Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T20:16:27.924Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A Radical Solution to the Race Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Abstract

It has become customary among philosophers and biologists to claim that folk racial classification has no biological basis. This paper attempts to debunk that view. In this paper I show that ‘race’, as used in current US race talk, picks out a biologically real entity. I do this by first showing that ‘race’, in this use, is not a kind term, but a proper name for a set of human population groups. Next, using recent human genetic clustering results, I show that this set of human population groups is a partition of human populations that I call ‘the Blumenbach partition’.

Type
Medical and Social Sciences
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank the following people for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Brian Donovan, Michael Ghiselin, Joshua Glasgow, Michael Hardimon, David Hills, Adam Hochman, Christopher Hom, Michael Hunter, Chike Jeffers, Helen Longino, Koffi Maglo, Roberta Millstein, Noah Rosenberg, Kenneth Taylor, Clinton Tolley, Neil van Leeuwen, Manuel Vargas, and Ward Watt. This research was funded by a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship and supplementary funding from the University of San Francisco. This research was completed while the author was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University.

References

Bertrand, Marianne, and Mullainathan, Sendhil. 2004. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” American Economic Review 94:9911013.10.1257/0002828042002561CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de la Cruz, G., and Brittingham, Angela. 2003. “The Arab Population: 2000.” Census 2000 Brief, US Census Bureau, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Dupré, John. 2008. “What Genes Are, and Why There Are No Genes for Race.” In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, ed. Koenig, Barbara, Lee, Sandra, and Richardson, Sarah, 3955. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Ennis, Sharon, Ríos-Vargas, Merarys, and Albert, Nora. 2011. “The Hispanic Population: 2010.” 2010 Census Briefs, US Census Bureau, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Feldman, Marcus, and Lewontin, Richard. 2008. “Race, Ancestry, and Medicine.” In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, ed. Koenig, Barbara, Lee, Sandra, and Richardson, Sarah, 89101. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Fiscella, Kevin, and Fremont, Allen. 2006. “Use of Geocoding and Surname Analysis to Estimate Race and Ethnicity.” Health Services Research 41:14821500.Google ScholarPubMed
Friedlaender, Jonathan, et al. 2008. “The Genetic Structure of Pacific Islanders.” PLoS Genetics 4:173–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Glasgow, Joshua. 2009. A Theory of Race. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Glasgow, Joshua, Shulman, Julie, and Covarrubias, Enrique. 2009. “The Ordinary Conception of Race in the United States and Its Relation to Racial Attitudes: A New Approach.” Journal of Cognition and Culture 9:1538.10.1163/156853709X414610CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graves, Joseph. 2004. The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. New York: Plume.Google Scholar
Hochman, Adam. 2013. “Against the New Racial Naturalism.” Journal of Philosophy 110:331–51.10.5840/jphil2013110625CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hofmann, Sigurd. 2010. “Exploring the Island of Superheavy Elements.” Physics 3:31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hourihan, Kathleen, Benjamin, Aaron, and Liu, Xiping. 2012. “A Cross-Race Effect in Metamemory: Predictions of Face Recognition Are More Accurate for Members of Our Own Race.” Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition 1:158–62.10.1016/j.jarmac.2012.06.004CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Humes, Karen, Jones, Nicholas, and Ramirez, Roberto. 2011. “Overview of Race and Hispanic Origin: 2010.” 2010 Census Briefs, US Census Bureau, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Kittles, Rick, and Weiss, Kenneth. 2003. “Race, Ancestry, and Genes: Implications for Defining Disease Risk.” Annual Reviews: Genomics and Human Genetics 4:3369.Google ScholarPubMed
Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Li, Jun, et al. 2008. “Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation.” Science 319:11001104.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Maglo, Koffi. 2011. “The Case against Biological Realism about Race: From Darwin to the Post-genomic Era.” Perspectives on Science 19:361–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McEvoy, Brian, Lind, Joanne, Wang, Eric, Moyzis, Robert, Visscher, Peter, Pellekaan, Sheila van Holst, and Wilton, Alan. 2010. “Whole-Genome Genetic Diversity in a Sample of Australians with Deep Aboriginal Ancestry.” American Journal of Human Genetics 87:297305.10.1016/j.ajhg.2010.07.008CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Millstein, Roberta. 2010. “The Concepts of Population and Metapopulation in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology.” In Evolution since Darwin: The First 150 Years, ed. Bell, Michael, Futuyma, Douglas, Eanes, Walter, and Levinton, Jeffrey, 6186. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.Google Scholar
Morning, Ann. 2011. The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Outlaw, Lucius. 1990. “Toward a Critical Theory of Race.” In Anatomy of Racism, ed. Goldberg, David, 5882. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Pemberton, Trevor, DeGiorgio, Michael, and Rosenberg, Noah. 2013. “Population Structure in a Comprehensive Genomic Data Set on Human Microsatellite Variation.” G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics 3:891907.10.1534/g3.113.005728CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Purnell, Thomas, Idsari, William, and Baugh, John. 1999. “Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18:1030.10.1177/0261927X99018001002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Root, Michael. 2000. “How We Divide the World.” Philosophy of Science 67 (Proceedings): S628S639.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberg, Noah, Mahajan, Saurabh, Ramachandran, Sohini, Zhao, Chengfeng, Pritchard, Jonathan, and Feldman, Marcus. 2005. “Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure.” PLoS Genetics 1:660–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosenberg, Noah, Pritchard, Jonathan, Weber, James, Cann, Howard, Kidd, Kenneth, Zhivotovsky, Lev, and Feldman, Marcus. 2002. “Genetic Structure of Human Populations.” Science 298:2381–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Spencer, Quayshawn. 2012. “What ‘Biological Racial Realism’ Should Mean.” Philosophical Studies 159:181204.10.1007/s11098-011-9697-2CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tishkoff, Sarah, et al. 2009. “The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans.” Science 324:1035–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zack, Naomi. 2002. Philosophy of Science and Race. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar