Recently in Race Category

I have a few requests in case anyone reading this blog can help. If you've been following my recent submissions and approvals for the Blackwell philosophy and pop culture series, you might have some idea of why I want some of the following information if anyone has it readily available. If you have exact quotes or specific scenes from the movies or issue numbers in the comics, that would be wonderful. I have a large number of X-Men comic books (mostly from the mid-late 80s until the early 90s, but I have reprints of older stuff too), but if it's easy for anyone to find some then it will make my work much easier in two weeks once I'm done grading and begin writing, so I can focus on the philosophy.

1. I'm looking for any instances in X-Men movies or comic books where any character or the narrator uses race-language or species-language to refer to mutants as distinct from humans. This includes when it's morally loaded but also when it's not. I'm interested both in Magneto's elevated view of the rights of mutants as superior beings but also in the factual claim that mutants are a separate race, sub-species, or species.

2. I'm also looking for instances where Magneto has given moral justifications for his questionable or immoral actions, again from the movies or the comic books. (I have no cartoon episodes to verify the information.) I'm interested in his attitude toward humans and the moral difference he sees between mutants and humans. I'm also interested in any general moral principles he might state in the process of explaining his reasons for doing things. Any specific descriptions of Magneto's actions as terrorist would also be nice or descriptions of particular actions he's taken that are morally questionable or outright immoral would also help me.

3. For those more wizard-inclined, I'm hoping to compile a list of seemingly-chance occurrences in Harry Potter, where something not under the conscious control of any character, i.e. lucky occurrences, are absolutely crucial for the major plot of the book to move along, particularly if Harry's success or the bad guys' defeat or frustration in their purposes hinges on it. I'm also looking for specific instances where any characters talk about issues related to destiny, the various prophecies, time travel and changing the past, free will, and so on. If you can give page numbers in the American paperback editions (hardcover for Deathly Hallows) or chapter numbers otherwise, that would be great. But even just mention of the events and how important they are could help me if it's something I haven't thought of yet, especially if it's a really big deal.

Whatever help anyone can offer is appreciated.

I've been reading J. Daniel Hays, From every People and Nation: A biblical theology of race. I'm really enjoying it so far. Occasionally something puzzles me a little. Consider the following passage:

The Bible does not begin with the creation of a special race of people. When the first human is introduced into the story, he was called adam [special characters removed because I have no idea how to do them], which means 'humankind'. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Adam and Eve are not Hebrews or Egyptians or Canaanites. It is incorrect for the White church to view them as White or for the Black church to view them as Black. Their 'race' is not identifiable; they are neither Negroid nor Caucasian, nor even Semitic. They become the mother and father of all peoples. The division of humankind into peoples and races is not even mentioned until Genesis 10. Adam and Eve, as well as Noah, is non-ethnic and non-national. They represent all people and not some people. [Hays, pp.48-49]

After the word 'Semitic', he places a footnote number, which leads to the following footnote:

[W.D.] McKissic [in Beyond Roots: In Search of Blacks in the Bible, 1990] disagrees, raising the issue of genetics, both for Adam and Eve and for Noah and his wife. The genetic pattern for all the races of humankind, argues McKissic, had to be present in both these sets of people. Thus they had to carry the genetic pattern for the Negroid race. If they carried these genes then one of them at least, according to McKissic, would have had Negroid features.

I'm not sure there's any real disagreement here, though, at least in substance. Hays seems to be thinking of race as some later subdivision of people, and of course Adam and Eve couldn't be of any race if it necessarily involves that. McKissic, on the other hand, is thinking of race in a very different way. If at one point you had two people who became the ancestors of every human being, including those who would be parts of pretty diverse races, then you must have had the genetic material necessary for those races to exist later. One thing McKissic doesn't take into account, at least in this quote (although I think he might in the book; it's been many years since I read his book, and I don't have it in front of me at the moment) is that mutations can explain changes in skin color, hair type, and so on. It doesn't have to stem from just genetic information present in the ancestors.

I seem to remember McKissic making the argument that darker skin color genes tend to be dominant, which means at least one of the ancestor-pair would have to be black. Using the term this way clearly does not indicate species sub-division into races, as Hays seems to be treating it. All it means is that we in our day have identified various characteristics that we associate with various races. Someone is identified as being in a certain race according to such characteristics. An earlier ancestor with those characteristics would rightly, as the English words are now used, be called black or white (or whatever) according to the criteria we now use to assign such terms. So if Adam, say, looked enough like the typical African or black American today that were he seen today he'd be so classified, then he was black by the meaning of the current term. That, as far as I can tell, is what McKissic means. He's simply talking about something different from what Hays is talking about.

Now there's actually been a DNA discovery since McKissic's book (and since Hays's book, for that matter) that shows that light skin color is a mutation and that the ancestors of white people were black by the current definition (as McKissic is using the term), so I think his view is pretty much scientifically confirmed at this point. Hays doesn't want to acknowledge that as Adam and Eve belonging to the black race, because his notion of race is defined as a sub-division that later occurs. But racialized terms aren't always used that way, as the meaningfulness of McKissic's claim shows. I think it's perfectly ok (at least linguistically) to say that Adam and Eve were black. It doesn't seem to me to involve any misuse of the terms involved. If this is right, then it has an interesting consequence for those who claim race terms involve an ancestry component. It doesn't remove an ancestry component, but it does allow someone with no ancestry (or no human ancestry, depending on how you view Adam and Eve) to have a race under one important concept of what it is to be a member of a race.

