My task so far has been to explain what dehumanization is and to show, using historical examples, that any reasonable person should accept that dehumanization is a real phenomenon. I hope I have managed to convince you that we really are capable of conceiving of other people as less-than-human beings, and that this is something that it is important to understand. My next task is to begin to tease out just what it is about the human mind that makes this peculiar phenomenon possible. Of course, psychology does not provide us with the whole story of how dehumanization happens. We also need to take account of political and social processes. But psychology is a good place to begin.
Otto Bradfisch was the head of Einsatzkommando 8, a mobile killing unit that followed in the wake of the German army as it pressed eastward across Poland and Belarus toward the ultimate prize of Moscow during World War II. Like the other Einsatzkommando units, it was tasked with rounding up and killing Jews and Communist Party members. The standard procedure was to line up men, women, and children at the edge of a large pit or ditch, and then shoot them either in machine gun salvos or by a single bullet to the back of the head. Those who were still alive among the mass of blood-soaked corpses were finished off with another shot.
The eighty or so men of Bradfisch’s unit were experienced killers who executed thousands of people in this manner. In 1942, in his capacity as head of the Gestapo in the Polish city of Lodz, Bradfisch was also responsible for deporting more than 20,000 Jews from the Lodz ghetto to the Chelmno extermination camp. Here is how holocaust scholar Guenter Lewy describes testimony from Bradfisch’s 1961 trial in Munich: “The court noted that Bradfisch was known as a reliable and efficient officer who showed initiative in finding his victims. In at least two instances, he personally participated in the shooting by providing the coup de grâce to Jews lying wounded in the pit. There was no evidence, the court noted, that Bradfisch had made any attempt to escape this assignment. ‘His conduct was that of a faithful follower of Hitler. The will of the Führer for him was law irrespective of its content.’ At an execution in Minsk, a member of his unit testified, Bradfisch had pointed out that ‘the Jews were not to be regarded as human’ ” (emphasis added).1
Now, picture the men of Einsatzkommando 8 looking at a row of men, women, and children lined up along the edge of a pit—Jews whom they will, in a few moments, exterminate. According to Nazi ideology, Jews are Untermenschen (“subhumans”)—beings that are more like vermin than they are like human beings. So, insofar as they accepted the doctrine of Jewish subhumanity, the men of Einsatzkommando 8 would not experience these weeping, trembling, and terrified people as human beings. Instead, they would be gazing at disgusting, evil, subhuman creatures—creatures that ought to be exterminated.
If you think about it, this is perplexing. The ostensibly less-than-human beings lined up along the edge of the killing had the bodily form of human beings. They were bipedal and had two arms. They could speak. They took the streetcar to work, wore clothes, shielded themselves with umbrellas from the rain, tucked their children in bed at night, and read the daily newspaper. They looked and behaved exactly like real human beings look and behave, and yet, in Bradfisch’s men’s eyes, they were not human beings.
Episodes like this occurred often during the Holocaust. Under the impact of political propaganda, Jews came to be seen not only as dangerous human aliens, but also, at the extreme, as subhuman monsters, in spite of their human appearance and behavior.
The example of Einsatzkommando 8 teaches us something important about the phenomenology of dehumanization. Dehumanization is not about how people look. Dehumanized people are often physically indistinguishable from those who dehumanize them, and even in cases where there are striking physical differences, such as the dehumanization of Black people by Whites, the target population is not thought of as less than human because of their outward appearance. Rather, their appearance is imagined to conceal something deeper about them, something that is located “inside” them.
If you are well acquainted with the history of racism, you might protest that when White Americans dehumanized Blacks they sometimes cited what they considered to be anatomical evidence such as the size and shape of the cranium, or the form of the heel, as evidence that Blacks belong to an alien species. But this alleged anatomical evidence was not the foundation for the dehumanization of Black people. It couldn’t be. Minor phenotypic variations, whether imagined or real, do not have any bearing on whether two beings belong to the same species. The role of such “scientific” studies was to provide post hoc justifications for a preexisting commitment to the view that Black people are less than human.
