Mixed Race Studies

Forging People: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic American and Latino/a Thought

University of Notre Dame Press
2011
376 pages
ISBN 10: 0-268-02982-2
ISBN 13: 978-0-268-02982-1

Edited by:

Jorge J. E. Gracia, Samuel P. Capen Chair; SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature
State University of New York, Buffalo

Forging People explores the way in which Hispanic American thinkers in Latin America and Latino/a philosophers in the United States have posed and thought about questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and how they have interpreted the most significant racial and ethnic labels used in Hispanic America in connection with issues of rights, nationalism, power, and identity. Following the first introductory chapter, each of the essays addresses one or more influential thinkers, ranging from Bartolomé de Las Casas on race and the rights of Amerindians; to Simón Bolívar’s struggle with questions of how to forge a nation from disparate populations; to modern and contemporary thinkers on issues of race, unity, assimilation, and diversity. Each essay carefully and clearly presents the views of key authors in their historical and philosophical context and provides brief biographical sketches and reading lists, as aids to students and other readers.

Contents

• Contributors
  Preface
• 1. Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in Hispanic A merican and Latino/a Thought—Jorge J. E. Gracia
• Part I. The Colony and Scholasticism
  • 2. The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas: Race and Personhood—Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey
• Part II. Independence and the Enlightenment
  • 3. Men or Citizens? The Making of Bolívar’s Patria—José Antonio Aguilar Rivera
  • 4. Andrés Bello: Race and National Political Culture—Iván Jaksica
  • 5. Undoing “Race”: Martí’s Historical Predicament—Ofelia Schutte
• Part III. New Nations and Positivism
  • 6. Sarmiento on Barbarism, Race, and Nation Building—Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey
  • 7. Justo Sierra and the Forging of a Mexican Nation—Oscar R. Martí
• Part IV. Challenges in the Twentieth Century
  • 8. Rodó, Race, and Morality—Arleen Salles
  • 9. Zarathustra Criollo: Vasconcelos on Race—Diego von Vacano
  • 10. The Amauta’s Ambivalence: Mariátegui on Race—Renzo Llorente
  • 11. Mestizaje, mexicanidad, and Assimilation: Zea on Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality—Amy A. Oliver
• Part V. Latinos/as in the United States
  • 12. Latino/a Identity and the Search for Unity: Alcoff, Corlett, and Gracia—Elizabeth Millán and Ernesto Rosen Velásquez
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Preface

The discussion of race in the United States reflects to a great extent the situation in the country. The adoption of the one-drop rule, according to which anyone who has a drop of black blood is considered black, has too often been taken for granted, resulting in a polarization that characterizes both the formulation of problems related to race and the purported solutions to those problems: a person is either black or white but not both; there is no in between. It also has tended to move to the background the visible dimensions of race and to pay undue attention to biological and genetic conceptions of it; heredity, rather than appearance, has often been regarded as most significant. Finally, it has contributed to the widespread use of the metaphor of purity associated with whites and of impurity associated with blacks: to be white is to be uncontaminated, whereas to be black is to be contaminated. That a mixture is generally different from the elements that compose it but partakes of them, that races involve gradation and fuzzy boundaries, and that visible appearance plays an important role in racial classifications are facts too often neglected.

This model of race takes insufficient note of what much of the world thinks and illustrates the insularity that characterizes some segments of the U.S. community. Indeed, it is seldom that proper attention is paid to the views of other societies. Although the views on race of some European philosophers, such as Kant and Hume, have been studied in some detail, treatments by Latin Americans or Africans, for example, are generally ignored by North American philosophers concerned with race.

The inadequacy of this parochial approach becomes clear when one considers how conceptions of race vary from place to place. In Cuba, for example, to be black entails a certain kind of appearance. A person who appears to have mixed black-white ancestry is not usually considered black or white but mulatto. In the United States, according to the one-drop rule, to be black requires only one black ancestor, even if physical appearance tells another story. But in Cuba persons of mixed black and white ancestry who look white are generally taken as white, whereas those who appear black are considered black. Clearly the criteria of racial classification used in the United States and Cuba are different. Similar differences can be found between the views of race in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

This neglect of points of view in other parts of the world also applies to ethnicity and nationality. Societies differ substantially in how they establish and think about ethnicity or nationality. Some societies use skin color and physical appearance to establish ethnic and national distinctions; others use lineage or culture. Indian is a racial term generally associated with ancestry in the United States, but in some contexts in South America it is used to refer to culture: to be an Indian indicates that one has not adopted the ways of Europeans, thus carrying with it the disparaging connotations that this entails in the eyes of those who are European or have adopted European culture. Nationality is taken in some cases to be a legal marker—whether involving birthplace or ancestry—and in others to be an indicator of kinship, race, or culture. As in the United States, in some parts of Latin America blacks and mulattoes were denied citizenship because of their race or racial mixture, whereas in other parts of that region it was denied on other grounds, including culture.