I've long wondered what idiot first came up with the idea that a curse on Canaan in Genesis 9 someone was supposed to justify mistreatment of black Africans, who have little association with Canaan anywhere in the Bible. Most scholars today don't see Genesis 10's table of nations as showing geneaological connections to begin with, given how such language is often used in ancient near eastern cultures for political and cultural connections of vassalship without geneaological connections (and most of the names are place names and ethnic groups without the usual indications that appear with proper names). However, even if you do take it the way it sounds if you take what's in the English translations literally, the curse is on Ham's son Canaan, not on Ham himself. Black Africans are connected with other sons of Ham, not the one who was cursed. The view is completely at odds with what the text actually says.

So I've long wondered who first came up with the view this curse on Canaan justified enslaving the descendants of Canaan's brothers, Ham's other sons. I'm wondering no longer. It turns out that it wasn't a Jewish or Christian interpreter at all, and the view is actually a lot older than I thought. I figured it appeared at the earliest in the late medieval period. It actually doesn't appear in Europe until the slave trade was well under way, so I was partly right. Medieval Europe (Spain and other Muslim-influenced parts aside) was actually opposed to slavery for the most part (at least if you don't count serfdom as slavery; I do, but I also consider modern employment a kind of slavery, and that's not the kind of slavery this view was trying to justify).

The people who first came up with this justification for slavery of Africans were very early Muslims, and that view was dominant within the Islamic world (but not outside it) for 100 years until it spread to Europeans via contact with the Spanish and their treatment of Moors. Then Europeans and eventually colonial Americans began to adopt it. So it wasn't even initially a misreading of the Bible. The relevant parts of the Qur'an don't mention Ham at all, so it's not even a misreading of the Qur'an. It's simply a fabrication in order to justify the kind of slavery Muslims had been imposing on black Africans.

It was an early Muslims who first (as far as we know) developed the idea that Ham was cursed. I found a quote in Edwin Yamauchi's Africa and the Bible from a Muslim who wrote in the late 7th to early 8th centuries, and the whole view is right there. Noah cursed Ham (not Canaan) by imposing slavery on Africans whenever the descendants of Shem would come across them. It attributes their hair type to the curse as well (but not, interestingly, their skin color, though it does mention their skin color). A 9th century Muslim does bring in a change of skin color because of the curse, and Yamauchi mentions other sources attributing natural slavery to black Africans because of this curse, a view that I'm pretty sure doesn't become entrenched in Europe or the Americas until the slave trade was well under way.

Its first appearance in the colonies isn't long after the British occupied American territory and started importing slaves, but it had been in Europe before that. Various versions of it appear even before the Reformation, as early as the mid-15th century, but that was in formerly-Muslim Portugal regarding the now-enslaved Moors. European theologians generally resisted the idea, and it probably didn't take serious hold until the modern concept of race came into existence through the work of Immanuel Kant and his contemporaries who sought to explain differences in physical features by means of biological essences of different races.

So Muslims, a very dominant form of which has an awful lot of problems with human rights even today, seem to be the initial impetus behind one of the key justifications of European and American slavery of blacks. This doesn't excuse the Europeans and Americans who did it, but Muslim writers were originally responsible for the idea, and it came to the colonies and Europeans via the cotton trade. I think it's time to stop blaming this on Christianity even if there were plenty of Christians who have held this view that originated in Islamic slavery. It's silly enough to blame Christianity for a view that hasn't held sway for most of Christian history but only appeared late and lasted only a couple hundred years before going the way of the dodo except in offshoot groups like Mormons. But if the view originally came from another religion entirely and has been dominant in the members of that religion's justification of slavery, while Christians steadfastly resisted it for centuries before falling sway to it for a few hundred years, I think it's justifiable to claim that those who blame this on Christianity are relying on historical ignorance.

One of the things I'm suggesting in my dissertation is that the one-drop rule for determining race in the United States is on the wane, or at least that it's more complicated when it applies than just the usual view that it always does. One piece of evidence I think is somewhat compelling is the linguistic fact that a lot of people feel perfectly comfortable referring to a set of twins with different skin colors as if one is black and the other white. I've also got some more outlandish intuition pumps that I think help the case a little.

But there's another way of departing from the one-drop rule that a lot of people I know seem to exhibit, one that a lot of race scholars seem to me to treat as at best marginal. A lot of people will talk about mixed-race people as if they are both races. Barack Obama is sometimes referred to as both black and white, for example. James Collier, a mixed black-white man, speaks this way. I think a lot of people we know see our kids as either both black and white or as neither black nor white. If someone can be both black and white, then it clearly contradicts the one-drop rule.

