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Cultural Constructionism

What Is Race?: Four Philosophical Views

Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer

Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780190610173
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190610173.001.0001

Cultural Constructionism
Chike Jeffers

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190610173.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords

Chike Jeffers argues in this chapter that social constructionism about race is a
preferable position to non-biological essentialism about race (such as the kind
defended by Quayshawn Spencer in Chapters 3 and 7) and anti-realism about
race (such as the kind Joshua Glasgow defends in Chapters 4 and 8). He then
argues that one should distinguish between two kinds of social constructionism:
political constructionism (such as the kind defended by Sally Haslanger in
Chapters 1 and 5) and cultural constructionism, which he defends. While he
shows why it is understandable that political constructionism is sometimes taken
to be the default position among social constructionists, he argues that political
constructionism misses the significance of the cultural aspect of race in the
present and fails to recognize the possibility of races existing past the end of
racism.

Keywords: race, culture, racism, racial identity, social constructionism, political constructionism,
cultural constructionism

Human races are social constructions. What I mean by this is that, while there
are aspects of racial diversity among humans that may be studied by natural
science, the fundamental factors making it the case that races exist are
sociohistorical in nature. Racial distinctions have come to be and continue to
exist in the present as a result of the ways that we as humans have interacted
and organized our affairs over time. To believe this, as I do, is to be a social
constructionist about race. Like Sally Haslanger in the first chapter of this book,
one of my aims in what follows is to explain why this is the most attractive
position on the metaphysics of race. More distinctively, however, I want to argue

Page 1 of 33

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Cultural Constructionism

that it is important to distinguish between two kinds of social constructionism,

which I will call political constructionism and cultural constructionism. In
contrast with Haslanger’s political constructionist account of race, I will defend
a cultural constructionist account.

The first section of the chapter provides a framework for comparing theories of
race and then offers critiques of biological realist and anti-realist positions on
race, delivered from a perspective that is neutral between the two kinds of social
constructionism that I will differentiate in the chapter’s second section. In the
second section, once I have distinguished political from cultural constructionism,
I discuss why political constructionism might be seen as the default position for
a social constructionist. The third and final section then provides an explanation
and defense of my version of cultural constructionism. Among my tasks in this
section will be spelling out the normative underpinnings and implications of my
view.

(p.39) 2.1. Why Social Constructionism?

People have used and still use the English word ‘race’ and its etymologically
related cognates in other languages in a variety of ways. This makes it important
to achieve some clarity about the subject matter to be dealt with before fruitful
metaphysical discussion can take place. For example, people sometimes treat
the terms ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ as completely interchangeable. It seems
necessary to me, though, that we avoid paying too much attention to this kind of
usage if we are to see any reason for debating whether races are real and what
races fundamentally are. Few people debate whether ethnic groups exist and,
although saying what they are might be slightly more contentious, most experts
would agree that we are talking about a kind of social category. Thus, if races
were nothing other than ethnicities, there would be little reason to debate
whether they exist and whether they are fundamentally biological or social. We
get closer to understanding debates about the nature and reality of race, though,
when we acknowledge the widespread assumption that people of different ethnic
backgrounds can be members of the same race (e.g., white people may be Irish,
Italian, Russian, something else). This belief is commonly held among those who
agree that race is real, even if they disagree about whether race is biological or
social in kind, and those who do not believe that race is real can be expected to
agree as well, though they might be more careful to say that this is a matter of
what would be the case if races were real. Shared assumptions of this sort
evidently suggest that there is some common ground, some useful starting point
for discussion, that we can isolate before going on to investigate why and how
people disagree about the nature and reality of race.

Page 2 of 33

The most helpful attempt at making precise what this starting point is, in my
view, would be Michael Hardimon’s account of the “logical core” of the concept
of race.1 Hardimon claims this logical core can be summarized as follows:

(1) The concept of race is the concept of a group of human beings

distinguished from other human beings by visible physical features of the
relevant kind.
(2) The concept of race is the concept of a group of human beings whose
members are linked by a common ancestry.
(p.40) (3) The concept of race is the concept of a group of human beings
who originate from a distinctive geographic location.2

Each subsequent thesis here can be seen as building upon and explaining what
comes before it. People possess visible physical features of various kinds for
various reasons (their sex, their lifestyle choices, etc.), but the kind of physical
features that distinguish them as members of races are inherited from their
parents, as races are groups whose members are linked by common ancestry.
These features at least somewhat reliably indicate where in the world the
ancestors of group members lived, as races are groups who originate from a
distinctive geographic location. Regarding this last point, Hardimon notes: “[t]he
aboriginal habitat of common-sense and conventional races is fixed by the
location the ancestors of the members of those groups occupied immediately
prior to the advent of European oceangoing transport, which is to say around
1492.”3 Thus two Canadians, both of whose heritage in Canada goes back many
generations, may nevertheless be obviously racially different because the
physical features of one are indicative of ancestors located in Europe at the time
Hardimon suggests is relevant, while the features of the other indicate ancestors
located in sub-Saharan Africa.

According to Hardimon, “[o]ne of the most striking results of our account of the
logical core of the ordinary concept of race is that race turns out to be relatively
unimportant.”4 One way to explain what he means by this is to say that, if one
sees a man who happens to be Chinese and rightly guesses on the basis of his
appearance that most of his ancestors in the fifteenth century lived somewhere
in East Asia, it is not clear that one has recognized anything of great
significance. It is certainly the case that, historically, in the West, recognizing
someone as “Oriental” was often thought to license various inferences about the
character and capacities of the person in question, but Hardimon argues that
the three theses at the core of the concept of race do not, by themselves,
necessarily imply that we can learn anything of interest about people merely by
noticing the connection between their appearance and their place of ancestral
origin.

Page 3 of 33

One useful way to compare metaphysical positions in the philosophy of race is to

see them as diverging with regard to what significance, if any, (p.41) they
accord to the differences in human appearance and ancestral place of origin
underlying racial categorizations. The dominant view about race from some time
in the early modern era until at least the latter part of the twentieth century has
been a biologically essentialist realism, according to which we inherit, along
with racial membership, a set of distinctive traits broader than the particular
physical features that indicate this membership, including mental and behavioral
tendencies, moral and intellectual talents or deficiencies, and physiological
characteristics beyond a distinctive appearance as well. Thus we have a long
tradition, especially in the West, of taking appearance and ancestry to be very
significant indeed. More recently, some philosophers have jettisoned the
essentialism of the past while maintaining that there are nevertheless
biologically significant divisions of the human species that we can describe as
races (a view that will be defended by Quayshawn Spencer in Chapter 3).

An anti-realist about race, on the other hand, would take Hardimon to be

begging the question when he says he has revealed race to be unimportant, for,
insofar as he is describing something real, it is not clear that it should count as
race. It is impossible to deny that there are some regularities in how we look
that relate to where many of our ancestors lived, but anti-realists deny, first of
all, that these regularities are significant in the way they have traditionally been
taken to be significant and, second, they hold that to deny this implies the
nonexistence of races. They hold, in other words, that it is only if there is some
systematic and more broadly relevant significance to appearance and ancestry
of the type imagined by biological essentialists that we have reason to affirm
that races exist. From this perspective, which will be defended by Joshua
Glasgow in Chapter 4 of this volume, to discuss biologically defined groupings of
humans in the non-essentialist manner of some more recent biological realists is
to leave the topic of race behind.

In contrast with both of these positions, social constructionists about race take
appearance and ancestry to be very significant, not as a matter of biological
reality that we discover by looking at the world, but as a matter of social reality
that we produce and maintain through widespread patterns of thought and
behavior. The remainder of this section will consist in arguments for rejecting
biological realism—whether essentialist or not—and anti-realism, along with
explanation and defense of the social constructionist alternative.

Reasons for dismissing traditional biological essentialism have by now become

familiar to many. Simply put, the view is baseless: the ways in which it connects
differences in outer appearance and ancestral place of origin to imagined inner
differences—differences in our blood assumed to cause (p.42) systematic
variation in how we think and act—are not currently and arguably never could
be supported by scientific research. Paul Taylor aptly notes that, from the

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essentialist perspective (which he refers to as “classical racialism”), the result of

two races mixing can be compared to “diluting a potion.”5 This idea that each
race’s blood is like a potion, with the special characteristics of the race being
the powers of the potion, is at odds with (1) our overwhelming genetic similarity
as a species, (2) our genetic distinctness as individuals, and (3) how much we
still do not know, even regardless of race, about how genes interact with each
other and the environment to cause character traits. With regard to this last
point, whatever we learn as our understanding of the relationship between
genes and personality increases, it is extremely unlikely that it will validate the
traditional essentialist ascription of stable sets of hereditary traits to the wide
and somewhat arbitrarily demarcated swaths of humanity that common sense
racial groupings are.

