Useful though it may once have been for denaturalizing race, the well-worn piety that race is a social construct (with exculpatory quotation marks to prove it) does not get us very far. It simply begs further questions: ‘Under what circumstances was (or is) race constructed?’; ‘Has race been differently constructed under different circumstances?’, and so on.
Patrick Wolfe, ‘Race and the Trace of History’ (2011: 274)
In 2017, Meryl Streep presided over the jury of the Berlin Film Festival.1 During a press conference and in answer to a question from an Egyptian journalist, she remarked,
I don’t know very much about, honestly, the Middle East, ... and yet I’ve played a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures. And the thing I notice is that we’re all – I mean there is a core of humanity that travels right through every culture, and after all, we’re all from Africa originally, you know? We’re all Berliners, we’re all Africans, really. (Streep 2016)
Although she denies this, Streep’s comments were widely understood to be an explanation for the all-white composition of the film festival jury. ‘We’re all Africans, really’, is a particularly dismissive response to the observation of the structural inequalities that result in all-white conference panels, white-dominated media, the white curriculum, and the overwhelming whiteness of the majority of parliaments in countries whose population is increasingly multiracial.
Speaking clearly about race is difficult, as this episode shows. It always invites multiple and competing readings. Because of its inherent instability, lending itself to myriad interpretations, race is a particularly polyvalent term or, as mentioned in the Introduction, a ‘sliding signifier’ (S. Hall 2017). The body of knowledge you may be thinking about might be completely different to the political implications I have in mind or separate again from the feeling hearing ‘We’re all Africans, really’, spoken by Meryl Streep might have for another person, a victim of modern-day enslavement in Libya, say. But even the comment itself contains several layers. The article Streep wrote in defence of her remarks emphasized the cultural richness of the Berlin Film Festival, which screens films from around the world. She explained that the comment was made in response to a question about Middle Eastern cinema. So, while it seems strange that what came to Streep’s mind was a genetic study about DNA and human evolution, it reveals that talk of race and talk of culture are regularly exchanged in commonsense discourse. The reaching for the standard colourblind response – we are all one, human race – papers over the undeniable fact that no number of films from around the world overcomes the persistence of white domination over the Eurocentric culture industry. It is telling too that the preceding words – ‘We’re all Berliners’ – a repurposing of the words of another American in Berlin, John F. Kennedy, were not seized upon in the same way. We know that we are precisely not all Berliners; some of us are being confined in camps on the outer fringes of eastern Europe built to stop too many people from becoming Berliners.
Biological ideas of race never completely disappeared from either scientific or public discourse. However, the more apparent resurgence of racial science, and the link to what its popular proponents call ‘race realism’, is apparent in genetic science and medicine (Roberts 2012) and in the development of technologies of security and surveillance for the control both of ‘unruly’ racialized groups (Vitale and Jefferson 2016) and of migrants and asylum seekers at the highly policed borders of the Global North (Andersson 2016). It is also a powerful narrative that propels the white supremacist right forward, attaching itself to the conspiracies of ‘white genocide’ and ‘great replacement’ that construe ethnonational populations as organically weakened by culturally inferior imposters, most prominently today Muslims (Camus 2015). Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist terrorist who murdered fifty-one Muslim worshippers in Christchurch in March 2019, wrote a manifesto entitled ‘The Great Replacement’ in which he interviewed himself on the motives for the attack: ‘Was the attack anti-immigration in origin? Yes, beyond all doubt, anti-immigration, anti-ethnic replacement and anti-cultural replacement.’
In this chapter, I make the case that the current terms available in the public sphere to discuss race are not fit for purpose. As I stated in the Introduction, racial literacy is not a feature of western educational systems, whose remit is largely to recreate the Eurocentric nation-state in its own image. Race and racism, therefore, remain special interest subjects. We are not, then, equipped with the tools necessary for challenging racial pseudoscience discourse. For example, there was barely a murmur when, in October 2019, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton proposed that DNA testing is required to verify the Australian citizenship claims of women currently trapped in Syria after the fall of the Islamic State (SBS 2019). Of course, there is no link between DNA and citizenship, yet what Dutton’s statement reveals is that it is easy to conflate the two because both are commonly understood to be ‘about race’.
The current terms available in the public sphere to discuss race are not fit for purpose.
In the next chapter, I discuss the relationship between racial structures and racist practices such as violence, discrimination, and exclusion in greater detail. For now, I suggest that the failure to connect racism to race as a regime of power allows singular definitions of race as biological categories to define public conversations. Because of the failure to unearth the many cross-cutting functions of race as a regime of power, we have come to see eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pseudoscientific racial classifications as synonymous with race in general. This has two consequences which are relevant to our discussion here. First, we have been unable to interrogate how race is assembled from a multiplicity of rationales, including the geographical, the religious, the cultural, the visual, and the biological, all of which intersect with other regimes of power, most significantly gender. Second, this has paradoxically allowed a biological understanding of race to be retained, particularly within scientific and medical discourses, with a flow-on effect on everyday ways of understanding and talking about human difference.
One of the most serious problems for us today is that what I have referred to as the ‘silence about race’ has allowed biological race, in a similar fashion to gender determinism, to become a currency on the ‘marketplace of ideas’ (A. Lentin 2008). Though it never left, with the renewed élan of white supremacy, race seems to have found new wings in these ‘post-postracial’ times, well after the waning of the racial optimism of the early years of the Obama era. In the rest of this chapter, I explore the context in which ideas of racial science are resurgent. I argue that we must find ways of countering them that go beyond what I shall suggest is the insufficient proposition that race is a social construct that has no basis in scientific fact. This is a truism that only takes us so far, and which risks misappropriation by those with anything but antiracist intentions. I query how we can retain the conceptual utility of race as something that is necessary to understand in the aim of achieving better historical, political, and sociological literacy, while rejecting the false premises of racial science. These inquiries might help us makes sense of the persistent political and social impact that race continues to have.