I discussed some of my work with a leading scholar of African-American philosophy a few months ago. He took me to task for a lot of assumptions that he refused to recognize as anything but ignorance. He spent a lot of time explaining that Plessy of Plessy v. Ferguson was 7/8 white, I suppose in order to show how significantly the one-drop rule has affected policy. What that ignores is that things are changing, however. That case was a long time ago. I think he may have thought I was denying that the one-drop rule ever operates, which is not only way beyond the evidence I've presented but almost certainly very easy to prove false. But that's not the view I was defending. I was simply arguing that it's more complicated than it was several decades ago, with some people at some times no longer relying on such a rule.

I don't know many non-blacks of my generation whose racial judgments rely on the one-drop rule, and I've discussed race issues with a lot of people of my generation from a broad range of backgrounds. The one place it still persists very strongly in the circles I've run in is among black people. I know of at least two black conservatives who have claimed that black Americans have a lot invested in the one-drop rule, although I haven't seen enough to figure out what they might be. It's a provocative claim, one I want to think about more. But I'm sure of one thing. At least in the northeast of the U.S., people of my generation are at the very least not consistently using the one-drop rule. I say good riddance. It's unfortunate that some scholars are a little more reluctant to acknowledge that than there seems to be evidence for.

Kevin Drum had a very helpful discussion of the charges the Obama campaign and its surrogates have been leveling against Hillary Clinton. I'm not sure I agree with him in every case, but it's one of the best things I've seen on the subject. Any claim that it's Hillary who's really driving the racial overtones of the Democratic race is just ignoring a lot of what's out there. Some on her side have surely said things intended to be taken in a racially-negative way. But the examples he gives (and see the discussions he links to for arguments why the criticisms are indeed over-the-top) show that it's not simply an example of the Hillary side raising racial issues and the Obama side ignoring them and not making anything of race.

I had to take interest in the first two comments mentioning Geraldine Ferraro, who didn't come up in the post. What interested me most about their appearance is the assumption that that's a genuine case of racism that they must be taking to undermine his whole argument. First of all, if it's genuine racism that doesn't undermine his argument. His point is that many of the accusations of racism are going way too far. One case that is racism doesn't undermine that claim.

Second, I don't think it's fair to describe that as racist. If the same person who says Barack Obama's race has helped raise interest from the media and the Democratic higher-ups to jump-start his campaign also says of herself that the same is true from her being a woman, it strikes me as very unlikely that she's saying the former out of racism but is rather just acknowledging that the Democratic party is more likely to use affirmative action considerations for selecting presidential and vice-presidential candidates, something Democrats aren't generally opposed to and don't generally consider racist. (It's Republicans who are more likely to level that charge.) So why is it racist to point out that affirmative action techniques on that level might put someone in a position to get more attention than they could have gotten otherwise?

[I do realize that some people think Ferraro was saying more. According to them, she was claiming that no one would now support Obama if he weren't black. But I think that's a very unlikely interpretation. It's so radically at odds with the exit polls that I don't know how she could have thought she'd get away with saying something so empirically false.]

Update March 29: Is it racist for Obama to say the things of himself that Ferraro said of him?

One of the most irksome things about the fascination in cable news with certain missing persons cases is that virtually all of the cases they pay any attention to are of blond, white girls or young women, and they pay absolutely no attention to the vast majority of missing persons cases, and yet the few they can find with an attractive blond girl will get hours a day for months. It's such a clear example of a kind of white racism that isn't what most white people think of when they hear the word 'racism'. White people think of negative, overt, conscious attitudes against non-whites when they hear that word. This is clearly not that, and yet there's no way it's not a kind of racism.

In light of that, see this interesting poster campaign. [hat tip: Racialicious]

A janitor at the University of Indiana at Purdue is in their continuing education program, trying to improve his lot in life on the side. He reads during his break time. One book he reads is called Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. It's not exactly favorable to the KKK, but it does include their name in the title.

Somehow the university thought it was ok to ban him from reading this book during his breaks [hat tip: David Bernstein], because there were black people around him, and they were offended that the book mentions the KKK. Here is the statement from the affirmative action office on why this counts as racial harassment:

"You demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your coworkers who repeatedly requested that you refrain from reading the book which has such an inflammatory and offensive topic in their presence...you used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black coworkers."

First of all, how could someone possibly think that it's immoral to read a book that's highly critical of the KKK while in the presence of a black person? Second, it's not as if he was reading it aloud. All they had any access to was the fact that he was reading it. Third, even if it's immoral to read something in the presence of someone else, how does that give the university a good reason to ban it. It's not as if he was waving the book around and saying anything to anyone else about it. He merely had the book and was reading it. Fourth, why would they want to give the appearance that they're hindering a janitor, who does some of the dirtiest jobs at the university, from getting his education? It doesn't reflect all that well on them. Fifth, they accuse him of being insensitive and expressing disdain for his co-workers, when he's the one who tried to explain the book's content to several people who refused to listen to him and insisted that anything even remotely discussing the KKK is offensive. How backwards is that?

Well, they recanted while pretending to clarify their position. Some higher-up must have realized how silly the whole thing was.

I don't spend a lot of time harping on this point, but this is a pretty good instance of something I've tried to motivate a few times before. There is certainly plenty of room for improvement in how sensitive white people are to black people's experiences, and a lot of offense can occur that isn't intended. Nevertheless, it only hurts that cause to insist on offense over stupid things like this. The guy was reading a book whose very title shows that it's not in support of the KKK. It's not a good idea to try to get your employer to ban someone from becoming educated about the realities of race relations, something white people certainly need more of.