But what about non-essentialist biological realism? Whatever it is, it is not

baseless. Take Robin Andreasen’s cladistic account of race, which would have us
understand races as reproductively isolated breeding populations whose
biological relationships with each other can be depicted as an evolutionary tree,
the branches of which constitute different races.6 As evidence that we can
construct such a tree, Andreasen points us to the work that geneticist Luigi Luca
Cavalli-Sforza has done, with others, to map the history of human evolution by
measuring the genetic distance between populations. Cavalli-Sforza’s work,
while not without controversy, is credible scientific research. Andreasen’s
proposal for how to understand what races are thus leaves behind biological
essentialism’s implausible claims about character traits while making use of
fascinating evidence from the field of genetics.

But should we see groupings of humans like those represented by the branches
of Cavalli-Sforza’s tree as races? Anti-realists and social constructionists agree
that we should not.7 Note, first, Andreasen’s finding that the tree appears to
explode our normal idea of East Asians as a group, as Southeast and Northeast
Asians appear on “two distinct major branches.”8 (p.43) Southeast Asians
branch off of a division that also includes Pacific Islanders, New Guineans, and
indigenous Australians, while Northeast Asians branch off of a division that
includes the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Europeans, and “Non-
European Caucasoids.”9 Thus, according to Andreasen, it would be more
accurate to represent Koreans as sharing a race with Germans and people from
Thailand as sharing with a race with Fijians than to represent these two
somewhat similar-looking peoples of eastern Asia as sharing a race with each
other! Note, second, something that Andreasen does not explicitly address: the
categorization of South Asians as “Caucasoids.” This does receive mention,
however, in Quayshawn Spencer’s recent work arguing for biological realism.
Spencer’s argument relies on noting the overlap between the racial categories of
the US Census and what he takes to be a biologically significant division of the
human species into five genetically clustering partitions of populations, but he

Page 5 of 33

notes that one obstacle to complete overlap is the lumping in the Census of
“South Asians with Asians and not with whites.”10

Anti-realists and social constructionists hold that these kinds of discrepancies

between common-sense racial classifications and biologically respectable
accounts of how we may subdivide our species demonstrate that biology
ultimately undermines, rather than supports, our talk of races. There is, of
course, the option of seeing these discrepancies as a matter of natural science
correcting misconceptions in our common-sense classifications. Consider,
however, the way that such discrepancies lead us to abandon the core notion
that race involves how appearance is linked to ancestry, and think also of the
confusion this may engender. Imagine a young woman, born in England to
parents from Bangladesh, whose dark brown skin has marked her for her whole
life as a minority of foreign origin. What should she make of the idea that it
would be accurate to classify her as being of the same race as the majority?
Faced with a choice between describing herself in relation to white people as
racially different in recognition of how her appearance has generated a
particular experience and describing herself as racially the same on the basis of
the broadness of “Caucasian” or “Caucasoid” as a category, should she see both
options as equally reasonable? The anti-realist will reject both options as
misleading while, as a social constructionist, I would deem the first (p.44)
option more illuminating. Either way, the point about the second option will be
that it conflicts with common sense in a way that is best addressed by giving up
the idea that it counts as a description of race and choosing to phrase its insight
into our development and diversity as a species in other terms.

If we therefore put aside biological realism as an approach to race, how do we

decide between anti-realism and social constructionism? Anti-realism certainly
has much to be said for it. There is good reason to think that it is hard to
separate talk of race from traditional biological essentialism. Even Hardimon,
while asserting that the concept of race at its core is logically independent of
essentialist ideas, admits that, as a historical matter, the concept came into
general usage already laden with essentialism. He adds six theses, which he
calls the “racialist development” and which amount to biological essentialism, to
the original three theses in order to give us what he calls “the ordinary
conception of race,” and he acknowledges that “[w]hen the logical core first
entered the historical scene, it was already articulated by the racialist
development.”11 If essentialism is thus a heavy historical legacy to be overcome,
it should furthermore be acknowledged that we are by no means yet near to
overcoming it. Many think that the fact that people today often dress up
essentialist ideas in talk of ‘culture’ rather than ‘race’ only extends the power of
such thinking. Lawrence Blum gives us an example of this kind of talk: “These
people (Jews, whites, Asians) just are that way (stingy, racist, studious); it’s part
of their culture.”12 It seems clear, from an anti-realist perspective, that we will
not defeat this insidious tendency to essentialize by encouraging continued
Page 6 of 33

belief in and talk about races as real. We should instead expose all such belief
and talk as mistaken or confused (not to mention, in many cases, hateful and
oppressive).

(p.45) Despite the attractions of anti-realism, however, I reject it. When

evaluated as a position on the significance or insignificance of appearance as
related to ancestral place of origin, I think it fails to accurately describe and
explain reality. Think once more of the Englishwoman of South Asian descent.
How she looks as a result of where her ancestors are from has indeed been very
significant, not because of differences of character rooted in her blood, but
because of the social situation of South Asians in England. While anti-realism
helps us appreciate ways in which differences of appearance and ancestry are
not significant, only social constructionism redirects our focus toward ways in
which they really are. Racial difference, it should be noted, is not wholly
unrelated to that which we may study by means of natural science because it is
partly a matter of physical, biological, and geographical differences: it involves
how distinctive physical appearances indicate biological connections of descent
that tie us to particular geographical regions of the world. It is, however, only
through social and historical processes that the particular physical, biological,
and geographical differences that we recognize as racial have come to gain
some relatively stable significance. It is only because racial distinctions are,
fundamentally, significant social distinctions that we can say, in spite of the
falsity of biological essentialism, that racial difference is not an illusion.

One might object, from an anti-realist perspective, that we have here the same
problem we encountered with non-essentialist biological realism: namely, the
problem of changing the subject. I claimed earlier that anti-realists and social
constructionists alike see the mismatches between common-sense racial
categorizations and those invoked by non-essentialist biological realists as
evidence that what those biological realists are discussing is not, in fact, race.
The question then becomes why anti-realists cannot make a similar charge
against social constructionists, given that they too are at odds with common
sense. According to common sense, how we look and where we are from
determine our race, regardless of social and historical conditions. It also remains
to a great extent common sense that people of different races naturally inherit
different characteristics or tendencies in thought and behavior. If social
constructionists deny all this, why should they be seen as still talking about
race?

The first thing to be said in response is that it matters that the divergence from
common sense in the case of social constructionists does not involve racial
categorizations, as in the case of non-essentialist biological realists. Social
constructionists accept common-sense racial categorizations, precisely because
it is only by looking at what people as a matter of sociohistorical contingency
widely accept that we can determine what races there are from a social (p.46)

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constructionist perspective. The pattern of overlaps and divergences in

categorization that we see with non-essentialist biological realists suggests that
they are talking about a kind of distinction that is similar and perhaps closely
related to racial difference, but not the same thing. The lack of divergence in
categorization by social constructionists, on the other hand, suggests that what
is at stake from this perspective is the same distinction that is at stake in
ordinary talk of race, despite the fact that social constructionists offer an
alternative and disruptive understanding of the nature of this distinction.

As an analogy, compare, on the one hand, the divergences between the known
facts of a real-life murder case and the plot of a film loosely based on the case,
and, on the other hand, the divergence or shift in understanding brought about
by a new piece of evidence that appears to exculpate the person convicted of the
murder. The murderer in the film may be similar to the person we take to be the
murderer in real life, but they are not the same. By contrast, the person
convicted of the murder is the same being even after we come to believe that he
is innocent. Social constructionism about race involves this kind of shift in
understanding what something is, not a change in subject matter.

In relation to this same objection, though, we should also note that anti-realists
are generally not so obtuse as to deny that there are significant social
distinctions that people normally discuss using the language of race. They claim,
however, that to speak clearly and accurately about these social distinctions, we
must admit that there are no such things as races and use a different term to
refer to the socially differentiated groups we wish to discuss. Thus Kwame
Anthony Appiah at one point held that there are no races but there are racial
identities, and it has remained Blum’s position that races do not exist but
racialized groups do.13 Conceptual moves such as these allow anti-realists to
claim that the social constructionist confuses rather than clarifies things by
continuing to use the term traditionally associated with biological essences
when referring to a social and historical phenomenon.

(p.47) What would make switching terms most appropriate, however, is a belief
that everyday talk about races is talk about some nonexistent stuff that must be
distinguished from the real social groups worth discussing. If, as I have already
suggested, the best account of the social construction of races would have us
acknowledge the existence of the groups referred to in everyday talk but then
provide a different account of their nature, then it is, in fact, a matter of
clarifying things to continue to use the same term, while it would be at the very
least unnecessary and possibly even misleading to switch terms.

Everyday talk about black people, for example, is best understood as referring to
a real group to which one can belong, even if such talk often involves false
assumptions about what comes naturally to people of recent sub-Saharan
African ancestry. What needs to be recognized in order to properly transform

Page 8 of 33

everyday understandings of this group is that it is distinct as a group not merely

because some of us have ancestors who, in the fifteenth century, lived in sub-
Saharan Africa, but rather because being visibly of this ancestry or in some
other way being known to be of this ancestry has, particularly since the
sixteenth century, been socially significant. Through, among other things, the
horrors of slavery, the injustices of colonialism, and, contrastingly, the activism
of movements promoting black pride, to be black in our world has been to
belong to a meaningfully distinct category of human beings. When we recognize
this as a social and historical phenomenon that forms one part among others of
the larger global story of race, I believe we describe and explain reality in an
informative manner without indulging in essentialist myths, without taking
detours through respectable biology toward a separate subject matter, and
without mistakenly suggesting that talk of race is talk of nothing real.

