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

0:00 Seth: Since we've Talked about the one drop rule, I've done the 23andMe report on my genetic composition. I have 1.1% sub Saharan African. Apparently that qualifies me. And so I've been answering the question wrong for the last 50 years of life. So I'm wondering if there's going to be any influence of all of this ancestry and genetic stuff on popular perceptions. It's alluded to in one of the essays that the bifurcated black white distinction in the United States could be more nuanced. Like in the Caribbean, where there's three categories, you know, black, white, and somewhere in between.

That points towards the idea that race is socially constructed, at least in the United States, because clearly there's an alternative construction of the concept of race or construction of race that is employed very nearby that we don't choose to use except in Louisiana. Then we had the example of, oh well, there's Orientals. And you mentioned the research where asked whether or not they identified as Asian Americans and the answer was no, they're Japanese or Chinese or Taiwanese or Korean or what have you that I don't think there's a Pan Asian kind of consciousness or anything like that.

The one drop rule is something that only applied to blacks and only in the context of slavery in the south and all of the laws associated with trying to maintain that economic system. And it's irrelevant to some extent, or at least I assume it's irrelevant to some extent to any non black race in the United States because they were not part of that economic system and the history associated with it and so forth. So given that without denying the fact that genetics dictate that people have different kinds of morphologies, so skin tone, skull shape, you know, all that kind of stuff, how is it that we can't just avoid spending time talking about the fact that race is employed in specific ways to perpetuate these power structures and to maintain classifications for the purposes of, you know, the hierarchical elevation of R1 over R2, as Mills says, the one

2:10 Coleman: drop rule supposedly goes, the Other direction in Brazil, which is to say if you have one drop of white, you can be classified as white. I don't know exactly what that says, but maybe it implies the way in which race is socially constructed doesn't track one to one with hierarchies. The construction doesn't necessarily predict the direction of the hierarchy. I think to myself nowadays I actually don't know a single person who is half black, half white in terms of white father, white mother, or vice versa. I don't know a single person in that category who identifies as white.

I only know people in that category who identify as black and occasionally biracial or mixed race. But even that's less common. I know many people who are in that situation. Some of them are light skinned enough that if they wanted to say they were white, they perhaps could. I don't know exactly what that says because there's a aspect to the whole question that has to do with social incentives. You know, it made a lot of sense if you could pass for white in this country for most of its history to do so, if you could. But as racism wanes, it makes less and less sense to try to pass for white.

Indeed, I go to Columbia, which is a very rarefied sub, sub subculture in which arguably the direction of social incentives go the other way. If you are black at Columbia or particularly at Barnard in this political moment in 2019, there actually is kind of more social power in that. In this local circumstance it would be different in many other parts of the country. But all that to say, I think it's possible that the social construction doesn't necessarily have to be tied to a hierarchy. Maybe, but I don't feel confident in that.

4:03 Dylan: Appiah gets to some of this thinking at the end of his piece after like the last 10 or 15 pages is about thinking about identity. You know, on the one hand, the sensibleness of different kinds of cultural identities or ethnic identities as being a positive thing. Then he goes on to warn against a kind of imperialism of identity. After talking about understanding that there are even useful and important ways of having racial identity, he then on page 134, he wants to talk about how we could lead to a more recreational conception of racial identity.

It would make African American identity more like Irish American identity for most of those who care to keep the label. It would allow us to resist one persistent feature of ethnoracial identities. They risk becoming the obsessive focus, the be all and end all of the lives of those who identify with them. They lead people to forget that their individual identities are complex and multifarious, that they have enthusiasms that do not flow from their race or ethnicity, interests and tastes that cross ethnoracial boundaries, that they have occupations or professions, are fans of clubs and groups, and they can then lead them in obliterating the identities they share with people outside their race or ethnicity, away from the possibility of identification with others.

