Less Than Human by David Livingstone Smith

Author:David Livingstone Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

BEYOND IDEOLOGY

I suppose it is a truth too well attested to you, to need a proof here that we are a race of beings, who … have long been considered rather as brutish than human, and scarcely capable of mental endowments.

—BENJAMIN BANNEKER TO THOMAS JEFFERSON, AUGUST 19, 17919

Social constructionism accounts for the fluidity and historical specificity of beliefs about race. But it also has limitations. Its chief shortcoming, as a comprehensive theory of race, lies in what it doesn’t address. Constructionism does a good job explaining the content of racial thinking, but lacks the resources for explaining its distinctive form. The practice of segregating the human species into races reflects a certain style of thinking. Social constructionism explains why we classify certain groups as races, but it has nothing to say about why the very concept of race is so widespread and historically persistent, and it does not address the question of why it is that the racial concepts deployed by culturally and historically diverse societies have so much in common.10

Some social constructionists claim that the very notion of race is an ideological invention tied to a particular historical epoch. Some argue that it originated in the fifteenth century, with the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain and the imposition of “purity of blood” laws. Others believe that it began in the sixteenth century, as an offshoot of European colonialism. Some locate it in the consolidation of European class relations and the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade during the seventeenth century. Yet others claim that it originated in nineteenth-century biology and anthropology.11 All of these theorists hold that prior to the comparatively recent “construction” of race, racialism did not exist, but the sheer lack of convergence on a single historical epoch when the notion of race was supposedly “constructed” ought to make us suspicious that they are barking up the wrong tree. I’ve already presented evidence against the extreme version of the constructionist position in my discussion of slavery, so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say that this version of social constructionism confuses historically specific manifestations of racism with the deeper phenomenon that they are all manifestations of. It is certainly correct to say that there are many socially constructed concepts of race, but they are all variations on an underlying theme. Social constructions of race are constrained by the psychology of racial thinking—after all, they weren’t constructed ex nihilo. To fail to grasp this is to fail to understand the concept of race and the prevalence of racial beliefs.

Over the past twenty years or so, a new cognitive-evolutionary approach to the study of race has emerged.12 Theorists in this camp accept that racial categories don’t have any scientific justification, and allow that social forces fill out the content of racial categories. But they go beyond the social constructionists, arguing that the near-universality of the concept of race suggests that it reflects something about how the human mind works. If this is right, then it has serious social implications.

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