2.2. Political versus Cultural Constructionism

I would not be so bold as to assume that the account of what races are in the
previous section would receive assent in its every detail by all who would call
themselves social constructionists. Details may be disputed, and perhaps major
features of the account as well. Nevertheless, the account in the previous
section is neutral between two different kinds of social constructionism, and it is
my view that the divergence between these two is highly significant. Fruitful
philosophical discussion of race going forward, I would argue, will require
serious attention to and critical comparison of these two positions so that their
potential merits and disadvantages may become clearer and those participating
in the debate about race may develop views on why to prefer one or the other.

(p.48) One way to begin introducing the difference between the two views is to
note that there is a certain vagueness in saying that race is socially constructed.
What kinds of social relations, processes, or states of affairs are involved in the
construction of racial reality? One answer is that race is made real wholly or
most importantly by hierarchical relations of power. I call this political
constructionism. Stated abstractly, the position need not commit one to any
particular understanding of history, but, as a matter of fact, social
constructionists who think this way generally believe that the specific
hierarchical relations of power that make race real are those constituted or
brought about by European imperialism and the various social structures it
created—in other words, the global sociopolitical system of white supremacy.
Taylor, for example, conceives of races in the modern world as “the
probabilistically defined populations that result from the white supremacist
determination to link appearance and ancestry with social location and life
chances.”14

Let us look now at Haslanger’s view of race, as she is especially explicit about
offering a form of what I have called political constructionism. She gives us this
account of what a race is:

Page 9 of 33

A group G is racialized relative to context C iffdf members of G are (all and only)
those:

(i) who are observed or imagined to have certain bodily features

presumed in C to be evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographical
region (or regions);
(ii) whose having (or being imagined to have) these features marks them
within the context of the background ideology in C as appropriately
occupying certain kinds of social position that are in fact either
subordinate or privileged (and so motivates and justifies their occupying
such a position); and
(iii) whose satisfying (i) and (ii) plays (or would play) a role in their
systematic subordination or privilege in C, that is, who are along some
dimension systematically subordinated or privileged when in C, and
satisfying (i) and (ii) plays (or would play) a role in that dimension of
privilege or subordination.15

(p.49) Note, first, the relationship between (i) and Hardimon’s three theses.
Haslanger, like Hardimon, takes race to involve visible features that relate us
through ancestry to a certain part of the world, although there is the interesting
difference here that Haslanger speaks also of imagined features and presumed
ancestral links, rather than simply observed features and actual links.

We see in (ii) and (iii) Haslanger’s commitment to social constructionism. She

does not take the connection between features of the body, ancestral relations,
and ties to particular geographic regions to be sufficient for racial membership.
In order to amount to something distinguishable as such, these attributes must
furthermore figure in widely shared patterns of thought about how different
kinds of people can be compared with one another, and they must moreover
serve as the ground for actual differences in how people in society position
themselves and find themselves positioned in relation to one another. As she
puts it, adapting the classic feminist explanation of how gender relates to sex,
“race is the social meaning of the geographically marked body.”16

But Haslanger will not count just any kind of commonly drawn distinction and
associated relationship between different groups as racial. She holds that these
distinctions in thought and patterns in group relations must be matters of
subordination and privilege. This is, in fact, what explains why imagined and
presumed attributes count just as much as accurately perceived ones for her. If
you are not actually linked by descent to the place where many guess that you
have roots, but the mistaken perception that many have regularly results in your
experience of advantage or disadvantage comparable to that which is
experienced by people who are actually linked by descent to that place, then

Page 10 of 33

Haslanger aims to capture your social reality in her account of what it means to
belong to a race.

Haslanger’s approach is distinctive and, in several respects, controversial, but I

take her to be representative of the norm among social constructionists in being
a political constructionist. If I am right about this, one irony is that what many
take to be the pioneering philosophical account of race as a social construction
rather than a natural kind is, in fact, not a political constructionist account. In
1897, at the first meeting of the American Negro Academy, W. E. B. Du Bois
presented a paper entitled “The Conservation of Races,” in which he attempts to
answer the question of “the real meaning of race.”17 (p.50) Du Bois argues that
natural science has failed to clarify and distinguish the criteria for race
membership, but that it remains the case that “subtle forces” have divided us
into “races, which, while they perhaps transcend scientific definition,
nevertheless, are clearly defined to the eye of the historian and sociologist.”18
Having thus committed himself to the view that races are fundamentally
sociohistorical, he goes on to define a race as “a vast family of human beings,
generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions
and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the
accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life.”19

With its emphasis on differing “traditions” and “ideals of life,” I would classify
this definition of race as a form of cultural constructionism. For the cultural
constructionist, participation in distinctive ways of life, rather than positioning
in hierarchical relations of power, is what is most important in making race real.
As I have argued elsewhere, Du Bois can be seen not merely as offering a
cultural theory of race, but also as explicitly distancing himself from the political
approach.20 Writing in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson, the US Supreme Court
case that cemented the system of Jim Crow segregation, Du Bois identifies his
purpose in thinking about the nature of race as political but claims that, when
seeking the substance of race, we will have to look beyond political conditions:

It is necessary in planning our movements, in guiding our future

development, that at times we rise above the pressing, but smaller
questions of separate schools and cars, wage-discrimination and lynch law,
to survey the whole question of race in human philosophy and to lay, on a
basis of broad knowledge and careful insight, those large lines of policy
and higher ideals which may form our guiding lines and boundaries in the
practical difficulties of everyday.21

As this passage suggests, it is not only of theoretical but also practical

significance for Du Bois that he arrives at his cultural definition of race. He ends
(p.51) up arguing that the advancement of civilization has been a matter of the
pursuit of different ideals by different races, and then claims on that basis that it
is incumbent upon African Americans to proliferate institutions that will help

Page 11 of 33

them to develop black culture and thus contribute something special to world,
rather than buckle under the pressure of American racism by devaluing and
seeking to be rid of their racial distinctness.

Cultural constructionism is thus an alternative to political constructionism with a

long history. It has sometimes been recognized and discussed as an alternative,
even if not by the name I have given it, as when Taylor describes the “racial
communitarian” as believing that “we construct races by creating cultural
groups.”22 Taylor offers arguments against this position, which I will consider in
the following section. More often than not, though, cultural constructionism is
simply ignored as a distinct option. The reason for this, I think, is that political
constructionism is such a common position among social constructionists that
many seem not to consider the possibility that one might be a social
constructionist without being a political constructionist. While unfortunate, this
is not, in my view, mysterious. Indeed, I think there is much that can be said in
explanation of why, to many, it seems just obvious that political constructionism
is the right way to think about the social construction of race.

Note, first, that political constructionism appears to offer the best way from a
social constructionist perspective to understand the historical development of
racial difference. While biological realists may be willing to envision races
becoming distinct from each other as much as tens of thousands of years ago,
social constructionists tend to treat races as products of the modern era (that is
to say, the last five centuries or so), and the most obvious way to explain how
they came about given this assumption is to point to the hierarchical social
structures created by European imperialism. Taylor is notably flexible in being
willing to see “race-thinking” in a broad sense—defined as “assigning generic
meaning to human bodies and bloodlines”—as already existing in the ancient
world, but he sharply distinguishes what existed before from “modern
racialism,” or the system of thought and practice that “relies mainly on skin
color, facial features, and hair texture to divide humankind into four or five
color-coded groups—black, brown, red, white, yellow.”23 His (p.52) willingness
to recognize antecedents does not prevent him from saying that “modern Europe
invented the concept of race,” thus emphasizing that however old the process of
assigning meaning to bodies and bloodlines may be, modern Europeans
“developed a vocabulary that highlights certain aspects of this process” and then
“refined it, exported it, tried to make it scientific, and built it into the foundation
of world-shaping . . . developments in political economy.”24

That last part is, of course, hugely important. The standard social constructionist
story is that Europe’s colonization of most of the rest of the world, with all the
voluntary and involuntary movements, new assortments, and reorganized
institutional relations of peoples this entailed, brought it about that differences
of appearance and ancestry gained significance in the modern era in a
systematic and global manner unlike anything that came before. This is why, as

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we have seen, Taylor argues for the current reality of races by defining them as
populations distinct from each other not merely in appearance and ancestry, but
also in probabilities of social location and life chances, with the distinctness in
these latter regards being directly or indirectly the result of modern European
efforts to establish the supremacy of white people over all others.