This is why appeals to observable similarity to counteract dehumanization virtually always fall on deaf ears. When one Dr. Grant, who seriously proposed that Black people were apes, disrupted an 1850 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society with a supposedly scientific explanation of Negro subhumanity, Frederick Douglass responded, “We have heard all that can be said against the humanity of the negro, from one who deals with the matter scientifically … but look at me, look at the negro in the face, examine his wooly head, his entire physical conformation; I invite you to the examination, and ask this audience to judge.… Am I a man?”2
In a similar vein, in 1868 Henry McNeal Turner addressed the Georgia state legislature after it had expelled all of its Black elected officials with the question “Am I a man? If I am such, I claim the rights of a man.” He continued,
A certain gentleman has argued that the Negro was a mere development similar to the orangoutang or chimpanzee, but it so happens that, when a Negro is examined, physiologically, phrenologically and anatomically, and I may say, physiognomically, he is found to be the same as persons of different color. I would like to ask any gentleman on this floor, where is the analogy? Do you find me a quadruped, or do you find me a man? Do you find three bones less in my back than in that of the White man? Do you find fewer organs in the brain? If you know nothing of this, I do; for I have helped to dissect fifty men, black and White, and I assert that by the time you take off the mucous pigment—the color of the skin—you cannot, to save your life, distinguish between the black man and the White. Am I a man? Have I a soul to save, as you have?3
Arguments of this sort were unpersuasive because the people that Douglass and Turner were addressing were not in the grip of a perceptual illusion. They were hostage to a conceptual one. They were married to the view that in spite of appearances, Black people are subhuman animals.
The phenomenon toward which I am gesturing—the idea that when people dehumanize others they think of them as subhuman on the “inside,” notwithstanding their human appearance—is not something that is entirely alien to everyday experience. The basis of this way of thinking is the idea that appearances can be misleading, and that what a thing seems to be does not always correspond to what it really is. And this comes very easily to us.
Consider the fate of the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis”: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.” Gregor Samsa’s outward appearance has morphed into the form of a “monstrous verminous bug.” But in spite of his metamorphosis, he is still Gregor Samsa, a human being trapped in an insect body. The juxtaposition of what the protagonist is with what he seems to be is immediately understandable, and is what gives the story much of its heartbreaking poignancy. Kafka’s story presents us with the inverse of dehumanization. When we dehumanize others, we conceive of them as having a human appearance that hides a subhuman essence, but in the story, Samsa’s human essence is concealed behind a subhuman appearance.
Imagine a coffeemaker that is designed to look just like an ordinary food processor.4 If you were to enter a kitchen that is equipped with such a coffeemaker, you would mistake it for a food processor. The reason is obvious, but it is nevertheless worth spelling out. We very often categorize things on the basis of evidence provided by our senses. Put crudely, we assign things to categories on the basis of what they look like. You think that the machine is a food processor because it looks like a food processor, because things that look like food processors almost always really are food processors.
But sometimes we are not content to classify things based on their appearance. Sometimes, we feel moved to dig deeper. Suppose that, for some reason or other, you decide to inspect the faux food processor more carefully, so you strip it down and compare its insides with the insides of a genuine food processor. If you did this, you would discover that the insides of the real food processor are configured very differently from the insides of the phony one. And if you then went on to compare the insides of the mock food processor with the insides of a more conventional looking coffeemaker, you would discover them to be very similar.5 Confronted with this sort of evidence, you would reclassify the thing that looks like a food processor as a coffeemaker.
This coffeemaker example can help us to understand the pattern of thinking that made it possible for the men of Einsatzkommando 8 to conceive of their victims as subhumans. These men regarded Jews’ ostensible humanity as merely cosmetic—a façade that deceptively masked their inner subhumanity—just like the outward appearance of the simulated food processor concealed the fact that it was really a coffeemaker.
As it stands, this analogy takes us only so far, because if you were to perform an autopsy on the body of the Jewish man and compare his internal anatomy to that of a German you would find that the two are virtually indiscernible, unlike the internal “anatomy” of food processors and coffeemakers. So, if Jews were supposed to be subhuman on the “inside,” what was meant by this had to have been far subtler and more elusive than any anatomical dissection could reveal. Whatever it was that was supposed to distinguish Jewish subhumans from Aryan humans, and Black subhumans from White humans, had to be something that cannot be observed by the naked eye. To those who dehumanized Jews and Blacks, the mere fact of their racial identity—the mere fact that they were Jewish or Black—was enough to make them subhuman.
This points to a crucial connection between dehumanization and race, and raises two very important questions. The first is the question of what is it to think of a group of people as belonging to a race.
In everyday life, we tend to take the notion of race for granted without examining what it really means. Interrogating ordinary notions of race will help us understand why racism and dehumanization are so closely tied together. Once the first question has been settled, we can move on to the second one, the question of what is it about the psychological form of racial thinking that makes it so easy to transition from racializing others to dehumanizing them. I will take up the first question in the remainder of this chapter and move on to the second question in Chapter 4.
