I was taken aback by Dr Adyanga's syllabus for the graduate seminar on 20th Century Africa. I presumed that a "topics" course entitled "20th Century Africa" would have as its topic 20th-Century Africa and would be essentially chronological, perhaps by region. What I discovered was that it was a course of topics relating to 20th-Century Africa: Race, Imagining the Other, Colonialism and Underdevelopment, Changing Identities, and so on. I took some time to adjust to this structure.
Furthermore, I misunderstood a basic principle in Dr Adyanga's syllabus that the students should read a series of articles on the proposed topic before reflecting on the topic. My misunderstanding, in my own defense, was strengthened when in the first session (prior to our having read any course materials other than the syllabus) Dr Adyanga wished to engage the class in a discussion of our ideas about race in which he played a somewhat adversarial role. I therefore cultivated the sense that the reflective essays which will constitute a large part of this blog as I have conceived it were to be prepared before reading on the topic, and then through readings and class discussion our ideas were to be sharpened.
This sense of order, with reflection coming first, is a carry-over from my experiences as an undergraduate. As a philosophy major, I established a basic approach of reflection -- reading -- refinement of reflection. I proposed that rather than being influenced by others, I should first try to understand the problem at hand (say, "what is goodness?") and only after I had myself explored the topic to exhaustion would I turn to the assigned readings on the topic. This way, I was certain that I did not agree or disagree out of absolute ignorance, but out of corroboration or testing of what I had already developed. I can't really say whether this is the best approach. Some might argue that it is not a particularly efficient one in respect to completing work and manufacturing a high grade-point average. But it builds from the Socratic view that, in respect to knowledge of the truth at any rate, we all know, and have only to discover that we know.
This sense was supported by the early sessions of the course on race, otherness, and so on. However, the Socratic program begins to break down when one needs factual information. This does not mean that one cannot use a Socratic method of self-inspection once one has information: from that information one can dialectially draw inferences aplenty. But it is vain to suppose that if one merely looks inside oneself one will find the contents of NSSM 200 (the "Kissinger Report") or learn the particulars of African socialist theories.
Faced with this clash of the need for facts rather than truths, my reflective essays began to change, and I saw the value, indeed the necessity, of reading a good deal before engaging in reflection. And some of my later reflections are quite brief and maybe not very bright.
As noted above, the seminar began with an examination of the problems inherent in the concept of race and the uses of the notion of race for exploitative purposes. Dr Adyanga asserted repeatedly that "race" is a fantasy: there is but one race, the human race. While this may be true, we must also confront the reality that people perceive race as meaningful, invest the concept with meaning and promote the concept of race in various persuasive ways.
II. Reflective Essay 1: Race and Rationality, 1 September 2010
Dr Adyanga proposes that scientifically there is but one race, the human race. But of course then “race” means the same as “species”. Yet neither does it mean something hard and fast that can be discerned in the same way as a species can. Winthrop Jordan, in The White Man's Burden (Oxford UP, 1974; see x-xii “Note on the Concept of Race”) presents a definition which while retaining sufficient flexibility, gives a handle for this troublesome term. Dr Adyanga, if I understand the conversation properly, identifies race with ethnicity, but if so it is a very broad ethnicity.
Race is a slippery concept. And it is far more a concept than anything which can be materially demonstrated in a hard and fast way. No set of racial characteristics ever seems to fit every member of the group of whom those characteristics might be expected. Presumably a “race” is a genetic group: this is the primary scientific – or pseudo-scientific – meaning of the term “race”.
If the concept is applied very broadly and not with any expectation that any one member of a group defined as a race would have all of the proposed characteristics of that group (the very nature of any grouping being recognized as artificial and “propositional”), but merely a preponderance of those characteristics, “race” could be a meaningful term in the sense of having a reference to really existing experiences in the world of sensation. But we could also expect that even the simplest of racial classifications must include considerable overlap in respect to the intension: the total number of individuals identified as being in some particular race. Blendings, in fact, seem to dismantle the very fabric of the concept of “race”.