Considering these differences in conception, it would seem to make sense that theories of race, ethnicity, and nationality need to take into account as many of the various ways in which different societies use these notions as possible. But the tendency in the United States has been to concentrate on Western European views. This has resulted in inadequate theories, based on cultural and social biases. If U.S. thinking is to make any progress toward an understanding of these phenomena, it needs to go beyond parochial boundaries and consider other societies where race, ethnicity, and nationality also play important roles. How are these notions used in the East, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America?

Latin America is especially important because it is the place where Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans first came together in substantial numbers. Indeed, some scholars have made the argument that the concept of race in particular developed in the context of the encounters between these peoples in the sixteenth century. The details of the story have still to be worked out, but one thing is clear: Latin America is significant in this development. And the significance is not restricted to the fact that Latin America is a meeting place of Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans; it involves also the complex subsequent history of racial, ethnic, and national mixture in the region. Scholars who have studied the pertinent populations do not tire of repeating that Latin America is one of the places in the world where mixing has been most prevalent…

Read the Preface and Chapter 1 here.

Kant’s Race Theory, Forster’s Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color

The Eighteenth Century
Volume 53, Number 4, Winter 2012
pages 393-412
DOI: 10.1353/ecy.2012.0032

Sally Hatch Gray, Assistant Professor of German
Mississippi State University

This article argues for an understanding of Kant’s race theory as an integral part of his idea of nature and of humans in nature as presented in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790). It places an examination of Kant and Forster’s debate over race, which was ignited in 1785 upon the publication of Kant’s second essay on race, “Definition of a Concept of a Human Race” (“Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace”), in the context of an illumination of the connections between aesthetics and anthropology in Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, 1764) and Forster’s Voyage round the World (Reise um die Welt 1777). Forster responded to Kant’s new “race” classifications, which were based essentially on skin color, with “Still More about the Human Races” (“Noch etwas über Menschenraßen,” 1786). This article shows that Kant then developed his scientific theory and his idea of a teleological nature as presented in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, at least in part, in order to provide a unifying theoretical basis for his race theory so that it could withstand the scrutiny of an empirical scientific method based on deductive logic, such as that advanced by Forster. While Forster’s strict empiricism, perspectivism, and rejection of “race” as a scientific classification reflect an underlying, distinctly modern, concept of the natural world, Kant’s nature, as presented in his third Critique, reveals a metaphysically-based structure supporting a universal cosmopolitanism, but veils a particular European perspective that allows a damaging global authority on difference.

At a key moment in his 1777 travelogue A Voyage Round the World (Reise um die Welt) describing his adventures aboard Captain Cook’s second exploratory journey into the Antarctic, the narrative of the young German naturalist Georg Forster (1754-94), takes on a decidedly more excited tone. In August 1773, he and his traveling companions were enjoying the charms of the Society Islands, when, during a banquet featuring traditional dancing, the atmosphere became sexually charged. The sailors bribed the women with bits of meat to continue making seemingly indiscreet dance movements, while the hosts treated the British officers and Prussian naturalists to a peek into the dancers’ dressing room. Forster writes:

To complete our entertainment this day, the chief gave orders for performing another heeva, and we were admitted (behind the scenes} to see the ladies dressing for that purpose.  They obtained some string of beads on this occasion, with which we took it into our heads to improve upon their ornaments, much to their own satisfaction. Among the spectators we observed several of the prettiest women of this country, and one of them was remarkable for the whitest complexion we had ever seen in all these islands. Her colour resembled that of white wax a little sullied, without having the least appearance of sickness, which that hue commonly conveys; and her fine black eyes and hair contrasted so well with it, that she was admired by us all.

