Ep. 228: Social Construction of Race (Appiah, Mills) (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 228 is what is it to claim that race is socially constructed or that the concept doesn't refer to anything? And we read Race, Culture, Identity, Misunderstood Connections by kwame Anthony Appiah, 1994. Charles Mills's essay But What Are You? The Metaphysics of race from 1998. A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept by Neven Sesardic from 2010. And finally, Do Races Exist? Contemporary Philosophical Debates That's a section in the Stanford Encyclopedia, a philosophy article on race by Michael James from 2008, updated in 2016. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, essentially in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:47 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:49 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:51 Coleman: This is Coleman Hughes, a black man in quotation marks in New York.

0:58 Mark: Thanks for rejoining us, Coleman. All right, so maybe we should go around the table, since we have four different sources here that have different emphases and between the four of us kind of sum up what the theme is here, what we want to get out of the conversation. I want to make sure people look back to our episode 227 on social construction in general, because at least what I see us doing today is just applying the insights that we got last time, like from hacking, to what we're reading here. So we have two of the most famous black philosophers, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Charles Mills, that are both claiming in different ways that race is socially constructed.

So Mills is explicitly saying, race is not a biological thing, it is a social construct, but it's still real because of that. Whereas Appiah, I think, wants to emphasize, yes, there is a history of the growth of the concept of race, but ultimately the concept does not actually refer to anything. So he's using social construction in a destructive way, in a way to kind of dispel the concept altogether. And then Sesardic, who I had not heard of, is arguing that, yes, it is a legitimate biological concept. And he just points to the fact that, you know, if race weren't real, how can forensic pathologists determine, you know, if they find a corpse so accurately, what race it is?

So my approach to this is I think these folks are kind of talking past each other. Appiah even says, like, if people want to use race for population genetics, go for it, arguing in his sense that race is mythical, that it doesn't exist does not mean that you can't treat cancers differently for different populations because of genetically inherited traits. Like, obviously they're talking about different things.

2:39 Seth: Well, I think I'm generally in agreement, Mark, with your assessment as far as the position of the readings. I think the thing that's challenging for me, what I'm hoping to get a better understanding of is last time Coleman said something to the effect of if by thinking of it differently or if by positioning it, if we took it away, would it be affected? Yes or no? Sort of a combination of a Rawlsian approach of sort of taking a behind the veil position as well as kind of like maybe a consequentialist approach. But in all these readings, I feel like there's a lot of threads going on and despite the best attempts of the authors to disambiguate and how many classifications were there in The Mills reading?

11 ways that you could cross the boundaries. And it's not helping me get any clearer on the concept. I sort of, by default, maybe I keep falling back into a political or ethical stance, like as far as how the notion of race is used, so to speak. And so the distinctions about whether or not somebody is black or white, based on ancestry, or whether they feel they're black or white, or less relevant to me than how they're being classified impacts their life. So I'm still not sure how to tie all that together and come out with an ontological stance.

3:47 Dylan: There's for me an interesting parallel track in all these social construction discussions. So on the one hand, there's the discussion about an extension of how we're classifying things in general so that you get this sort of philosophy of science tack on it and you go down this road of are electrons real? Or other kinds of scientific questions? And the reason you go down that road is because you're participating in the same kind of classification metaphysical discussion that's been going on for a long time. Epistemological, metaphysical, what do I know are the things that I point at?

Do they refer or do they not refer? If I talked about the existence of caloric as a way of describing the manifestation of heat, and then I change my mind and I decide that, well, caloric doesn't really exist, really. Heat exists. Especially when I change my mind about these things or I refine something, I say that, well, atoms are the smallest thing in the world, but, oh, hey, wait, no, atoms aren't the smallest thing in the world. There are other things that are smaller than that. What does that mean about the Status of what I know about anything.

That whole direction is part of it, and that's thinking about the way of classifying the world. And then we get into these questions that are, I'll just say, more personal and ethical because they end up having dimensions of classifying things that end up having ethical dimensions about the choices we make in the world. And that when we say something is something one way or another, then would there end up being consequences for that? Or people take there being consequences for that? And so to me, most of these articles involve, on the one hand, an explicit sort of trying to articulate what we mean by race, but then also pulling us to analogies about the way in which we talk about other kinds of classifications, both in the natural world, where it feels somehow a little less burdened, and also in, say, the human world, in classifications that again, seem try to give us a window into how we ought to understand race without the baggage associated with it.