John McWhorter's stuff on victimology is often dismissed among those on the left who recognize real racial problems (not that McWhorter ever denies those, of course). But he's surely right that there's a culture of complaint about relatively trivial offenses and in many cases immoral complaints about non-offenses like this one. This kind of reaction only fosters the attitude among many on the right that racial problems are caused by black (or in general non-white) people who won't learn to get over it, because it confirms that at least in some cases there's some truth to that.

For an interesting take on all this talk of Senator Barack Obama transcending race, see this post by Too Sense. One Drop argues that those speaking of Senator Obama transcending race are actually exhibiting a kind of racism. The way some people speak of transcending race, you get the idea that Obama is making headway with white voters because he's somehow risen above the fact that he's black.

I very much appreciate One Drop's affirmation that black people who have "made it", such as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, are still as black as they ever were and as black as anyone else who is black. Colin Powell, who occupied high positions both in the military and the civilian government, is black. He didn't transcend his race. It's insulting to them and to all black people to speak as if these people did.

I must note that it isn't just white people who think this way. Black people can operate from the same assumption. They don't usually say Colin Powell transcends race, though, as white people operating under this assumption will. They say he's not really black and that he's sold out to the white power structure by his willingness to hold a position in it. It's a pretty negative attitude toward the person, whereas this idea of transcending race is at least on the surface positive. But both come from the same false assumption, that blackness is incompatible with success in a world dominated by white people (and most often white men).

On the other hand, as I commented at One Drop's post, there's something very different that someone might mean by the expression "transcending race". Rather than seeing Obama as somehow beyond his race, as if his race doesn't matter at all, some people (I am convinced) are seeing him as standing for more than the issues that are particularly associated with being black. They see most blacks who have run for president in the past, most notably Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley-Braun, Jesse Jackson, and Shirley Chisholm (but most definitely not Alan Keyes) as being too focused on concerns that are black, in a way that white people who haven't adopted those concerns would be less attracted to their candidacy. In other words, Obama has a wider attraction because he deals with wider issues, and he presents the issues that are specifically related to black people in a way that white people can see that they support them too.

Now there's a different danger with this kind of "transcending race". If it assumes (or gives the impression) that so-called black issues aren't important for non-blacks to be concerned about or that what's bad for blacks isn't bad for everyone, then I think that's bad. It displays a real insensitivity to race issues. But I don't think it's quite as bad as the kind of "transcending race" talk One Drop points to. I'd say that it's a pretty unfortunate feature of the Obama campaign but one that he can do little about at this point (and I suspect wasn't responsible for in the first place). But those who participate in it are perpetuating something racially harmful.

There's actually a third group of people talking about Obama as transcending race who do neither of the above. They see him as transcending race but see that as negative. They're well aware of the fact that, for many, transcending race can be one or both of the above two things. Then they accuse Obama of inappropriately trying to transcend race (or perhaps being used by others to do so) in order to appeal to white people. Those who make this complaint will thus see him as a sort of race traitor. I don't think it's fair to go that far with it, but I do think a lot of the reason why he's got the support he's got from white people is that they see Obama as a safe black. Talking about someone as transcending race in that sense can be perfectly legitimate when it informs us about a real racial dynamic, one that can be dangerous. So it's not clear to me that all talk of transcending race is bad, even if the first kind is very bad and the second is at least unfortunate.

Ron Paul is indisputably the presidential candidate who most attracts the support of white supremacists, and he has come under a lot of fire recently for not taking a strong enough stand against his racist supporters. What's worried me even more is his inability to show even a minimally decent understanding of what racism even is when he's declared himself not to be a racist.

So it's a bit surprising that Paul is also the Republican candidate with the greatest traction among black voters. Does this mean he'll be a uniter and not a divider?

I was discussing a piece of my dissertation with a group of other people from my department at a dissertation workshop last night, and some of the attendees raised some interesting cases that I'm curious how people would respond to.

Case A: Suppose an evil geneticist decides to play around with people's racial intuitions. One way to do that would be to modify the DNA of a human embryo who is the product of two white parents to give the genetic characteristics that would typically cause the visible characteristics commonly associated with black people. Would the child be black? This isn't a case of egg-switching, baby-switching, or anything like that. The child's biological parents are both white. Is the child therefore white?

Case B: God decides it would be fun to have two versions of Michael Jordan in the world and thus creates an exact duplicate of him. Is the duplicate black?

If the answer in either case is that the resulting person is black, then descent from black people isn't necessary for being black. One has only white ancestors, and the other has no ancestors. I think that would be pretty significant given that most people working in the philosophy of race think descent is a necessary condition (and many think it's even a sufficient condition).

Racialicious links to a post asking how racism harms white people. It's a good question that I think whites and non-whites should spend a lot of time thinking about, and I don't think most of the comments on that post have really gotten to the most fundamental issues. The question does assume that there is never any anti-white racism, which would be a mistake. A question that would better express the original intent is "How does white racism harm white people?"