In May 2018, the Monash Bioethics Review published an article by a University of San Diego assistant professor of philosophy, Jonathan Anomaly, titled ‘Defending Eugenics’, in which he argues that ‘future people would be better off if people with heritable traits that we value had a greater proportion of children’ (Anomaly 2018: 25). Anomaly attempts to avoid the charge of racism by arguing that the virtues of eugenics should not be obscured by the ends to which these ideas were put by the Nazis. However, it is impossible to dissociate an idea from the context in which it emerged and the practices to which it led.2 The article came to my notice via a tweet from author and academic Sunny Singh on 12 November that year, the same day as the announcement of a new academic journal, the Journal of Controversial Ideas, founded under the editorship of Peter Singer, Jeff McMahan, and Francesca Minerva, which would allow academics to publish controversial ideas pseudonymously. Peter Singer, the Australian utilitarian bioethicist well known for his support for animal liberation, is also on the editorial board of the Monash Bioethics Review. It is not irrelevant that Singer has expressed disturbing views on race (Grey and Cleffie 2015). In an interview with the African-American philosopher George Yancy, he compared what he calls ‘speciesism’ to chattel-slavery, and argued that racism is mainly a past phenomenon and that discrimination against animals is more insidious (Yancy 2015).
During a BBC Radio 4 documentary, University Unchallenged, about so-called ‘viewpoint diversity’ in academia, co-editor Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, explained the need for the journal was due to ‘greater inhibition on university campuses about taking certain positions for fear of what will happen’ (Rosenbaum 2018). The complaint about the lack of diversity of perspective on university campuses has become ‘a central trope of the disingenuous both-sidesism’ of those who argue that too much concern with racism, sexism, or queerphobia is propelling a crisis of academic free speech (Mitchell 2018). According to those who bemoan a lack of ‘viewpoint diversity’, conservative or right-wing ideas are stifled by what they see as the overwhelming dominance of ‘liberal’ perspectives among teaching and administrative staff at UK and US colleges. According to one ‘conservative-leaning professor’, this liberal dominance hinders student learning and ‘threatens the free and open exchange of ideas’ (Abrams 2018). In fact, there are many attacks on academic free speech, but in the main they do not come from ‘liberals’. For example, Murdoch University in Western Australia took a case against one of its academics for blowing the whistle on the treatment of international students in 2019 (Knaus 2019).
Jonathan Anomaly also couches his article in these ‘viewpoint diversity’ terms, a frame in which racial ideas are presented as purportedly neutral, and just another topic of debate (Reiheld 2018). Proponents of such theories calls themselves ‘race realists’, and argue that there is nothing nefarious in research that finds that different groups in the population can be genetically ranked on a range of indices. The recent emboldening of the ‘race realists’ should not lead us to ignore the fact that, despite consensus within the international community that ‘current biological knowledge does not permit us to impute cultural achievements to differences in genetic potential’ (UNESCO 1968: 270), the use of racial taxonomy in biology and medicine has never stopped (Carter 2007; Fields and Fields 2012). Eugenicist ideas and practices did not completely exit the mainstream despite being disavowed after the Nazi Holocaust.3 For example, the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which argued that Black people have low IQ, has had enormous influence (Roberts 2015).
The book’s co-author, Charles Murray, is often claimed to be silenced, particularly following the 2017 protests against him at Middlebury College (Reilly 2017). However, Murray is in fact ‘ensconced at the center of the conservative policy establishment as an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In 2016, he won the Bradley Prize, a prestigious conservative award that carries a $250,000 stipend. He regularly publishes op-eds in the Wall Street Journal’ (Yglesias 2018).
Nevertheless, an important key to understanding today’s circulation and proliferation of nineteenth-century ideas about the purported genetic inferiority of people racialized as non-white is that their proponents are presented as brave, clamouring to be heard above the din of antiracist orthodoxy. It is of little surprise, then, that Jonathan Anomaly is also a frequent contributor to the right-libertarian Quillette, an online magazine edited by ‘Mistress of the Intellectual Dark Web’ Australian Claire Lehmann (Dale 2018). Lehmann herself has defended behavioural genetics, claiming that ‘it is measured by IQ testing, is genetically based, and correlates with success in life’ (Hochschild 2019). In one of his Quillette articles, Anomaly argues that ‘good’ science is often refuted on moral rather than scientific grounds (Anomaly 2017). Referring to proponents of the link between race and IQ, Edmund Wilson and Arthur Jensen’s argument that, as Anomaly puts it, ‘different racial groups probably have different cognitive propensities and capacities’, he claims that ‘they were harshly denounced, typically on moral grounds rather than on the scientific merit of their arguments. Their careers were threatened, and people who might otherwise pursue this research or publicly explain the evidence for these hypotheses learned to keep their mouths shut.’ Without irony, Anomaly is arguing that ‘best available evidence’ on what he calls ‘politically contentious scientific topics’ is refuted because of ‘the career-advancing opportunities open to those who symbolically reject sexism and racism’ (original emphasis). However, there is no evaluation of this evidence against the wider literature because, despite its claim to rigour, Quillette’s offerings are rather more hyperbolic than they are evidence-based.