“There is no race but the human race.” I have heard several variations on that proposition, which a bit smugly dismisses “race” as a meaningful term: it becomes a mere synonym of “species”. Yet people differ from each other in ways that, because they are tied to genetics, offer insight into movements of peoples – or have I used the term “people” wrongly here? Are “peoples” not synonymous in some degree of past use with “race”? Then there must be but one people, the human people, and one nation, the human nation. Would that it were in our political formulations as in our bodies in truth! Quickly I could move, and happily too, down a road beginning with this claim, but I think we should not so easily abandon the concept before examining it more fully: what it means, what is has meant, how that meaning has changed and been appropriated. The Oxford Universal Dictionary's etymology is not unimpeachable (several recent authors including Tom Shippey have noted JRR Tolkien's criticisms of the OED), but it is a rich resource for students of the uses of language.
Language, it seems to me, is the real substance of history, even when we are able to draw on material remains, say, documentary photographs. So, yes, a longstanding use of race – back to the 1500s at least – is to mean “species”. Yet it also means, in a general way, a type of something, a “breed”. Breeds, like “races”, are slippery. Breeds in non-human animals must be maintained artificially, and the same would, I imagine, be true of humans, since humans are animals except in some imaginary sense. Left to their own devices, dogs would simply be dogs: phenotypically and genotypically diverse and yet uniform, like most species. Humans, too, were it simply a matter of living and breeding, would probably be diverse and uniform – and to an enormous degree we are uniform, but it is, then, the diversity which is interesting, it is the diversity which allows individuality.
“Race” might be identified with ethnicity, but ethnicity seems to me to be primarily a cultural rather than a biological or genetic term. Race could go either way, could be used in either a cultural or a genetic context, and the ambiguity or ambivalence of the term argues against any scientific use unless it were a clearly “precising” use as outlined in Copi & Cohen's Introduction to Logic. Still, to use “race” synonymously with ethnicity either invalidates the equivalence of race to species, or so flattens the term ethnicity as to render it really useless. In the first instance, while race would be taken away from one of its old associations (perhaps only borrowing it, as it were, for a precising definition), it would again court confusion, for again, an ethnicity may well be tied to genetics, but it may not. I hesitate to use terms which might offend, but on the one hand we have “wigger” and on the other “oreo”: of course these are neither complementary (nor particularly complimentary) nor opposite, but they illustrate a possibility that a person of one “race” might adopt the “ethnic trappings” of another. Thus, the “ethnicity” abides in a realm beyond the physiology of the individual.
If race can be useful as a term, it must be disconnected from any notion of permanency: the membership of any racial class shifts – at least potentially – with each generation. But this only means that some “races” remain more “pure” (distinct, differentiated, separated) for more time than others. Certainly, the associations of certain moral, affective, and cognitive powers with certain groups of individuals could be (perhaps necessarily would be) deeply flawed. Characterizing some race, or characterizing some individual as being a member of a race, even through self-identification may involve logical fallacies, particularly fallacies of composition (in which attributes of particular individual in a group are assumed to be the attributes of all members of the group) and of division (in which attributes of the group as a whole are assumed to be attributes of particular individuals in the group).
“Race”, then, is a linguistic construction, yes, but not that alone. The word and the concepts connected with it are aligned with (either “causing”, resulting from, or situated “parallel to”) actions and institutions. “Race” is tied to moral valuation. In my view, the concept of race itself is morally neutral. It is also scientifically ambiguous. Simply because of this it might be better to develop new language while simultaneously struggling against what is likely the truly objectionable point: racism.
No association of moral determination (e.g. association of “goodness”) should be made with any “race”, nor with the concept itself, on philosophical (sp. logical) grounds. But neither is the concept of race, in and of itself, good or bad. So, Whites should not be construed, as a class, as having any attributes other than Whiteness, and Whiteness is neither good nor bad. But neither is the concept of race in and of itself good or bad. Determinations of race may not be particularly “good” science, and scientists may well (and do) debate whether determinations of race are so difficult or inaccurate that the concept should be abandoned in scientific use. Yet if this course were taken, still some considerable effort should go to explaining why the concept remains persuasive, and why any scientist would persist in attempting to determine races.
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