They do so to varying degrees of success.

5:51 Coleman: My first thought hearing this is that sometimes when people say something is a social construct, they're saying that, implying that we should construct the thing in question differently, that the way it's constructed now is bad ethically. So when people rail against gender being a social construct, usually they mean it could be constructed differently, such that women have more power, such that we don't have these masculine stereotypes, etc. Other times people say X is a social construct, they actually don't want to get rid of the social construct.

So with race, there are many people who will say race is a social construct. But I am a very proud black man. I'm not eager to get rid of my identity as a black man. And they'll have various justifications for that. For instance, I will be treated as a black man. You know, the social construct is in the minds of a high enough proportion of the people around me that I benefit more from embracing it than I would from naively pretending it wasn't there. Whether or not you want to change a social construct, to me it seems more coherent to say, X is a social construct, let's change it, than to really push the fact that X is a social construct.

But say, let's not change it, that's rarer, but it's done. You don't hear people railing about the fact that states are a social construct or countries are a social construct, A because it's kind of obvious that they're a social construct. We could have drawn the borders differently, but I think it's, you know, most people aren't Eager to make New Jersey twice as large. It's just not in people's minds. Although, you know, you might. In any case, the second thought I had is this word race I think of as having two distinct dictionary entries. The first is a purely biological classification.

It's the kind of phenomenon that population geneticists study. It's the domain in which you can get a follicle of hair and tell someone where their ancestors are from. The domain in which you could predict someone's likelihood of getting sickle cell or Tay Sachs. And then the second dictionary definition of race is the one that we're almost always talking about all the time. It's the definition under which Barack Obama is routinely referred to as the first black president despite having a white mother. On the first definition, the population geneticists would just look at you befuddled and say, well, he's the first mixed race president.

He's half Caucasian, half African. But the level at which we're normally talking about is that second more clearly socially constructed category under which someone who's half African is called black. So I think it's useful to not conflate those two.

8:42 Dylan: So I think that part of it is trying to wrestle with the relative clarity or lack of clarity of the biological classification and whether that what amount of information that brings us and how much it does. And then there's the theme, like in Appiah, about how, at least in the history of race, the way in which that kind of knowledge would be then leveled to create social context. You were bringing up the reality of a social construct and the notion that we might bring it up to undermine it. What I think is interesting about social constructs and when we talk about whether there is this notion that, well, it's not really real if it's a social construct and therefore that means it's, as you said, amenable to change.

And this is something that Hacking brought up about the reason why we would classify something as a social construct. But over and over again we also have the fact that social constructs are real in the sense they have real world effects. And I guess that's what your second classification is really pointing to. But I'm wondering how strictly parallel they are because at least for Sesardic, even though he doesn't say it, I feel like he wants to say, look, there is scientific knowledge to be leveraged in our understanding of these things that would inform our social consciousness context.

9:58 Mark: Yeah, it's interesting. I read Sesardic first or at least before Appiah, and he attacks Appiah definitely specifically and just thinks that most of these philosophers, they're making claims about science, they're making claims about whether it's a natural kind or not without any reference to the actual scientists. And you know, the way he put it, it sounded very sensible when I actually got around and read the Appiah. Well, he's giving a historical account. It's a very long historical account. So Sesardic says, look, the only thing Appiah considers is an essentialist view.

10:34 Dylan: Yeah. And that's just wrong.

10:35 Mark: Yes. That there's a sharp distinction between the races and that they each have a different sort of essence. Why would you even argue against that? Nobody but the extreme racist hate groups or something actually has that in mind. Clearly like that this is the spirit of the white race or whatever. But Appiah thinks that he's tracing a conceptual history. So he is like quoting specifically Matthew Arnold and Thomas Jefferson before that. And he even sees this in Du Bois and he says that the concepts that we have today are inherited from these folks.