It is vital to loudly oppose the notion that eugenics can ever constitute desirable public policy proposals, even those associated with what Anomaly calls ‘liberal eugenics’, which apparently ‘places more weight on individual liberty and less confidence in the wisdom of state agents than early manifestations of eugenics did’ (Anomaly 2018: 30; see also Agar 2004). It is also crucial to cast doubt on the proposition that these types of ideas have been marginalized. However, it is insufficient to argue against the contentions made by ‘race realists’ on scientific grounds alone. To do so is to misconstrue the terms of the race project, which were never purely scientific, but inherently political, and which actually predate the invention of racial science in the nineteenth century (S. Hall 2017). A case in point is science writer Nicholas Wade’s response to the 139 geneticists who signed an open letter condemning his 2014 book A Troublesome Inheritance. The book rehashes the main precepts of racial science, ‘that the notion of “race” corresponds to profound biological differences among groups of humans; that human brains evolved differently from race to race; and that this is supported by different racial averages in IQ scores’ (Evans 2018). The geneticists who signed the letter claimed unequivocally that,
Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in IQ test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures.4
However, this was immaterial for Wade, who rejected all criticisms as without scientific basis, made by people who had not actually read his book (Evans 2018). According to the anthropologist Alex Golub, this was baseless because the letter’s signatories were not even the ‘die-hard anti-Wade contingent’ and the book had been discussed at length in genetics circles before the letter had even been written (Golub 2014). While some involved in these debates may wish for the matter to remain confined to academia, the politics of genetics and IQ cannot be ignored, particularly as they run rampant through the microcosms of YouTube and podcasting. For example, after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Wade revisited the criticisms of his book during a conversation with the vastly popular Canadian ‘race realism’ propagandist Stefan Molyneux, who, at the time of writing, has 925,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel (Evans 2018). At an event in Sydney with far-right provocateur Lauren Southern, Molyneux said of white dispossession of Aboriginal land: ‘They say that your ancestors tried to steal the land. I say they were trying to stop infanticide and mass rape ... I will not honour this culture’ (D. Smith 2018).
In our times, a central conduit for ideas such as those promulgated by non-scientists – who nonetheless claim the language of science – about the links between race, intelligence, poverty, criminality, and educational attainment is the rise of far-right YouTubers and podcasters such as Molyneux or the ‘radical atheist’ and Islamophobe Sam Harris. As Flavia Dzodan notes, in our digital era, a direct link is being established between gut feeling and policy. She cites the CEO of one marketing firm who describes how a new practice known as ‘opinion mining’ ‘uses the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to mine public opinion for sentiment’ (Dzodan 2017). The collection of the data on social media users’ collective feelings can be used to better sell them products, as those on Facebook well know. However, similar data – X% of people agree with a statement such as ‘Muslims are dangerous’, ‘Black people abuse welfare because they are lazy’ – are used to fuel the campaigns of ‘charismatic bigots’ (Dzodan 2017). In parallel, ‘race realism’ takes hold because many white people in societies of the Global North, in the face of what they perceive as the hegemonic dictum that racism is a moral wrong, look for evidence to undergird their feeling that their culture has been supplanted by undeserving immigrants (Caldwell 2009), or that Black and Indigenous people have been the beneficiaries of unjustified attention or assistance. Given the role played by what Dzodan calls this ‘collective affect’, it is necessary to ask serious questions about whether established antiracist discourse can dislodge pop race science and demography.
The work, most prominently, of anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century went a long way to establishing the predominantly correct view that race has no basis in actual physical differences between groups of human beings.5 The anthropologist of race Ashley Montagu, concerned about the Nazis’ eugenicist practices, agreed (Montagu 1962). Following the end of Nazi rule, the idea that race is socially constructed became widely – if not universally – accepted in scientific and political circles. The most well-known exponent of the social constructionist position on race from within genetics is Richard Lewontin, who first argued in 1972 that there is more genetic difference between individuals than there is among population groups, and that ‘there is no objective way to assign the various human populations to clear-cut races’ (Lewontin 2006). This appeared to be borne out in broad terms by the publication of the human genome project in 2003 (El-Haj 2007).
Nevertheless, there has never been a time in which race was not in use both colloquially and by scientists. Amade M’charek reminds us that even the 1950 UNESCO ‘Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice’ wished to conserve a separation between the ‘fact’ of biological race as it may pertain in the laboratory and the mythical nature of race as it is applied in common parlance (M’charek 2013: 431). Race is under constant, silent production, with research continuously emerging that appears to open caveats in the dominant position that there is no way to equate race with human genetic diversity (Hartigan 2008). However, the general public lack of scientific literacy, the political investment in the idea of natural racial differences that can be ‘read’ in our DNA, which, as I have shown, is resurgent today, as well as the popular fascination with genetics as a mode of explanation for a range of human phenomena, often leading ‘to a reductive stance that biology is destiny’ (Yehuda et al. 2018: 5), all conspire to make it incumbent upon us to be better at explaining what race does.
The explosion in popularity of DNA testing services such as 23 and Me, a company that claims to ‘democratize personal genetics’, is evidence of the epistemic primacy of genetics in the twenty-first century. An online search for ‘DNA’ will reveal a panoply of articles about whether genetics can tell your politics or whether not you are likely to be more promiscuous or monogamous. DNA ancestry testing is the object of particular popular fascination. Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates has spurred a digital genealogy industry through his role as producer of highly successful television series such as African American Lives. There are a multitude of social media forums and DIY reality television-style YouTube posts in which people reveal the results of their ancestry tests. DNA testing is even proposed to have an antiracist impact, as seen in attempts to use test results to confront avowed white supremacists on the fallacy of racial purity. In one notorious case, a white supremacist activist called Craig Cobb, so convinced of his ‘racial purity’, took up the challenge to take a DNA test, which was revealed on American daytime talk programme The Trisha Goddard Show. The test revealed that 14% of Cobb’s DNA came from sub-Saharan Africa, a result that he rejected as a multiculturalist plot (WYSO 2018). Indeed, research into white supremacist reactions to DNA test results revealed a tendency to ‘bargain’ over what percentage of white ancestry makes a person white, or to condemn ancestry testing as a whole as a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ if the desired results were not received (Panofsky and Donovan 2017).
