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The concept of race Author(s): Arun Saldanha Source: Geography, Vol. 96, No. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 27-33 Published by: Geographical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41320323 Accessed: 23-03-2017 03:16 UTC

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© Geography 2011 Geography Voi 96 Part 1 Spring 2011

The concept of race

Arun Saldanha

ABSTRACT: Over the last few decades there has

been some confusion in geographical education and

research about the category of race, a category that was once so central to all the social sciences. If

race often appears in quotes, does that mean it is

not real? If race is a social construction, why is

there still racism in institutions, feelings and

economic distribution? Can physical differences between human bodies be considered without

boxing them into the old colonial categories? This

article provides a critical account of some of the

mechanisms whereby differentiation happens along

racial lines. It does so by carefully avoiding the

reduction of race to genetic lines, while also taking

the biological dimension of race seriously. A

framework for approaching race and racism is

suggested that will hopefully help to clear the confusion.

Why race, still? A feeling shared by most educators and policy

makers is that race is no longer the big issue it

was during European imperialism and eugenic

science. In places as disparate as Dubai,

Singapore, Brasilia, Silicon Valley or Berlin,

focusing explicitly on the term race makes people

uneasy. Although socio-economic inequalities are

readily admitted to exist, the fact they are visible

across populations of physically varying bodies is

either denied or seen as inconsequential. The

reasoning is that if we would acknowledge

phenotype (visible physical differences) as

consequential for the reality of inequalities, we

already open the door for justifying them through

unequal inherited capacities for success. Here, I

argue that it is not only possible to study the

reality of phenotype but also necessary for anti-

racist pedagogy to do so (Saldanha, 2007). For

critical geographers racism still structures

humanity as it has for centuries, and in avoiding

tackling the issue head-on the inequalities of the

world will only deepen. In fact, the conceptual

confusion surrounding race is part of its

persistence. But first, a brief overview of race's

global inequalities will be helpful.

Geographers are singularly aware that in the last

two or three generations the world has become

more interconnected than ever before, this process

is seldom understood in its racialising effects

(exceptions include Anderson, 2007; Bonnett,

2000; Nayak, 2003). One obvious global process

that has racialising implications is migration. Most European settlers in the Americas, Asia and Africa

did their utmost to erect punishable spatial

boundaries between white and native (Duncan,

2007). In post-colonial Europe itself, from the

beginning of state-sponsored migration from

formerly colonised countries, non-white immigrants

have generally been at one remove from full

citizenship. While there is reason for celebrating

the cosmopolitanism and hybrid cultural forms

migratory movements led to, geographers continue

to show that institutional racism has the upper

hand - on scales from the body to the region

(Dwyer and Bressey, 2008). Immigrants' incomes,

education levels and political participation still lag

behind white mainstream society. Across Europe,

despite (and to an extent even because of) the

official and commercial celebrations of 'diversity',

racist populism has returned with a vengeance.

Nationalist and regionalist movements from Russia and Austria to Scotland and the Netherlands

define the nation or region they wish to preserve in

the face of globalisation as white, even if they

usually do so implicitly.

Hence the European Union's (EU) exaggerated 'fortress' response to asylum seekers from Africa

and Asia is ultimately based on defining Europe as

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Geography Vol 96 Part 1 Spring 2011 ® Geography 2011

Prostestors display signs

against the state of Arizona, USA, for their

recent immigration bill

against Mexicans who work as labourers in the

housing trade.

Photo: EIFIacodelNorte/

iStockphoto.

full, fragile - and white. Since the attacks on the

World Trade Center in New York in September 2001 and the declaration of a nebulous and

infinite 'war on terror', new obsessions with

security and control have colluded across the West

and elsewhere. Surveillance has become heavily

infused with xenophobia, directed especially

against Muslims. Research shows that racial

profiling is a logical implication of surveillance

technology (Gregory and Pred, 2006). The more

subtle discrimination and exploitation of Eastern

European immigrants in the EU has also to be called a form of racism insofar as it is facilitated

by visible difference, just like anti-Semitism

attempts to base itself on racial features. The

trafficking of Third World and Eastern European

girls to the red light districts of Western Europe is

an extreme example of the racial division of labour

that a racist society is based on. The racialisation

of sex work, and circumstances approaching

slavery, is further seen in the international sex

tourism of Thailand and elsewhere. German,

American or Chinese men have the purchasing

power to buy sex from economic or political

refugees originating from rural South East Asia. In

short, the uneven distribution of access to

transport and communications technologies is

itself racialising, because it shows that certain

bodies do the touring while other bodies do the work.

