Race and Gender

12

What Is Race? What Is Gender?

What do the U.S. Census, college application forms, and online dating websites have in common? They are all very keen to find out your sex, race, and age. The social and personal significance of these three categories can hardly be overestimated. Of these three, age is clear-cut and not open to debate. Once we know your date of birth, your age is settled. Whether you “feel like a 20-year-old” or whether people treat you as a teenager is irrelevant. But sex and race are much more complicated. The Common Application for U.S. colleges recently replaced “sex” with “sex assigned at birth” and added a field on gender identity. The first U.S. Census—the census of 1790—had three non-overlapping socio-racial categories: “Free whites,” “All other free persons,” and “Slaves.” Starting in 2000, the census allowed people to identify with more than one race. The past decennial census, in 2010, had six single-race categories (including “Some other race”), with 3 percent of Americans choosing from more than one category.

You are, say, an Asian woman. Like it or not, your race and sex have significantly affected how people relate to you and how you think of yourself. But what is it to be Asian? Or a woman? The readings in this chapter grapple with these questions.

Out of Africa

Your ancestors lived in Africa. Maybe your parents live there today, if you are an immigrant from Nigeria. But even if your great great . . . great great grandparents came to America on the Mayflower and your family lives in Ohio, your ancestry eventually reaches back to Africa. That is where modern humans—Homo sapiens—evolved, about 200,000 years ago.

According to the currently favored theory, the most significant wave of human migration out of Africa occurred between 80,000 and 40,000 years ago. The migrants spread into Europe, Asia, and Australia around 50,000 years ago and reached the Americas relatively recently, around 15,000 years ago. When groups of the same species become isolated from each other, for instance by oceans and mountains, they begin to genetically diverge. Some of this divergence will be due to random factors that have limited effects on reproductive success, but natural selection will also play a role, especially if the environments of the separated groups are significantly different. In the case of modern humans, increased genetic diversity arose via interbreeding with at least two extinct kinds of human: Neanderthals in Europe and Asia, and Denisovans in Asia. The visible marks of these events are the anatomical differences between individuals that, taken together, correlate (imperfectly) with their geographic ancestry. There are invisible marks too, the extent of them only recently revealed by modern genomics. Your DNA contains complex patterns of genetic variants (alleles) that indicate whether your distant ancestors stayed in (sub-Saharan) Africa or settled in Eurasia (here stipulated to be North Africa/Europe/Asia east and south of the Himalayas 1 ), East Asia, Oceania (which includes Australia and the Pacific Islands), or the Americas. 2 You may well have significant ancestry from more than one of these groups; for instance, according to one estimate, the ancestry of the average African American is 73 percent African, 24 percent Eurasian (specifically, European), and 1 percent Native American. 3 If you want to find this sort of thing out about yourself, you can pay a modest fee and mail a saliva sample to a personal genomics company.

For brevity, let’s say that if your ancestry is predominantly African (Eurasian, American, . . .), then you are African (Eurasian, American, . . .). Although Africans, Eurasians, Americans, East Asians, and Oceanians carry a signature of their origins in their DNA, there are no genes shared by all and only those people who belong to one of these five groups. So there are no “East Asian” genes, although (to take just one example) East Asians are especially unlikely to have alleles that allow the digestion of milk beyond childhood.

People living in the nineteenth century would have been Oceanian, East Asian, and so on, even if humanity had blown itself up in the twentieth century and never developed the Out of Africa theory or DNA sequencing techniques. In that sense, the five categories are perfectly “objective.” But biology provides no basis for thinking that these categories “carve nature at the joints” 4 : the distinction between Africans and Eurasians is more like the distinction between water from different ocean regions than that between the elements nickel and iron. Someone (like former U.S. President Barack Obama) whose ancestry is evenly split between African and Eurasian is in no interesting biological sense a “mixture” of purer ingredients. Obama is not like bronze, a mixture or alloy of pure nickel and iron; he is more like a blend of samples from different parts of the Pacific. Chemically, the ocean waters that are blended are just as “mixed” as the resulting blend.