Calls this imperialism of identity, and in policing this, an imperialism as visible in racial identities as anywhere else. It is crucial to remember ways that we are not simply black or white or yellow or brown, gay or straight or bisexual, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian. But there were also brothers and sisters, parents and children, liberals, conservatives and leftists, teachers and lawyers and automakers and gardeners, fans of the Padres and the Bruins, amateurs of grunge rock and lovers of Wagner, movie buffs, MTVaholics, mystery readers, surfers and singers, poets and pet lovers, students and teachers, friends and lovers, racial identity can be the basis of resistance to racism.

But even as we struggle against racism, and though we have made great progress, we still have further to go. Let us not let our racial identities subject us to new tyrannies.

6:11 Mark: I like the idea of recreational identity of race, but then I think about how, I don't know, that making it recreational actually gets rid of all the bad juju. You know, think about, are you a real Game of Thrones fan? You just watched the show, you don't even read the books. Come on, you're not. So there's still, it seems like this imperialism is present in maybe all forms of identity, certainly a lot of them. So it might be more complicated than we think to tamp down the negative social manifestations.

6:41 Coleman: I mean, it's a spectrum. I really, really resonate with that passage about, in America, the Irish identity was at one point very strong. But now it's the kind of thing where if you're Irish, you maybe know it, you might, maybe you celebrate St. Patrick's Day. But you're never tempted, for instance, to organize your politics around your Irishness. You're never tempted to go look at the census and find that Irish Americans make 80 cents on the Russian American dollar. Which is actually almost true, that by recreational, I think that's what is meant. Whereas if you're black, you can organize your whole politics around your blackness, you can organize your whole life around your blackness. And I know people who've done that.

7:28 Dylan: Another distinction is that in this recreational idea of ethnic identity is you can go to an Irish festival and you don't have to have A drop of Irishness in you, so to speak. Right? And you can go participate in that and no one's going to be giving you a hard time about that. And so then you would imagine what would the African American festival of the same sort look like?

7:51 Coleman: To be fair, I know what the counter argument to this would be because I've heard it so many times. Well, if you're Irish, you get to be playful with your identity. We don't get to be playful. The cops are killing us, we're mass incarcerated, we have one tenth the wealth. I have to live Ziblia. I have to experience racism and weather the storm. So it's all well and good to say that, but when you're black, it's a different thing. To me this argument, I have empirical quibbles with it in terms of I think there is racism in society. Racism is real, but it often gets exaggerated in 2019.

But also, I'm not sure it necessarily follows from the fact that you are treated occasionally differently and worse because of how you look, that therefore you must internalize that identity deeply. I mean, I'm sure I could find a million studies that show short people are treated differently than tall people, perhaps seen as less confident, less attractive.

8:50 Dylan: All those are true.

8:51 Coleman: I'm sure all that's true. And I'm five foot seven, right? I'm short. Does that mean I have to assert my shortness as a big part of my identity? I mean it doesn't seem to follow logically if you insert anything else into that space where race is. So that's all to say. I really agree with Kwame Appiah there.

9:14 Mark: It doesn't follow logically. I'm trying to think of how the other poll of this. So I was thinking like My Big Fat Greek Wedding. So in that situation it was a family that just everything is Greek, do you remember? Everything comes from Greece.

9:28 Dylan: The word kimono is Greek.

9:30 Mark: And of course you would highly discourage marrying outside somebody the Greek population. But yet anybody who's not Greek just doesn't care. At least probably doesn't know the difference between Greeks or Middle Easterners or you know, if they're going to be racist about it, they're not going to be specifically anti Greek racist. And a lot of people who are Jewish treat their Judaism, even if they're, you know, they could completely pass as they say, but like it might just be a really central. But certainly none of that follows logically from the way that you are treated. So it just seems like these are independent variables and you can Sort of. I wouldn't call that a recreational. You know, the fact that it's not being imposed upon you by a hostile society getting so into your identity, that's not a recreational use. That seems to lessen how central it is.