I would think that the primary way racism of any sort harms the racist themself is that it is bad to be a racist. It's just bad to be bad. It's bad for you, not just because it has bad consequences but merely because it's bad to be bad. You harm yourself intrinsically by being a bad person.

But there are all sorts of bad consequences of racism on those who are exhibiting it. One is that much of what's excellent in the culture that surrounds us, including things racists appreciate and rely on, is due to those racism harms and victimizes. So there's a kind of inconsistency in any kind of racism that names things as bad in the person one isolates as "other" while recognizing any of those good effects as good. It's bad to be inconsistent, because it's irrational. So that's another negative impact of racism on racists themselves.

We need to distinguish between racists as evil people with evil intent and other kinds of racism, which don't all involve racists. Lots of people contribute to institutional or structural racism by taking part in practices that in effect harm people along racial lines, even if the people involved aren't racists. Also, virtually all white people are affected by residual racism, which affects our unconscious responses and attitudes to non-whites, all the while not constituting what it is to be a racist. Both of these have similar characteristics with being a racist, in that it's bad to take part in bad practices and to have bad unconscious responses to people, even if such things don't make someone a racist.

More generally, and perhaps most fundamentally, we're all morally and socially interconnected, and harm toward an entire community of people is thus harm toward an entire segment of humanity, and we're all part of humanity. Thus harm toward other human beings of any sort (including racism) is thus harm to ourselves inasmuch as we are all human. Crimes against humanity are crimes against ourselves. So even any racism that I have nothing to do with causing or perpetuating is a harm to me, even if I'm not the immediate victim. All racism is harmful to all human beings.

It's only after all that that I'd bring in things like how our lives will be better off externally when we interact in a moral way with those who are different. It seemed to me that most of the comments on the post that started this were focusing on those questions, and I thought it was worth taking some time to reflect on some deeper reasons.

I'm trying to figure out if aboriginal Australians count as black. I'm not asking if Australians call them black. Australians call people from India black. Aborigines are actually more closely related to Asians than they are to Africans, so even though some Australians, including other aborigines, are happy to use the word 'black' to refer to them, it doesn't tell us if aborigines are black in terms of what Americans mean by the term. I want to know if the word 'black' as it is used in the United States (or perhaps Canada, the U.K., or other places) includes aboriginal Australians among the group it refers to. (In case it turns out that people from different geographical locations would respond differently, it would be nice to know where you're from if you're going to leave a comment.)

In response to a question a couple days ago about whether he expects to be Swift-Boated, presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama said the following:

I have no doubt there will be some of that — trying to make me into this foreign, odd, clearly black person and to scare people," he said. "When people try to Swift Boat you, you have to respond forcefully, you have to respond immediately and you have to respond truthfully. ... We are prepared for whatever they will throw at us.

I know what I think he means by "clearly black person", and I know what I think he's trying to say. I'm curious what other people think, though. Can you paraphrase what you think he's saying? I'm not so interested at this point in whether this is accurate, appropriate, insulting, or offensive. (If what he's saying is what I think he's saying, it's possible that it's all four.) I'm simply curious what people think he means. What exactly was he trying to say?

Jae Ran Kim writes about why she doesn't feel welcomed among groups of white moms. Some of this may well be bias against newcomers (despite official views that newcomes are welcomed) rather than racial bias. After all, white newcomers often experience the same sort of thing. I've certainly seen it happen many times among people who officially want to welcome and accept new people but are not comfortable doing so when they've already got their friends. But I doubt it all is that, since many people are a little intimidating by the prospect of doing all the work to initiate relationships across racial lines (particularly with certain racial groups).

But whether it is actual racial bias or just perceived racial bias isn't really the point. If it can even come across as racial bias, and it shouldn't be there to begin with, it's worth taking stock of that and seeking to avoid sending such signals.

Christians should pay special attention to her advice to those who say they want to reach out to non-whites but can't seem to do so successfully. I know a lot of congregations and Christian ministries that say such things without, to my mind, having a clue that many of the people they're trying to reach out to have exactly the kind of response she's describing here.

Thabiti Anyabwile has responded to my critique of his discussion of race. In several places, I think he has misunderstood my view or gone beyond my argument to attribute to me a view that I do not hold and that does not follow from what I said. In some places I think we just disagree about something fairly fundamental. I'll address each of his points in order

1. The issue of the image of God is largely irrelevant to the main issues. I just thought some of the way Thabiti was speaking had implications that I didn't think he would welcome. That seems to be a correct assessment. He doesn't welcome the suggestion that God has a body, but he wants to say that some of what the image of God constitutes is manifested in our bodily reality (both male and female). I don't have any problem with the idea that God worked into us certain capacities to carry out the mission of representing him, and some of those capacities have to do with our physical being. I do in fact think that's the case. I'm skeptical whether those capacities constitute being made in the image of God, however. I certainly would agree, however, that there are no people who are more in the image of God than others, as if white people represent God more fully. But I don't think you need to see the image of God as partially reflected in our bodies to say that. So I think this issue is largely a distraction from the issues we really do disagree about.