They're kind of the pale shadows, they're the residue, they're the leftovers of these sort of full throated. So yes, people actually did talk about race in this strong way. And it's interesting he gets into. We had an episode on Herder, pretty much exactly what we are seeing in Nietzsche, this racialism and talking about the genius of the Jewish people and the genius of the German people and sort of how those different sorts of genius interact. Like this was how the intelligentsia of a couple hundred years ago talked about these things. So I don't know, what do you think of that?

Appiah's whole rhetorical strategy of getting at when people were at least clear what they meant by these things and then positing that oh, the way that we talk about today is just somehow descendant of that.

11:54 Coleman: It's very easy to strawman the case for their existing races by only arguing against the essentialist version of the claim. That version would be black people and white people are Asians are fundamentally different. They all have an essence that is uniquely their own. Every black person shares that essence in common with all other blacks and does not share it in common with any whites, etc. It used to be a pretty common belief, but it's just obviously wrong at this point. To anyone who's an observant person in the 21st century, there's no one trait, whether it's athletic prowess or intellectual genius, that's reserved for any one race.

That's very easy at this point to debunk. And many People who say there are races are going to complain that you're strawmanning them. If you only argue against the essentialist conception of race, there's a more nuanced conversation to be had. Often it goes under the heading of populations rather than race. For example, if like this is hypothetical, I don't actually look at this data, but if it were true that human race started in Africa but some 50,000 or so years ago split up for long enough for evolution to make my skin look as dark as it does and your skin look as light as it does.

13:13 Mark: Right.

13:14 Coleman: That's a material fact. And there are some other changes that happen there. Like if it's true, and I'm not saying that this is true, that a person with 100% African genetics is 20 times more likely to get sickle cell than someone with ancestors from Europe. Well, that's interesting. That's interesting. Biological fact about the human species. Does that mean that race is a valid concept? Does the question of whether race exists turn on whether those kinds of facts exist? That's to me the meat of the conversation because I know people who feel very motivated in the bad sense to deny that any such facts like that could exist because they feel like if it's true that black people are many times more likely to get sickle cell anemia, that Jews are many times more likely to get Tay Sachs or facts such as that, that if those facts are true, then race is a valid concept, and.

And then we're two inches away from Jim Crow. My perspective is the facts are going to be what the facts are about, all those kinds of things. And I'm happy for population geneticists to study those kinds of things. And I think it's probably more responsible to call that population rather than race, just to avoid the confusion about whether we're making essentialist claims or on the average, this type of person is more likely to get, you know, more nuanced claims. And I also think you can preserve the idea that race is a social construct even admitting all of those facts, because like I said, we're just going around thinking of Barack Obama as black.

That doesn't track really anything the population geneticist would think about the subject.

14:58 Mark: I would love if I could say that these authors were purely speaking, past each other in that, you know, Sesardic is talking about the biological facts. And Appiah and Mills are concerned really with an ethical claim. And I think that's a good way of characterizing the distinction because maybe the whole pragmatist take on facts is like what counts as a fact? It kind of depends why you want to know.

15:23 Seth: Right.

15:23 Mark: So we covered this in many ways. Is France a trapezoid? For some purposes it's approximately a trapezoid, but for lots of purposes, you know, if you want to actually make a map or something. No, you need something more specific. So in the same way, if the reason that you care about race is because Mill seems to think as soon as you get separate, you get separate but not equal, it's very hard to imagine a society in which there are races. He says this at the beginning of his article. He calls them just imagine there's something a Quaice and it's just an arbitrary thing.

Everybody is a member of a Quaice, but there is no hierarchical result from that. He finds that very difficult to imagine that any races in real society could be that. That you could have these sort of distinctions and that they wouldn't immediately be grasped upon by one person or other as reasons for establishing a hierarchy.

16:14 Dylan: The closest thing to me for that is something like other kinds of social distinctions we make and the ones that come to mind are like regional distinctions. People talk about like, well, Midwesterners are all nice, right? So they'll have some kind of classification of the way they are and then they'll have all kinds of stories about that confirm that that's true and then you know, some kind of classification. Well, you know, New Yorkers are like this and people from the south are like that and people from California are like this. It's possible that there's some kind of truth to some kind of average about some of these things.