10:18 Seth: I feel like what all these things are pointing to is when you say examples like Irish or maybe blonde, right versus brunette or short versus tall, you're talking about externally identifiable traits, which then maybe not in the case of Irish, I guess maybe there's a distinction there to be had. But there seems to me that it's not even fair to use the term race, to talk about the employment of race as a concept, as a category, as a structure, and then to think that you can give a coherent analysis of that for blacks, African Americans, whatever the appropriate term is at the time, and Asians in the United States, of course, my context is the United States because the concept of race is employed, has been employed by the dominant group in our society.

Race, I guess, generally speaking, always reinforces the political structure and the power structure that the people who basically develop the term want to keep in place. But the way it's used to describe and to categorize Asians versus black skinned people versus Jews versus is very, very different. It's not like it's a consistent framework that makes sense and that it's employed in the same way across, you know, and the ways in which the effects that racial classifications have on these different populations vary quite a bit. I just keep coming back to this.

Maybe it's a functionalist argument. I'm trying to articulate that the concept exists to support some kind of power structure, some kind of political structure, some kind of social structure, whatever the relevant facts are in the world, skin tone that are seized upon and used as some kind of referent or basis for this are not irrelevant, but at least they aren't constructed. But the use that's made of them is constructed, and it's very clearly constructed for the purposes of empowering one group at the expense of another.

12:20 Coleman: I think you're right. I'm coming around to the point you're making. The way I think of it, the moment you carve up the human species into these very crude categories, you're inviting people to make generalizations about those categories. It's an invitation to attach other concepts. To take a modern example, white privilege. You can't have the concept of white privilege without the concept of white, or an even more recent one, white fragility. The New York Times bestselling author Robin Diangelo writes A book about how white people become fragile when we talk about race and defensive.

And that's why they won't acknowledge that they're racist. I have many issues with her books, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, when you have the category, it invites people to, on the one hand, say their group is the best, on the other hand, say their group is the worst. If they're masochists. It invites all kinds of generalizations that do have to do with social power, less and less today with political power. Because we've, after the civil rights movement, came to the conclusion that we're not going to play the mixing politics and race games, at least explicitly, but on the ground in terms of social power and sort of unspoken rules of what it means to be one race or another.

In certain social contexts, what you're allowed to say the words. You know, there are words that I can say that you can't. That would be meaningless if they came out of my mouth, but would get you fired if they came out of yours. There are certain contexts where if I'm black, there's a certain expectation about me that is uncomfortable, that if I were white, it does invite people to make generalizations and to jockey for status based on the category they happen to fall into. Is that at all what you're getting at?

14:06 Seth: I think I'm also in part trying to say if you look at the way in which the idea of race or racial terms are employed, you'll see that it's not a monolithic structure that is intended to carve out the world in the way that, say, for example, the biological argument says. It's not like the concept of race was invented because they said, okay, we really need to make sure that we classify. And because you have this kind of skin and you have this kind of forehead and this guy has this kind of trait that then ultimately what we come up with then is this categorization.

That's not the function of racial terms in our language. It's not classification, it's not scientific. So whatever biological connection there is or isn't is irrelevant because the issue is black as a term, or Negro, or the 1% rule, all those sorts of things. They're all employed to service the social structure of the people who created them and empower it. Those terms were not created by the oppressed. They were created by the people empowered to serve some kind of purpose. And they weren't trying to do science and be taxonomic.

15:17 Coleman: I mean, what do you make of the sort of radical strain of Black politics embodied by Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X in his early days, where they fully embraced the concept of white and black. But they would often call white people white devils. They had this mythology about white people coming from a particular island. They had all these bizarre theories about how white people and black people were different, but the power imbalance just went the other way in their heads. At least they thought white people were inferior, but they were kind of using the same categories made by white racists. White, black, et cetera. Would that not be a counterexample?

15:55 Seth: Would it be a counterexample or would that be an example of what we just recently read Simone Weil and she was talking about? Revolution substitutes one oppressive category for another. It's an attempt to respond to the power structure by appropriating the same methodologies and inverting it in some sense. But still it's playing within that same power structure. I think generally speaking, that's how I would associate it that whole era. And those thinkers are extremely complex also because there's a connection to Islam as well as Africa in some of the strains of the thinkers of that period. But I think in the case of Elijah Muhammad as opposed to Malcolm X, he was a follower. But was it Malcolm X that talked about basically taking economic, trying to recover.