2. Thabiti clarifies that he presents his argument against the reality of races as a way of getting to the sections of his article that I agree with, not as a way to respond to the wider literature on race. I though I already knew that, so I'm not sure how this is a corrective to my understanding. He also says that once you accept race, you cannot get out of that trap. He doesn't want to enter it to begin with. I disagree. It depends on what you take race to be. I can acknowledge the existence of what I think race to be without falling into the trap of admitting to the reality of what he thinks race is supposed to be, because what I think race is isn't the same thing as what he thinks race is supposed to be. But that issue comes out in his subsequent points, so I'll look at the details further there.

3. I never claimed that races are like refrigerators in every sense. I simply claimed that the principles that something doesn't exist just because it isn't talked about in the Bible is false. It's no argument against something's existence just because it isn't in the Bible. I did give other examples of social categories that are more analogous to race, e.g. political conservatives or university students. Nothing biological determines whether you are a university student. Social practices determine that. But the category exists nonetheless. Since races are socially-determined categories, they are more like that. The difference is that people are classified according to characteristics at least some of which are biological, and that is not true of all socially-constructed categories.

There is a big difference between races and leprechauns. Leprechauns are people with some very strange properties, and no one actually has the properties of leprechauns. But they are concrete individuals. There just aren't any of them. Races aren't concrete individuals. They are categories based on classification schemes. Even if the criteria used for determining who is in what category are biologically arbitrary, there does exist a set of classification practices, and the people who are members of the races do exist. The criteria that are used rely on realities, and those realities include some biological differences (even if they are somewhat arbitrarily chosen in terms of the biology). Those realities include real social and historical facts, including severe mistreatment of entire populations of people. Those realities include somewhat reliably-identifiable properties that people do in fact use to categorize people.

Justin Taylor sent me an email asking me to comment on Many Ethnicities, One Race by Thabiti Anyabwile, author of the forthcoming The Decline of African-American Theology: From Biblical Faith to Cultural Accomodation. This article is a Christian argument for an increasingly-common view today that races are not real, following by a biblical theology lying behind a call to end segregated congregations.

When I saw the links to a bunch of pieces on race on Justin's blog, I looked at a number of them and got a sense of what they were about, but I didn't pursue most of them (with John Piper's as a key exception). This was one I didn't look at in much detail, largely because what I initially saw seemed to me to be pretty far from what I think is the correct way to look at these issues. I must say (now that I've read the whole thing) that the second half of his piece was much more in line with my own thinking, but his initial arguments are very much not. Since Justin asked for my thoughts, here they are, and perhaps they will be helpful to others besides Justin. I'm not going to repeat the arguments in the article but will assume you have read it.

One worry I have is that I see no biblical warrant for taking the image of God to be anything more than being given a mission to represent God (which is what an image does for a god in the ancient near east). It is thus the same as being given the mandate to steward creation as God's representative on earth. Anyabwile rests a lot on his more expansive view of what the image of God is. all the while complaining that people's views of race go way beyond what the Bible actually says about race.

I'm a bit disturbed at the idea that our bodies could have something to do with being in the image of God to begin with. The only reason God has a body is because he incarnated himself in his second person as a human being. But that is in time after the creation of Adam, who is nonetheless made in the image of God. Even if being in the image of God is more substantive than the view I hold, it cannot have anything to do with having a body, since God does not have a body in any sense other than in the second person's incarnation, which is to reflect what human beings are like and not the other way around (although the new creation does reflect what Christ is like, but that's another step removed).

I think his general argument form is fallacious. It basically notes that the modern notion of race isn't in the Bible and thereby dismisses it. But the modern notion of a mailman isn't in the Bible. The modern notion of a refrigerator isn't either, nor is the modern notion of a university or the modern notion of a conservative. But all those things exist.

Another problem I have is that he keeps speaking of "races rooted in biological difference". Most race theorists who accept the existence of races do not think that races are a necessary implication of biological facts. They think social and historical factors have produced racial categories that rely on biological features in terms of how we classify people, but the root is in social and historical factors, not in biology. The fact that they are not rooted in biology doesn't mean they're nonexistent any more than the fact that categories like "conservative" or "university student" aren't rooted in biology doesn't make them unreal.

I was going to link to this a while ago, but I never got around to it. Someone who goes by the online name "tstorm" has put together an excellent short documentrary on race and humor, which you can find at Racialicious. It's been broken up nicely into small components in case you don't have a lot of time at once to watch it. It explores what factors go into evaluating whether a particular instance of racial humor is morally acceptable or offensive. I don't agree with everything he says in evaluating the instances in popular culture that he picks out, and a philosopher might want a more systematic treatment of some of the theoretical issues about what constitutes racism, whether causing offense is automatically immoral, and so on, but I think it's largely an excellent effort that's worth watching and thinking about. He says a lot of things that you might not have thought of, and he's done a good job of sorting through a wide range of issues that come to bear on this question. It's the sort of thing I'd show my students in class or assign for them to watch on their own.

Carmen Van Kerckove and Jae Ran Kim are criticizing a fairly common kind of statement among white parents who adopt non-white kids. It's not that uncommon to hear parents in such situations saying that they love their kids no matter what race they are, and it sometimes takes the form of "I don't care if they're black, white, green, or purple."