We can begin with Nazi anti-Semitism. The quest for a reliable, internal marker of Jewishness greatly preoccupied race experts in Nazi Germany. German scientists believed that there was such a thing as a typical Jewish physiognomy, and they tried to diagnose Jewishness on the basis of such supposedly typically Jewish traits. But they were also aware that Jews come in all shapes and sizes, and many could not be distinguished from Aryans by looks alone. Because there was no reliable method for distinguishing Jews from Germans on the basis of their appearance, it was possible to mistake them for one another. Jews could falsely present themselves as members of the master race, and Aryans could be wrongly persecuted and killed as Jews.6 Here is how Ernst Heimer, a writer for the virulently racist newspaper Der Stürmer, expressed the problem in one of the children’s books that he authored: “Just as it is often hard to perceive bacteria, so, too, it is often impossible to recognize the Jew. Not every Jew has the same racial characteristics! Not every Jew has a crooked nose or protruding ears! Not every Jew has a protruding lower lip or black, curly hair! Not every Jew has the typical Jewish eyes and flat feet! No! It is often hard to recognize a Jew. One must look very carefully to avoid being fooled. The variety in the Jew’s appearance is a great danger for other peoples.”7
Nazis solved the problem by looking at people’s pedigrees. Initially, they looked to racist American laws for inspiration, but concluded that the American “one-drop rule” was too extreme.8 An individual’s racial status was determined on the basis of the racial status of his or her grandparents. According to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, a person is Jewish if at least three of their grandparents were Jews. If only one or two grandparents were Jews, they were considered as Mischlingen, or racially mixed persons, although other sectors of the Nazi state, such as Heinrich Himmler’s SS, demanded that candidates meet far more exacting genealogical standards of racial purity.9
This “ancestral proof” of racial identity was underpinned by certain assumptions that are easily taken for granted but which should be laid out explicitly. Why should ancestry matter for determining race? Why should it be that a short, dark-haired, olive-skinned, full-lipped woman—that is, a woman who had what the Nazis regarded as a typically Jewish appearance—could have been classified as German while a tall, blond, blue-eyed woman, whom the Nazis regarded as having a paradigmatically German appearance, could have been classified as a Jew solely on the basis of their grandparents’ racial status? Like the naïve questions that children ask, these questions force us to notice something that is easily overlooked. The idea that a person’s race depends on their appearance is false.
The fact that European Jews were not, for the most part, physically discernible from non-Jews made idea that Jews disguise themselves as gentiles a fixture of European anti-Semitic mindset long before the Nazis came upon the scene. The belief that Jews have innate capacity to mimic the culture, behavior, and appearance of Aryans, and thereby conceal their true identity, was an important aspect of the anti-Semitic stereotype. As historian Steven E. Ascheim argues, Jews were thought to possess “a crafty, histrionic ability to camouflage their essence.… This is most strikingly elaborated in … the writings of Hans Blüher.… Every people, he declared in classical völkisch fashion, has its own built-in being and aptitude (Geschick). Jewish Geschick—radically incompatible with the deeply historical nature of Deutschtum—consisted in the dissimulatory mastery of appearances. The faculty of disguise was built into their sick substance. ‘The Jews,’ he declared, ‘are the only Volk [people] that operate through mimicry. Mimicry of the blood, the name, and the form.’ ”10
Nazi ideologues rejected the idea that a person’s race is fixed by their appearance. They thought that one’s race is located in one’s blood—blood that is transmitted down the so-called bloodline from parents to their offspring. The idea that race is carried in the blood explains the logic of diagnosing race by descent. Anyone who is descended from Jews is tainted with the Jewish blood and is therefore a Jew, no matter whether they look Jewish or not, and whether they observe the Jewish religion or not. And of course, if Jews were subhuman, it follows that their subhumanity (and the humanity of Aryans) is located in their blood as well.