16:40 Coleman: Yeah, like black economics, black sort of self reliance, starting black businesses. Yeah, Malcolm X.

16:47 Seth: And so looking at the dialogue, as it were between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, I was always sympathetic to what Malcolm X was saying is that understanding that they're living within a capitalist society, that strength comes from economic power in some respects. Of course, there's moral power and political power and variety of other things. But I thought it was always pragmatic and useful for him to focus on that.

17:10 Mark: Just so this is still relevant. I just remember, I think it was in the Times or something within the last two days. There is a defense of Clarence Thomas on exactly those same grounds by Corey Robin. I might think he's a. Yeah, okay, there you go. You might think he's an Uncle Tom, that he's selling out. But no, he's just buying this. We're in a capitalist system and the only way to actually gain power is to gain economic power. And so having completely free market capitalism is. That was at least the similar line of thought.

17:36 Coleman: His argument there was specifically that for a despised minority like black Americans, 14% of the population, politics is never going to be a route to power. He's an extreme pessimist about the possibility of black achievement through politics. The only other option for him is the free market. So he feels black people have much more opportunity in the market than in politics. But that's a little bit far afield.

18:02 Seth: You were asking if Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were counterexamples to using the concept of race. The people who developed the idea of race are the people in power and that they developed it to perpetuate the power structure. And I guess my response was just simply that that was an attempt to invert it, but it's still essentially working within the same power structure. It's an attempt to overthrow it using its own logic, I guess.

18:25 Coleman: I don't know if I totally buy that. The example I just thought of is like, quote, unquote, Islam versus the west, right? Huge, broad categories, clash of civilizations. There are people in the west who conceive of modern history since the end of the Cold War, at least this way, as a clash between Islam and the West. Hopefully we win it. That's how some people view it. There are also many people in the west who think this is a totally oversimplified way to talk about it. And I'm more sympathetic to that line. If you listen to what the Islamic State says or what Al Qaeda says, they totally buy the Islam versus the west clash.

They just think Islam is going to win in a way. Both extremes accept the terms of the war and just want to win the war. It's not obvious who would win the war. Like, if ISIS did build a global caliphate, it would still be Islam in the West. And it's not clear to me how dividing it that way inherently favors the west or Islam.

19:20 Dylan: But isn't it working at least two ways that are both related to power? One thing that's in common in those cases that seem to be at opposite ends, the west is the best narrative versus Islam is the best narrative. Or the white supremacist narrative versus Nation of Islam or something like that. Those are both identities that are being leveraged to assert power and privilege. And it's sort of clearly working in that direction on the basis of who's sort of winning in that clash. But the other way that it's working is it's working as a cohesive binder for the partisans of either side.

So in particular on the side that is, say, losing the war, even though saying that we are going to be victorious and having that framework of that identity is as a cohesive measure for that community, that's also working in a way of exerting power by the leaders of that community. There is a. You're in you're out criteria, you're either a member of the Taliban or you're not a member of the Taliban. In fact, there's ways in which we can get rid of you as a result of that, and you can be a traitor to that cause. And for lots of revolutionary organizations, whether you're sympathetic with them or not, a lot of them, especially the ones that have very, very strong identities, people who betray them, they'll just get rid of them.

I'm just thinking like for instance, during the Irish revolution, the IRA killed people who were Irish, who they thought were sympathizing with the British. Or you get excommunicated from that group. Right. That identity is operating in terms of power, but sometimes for the people who are just leaders of that group, leaders of that distinction.

21:05 Mark: So I'm trying to think what the role of the philosopher. These people that we read, all three of them, are trying to defuse these irrational narratives in certain ways that if we can get clear about where our concepts come from, what the history is, what in the world they might actually refer to. Sesardic, I read him as scientistic scientism. In other words, saying the whole concept of a narrative and making an argument based on a narrative is fundamentally fraudulent. That no, just figure out what scientific claims are being made and. And actually look at the data.