What alternative story might a cultural constructionist tell about how races as
we know them came to be? Unfortunately, it will not help to look to “The
Conservation of Races.” Du Bois tells a tale of nomadic groups settling in cities
and beginning to specialize in different ways of life, followed eventually by the
coalescing of cities into nations that constitute racial groups and which are
characterized by “spiritual and mental differences.”25 As fascinating as this story
may be, it is frustratingly vague on matters of chronology and geography,
making it hard to evaluate, much less accept. Du Bois is specific only when he
gets to the modern age, congratulating “the English nation” for its role in
developing the ideals of “constitutional liberty and commercial freedom,” the
“German nation” for “science and philosophy,” and the “Romance nations” for
“literature and art.”26 Note here also that, while Du Bois recognizes “whites” as
constituting one of two or three “great families (p.53) of human beings” from a
scientific perspective (along with “Negroes” and “possibly the yellow race”), he
disaggregates them into smaller families, including those just listed, when
differentiating between sociohistorical races as he understands them.27 Given
that it was in his time and remains in our time socially significant to be white,
we might even say that the charge of changing the subject as evidenced by
leaving behind common-sense racial categorizations—leveled by anti-realists and
social constructionists against non-essentialist biological realists—applies also to
his view. A political constructionist explanation of white distinctness as resulting
from the white supremacist construction of social hierarchies based on
appearance and ancestry thus seems clearly preferable.

Secondly, political constructionism appears most persuasive in explaining how

race is made real socially, partly through the impact of racial categorizations on
personal experience. Consider a young black man in the United States who has
grown up as the adopted son of white parents in a nearly all-white suburban
community. Depending on how he was raised and the interests of his friends,
such an individual may feel culturally quite disconnected from black people as a
group and rather continuous with those around him. This fact, however, may
have little bearing on his feeling that his appearance and ancestry are very
significant because of how often he is looked at suspiciously by strangers, how
store owners sometimes harass him, how encounters with the police go
differently for him than for his friends, etc. This would seem to suggest that
cultural difference may be unimportant to one’s experience of race, while social
hierarchy is essential or at least especially deep in its impact given its
connection to our ability to feel respected and valued in our social context.

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Another way we can make the foregoing point is by considering, in sharp

contrast, how race might be experienced by some as having little to no impact
on their life. The concept of white privilege, for example, is the concept of a
condition of which it is characteristic that having it makes it more likely that one
will be unaware of its existence and unaware that one has it.28 Many white
people living in social contexts characterized by racial multiplicity nevertheless
go through much of life reflecting comparatively seldom upon matters of race,
and it can seem particularly unimportant to their sense of who they are as
individuals. This is best explained from a social constructionist perspective (p.
54) not by accepting that race has done little to shape their lives and identities,
but rather by noticing that it is precisely one aspect of how race may shape us
that one’s whiteness may be systematically hidden from view even as the
relative privileges flowing from said whiteness are enjoyed. The enjoyment of
white privilege is not merely compatible with but, more importantly, facilitated
by a lack of consciousness about race.29 Recognizing how an imperative to
justification may come along with the conscious possession of privilege thus
helps clarify much about how many white people experience their whiteness,
and this is best explained as a matter of social hierarchy rather than simply as
cultural difference.

Finally, moving from personal experience to consideration of the social

landscape at large, political constructionism can seem best attuned to how race
matters socially in terms of major events and trends. As I first wrote this during
the summer of 2016, some of the ways in which race had been a prominent
feature of current affairs in the recent past included: growing attention to police
violence against black people and the corresponding growth of the Black Lives
Matter movement; the racism associated with Donald Trump’s campaign for
presidency of the United States, especially in the form of xenophobia directed at
Latinos and Muslims; concern about the role of racism in the Brexit vote in the
United Kingdom; concern over the role of racism in the water pollution crisis in
Flint, Michigan; racist reactions to Syrian refugees in various Western countries;
and activism and turmoil concerning racial justice on university campuses in the
United States and South Africa. At issue in all cases, arguably, was the problem
or response to the problem of the classification of non-white people as less
valuable and, in many cases, as particularly threatening to a social order. If this
is how race matters, how could it not be clear that race is fundamentally a
matter of social hierarchy?

2.3. Why Cultural Constructionism?

I do not find it strange, then, that political constructionism has been taken to be
the default position among social constructionists. So why would I choose to
defend cultural constructionism? The first thing I should say in order to clarify
my position is that I take race, at present, to be both politically and (p.55)
culturally constructed. If the only way we could make sense of the distinction
between political and cultural constructionism were viewing the former as
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denying that race is in any way culturally constructed and the latter as denying
that race is in any way politically constructed, I would deny that we have to
choose one or the other and reject both positions as false. Happily, I think many
other social constructionists who I would normally identify as political
constructionists would agree with me on this point.

Charles Mills, for example, when explaining his popular model of the system of
white supremacy as a “Racial Contract,” clarifies that this contract should be
understood as “creating not merely racial exploitation, but race itself as a group
identity.”30 This point about hierarchy not merely being based upon but rather
generating racial difference is, of course, characteristic of political
constructionism. Still, many of Mills’s efforts at exploring the various dimensions
of white supremacy include insightful attention to cultural difference. For
instance, while imploring political philosophers to take seriously how race brings
up questions of personhood, he encourages reflection on ways in which
personhood is linked to cultural membership. First, he notes: “Colonization has
standardly involved the denigration as barbaric of native cultures and
languages, and the demand to assimilate to the practices of the superior race, so
that one can achieve whatever fractional personhood is permitted.”31 Resistance
to racism thus often involves affirming the worth of indigenous languages or, as
in the Caribbean, creoles that deviate from the imperial standard. In the United
States, Mills argues, “the construction of an exclusionary cultural whiteness has
required the denial of the actual multiracial heritage of the country,” which
means that white people “appropriated Native American and African technical
advances, language use, cultural customs, and artistic innovations without
acknowledgment, thereby both reinforcing the image of nonwhites as
subpersons incapable of making any worthwhile contribution to global
civilization and burnishing the myth of their own monopoly on creativity.”32 As
Mills sums up this discussion, he suggests that thinking about race necessarily
requires thinking about cultural difference:

Culture has not been central to European political theory because cultural
commonality has been presupposed. But once cultures are in (p.56)
contestation, hegemonic and oppositional, and linked with personhood,
they necessarily acquire a political dimension.33

If thinking about race requires thinking about cultures in contestation, it seems

clear that Mills believes race involves both differential power relations and
participation in different ways of life.

Assuming I am right that it is common among social constructionists to

recognize that both of these kinds of difference are somehow involved in race,
one might begin to suspect that distinguishing between ‘political
constructionism’ and ‘cultural constructionism’ is misleading and unnecessary. I
think this suspicion is wrong. What is required for the distinction to be useful is

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that there be some social constructionists who think that differential power
relations are somehow most fundamental in the social construction of race and
some who, by contrast, accord that status to participation in different ways of
life. Mills, like Taylor, Haslanger, and others, fits the first description.34 I have
already suggested that those who fit the second description are less common,
but, among those who have been prominent in debates about the metaphysics of
race, one example would be Lucius Outlaw.35

Let us consider more carefully, then, what might be involved in treating politics
or culture as more fundamental to the social construction of race. We can define
a maximally robust political constructionism as a view that takes politics, in the
sense of power relations, to be what matters most for the reality of race in all of
the following ways: (1) differential power relations are what first brought racial
difference into existence and are thus fundamental in being the origin of races;
(2) differential power relations count as most important in the present to the
reality of race, which is to say that properly understanding any event, process,
or state of affairs that involves race always requires understanding how power
relations are at stake, whereas there is nothing else (p.57) that must similarly
always be understood; and (3) differential power relations are essential to race,
making it the case that if an egalitarian state of affairs in which appearance and
ancestry do not correlate with positions in a hierarchy is achieved, race will be
no more. I think many social constructionists are robust political constructionists
according to these criteria.

A maximally robust cultural constructionism would, by contrast, hold that (1) the
origin of racial difference is to be found in divergences in ways of life; (2) only
cultural difference must always be understood in order to understand the reality
of race in the present; and (3) cultural difference is essential to race, such that
the end of distinctive ways of life would mean the end of race. Confrontation
between this bold position and political constructionism as I have described it
would perhaps be the most exciting way for things to go in the rest of this
chapter, but, unfortunately for those awaiting such excitement, this is not a
version of cultural constructionism I would defend. Indeed, I disagree with each
of these three points, which might lead one to think it doubtful that I could
deserve the title of cultural constructionist!

The reason I take on the title, in spite of not holding the maximally robust
version of the position, is because I reject political constructionism in a way that
is, I think, best expressed by calling my view a form of cultural constructionism.
Before explaining how and why I reject it, however, let me first acknowledge the
crucial respect in which I do not challenge the political constructionist account. I
completely concede the first point about the origin of race. In other words, I take
European imperialism and the hierarchical social structures it created to be

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what gave rise to racial difference as we know it. If admitting this were all it
took to be a political constructionist, I would have to identify as one.