The racial division of labour in the United States is

well known. While some upward mobility of a

portion of every wave of immigrant is apparent,

illegal immigration from Latin America has become

a central political issue even while the economies

on both sides of the Mexican-US border depend

on the import of cheap labour. The United States is

of course a country almost entirely based on

modern migration, but the way in which it was

formed reveals some of the most far-reaching

racism in history. The original inhabitants of America were either killed or forced to become

semi-citizens and Africans were imported as

slaves. Today, African Americans, although having

recently helped elect a mixed-race President,

continue to bear the burden of the plantation

society. To any visitor to the United States, the exclusion of Native Americans and the racial

segregation in cities, media and schools is blatant.

Furthermore, this exclusion and segregation is to a

large extent condoned by urban policies and conservative intellectuals. It is in the United States

that the battle on racism remains most urgent, yet

no other country is innocent of deeply entrenched racism.

The geographical entrenchment of institutional

racism was apparent in the immediate and longer- term aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's devastation

of New Orleans in 2004. The scenes of stranded

people inexplicably left to their own accord by the

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© Geography 2011 Geography Vol 96 Part 1 Spring 2011

Border fence between El

Paso , USA and Juarez, Mexico.

Photo: El Flacodel Norte/

iStockphoto.

authorities, resembled scenes from sub-Saharan

Africa or Bangladesh - except that the dark-

skinned corpses and the desperate survivors in

second-hand clothing lived in the richest country of

the world. The lessons about systematic racism,

the outrageously expensive war being fought in the

Middle East, and the failure of the state that

Hurricane Katrina provided for the rest of the world

will not be so easily learnt in the United States

itself, because the country is systematic about

denying its racist system. An even deeper lesson

from the consequences of Hurricane Katrina - that

in modernity, what is disastrous about a natural

disaster is always man-made injustice against the

already disenfranchised - will take longer to sink in.

highways, the dumping of toxic waste, noise

pollution and other dangerous or unhealthy

environmental processes that are somehow never an issue for rich suburbs or downtown

skyscrapers. Environmental injustice occurs at the

global scale too. The immense amount of

electronic waste (e.g. computers, mobile phones)

from the rich are dumped and recycled in poorer countries like Pakistan and Ghana. All coastline or

delta populations will become more vulnerable to

rising sea levels, and most of these poorer and

denser populations lie outside the West. Labelling

these situations racialising effects is to leave the

question open as to whether the industrialists,

planners, real estate agents and consumers

The biggest and slowest human-induced disaster is

of course climate change. Global warming will

cause storms like Katrina to occur more frequently;

fluctuating levels will disturb canal and river

systems everywhere; in other places there will be

water shortage; and disease and chemical

pollutants will be more difficult to contain. What all

this means for segregated cities such as New

Orleans and Los Angeles is that African Americans

and Latinos will suffer disproportionately from

ecological transformations. Activists and

academics have gathered much evidence on what

is called environmental racism, including the unjust

and racialising effects of the construction of

Houses in New Orleans

destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Photo:

ctoocheck/stock.xchng.

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Geography Vol 96 Part 1 Spring 2011 ® Geography 2011

responsible for them are individually racist or not

(see Holifield et a/., 2010). Whether these people

are racist or not, be they non-white or non-Western,

what is beyond doubt is that the realities of their

actions systematically harm non-white people more

than they hurt white people.

The globalisation that migrants, tourists,

computers, waste, multinational companies and

governments bring about is therefore racist in its

systematic effects. Instead of binding humanity

into a 'global village' through instant

communication and intercultural understanding,

globalisation has disproportionally benefited

European and Europe-descended populations. Even

if many of the planetary troubles originated with

European capitalism and patriarcy, revealing

injustice is not simply blaming particular people.

Corporate elites and huge middle classes have also emerged in the Middle East, China, India and elsewhere who promote the same consumer

capitalism that encompasses developments like

climate change and sex tourism. What is important

is first to lay bare globalisation's unequal effects

on populations of the world. Once these effects

are known to be racist and sexist, we can say

systems, not individuals, are responsible and need

to be radically transformed. If it is true that

particular individuals justify and protect these

systems time and time again, they are well served

by an ignorance of the effects of their policies. It is

important to be extremely precise about the many

ways that racism operates.

Race and biology Why are the world's white people on the whole

better off? The continuing Eurocentric way of

thinking in educational and political institutions

has for a long time postulated that human

populations have adapted differently to the

different climates they settled in to evolve differing

capacities to think, work and appreciate art (Blaut,

1993). By the middle of the 19th century it could

no longer be seriously argued, against

overwhelming evidence of fertile mixed-race

offspring, that there was more than one human

species (Livingstone, 2008). Nevertheless the

desire to demonstrate that there exist significant differences between human 'races' - not

surprisingly, especially between sub-Saharan

Africans and northern Europeans - continues to

live on. For a critical geographer race is real, but that means 'races' are not.