DNA is the object of intense politicization, as was seen in the revelation by US Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren of the results of her DNA ancestry test in late 2018. The publication of the results was Warren’s attempt to quell Republican criticisms of her claim to have Cherokee and Delaware heritage and Donald Trump’s derogatory references to her as ‘Pocahontas’. The test revealed that she had ‘a small but detectable amount of Native American DNA’ and ‘concluded there is “strong evidence” she had a Native American ancestor approximately six to 10 generations ago’ (McDonald 2018). However, the reliance on DNA to prove Indigenous identity directly contravenes tribal protocols for assessing membership, which do not see genetic testing as valid. As Kim TallBear remarks, ‘It is one of the privileges of whiteness to define and control everyone else’s identity’ (Johnson 2018). TallBear contends that, rather than sitting down with tribal leaders, which the senator had repeatedly refused to do until meeting with Cherokee representatives in August 2019 during the Democratic Party primaries campaign, Warren ‘privileges DNA company definitions in this debate, which are ultimately settler-colonial definitions of who is indigenous’.6
Assessing indigeneity according to a scale of racial purity has dangerous implications given the use of ‘blood’ and ‘genes’ to exclude rather than include. For example, Australia’s far-right One Nation Party announced proposals to submit Aboriginal people to DNA testing and introduce a ‘qualifying benchmark of twenty-five percent Indigenous DNA ancestry’ in order to quell what it called the ‘widespread “rorting” [cheating] of the welfare system’. However, there is no test for genetic Aboriginality and no Australian Aboriginal genome (Fryer 2019b). Race under settler colonialism was a project of what the late Australian historian of race and colonialism Patrick Wolfe refers to as replacement and elimination, with the ultimate aim of wresting land away from its original inhabitants for the purposes of European wealth creation. In order to achieve this, European invaders had to construct Indigenous peoples as ‘maximally soluble, encouraging their disappearance into the settler mainstream’ (Wolfe 2016: 39). The measurement of blood quantum was used colonially in the process of Indigenous elimination. ‘Blood’, as Wolfe notes, ‘is like money, which also invokes liquidity to disguise the social relations that sustain it’ (2016: 39). Hence to possess Aboriginal lands, white colonizers set about diluting blood, dissolving Indigenous people, and scattering those left around the landscape. The separation of Aboriginal peoples from their homelands and the forced mixing of different tribal groups on missions, under a policy euphemistically titled ‘protection’, was integral to the cultural genocide endured by Aboriginal peoples. This historical fact makes the appeal to racial measurement dressed up as genomic science particularly egregious to many Indigenous people within a context of ongoing colonization.
Sadly, Indigenous people’s views do not stop the rise of genetic absolutism in the public sphere, with ‘savvy political commentators … taking new findings by geneticists and directly assailing social constructionist perspectives’ (Hartigan 2008: 164). The problem for antiracists confronted with the resurgence of racial science among ‘race realists’ and their ‘alt-right’ mouthpieces is that the maxim that race is a social construct is often the only riposte we have recourse to. Yet, far from ending the discussion of whether biological race is real, according to anthropologist Jason Antrosio, the idea that race is a social construction is actually a ‘conservative goldmine’ because it was never ‘connected to concrete political change’ (Antrosio 2012). It is thus especially important not to leave the questioning of the social construction of race to those such as Quillette’s Claire Lehmann, who tweeted that ‘we abhor racism yet do not believe that race is merely a social construct (another pernicious blank state dogma that has repercussions in the real world)’.7
Antiracists are very good at denying the biological facticity of race, but not very good at explaining what is social about race. Echoing Patrick Wolfe’s point in this chapter’s epigraph, Antrosio suggests that the social construction of race ‘should have never been a stopping point, but a way to analyse the particular circumstances that result in current configurations’. Focusing our arguments on whether race is or is not about biology is meaningless outside of academia because ‘underlying socioeconomic structural racism is unaltered’ (Antrosio 2012). Failures to properly explicate the social construction of race in the public domain have led to statements such as that Eduardo Bonilla-Silva reports hearing from a colleague: ‘Race is a myth, an invention, a socially constructed category. Therefore, we should not make it “real” by using it in our analyses. People are people, not black, white, or Indian. White males are just people’ (Bonilla-Silva 2018: 207). Social constructionism lends itself to such wilfully ignorant semantic arguments. According to Antrosio, we need to judge the theory that race is socially constructed on whether or not it has contributed to alleviating basic issues of racially determined power imbalances and inequality. On all measures, Antrosio claims, it is impossible to say that it has.
This problem is not confined to the social sciences. As John Hartigan notes, ‘Genetics is not going to provide the basis for either proving or disproving the “social” reality of race’ (Hartigan 2008: 167). If activists and social scientists are not good at parsing research in the natural sciences, geneticists and those in the biomedical sciences concerned with public misinterpretations of their findings may not be adept at reading the political writing on the wall which spells out that there is no way to discuss race outside of the political context in which it is continually reproduced. The problem with the pure social constructionist position is that it runs the risk of reasserting the primacy of race as biological rather than political. In a debate with the philosopher of race Charles W. Mills, Barnor Hesse asks: what is race the social construction of? The usual answer, he says, is ‘race is a construction of the idea that there is a biological racial hierarchy’. However, this does not answer the question ‘What is race?’ ‘In effect,’ Hesse remarks ‘social constructionists do not have anything to say about race that is not already said by the biological discourses’ (Hesse 2013). There is abundant evidence that ideas of race developed in situ and that there were competing ideas among various actors within and across various colonial contexts and vis-à-vis a range of different populations about what race meant for a generalized understanding of the human (Wolfe 2016).
According to Ian Hacking in The Social Construction of What?, social constructionist critiques usually contain three elements: that the thing being socially constructed is neither natural nor inevitable, that it is undesirable, and that it can be changed (Hacking 2003). Hesse argues that to resolve the tautology posed by the formulation ‘race is a social construction of the idea of biological race’, we need an alternative account of race that goes beyond this unexplanatory circularity, because ‘our account of race as a social fact cannot be the same as the very thing we’re discrediting’. If race can be changed because it is not natural, we need, as Antrosio also suggests, a way of explaining how race is socially produced that proposes ways of dismantling it. And because race does not originate in nineteenth-century biological theorizations, but is, as Hesse explains, ‘colonially assembled over a period of time’ which goes back at least to the fifteenth century, we need more complete historical and political accounts of how race emerged and became institutionalized. What is clear is that there is no way of reducing the broad scope of racial rule to only the ‘bodily or the biological’ (Hesse 2013).