Forster’s excitement helps to relay the intense experience of a special event which “perfects the joys of the day” as he writes in German, “Um die Freuden dieses Tages volkommen zu machen.” In this moment, they have not only been released from the physical hardship of months at sea aboard an eighteenth-century sailing vessel, but they are taken with “einstimmige Bewunderung” a kind of “unanimous wonderment.” beyond their immediate reality in their response…

The Philosophy of Race

Routledge
2011-12-14
1,584 pages
Hardback: 978-0-415-49602-5

Edited by:

Paul Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy; African American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

Since at least the early 1990s, philosophical race theory has emerged as a dynamic and fertile area of serious scholarly inquiry, and this new four-volume Major Work from Routledge meets the need for a comprehensive collection to facilitate ready access to the most influential and important foundational and cutting-edge scholarship.

Volume I (‘Philosophy and the History of Race, Race in the History of Philosophy’) brings together the key texts to have shaped the most widely recognized forms of ‘race thinking’. The second and third volumes in the collection, meanwhile, explore the questions that race raises in philosophy’s traditional subfields. Volume II (‘Racial Being and Knowing’) gathers the best and most influential work to unravel the implications of racial practices for metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology. And Volume III (‘Race-ing Beauty, Goodness, and Right’) collects the key scholarship to deal with the consequences of racial practices for aesthetics, ethics, and politics.

The final volume in the collection (‘Intersections and Positions’) assembles the most important work to grapple with the methodological and geographical complications that accompany a commitment to racialism. (Race is an inherently contextual phenomenon and some of the material gathered in this volume—in particular, that exploring racialization in Japan, Brazil, and Norway—provides a refreshing counterweight to the philosophical zeal for abstraction.)

The Philosophy of Race is edited by Paul C. Taylor, a leading scholar in the field. The collection is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the material in its intellectual and historic context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research resource.