And there's something that is overly simplistic about that. Whereas Appiah and Mills both have, I think, a greater sense of the complexity that you're still being analytical. If like Appiah, you say the concepts that we have are the leftover or the remnants of this conceptual history which has been driven so you can acknowledge that they were used for power relations. And you can talk about this dialectically in just the way that you guys were just doing in terms of take the concept, but invert them. But it's sort of different ways of cutting through the bullsh.

And I'm wondering what you guys thought of sort of the relative value of those ways of cutting through it. Whether you found Appiah's stories, for instance, merely Sesardic seems to think they're pretty darn arbitrary. You could tell any number of stories that would probably have the same epistemological justification. And so for him to Appiah to focus on that particular history of the term race and thereby he's using it to make bad arguments that Appiah and Mills are not sufficiently cutting through the bullshit. Did you have a sympathy with one or the other of these authors in terms of their overall method and the way that they're trying to defuse these toxic narratives.

22:50 Seth: Mills reminded me a lot of hacking, kind of taxonomic. It was useful, interesting and useful to do two things. One was to break out all the various components, self awareness versus public awareness, culture, and then to have the different classifications. They were thought experiments that tease out the intuitions. But again, it was all in the service, I think, of trying to point out how there's no coherent way to maintain a concept of race that satisfies the constructionist, slash objective distinction. I liked Appiah in the beginning, and then as it went on and on,

23:26 Coleman: I started to get a little lost

23:28 Seth: because it seemed like he was working through a theme and then it kind of went off in a few other directions towards the end. He's very clear, or at least he had been very clear, and it's alluded to in the essay, that he doesn't think there is such a thing as race. And so unlike Mill, who I think is saying something akin to what we were talking about with Searle around. How was it phrased, Dylan? Contingently objective, I can't remember. But Mill, I think, would say that race is real, but it's more along the lines of what I am empathetic to, which is our understanding of the idea of race and how it's employed is what's at issue. Whereas Appiah is just flat out denying that races exist. And I think, I guess I'm more sympathetic to Mill. I liked Appiah too, but it was less tightly focused.

24:15 Mark: Searle's terminology, it's social facts are epistemically objective. In other words, like you got to find out about them. You could be wrong, but they're metaphysically subjective in that they depend on the desires, the attitudes of individuals. Not you specifically, but some individuals. What did you think, Coleman? Between the three articles, whose method were you kind of most sympathetic to?

24:39 Coleman: So I think the biological reductionist method is one I'm not sympathetic to because I don't think the question of whether race is a social construction only turns on the data that a population geneticist studies. I think that's a misunderstanding of the question. It's not that we're asking, are people with majority African genetics, are we able to detect those regularities in the genetic data? Are we able to find average differences in the big data? Obviously that's true, or else 23andMe wouldn't be possible. They wouldn't be able to take my spit and tell me where my ancestors were from.

Moreover, there could be, you know, more substantial differences. I've always been so puzzled why people get mad when you say black people have bigger lips. We do. On average, it's fine. It's not about, one is uglier, one is prettier. It's just a fact. And wider noses, and it's fine. One can observe patterns in people from different places on the earth without making the illogical jump to say, well, then if black people have bigger lips, then slavery is okay. That's just a non sequitur anyway. So we should be able to admit all of those biological facts.

In my head, I put that in the category of studying populations. I distinguish between populations and race only because if I turn on cable news and hear a conversation about race relations, I'm not going to hear anything about genetic underpinnings. I'm not going to hear anybody called mixed race. I'm not going to hear Barack Obama called a mixed race. I'm going to hear Barack Obama called black. What that tells me is that when people colloquially discuss, quote, unquote, race, they're not thinking of race, the biologically neat construct. They're not thinking of sickle cell regularities, and they're thinking of race as a social fact, as an intersubjective reality situated in a particular context, in this case, America.

