Review of What Is Race? Four Philosophical Views

I just finished reading the book What Is Race? Four Philosophical Views (Oxford University Press, 2019). It’s an excellent treatment of a surprisingly difficult topic. When people ordinarily speak of race, what exactly are they referring to? Is it something real, or not? Is it determined by biology, or power dynamics, or culture, or something else? The contributors of this volume tackle these questions with philosophical rigor. Although they share a substantial degree in common, they each land on a different conclusion. Here’s my attempt to briefly summarize and evaluate each view.

View #1: Political Constructionism. Sally Haslanger uses the term Social/Political Race (SPR) to define “race” as a group imagined to have certain bodily features (such as skin color) indicating ancestral links to a certain geographical region, which also mark this group as occupying a certain social position within an ideological hierarchy, such that this group experiences systematic privilege or subordination (25-26). Or as Ta-Nehisi Coates once put it, “race is the child of racism, not the father.” Haslanger is explicit in her reliance on critical social theory. On her understanding, it is impossible to define race without reference to oppression. To eliminate racism is to eliminate race, and thus the very idea of racial equality is oxymoronic.

View #2: Cultural Constructionism. Chike Jeffers is closely aligned with Haslanger in many ways. Both authors offer a social constructionist account of race. Both recognize that our current racial system has its origins in early-modern European imperialism. But Jeffers differs in envisioning a post-racist future for race. He believes that racial equality is not only possible, but morally necessary. Once the racial injustices of the past have been corrected, he sees races persisting as distinct cultural groups that each take pride in their own racial identity (even whites, someday), while harmoniously co-existing with other races.

View #3: Biological Realism. Quayshawn Spencer’s view is to be sharply distinguished from biological essentialism, which holds that races reflect different biologically-based intellectual and moral capacities (in fact, all the contributors are united in rejecting biological essentialism). Instead, Spencer holds that when people today talk about race, they are ordinarily referring to the system of classification standardized by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which identifies five races: American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White (79). This classification system aligns with recent genetic research by Noah Rosenberg, who identified five genetic clusters within the global population, which Spencer refers to as human continental populations (99).

View #4: Anti-Realism or Basic Racial Realism. Joshua Glasgow takes races as ordinarily understood to be groups distinguished by a set of certain visible traits (117). He recognizes that people often associate race with ancestry and geography, but when these assumptions come into conflict, people tend to favor visible traits as the governing criteria. As such, Glasgow is convinced that race doesn’t actually exist; visible traits of every group exist on a spectrum, and the boundaries we set for each group are ultimately arbitrary. But even if race is a fiction, it remains the case that racialized groups are a fact. As a result of the widespread but mistaken historic belief in races, people have been mistreated in numerous ways, with the effects of such mistreatment persisting to this day. Glasgow allows for another possibility besides anti-realism: it may be that races are real, but only in a very basic and irrelevant way. That is, the visible traits that mark race are real, and they do have their source in biology, but we are free to choose how we categorize on the basis of such traits. Thus, any given person can belong to multiple races simultaneously, depending on the racialization system our society happens to adopt.

In my opinion, Haslanger’s view is the most problematic. On her understanding, racial justice isn’t merely a practical impossibility, it’s logically incoherent. There will never come a time when races as we understand them can co-exist in a state of equality. She offers a couple of proposals for moving forward, such as adopting new racial terminology and advancing debunking accounts of race (such as her own), but she also acknowledges that our current racial terminology is deeply entrenched. This leaves the reader with an inescapable sense of pessimism.

Spencer gives an admirable account of biological realism, but it has difficulties of its own. The other contributors highlight the so-called “mismatch objection,” referring to the fact that our ordinary racial categorizations don’t match up perfectly with genetic population groups. For example, South Asians belong to the same Eurasian genetic group as Europeans, but the OMB groups them with East Asians. And to make matters more difficult (and perhaps fatal) for Spencer’s case, the OMB revised its classification system in 2024 with Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 (SPD 15), adding the categories of Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) and Hispanic/Latino. This moves the OMB closer to common sense but further from biological reality.

And against Glasgow’s basic racial realist account, Jeffers points out that for any individual, there are actually an infinite number of possible racial categorizations. So if basic racial realism (or at least, this unqualified version of it) is true, then it follows that every person belongs to an infinite number of races—which is absurd. Glasgow’s anti-realism holds more promise, but functionally it seems almost indistinguishable from social constructionism. Glasgow offers a number of hypothetical scenarios in which the social conditions that constructionists claim give rise to race are removed (e.g., all racial inequalities are equalized, or all babies are raised without knowledge of cultural differences between races, etc.). In the absence of such conditions, could the ordinary (and mistaken) concept of race continue to exist? Glasgow says yes, while social constructionists would allegedly say no (133-134). But this seems to assume that social constructionists believe that the ordinary view of race is social constructionism. To the contrary, for a social constructionist, even false beliefs about race can (and in fact did) create real races. The only difference, then, between Glasgow and the constructionists is whether the groups emerging from mistaken beliefs and practices about race are better called racialized groups or actual races. I’m OK with the latter.

So that leaves me agreeing mostly with Chike Jeffers’s cultural constructionism. I am hopeful about his vision of a post-racist future. But is he correct that, in such a future, races would persist on the basis of cultural differences? Consider the alternative: if races are not seen as culturally distinct, then on what basis would they maintain their distinctness over time? At present, every racial group in the U.S. shows a strong preference for racial endogamy (marrying within one’s own race). Aside from racial bias, this is due largely to the widespread preference for a shared culture with one’s spouse. So if culture is not the defining feature of race in a post-racist future, then interracial marriages would inevitably increase. As a result, each subsequent generation would become more racially mixed, diminishing the visible differences associated with race, and eventually eliminating race itself. This seems like a good outcome to me.

On the other hand, if Jeffers is right that races will continue to be defined culturally, then we can expect racial endogamy preferences to persist into the future, even after the end of racism. As a result, the visible traits marking race will continue (more or less) along cultural lines. This is arguably a more likely outcome than the eliminativist scenario, but it raises some challenges. In particular, would it risk stigmatizing interracial marriages or individuals who cross-culturally assimilate? This is a valid concern, but in a future without racial hostility, we could perhaps imagine such cases being accepted as legitimate exceptions to the rule. As an analogy, consider how the Christian church treats marriage and singleness. Both are considered legitimate vocations, and while there are exceptional cases when singleness may be preferred (the apostle Paul is an obvious example), marriage is still treated as the default majority practice. Indeed, it must be treated as such, if a population is to maintain itself numerically over time. So it seems to me that Jeffers’s cultural constructionism can more or less adequately handle the objections raised against it. Whether it is preferable to the long-term eliminativist option is less clear to me, but I could imagine a racially just society moving in either direction.

I should add that this volume is a work of metaphysics, not public policy. The authors give occasional nods to possible political solutions for correcting historic racial injustices, but they do not elaborate on the extent to which such solutions should be color-blind or race-conscious. Still, I think the metaphysical question needs to be addressed if we are to adequately confront the political questions. In that regard, the authors have done us an invaluable service.