CONTENTS

• Volume I: HISTORY
  • Part 1: Philosophical Historiography
    • 1. Cornel West, ‘A Genealogy of Modern Racism’, Prophesy Deliverance! Towards an Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Westminster Press, 1982), pp. 47–68.
    • 2. Robert Bernasconi, ‘Race, Culture, History’ (plenary lecture at Sodertorn University, 28 May 2009), pp. 11–46.
    • 3. David Theo Goldberg, ‘The End(s) of Race’, Postcolonial Studies, 2004, 7, 2, 211–30.
  • Part 2: Early Figures and Moments
    • 4. Harry Bracken, ‘Philosophy and Racism’, Philosophia, 1978, 8, 2–3, 241–60.
    • 5. Richard Popkin, ‘Hume’s Racism Reconsidered’, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Brill, 1992), pp. 64–75.
    • 6. Meg Armstrong, ‘”The Effects of Blackness”: Gender, Race, and the Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1996, 54, 3, 213–36.
    • 7. Bernard Boxill and Thomas E. Hill, ‘Kant and Race’, in Bernard Boxill (ed.), Race and Racism (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 448–71.
    • 8. Patricia Purtschert, ‘On the Limit of Spirit: Hegel’s Racism Revisited’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2010, 36, 9, 1039–51.
    • 9. Tom Jeannot, ‘Marx, Capitalism, and Race’, in Harry Van der Linden (ed.), Democracy, Racism, and Prisons (Philosophy Documentation Center, 2007), pp. 69–92.
  • Part 3: Late Modern Race Theory in/and the Canon
    • 10. Berel Lang, ‘Heidegger and the Jewish Question: Metaphysical Racism in Silence and Word’, in Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott (eds.), Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays (Blackwell, 2002), pp. 205–21.
    • 11. Kathryn Gines, ‘Race Thinking and Racism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism’, in Dan Stone and Richard King (eds.), Imperialism, Slavery, Race, and Genocide: The Legacy of Hannah Arendt (Berghahn, 2007), pp. 38–53.
    • 12. Jonathan Judaken, ‘Sartre on Racism: From Existential Phenomenology to Globalization and “the New Racism”’, in Jonathan Judaken (ed.), Race After Sartre (SUNY Press, 2008), pp. 23–54.
  • Part 4: Critical Race Theory and the New Canon
    • 13. Diego von Vacano, ‘Race and Political Theory: Lessons from Latin America’, in Jorge Gracia (ed.), Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity (Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 248–66.
    • 14. Howard McGary, ‘Douglass on Racial Assimilation and Racial Institutions’, in Bill E. Lawson and Frank Kirkland (eds.), Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Publishing, 1999), pp. 50–63.
    • 15. Nancy Fraser, ‘Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical “Race” Theory, and the Politics of Culture’, in Morris Dickstein (ed.), The Revival of Pragmatism (Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 157–75.
    • 16. Vivian M. May, ‘Thinking from the Margins, Acting at the Intersections: Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South’, Hypatia, 2004, 19, 2, 74–91.
    • 17. K. A. Appiah, ‘The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Illusion of Race’, Critical Inquiry, 1985, 12, 1, 21–37.
    • 18. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept [1940] (Transaction Publishers, 1992), pp. 97–103, 114–17, 129–33, 137–40.
    • 19. Frantz Fanon, ‘The Lived Experience of the Black’, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. R. Philcox [1952] (Grove Press, 1967), pp. 78–99.
    • 20. Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Racism, Colonialism, and Anonymity: Social Theory and Embodied Agency’, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: A Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Routledge, 1995), pp. 37–67.
• Volume II: Racial Being and Knowing
  • Part 5: What Races Are, What ‘Race’ Means
    • 21. Charles W. Mills, ‘”But What Are You Really?” The Metaphysics of Race’, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 41–66.
    • 22. Lucius Outlaw, ‘Conserve Races? In Defense of W. E. B. Du Bois’, Critical Social Theory in the Interests of Black Folks (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 139–62.
    • 23. Ron Mallon, ‘Passing, Traveling, and Reality: Social Construction and the Metaphysics of Race’, Nous, 2004, 38, 644–73.
    • 24. Robin O. Andreasen, ‘A New Perspective on the Race Debate’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1998, XLIX, 2, 199–225.
    • 25. Philip Kitcher, ‘Does “Race” have a Future?’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2007, 35, 4, 293–317.
    • 26. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture (Blackwell, 1993), pp. 80–9.
    • 27. S. Haslanger, ‘Language, Politics and “the Folk”: Looking for “the Meaning” of “Race”’, The Monist, 2010, 93, 2, 169–87.
    • 28. Joshua Glasgow, Julie L. Shulman, and Enrique G. Covarrubias, ‘The Ordinary Conception of Race in the United States and its Relation to Racial Attitudes: A New Approach’, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2009, 9, 1–2, 15–38.
  • Part 6: What Racial Identities Are
    • 29. Linda Martín-Alcoff, ‘Philosophy and Racial Identity’, Philosophy Today, 1997, 41, 1, 67–76.
    • 30. K. Anthony Appiah, ‘Synthesis: For Racial Identities’, Color Conscious (Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 75–105.
    • 31. Judith Butler, ‘Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge’, Bodies That Matter (Routledge, 1993), pp. 167–86.
    • 32. Paul C. Taylor, Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity, 2004), pp. 84–7, 112–15.
  • Part 7: Power, Knowledge, Self-Knowledge, and Experience
    • 33. Charles Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 11–38.
    • 34. Anika Maaza Mann, ‘Race and Feminist Standpoint Theory’, in Kathryn Gines, Donna Dale-Marcano, and Maria del Guadelupe Davidson, Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010), pp. 105–20.
    • 35. Shannon Sullivan, ‘Ignorance and Habit’, Revealing Whiteness (University of Indiana Press, 2006), pp. 17–44.
    • 36. Ned Block, ‘How Heritability Misleads About Race’, Boston Review, 1996, 20, 6, 30–35.