An associated problem is that the discussion of race has been avoided, especially in the European context. The ‘silence about race’ (A. Lentin 2008) masks the fact that it remains ‘absently present’ in domains such as ‘medical practice and biomedical research, behavioural genetics and forensic policing’ (M’charek et al. 2014: 462; see also El-Haj 2007). And in our networked times, a range of racial biases undergird the development of the technologies that increasingly govern our interactions with institutions and each other, such as facial recognition software that repurposes old practices of phrenology for the digital age (Breland 2017; Dzodan 2016; Gillard 2018).8
It is vital, therefore, to explain how the attempt to refute racial science on scientific grounds alone can be counterproductive. For example, Karen and Barbara Fields remark that, for largely cultural reasons, contemporary genetics and biomedical research often map their data onto discredited racial categories that ‘make sense’ for no other reason than they have made sense before. This is clear in common discourse on ‘blood’, as in the statement, ‘even if Obama identifies as an African-American he cannot deny blood’ (Fields and Fields 2012: 48). Fields and Fields remark that it should be utterly impossible to talk about blood quantum because, being a liquid, blood cannot be separated into parts. However, this does not change the fact that not only do people indeed talk about bloods as separable, but the quantification of different blood ‘parts’ was the basis for laws governing Indigenous populations in colonized countries, such as Australia and the US. It was also integral to the US Jim Crow-era ‘one-drop rule’, according to which any level of African ancestry made a person Black and necessitated segregation, as well as to the Nazi regime’s assessment of the degree of Jewishness on the basis of heredity. Nevertheless, there is a problem in dismissing race as entirely fictitious if doing so leads to denying the fact that race – not as science but as rule – continues to govern the socioeconomic positioning and ‘vulnerability to premature death’ of variously racialized groups in society to the benefit of white people (Gilmore 2006: 28). We cannot disentangle the fact that a taxonomy of biological race is invented from the equally true fact that the experience of being ruled by racial technologies of power from birth can have a physical impact on the individual’s racialized body as well as a psychological effect on the mind (Kellermann 2013; Schuller 2017; Wynter 1999).
As Amade M’charek explains, race is both fact and fiction. The facticity of race relies on the fictional narratives that are woven around it to fix it in place. Using examples that demonstrate how the idea of biological race is situated in relational practices, she shows how race is not in, but rather of, the body. Race cannot be isolated as any one biological or genetic fact. To produce race as a cause for a particular phenomenon, for example a crime, an illness, or a behavioural disposition, requires it to be produced in relation to a host of other signifiers. In one case M’charek describes, CCTV footage of two people accused of stabbing a young man in Brussels in 2006 was used to infer their identity as Moroccan. Although the footage provided no clear evidence of the perpetrators’ ethnicity, emphasis was placed not only on phenotypical markers, such as skin colour, but also on a range of other extrinsic factors, such as clothing said to be typically worn by young North African men. Eventually, when one of the attackers was identified by his teacher as being of Polish origin, ‘the news that the suspects were not of Moroccan descent was received as a shock in Belgium’ (M’charek 2013). M’charek shows how, just as racial facts are attached to fictions in order to create the necessary narrative that makes race the determining factor in a given scenario, these fictions can also come unstuck. This can be seen in assumptions that when a violent attack is carried out by a Black or Brown person, it is that person’s racialized status that is to blame. Individual cases are then used to prove the general prevalence of violence among all members of the group, the most obvious case in point being Muslim people and terrorism. Race, in this scenario, magically disappears when the perpetrator is white and emphasis is placed on his (it is most commonly a man) status as a ‘lone wolf’, motivated by mental health problems (Bayoumi 2017) or, even more worryingly in terms of its rising acceptability, ‘legitimate’ concerns about immigration. For example, following the murder of Muslims in Christchurch in March 2019, the editor of The American Conservative, Rod Dreher, wrote that Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto was ‘grounded in both paranoid, racist grievance, and legitimate, realistic concerns’ about ‘declining numbers of ethnic Europeans’ (Singhal 2019).
In 2009, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology published a symposium titled ‘Race Reconciled’ in which the authors revisited arguments about the biological facticity of race in order to flesh out whether or not social constructionism was a useful explanatory approach (Antrosio 2011). Medical anthropologist Clarence Gravlee’s contribution raises interesting questions for the relationship between race and biology in ways that support the social constructionist view without ignoring the bodily effects of race (Gravlee 2009). Gravlee argues that discussions about the persistence of race in the US turn on the question ‘Does race exist?’, leading to fruitless debates about whether race has a basis in biology. In actual fact, we should be asking ‘in what ways race exists as a sociocultural phenomenon that has force in people’s lives – one with biological consequences’ (Gravlee 2009: 47). Race is not biology, he argues, but it may become biology.
According to Gravlee, discussions about whether race is biological or cultural operate with a confusion between genetics and biology. This can be observed in the biomedical research literature in the US, which often claims equivalence between the prevalence of certain diseases among particular racial groups and their presumed underlying genetic make-up. For example, a 2007 study of racial inequalities in pre-term birth was widely reported to provide evidence for ‘important genetic contributors to the timing of birth’ (Kistka et al. 2007). However, the study did not actually present any genetic data. The authors merely inferred a genetic cause from the residual differences found between Black and white mothers. As Gravlee notes, ‘This finding does not warrant the conclusion that racial inequalities are genetic in origin; genetic hypotheses require genetic data’ (Gravlee 2009: 49).
In the face of the popular representation of this type of research and the very real policy implications it can have, we are faced with significant challenges if we want to refute the conflation of genetics with biological race and give meaning to the statement that race is a social construct. Current evidence from population genetics demonstrates that there are more similarities than differences between groups traditionally defined as races, and that existing genetic variation does not map neatly onto these racial groups. However, it still contends that there is some degree of genetic variation between groups in the population that have been labelled as ‘races’. This opens the door to those who want to retain race as a way of thinking about human genetic variation and is fodder for the ‘race realists’, what Antrosio calls a ‘conservative goldmine’. Gravlee claims that saying that it is possible to identify clusters within the human population that can be mapped onto ‘races’ does not mean that these clusters are naturally occurring, as racial theory implies (Gravlee 2009). More or fewer clusters have been identified by different researchers over time, thus proving that there is nothing inevitable about identifying these formations. However, proponents of the social construction of race position cannot stop at the claim that there is not enough genetic variation between groups traditionally thought of as races to prove that they exist. Lewontin’s ‘argument that conventional racial classification accounts for only 5–10% of human genetic variation’ allows those who believe in race to say that there is at least some consistency between human population genetic variation and race, which is enough to maintain the idea of race (Lewontin 2006). This point recalls Dzodan’s important note about the role of ‘gut feeling’ in conjuring up racial certainties.