Or it could be just that there's confirmation bias that people have stories they tell about themselves and about their experiences. Those seem to have classification roles that are. Look, we just don't make laws based upon them. We don't have a history of making laws based upon them. Maybe I'm in Seth's camp on this, that one of the underlying currents is when we make these distinctions what the end game is for the use of them. Not just how they're rough and ready ways of breaking up the world, but they're end up being substantive consequences to it.

And not all distinctions are that way.

17:23 Seth: Yeah, and that's the point he's trying to make with the Quaice example. He talks about imagining Q1, Q2 or Q3, a classification for society, but it's not hierarchical, it's horizontal. You just arbitrarily are put into one of these classifications when you're born. And by the way, it's not related to what your parents were. So if your parents are both Q1s or Q1 and Q2, it doesn't mean you're going to be either one of those things. What he's trying to get to is, and I think this is one of the more powerful rhetorical moves in the piece is he's talking about filling out forms.

When we fill out forms, at least in the United States, I don't know what it's like in other countries, but there was a big to do about the Census recently, the U.S. census. But the idea is that we're constantly putting what our race is when you're answering a survey, when you fill out a form, when you apply for a loan. And it's not arbitrary why you're being asked to class self classify in one of those things when you apply to college. Right. It's not simply because there's some kind of classification system in place that it's important, you know, for everybody to have on their little ID card, whether they're black, white, yellow, red, whatever the cliched categories are.

It's the fact that there's meaningful impact to your life and the broader society of how you answer those questions. So those categories were instituted obviously, I think, to attempt to get data on first and the second, rectify social imbalances in terms of representation and college and jobs and things like that. There's already a whole history and a whole use for these classifications in place. And what he's trying to point out is like we don't even think about it. We just sort of answer these questions. We're inculcated to self identification with a racial classification that has all kinds of meaning and import for us and it's just something we do kind of like unthinkingly.

So the point of the Quaice to me was to kind of tease out this idea like, do you realize what the significance is of that process? And then of course he's going to go through and start looking at all of the various things that influence it and why people self identify and ancestry and all the various other things that go into it.

19:32 Coleman: I think another question is how does our judgment about whether something is a social construct change based on whether the people being referred to believe in that construct. So, for example, there was a Pew poll of quote, unquote, Asian Americans, asking them if they identified as Asian Americans and the majority did not. They identified as what we would think of as a subcategory, Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, etc. So that's a Category that it seems that is somewhat manufactured from the top down, it was less of a bottom up natural occurrence.

Hispanic was also this way. That was not a thing a hundred years ago. You know, grouping Dominicans and Mexicans together as if they felt they had very much in common. On the other hand, the concept of a black person, what used to be respectfully called Negro or colored, that was an identity that was bottom up. Or at least if you go back far enough, it was manufactured because of slavery. Obviously the Africans that came over from Africa did not think of themselves as all black people. They thought of themselves as belonging to the particular tribe they belong to.

But does it change at all for you if the majority of the people under a label don't see that label as being their main identity?

21:00 Mark: What I thought about the Mills article that was illuminating here is that if you see race as a social construct, then you shouldn't expect it to be coherent. It has a number of elements that can be very much in conflict. So he points to ancestry seems an obvious one, but then skin color seems another obvious one. But what if those are different? What if those pull apart? What if you have, in fact siblings, they have exactly the same ancestry, but one is just way, way lighter than the other, such that can pass for white and the other just can't.

So I think if you just say, okay, well, it's the social construct involved quite a lot of everyday concepts. And Mills goes through sort of the different, you know, the old style Aristotelian, necessary, insufficient conditions. Like if race were a natural kind, then you'd think, okay, there's some scientific, necessary and sufficient conditions. Maybe it's a genetic thing. Maybe for some purposes, you know, if you're doing population genetics, that's true. But like you were saying, Coleman, I don't even know that it's two concepts. That there's the strict biological concept and then there is the free floating concept.