    • 37. Michael Root, ‘The Problem of Race in Medicine’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2001, 31, 1, 20–39.
    • 38. Ronald Sundstrom, ‘Race and Place: Social Space in the Production of Human Kinds’, Philosophy and Geography, 2003, 6, 1, 83–95.
• Volume III: Race-ing Beauty, Goodness, and Right
  • Part 8: Racism
    • 39. Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Racisms’, in D. T. Goldberg (ed.), Anatomy of Racism (University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 3–17.
    • 40. Lewis R. Gordon, ‘Racialism, Racism, Racialists, Racists’, Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism (Humanity Books, 1999), pp. 67–77.
    • 41. J. L. A. Garcia, ‘The Heart of Racism’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 1996, 2, 5–45.
    • 42. Tommie Shelby, ‘Is Racism in the Heart?’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 2002, 33, 411–20.
    • 43. L. Faucher and E. Machery, ‘Racism: Against Jorge Garcia’s Moral and Psychological Monism’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2009, 39, 1, 41–62.
    • 44. Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Policing of Race Mixing: The Place of Biopower within the History of Racisms’, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2010, 7, 2, 205–16.
  • Part 9: Race, the Right, and the Good
    • 45. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 1–19.
    • 46. Anna Stubblefield, ‘Races as Families’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 2001, 32, 1, 99–112.
    • 47. L. Blum, ‘Three Kinds of Race-Related Solidarity’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 2007, 38, 53–72.
    • 48. Linda Martín Alcoff, ‘Latino/as, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary’, Journal of Ethics, 2003, 7, 1, 5–27.
    • 49. Howard McGary, ‘Psychological Violence, Physical Violence, and Racial Oppression’, in Lewis R. Gordon (ed.), Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (Routledge, 1996), pp. 263–72.
    • 50. Samantha Vice, ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 2010, 41, 3, 323–42.
  • Part 10: Selected Issues in Racial Politics
    • 51. Richard Wasserstrom, ‘Preferential Treatment, Color-Blindness, and the Evils of Racism and Racial Discrimination’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 1987, 61, 1, 27–42.
    • 52. Howard McGary, ‘Achieving Democratic Equality: Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Reparations’, Journal of Ethics, 2003, 7, 1, 93–113.
    • 53. Angela Y. Davis, ‘Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition’, in Tommy L. Lott (ed.), A Companion to African-American Philosophy (Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 360–9.
    • 54. Glen Coulthard, ‘Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the “Politics of Recognition”’, Contemporary Political Theory, 2007, 6, 4, 437–60.
  • Part 11: Aesthetics
    • 55. Monique Roelofs, ‘Racialization as an Aesthetic Production: What Does the Aesthetic Do for Whiteness and Blackness and Vice Versa?’, in George Yancy (ed.), White on White/Black on Black (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), pp. 83–124.
    • 56. Dan Flory, ‘Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2006, 64, 1, 67–79.
    • 57. Mariana Ortega, ‘Othering the Other: The Spectacle of Katrina for our Racial Entertainment Pleasure’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 2009, 2.
    • 58. Robert Gooding-Williams, ‘Aesthetics and Receptivity: Kant, Nietzsche, Cavell, Astaire’, Look, a Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics (Routledge, 2006), pp. 43–68.
    • 59. Falguni A. Sheth, ‘The Hijab and the Sari: The Strange and the Sexy Between Colonialism and Global Capitalism’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 2009, 2.
• Volume IV: Intersections and Positions
  • Part 12: Intersectionality
    • 60. Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Intersectionality, Citizenship and Contemporary Politics of Belonging’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2007, 10, 4, 561–74.
    • 61. Patricia Hill Collins, ‘It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation’, Hypatia, 1998, 13, 3, 62–82.
    • 62. Jorge J. E. Gracia, ‘The Nature of Ethnicity with Special Reference to Hispanic/Latino Identity’, Public Affairs Quarterly, 1999, 13, 1, 25–42.
    • 63. Ladelle McWhorter, ‘Sex, Race, and Biopower: A Foucauldian Genealogy’, Hypatia, 2004, 19, 3, 38–62.
    • 64. Stuart Hall, ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’, Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (UNESCO, 1980), pp. 305–45.
    • 65. Étienne Balibar, ‘Uprisings in the Banlieues’, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 2007, 14, 1, 47–71.
  • Part 13: Mapping Racial Imaginaries: Inventing the Other
    • 66. Edward Said, ‘Introduction to Orientalism’, in Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (eds.), The Edward Said Reader (Vintage, 2000), pp. 67–74, 78–81, 90–3.
    • 67. David Haekwon Kim, ‘Orientalism and America Enlarged’, Newsletter on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies, 2003, 2, 2, 30–4.
    • 68. V. Y. Mudimbe, ‘Discourse of Power and Knowledge of Otherness’, The Invention of Africa (Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 1–23.
    • 69. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers (Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 41, 56–9, 73–5, 80–90, 98–102.
    • 70. David Theo. Goldberg, ‘Racial Europeanization’, Ethnic & Racial Studies, 2006, 29, 2, 331–64.
    • 71. Nadia Abu El-Haj, ‘Racial Palestinianization and the Janus-Faced Nature of the Israeli State’, Patterns of Prejudice, 2010, 44, 1, 27–41.
  • Part 14: Positioning Critical Identities: Inventing Self and Community
    • 72. Sonia Sikka, ‘In What Sense are Dalits Black?’ (presentation to ‘Beyond the White–Black Binary’, conference held at Pennsylvania State University, 12 November 2010).
    • 73. Linda Martín Alcoff, ‘Mestizo Identity’, in Naomi Zack (ed.), American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), pp. 257–78.

