Update 2018: A New York Times Op-Ed and response from Agustin Fuentes et al. drew a flurry of clicks to my Race Revival and Race Re-Debunked posts. In March 2018:
NYT rejected an Op-Ed on David Reich's essay by 50 scientists (a letter to the editor (~125 words) might make it in). NYT again refuses to give anthropology a voice despite the fact that we generated much of the data and conducted many of the studies Reich cites.
— Agustin Fuentes (@Anthrofuentes) March 27, 2018
Although I have definitely been concerned about these issues, I’m also disappointed that the fury of those debates never seem to land on posts like this one, nor do many people in the keyboard battles seem to understand the larger politico-economic scene. The post below spells it out: Yes, there are many keyboard racists to fight on Twitter and in the Op-Eds, and it is ridiculous that anthropology does not have a bigger voice there. But the most basic issues are ones of power and inequality that have not budged a bit (or worsened) since race was originally debunked as a biological-genetic category. In this context, arguing against the biologization of race–again–provides fodder for conservative or reactionary political positions, since the underlying socioeconomic structural racism is unaltered. Until the underlying socioeconomic structural racism changes in a way that allows people to “flip the script,” I don’t see much use in Twitter battles and Op-Ed rebuttals. See Is Anthropology Better than Starbucks?
For comprehensive current coverage of race and racism, see the Race and Racism in Anthropology page, which covers biological origins, colonial categories, structural racism, colorism, and white supremacy as analytical term.
Social Construction of Race: A Conservative Goldmine
The assertion and oft-caricatured mantra that race is a social construction, or the social construction of race, is quite old. Regularly pilloried and attacked, the social construction of race is also defended and celebrated as the backbone of not just scientific understandings of human variation but as a liberal political plank.
As this ritualized game is rehearsed and replayed, it is worth taking stock of an essential but overlooked fact: the social construction of race is a goldmine for conservative political positions. The social construction of race is the gift that keeps on giving, far more helpful for conservative politics than for a progressive-liberal front.
First, there is the unbelievable advantage gained from denouncing and mocking the social construction of race. Second, this denunciation is almost always linked to promoting delusions that the balance of power has shifted to an anti-white bias. Finally, since the social construction of race was never connected to concrete political change, the reality of power imbalances favoring whites is met by naïve hand-wringing, with little understanding of what went so wrong in the post-civil rights era.
Denouncing the Social Construction of Race–How Fun Is This!
The Olympic sprints always serve up people who love denouncing the social construction of race. Just look at them! And in fact it takes more than a bit of history and demographics to figure out that the results have more to do with Jamaica than they do an African gene for running:
Where does great achievement come from? In the minutes before Bolt, Blake and Weir of Jamaica took 1-2-3 in the 200m, the BBC played a short film which suggested that black athletes won medals because of “west African genes” and the unnatural selection of the “fittest” by plantation slavery. If either of these were sufficient explanation then such centres of new world slavery as Haiti and Brazil would also be athletic superpowers, as would Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, and the Congo from which most slaves came, and the United States itself would not be increasingly pushed into the shade. Genes may help, but only one part of the African diaspora has won disproportionately in Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012. (Genes may help, but Caribbean Olympians were nurtured to success)
Is there a Jamaican gene for running, a Dominican Republic gene for baseball, an Otavalan gene for weaving and marketing? What we miss when we assign outcomes to genes is how certain groups get drawn and held into specific activities. As my colleague Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld and I show for Otavalans and other artisans, this concentration of careers often happens because of a big payoff, a particularly spectacular success which condenses the ideas, training, and hopes within one community. Such successes can be enabling, especially when there are few other earning opportunities, but over the long run detrimental to economic diversification and a broader pool of resources.
The “just look at them” denunciation caricatures one of the most misunderstood aspects of the social construction of race argument. The argument was never meant to say that people are all the same. People vary biologically, and that biological variation is important. When Frank Livingstone in 1962 wrote There are no races, there are only clines, he never said there weren’t any clines!
But the denunciation fun need not stop there. It’s always a good time to take a whack at the fraudulent Stephen Jay Gould. The Marxist Richard Lewontin. Bash the silly anthropologists. Pointy-headed academics. Clueless liberals.
But of Course Race Is a Social Construction
What is puzzling is that sometimes when people pause to think a bit, there is yet another counterattack: Oh, yeah, of course race is a social construction. Everything is. Everyone knows that.