But the free floating concept itself is quite a few things all jammed together that you often see together, but then when you pull them apart, you don't know. That's why Mills goes through all these cases of somebody who has a certain skin tone but feels a completely different way or was raised in a different environment. It doesn't have any of the typical cultural associations with that particular skin tone. And so that seems to be what you're talking about, Coleman, is a variety of the complexity of that story.

22:33 Dylan: But let's be a little bit careful. The analysis that Mills does isn't made possible as a feature of every kind of socially constructed idea. I think that he's able to make that analysis essentially to show that the clarity of the idea of race is poor. Yes, it's a social construction, but there's all kinds of concepts that are socially constructed. I took his analysis to be that as a construct, it is a poor signifier. It's not really selecting out the things that you really want to select out. That a that either is purporting to select out or that there's even real clarity about the kinds of things that it does select out. And that's what all of these different components that analysis is meant to show.

23:17 Mark: Unlike a dollar, it's either a dollar or it's not a dollar. Maybe you don't recognize it's a Canadian dollar. You don't know does it quite count as a dollar. But just compared to race, that's such a clear concept.

23:27 Dylan: That's what I took his analysis to be.

23:29 Seth: See, I thought what Mills was trying to get at was he was teasing you into the idea of talking about racial ontology or racial metaphysics. And then he's essentially sort of trying to turn that to say that if you think there is a thing called race, then you're going to have to account for all of these problematic categories. Because that thing called race, it's not realist, it's constructed. So there's no natural kind that you can appeal to. And then this is going to cause all kinds of problems. I thought he was trying to essentially problematize the idea of treating race metaphysically as a natural kind. Or it's the anti biological argument.

24:07 Dylan: I would bracket the whole natural kind discussion because as we know from other podcast episodes, the whole notion of a natural kind is philosophically challenging. And it's not even true amongst biologists that they would agree that there are natural kinds.

24:22 Seth: Sorry, maybe an essentialist and realist. Maybe I should have used that terminology. But going back to Mill's diagram that he has on page three or whatever it is showing, he wants to make sure that when he says constructivist, you don't think he's talking about subjective. It's not a subjective position. Constructed is very complicated because it involves self identification and external identification and ancestry and a whole bunch of other different things.

24:45 Mark: I guess just a terminological clarification. I like his notion of social ontology or social metaphysics. What are the basic struts and girders of social reality? You said racial ontology. To say that there is a racial ontology is being more a realist about race. Than he in fact is.

25:01 Dylan: He does subtitle his paper the Metaphysics of Race.

25:05 Mark: Well, there you go.

25:07 Dylan: At least he's framing it in a kind of exploration of what would it mean to have a metaphysics of race at the very least.

25:15 Seth: Yeah, right.

25:15 Dylan: A kind of Kantian kind of argument.

25:17 Mark: Right. The fact that there is a question, page 45, one's racial category has been taken as saying a great deal about what and who one is. More fundamentally, to what extent in what ways is race real and how deep is this reality? That's what he's asking. If it were really, you know, a purely surface level thing like Quaice, it wouldn't make sense for someone to ask, you know, so someone comes from a mixed race background to say, what am I really? That question just wouldn't even make any sense.

25:46 Dylan: That example, I think is illustrative about what's at stake. But because that categorization really is a distinction that makes literally no difference at all, it takes some of the teeth out of it. I feel like maybe he could have had a way of having that horizontal distinction that was the distinctions that made a difference but were not hierarchical differences. That's a quibble. I mean, it's just there's no import given of the Q1, Q2, Q3. So there's no action anybody would take even if those actions were ethically neutral with respect to one another, other than

26:23 Mark: checking the box that says Q1. Let me give one more quote from Mills here. This is page 48. Race is not metaphysical quote in the deep sense of being eternal, unchanging, necessary, a part of the basic furniture of the universe. But a race is a contingently deep reality that structures our particular social universe having a social objectivity and a causal significance that arise out of our particular history.

26:45 Dylan: We should note that some philosophers that we've read make that claim about everything that we know. They would deny metaphysics in the sense that he put at the beginning of that as a metaphysics of things that are eternally real. It just doesn't exist either.