While the majority of scientists today fortunately

emphasise genetic and behavioural

interconnectivity of human populations, a

combative minority perseveres in the conviction

that regionally evolved sub-species are

demonstrable. However careful to distinguish themselves from earlier racist science, these

scientists clearly find it as frightening as 19th-

century racists to accept the fact of constant gene

flow among all humans and hominids. Today's

racist scientists feel besieged by an allegedly

politically correct majority and thoroughly enjoy

kicking up dust, claiming it is data not ideology

that drives them. They seem incapable of

acknowledging that they reinforce the oldest and

silliest of white male anxieties (e.g. Sarich and

Miele, 2005). It is crucial for the public to discern

this bogus science. Data do not appear by

themselves. The refusal to examine where exactly one's own scientific interests and choices come

from is purely ideological and is central to the

persistence of racism. The reality of race depends

to a large extent on the insistence of the reality of 'races'.

There are fortunately more nuanced ways of

producing and interpreting biological data.

Geographers have to posit forcefully that genetic,

morphological and physiological variation is real

and can only be studied as a highly volatile planet-

wide system. Regardless of how much some may

try, human variation will never allow for any strict

and timeless classification. Borrowing from natural

history, especially the famous system of Linnaeus, racist science seeks to determine a fixed number

of 'races' within the human species. Taxonomy in

biology cannot avoid a fairly strong version of what

philosophy calls essentialism: each species,

genus, etc., has an unchanging essence which can

be found to varying degrees in individual

organisms. Charles Darwin was aware that this

taxonomic desire to place organisms into boxes

only works if one forgets the many intermediate

stages between species on the evolutionary 'tree';

the many hybrids; the fundamental sexual

differences within a species; the role environments

play in introducing variations, even during lifetimes;

and the many cases where it is unclear whether a

population is a variation, a separate species, or

something else entirely. In other words,

classification can exist only if we bracket all that is

interesting about life in the first place (Mayr,

2007).

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© Geography 2011 Geography Vol 96 Part 1 Spring 2011

A young man holds dismantled pieces of a

computer at Agbogbloshie dump , Ghana, which has

become a dumping ground for computers and electronic waste from all

over the developed world. Hundreds of tons of e-

waste end up here every month. It is broken apart,

and those components that can be sold on, are

salvaged. Photo: © Fernando Moleres/Panos Pictures.

Furthermore, physical variation between human

bodies is inseparable from what cultural practices

do to them. Barring a handful of hereditary

diseases, health and well-being are determined by

access during one's lifetime to medication, safe

food and clean water, hence ultimately one's

position in global capitalism. The extent to which

disabilities or mental instabilities impinge on

social interaction depends on cultural

understandings and a country's healthcare policy.

On the physiological level itself, therefore, human

variation can only be explained by bringing

economics and politics into the equation. Put more

strongly, social injustice is ingrained biologically

into human populations.

Bodies develop and experience very differently over

their lifetime. Bodies are trained, surgically altered,

enhanced with bypasses and spectacles, tattooed,

clothed, decorated, painted, erotically disrobed and

subjected to all sorts of media-fed pressures (for

example, anorexia). In a basic sense humans eat,

have sex and die just like all mammals (including

the many weird combinations of sex, death and

eating which are entirely useless for survival). In a

more exacting sense, however, the variation in

prohibitions, transgressions, kinship, ceremony are

what really matters for our daily lives. This variation is called cultural because it is learned not

inherited, but still it engages human physiology.

When we look at bodily variation carefully it

becomes not just practically but theoretically

impossible to say where 'biology' ends and where

'culture' begins. Human culture does not escape human biology, but necessarily uses 'it' as raw material out of which unprecedented forms are

continually invented.

Hence human biological variation is real,

unclassifiable and intrinsically cultural. What does

this mean for our understanding of race? I would

argue that it makes race something more than an

idea: race is a fleshy reality of mass and

movement. Some of the bodily features listed above cohere into identities which are racial. For

example, obesity rates may vary significantly

between white, Afro-Caribbean and Asian

populations, and certain ways of talking or singing

are recognised and marketed as black or regional.

The important point for anti-racist geography is

neither to shy away from talking about physiological

and ecological differences nor to become

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Geography Vol 96 Part 1 Spring 2011 ® Geography 2011 determinist about them. One instance of this is the

many researchers and African American doctors

(as well as, of course, pharmaceutical companies)

who are keen for treatment to become racially

sensitive. With a more complex and critical

understanding of human biology it becomes

possible to call such a field of pharmacogenetics

not just ideological and commercially driven, but

scientifically inadequate. A risk of heart disease,

for example, is directly caused by lifestyle not by

genes or skin hue. Race is an effect of health

inequalities spread over differently coloured

bodies, not a cause. Besides, there is no

dependable way of telling genetically who would be

the target group for these 'ethnic drugs'.

A biological perspective on the human species has

to be resolutely multidimensional and include

culture, history and economic globalisation.