This general conception of the nature of race was already established in Europe long before the rise of National Socialism. During the Middle Ages, the hereditary distinction between nobility and commoners was justified by the idea that the former are of royal blood and the latter are not.11 In fifteenth-century Spain, Jews and Muslims who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism were excluded from public life by limpiesa de sangre (“purity of blood”) laws. By the seventeenth century, when European physicians were beginning to experiment with transfusions, some were intrigued by the possibility of cross-species transfusions, and speculated that if such transfusions were made, the characteristics of the donor would modify the appearance and behavior recipient. As historian Rachel Boaz notes, “The idea that blood contained the attributes of the creature [that it] came from (human or animal) became most apparent when clinical experiments with transfusing blood became more common. Robert Boyle, a British chemist and physicist of the seventeenth century, wondered whether a recipient dog would recognize his master, whether a dog transfused with sheep’s blood would grow horns or wool, whether a small dog would change in stature if transfused with blood from a larger animal, and even whether marital discord could be treated by reciprocal transfusions of husband and wife.”12
Others extended this general idea to theories about race. Seventeenth-century scientists adopted the notion that there is something in the blood that is responsible for observable racial characteristics. The conviction that race is, in some mysterious sense, carried in the blood had such a powerful grip on the European imagination that it could lead observers to dismiss what their own eyes told them. For example, an English physician living in Barbados wrote to a colleague, “It will not be unwelcome to you, perhaps, if I tell you that the blood of Negroes is almost as black as their skin. I have seen the blood of at least 20 both sick & in health, drawn forth, and the superficies of it all is as dark as the bottome of any European blood, after standing a while in a dish; soe that the blackness of Negroes is likely to be inherent in them.”13
Similarly, colonists of European descent instituted what was (and is) called the “blood quantum” criterion for determining who is and who is not a Native American. In its most general version, of this principle defines Indians as persons having at least 50 percent Indian blood, while the more delimited versions define tribal membership in terms of the proportion of a person’s blood that is blood from a particular tribe. The general principle was enshrined in law—complete with the scientifically absurd reference to blood—in the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.14 Native American groups have retained this rule. Among these, there are variations in the “amount” of tribal blood that an individual must have in order to qualify as a tribal member.15
In Germany during the Weimar period, folk conceptions of race and blood became yoked to the new science of serology to produce a potent, blood-centered racist cocktail.16 Weimar seroanthropologists thought that it might be possible to use blood typing to objectively distinguish one race from another.17 And as the twentieth century wore on, the race-obsessed intelligentsia of the Nazi movement—and later those of the Third Reich—took up this project with alacrity. Their aim, of course, was to use the analysis of blood to distinguish “true” Germans from Jews, so that they wouldn’t have to rely on imprecise physiognomic criteria or cumbersome ancestral pedigrees.
Even though these scientific efforts eventually proved to be fruitless, the Nazi regime continued to produce the belief that race is located in the blood, as is evident in the 1935 Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, which forbade marriage or sexual relations between Jews and Aryans. And the rhetoric of Nazi propaganda was replete with references to Bluteinheit (“unity of blood”), Blut und Boden (“blood and soil”), Blutbewusstein (“blood consciousness”), and Blutsgemeinschaft (“blood community”).
In all of these examples of Nazi lingo, “blood” is a proxy for “race.” The association between blood and race was starkly explicit in many Nazi publications. For example, one text from the Ministry of Propaganda stated, “We know that blood is not simply a red fluid that flows through our veins. Rather, it is our very being—which carries our ancestry and represents the lineage to which we will return. The same physical and spiritual predispositions are only found among men who are of the same blood. We are related to those who have carried the same blood. These carriers of the same blood—the different races—are different from one another.”18
It is important to grasp that, bizarre though this may seem, the Nazis’ use of blood imagery wasn’t merely figurative. When they spoke about race being carried in the blood, they were expressing the idea that a person’s race is literally located in the fluid flowing through their veins and arteries—the substance that Goethe’s Mephistopheles called “juice of very special kind.”19 In 1935, just a few weeks after Germany instituted the Nuremberg race laws, a German-Jewish physician named Hans Serelman donated his own blood to save the life of a seriously injured Nazi storm trooper. German physicians loyal to the Reich reported Serelman to the Gestapo, and despite the fact that he had saved a Nazi’s life, he was convicted of the crime of Rassenschande (“race defilement,” the pollution of Aryan blood by Jewish blood) and was sent to Sachsenburg concentration camp for Schutzhaft (“protective custody”).20 That same year, a Nazi storm trooper who was seriously injured in an automobile accident was rushed to a nearby hospital and given a life-saving blood transfusion. The blood that he received was Jewish blood, and a German court subsequently convicted him of race defilement (the court allowed him to remain in the Sturmabteilung because the donor was a World War I veteran). Wounded German soldiers died on the Eastern front because transfusions of “Jewish blood” were banned.21
The pattern of racial thinking that I have just described should sound familiar to anyone who’s even minimally versed in the history of North American racism. The idea that a person’s race is fixed by their genealogy was the basis for the one-drop rule of the American South, which remained in legal force well into the twentieth century. In its most extreme version, the one-drop rule (also called the rule of “hypodescent”) specified that having even a single black ancestor made it the case that one was black (or, at least, non-White).22 For example, Homer Plessy—the plaintiff in the famous case of Plessy v. Ferguson was visually indistinguishable from a White person, but was nonetheless considered Black because one of his great-grandparents was born in Africa. In spite of his appearance and his predominantly European ancestry, it was illegal for Plessy to ride in railway carriages reserved for Whites.