26:59 Mark: But it's still. It's over above that to say race is a contingently deep reality. So it's not just that it's contingent. You're saying that some philosophers say everything is contingent. That might be so right. And Appiah, at the very end of his paper basically says, I'm with Rorty, solidarity, contingency and irony that that is the way that we should act toward race, like it is a thing that is floating around in our consciousness, but it's not an essential thing. It's something that we should experiment with and just recognize that if you're asking that question, what race am I really?

Even though it sounds like that question makes sense, it really doesn't. You know, it's like asking what profession am I really? In other words, am I a born fireman or am I a born business person? Like, no, a lot of what you decide, you might have desires that push you toward one thing rather than another. But obviously this is a human feature and it is more of a performance. So Appiah sees race, I think, as a performance. Mills, I think, thinks that is part of what goes into it. But there's other things as well.

28:03 Dylan: I just wanted to comment that I think that example that you gave Mark, are you really a fireman or a lawyer? I think that the idea of that there being a lot of choice involved in that is true, but it's also the case thinking about maybe I'm abusing the term, but these loopback mechanisms that Hacking mentioned is that you can develop and it can be important to your identity that you have that particular either occupation or that way of life and you're thinking and it can matter that you understand yourself. Well, I'm a lawyer or I'm a scientist or I'm a priest. And that self understanding actually means a great deal and has a big effect on both your self understanding, but also the way you act in the world. Even though it's, let's call it socially constructed and even though it's maybe chosen and self constructed.

28:54 Coleman: I wonder how the conversation about race being a social construction at all links to the phenomenon, which seems to not be as much in the news now as it was like two years ago, of transracialism. Like Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP woman who by her parents account is white and has been her whole life, but by her account is black because she feels black has chosen to live black. I don't know if these phrases I'm saying refer to things, but that's kind of the crux of the issue. Is living black is that a sentence that has a meaning? Is feeling black a sentence that has a meaning?

Rachel Dolezal caught so much heat for her claim to be black, very few people were willing to defend her intellectually. I remember there was one philosopher, was it Rebecca Tuvel, who tried to write a philosophical defense of transracialism? Yeah. And the article was regardless of whether the arguments were good, it was very respectful, the tone and it was serious. Her article got retracted because it came under so much fire. It's interesting to me that many of the people who push that race as a social construct, the moment someone tries to be fluid with it in real time, they are authoritarian.

This is the equivalent of acknowledging that the US Is a social construct, the border between US and Mexico is a social construct, and being extremely punitive with an immigrant that crosses, you know, putting them in a cage. Maybe that's not a tension. Maybe it's perfectly coherent to maintain that something is a social construct against those who say it's real and at the same time punishment Rachel Dolezal types. But maybe it's not. What do you think?

30:51 Dylan: I do think it's incoherent. I think that it's in that mix with Rachel Dolezal is the whole question. In that mix is the vitriolic arguments about appropriation. Everything from like wearing a kimono, you know, when you're going out in Chicago as a white woman, would be cultural appropriation or something like that. It's a similar kind of argument that you shouldn't be engaging in that kind of cultural play or cultural fluidity. And in the case of Dolezal, her claim was that she really felt that way. So there was this transracial, conventional, racial identity aspect to it.

31:33 Seth: If we're taking her case as paradigmatic, we're going to run into some problems because part of it is she was an executive, I believe, right, with the naacp. So there's a whole issue around the idea that she was white and was somehow acting on behalf of the naacp. That was an issue. But Coleman, doesn't this get back to what you said at the beginning, where part of the other challenge with her case was that the fact of race, the biological underpinnings, quote unquote, of race and the idea of race that really where she was transgressing was just essentially saying, I'm choosing not to identify with my biological designation.

My genetic. Biological is maybe not the right word. My genetic. There's also kind of an uproar around. You can't choose to be from a part of the world or from an ancestry that you're not from. You can't choose that to appropriate, not culture, but actual genetic lineage. I just feel like that was super confusing and conflicted. But I think obviously it teased out a lot of the stressors around the objections, the issues, the challenges, the emotions around that particular issue. She's just. That's an unusual case.

