The Conceptual Politics of Race: lessons from Our Children

When thinking about race there is a tendency to combine into a single package two distinct cultural practices: one racialist, the other racist. On the one hand, people effortlessly (or seemingly effortlessly) partition humans into categories based on differences in external anatomy. On the other hand, people use these categories to rationalize inequitable distributions of valued resources, power, and authority. That people engage in these practices is uncontroversial. What is contentious is the relationship between racialist and racist modes of thought, which might be called the conceptual politics of race. Psychologists, who are principally concerned with the organization of mental life, tend to view racial categories as the unmediated outcome of discontinuity in human phenotype encountering a spontaneous impulse to categorize similar things together. Of course, psychologists do not deny that representations of race play a role in the rationalization of domination and of inequity. But they tend to view this role as a by-product of the way that racial representations are mentally formed. On such a view, race is a category of power because it is a category of mind. In contrast, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists—that is, those scholars most concerned with race as a category of power—argue that the partitioning of humans into racial categories is contingent on and derived from the particular ways power and authority are articulated in specific systems of domination. In this view, race is a category of mind because it is a category of (certain) power relations. Both these approaches clearly have merit, and one might be tempted to adopt an eclectic reconciliation if not for one thing. Neither provides much insight into arguably the most significant aspect of racial thinking, the capacity of a system that simply represents human difference to underwrite judgments about the intrinsic value and potential of those groups represented. Thus, although thought to be directly derived from