As the last two chapters have shown, dehumanization is bound up with racism. But to understand why that’s so important, we’ve got to take a closer look at what it means to conceive of a group of people as belonging to a race.
Beliefs about race seep into almost every corner of our lives. As legal scholar Dorothy Roberts points out, “Race determines which church most Americans attend, where they buy a house, what persons they choose to marry, whom they vote for, and the music that they listen to. Race is evident in the color of inner-city and suburban schools, prison populations, the US Senate, and Fortune 500 boardrooms.”1 But despite its pervasiveness and significance, and its implications for human lives, few of us ever pause to consider what, exactly, race is supposed to be. What are we talking about when we talk about race? Is it something about people’s appearance? Or is it something deeper?
In this chapter, I’m going to tease out the core elements of the ordinary conception of race. This isn’t a fancy scientific or philosophical definition of race (I’ll talk a bit about those later on). It’s the view of race that most of us just slip into when going about the everyday business of life. It’s a conception that we take so thoroughly for granted that we don’t even question it. But to understand dehumanization we’ve got to open that Pandora’s box, because beliefs about race lie at the heart of the dehumanizing process.
First, a few words of caution. Race is very easy to misunderstand, for a couple of reasons. One is that we tend to overgeneralize the racial assumptions that are prevalent here and now. That’s a mistake because the particulars of racial categorization are often different at different times and at different places. To get a grasp of the ordinary conception of race it’s important to abstract away from the details and identify the basic template of racial thinking, which remains more or less constant across time and space.
Part of this involves letting go of the tendency to equate race with skin color. Americans tend to think of race as very closely connected with skin color—so much so that “race” and “skin color” are often used interchangeably. But this connection doesn’t apply across the board. European Jews had skin that was every bit as pale as that of the Germans who persecuted them, but this didn’t prevent the Nazis (and others) from considering them as a separate race. The Tutsi and Hutu—victims and persecutors in the Rwanda genocide—were labeled as different races by the Belgian colonial administration, and came to think of themselves as such. But this wasn’t based upon differences in skin color. And it’s common for people in Japan to think of Korean and Chinese people as racially alien without any reference to the color of their skin. Color is an important marker of race in the Americas and Europe for historical reasons involving colonialism and slavery, but there can be racial difference without color difference, and color difference without racial difference.
Finally, it’s crucial not to be hung up on the word “race.” Some scholars tie the concept of race very closely to the word “race,” and they have the idea that nobody had a concept of race prior to the use of the word in its modern sense. This simply isn’t true. You don’t need the word “race” to have the concept of race any more than you need the word “porcupine” to have the concept of porcupines. (I’m pretty sure that our prehistoric ancestors had no difficulty thinking about porcupines long before they had a name for them.) In fact, once the concept of race gets unpacked, you see that people use words like “ethnicity,” “culture,” and even sometimes “religion” and “nationality” to talk about race without even realizing that’s what they’re doing.
Enough preliminaries. Let’s get on with it.
Part of the ordinary conception of race is what philosophers call natural kinds. Natural kinds are the sorts of things that exist “out there” in nature rather than being human creations. Chemical elements, biological species, and the elementary particles described by physicists are natural kinds. In contrast, invented kinds are artifacts produced by human beings (and possibly other intelligent life forms). Makes and models of cars, Thursdays, and dollars are all invented kinds. If human beings didn’t exist, cars, Thursdays, and dollars wouldn’t exist either, but elements, species, and subatomic particles would still be there. Some invented kinds are real and others are fictional. This book was invented, but it’s perfectly real. But hobbits—which were also invented—are purely fictional.
When it comes to kinds of human beings, we think of some of these as natural and some as invented. For instance, it’s widely believed that males and females are natural kinds, and disputes about the possibility of changing one’s gender are often driven by clashing assumptions about whether men and women are natural kinds or invented ones. Whatever your particular stance is, we can all agree that there are lots more invented human kinds than there are natural ones. Some of these are real: professional categories such as “teacher” and “doctor” are examples. Others, such as witches and zombies, are fictional. (I don’t deny that there are people who believe themselves to be witches, and there might even be a few who believe that they’re zombies, but that’s beside the point.)
So, where does race fit in to this conceptual landscape? Are races natural kinds or are they invented kinds? And if they’re invented kinds, are they real or are they fictional ones?
People ordinarily think of races as natural kinds. They think that a person’s race is something that’s objectively true of them, rather than being merely a matter of how other people categorize them. A person’s race is thought to be something that makes them the person that they are—something that’s deep and unalterable, and which gets passed down, biologically, from parents to their children.
Scholars who study race call this the idea of racial essentialism. The idea that things have essences is crucial for understanding dehumanization, and I’ll have more to say about it in chapter nine. But for now, the key point is that the essence of a thing is supposed to be something about it—something that’s deep and unobservable—that makes it belong to a natural kind. Chemistry is one of the few domains where essentialism earns its keep. Hydrogen is made out of atoms that have only one proton. That’s why hydrogen is assigned the atomic number 1. All hydrogen atoms have the atomic number 1, and nothing that’s not hydrogen has that atomic number. It would be impossible for a hydrogen atom to have two protons, because an atom with two protons is a helium atom not a hydrogen atom. So, we can say that the essence of hydrogen is located in the microstructure of the hydrogen atom. It’s the microstructure of chemical elements that determines how they behave and how they appear to us. Because of its microstructure—its essence—hydrogen behaves very differently from gold, which has seventy-nine protons. These microscopic differences explain why you can have a ring that’s made out of gold but you can’t have one that’s made out of hydrogen. This points to a very general feature of essentialistic thinking: the principle that the essence of a thing is what determines its outer properties. This way of thinking really does apply in chemistry. All of the features of gold—its weight, its conductivity, its melting point, and so on—are outcomes of its essential microstructure.
