The Way We Use Racial Categories Is Dangerous: An Introduction [1]

This series is an attempt to distill my research into a resource that can help the human family rethink human diversity and create a more equitable world.

We've convinced ourselves that talking about race is difficult. But addressing human diversity in racial terms is perhaps the easiest way to do it. Categorizing people and communities according to visual cues is actually quite simplistic. Instead, we can think about what we refer to as race, not as biological or geographical or even socially constructed, but like looking at a well-used notebook page where many different notes have been written, erased, and written again. This means that if race has ever been conceived of as biological, remnants of that conceptualization will always exist even as they are mitigated other ways of understanding race. In other words, interpreting human individuality through the lens of categorical diversity is always a hybrid of all the readings that have gone before it. This idea helps us see race not as something fixed but as a collection of ideas and beliefs that have changed over time. Race, however it is defined, is too simplistic an approach because doesn't appreciate that racial terms themselves facilitate the exclusive enactment of profound systemic inequities on certain kinds of bodies. Even those committed to overruling the notion of biological race - the phenotypical characteristics can explain or predict inherent characteristics - must default to visually based definitions of racial groups in order to prove their positions. Even worse, they must imagine (or already be convinced of ) the delineations that make those racial separate in the first place. It is a self-sustaining cycle.

The truth is that the concept of race has been shaped and reshaped throughout history by society, culture, and even science. Despite what recent genomic research show us—that all humans are remarkably similar at the genetic level—society still tends to focus on the slight differences; the differences that can be seen. This focus can reinforce old stereotypes and inequalities, even though these genetic differences are not significant enough to define or divide us.

It's easy to forget that race is not a natural, unchanging part of who we are. It is easy to ignore how individuals are able to slip the bonds of race as they travel from place to place. Racial calculus is not useful for understanding human society. It is a narrative, a story that's been told in different ways over time, that ultimately came to influence, perhaps even govern, how we see each other and ourselves. Recognizing that appealing to this complex of narrative as a source of truth is a not only a choice but a harmful one, can help to redirect our thinking toward a better understanding of human diversity. So this is not a social construction approach. It is a tier above. Instead of thinking of racial categorization as horizontal progression through time that moved from the religious to the biological and then social and geographical, we can alter the make the lens vertical, realizing that when we apply a racial label to a human being we are constituting them through a layered lens of time and approach. Embedded in every racial definition are elements of the ones before it even, or especially when, the new definition is crafted in resistance to the previous ones.

Thinking about race as a fixed part of our identity can lead us down the wrong path. It can encourage us to think that physical traits explain people's behavior or their place in society, which isn't accurate or fair. Moreover, it encourages us to expect some kinds of things, not so much from some kinds of people, but from people who look some kinds of ways. Instead, we should focus on the larger picture—that we're all part of the human family and we are different in far more significant ways than how we look. These important, invisible ways can profoundly affect our quality of life. Ignoring human agency significantly undermines our capacity as a species.

So, it's important to consider more thoughtful approaches to talking about race. We should remember the bigger story of human connection and how society's rules have shaped our views. By doing this, we can move beyond old divisions and work towards a culture that values everyone's humanity equally.

Racial labels create categories rather than simply identifying them as natural phenomena, becuase they simply are not. They draw lines where they do not exist to order humanity and create an accessible (dangerous) shorthand for survival. It not that people are 'raced' in any real way but that they register in the human mind as raced because of the need for group belonging and the availability of racial categories.

Over the next year, I will be thinking through new ways to talk about race and genetics that might be helpful for those of us who are no longer interested in taking the easy way out. I'll share a reading list of some writers and academics who have helped me understand the relationship between socially constructed race and genetic diversity.

Next: What is a palimpsest and why is it helpful in understanding race?