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Race beyond Social Construction

Useful though it may once have been for denaturalizing race, the well-worn piety that race is a social construct (with exculpatory quotation marks to prove it) does not get us very far. It simply begs further questions: 'Under what circumstances was (or is) race constructed?'; 'Has race been differently constructed under different circumstances?', and so on.

Patrick Wolfe, 'Race and the Trace of History' (2011: 274)

In 2017, Meryl Streep presided over the jury of the Berlin Film Festival.1 During a press conference and in answer to a question from an Egyptian journalist, she remarked,

I don't know very much about, honestly, the Middle East, ... and yet I've played a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures. And the thing I notice is that we're all - I mean there is a core of humanity that travels right through every culture, and after all, we're all from Africa originally, you know? We're all Berliners, we're all Africans, really. (Streep 2016)

Although she denies this, Streep's comments were widely understood to be an explanation for the all-white composition of the film festival jury. 'We're all Africans, really', is a particularly dismissive response to the observation of the structural inequalities that result in all-white conference panels, white-dominated media, the white curriculum, and the overwhelming whiteness of the majority of parliaments in countries whose population is increasingly multiracial.

Speaking clearly about race is difficult, as this episode shows. It always invites multiple and competing readings. Because of its inherent instability, lending itself to myriad interpretations, race is a particularly polyvalent term or, as mentioned in the Introduction, a 'sliding signifier' (S. Hall 2017). The body of knowledge you may be thinking about might be completely different to the political implications I have in mind or separate again from the feeling hearing 'We're all Africans, really', spoken by Meryl Streep might have for another person, a victim of modern-day enslavement in Libya, say. But even the comment itself contains several layers. The article Streep wrote in defence of her remarks emphasized the cultural richness of the Berlin Film Festival, which screens films from around the world. She explained that the comment was made in response to a question about Middle Eastern cinema. So, while it seems strange that what came to Streep's mind was a genetic study about DNA and human evolution, it reveals that talk of race and talk of culture are regularly exchanged in commonsense discourse. The reaching for the standard colourblind response - we are all one, human race - papers over the undeniable fact that no number of films from around the world overcomes the persistence of white domination over the Eurocentric culture industry. It is telling too that the preceding words - 'We're all Berliners' - a repurposing of the words of another American in Berlin, John F. Kennedy, were not seized upon in the same way. We know that we are precisely not all Berliners; some of us are being confined in camps on the outer fringes of eastern Europe built to stop too many people from becoming Berliners.

Biological ideas of race never completely disappeared from either scientific or public discourse. However, the more apparent resurgence of racial science, and the link to what its popular proponents call 'race realism', is apparent in genetic science and medicine (Roberts 2012) and in the development of technologies of security and surveillance for the control both of 'unruly' racialized groups (Vitale and Jefferson 2016) and of migrants and asylum seekers at the highly policed borders of the Global North (Andersson 2016). It is also a powerful narrative that propels the white supremacist right forward, attaching itself to the conspiracies of 'white genocide' and 'great replacement' that construe ethnonational populations as organically weakened by culturally inferior imposters, most prominently today Muslims (Camus 2015). Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist terrorist who murdered fifty-one Muslim worshippers in Christchurch in March 2019, wrote a manifesto entitled 'The Great Replacement' in which he interviewed himself on the motives for the attack: 'Was the attack anti-immigration in origin? Yes, beyond all doubt, anti-immigration, anti-ethnic replacement and anti-cultural replacement.'

In this chapter, I make the case that the current terms available in the public sphere to discuss race are not fit for purpose. As I stated in the Introduction, racial literacy is not a feature of western educational systems, whose remit is largely to recreate the Eurocentric nation-state in its own image. Race and racism, therefore, remain special interest subjects. We are not, then, equipped with the tools necessary for challenging racial pseudoscience discourse. For example, there was barely a murmur when, in October 2019, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton proposed that DNA testing is required to verify the Australian citizenship claims of women currently trapped in Syria after the fall of the Islamic State (SBS 2019). Of course, there is no link between DNA and citizenship, yet what Dutton's statement reveals is that it is easy to conflate the two because both are commonly understood to be 'about race'.

The current terms available in the public sphere to discuss race are not fit for purpose.

In the next chapter, I discuss the relationship between racial structures and racist practices such as violence, discrimination, and exclusion in greater detail. For now, I suggest that the failure to connect racism to race as a regime of power allows singular definitions of race as biological categories to define public conversations. Because of the failure to unearth the many cross-cutting functions of race as a regime of power, we have come to see eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pseudoscientific racial classifications as synonymous with race in general. This has two consequences which are relevant to our discussion here. First, we have been unable to interrogate how race is assembled from a multiplicity of rationales, including the geographical, the religious, the cultural, the visual, and the biological, all of which intersect with other regimes of power, most significantly gender. Second, this has paradoxically allowed a biological understanding of race to be retained, particularly within scientific and medical discourses, with a flow-on effect on everyday ways of understanding and talking about human difference.

One of the most serious problems for us today is that what I have referred to as the 'silence about race' has allowed biological race, in a similar fashion to gender determinism, to become a currency on the 'marketplace of ideas' (A. Lentin 2008). Though it never left, with the renewed élan of white supremacy, race seems to have found new wings in these 'post-postracial' times, well after the waning of the racial optimism of the early years of the Obama era. In the rest of this chapter, I explore the context in which ideas of racial science are resurgent. I argue that we must find ways of countering them that go beyond what I shall suggest is the insufficient proposition that race is a social construct that has no basis in scientific fact. This is a truism that only takes us so far, and which risks misappropriation by those with anything but antiracist intentions. I query how we can retain the conceptual utility of race as something that is necessary to understand in the aim of achieving better historical, political, and sociological literacy, while rejecting the false premises of racial science. These inquiries might help us makes sense of the persistent political and social impact that race continues to have.

Eugenics redux

In May 2018, the Monash Bioethics Review published an article by a University of San Diego assistant professor of philosophy, Jonathan Anomaly, titled 'Defending Eugenics', in which he argues that 'future people would be better off if people with heritable traits that we value had a greater proportion of children' (Anomaly 2018: 25). Anomaly attempts to avoid the charge of racism by arguing that the virtues of eugenics should not be obscured by the ends to which these ideas were put by the Nazis. However, it is impossible to dissociate an idea from the context in which it emerged and the practices to which it led.2 The article came to my notice via a tweet from author and academic Sunny Singh on 12 November that year, the same day as the announcement of a new academic journal, the Journal of Controversial Ideas, founded under the editorship of Peter Singer, Jeff McMahan, and Francesca Minerva, which would allow academics to publish controversial ideas pseudonymously. Peter Singer, the Australian utilitarian bioethicist well known for his support for animal liberation, is also on the editorial board of the Monash Bioethics Review. It is not irrelevant that Singer has expressed disturbing views on race (Grey and Cleffie 2015). In an interview with the African-American philosopher George Yancy, he compared what he calls 'speciesism' to chattel-slavery, and argued that racism is mainly a past phenomenon and...