I disagree, however, with the second and third points of the robust political
constructionist account for reasons involving my belief in the significance of
cultural difference to race’s existence and functioning as a social distinction. I
reject the claim that politics is more important than culture at present. I hold
that they are of equal importance and, though I do not go so far as to claim that
culture is more important, this disagreement nevertheless already commits me
to putting additional emphasis on the significance of culture in opposition to the
political constructionist’s relative disregard. I also reject the claim that the end
of social hierarchy based on appearance and ancestry would mean the end of
race. Race as a social construction could live on past the death of racism, in my
view, given that racial groups could continue to exist as cultural groups. Here
too we see how my disagreement with the political constructionist allows me to
uphold culture as particularly significant. (p.58) While the political
constructionist sees the end of racism as a potential future transition from social
reality to nothingness, I see the potential for a transition from cultural difference
being one component of a social reality to being the entirety of that reality.

To see most clearly why it is useful to call my view cultural constructionism,

though, it is necessary to pay attention to the role of values and ideals in
thinking about the nature and reality of race. The more we try to draw a very
sharp distinction between ethics and metaphysics, the less reason there will be
to say that my metaphysical stance should be described as centering culture
more than politics. Race is fundamentally social, in my view, but I do not take
either politics or culture to be more fundamental in the sense of being what is
essential for the social reality of race. Culture cannot be essential in this way if,
as I hold, race is political at its origin. Politics cannot be essential if, as I believe,
a future in which race is merely cultural is possible. This comparison seems,
however, to leave the two equal in status.

Think now, though, about the fact that getting rid of unjust social distinctions
clearly ought to be our shared goal as human beings in society. We therefore
have a duty to work toward the end of race as a social reality insofar as it is
constituted by a hierarchy based on appearance and ancestry. It is not so clear,
by contrast, that we have any duty to work toward ending the existence of
different cultures. People differ in how permissible and valuable they take the
perpetuation of cultural distinctions to be, but I am among those who value
cultural diversity and think that, at least in many cases, the preservation of
distinctive cultural traditions is desirable and admirable. The continued
existence of racial diversity as cultural diversity after the end of racism is
therefore, in my view, something good. As a result, one normative implication of
my position on race is that we should be orienting ourselves in the present
toward the eventual achievement of a world in which races exist only as cultural

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groups. This vision for the future and the concern for valuing the cultural
aspects of race in the present that it entails makes it sensible to say that culture
is indeed fundamental, on my view. Thinking of cultural constructionism as
including perspectives according to which we ought to actively continue
constructing races as cultural groups makes applying that label to my view
perfectly apt.

I will provide in the remaining space of this chapter a preliminary defense of my

version of cultural constructionism. I mentioned earlier that Taylor criticizes
cultural constructionism, and I will first consider the trilemma he devises in
order to do so. Responding to Taylor will be useful for establishing the basic
coherence and plausibility of my position. Second, I will say more (p.59) about
how and why my position contrasts with a robust political constructionism,
allowing me to defend the superiority of my view. Further development and
defense of my position will then come in Chapter 6.

Taylor’s trilemma is aimed at what he refers to as the “strong communitarian”

view that races are groups “composed of people who share or have some claim
on a common culture,” with the normative implication that these groups
“deserve a certain kind of reverence or commitment from their constituent
members, such that the people who don’t participate in the culture ought to do
so.”36 This is, as he also calls it, a “cultural-nationalist account of race.”37 The
question that arises in relation to this view is this: How might the claim that
races are made up of people who share not only a similar appearance and
ancestry but also a common culture be justified? Taylor imagines three options
for how the cultural constructionist (as I will refer to his target) could reply, and
deems each option unsatisfactory.

First, the view might be that it is simply how nature works that, just as members
of races inherit common physical features, they inherit common cultural
tendencies as well. But this is classical racialism (i.e., biological essentialism),
and so it must be ruled out as an option. Second, he imagines that a non-
essentialist version of the position might take as its starting point the plausible
idea that “people who are treated in similar ways might do well to join forces to
resist their common oppression.”38 From there, one might reasonably conclude
that people oppressed on the basis of their common racial categorization will be
aided in their struggles against oppression by cultivating togetherness through a
sense of cultural community. The problem with this “practical cultural
nationalism,” as Taylor calls it, is that it is a prescriptive view about what
members of races ought to do, not a descriptive view concerned with what races
are, and thus it is irrelevant to the debate over the nature and reality of race.39
Finally, if the cultural constructionist is not being prescriptive but rather is, in
fact, making the descriptive claim that races are, like ethnic groups, made up of

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people associated with a common culture, then the view is “simply incorrect.”40
Races and ethnic groups are not the same things.

(p.60) Taylor thus treats cultural constructionism as untenable because it is

either empirically baseless (because essentialist), irrelevant (because
prescriptive, not descriptive), or a confusion of two distinct categories (races
and ethnic groups). It is already obvious that I would reject the essentialist
version of the identification of races with cultures, so the question becomes
whether my position is captured by either of the two non-essentialist options
and, if so, what I might say in response to Taylor’s criticisms. Let us first notice
what is strange about Taylor’s conception of a practical cultural nationalist. In
order for his criticism of irrelevance to work, he must imagine the practical
cultural nationalist as refraining from describing races as being presently
cultural groups, even while prescribing that the members of at least some races
work to change this situation. But cultural nationalists, as a rule, argue for the
preservation and cultivation of a culture that they believe already exists, at least
in some shape or form, and this is true for those whose cultural nationalism is
racial in scope as well.

Take Du Bois. In “The Conservation of Races,” he exhorts African Americans to

lead black people as a whole in making a distinctive cultural contribution to
civilization. This is a prescriptive, future-oriented view, but Du Bois clearly
suggests that the cultural contribution to come will build on contributions that
have already been made. As “members of a vast historic race,” he claims, his
people have brought unique gifts to America, for their “subtle sense of song has
given America its only American music, its only fairy tales, its only touch of
pathos and humor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy.”41

The position Taylor depicts is certainly not logically impossible, but given the
goal of evaluating what has actually been held by proponents of cultural theories
of race, we should note that, in practice, prescriptions of the type he is
discussing are almost always inseparable from an understanding of the race
being exhorted as already a cultural group in some sense, whether this
understanding is biologically essentialist or not.42 Thus Taylor’s second option is
not really worth distinguishing from the first and third options. Given (p.61)
that the first option has been ruled out, the crucial question is thus whether my
view is, as Taylor’s trilemma suggests, a simple confusion of race with ethnicity.
This would, of course, be an ironic result, in light of the fact that the need to
avoid treating ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ as synonymous in order to think productively
about race was among the first things I asserted in this chapter.

Before responding, I should clarify how Taylor takes these two terms to differ in
meaning. According to him, both terms refer to groups based partially on
descent, but “ ‘race’ points to the body while ‘ethnicity’ points to culture.”43 In
other words, while races are groups distinguished at least in part by shared

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ancestry and distinctive physical appearances, ethnicities are groups

distinguished by shared ancestry and by cultural factors like language and
religion. I happen to think that this is a very reasonable way of differentiating
between race and ethnicity, so it will not be my strategy to say that Taylor has
failed in drawing the distinction. It is compatible with and, I would say,
important to my view that physical appearance plays a key role in racial
difference that it does not by necessity play in ethnic difference. Taylor seems to
suggest that recognizing races as cultural groups involves contradicting that
point, but this is not the case. Culture is not displacing the centrality of the body,
in my view, but rather serving as a key factor in explaining how the body is
socially meaningful in cases of racial difference.

Consider examples of people feeling cultural pride in both their race and their
ethnicity, where these are not the same thing. One can feel a sense of cultural
allegiance to the black race as a whole, for instance, while also proudly
identifying as a member of an ethnic group that is but a small component of the
race or one that overlaps multiple races, as in the cases of those who identify
ethnically as Latin American or Arab. An Afro-Cuban individual may love being a
Latino and yet simultaneously take great pride in being of African descent, with
the result that she feels a strong sense of kinship and shared cultural ownership
when witnessing or participating in forms of culture originating in sub-Saharan
Africa or in places in the African diaspora outside Latin America. This example
fits well with Taylor’s claim that ethnic belonging need not be associated with a
shared physical appearance, given the diversity of ways Latin American people
can look, while racial membership is linked with visible continuities, as in the
case of those whose features indicate sub-Saharan African ancestry.

(p.62) We can, however, go a step further in demonstrating the lack of

confusion between race and ethnicity on my part by recalling my agreement
with Taylor and other political constructionists that the origin of races as we
know them is to be found in the construction of white supremacist social
hierarchies. What this means is that, on my view, when the Afro-Cuban I
described feels culturally connected to other black people, the pride she
experiences involves valuing black bodies and their activities in the face of their
historical devaluation, a devaluation that was part of the colonial projects that
made being of this particular descent a salient shared identity in the modern
world in the first place. Adding this historical specificity to the account helps to
make it obvious beyond a shadow of a doubt that race is not being confused here
with ethnicity or any other social category. This pride is racial pride, and it can
be felt without having a biologically essentialist understanding of racial identity,
for our Afro-Cuban friend may well recognize the historical contingencies upon
which her feelings of belonging within a larger whole rest, whether with respect
to her race or her ethnicity.

