Forget eugenics, it’s all about race
SOMEONE asked me the other day whether white and black people exist. They said they find it puzzling that they keep seeing references to “whiteness” in public discourse on racism. And they said they could assume only that that word presupposes that white people existed, and whiteness is an ideology that someone related to white people.
They had the same puzzle about “black people”. They found the constant reference to black people, and ideologies like black consciousness, weird because there is no biological basis for all this race talk.
I figured that it’s worth addressing the question “Do races exist?”.
Races are biologically unstable concepts. I’m told by those who know a lot about science that science dismisses the idea of race categories. I once heard that there is more genetic variety, even, between “black people” than there is between black people and white people. So races are invented by humans and aren’t Mother Nature’s gift to us.
What I do know, however, is that people who are obsessed with pointing out the fact that race is biologically unstable are kidding themselves about the consequences of that fact. If we accept, for argument’s sake, (despite some biologists rethinking this) that races are biologically unstable concepts, does that mean we should all stop talking about races? Does it mean race has no place in social and political life? No.
This reference to biology is poorly considered. Human beings are so amazingly complex that we’ve evolved into a species capable of loving and hating on the basis of traits that aren’t biologically stable.
Singer Steve Hofmeyr doesn’t need permission from Mother Nature in order to be a racist. Mother Nature gave him the capacity to be an anti-black racist even though race is biological nonsense. And this matters. Because if we overstate the significance of biology for race discourse, we will quickly become racism denialists.
Race is, indeed, a social and a political construction. But so what? That is at best intellectually interesting if science fascinates you. What matters is the power of social constructs in our daily lived experiences. Discrimination, both interpersonal and structural, aren’t less poisonous because it’s done on the basis of a social construct rather than on a biologically stable concept. It’s enough that I can see your morphological traits, box you as “black” or “white” and then decide how to treat you based on that.
They’re biologically unstable concepts, and science dismisses
the idea of such categories, so they must be invented
If anything, our complex sociological and anthropological histories as a species have endowed us with truckloads of constructs we use all the time. Myth-making can be playful, innocent or even profoundly joyous. Tooth fairies don’t exist. But the myth that they do can make for a beautiful smile on the face of your child when the tooth fairy has left her money for a rotten tooth while your bundle of joy was sleeping with a new gap in her mouth.
Equally, some people get murdered because they’re declared witches in their communities. They’re not spared death just because witches don’t exist in biology.
Every undergraduate law student remembers the case in criminal law where an accused’s defence for killing someone was that they thought it was a tokoloshe. They didn’t intend to kill another person. The case then centred on whether that traditional belief was genuinely prevalent in their community and genuinely the operating reason for the killing. The court actually asked itself whether it was a case of mistaken identity on the part of the killer. Did they kill a person or did they kill a tokoloshe? Social constructs (can) kill.
When we say race is real and really matters, we can do so knowing that it is a shorthand way of saying “race is socially real even if it isn’t biologically real”.
What surprises me about people who’re excited to point out that races are biologically unstable is that they don’t deny that apartheid happened. Yet apartheid would presumably be impossible if a weak biological concept, like race, can’t affect the real world in powerful, material ways. But apartheid happened. And it destroyed real lives. And that’s because we don’t need biology to give weight to a social construct before that construct has an effect on human life.
Why does all this matter? Because many people who have the privilege to get tired of ‘”race talk” and discussions about racism use biology as a defence for their privileged fatigue. One trick they use is to say that races don’t exist in biology.
Next time someone pulls that fast one on you, ask them why we should take our cue from biology when former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd didn’t do so when he perfected colonialism on the basis of skin colour, hair texture and the size of my black nose. Race matters.