Perhaps in some bland sense everything is socially constructed. But that misses several points. Social constructions are very real, and to say something is a social construction is not to be equated with illusion or fiction. It also misses the point that some social constructions are more powerful and with more far reaching consequences than others. It misses the whole idea, that “the social construction of race” should have never been a stopping point, but as a way to analyze the particular circumstances that result in current configurations.
The “everything is a social construction” is reminiscent of the kind of argumentation and evidence Michel-Rolph Trouillot developed in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Trouillot navigated between the equally untenable extremes that history is merely the documenting of retrievable fact and that history is merely just another story:
What history is changes with time and place or, better said, history reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters most are the process and conditions of production of such narratives. Only a focus on that process can uncover the ways in which the two sides of historicity intertwine in a particular context. (1995:25)
IQ, Wealth, and Liberal Delusions
The most recent installment in the race/IQ debate came with The Bell Curve. What I have always found most fascinating is how that debate has continued, how much venom was directed at the usual suspects–Gould and Lewontin–and how little notice or discussion there has been of the wealth gap data:
A 2011 study from the Economic Policy Institute found that the median wealth of white households is twenty times that of black households. Shockingly, the median wealth of black households has fallen 77 percent since the recession. Atlantic (July 2012)
Adam Smith knew better. Smith in The Wealth of Nations:
The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education. (1776 [1982]:120)
The idea that intelligence creates wealth is particularly obnoxious when looking at the data from 2007-2010. Here are people trying to play by the rules–save money and acquire the classic starting point for the American dream, homeownership–who were gutted by unscrupulous lending practices and a housing price deflation completely out of their control. Hardly the first time for people of color that rules have been written up and then changed in mid-course.
Social Construction of Race & Liberal Naïveté
One of the many problems with the social construction of race is how it was never joined to a concrete political program. It was indeed an intervention at the elite academic level–scientifically correct, to be sure, but as an intervention it had close to zero political effect. Even if Lewontin is a Marxist (and what does that even mean in the United States?) there is no political party to turn to, no true left political movement.
There have been a few piecemeal measures. Affirmative action has been under attack since inception, with enormous uproar about a program aimed mostly at elite institutions. There have been attempts to desegregate schools, but school funding remains enormously unequal, linked to local property taxes for what remains of the public school system.
But the main problem is the naïve assumption that since race is a social construction, with the end of de jure and legal policies, everything should just even out. As an incredibly misguided column in March 2018 by David Brooks claims: “The idea for decades was that racial justice would come when we reduced individual bigotry–the goal was colorblind individualism” (Brooks is mistaken about the goal of the Civil Rights movement; see also Biological Anthropology & Racism).
Things obviously have not just evened out. Unequal outcomes lead to hand-wringing and to questioning the social construction of race. But none of this would be necessary if there had been less naïveté and more concrete political action from the beginning. This is a classic example of the naïveté Trouillot insisted we needed to confront:
This optimism comes with duties, responsibilities, and some personal discomfort. We cannot bury it under weak social analysis flavored by political optimism, the way we sometimes do in studies of resistance that any semi-illiterate dictator in the Caribbean or in Africa can easily dismiss as exemplars of liberal political naïveté. When we do that, we add insult to injury for we merely aestheticize the natives’ pain to alleviate our own personal uneasiness. (Global Transformations 2003:136)
And so we seem destined to go around and around on the social construction of race. Not so much because there’s something new in the genetics or some pristine scientific hypothesis to prove the biological basis of some trait. But because it’s just too delightful, a goldmine of payoff, to denounce the social construction of race, which can then be spun off into endless denunciation, propagating delusions about anti-white bias, and further paralyzing any measures that might be politically progressive.
Ironically, the science behind the social construction of race is close to unimpeachable. But the political backlash is so strong, it may be time to reconsider the social construction of race as a relevant message.
Related Resources
Comprehensive overview: Race and Racism in Anthropology – Complete coverage from biological origins and colonial categories to structural racism, colorism, and white supremacy as analytical term.
Contemporary perspectives:
- Race as Social Construction (2024) – Why racism produces race, not the reverse
- Whiteness as Unmarked Category (2024) – White privilege, intersectionality, and institutional racism mechanisms
Historical perspectives:
- Race Revival (2011) – How attacks on anthropology failed to address structural racism
- Biological Anthropology and Racism (2011) – The entangled history of evolution studies and racial categories
Broader context: Power Analysis – Understanding how power systems create and maintain structural inequality