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Cultural constructionism thus need not be seen as necessarily empirically

baseless, irrelevant, or confused. There is a coherent and plausible idea here. In
order to make it clear why it should be seen not only as plausible but also as
preferable to political constructionism, I will now systematically contrast my
position with the three tenets of the robust version of that view. As mentioned
multiple times now, the first tenet of the view is one I accept: races emerged out
of political conditions that divided people into groups unequal in power. What I
would add, though, is that as soon as you have races emerging in this way, you
have social categories shaping the identities of those who are included in them
in such a way that these members may plausibly view these categories as
culturally significant.

The cultural significance of races can be seen as coming about in at least three
ways (and I mean all of these ways, not just any or some). First, the emergence
of racial categories is itself a cultural shift, and thus a social context in which
people are viewed as being of different races is in that way culturally distinctive.
This is a point that may seem subtle but which is ultimately somewhat obvious. I
am not yet describing how individual races might differ in their respective ways
of life. I am describing instead how being socialized into a world where people
conceive of each other as racially different means being socialized into a
particular way of life. If we think, for example, of the difference between, on the
one hand, someone growing up in a West African village in the fifteenth century
in an area where it was common to be aware only of what we would now think of
as ethnic differences and, on the other (p.63) hand, an enslaved descendant of
this person on a Caribbean island a couple of centuries later who is acutely
aware of her place in a racial hierarchy, we are noticing a difference in the
cultures that shaped these two related individuals. The social construction of
race is therefore, from the beginning, a cultural process, and race can
accurately be described as being from the start both politically and culturally
constructed, even if we acknowledge that, at the point of origin, it is the political
circumstance (e.g., the social hierarchy of slavery) that gives rise to the cultural
condition of racial identification being common.

Second, there are the novel forms of cultural difference between groups that
arise in the wake of the development of racial difference. Once people are being
socialized into worlds in which they inhabit different racial categories, it is a
necessarily common occurrence that these social distinctions lead to inhabiting
relatively different worlds and thus participating in different ways of life. As
people of different African ethnicities came in the Americas to inhabit the
category of ‘Negro’ or ‘black,’ for example, their new cultural creations were
products of black culture. They could not be products of the distinctive ethnic
groups of old as these distinctions faded. One might associate them with
particular territories, calling jazz a product of the United States, samba a
product of Brazil, calypso a product of Trinidad, and so on, but to say this alone
is misleading, for no explanation of these musical cultures that fails to
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acknowledge their initial development primarily by those of African descent is

adequate.

Third, we should not let the novelty that comes along with social orders and
relations brought about by colonialism cause us to miss the ways in which racial
groups are also shaped culturally by historical patterns and events preceding
racial formation. It is true that there is some level of anachronism in an African
American boy alive today learning about Great Zimbabwe, the large city whose
ruins we can still visit, that served as the capital of a flourishing kingdom from
the eleventh to the fifteenth century, and experiencing this as a moment of pride
in ‘black heritage.’ On a social constructionist view, we have reason to deny that
the Shona people who lived in this place at that time were part of something we
can call the black race (in contrast with Shona people today, as the development
starting in the late nineteenth century of Rhodesia as a settler colony and the
struggle against white rule leading up to Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980
make it especially obvious on this view that they are black). But there is also
something clearly right about him describing his experience in that way. He is
engaging in the common cultural practice of taking pride in the past
accomplishments of one’s people, but what enables him to count those who
constructed Great Zimbabwe as his people (p.64) is an ancestral connection to
Africa made significant by the social reality that being black is significant. Note
how whiteness as a cultural reality has been similarly shaped by pride among
Europeans and those of European descent in the accomplishments of ancient
Greeks and Romans.

It might be thought that, while it makes sense to call this boy’s feeling a case of
taking pride in black heritage, the accuracy of the description does not mean
that the practice itself makes sense. This boy’s ancestors in Africa were likely to
be found in West Africa, not the southern part of the continent where Great
Zimbabwe is. With no known connection to Zimbabwe, how could Shona people
be his people? There is much that could be said in response, including the
political constructionist point that a world shaped by white supremacy is a world
in which it makes sense for this boy to see himself as in the same group as
others with a similar appearance and sub-Saharan African ancestry. An
important point about culture that should be made in response, though, is that
to scoff at the idea that West African ancestry could allow a sense of cultural
connection with people from what is now Zimbabwe is to wrongfully assume that
geographic distance automatically means a lack of cultural commonality. We can
relate this to Kwame Gyekye’s complaint about some of Appiah’s work. Gyekye
claims that Appiah expends great energy emphasizing Africa’s cultural diversity
at the expense of recognizing common “threads visible in the cultural tapestry of
the African peoples.”44 Without denying Africa’s “pluralism,” Gyekye points out a
number of “horizontal relationships” (i.e., similarities) between traditional
African cultures in metaphysical, epistemological, moral, and sociopolitical
matters.45 We can discern premodern horizontal relationships in other racial
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groups as well, and this is best understood, of course, not as the result of inborn
impulses, but rather sociohistorical processes. Think, for instance, of how we
can tell the story of Buddhism arriving from India in East Asia and gradually
spreading throughout the region, centuries before East Asians were classed
together by Westerners as “Orientals” or the “yellow” race.

These three forms of cultural significance—racial consciousness itself as

cultural, racial consciousness as facilitating new cultural developments, and
racial consciousness as shaped by prior cultural developments—are key (p.65)
aspects of a proper account of the social construction of race, on my view. They
are not central to standard political constructionism. That being said, it is not
clear that the committed political constructionist has reason as yet to deny
anything I have said. As long as I admit the political origin of race, my talk of
cultural significance arising in the wake and as part of this process of origination
may be seen as helpful detail, rather than harmful challenge. A maximally robust
cultural constructionism might claim that premodern cultural commonalities
represent in themselves the origin of racial difference. I would not claim that.
Cultural commonalities across large expanses are not hard to find, and if one
tried to divide up the world on that basis, many different sets based on
alternative choices of how to divide would be possible. Premodern
commonalities matter in the case of races only because they accord with
divisions based on appearance, but given the various continuities in how we
look, there are different sets based on alternative divisions possible on this basis
as well. Races as we know them, on my view, are appearance-based groups that
initially result from the history of Europe’s imperial encounters.

Where cultural constructionism as I conceive of it moves from offering a change

in emphasis to seriously challenging the dominant view among social
constructionists, then, is in its opposition to the second and third tenets of a
robust political constructionism. I reject the idea that cultural difference is less
important than differences in power relations for understanding racial
phenomena in the present. This forces me to address what we should make of
hypothetical examples like the adopted young man who experiences little
cultural attachment to blackness but whose experiences of social inequities
nevertheless render his blackness very significant. Does this not show that the
political constructionist is right and I am wrong about what is important?

The mistake here is the expectation that the cultural construction of race would
involve a uniformity of experience across individuals, whereas this is the case
neither for race’s cultural nor for its political aspects. For any particular way in
which disadvantage can be experienced within a social hierarchy, one cannot
assume that because a person is non-white that he or she has personally
experienced that form of racism or racism’s effects. This is why Taylor’s political
account of race is structured around probabilities—around the fact that, in the
United States, for example, “non-whites are much more likely to be unemployed,

Page 23 of 33

to commit and become victims of violent crime, to receive substandard medical

care, and to live in inadequate housing.”46 To point out (p.66) a non-white
individual in the United States today who is employed, who has not committed or
been a victim of violent crime, who has received quality medical care, and who
lives in a very nice house does nothing to disprove his theory.

Similarly, it is not my claim that all members of races have uniform cultural
experiences. Indeed, there is no such thing as uniformity of experience within
cultural groups, especially when the group in question is large and
geographically dispersed. In any group that can be described as a cultural
group, it will be normal for some individuals to be more familiar with certain
aspects of the culture, less familiar with others. Once we are talking about
groups that are associated with cultures but whose members are also connected
by other ties—such as descent in the case of ethnicities, or citizenship in the
case of countries, geographic location in the case of regions, and so on—then
there can be not only differential familiarity with various aspects of the culture,
but also the common occurrence of some group members having little to no
investment in the group’s culture. What makes it the case that there is a culture
of the group to speak of is not all group members being equally invested and
engaged in reproducing a specific set of customs, but rather there being many
group members whose identification with the group is connected with
investment and engagement in practices that they take to be distinctively
related to the group’s existence, which is a state of affairs compatible with a
significant amount of diversity in what is taken to be distinctive and in how
invested and engaged group members are.

I have provided an argument, then, against taking cases of individual experience

as evidence that politics is more fundamental than culture to race, but this
defensive move is, of course, not enough to show that politics and culture are, at
present, equally important to understanding racial phenomena. This is not the
kind of claim for which it is easy to provide definitive proof, but I will use three
examples of issues involving race to motivate the idea that paying attention to
matters of social hierarchy without also paying attention to how people often
identify on the basis of appearance and ancestry with distinctive ways of life
generally leads to confusion about what is going on.