A different but equally important point is that the fivefold division is just one of many that can be extracted from the genetic data and the facts about human migrations. We could divide humanity more coarsely (say, between the Africans and the rest) or much more finely, dividing the Africans or Eurasians into numerous geographically based subgroups. Using the same basic genetic techniques, we might even be able to tell that your ancestors lived in a remote village in northeastern Italy. As with science in general, researchers don’t all agree on the fine details of genetics and human history. But the real controversy starts when we ask how our everyday racial categories fit into the broad-brush scientific picture just sketched. One possibility is that the five “continental” categories simply are (some of) the racial categories recognized in everyday life, although ordinary people use different names: “black” instead of “African,” “white/Caucasian” instead of “Eurasian,” “Asian” instead of “East Asian,” “Native American” instead of “American,” “Pacific Islander” instead of “Oceanian.” 5 However, Barack Obama is black, despite the fact that his mother is white. And the notorious “one drop rule” prevalent in the southern United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries labeled a person with any African ancestry as black (a “Negro,” in the language of the time). Focusing on the immense social significance that has been attached to race, racial terms can look more like ways of classifying people as subordinate or privileged, like “serf” or “aristocrat,” than as belonging to (relatively superficial) human ancestral groups.

At least a serf can hope for upward mobility, but historically human races were supposed to correspond to levels in some natural (or perhaps divine) immutable hierarchy of basic human types, with whites at the top. For example, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (who founded modern biological classification), characterized what he called “Homo sapiens asiaticus” as “yellow, melancholy, greedy. Hair black. Eyes dark. Severe, haughty, desirous. Covered by loose garments. Ruled by opinion.” 6 If something like that is built in to the meaning of “Asian” and other ordinary words for races, then a better comparison is with terms such as “angel” and “demon.” There really were serfs and aristocrats, but there never were any angels or demons (despite the fact that some people claimed to have seen them).

This gives us (at least) three positions: races are populations with a common ancient ancestry, social categories of some kind, or nothing at all. The first two are forms of realism about race; the latter is eliminativism about race, so called because races have been “eliminated” from the categories that really apply to things. According to the racial eliminativist, no one is white or Asian, just as no one is an angel or a demon. All three positions are represented in the selections: Quayshawn Spencer uses the genetic results just discussed to defend the first, 7 and Anthony Appiah defends the third. The second position is represented by Sally Haslanger—but with a twist.

Suppose that Appiah is right, and that no one belongs to any race. Then what? Should we continue to classify people as white, Asian, and so on, even though no one really is white or Asian? Suppose, alternatively, that Spencer is right, and our racial classifications are often correct, because people belong to the appropriate ancestral/biological category. Given the pernicious influence that biological theories of race have had in the past, is it really a good idea to think of our fellow humans as members of different biological kinds? (Similar questions could be raised if we suppose that races are like the social categories of serf and aristocrat.) Whatever races turn out to be, there is the further question of how we should continue to talk.

And this is where Haslanger joins the debate. She is not primarily concerned to find out what races are, but how we should use terms like “white race” and “Asian race” in a way that will “contribute to empowering critical social agents” (see page 569 (chapter12-4.xhtml#page_569) of this anthology). And, as we will shortly see, Haslanger takes a similar approach to the terms “man” and “woman.”

Sex and Gender

Eliminativism about race is endorsed by a number of eminent biologists. But biologists do not seriously entertain eliminativism about sex (the categories of male and female). Any textbook will tell you that humans come in two main varieties, males and females. (This is compatible with the occasional case of neither or both. 8 ) Male and female humans differ not just in sexual organs but also in many other respects; for example, size, the presence of breasts, and distribution of body hair. In biological terminology, our species (like many others) is sexually dimorphic.

With few exceptions, humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes in their cells, essentially packages of DNA. 9 The two sex chromosomes form one of these pairs, with one chromosome inherited from the father and the other from the mother. A typical human female has two X chromosomes (and so is genetically female); a typical male has one X and one Y chromosome. 10 A typical human female is externally female, having a distinctive cluster of external bodily features: breasts (in the adult), vagina, a smaller forehead, . . . ; a typical male is externally male. A typical human female is gonadally female, with ovaries (female gonads) that produce eggs; a typical male is gonadally male, with testes that produce sperm. A typical human female is sexually attracted to males, and vice versa for typical males —this is their sexual orientation. Finally, a typical human female thinks of herself as female, or “identifies as” female, and vice versa for typical males—this is their sexual identity. The following mostly go together: XX, external female, gonadal female, sexual orientation to males, female sexual identity, with a similar clustering for typical males. Do they always go together? The common phenomenon of homosexuality shows that they don’t. But this is just the tip of the iceberg: almost every other combination can occur. 11 Someone with a condition called complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) is XY and gonadally male (with undescended testes) but externally female, and will likely have an attraction to males and a female sexual identity. Someone with XX male syndrome is XX but gonadally male and usually externally male with a male sexual identity. And there are plenty more examples.