One reason why some researchers continue to use race as a way of distinguishing between groups in the population is its utility to the biomedical profession, which is able to map complex genetics data onto common-sense ideas about racial divisions in ways that ring true to the public, to policy-makers, and to pharmaceutical companies. As Fields and Fields discuss, for example, sickle cell anaemia is still considered a ‘black disease’, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, because the power of what they call ‘folk precepts’ makes the ‘racial’ and the ‘genetic’ analogous (Fields and Fields 2012). Sickle cell disease is defined in the 1972 Sickle Cell Control Act brought into effect in the US under Richard Nixon as ‘an inherited blood disorder’. Because of the popular confusion between race, genetics, and blood, this entered into public consciousness through tacit endorsement by scientists despite the fact that sickle cell anaemia also affects groups who are not Black, often leading to their misdiagnosis. The US and other colonial countries have a long history of experimentation on racially marginalized populations. The infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, for example, tested the ‘belief that syphilis killed black and white patients differently though the test involved black subjects only’ (Fields and Fields 2012: 53). The experiment, run by the US Health Service between 1932 and 1972, allowed researchers to study the disease’s natural course over time. It involved making Black syphilis sufferers believe they were being given a cure for the disease while actually being denied the necessary penicillin, leading to their eventual deaths.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a particular lightning rod for race, as well as the class and gender assumptions with which they intersect. Janet Shim’s research into the politics of CVD epidemiology notes the biopolitical nature of this field of research, involved as it is in ‘tying together statistics about individuals and populations with particular conceptions of the “problem” of health, disease, morbidity and mortality’ (Shim 2014: 50–1). A central concern for epidemiologists is risk prevention, and, to this end, statistics are deployed to calculate the probability of particular diseases among sectors of the population which are rendered in terms of race, class, and ethnicity. As a discipline, epidemiology requires the identification of previously unexplored risk factors to maintain legitimacy. In this context and ‘under the intense surveillance of epidemiologic cohort studies, individuals classified as distinct groups and populations characterized by particular risk factors become sites for the further production of epidemiologic knowledge on cardiovascular risk’ (Shim 2014: 60). For Shim, then, ‘culture’ becomes a ‘proxy for pathology in CVD research and treatment’, and recognizing risk variations among groups in the population leads to ‘working-class people of colour’ in particular being treated as culturally inferior (Grzanka et al. 2016: 28).
Relatedly, the heart failure drug BiDil is specifically marketed to Black patients in the US. Most drugs developed in the US are tested on white people yet marketed to the population as a whole. However, in the case of BiDil, only Black patients were studied and a specific drug was developed for Black heart disease sufferers. BiDil is sold at seven times the cost of similar drugs used for non-Black patients. It can thus be highly profitable to suggest that groups designated as races suffer from particular diseases or suffer from them in particular ways based on a problematic connection drawn between race and genetics, and an even more problematic assumption that different ‘races’ have different kinds of blood, as in the case of sickle cell anaemia. Patrick Grzanska and his co-authors argue that bioethicists must take an intersectional approach that would zoom in on how the interplay between interlocking systems of ‘racism, sexism, heterosexism and ableism’ produces inequality in the research and treatment of disease (Grzanska et al. 2016: 27). But it is debatable what impact this would have in a world in which race has been commodified in biomedicine, as the BiDil example shows. Nadia Abu El-Haj signals the role that individuals play in this too, not just as patients but as ‘consumers in waiting’ (El-Haj 2007: 293). As in the case of DNA testing, the certainties that race seems to provide, and which individuals crave, mean that the public also participates in the move to see the world in genomic terms. The state, on the one hand, imposes an order on an uncertain world by, for example, approving drugs such as BiDil, which ‘implies recognizing the biological reality of race’). But, on the other hand, it does so in response to the demands both of the profit-driven biomedical industry and of consumers sold a new horizon of ‘personalized medicine’ (El-Haj 2007: 293).
Refuting the existence of race, however, is not the same as saying that there is no such thing as human biodiversity and that groups who are racialized differently may require different forms of treatment for physical and mental illness. According to Gravlee, diversity, whether cultural or genetic (and these registers are often conflated), is not the problem; the problem is the persistence of white supremacy based on the belief that diversity is hierarchical (Gravlee 2009). We cannot discuss diversity neutrally because it is imbued with racial meaning. Different groups in the population who have traditionally been thought of as races may indeed suffer differently and have a higher incidence of certain diseases. A good example in Australia is the higher prevalence of diabetes among certain Aboriginal people.9 This cannot be explained without shedding light on how techniques of race produce these bodily inequities, including through the denial of Aboriginal people’s connection to their traditional food sources owing to their removal from ancestral lands (Foley 2005) and the contemporary unaffordability of fresh produce in many Aboriginal communities (Stoneham 2017). We must explain these differences without succumbing to simplistic biological accounts that suggest that there is a natural predisposition of Aboriginal people to diabetes, rather than a colonially produced effect on health. The very real fact that racial rule produces inequities between groups construed as separate races means that people, such as Aboriginals in Australia or Black people in the US, among whom there is more socioeconomic deprivation over generations get more sick. Racial rule, thus, has a biological effect both on the individual body and on bodies over generations. It is not that Black or Aboriginal people start off with a genetic predisposition to contracting particular diseases, but that the effects of colonization, slavery, and the resultant inequality and discrimination can begin to make generation after generation sick.