American racists took the idea of racial blood every bit as literally as the Nazis did, which is unsurprising give the fact that the Nazis looked to the United States for guidance. This is why in 1942, after relaxing a ban on Black blood donors, the American Red Cross segregated White and Black blood supplies, a move that “reflected ambivalence and uncertainty in the minds of White Americans who believed in the dominant racial mythology of the 1940s.”23 This mythology led them to believe that there was a fundamental difference between the blood of different races, that it was possible to transmit the traits and characteristics of one race to a member of another race by means of a blood transfusion, and that it was possible for blood transfusions to implant potentialities in an individual of another race that would show up in succeeding generations.
The core assumptions of both German and North American racial thinking were in essence identical. According to legal scholar Judy Scales-Trent, “Both societies, thus, use the language of descent in an effort to transform the sociolegal categories they are creating into biological categories. In the ideology of both cultures, there is a very real genetic taint that can be transmitted from grandparent to parent to child through ‘blood.’ As a reflection of the value both societies placed on the biological necessity of maintaining the ‘purity’ of ‘Aryan’ or ‘White’ blood, both societies separated their blood supplies—Aryan from Jewish, White from colored.”24
Versions of the notion that race is located in the blood, or sometimes that it is located in bodily fluids such as milk or semen, are widespread, and are aspects of a prevalent folk theory of race. For instance, some Nazis believed that the racial essence could be transmitted by sexual intercourse, through semen, like a sexually transmitted disease. A 1935 article in German People’s Health through Blood and Soil!, a medical journal edited by Julius Streicher, stated that “ ‘alien albumin’ is the semen of a man of another race. As a result of intercourse, the male semen is partially or totally absorbed by the female body. A single incident of intercourse is sufficient to poison her blood. She has taken in the alien soul along with the ‘alien albumin.’ Even if she marries an Aryan man, she can no longer bear pure Aryan children, but only bastards in whose breasts dwell two souls, and who physically look like members of a mixed race.”25 This essentialist conception of race is vital for understanding the nature of dehumanization because the way that we think about race conforms to the same pattern as the way that we think about dehumanization, and because racializing a population is very often the first step toward dehumanizing them.
Folk theories are commonsensical views about the nature of things. They often consist of implicit, unarticulated background assumptions that remain unquestioned. We absorb these folk theories from the culture in which we are embedded, without the need for any formal instruction. Unlike scientific theories, which are explicitly articulated and subject to testing and revision in light of disconfirming evidence, folk theories are often implicit and impervious to contrary evidence.
Although this is an important difference, there are other respects in which folk theories and scientific theories are quite similar. In both cases, theories are tools for explaining observable things by citing unobservable things—things that are assumed to exist because of the role that they play in making sense of our experiences. We observe patterns of phenomena in the world, look for ways to make sense of them, and suppose that their explanation lies in something deeper than meets the eye—something that is hidden behind the curtain that separates the aspects of the world that are accessible to our sense organs from those that are not. It is these unobservable things (called “theoretical entities” in the philosophical jargon) that do the explanatory and predictive work in any theory. For example, human beings have known for thousands of years that characteristics of domesticated plants and animals can be engineered by selective breeding. Apple trees are bred to bear more fruit, cattle to yield more milk, dogs to run faster, and so on. The practice of selective breeding was based on the everyday observation that offspring more often than not resemble their parents. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Gregor Mendel undertook a painstaking series of experiments on nearly thirty thousand pea plants to figure out how to account for the similarities between parents and their offspring. First, he bred pure strains of pea plants—plants that “breed true.” Then, he crossbred them and carefully noted the resulting patterns of resemblance in subsequent generations. This experiment revealed some peculiar facts. For example, Mendel found that when he crossed pure strains of tall pea plants with pure strains of short ones, all of their offspring were tall, but when he bred two of this tall offspring together, three-quarters of their offspring were tall and one-quarter of them were short.