But substitute wherever you're from.

26:52 Mark: So just in terms of getting what the distinction, you know, it's clear what the biological concept is, but what the other one is, and that's what these folks kind of disagree about is, you know, is it a coherent thing? Even Appiah, even though he's arguing against the ultimate existence of race, Right. It is not part of the metaphysical furniture in the way that Mills thinks, you know, it's part of social ontology. But still, people have ideas about race. He gives witchcraft, to use an analogy I've often used before, we may need to understand talk of witchcraft to understand how people respond cognitively and how they act in a culture that has a concept of witchcraft, whether or not we think there are in fact, any witches.

So that's interesting that you could potentially give a whole analysis of conflicts about social stuff and then say, yeah, but really the social stuff is not ultimately referring to anything. There is no deep matter in the way that Mills potentially thinks there is of what racial essence you maintain. And I think his example of Du Bois, him wanting to feel a kinship with all the black people of the world, not just the American descendants of slaves or people who actually were enslaved, since we're talking very beginning of the 20th century here, that a lot of those people were still alive.

But you Know all the people in Africa. There's no reason that you would think that there's any sort of essence that extends to those people as well. Now, we just earlier in the year read some Franz Fanon who had a similar thing, but he just characterized it as colonized peoples across the world, so it wouldn't even be. Actually, I think Du Bois makes this point too, that it's not what he's thinking of in the spirit of blackness or would also apply to oppressed Asians in America, et cetera.

28:36 Dylan: But there's something deeper about identity and how we gravitate towards groups that we identify with. The examples you give are true, but look the same kind of thing of being part of some kind of relative minority in a given context and gravitating to someone that you understand is like you happens all the time. When I was in high school, I was an exchange student in Japan for three weeks. And I was on a train in Honda, Japan, which was far from cosmopolitan Tokyo, where there were lots of different people from all over the world in Tokyo, it was like going to London or something like that, with a slightly.

Just different balance, but lots of different kinds. But in Honda, I didn't see another Western American for 10 or 15 days. And then I saw a guy on a train and we basically walked towards one another to talk to each other. You know, this might sound like a trivial example, but I give it because it is sort of trivial, is motorcycle riding. So I ride a motorcycle. And if you ride a motorcycle around, what you'll find out very quickly is that motorcyclists say hi to each other whenever they pass each other. They all give each other a hand signal you're going along, and you throw out your hand and you say, hey, man, all the time.

And I never knew that was true until I started riding a motorcycle. Just because you ride a motorcycle, you feel like, ah, we're part of the same group of people. There's something about us that is the same. You know, there's, of course, interseen. You know, some people are, well, I gotta be a Honda rider or I'm gonna be a Harley rider, whatever. There's. But it's. There's that kind of identity. So I think that there's something going on in all of these cases about the way in which you understand yourself, who you're a part of and who you recognize as being like you and forming a group with them.

30:26 Coleman: Interestingly, that's a point that transcends race entirely. So if a black motorcycle rider comes up to you. They might come up to you and not me because I don't ride a motorcycle.

30:35 Seth: Right.

30:35 Coleman: But I've also seen a few weeks ago, I live in Harlem, and there's a big black American population here, but there's also a big black, African and West Indian population. And you can learn to tell the difference between them. Not in the way they dress, sometimes in the facial structure, too. I've gotten good at telling what a West African or Ethiopian looks like. In any case, I was at a pharmacy late at night, and the grocer, the guy who worked at the pharmacy, was a short, short black dude from Africa. Really short, probably like 5 foot 4 or something.

And he got into an altercation with this buff black American dude who was probably a foot taller than him. And they were having a tug of war over some object. Maybe the guy was stealing it or was thought to be stealing it. And the little African dude says, you think I'm afraid of you? I'm from Africa. I'm from Africa. The implication being, like, you black people in America, you think you're hard, but you have no idea. I'm from that third world. Hard. Like, we are not the same, you and I. And it was impressive. I mean, obviously the tougher guy ended up just like, ripping it away from him and walking out.