The potential of epigenetics for theorizing how ‘heredity material is shaped by life events’ is an area of research gaining more attention (Schuller 2017: 210). Studies of the intergenerational effects of trauma propose that people can inherit the effects of their progenitors’ experiences. In the most widely discussed research on descendants of Holocaust survivors, geneticists proposed that ‘effects of a parental trauma could persist into the next generation though epigenetic marks encoded on DNA and passed through the germ line’ (Yehuda et al. 2018: 2). This does not cause mutation of the gene itself but rather alters the way in which the gene is expressed by damaging its functioning proteins (Carey 2018). For Kyla Schuller, these new findings in epigenetics map onto a nineteenth-century history of the role of what she calls ‘sentimental biopolitics’ in the development of ‘modern concepts of race, sex and species’ (Schuller 2017: 5). Her discussion foregrounds one of the major difficulties in developing understandings of race that grasp at its complexity while being accessible to the public.
The idea that race is a social construction of the idea of biological race relies on the notions, first, that there was agreement on what precisely biological races looked like, and, second, that these were arranged according to a hierarchy of immutable categories. In fact, Schuller argues, race and sex were never static or insurmountable in nineteenth-century accounts. Plasticity was emphasized over determinism. The major distinguishing factor between ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’ bodies was gauged by their assumed capacity for ‘impressibility’, the degree to which the nervous system can be altered by external agents ‘over evolutionary time’ (Schuller 2017: 7). Those possessing ‘civilized bodies’ were theorized as being able to modulate how susceptible their senses were to the world around them and, as a population, develop stronger resistance to it. In contrast, ‘primitive bodies’ were ‘deemed to be impulsive and insensate, incapable of evolutionary change, whose existence was very close to running out of time’ (Schuller 2017: 4). Settlers on stolen Aboriginal lands, for example, were said to be adaptable to a society under construction, in contrast to ‘natives’, who were assimilated only with nature and thus incapable of accommodating to new realities, an idea that could not be further from the truth given the capacity of Aboriginal people for survival (Wolfe 2016). Schuller’s account sheds light on how race works analogously to a valve which opens and closes to diversely include and exclude so that groups are racialized differently over time and space and in relation to the political demands of the day. The regulation of feeling that she describes also signals that race is best thought about alongside accounts of how the constraining structures of nation, gender, heterosexuality, and class are set up to create order amid the messy realities of actually existing human life.
For Schuller, Wolfe, Antrosio, Hesse, and Gravlee, social constructionism has reached the end of its utility. Schuller remarks that the social constructionist position on race sees the material body as a ‘passive receptor of social scripts’ (Schuller 2017: 206). She argues that the social constructionist idea that the body responds to culturally produced stimuli, but not vice versa, deepens rather than disrupts the power of race and sex as technologies of power. Culture or socialization are easily interchangeable with race as a naturalized rationale for inequality (Lentin 2014a). Social constructionism sought to put the lie to the idea that bodies could be perfected through eugenicist practices in order to yield the ‘racially superior’ and breed out the ‘feeble races’. The focus on the abhorrence of these ideas and the decision that they were motivated by an ideology of racism, as we shall see in the next chapter, further obscured the extent to which they remain fundamental to the race project under different guises. As Cheryl Harris shows in her study of how whiteness was made property in the US – a settler colonial society founded on dispossession and slavery – the entire object of race as heredity is to render whiteness both superior and inherently precarious, thus necessitating protection (Harris 1993; see also Schuller 2017). We can understand the resurgence of biological race, seeping from the political fringes into the mainstream under the guise of ‘race realism’, as connected to the continued need to rescue whiteness from perceived demographic overrun by ‘primitive’ bodies (asylum seekers, Palestinians, Muslims, etc.). ‘White genocide’ is nothing short of a breath-taking, albeit knowing, subversion of the actual histories of genocide against Indigenous peoples around the world, and against Jews and Roma people.
The entire object of race as heredity is to render whiteness both superior and inherently precarious, thus necessitating protection.
It is also no accident that racial determinism appears to be gaining in public acceptability when the final nail in the coffin of multiculturalism has been well and truly hammered in (Lentin and Titley 2011). ‘Race realists’ propose that ‘dangerous left-wing’ beliefs in human hybridity which provided the ideological framework for ‘mass migration’ into the imagined homogeneous cultural spaces of the West are responsible for societal disarray. The division of the world’s populations along traditional racial lines, each with its own ‘natural’ corresponding geographical space, has thus been shattered. Put this way, the political implications of ‘race realism’ become clear: while western governments of all political stripes may not refer openly to the language of biological race, they all advocate for the control of migration along racial lines and enact discriminatory policies which reproduce race internally. They may not endorse the language of ‘white genocide’, but their practices suggest the tacit acceptance of what that implies. How else might we explain the passage by the social democratic Danish government of over 100 new laws regulating migration and the lives of migrants, asylum seekers, and their descendants, including a burqa ban and the designation of twenty-nine areas as ‘ghettos’? (Macdonald 2019). Such policies conceive certain bodies as being ‘out of place’. We cannot then discuss them without thinking about how the body is the primary carrier of race and how bodies are collectively turned into populations to be regulated and confined. In other words, we cannot overlook the body as a racial frontier. Knowing that this is socially constructed does not overcome the effects of the ways in which race is lived in the body, both by those racialized as other than white, and by those for whom maintaining racial boundaries around what they have amassed – as individuals, as institutions, or as geopolitical entities – is vital for survival.
Schuller suggests that, while epigenetics research does not overturn dominant accounts of sex and race as immutable, it nonetheless has the capacity for seeing ‘the body as an assemblage of corporeal and environmental processes’ (Schuller 2017: 210). Might epigenetics provide the key for how the experience of being racialized or gendered takes hold in the body rather than being just an idea? Alexander Weheliye’s focus (Weheliye 2014), following Hortense Spillers (Spillers 1987), on how racializing assemblages make the suffering body into flesh also gestures towards the problematic divide between the bodily and the sociopolitical in most accounts of race. Far from using the findings from epigenetics research to see heredity as destiny, as is the case in most interpretations (Yehuda et al. 2018), Schuller suggests we follow Silvia Wynter (Wynter 1999), who emphasizes what the radical anticolonial psychiatrist and theorist of the Black condition Frantz Fanon called ‘sociogeny’ (Fanon 1986 [1967]), the binding together of nature and culture in determining individual experience. Seeing the relationship between the body and the social world in this way could go some way towards showing how psychology and physiology are also important in assessing the individual effects of material racialized and gendered inequities.