Carmen doesn't indicate why such a statement is offensive, but she quotes something from Jae Ran that is a reason. However, her reason seems wholly inadequate to me. She says it's merely because there are no green or purple kids. But there's nothing problematic about saying you would love your kids even if something were true of them that isn't true of any actual kid. There's no actual kid with six arms, but I don't think it's offensive to say that you'd love your kids even if they had six arms. So something more needs to be said to explain why this kind of statement is offensive. I have two suggestions, but at the same time I wonder if Carmen and Jae Ran are nonetheless being too critical.

1. There’s an ignorant assumption behind this well-meaning expression. It’s ignorant to speak as if color doesn’t matter at all. Color does have an impact. If this statement is supposed to be indicating that the parent thinks race doesn't matter in any sense, that is simply ignorance speaking. Also, it's going to be a rare white parent who is not in some way affected by having children who are not white. Most people imagine what their kids might look like long before they have any, and if that involves imagining white kids who look like them, then there will be at least some level of unmet expectations. If the statement is doing that, then it's a lie.

2. Another ignorant assumption seems to me to lie behind the statement. It treats any racial issues that might be raised by the race of their kids as if they are merely a matter of what color the kids' skin is. Why would it be relevant that the kids could be green or purple unless the mere fact of a different skin color is what might be problematic about race. But skin color itself is only our way of identifying and classifying people according to race. It isn't what causes any actual racial problems. So it's profoundly ignorant to speak as if red or purple skin color, which would be weird but doesn't bring any actual racially-loaded issues with it, is anything remotely like having kids of another race.

3. Some who say this may well be saying something that could be more explicitly put as follows. “I know it’s weird for white parents to have kids who are black or Asian or whatever, but I'd be ok with that weirdness. I don’t even care if their coloring is so weird that no other kid has ever had that coloring, e.g. if they had green or purple skin instead. I’d still love them.” The problem is that such a speech demeans the kids who aren’t white by treating them as ok despite not being white, and that does have a troublesome assumption. I can see how some who say this sort of thing really are assuming something like that. That reveals at the very least a kind of residual racism that sees non-white kids, even their own, as something they have to make an effort to love more than they might be expected to.

Tiffany Pridgen has a nice post about the tendency among some black kids to see being smart or caring about learning as a "white" trait that "real" black kids shouldn't have anything to do with. This is one of the more insidious anti-black narratives within black culture, because it masquerades itself as anti-white racism (because it sees a supposedly white characteristic as bad) while actually directing its harm toward blacks. It's really sad when it keeps smart kids from doing well in school.

Black conservatives have been quick to recognize this problem. See here for my summary of some of what they say about it. Liberals on race issues have tended to downplay this phenomenon. It amazes me that so many people will insist that something like this can't be part of the explanation for why black kids don't do as well on SATs and don't have as good grades. Just read some reviews of John McWhorter's books by liberals on race issues to see people denying that there's any significant peer pressure of this sort. I can't help but think that they're assuming such an admission would mean that white racism isn't the immediate cause of every problem within the black community, which would then undermine one of the reasons for affirmative action. But almost every black person I've talked to who cared about learning and grades before college has told me that the phenomenon is real and that it does lead kids to do less well.

There will surely be differences of opinion over how much of the SAT and grade gap is explained just by this. I myself don't think it's the only cause. For one thing, affirmative action itself is one further explanation, since it lessens the need for black kids to do as well if they want to get into a good college, and only the best students are doing well purely for the sake of doing well. But the traditional liberal "white racism" explanation for the racial grade/SAT gap is compatible with this as an additional contributing factor, so it's kind of lame to dismiss it out of a desire to maintain support for affirmative action.

Carmen Van Kerckhove has some helpful reflections on how to respond to racist jokes. She gives some good reasons why some responses that you might be inclined toward wouldn't be so good. She suggests of how to respond instead: play dumb to get them to explain it, which will require bringing the racist assumptions into the open, which you can then be puzzled about, asking them to explain why they think that, and they won't be able to defend the assumptions. I kind of like that.

I've just finished Jorge Gracia's Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality: A Challenge for the Twenty-first Century, which I've blogged about briefly before. Overall, it's an excellent treatment of the metaphysical issues about race, ethnicity, and nationality. Gracia's primary focus is defending the existence of all three, explaining what they all are, distinguishing amongst them, and responding to objections against using such categories.

It's carefully argued and very clear. I can't see how someone can think through the ethical and political issues involving these three categories without having first thought about these more fundamental issues, and this is the best treatment of them that I've seen. It's treating an issue usually covered by continental philosophers but with the tools of analytic metaphysics, which is a breath of fresh air for me, since I'm trying to do the same thing.

I'm actually a little worried about what sort of positive view I'm going to end up with in my dissertation, because he's already come up with a similar enough view, and I think he's basically right. I'm sure I'll come up with something distinctive as I go, but this is the best discussion of the metaphysical status of race that I've seen yet, and I've been immersed in this literature for some time now. The other issues aren't my area, but I found his discussions of them helpful, particularly his arguments for what the differences are and why it's important to distinguish them.