Biologists are themselves gradually understanding

that nothing about life's complexity can be reduced

to the quasi-metaphysical notion of 'natural

selection', with 'selfish genes' directing material

processes from their little hideouts, unperturbed by

what goes on at smaller and larger levels of

physical organisation. Intra-species phenotypic

variations are obviously a key topic for biology and

there are ways to take them seriously that undermine racist science.

Getting real about race By focusing on the concept of race, and assuming

that the reality of racism followed from it, the

answer to the question 'what is race?' has in

recent geography tended towards philosophical

idealism: race is an idea. More precisely, like other

phenomena from science to the state and

menstruation, race is metaphorically called a

'social construction' (Jackson and Penrose, 1993). What is race then constructed from? Social

interactions, presumably, but what is social

interaction? The production of meanings, we might

say, but who produces and circulates these

meanings? People, probably. But are those people

not bodies with certain shapes, colours, desires,

illnesses? Isn't it precisely those material features

that are swept up in the social constructions of

race, sex, health? How can they be simultaneously

the material and the objective of the constructing?

Unpacking the term 'social construction' leads to

complicated and age-old philosophical discussions

about the nature of reality and the language to

describe it. Why was it so important anyway to

assert the constructedness of everything?

For feminist and anti-racist geographers, social

construction was from the start a politically salient

decision. If social reality is shown to be far from

'natural', constructed specifically by those who

benefit from calling it natural, then it can be

changed. For a just society, race and sex are the

quintessential constructions that should be

exposed as fallacious. If you would suppose there

really exists some indisputable bedrock of material differences on which race and sex are founded,

you already succumb to accepting some states of

affairs as inevitable. The strong social-

constructionist political view is to deny the

relevance of any knowledge of physical bodies for

politics, since it is based on the (scientific)

supposition that bodies can be known. However,

we do not have to suppose that bodies are fully

transparent to knowledge. Bodies beckon

knowledge onwards forever into their ever-receding

depths, requiring from knowledge constant

invention. Instead of hitting a bedrock (this is

race), science and politics are ongoing explorations

through the body rather like the science-fiction

movie Fantastic Voyage.

Hence race is not constructed merely from ideas or

meanings and not even only by people, but it is

constructed by and in material reality itself. There

are realities of trade, migration, conquest and

slavery, and then racist ideas of inevitable

superiority and inferiority emerge to make sense of

and maintain those realities. From Marx onwards,

philosophical realism has been committed to

change by understanding ideas to be secondary in relation to the material circumstances in which

they participate. This is not to say that a realist

cannot study a reality - say, the genocide of the

Jews or the Vietnamese minority and Cambodian

dissidents under the Khmer Rouge - that is at

least partially triggered by ideas. Nevertheless

ideas have to negotiate their way through an

immense thicket of heterogeneous processes in order to take effect. Indeed, as we see from Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans and

anthropogenic climate change, there are racist

realities that are triggered not by clearly

identifiable ideas at all, but by forces of so-called

'nature'. Human-biophysical systems of unequal

distributions of power are what matter first. Race

is mostly constituted of racialising effects of

processes that far exceed people and meanings.

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© Geography 2011 Geography Vol 96 Part 1 Spring 2011

Race is always more... Getting real about race means understanding race

perhaps above all as irreducible. Race is always

more than mental conceptions, genotype,

phenotype or socio-economic inequality, although

some racial phenomena may be better explained

through one particular component. There are no

essential 'races', no differently evolved human

sub-species as racist typologists still try to argue -

even if genetic, physical and cultural variation in

the species and beyond can and should be studied

using non-essentialist and non-reductionist

methods. Anti-racism becomes more precise and

vigorous as we address the biological components

of race and racism. Not only can racist scientists

be defeated on their own turf, but the wide, sub-

and supra-human scope of institutional racism is

revealed. Darwin himself provides complex

conceptions of human life that are in some ways

more radically open to the future than is available

in the humanities (see Amin, 2010). Instead of the

conventional religious or liberal-humanist positions

that humans are fundamentally equal because they

are so in the eyes of God, the law or the market, anti-racism should be derived here as an ever-

changing geopolitical situation which does not

allow for such a priori principles. Dismantling

racism is still necessary in popular media

discourse and the lingering Eurocentrism of our

discipline, but sadly also in many other areas, such

as the environment and housing. In fact, without

changing the mechanisms behind racialising

effects - chiefly capitalism and patriarchy - it is

Utopian to think racism will disappear. Racism is

not simply prejudice. If only it were!

Acknowledgements This is an abridged version of a paper in the

Insights series of the Institute of Advanced Study

at Durham University, UK, where the author was

fortunate to be Fellow in 2008. Thanks go to the

anonymous reviewers and Stuart Lane for comments.

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m

Arun Saldanha Is Associate Professor In the

Department of Geography, University of

Minnesota, USA (email: saldanha9umn.edu).

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