Yet current interest in the epigenetic transmission of trauma signifies the dangers, already alluded to, of conducting discussions of the biological effects of race, culture, and inheritance in an apolitical register. There is always the potential for the findings of epigenetics research and the idea of biological plasticity to be used to propose eugenics-type policies. Schuller suggests that giving expression to how race resides in the body not only as inherited trauma but as also as identity has the capacity to generate new forms of resistance against the inevitabilities that racialization reproduces, even if that identity is derived from being racialized against one’s will . This is supported by Rachel Yehuda and her co-authors’ study of inherited Holocaust trauma, which insists that, far from the traumatic effect on individuals being permanent, it is ‘as likely to foster resilience as vulnerability’ (Yehuda et al. 2018: 5).
This chapter has shown how repeating the mantra that race is a social construction is not enough to dismantle its effects on either the social or the physical body. Mainstream antiracism that relies predominantly on this stance is ill equipped to counter the ahistorical redefinition of racism as a universal form of prejudice. The critique of antiracism from both the right and the left of politics cannot be withstood if we do not engage in a much more historically situated account of how race is produced and reproduced on a range of registers: economic, political, corporeal, and environmental. The fundamental truth about race, that it is in constant need of replication owing to its inherent instability, is illustrated by Patrick Wolfe. Wolfe contrasts the meanings of blackness and indigeneity under racial colonialism (Wolfe 2016). During the US regime of slavery, blackness signified the inherited status of enslavement. The maternal body was the literal site where race was reproduced, as someone born to an enslaved woman automatically became enslaved themselves. Unlike in the case of the Indigenous peoples who had to be ushered out to clear the land, the Black body had to be continually reproduced to ensure a constant, intergenerational labour supply (Harris 1993). In contrast, following the incipient attempts at total genocide, the colonial management of Indigenous populations in North America and Australia proceeded by attempting to ‘breed nativeness out’ through what Wolfe calls a ‘biogenetic expansion of frontier homicide’ (Wolfe 2016: 11).
The fact, evidenced by the ‘one-drop rule’, that acceding to whiteness is seen as impossible for the Black population while desirable for the Indigenous population, and that both these views serve to solidify white dominance, reveals the ultimate unsteadiness of race and why it requires constant remaking (Wolfe 2016). Nevertheless, this inherent instability, while pointing to the myriad ways in which race can be challenged and critiqued, does not mean that we are about to witness the collapse of racial rule. Necessity – in this case the necessity of maintaining the global colonial order to which ideas of racialized advantage are fundamental – is the mother of (re)invention.
Race, thus, predates the era with which it is most often associated, the so-called nineteenth-century ‘golden age’ which saw the rise to dominance of biological determinism in all areas: reproductive, familial, political, economic, and social, in addition to the scientific. More than an idea, as I proposed in the Introduction, it is a practice; a mechanism for sifting and classifying the world, declaring parts of it Terra Nullius and placing the populations living there outside the realms of humanity to achieve colonial domination. Nonetheless, much of the debate about whether race is real or socially constructed does not take into account the fact that race predated its theorization as biology, developing in stages and relying on a range of accounts including the religious and the cultural after 1492 (S. Hall 2017). Discussions focus on whether or not race exists rather than on the capacity for racial logics to adapt (Chun 2012; Muñoz 2006). The very discussion about whether or not race is really descriptive of differences between human groups exists because of the power that race has had to arrange and structure our understanding of the relationship between the different parts of the world and its people since the invasion of the Americas, thus creating a vicious circle from which it is difficult to escape.
In the next chapter, I argue that the debate about the uses of race is further muddied by the suggestion that it is motivated only by an ideological commitment to racism. This view of race as narrowly commensurable with its theorization as science does not take into account the longer durée of the racial-colonial and lends itself to facile adjudications of what is and is not racism, a question wholly bound up with the acceptability of contrarian ‘race realism’ in the public sphere at a time of mounting white supremacism. This is not a purely academic conversation, but academics do play a central role in it. Indeed, those most visibly claiming to bravely speak uncomfortable truths about race, migration, and Islam against what they misrepresent as the antiracist orthodoxy are academics, many of whom have highly rewarded positions at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions. Their claim of marginalization is thus disingenuous, but effective, and serves to present repackaged eugenicist ideas as legitimate scholarly offerings on a so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’, that most apt of adaptations of the fiction of the free market as a neutral arbiter.
This could be seen in the case of Cambridge University’s decision to withdraw the fellowship of ‘race realist’ social scientist Noah Carl in May 2019, which prompted prominent figures among a cohort of highly mediatized academics to rush to his defence. Despite Carl having contributed to the conference on eugenics secretly held annually at University College London between 2014 and 2018 and the replication of his research on racial stereotypes by far-right websites (van der Merwe 2018) the Birkbeck College political scientist Eric Kaufmann concluded that Carl’s dismissal was ‘a victory for the Leftist-Modernist Inquisition based on guilt-by-association and abandoning the defense of free enquiry’.10 Quillette magazine’s characterization of Carl’s scholarship as ‘defending intelligence researchers who’ve written about the taboo topics of race, genes and IQ and argu[ing] that stifling debate in these areas is likely to cause more harm than allowing them to be freely discussed by academics’ is key to understanding how, in the face of hegemonically produced racial illiteracy, a contrarian elite peddling its own fictitious victimization is strongly positioned to establish the grounds for how racism is defined (Quillette 2018). Who may and may not define racism, and how this relates to race as rule, is the subject to which I now turn.