Consider, first, the example of education. This is a topic that can be racially
fraught, especially in majority-white countries with sizable non-white minorities
(although I have mentioned already that racial dynamics in education have been
recently controversial in South Africa). The political account of race is certainly
helpful in illuminating many problems with education, such as inequality in basic
access, inequality in funding, and unequal treatment of students by teachers and
other staff with regard to discipline and the (p.67) provision of opportunities.
One will badly misunderstand mobilization over racism in education, however, if
one ignores matters of curriculum design, and such matters can only be

Page 24 of 33

understood through attention to cultural difference. For many concerned with

racism in education, it would be manifestly unsatisfactory for us to achieve
equality in access, funding, discipline, and opportunities while doing nothing
about the traditional privileging of white people, their accomplishments, and
their perspectives in school materials and teaching methods. This traditional
Eurocentric bias is viewed by many anti-racists not only as problematic in itself,
but also as a significant factor in non-white students—especially black students
—doing less well than others, dropping out at higher rates, and other such
manifestations of inequality. Concern about these effects strongly motivates
demand for the availability of black-focused schools, where emphasis on the
value of black cultural heritage is an essential component of the pedagogical
approach.47

While there can be no mistaking the centrality of cultural difference in demands

for and efforts to provide black-focused education, it might be objected that this
mode of dealing with the problem of racism in schools is controversial and that,
if put aside, it remains possible to understand the issue at hand without any
focus on cultural differences between students. After all, it seems clear that
students of every racial group benefit from a curriculum that does not minimize
the contributions or ignore the perspectives of non-white people. This is indeed
true but, if used by a political constructionist as a reason for not paying
attention to cultural difference, this is self-defeating. The only way this point
could be seen as eliminating the role of cultural difference would be if the
suggestion were that an inclusive curriculum benefits all students in the same
way, but that would mean denying that the Eurocentric approach being targeted
for change hurts non-white students differently than white students, thus
denying that there is a problem of racial hierarchy here in the first place! To
admit that students are placed in unequal positions by a Eurocentric curriculum
is to admit that some students—white ones—are culturally affirmed by such a
curriculum while others—non-white students—are not. An inclusive curriculum
in a racially integrated school benefits everybody but benefits different students
in different ways. Most importantly, (p.68) for our purposes, if it is effective
with regard to non-white students, such a curriculum encourages them to
positively value their racial group and what is unique about it, instead of leading
them to covet whiteness as the authoritative source of goodness and progress.

Consider, second, the issue of interracial marriage. Opposition to it by white

people dedicated to keeping their race pure is, by now, an uncontroversial
example of irredeemable racism. But what about opposition to it by non-white
people? Is this similarly worthy of automatic dismissal and disdain? A number of
black philosophers have demanded that we take seriously the concerns
motivating such opposition among black people, especially as expressed by black
women. Anita Allen points out that many African Americans think of Loving v.
Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down bans on interracial marriage,
as an important blow to racial injustice while still remaining “morally troubled
Page 25 of 33

by marriage between blacks and whites.”48 What could explain this mix of
attitudes? Notice that the attitude toward the law here is sensitive to how
marking racial difference is often a matter of affirming social hierarchy. It is
therefore telling and useful from my perspective that Allen foregrounds the ideal
of commitment to one’s cultural community as often underlying the moral
concern.

To be clear, Allen does not conclude that those who hold this ideal are ultimately
right to oppose interracial marriage, but she defends the moral innocence of
interracial marriage not by dismissing the values invoked against it, but by
outlining a position that “reconciles interracial marriages between blacks and
whites with black community-centered concerns about respect and care.”49
Taylor also takes concerns that non-white people have about interracial
marriage seriously, but he appears to go even further than Allen in his
conclusion by not only rejecting a duty to marry within the race, but finding little
justification for anyone having a right to “color-conscious endogamy.”50 (p.69)
When rejecting arguments that rely on preserving culture, he repeats his refrain
that “races aren’t cultural groups.”51 Later on, however, when clarifying that he
is not saying we should immediately eradicate all racial endogamy, Taylor
concedes that “racial populations may serve as incubators for ethnic
communities, whose members may choose to relate to each other more closely
than to other groups” and, in this way, racial endogamy may be “the
consequence, sign, and mechanism of some benign segregation.”52 This sounds
to me like an argument from the cultural dimension of race to the permissibility
of having a preference for marrying within one’s race, which is support from a
surprising source for my claim about the importance of culture to race.53

Consider, finally, stereotyping. It is undoubtedly one of the things one must

understand in order to know how race works in the world at present. Simple
interactions are affected, such as when acquaintances wrongfully assume that
you must know how to dance because you are black or you must be good at math
because you are East Asian. It is a major issue in art and media, requiring
critical analysis of when, how, and to what purpose stereotypes function in
individual cases and in patterns across various works, genres, and forms of
representation. It is also a source of danger to people’s bodies and lives, given
the way that racial profiling, especially by the police, promotes the influence of
stereotypes over when people are detained and how they are treated, including
whether they might be subjected to deadly force. A political constructionist
account of race can help us understand all of this, from the small slights to the
serious harms, by pointing out how stereotypes rob us of our individuality and
obscure our humanity by flattening us into caricatures on the basis of
appearance and ancestry—caricatures that correspond to particular placements
in a social order.

Page 26 of 33

The logic of the political constructionist account, however, can lead us toward an
untenable position. We are apt to respond to stereotypes by affirming our
individuality—“I am not just some black guy, I am Chike, and Chike is not good
at basketball”—or our humanity—“Stop portraying us in servile roles only, we
are fully human and we can be heroes”—or sometimes both. These responses
certainly have merit, but the more strongly we cling to our (p.70) uniqueness
as individuals or to our shared humanity, the more we move in the direction of
wrongly suggesting that nothing of interest can be said about groups. Consider
the example of someone being stereotyped as particularly in touch with nature
because she belongs to one of the indigenous groups of North America. This is
racial stereotyping and, like all stereotyping of individuals, involves a false,
essentialist assumption. One has learned the wrong lesson, however, if one
concludes that all perceptions of the first peoples of this land as distinct in how
they conceive of and interact with the natural environment must be equally
mistaken. Indeed, it is necessary to learn something about cultural difference in
this regard in order to properly understand debates about land ownership and
use, special rights to hunt and fish, and various other matters involving
indigenous peoples.

Stereotypes, then, are problematic distortions, but not by virtue of representing

differences in thought and behavior between races. The problems are in how
they exaggerate differences, in how intrinsic to group membership they
represent differences, in how they reduce groups to specific differences, thus
obscuring inner complexity and diversity, and, at times, how the differences they
represent are completely made up. Opposing stereotypes should not be equated,
then, with opposing the representation of racial groups as having different ways
of life. Sometimes a stereotype will be related to real differences between races
that are political in nature, such as stereotypes about criminal behavior that can
be connected to disproportionate convictions for crimes because of the
disadvantaged socioeconomic status of the group and bias within the justice
system. Other times, a stereotype will relate to a cultural difference with roots
older than racial difference as we know it, as in the indigenous case just
mentioned. Often enough, there will be relations of both kinds: stereotypes
about black people being good at dancing may be related both to the
significance of dance in traditional African cultures as well as a white
supremacist willingness to recognize physical but not intellectual talents among
black people. And, finally, some stereotypes may have nothing but the most
tenuous relation to anything real, whether political or cultural. What relation or
lack of relation there may be, though, cannot be predicted in advance of
attention to the racial group’s past and present.

Throughout the preceding discussions of education, interracial marriage, and

stereotyping, a crucially important theme emerges. In each case, a political
account of race can be credited with insight into the ways that the issue involves
unfair distinctions and divisions between people that ought to be overcome. In
Page 27 of 33

each case, however, paying attention to culture is necessary for appreciating

how the issue also involves legitimate forms (p.71) of difference, that is,
differences that need not be overcome but rather affirmed and appreciated. My
claim that culture and politics are equally fundamental to race in the present
can be understood as the claim that there can be no justification in assuming,
before examining an issue involving racial difference, that the ways in which
people are different from each other in this case will be the unfair kind or the
legitimate kind, although the best bet will be that both kinds are involved. The
normative implication of this view is that dedication to fighting racism requires
sensitivity to racism’s ability to operate in two seemingly contradictory ways: it
creates and sustains difference where there ought to be none, and it disparages
and suppresses difference where it ought to be respected and valued. Achieving
victory over racism involves arriving at the point where the first kind of
difference is no more, while the second kind of difference is uninhibited in
flourishing.