Scientists do not usually waste time debating whether someone with CAIS is really female—the necessary distinctions can be made using the appropriate technical terms (“XY,” “externally female,” and so on). Still, although “female” (like most other terms) cannot be precisely defined, it’s still very useful for theorizing about the biological world.

Unlike “XY,” “externally female,” and so forth, “male” and “female” are not special bits of scientific jargon but words of ordinary English. “Female” and “male,” as they appear in biology and psychology journals, seem to mean whatever they mean on birth certificates or college application forms. However, outside the sciences (and the police force), people are rarely called “female” or “male”: instead they are called “women,” “girls,” “men,” or “boys.” So what’s the relation between, say, being a woman and being female?

One obvious answer, found in dictionaries, is that a woman is an adult human female. Suppose that is right. It makes perfect sense to suppose that there are adult human females who live isolated from any kind of society: presumably there have been some real examples over the course of 200,000 years of human history. Being an adult human female, then, is not something that requires the presence of social organizations, cultural expectations and standards, power relations, or anything like that. So being a woman doesn’t require that either: “woman” does not pick out a social category (or social property). In that respect, “woman” is quite unlike “queen,” “policewoman,” or “wife”—without society, there are no queens, policewomen, or wives.

An obvious answer might not be the right answer. And, in this case, the obvious answer has been disputed. As the philosopher Mari Mikkola puts it:

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/gender distinction. 12

What is the “sex/gender distinction”? Roughly, it is the distinction between sex (male, female, and related biological categories such as XY, externally female, etc.) and (as Sally Haslanger says in her essay) the “social meaning of sex” (p. 563 (chapter12-4.xhtml#page_563)). So, for example, if, in society A, adult human females are expected to look after the children and work in the fields, and adult human males are expected to wear pants and take all the political decisions, then these are facts about gender (in society A)—facts about the social meaning or significance attaching to biological categories. 13

If the sex/gender distinction is explained this way, it is compatible with the obvious answer above, that someone is a woman if and only if she is an adult human female. If the obvious answer is right, then the category picked out by “woman” lies on the sex side of the sex/gender distinction: the fact that Eve is a woman is simply a biological fact, not a fact about gender. But of course that is not to deny that there are facts about gender, that there is something on the gender side of the sex/gender distinction —perhaps Eve is expected to help Adam and to obey him.

However, as the quotation from Mikkola shows, some writers who attach a lot of importance to the sex/gender distinction have done so because they disagree with the obvious answer. According to them, the category of women is not the same as the category of adult human females or any other biological category. What is it, then? Perhaps some sort of social category, something on the gender side of the sex/gender distinction, but there are other options. In her essay, Elizabeth Barnes addresses this issue. She first argues that being a woman is not a biological category and then examines some leading proposals for what it might be instead. She argues that they are all problematic. According to Barnes, we need an answer to the question “What is a woman?” but no existing answers are satisfactory.

In her essay, Haslanger is concerned with the same issues but (as with race) from a more prescriptive angle. Rather than investigating what it is to be a woman (or to be white), she asks what the word “woman” (or “white”) should pick out, given that we have “the goal of understanding racial and sexual oppression, and of achieving sexual and racial equality” (p. 568 (chapter12 4.xhtml#page_568)). She recommends a “terminological shift,” so that “woman” picks out a kind of subordinated social category. With the shift made, “part of the project of feminism [is] to bring about a day when there are no more women (though, of course, we should not aim to do away with females!)” (pp. 567–68 (chapter12-4.xhtml#page_567)).

Some of the chapters in this anthology concern issues that have preoccupied philosophers since ancient Greece. But philosophy is a living subject and, as this chapter shows, new questions and topics can come to seem just as important and puzzling as the old ones.