I came across a nice little quote near the end that doesn't relate at all to my dissertation, but I found it both insightful and intriguing, and I thought readers of this blog might find it interesting as well:

The common idea that colonialism is responsible for the conflicts that afflict some parts of the Third World because colonial powers carved out states without regard to racial and ethnic differences assumes that it is a good thing to have states that are ethnically and racially homogeneous and divided along ethnic and racial lines. I am not going to defend colonialism, or the way colonial powers created states in the territories that once they controlled. I do not believe these are defensible causes, and their defense appears to be morally repugnant. It is quite clear that colonial powers created artificial states without nations. But their mistake was not neglecting ethnic or racial boundaries, but rather forming states without regard for nationality. Instead of helping to develop nations out of disparate ethnic and racial groups based on a common will to live under a system of laws with the aims of justice and the good of their members, they mostly drew lines on a map based on expediency and their own national or state interests.

I've always just accepted this argument whenever I've heard it. There really have been all manner of problems appearing in parts of the world where the boundary lines have been redrawn by colonial powers, separating ethnic groups down the middle and forcing them into states with other ethnic groups. But the solution wouldn't be making ethnic groups line up exactly with nations. That's a recipe for making every ethnic disagreement an international disagreement, and it makes outsiders of anyone who happens not to be in that ethnic group who is in the state. But as Gracia notes, the problem isn't arbitrary dividing lines, as if different ethnic groups couldn't form a nation and thrive. The problem is that those who colonized and drew the lines didn't engage in nation-building, i.e. they didn't work toward bringing these people to be part of a nation seeking a common system of laws to govern them for their own best interests.

What an interesting argument! Laurence Thomas argues that there is a black American imperialism. [Note: Laurence's site doesn't like the server this blog resides on. You usually have to click on the link, wait until you get a rejection message, click in the URL box, and hit enter. I've never seen it fail to work that way.]

Blacks in the U.S. tend to see blackness as something they have a monopoly on, such that Barack Obama isn't really black due to his father being from Africa and his mother being white. You might hear things like, "Immigrant blacks don't have our heritage, so they must not really be black." At the same time, hip-hop is one of the biggest cultural exports from the U.S., and blacks in the U.S. are having a huge impact on blacks elsewhere, while ignoring that Africa is a continent and not a country, smoothing over the huge differences throughout Africa to act as if all blacks are just from Africa (appropriating half-customs with no meaning in the process). A number of elements in this process resemble the cultural imperialism that larger American culture regularly engages in, so it's interesting to see him identifying some ways that the black subculture in the U.S. does similar things.

It's not on the genetic issues with nature favoring interracial reproduction, but Sam's been reflecting on other aspects of interracial relationships.

Undercover Black Man has a nice post outlining the genetic advantages to race-mixing, something I've always thought should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about genetics. You don't even need to know about genetics. Just look at the hereditary problems in close-knit and inbred populations. The post details quite a few of those. It's a nice, inconvenient fact for those who think race-mixing is unnatural. Even aside from the difficulty such views face in identifying exactly which populations are the races that can't be mixed, it does seem as if nature prefers combinations of genes that are less closely-related than combinations that are too closely-related.

I do think, however, that it's worth acknowledging that some effects of combining the DNA of very distantly related people could be more harmful. If a trait requires gene coordination from both parents, and the coordination requires more closely-related DNA, then such a crossbreeding could lead to a loss of those kinds of traits, even if it's more likely to preserve traits one of the populations has lost (because those traits are usually simpler).

So it's not purely a matter of race-mixing being healthier and monoracial reproduction being less healthy. There are benefits and disadvantages either way. But the most common opposition to race-mixing in the U.S. context is the racist idea that white genes shouldn't be polluted with black genes, and blacks and whites in the U.S. at this point are much more closely related than most other interracial pairings, largely due to race-mixing in the past (ironically caused mostly by white slaveowners raping or seducing their slaves). Given that, I would expect these negative effects to be significantly reduced in black-white pairings than would have been true in the time of slavery.

So I do think the conclusion is correct. If anything, interracial relationships are at least in one respect more natural than same-race pairings.

What would you describe as the typical Disney family model? Jae Ran Kim points out how frequently the main character of Disney movies has either an absent or dead parent (or two absent or dead parents), among other unusual anomalies that should be surprising for a line of children's entertainment. I think the only one in her pretty long list to have both parents raise her ends up a cross-dresser.

This isn't necessarily a criticism. This particular story device often simply makes for a good story. But doesn't it seem excessive for Disney to be so overwhelmingly like this? Or is this more common in children's stories in general than we notice? Since we generally don't notice it with Disney, maybe that's so. But why don't we notice it, if we don't?

There is always the stray race story, but lately it seems as if there have been far more than usual.

NPR had a story called "The Multiracial Identity" that I still haven't had a chance to listen to, and I'm not sure if I'll have any thoughts on it when I do, but I thought I'd link to Sam's post on it for now.

Someone is offering evidence for racial bias among NBA refs (NYT registration or Bugmenot required). They found much higher calls for black players when there are more white refs and somewhat higher for white players when there are more black refs. I'll hold my judgment until the study can be subjected to peer review. I haven't had a chance to look at it, but the first thing I'd want to rule out is whether black players are more likely to foul more often than white players. This gap, if it turns out to be real, might be partially explained by black refs going too easy on black players as much as it could be wh