32:47 Coleman: It's weird because if I think of very, very, very light skinned black people, another famous NAACP actually the president of the NAACP in the early 20th century, Ben Jealous, very light skinned to the point where if you saw him, it would not at all be obvious that he were African American. Particularly if he had a very short haircut, so you couldn't see the kinks in his hair. It would not at all be obvious that he was quote unquote black. As light skinned as Rachel Dolezal. What is it that separates him from Rachel Dolezal? Only genetics. Really.

Only that if you had a hair follicle you would find some African DNA. Whatever. Exactly. That means a population geneticist would be able to tell. If that's the only difference between Ben Jealous and Rachel Dolezal, then how can we say one gets to be black and one can't be black? But also this race thing has nothing to do with genetics. Genetics is out of the question. Isn't that something of a contradiction?

33:48 Mark: Yeah, and I'm brought to mind, I don't know if you guys saw the episode of Atlanta. The whole format of the episode is a news show and one is interviewing a sort of high school age black fellow who says I identify as a middle aged white man. So it's not even just transracialism, it's trans ageism. So clearly this was the producers making fun of that idea. And then also I was thinking about Dave Chappelle's black member of the KKK because he's blind and nobody's ever told him they can't bring themselves to ruin. Do you feel like those kind of critiques are missing the point?

That there's something legitimately ambiguous? It sounds like Coleman, you were just pointing to something that's legitimately ambiguous. And Appiah, this is like I think the whole reason why his position is summed up by. It's not a social constructionist one, it's a dismissive one because he focuses on that one drop rule, which I think is kind of what you're talking about, that anybody that is not completely white is considered black. And Mills considers this too, because I believe he's from some other country where the rule is different, you know, so that there's three distinct races rather than two distinct races.

Just even light skinned blacks versus dark skinned blacks are considered a whole different thing. And that's just obviously socially contingent. If you can go to across a border and they divide it up differently.

35:05 Dylan: Well, Mills points to Louisiana and there being black, white and Creole, or maybe it was Appiah, there was a. I forget which historical case it was talking about. But again, as an example of One of the signs of the lack of clarity of the concept of race is that there can be incoherence regarding the number of them, incoherence of how you assign people to them for all of these mixed cases. But I thought that Coleman was raising the question of an inconsistency between that. It seems like partisans of social construction regarding race often are the most vociferous against something like the actual fluidity of race as personified by someone just saying that they're a race that's different than the one that they maybe morphologically appear as, or that they push even further, that they would sort of, from a population genetics point of view, say that they weren't part of.

And that seems to be a discontinuity because you would think that if you were a partisan of the social construction aspect of it, you also would be comfortable with the idea that people can move back and forth between them, that there's something else that's going on about their racial identification than their genetics.

36:27 Coleman: Thomas Chatterton Williams, who is a great writer, grew up in New Jersey. Black father, white mother identified as black. And I've seen pictures of him as a kid and grew up in the same area as him, actually. And if I had seen him as a kid, I would have reflexively thought of him as black as well. But he's very light skinned and as he's gotten older, he's sort of lost his little Afro that he used to have and moved to France, where sometimes he's thought of as an Arab. Other times he's been around white people who have been saying racist things in his vicinity on the assumption that he's not black and wouldn't possibly get offended because he's light skinned enough to, you know, seem white in certain contexts.

He writes about this in his new book, Self Portrait in Black and White. He knows a couple things. You know, one thing he notes is, yeah, we had this one drop rule in this country. If you were like 1 32nd black, you were considered, quote, unquote, colored. Many people today will say, well, yeah, we had this one drop rule in this country. And that logic still rules today. And in a way they just accept that, that essentially the logic of the plantation has carried through today and we can't do anything about it. So if you're, you know, a quarter black and you identify as black, but you're very light skinned and someone says, well, why do you identify as black rather than mixed?

The response will be, well, in this country we've had the one drop rule for so long. It almost seems like those people are saying that they're claiming to hate the one drop rule, but they don't actually want to move past it. In many cases, they're using it as a defense mechanism to kind of reconcile themselves with their own identities. It's like an identity protection mechanism. But again, this feels like a contradiction. To bemoan how race was socially constructed in this country for its whole history, but then resist any attempt to change the social construction.