Rethinking Race Labels
Is it time to drop the old labels of white, black, etc.?
One of the tenets of anti-racist belief is that race doesn’t actually exist. Instead it is only a social construct. Perceptions of race have certainly changed over time, but the way we think of race today — and the way I myself grew up understanding it — is that it only applies to certain physical differences, most notably the tone of one’s skin.
The English word “race,” as it relates to lineage or ethnicity, originates from the 16th century. It derives from the French word which is spelled the same way but pronounced differently. In turn, the French word comes from the Italian “razza.” The racial categories that we use today were influenced by the work of German anthropologist Johann Blumenbach. He sorted humanity into five original classifications that included a color coding roughly based on skin tone: Caucasian/white, Mongolian/yellow, Malayan/brown, Ethiopian/black and American/red.
Race may or may not truly exist but there are indeed similarities in physical features among large groups of humans. We’re bound to notice those commonalities and thus categorize them mentally, even if not verbally. After all, we do the same with age, class, religion, political beliefs and others. That’s just how we make sense of the world.
So should we continue to use descriptive labels for people like “white” and “black”?
Undeniably, we continue to misuse racial perceptions to this very day. Only recently the NFL ended their practice of race-norming, which denied compensation to numerous black players suffering from dementia and other diseases of the brain. It surmised that black people have innately lower cognitive function than other racial groups. It thus used a separate protocol that made it harder for black players to prove that their symptoms were caused by game-related injury.
Also, the names that we currently use for racial categories are rather sloppy. You’ll notice that certain forms — like an application for a job or a background check on a firearm purchase — usually include “Asian” as a racial category. In America, we tend to associate “Asian” with the physical appearance most commonly found among Chinese, Korean and Japanese people. But what about people who come from or have ancestry from India? Would they not be Asian too since India is located in Asia? What about the Arab peoples in western Asia?
Incidentally, the last census taken in the U.S. in 2020 included the categories of “American Indian” and “Asian Indian.” It’s well known today that “American Indians,” also called Native Americans, are not in fact Indian at all.
The terms “white” and “black” are themselves technically misnomers. Nobody has skin the same color as white copy paper or black pen ink. Even those with albinism don’t have perfectly white skin and although there have apparently been cases of people whose skin tone is close to being pitch black, this seems extremely rare.
It is certainly difficult to think of names that can precisely describe such groupings. John H. McWhorter, linguist and author of the book Woke Racism, has noted that no terms used that way can ever be perfect. He himself prefers to identify as black instead of African American.
Anthropology professor Yolanda Moses discusses how our usage of “Caucasian” to describe white people has a very weak historical basis despite the fact that we still say it. She suggests that we should use terms like “European American” which refer less to physical appearance and more to geographic origin. This would include others like “African American” and “Mexican American.” We’ve already moved towards this to a certain degree, using words like “Asian” instead of “yellow,” and “Native American” instead of “red.” Today those color labels are considered pejorative, hence the recent renaming of the Washington Redskins team to the Washington Commanders. There may come a time when we think of “white” and “black” the same way.
There are those who, despite agreeing that race doesn’t technically exist, argue that we must continue to identify people by race in order to root out racism. They believe that doing so is necessary for applying equity based on race. To be sure, many organizations today are embracing race-based equity [1,2], which is why I personally have stopped filling out my race on forms. It’s another example of how we continue to misuse perceptions of race.
Understandably, others would say that we should discard these groupings altogether because of how much conflict and trouble they’ve caused us. Indeed that seems to be at least part of the premise behind the anti-racist belief that race doesn’t actually exist.
But is that a realistic proposal? As mentioned earlier, we’d still be bound to distinguish those groupings mentally even if we don’t call them “races,” because we’re simply hardwired as humans to do so. Could they still serve a purpose for understanding the diversity of human physical traits?
Yes, argues philosophy professor Michael O. Hardimon in his book Rethinking Race: The Case for Deflationary Realism. He rejects the idea that the concept of race should be thrown out altogether — what he calls “eliminativism” — and favors treating it in a minimalist perspective that only denotes the physical differences among humanity at large. He distinguishes this from the racialist perspective that ties those differences to one’s intellect and character. In her review of Dr. Hardimon’s book, which largely agrees with his points, assistant philosophy professor Robin Zheng sums up deflationary realism as follows:
The view is realist because it asserts that minimalist races are biologically real and social races are socially real… But it is deflationary because being ‘real’ need not amount to very much, biologically speaking.
In this view, which I’m inclined to say is reasonable, we need not fear the existence of race as a simple physical concept. We should be accurate and respectful in the way we define it, and we don’t even necessarily have to call it “race.” But it seems practical for us to hold onto it as an idea since, as Zheng further notes, ordinary people are likely to make those distinctions anyway.
However we decide to go about defining race in the future, what ultimately matters is what we do with it. We do come in different shades, but in the end we are all human and we are all individuals.