Deconstructing Race: Gobinism and Miscegenation in Pearl S. Buck

The Criterion: An International Journal in English
Volume III, Issue II (June 2012)
8 pages
ISSN 0976-8165

Aysha Munira

The 17th and 18th centuries saw the emergence of the idea of race, along with the rise of colonialism and transatlantic slave trade. By the end of the seventeenth century, the racial category of “black” evolved with the consolidation of racial slavery, in the United States. The specific identities of Africans were engulfed and rendered “black” by an ideology of racial exploitation, leading to the establishment and maintenance of a “color line.” The consolidation of racial slavery was an outcome of a period of indentured servitude. This led to a racially polarized society and shaped specific identities for the slaves as well as white. With homogenization of the colonies as a whole, the new term of self-identification evolved as white (Omi and Winant).

In the conception of race, the discovery of the most perfect female human skull at the Caucasus Mountains, near the purported location of the Noah’s Ark was used to establish and explain racial hierarchy starting from the Caucasoid on top. Theologically, humans are supposed to have come from Adam and Eve, but it is alleged that with the increase in population, some groups in later descendants degenerated and digressed into deviations, which is also used to explain racial hierarchy. On the other hand, the polygenists believe that human had different ancestors. Till the beginning of the 20th century, the notion of archaic subspecies was held, with corresponding cultural and biological manifestations. But the contemporary anthropologists do not hold the idea of race as valid. Race as a scientific reality is no more accepted. The macroracial terms used in order to categorise, e.g. light and dark are not able to cater to the diversity of humanity and therefore are being rejected (Mukhopadhye and Henze). The Columbia Encyclopedia documents that many physical anthropologists believe that the concept of race is unscientific and flawed, since the genetic variations within one race are as many as there can be found between the macroracial groups, (“Race.”). Hence, the term race is unsound especially when applied in order to ethnopsychologize and hierarchize the human species. As to the question how the colours and physiognomic differences marking one set of people different in appearance from others come about, the answer lies in “mutation , selection, and adaptational changes in human populations” (“Race.”) that took place with the passage of time. Race is commonly understood to be the colour of skin or difference in physiognomy that goes into the making of one race different from others.

Despite the scientific truth, race has been used, throughout human history in varying degrees, as “a disfavored means of judging human reality and potential” (Brown). For centuries, the western society has perceived the world as Eurocentric, in terms of exploiting it for albocratic purposes. The various kinds of Eurocentric social discourses reflect and endorse the notion of superiority of white race to the coloured. For sociologists, psychologists and phrenologists there are various ways to define race and explain the reason why there exist hierarchical parameters that declare one race to be superior to the others. Historically speaking, the success of the white race has led to Gobinism or the belief that comparative lightness or darkness of skin colour is a determiner of superiority or inferiority of a particular race. Using the differentiation between essence and existence and Hegelian distinction between ‘to be’ and ‘to have become’ as used by Simone de Beauvoir, (Beauvoir 15), the concept of race and racialization as a basis for another kind of hierarchization can be taken as another human folly to maintain the status quo of global power politics. To Howard Winant, notion of race as an “objective condition” is illogical and flawed. Race can only be understood as a “dynamic flexible social construct” (Chancer and Watkins 50). If an amount of uncertainty or accidental occurrence may be considered to be the law of the universe (Madison), little validity remains to hold the view that success as well as tts resultant seeming superiority of one race is decisive of human worth and not the result of chance and accidents in the history of evolution. It leaves space for a change in the fortunes of the history of peoples.

Race as a notion of hierarchy is also invalidated by the fact that “All human groups belong to the same species (Homo sapiens) and are mutually fertile” (“Race”). This reality of mutual fertility at the same time, has given rise to one of the biggest social problems of human history, the mixed race children.

Even a cursory glance at Pearl S. Buck’s fiction reveals the fact that as a transnational and what she calls a “culturally bifocal” (Conn xiii) person, she subscribes to the constructionists’ idea of race. She holds the view that mutual fertility is a boon for the human species as it creates better progeny that the humanity should be proud of instead of being ashamed of and embarrassed about. For Pearl S. Buck, the cause of the coloured people and the mixed race children was very important and she devoted much of her time and energy for the new breed with different colours and physiognomic features. Laura the chief protagonist in The New Year reads Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, The Fallacy of Race by Ashley Montague which echoes the author’s idea about miscegenation:

When we combine oxygen and hydrogen, we obtain water…When we combine zinc and copper, we obtain an alloy, bronze, which has far greater strength, and numerous other qualities, than the unalloyed metals comprising it; that is certainly getting more out of a mixture than was put into it. When two pure bred varieties of plants or animals unite to produce offspring, the latter often show many more desirable qualities and characters than the stock from which they were derived. Surely the varieties which man presents in his various ethnic forms would suggest that something more has been produced out of the elements than was originally brought into association. (Buck, The New Year 217).