Mendel was not content simply to observe these patterns. He wanted to explain them. To do that, he had to posit theoretical entities that he called hereditary “elements” or “factors.” These, he supposed, combined with one another in accord with three rules later known as “Mendel’s Laws” to produce these particular tall / short ratios among offspring. Mendel’s theoretical entities, later renamed “genes,” together with his combinatorial laws, are the foundation for the science of genetics.
Another good example, this time from the world of physics, is Einstein’s explanation of Brownian motion. Brownian motion is the erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid or a gas. To picture it, think of motes of dust dancing in the sunlight. In 1905, Einstein elegantly demonstrated that this phenomenon can be explained by atoms and molecules colliding with the particles. Atoms and molecules had not been observed in 1905. At the time, they were theoretical entities that were only conjectured by some to exist. But Einstein argued that in this case what is observable (Brownian motion) is best explained by these unobservable theoretical entities.
This conception of what theories are applies just as much to folk theories as it does to scientific ones. So, to start to unpack any folk theory of race, we need to ask two questions about it. First, we need to ask what observations the theory purports to explain, and second, we need to ask what theoretical entities the theory posits to do the explaining.
With respect to folk theories of race, the answer to the first question is that these theories are supposed to explain observable patterns of human diversity. Go to sub-Saharan Africa and you will find that most people have dark skin and tightly curled hair. Go to Finland and you will find that most people have pale skin and relatively straight hair. Folk theories of race try to explain differences like these by proposing that humanity is composed of a small number of fundamentally different kinds of people, and that every human being is either a “pure” member of one of these kinds or a mixture of two or more of them. These kinds of people are what we call “races.”
The principle that there are pure types of people as well mixtures of these pure types is so deeply entrenched in everyday patterns of thinking that it can be difficult to notice it is a theoretical rather than an empirical proposition. We observe similarities and differences between people, and we can group people together on the basis of their observable similarities and differences, but we do not observe that there are a few pure kinds of people. The notion of human races is an interpretive grid that is superimposed upon the dappled landscape of human diversity. That is the first theoretical component of the notion of race.
You might rightly object that it is not enough to say that the folk theory of race is the idea that human beings come packaged in discrete kinds, because there are plenty of kinds of people nobody would be inclined to think of as races. Men and women are different kinds, and so are babies and adults, as well as college professors and people who sell shoes. So, we need to be more specific about the kind of kind that races are supposed to be. Races are supposed to be what philosophers call “natural kinds.” These are the kinds that are part of the objective structure of the world, and are not human inventions. Carbon atoms and quarks are natural kinds, but Tuesdays and dollars are not. Pets are not a natural kind, because they do not have any biological properties that set them apart from animals that are not pets (there are not any biological features that set dogs, cats, canaries, and goldfish apart from all other creatures). Some kinds of animals are considered pets and others are not only by dint of human practices and conventions.
The claim that races are natural human kinds still does not fully capture the folk conception, however, because not all natural human kinds are thought of as races. The human race includes males and females. These are (unlike professors and shoe salespeople) human natural kinds, but we do not regard females and males as distinct races. So, it must be that the folk theory of race is focused on a particular kind of putative natural kinds.
Descent is a hugely important component. Some natural kinds are descent-based. For example, for something to be a porcupine it is sufficient for its parents to be porcupines (or, to flip it, the offspring of any two porcupines will, of necessity, be porcupines).26 Like porcupinehood, race is supposed to be transmitted by descent. This is a mainstay of systems of racial assignment. As I earlier explained, when Nazi race experts were confronted with the problem of who counts as a Jew and who does not, they settled on the criterion of descent. They determined a person’s racial status by their pedigree rather than how they looked, the language they spoke, or the religion they practiced (although all of these could be considered in ambiguous cases).27 Similarly, the rule of hypodescent is what fixed one’s racial status in a large swath of the United States. Contrast this element of racial thinking with how we think about sex and gender. It would obviously be ridiculous to say that children inherit their sex or gender from their parents, because every human child is the offspring of a man and a woman. In contrast to sex and gender, then, the idea of race is the idea of a human natural kind, the membership in which is transmitted by descent.
To more fully understand the folk theory, we need to probe more deeply still. We need to look into what it is about a person that is supposed to make them a member of a certain race—what it is that is supposed to be transmitted from parent to child that determines the child’s racial identity. This is the topic of Chapter 4.