But it was an interesting moment where it became clear that this guy did not view himself as a black person in America. He viewed himself as if he was from Ghana. Ghanaian, right. I have one friend actually from Jamaica who is very dark skinned, but if you call her black, she says, what are you talking about? I'm Jamaican, I'm not black. All that to say that the solidarity thing can as much undermine race as it can reify it.

32:12 Mark: Yeah. Maybe a stronger cutting point is what is your attitude towards your dogs? I just remember talking to. I had a student from. I don't remember where in Africa he was from. And he just didn't understand how in America, people, like, treated dogs like their little snuggle, their friends. Dogs are in the yard. They're a tool. Treating an animal as a person. That for him was like a complete cutting point that he could not understand us crazy Americans.

32:38 Coleman: I still kind of don't understand that. And I'm American.

32:42 Mark: All right.

32:44 Coleman: Someone's going to come after me on Twitter because I think dogs are cute sometimes, for the record, come after me.

32:50 Dylan: But those damn cats,

32:54 Mark: dog people and cat people, that is the next race war. I think I became a trans. I was a dog person, and then I got a Cat eventually and became a trans pet owner. So there you go. It is not in the blood.

33:08 Dylan: Mark is just fishing for hate mail right now.

33:10 Seth: He is.

33:13 Mark: Does anybody have anything else substantial points to make?

33:15 Seth: Clearly I don't worthwhile readings for sure. And I think we all agree that the last paper is kind of missing the point a little bit. Although I understand where it's coming from. Also there's probably some fairness to some of the criticisms of some of the folks in the Coleman, were you involved in the selection of the readings? I don't remember how this all evolved.

33:37 Mark: This was all Wes. I believe Wes had his agenda. Since he is not here, I don't think we're gonna continue. We're not gonna do number three, the gender one. I'm sure we'll read some of the stuff that we're gon read for that eventually sooner or later. Yeah. So I'm not sure what the agenda in putting these three together. Like I wish that I could make the simple distinction that Appiah and Mills are sort of doing more essay like you know, they're giving a narrative, they're giving a story, they're giving a history. And I draw a distinction between that and stating scientific facts.

Of course histories, they should relate to true things. But when you draw history, you're inevitably picking details. So right. Appiah picks. Here's some Thomas Jefferson, here's some Matthew Arnold, here's some Du Bois and goes down this list and traces this genealogy. Of course you could do that in many, many, many other ways and so tell a different story. That doesn't mean the practice is fundamentally bullshit. The fact, you know that it could have gone recently. It's just you use different epistemic standards to judge that kind of account.

Right. We love Nietzsche, but he fails if you hold him to a higher epistemic standard. You got to keep it to a certain semi literary standard of whether they're bullshitting or not. That's my diagnosis for why Sesardic sort of just doesn't get what the other guys are doing. But at the same time they do. Appiah and Mills do make scientific claims in there. Like Appiah claims that yeah, there are biological correlates of race, but there are lots of things you could want to do biologically with race. And none of them actually correspond to the races, you know, the four races or something.

Whereas Sesardic says no actually biologically, this division into four says recent research. We kind of just have to take his word for it. Unless we're going to follow this rabbit hole and Read his primary sources. Actually, that does correspond in some ways to our everyday notion of race. There are factual disagreements between these guys that I don't feel in a position to judge. It's just I see what Appiah and Mills are doing sort of literarily, historically, politically, as much more central to their projects. And so I just don't even care about resolving these empirical issues.

35:54 Seth: Exactly right.

35:55 Coleman: I read. I think his name is David Reich. He's a Harvard geneticist who wrote a book called Something like Who We Are and How We Got Here about the history of the human race, specifically on the question of race. And it was very rigorously done. And, you know, he's writing New York Times op eds summarizing the book and what he did say in the book. He said, essentially, when we feed the data into a computer model, we feed big data on every human genome we have from all over the earth into a big data model and ask the computer to carve it up in the way that makes most mathematical sense.