Pearl Buck’s is a perfect eugenic solution. She extols the result of miscegenation. Laura like Pearl S. Buck reaches the conclusion that hybrid is an improvement upon the originals and should be valued as an example of human’s forward march in the process of evolution. It is a symbol of unity rather than of discord and dispute between the progenitors. Kim Christopher and the likes are “a step into future” (Buck, The New Year 218) and so is her husband’s recognition of his son publicly…

Read the entire article here.

Ocular Anthropomorphisms: Eugenics and Primatology at the Threshold of the “Almost Human”

Social Text
Volume 30, Number 3 112
pages 97-121
DOI: 10.1215/01642472-1597350

Megan H. Glick, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies
Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania

From the moment Charles Darwin proposed Africa as the site of human origins, scientists and the lay public alike labored to reconcile contemporary racial hierarchies with the possibility of a universal African birthplace. Previous historical treatments of this phenomenon have focused on the search for the “missing link” in Asia and Europe, an investigation that, if successful, would have effectively established a separate ancestry for the white races. This essay identifies a new component of this history: the racialization of higher-order primates within the nascent discipline of primatology and within US popular culture between the 1910s and 1930s. Departing from Donna Haraway’s originary work on the field, this essay argues that primatology was in fact built upon preexisting scientific racial ideologies, such that the animals themselves became parsed according to racial categorizations. In particular, the anthropomorphization and “whitening” of the chimpanzee on the one hand, and the bestialization and “blackening” of the gorilla on the other, provided a forum for ideas about biological essentialism, evolutionary capabilities, and racial difference. This alternative history is revealed through an examination of the photographic archives and written work of longtime eugenicist and founding primatologist Robert Mearns Yerkes, and through a contextualization of these documents within contemporary scientific and popular cultures. By tracing the lineage of American primatology to the closing arc of eugenic science, this essay seeks to enrich and reimagine the relationship between practices of racialization and speciation within the larger histories of evolutionary thought and racial formation.

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The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice

SUNY Press
October 2008
200 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7585-0
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7586-7

Ronald R. Sundstrom,Professor of Philosophy
University of San Francisco

Considers the effects of the browning of America on philosophical debates over race, racism, and social justice.

This book considers the challenge that the so-called browning of America poses for any discussion of the future of race and social justice. In the philosophy of race there has been little reflection about how the rapid increase in the Latino, Asian American, and mixed-race populations affects the historical demands for racial justice by Native Americans and African Americans. Ronald R. Sundstrom examines how recent demographic shifts bear upon central questions in race theory and social and political philosophy, including color blindness, interracial intimacy, and the future of race.

Sundstrom cautions that rather than getting caught up in romantic reveries about the browning of America, we should remain vigilant that longstanding claims for racial justice not be washed away.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Frederick Douglass’s Political Apostasy
• 2. Color Blindness and the Browning of America
• 3. The Black-White Binary as Racial Anxiety and Demand for Justice
• 4. Interracial Intimicies: Racism and the Political Romance of the Browning of America
• 5. Responsible Multiracial Politics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The Policing of Race Mixing: The Place of Biopower within the History of Racisms

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
Volume 7, Number 2 (2010)
pages 205-216
DOI: 10.1007/s11673-010-9224-8

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

In this paper I investigate a largely untold chapter in the history of race thinking in Northern Europe and North America: the transition from the form of racism that was used to justify a race-based system of slavery to the medicalising racism which called for segregation, apartheid, eugenics, and, eventually, sterilization and the holocaust. In constructing this history I will employ the notion of biopower introduced by Michel Foucault. Foucault’s account of biopower has received a great deal of attention recently, but because what he actually has to say about race tends to be vague and radically incomplete, many race theorists have been critical of his contribution. However, even if the account of the holocaust in terms of biopower is incomplete, there is still a great deal to be learned from Foucault’s identification of this biologizing, or medicalising racism.

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Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08

boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture
Volume 39, Number 2 (Summer 2012)
pages 3-32
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-1597871

Hortense Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English
Vanderbilt University

“Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08” interrogates the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States as a historically ordained event. This essay not only addresses the question of whether we might plausibly read it as the fulfillment of telos but also examines the implications of our having already done so.