This brings up my final point: my opposition to the political constructionist tenet

that racial difference would no longer exist if equality were to be achieved. If
races are at present partly cultural constructions, then the end of racial
hierarchy has the potential to usher in a condition of racial equality, where races
as cultural groups coexist in an egalitarian manner, rather than a post-racial era
in which there are no more races. I do not deny that the latter outcome is
possible—as a social constructionist, I accept that just as races came into
existence, they may cease to exist. I deny, however, that their ceasing to exist is
a necessary condition for or consequence of the end of racism. Furthermore, as
someone of sub-Saharan African descent, I personally desire the indefinite
persistence of black people as a cultural group.

Despite political constructionism’s dominance, I take my position here to be the

more intuitive one. What could make the political constructionist view true?
Even if you suspect that it is most likely that we would need to mix together until
appearance gave no clue as to ancestry before racism would end, that is not yet
to say that it is simply impossible that we could eliminate relative advantage and
disadvantage while still identifying as black, white, Polynesian, etc. The political
constructionist can make the move, however, of refraining from claiming that
that would be impossible and claiming instead that, under conditions of equality,
identifications of these sorts would no longer count as identifications with races.
Haslanger, for example, has considered the possibility that groups that are
otherwise like races but are not “hierarchically organized” might be called
“ethnicities.”54

(p.72) I reject this move, both Haslanger’s specific version (as ‘race’ ought not
to be confused with ‘ethnicity’) and the general idea that we should call races
something else after the achievement of equality. I take it to be both intuitive
from an everyday perspective and expressive of a social constructionist

Page 28 of 33

highlighting of historical development to hold that people’s continued

attachment to being black, for example, in a post-racist world would remain an
attachment to a race. It would remain, that is, identification with a group
distinguished by appearance and ancestry but made distinguishable in these
ways through social significance.

Notes:
(1.) Michael O. Hardimon, “The Ordinary Concept of Race,” Journal of Philosophy
100 (September 2003): 441.

(2.) Ibid., 442, 445, 447.

(3.) Ibid., 447–448.

(4.) Ibid., 451.

(5.) Paul C. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK:
Polity, 2013), 50.

(6.) Robin O. Andreasen, “A New Perspective on the Race Debate,” The British
Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (June 1998): 199–225.

(7.) Cavalli-Sforza himself also disagrees with calling them races, but I accept
Andreasen’s claim that we should not take this disavowal as decisive. See
Andreasen, “A New Perspective,” 213.

(8.) Andreasen, “A New Perspective,” 212.

(9.) Ibid.

(10.) Quayshawn Spencer, “A Radical Solution to the Race Problem,” Philosophy

of Science 81 (December 2014): 1031. See Chapter 3 in this volume for
Spencer’s most recent expression of his view.

(11.) Hardimon, “The Ordinary Concept of Race,” 451, 453. According to the six
additional theses, a race is “(4) a natural division of the human species into a
hierarchy of groups that satisfy the conditions specified in (1)–(3); (5) a group of
human beings satisfying the conditions specified in (1)–(3) which is
characterized by a fixed set of fundamental, ‘heritable,’ physical, moral,
intellectual, and cultural characteristics common and peculiar to it; (6) a group
of human beings satisfying the conditions specified in (1)–(3) whose distinctive
visible physical features are correlated with the moral, intellectual, and cultural
characteristics that are common and peculiar to it; (7) a group satisfying the
conditions specified in (1)–(3) that possesses an ‘essence’ which explains why it
is that the group has the distinctive visible features that it does, why it is that
the group has the particular moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics it
does, and the correlation between the two; (8) a group of human beings

Page 29 of 33

satisfying the conditions specified in (1)–(3) whose members necessarily share

its “essential” characteristics; (9) a group of human beings satisfying the
conditions specified in (1)–(3) whose essential characteristics constitute the
essence of its members.” Ibid., 452.

(12.) Lawrence Blum, “I’m Not a Racist, But . . .”: The Moral Quandary of Race
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 134.

(13.) See K. Anthony Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood

Connections,” in Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political
Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 30–105, and
Blum, Chapters 7–8 (131–163). Appiah has not made the same distinction in
more recent work and has thus drifted toward social constructionism. See, for
example, Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Does Truth Matter to Identity?” in Jorge J. E.
Gracia (ed.), Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2007), 19–44, and Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the
Emergence of Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). For
Blum’s continued commitment to his position, see Blum, “Racialized Groups: The
Sociohistorical Consensus,” The Monist 93 (April 2010): 298–320.

(14.) Taylor, Race, 89–90.

(15.) Sally Haslanger, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 236–237. Note that Haslanger, unlike
Blum, treats “groups that are racialized” as synonymous with “races.”

(16.) Ibid., 236.

(17.) W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in The Oxford W. E. B. Du

Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 39.

(18.) Ibid., 40.

(19.) Ibid.

(20.) Chike Jeffers, “The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois’s
‘The Conservation of Races,’” Ethics 123 (April 2013): 403–426.

(21.) Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 39.

(22.) Taylor, Race, 100.

(23.) Ibid., 16, 18. One form of pre-modern “race-thinking” that Taylor does not
say much about is that which can arguably be found in medieval thought,
especially that of the Islamic world. The most convincing philosophical account
of how modern racialism differs from that which precedes it must, in my view,
pay serious attention to this part of the world’s intellectual history. For a starting

Page 30 of 33

point, see Paul-A. Hardy, “Medieval Muslim Philosophers on Race,” in Julie K.

Ward and Tommy L. Lott (eds.), Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2002), 38–62.

(24.) Ibid., 19, 20.

(25.) Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 41.

(26.) Ibid., 42.

(27.) Ibid., 39.

(28.) In this respect, it is similar to some but not all mental illnesses. I thank
Tina Roberts-Jeffers for this point.

(29.) Charles Mills has famously addressed this by developing the

epistemological concept of “white ignorance.” For the most focused expression
of his view, see Mills, “White Ignorance,” in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana
(eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2007), 13–38.

(30.) Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 63.

(31.) Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 115.

(32.) Ibid.

(33.) Ibid.

(34.) That politics is more fundamental than culture to the social construction of
race for Mills is especially clear in his “Multiculturalism as/and/or Anti-Racism?”
in Anthony Simon Laden and David Owen (eds.), Multiculturalism and Political
Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 89–114.

(35.) See Lucius T. Outlaw (Jr.), On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge,
1996), especially the Introduction (1–21) and Chapters 6–7 (135–182). Outlaw’s
position is unique because he not only treats culture as fundamental in the social
construction of race, but also takes race to be both social and biological in
nature in such a way that races are appropriately called “social-natural
kinds” (7). The opposition between social constructionism and biological realism
that I depicted in the first section thus leaves out his distinctive view.

(36.) Taylor, Race, 100–101. Taylor takes Molefi Asante’s Afrocentrism to be an

example of a view of this sort.

(37.) Ibid., 101.

Page 31 of 33

(38.) Ibid.

(39.) Ibid.

(40.) Ibid., 102.

(41.) Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 44.

(42.) Whether Du Bois should be viewed as relying on biological essentialism in

“The Conservation of Races” is a famously controversial question among
philosophers of race and Taylor, as a matter of fact, is one of the major
contributors to this debate who have written in defense of Du Bois. See Appiah,
“The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry
12 (Autumn 1985): 21–37, and Taylor, “Appiah’s Uncompleted Argument: W. E. B.
Du Bois and the Reality of Race,” Social Theory and Practice 26 (Spring 2000):
103–128.

(43.) Taylor, Race, 53.

(44.) Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan

Conceptual Scheme, revised ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995),
xxx.

(45.) Ibid., 195–210. His examples include: an ontology including a Supreme

Being and ancestral spirits; divination, witchcraft, and spirit mediumship as
sources of knowledge; and communalism in social thought and practice.

(46.) Taylor, Race, 82–83. Emphasis mine.

(47.) For an example of such a school, see the Africentric Alternative School in
Toronto, Ontario: http://schoolweb.tdsb.on.ca/africentricschool/Home.aspx.
Political philosopher Will Kymlicka sympathetically considers the case for black-
focused schools in the United States and in Canada in his essay, “A Crossroads in
Race Relations,” in Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism,
Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),
177–199.

(48.) Anita Allen, “Interracial Marriage: Folk Ethics in Contemporary

Philosophy,” in Naomi Zack (ed.), Women of Color and Philosophy: A Critical
Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 183.

(49.) Ibid., 193.

(50.) Taylor, Race, 167. Besides Allen and Taylor, the other classic philosophical
engagement with this topic is Mills’s “Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry
Black Women?” Of the three, Mills ends on the note most friendly to black
opponents of interracial marriage, answering the question in his title by saying

Page 32 of 33

that there are enough at least partially strong arguments to yield a “presumptive
duty,” while leaving it open how easy it may be to defeat the presumption. See
Mills, “Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women?” Journal of
Social Philosophy 25 (June 1994): 150.

(51.) Ibid., 161.

(52.) Ibid., 169.

(53.) Surprising but not extremely so. As I have noted elsewhere, this is not the
only case of Taylor making comments about the relationship between racial and
cultural identity that seem strikingly compatible with my perspective. See
Jeffers, “The Cultural Theory of Race,” 420 n52, and Taylor, Race, 114–115.

(54.) Haslanger, Resisting Reality, 245.

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