And I can't cache that out as someone who doesn't do that research. He says the computer carves it into our kind of, like, common sense notions of, like, black, white, Asian, Arab. So I'm willing to accept that that's under some construal, the most plausible way to carve up the human species. But when I hear that claim, I kind of hear it in the same way that we talk about plausible ways of cutting up the color wheel. Like, it's not totally an accident that we talk about blue and red and green and yellow. Obviously, if we wanted to what we call light blue, we could call blorf.

And so the spectrum that takes up the word blue would then be narrowed, and we could have more colors rather than less, if we chose to carve it up more finely. But there is a really plausible way, based on sort of how human cognition works, to carve it up into that many colors. It doesn't mean that it's not, in some sense, a social construct. We could do it differently. I've looked at a lot of data recently about disease, and it turns out white people are twice as likely in America to die of liver failure. Let's just posit that there's something genetic there, like something about the way that the average white person's genetics interacts with alcohol, makes their liver more likely to go out.

Let's just posit that that's true. And let's posit that there's a lot of facts like that. Is that where the question turns of Whether race is a social construct, it seems to me. No, because there have to be more facts like that that are intraracial within one race. If you compare the Ethiopians to the Ghanaians, two totally different sides of Africa, I'm sure that there are facts analogous to the liver difference. Right. Like there have to be. The question of how we parse those facts. The question of whether those facts entail that we need to draw a conceptual distinction between those people doesn't seem obvious to me.

This is why I think the biological arguments are a red herring. Because what magnitude of biological difference becomes a conceptual distinction? That's not at all a given to me.

38:45 Dylan: Yes, I think that's very well said. And you can pick other biological variants that would slice you up in different ways, even accounting for nutrition. If you just take average height. Right. You're going to end up with a completely different grouping of people across the world that won't always be regional, even.

39:06 Mark: Well, I hope you'll join me in saying screw indigo. Roy G. BV is enough. We don't need an extra thing between blue and violet. No. When's the last time you had an indigo crayon? How do you. You mix the blue and the red? It makes the violet. It doesn't make the indigo. Screw the indigo. That's the political point. I want to end on myself.

39:28 Coleman: Amen.

39:30 Dylan: There we go.

39:30 Seth: All right.

39:31 Mark: Next time we're going to talk about Rene Descartes, we're going to go back to a classic discourse on method and the rules for direction of the mind. So some sort of borderline science philosophy. How do you do this stuff? How do you think clearly about stuff? Our closing song is called Tired Skin. It's by Alejandro Escovedo. It's probably not actually about the social construction of race, but if you're very generous in your interpretation, you can make it address that.

39:56 Unknown speaker: Maybe.

39:57 Mark: I talked to Alejandro on Nakedly Examined Music Episode 60. Check that out at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com thanks, Coleman.

40:05 Dylan: Yeah, thanks, Coleman.

40:06 Coleman: Thanks for having me, guys.

40:08 Mark: Everybody should go and tell us what they think about this. At partiallyexaminedlife.com you can respond to the blog post associated with this episode. You can go comment on it on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn. You could email us directly pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com so many options. What else in this area? Or do you want to just never do anything in this area ever again? I'm open to both suggestions.

40:31 Coleman: Very briefly, my partner in crime, Jay Shapiro, will kill me if I don't plug our philosophy podcast Dilemma. Yes, it's called Dilemma. We deal with one moral philosophy dilemma every episode. Check it out.

40:42 Mark: Awesome. Thanks. Good night, everybody.

40:44 Dylan: Good night, Sam.

41:11 Unknown speaker: Take this old and berry tired skin? Wrap up a newborn baby? Keep her warm? Take this olden berry and tarnish string? Slip it on your finger and watch it shine? My feet hurt from walking round this room? My head hurts from thinking about you? Take this old and worn out violin? Hold it in your arms and make it sing? Footsteps come, then they go? Some of them are new and some are old? Read a story from this weathered book? We've a happy ending? We with your hair?

44:09 Dylan: Sam.