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Constructing race: racialization, causal effects, or both?

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Abstract

Social constructionism about race is a common view, but there remain questions about what exactly constitutes constructed race. Some hold that our concepts and conceptual practices construct race, and some hold that the causal consequences of these concepts and conceptual practices also play a role. But there is a third option, which is that the causal effects of our concepts and conceptual practices constitute race, but not the concepts and conceptual practices themselves. This paper reconsiders an argument for the reality of race that grows out of the role of racial kinds in social scientific generalizations. It then uses recent work on the correlation of racial attitudes with behaviors to raise questions about the sufficiency, and perhaps also the necessity, of our concepts and conceptual practices in constituting constructed race, thus understood.

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Notes

  1. Glasgow and Woodward (2015) talk about racial amnesia (pp. 455–456).

  2. It is now standard for commentators on social construction to distinguish constitutive constructionist views from causal ones (e.g. Haslanger 1995; Hacking 1999; Diaz-Leon 2015).

  3. Note that neither the neither the simple CCP view nor the simple causal effects view insists upon the sufficiency of CCPs or causal effects (respectively) for racial kinds.

  4. Glasgow and Woodward (2015) defend an alternative, weaker form racial realism.

  5. Searle (2010) acknowledges “though ‘X counts as Y in C’ is one form of Status Function Declaration, there are also other forms” (19). Nonetheless, he claims “all of human institutional reality is created and maintained in existence by (representations that have the same logical form as) [Status Function] Declarations” (13).

  6. While Hacking (1986) seems to suggest the sufficiency of CCPs, in later work, he emphasizes elements beyond intentional action in the construction of human kinds (e.g. Hacking 2007).

  7. Question wording has shifted over time, from “Negroes” to “blacks” or “African Americans.”.

  8. Oswald et al. (2013) reported correlations using a different meta-analytic technique; the estimate of “r = .148” was computed from their data by Greenwald et al. (2015, p. 553, 555) for comparison. Oswald et al. dispute the estimate of the predictive validity of explicit measures (2013, p. 172).

  9. Cohen suggests that effect sizes from .1 to .3 be regarded as “small,” .3 to .5 as “medium,” and .5 and up as “large” (1988, pp. 79–81).

  10. In Mallon (ms), I argue that defenders of the relevance of small psychological effects might better secure their relevance by relaxing this assumption.

  11. Valian (1998) argues, similarly, for the accumulation of small events of bias into substantial disadvantage for women.

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  1. Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA

    Ron Mallon

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  1. Ron Mallon
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Mallon, R. Constructing race: racialization, causal effects, or both?. Philos Stud 175, 1039–1056 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1069-8

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