Читать книгу Race - Paul C. Taylor - Страница 12

If I’m right, focusing on the Anglo-American model of race-thinking doesn’t have to get in the way of telling a more global story about race. Unfortunately, the narrower focus may have its own internal difficulties. I’ve already said that we use race-talk in unclear and inconsistent ways, so how do I propose to reduce that semantic diversity to a single model?

Using the same words in unclear and inconsistent ways is not a problem that’s unique to race-talk. The elements of language are tools, and like any other tools, they can play roles beyond the ones for which they were originally created. Just as some people use irons not just to remove wrinkles from their clothes but also to make grilled cheese sandwiches, sometimes people repurpose words in ways that give them strikingly new meanings. Think of the way names like “Karen” and “Becky” have come to stand in for objectionable personality types. (In current vernacular usage, “Karen” refers to “women, usually white, who commit acts that are perceived to be bullying and sometimes racist,” as in the “Central Park Karen” incident from May 2020.)⁵

The variability and flexibility of language notwithstanding, the fact that we can use it reliably to communicate and solve problems means that there is some unity amid the variety. The divergent evolution of linguistic elements brings slang into being, but then slang does its work in part because it exists in a productive tension with established, standard usage. A comprehensive sociological report of language habits is bound to turn up an array of uses for any particular word or phrase. Still, there will be core uses, uses encouraged by the long period of socialization during which we train people, both formally and informally, how to use their words. This should be as true of race-talk as of any natural language.

Unfortunately, perhaps the most obvious candidate for a core meaning of “race” might defeat the purpose of this book. If the meaning of “race” is fully specified in the official doctrine of the Ku Klux Klan, the ideology of the Nazi Party, or the original theology of the Nation of Islam, then there may not be much more to say about race-talk than that it’s false and dangerous. Our best information about human physiology suggests that the human race is not naturally divided into the Klan’s (and Nazis’, and Nation’s) small set of distinct, opposed, and hierarchically ranked natural groups. And the persistence of things that seem to be about race – false beliefs about human capacity, stubborn aversions to associating with certain people, unjust allocations of social resources – seem to have less to do with philosophy than with psychology, sociology, and public policy.

I agree that the best testimony of the physical sciences effectively refutes the Klansman. The pages to follow will present some of the details of this scientific challenge and swiftly survey some ways of interpreting it. I also agree that social science and policy analysis are essential to the work of taking race seriously. I am also convinced, though, that studying race effectively in these domains requires some clarity about several squarely philosophical questions.

The inevitability of philosophy is easiest to see in relation to the social sciences. Once we decide what racial prejudice is, psychologists can test for it; and once we decide what injustice is, policy analysts can devise ways to contest it. But settling the best ways to think about justice and prejudice is a philosophical project, even if people other than philosophers often, by necessity, do the work.

The natural scientist’s challenge to race-thinking also leaves openings for the philosopher. Many people take the scientist’s victory over the Klansman to show that all race-thinking is futile, that all race-talk is false and objectionable. What it actually shows, though, is that certain dialects of race-talk are problematic. After all, not everyone who wants to talk about race – or, as I’ll say from here on out, not every racialist – is a member of the Klan. Some speakers of race-talk are, as we’ll see, devout anti-racists, fully committed to the thought that racial differences, whatever they are, make no difference to judgments about human worth or capacity.

The existence of people who reject obviously objectionable forms of race-talk without rejecting race altogether is a sign that philosophical attention is necessary. The philosopher J. L. Austin put the key point like this: “If a distinction works well for practical purposes in ordinary life (no mean feat, for even ordinary life is full of hard cases), then there is sure to be something in it, it will not mark nothing.”⁶ When people persist in using an idea or concept to organize their lives, we have to take that seriously, at least long enough to see what purposes it serves and what work it’s doing.

I don’t mean to have settled accounts with the scientific challenge to race-talk just yet. Maybe the anti-racist racialist is just confused and trying to use race-talk to do work that may be important – like resisting racism – but that it just isn’t up to. Maybe race is an essentially biological concept and the repudiation of that concept by contemporary physical science means that it belongs in the dustbin of history. We’ll consider these possibilities in later chapters. The point right now, though, is that it’s impossible to evaluate these arguments without some prior clearing of the philosophical ground. Why might one think that race is an essentially biological concept? If race-thinking is older than modern physical science, then maybe something else is going on. What exactly does the anti-racist racialist want race-talk to do? If there is a way to make the race concept do this work without turning into a Nazi, then maybe there’s something here to consider.

Having put off the inevitable encounter with the scientific anti-racialist, I will adopt an expository strategy that requires some comment. Hardline anti-racialists sometimes signal their suspicion of race by putting quotation marks around the offending word, in the manner that has earned scare quotes their name. This strategy strikes me as premature until we know more about the grounds for their suspicion. In light of these considerations, and as you may have noticed, I will use scare quotes sparingly, mainly to observe what philosophers call the “use-mention distinction.” When I’m talking about the word, term, or concept, I will use quotation marks. When I am not mentioning the term “race” but using it to talk about whatever the term denotes, it will appear without quotation marks.