Racial thinking follows much the same pattern. According to the ordinary conception of race, there’s some deep defining property for each race—the racial equivalent to an atomic number—that’s located “inside” a person, and which all and only individuals who belong to that race possess. This racial essence is said to determine the more superficial, observable characteristics of members of that race: how they look, how they think, and how they behave.
The theory of essences doesn’t make any scientific sense when it’s applied to races. As a matter of biological fact, there just isn’t a racial equivalent of an atomic number. Races don’t really have essences. We just imagine that they do. But despite its falsity, racial essentialism maintains a fierce grip on the human imagination. Most people find themselves buying into it. They operate with the implicit or explicit assumption that there are deep biological differences between people who are said to belong to different races. And even those who really do know better—people like biologists and philosophers—can have a hard time keeping themselves from slipping into the essentialist mindset.
Let’s look a little closer at the connection between a person’s race and their appearance. According to the ordinary conception of race, it’s the unfolding of people’s racial essence—its expression in their bodily form and psychological character—that causes them to look and behave in ways that are typical of their race. In this book, I’m using the word “appearance” to cover the whole gamut of observable characteristics, including their behavior. So, according to the ordinary concept, it’s this process of unfolding that determines the race-specific aspects of a person’s appearance, and that’s why we’re normally able to infer people’s race from their appearance. If they have certain physical features that are typically associated with a certain race, we assume that they belong to that race. In light of what I’ve already said about racial essences, this can only mean that a person’s appearance is assumed to be a reliable sign of their race.
According to the ordinary conception, a person’s race is determined by something that’s inside them that can never be perceived directly. The racial essence (which, I’ll remind you, is supposed to be what makes it the case that a person is a person of a certain race) is by definition unobservable. This means that when we classify people racially, it’s always a kind of conjecture. A person’s appearance is taken to be an indication of their race, just as, for example, the color of a tomato is supposed to be an indication of its ripeness. The bright red color of the tomato tells us that it is ripe—it’s a symptom of ripeness rather than the ripeness itself. And although the red color is very often a reliable indicator of ripeness, this isn’t always the case. Some varieties of tomato turn yellow or orange or even purple, rather than red, when they’re ripe. Similarly, the ordinary conception of race allows that a person’s appearance may be deceptive. Their true racial identity may not match up with their appearance.
There’s a compelling example of such a mismatch in Lillian Smith’s memoir Killers of the Dream. Lillian Smith was a novelist and Civil Rights activist who grew up in the Deep South at around the turn of the twentieth century. In one of the chapters, Smith (who was a White woman) describes a formative experience from her childhood. A very fair-skinned girl was spotted in the Black section of her segregated town. On hearing of this, a group of White women jumped to the conclusion that the little girl had been kidnapped by the Black couple that she was living with, so they told the local sheriff, who took the child into custody and then fostered her with Lillian’s family.
The girl, whose name was Janie, quickly became part of the Smith household. She and Lillian became fast friends, until an unexpected phone call from an African American orphanage shattered their relationship. The caller explained that, despite appearances, Janie was in fact a Black child who had been adopted rather than abducted by the Black couple she had been living with. Lillian recalled the following:
In a little while my mother called my sister and me into her bedroom and told us that in the morning Janie would return to Colored Town. . . . And then I found it possible to say, “Why is she leaving? . . .”
“Because,” mother said gently, “Janie is a little colored girl.”
“But she’s white!”
“We were mistaken. She is colored.”
“But she looks—"
“She is colored. Please don’t argue!”2
That a person can look White but be categorized as Black seems odd, but it’s perfectly in line with the ordinary conception of race. That’s because the ordinary conception of race is actually a theory of race. It’s what’s called a “folk theory” rather than a fancy scientific or philosophical one. The purpose of any theory—whether it’s a folk theory or a scientific one—is to explain some aspect of our world. Scientific theories make sense of observable things by postulating the existence of unobservable things that explain them. For example, chemists make sense of the properties of hydrogen by citing its microstructure. In the same way, the folk theory of race explains something that’s observable by positing the existence of something that’s unobservable. We observe that people come in different physical packages and behave in a wealth of different ways, and we use the idea of hidden racial essences to explain this observable diversity. But although we can see diversity, we can’t see race.
Dividing human beings into races—into “our kind” and “their kind”—is the first step on the road to dehumanizing them. We first set them apart as a fundamentally different kind of human being—we treat them as a separate race—and only later transmute them into subhuman creatures fit to be exterminated or enslaved. Bad ideas about race are worth combatting all on their own, but all the more so because conceiving of people as racially other so easily morphs into dehumanizing them.