) and ancestry (bloodlines) will occupy certain stratified social positions and have certain life-prospects. ⁷⁵ These probabilities constitute the ‘social meaning’ of having a certain kind of body and being of a certain bloodline.

Although Taylor’s talk of ‘white supremacist determination’ carries the unfortunate suggestion of a conscious conspiracy, his considered view does not require the postulation of such. Taylor has a clear sense of the phenomenon of socialrace as a social phenomenon. What seems to be lacking in his discussion is a crisp sense of socialrace as a distinctive ‘race’ concept. Socialrace is not (as he suggests) a successor to the ordinary concept of race but rather a contrasting concept with a different extension and a different function. Recognition of the concept socialrace does not obviate the discursive need for the ordinary concept of race; it satisfies our interest in having a race concept that can refer to the social phenomenon of race as such while leaving the need for the ordinary concept intact.

Lucius Outlaw, following W. E. B. Dubois, proposes the formation of a concept that might be thought of as a concept of socialrace. He calls for the formulation of a cogent and viable concept of race that will be of service to the non-invidious conservation of racial and ethnic groups – a formulation, and the politics it facilitates, that also avoids the quagmire of chauvinism. ⁷⁶

The concept whose construction he envisions contains significant constructivist elements. It will not represent race as a natural kind nor will it represent the social and cultural aspects of race as being causally determined by the biological components of race. ⁷⁷

Outlaw assumes – problematically I think – that ‘racial and ethnic differences are fundamentally constitutive of human beings and each member of a particular race and/or ethnie shares the group’s defining characteristics, more or less, and is substantially identified (and identifiable) by these characteristics’. ⁷⁸ Human beings, he maintains, generally need particular communities of race and ethnicity to thrive as human beings. ‘Conservation of race’ is thus, on his view, an indispensable condition of human flourishing. In the case of ‘people who suffer invidious discrimination leading to diminished life-chances and quality of life because of practices rationalized by reference to their race and/or ethnicity’, ⁷⁹ the need for racial and/or ethnic community is especially pressing. Yet this need is not purely strategic. Outlaw contends that even if ‘racism and invidious ethnocentrism in every form and manifestation were to disappear forever’ the ‘continued existence of discernable racial/ethnic communities of meaning’ would still be ‘desirable’. ⁸⁰ He holds that the attainment of such a community on the part of ‘people who have suffered oppression at the hands of persons of various ethnies of a particular race’ requires the articulation of a concept of race free of ethnocentrism and chauvinism that will allow for a positive valorization of their racial identities and support their struggles against racialized subordination. ⁸¹

Inasmuch as the concept Outlaw wants would be the concept of a socially constructed racial identity, it could be called a ‘concept of socialrace’. But it would be a different kind of concept than the notion I am calling socialrace and belong to a different kind of project. An essential feature of the ‘anticipated rethinking of race’ Outlaw envisages is that it depict the kind race as containing an essential biological component. His concept represents the visible physical differences associated with differences of geographical ancestry as racial in order to enable people to affirm the pattern of visible physical features associated with their race as features of their race. The concept of socialrace is not biological in this way. Its point is to represent the phenomenon of socialrace as it is, not to facilitate the affirmation of racial identity. The latter is a legitimate project but does not belong to the functions the concept of socialrace is meant to fulfill.

8 Conclusion

At some point over the course of this discussion the reader might have felt the wish to say: ‘Why, the concept of socialrace is just obvious!’ Indeed. The concept socialrace is – or becomes – obvious once it is presented clearly as the specific concept that it is. The idea of the phenomenon of social race is not new. What is new is the reflective apprehension of socialrace as a concept that is distinct from the ordinary and racialist concept of race. Even when it has been used implicitly, the special character of socialrace has largely gone unnoticed.

What I claim to have done is to have reflectively uncovered a concept already in general circulation. I have endeavored to make it possible to get a proper hold on the concept – and to secure an adequate reflective understanding of what the concept is. If the reader thinks that my account of the concept socialrace captures a concept he or she has already been using, so much the better. I hope to have clarified that concept. As for the word ‘socialrace’, I hope that it catches on, that its dissemination promotes understanding of the phenomenon of socialrace, and that this in turn contributes to the dismantling of the latter’s existence.