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Frantz Fanon’s reception in Brazil

Penser aujourd’hui à partir de Frantz Fanon, Actes du colloque Fanon (Symposium on Frantz Fanon)
Université Paris 7
February 2008

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

Frantz Fanon is a central figure in cultural, post-colonial and African-American studies, whether in the United States, Africa or Europe. We often speak about Fanonian studies, such is the volume of research that has been based on his work. My black Brazilian colleagues and students have the same admiration, respect and devotion for him as their black North American and African brothers. However, when I looked for material to write this paper, I was met with a conspicuous silence, both in cultural and academic journals which lasted all the way to the mid 1960s.

Although he had previously had a limited readership in Brazil, Fanon became known within cultural circles, as in other parts of the world, when revolutionary violence was the order of the day, championed by thinking revolutionary fighters such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Torres; or by black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X and Eldridge Cleaver; or Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Kwame N’Krumah. However, after this phase, contrary to what occurred in other places, his thinking did not become the object of elucidating and critical reflection on the part of Brazilian universities and academics who were established in study centres, as was the case with other revolutionary thinkers.

In this paper, I will defend two theses. The first is that his lukewarm reception was due to a national and racial makeup totally opposed to racial conflicts, highly instilled within an intellectual middle class which was white and mixed race, yet racially colourless. That is, the Brazil of racial democracy. The second thesis explains the limited dissemination of Fanonian studies by the small number of black professors and researchers at Brazilian universities who focus on the formation of black identity or the affirmation of racially oppressed subjects as their area of study.

Fanon’s thinking came to Brazil much like all new ideas – in European books – and at a time when Marxism and existentialism competed for the limelight of the Brazilian cultural and political scene.

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‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.1] (2012-07-02)

Daniel McNeil, Associate Professor of History, Migration and Diaspora Studies
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Many conservative commentators reacted to the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 with platitudes about the clash of civilizations. Robert Fulford, a prominent cultural critic for the Canadian National Post, was one of the few to tie a post-9/11 context to the fortieth anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death. In an article strategically published at the beginning of Black History Month, Fulford claimed that Fanon’s classic texts were invoked and not read, as if The Wretched of the Earth was just another ironic commodity for consumers full of sound and fury who wear images of Malcolm X and Che Guevara without knowing anything about their commitment to human rights. To go further, he maintained that Fanon should be remembered as a ‘poisonous thinker’ who helped usher in a culture of violence and victimization in the West.

Providing a critical alternative to Fulford, activists and scholars marked the fiftieth anniversary of Fanon’s passing with extensive discussions of his impact on social justice movements and intellectual debates about existentialism, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. This short article takes a rather circuitous route to their commentaries on the legacy of Fanon’s explorative, suggestive and provocative work. It argues that the loaded metaphors Fanon used to target ‘half-breed’ translators in the 1950s and 60s have been creatively adapted by transnational intellectuals in their critique of forms of neoliberal multiculturalism that privilege the multiracial American citizen as a subject more universal and legitimate than even the multicultural world citizen.

The article revolves around three sections and three conceptual metaphors in its attempts to address an oft-repeated element of Fanon’s work that has rarely been the subject of extended analysis or critical inquiry. The first section introduces three popular metaphors about mixed-race objects and ‘racial bridges’ that Fanon used to invoke the threat of bestial, immature and consumerist Others – metaphors that were not swept away by the winds of change in the 1960s, or the decline and fall of Black internationalist movements in the 1970s. It contends that similar metaphors and similes continue to frame representations of mixed-race individuals that emerged after the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and 80s called for ‘new’ multicultural identities to replace ‘old-fashioned’ notions of racial essences. The second section documents how intellectuals such as David Theo Goldberg, Paul Gilroy and Lewis Gordon have engaged with Fanon and mixed-race metaphors in order to critique the slyness of neoliberal agents in the age of Obama. The third and final section also addresses three writers – Jared Sexton, Paul Spickard and Mark Anthony Neal – who have developed work on multiracial national subjects in the United States. The short conclusion contends that Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism avoids some of the pitfalls of national consciousness evident in the work of Spickard and Neal – and engages with the diasporic work of Fanon and ‘Fanon’s children’ in order to challenge multiracial, and post-racial, environments that deny the legitimacy of African American anger. In short, it uses Sexton’s vision of a global African American studies to illuminate some of the discordant affinities between more insular visions of ethnic American studies and the cultural project of neoliberal multiculturalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries…

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