2.2 Undoing bias: constructed stereotypes

Watch the clip from the conversation between Adam Rutherford, a geneticist, and Lurraine Jones, Director of EDI at The Open University, as they discuss the biological and sociological impacts of ‘Black’.

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Transcript: Video 6 Adam Rutherford and Lurraine Jones

ADAM RUTHERFORD:

There’s plenty of examples of the recognition of different skin pigmentations throughout history. But it’s only really in the 17th, 18th century, what we sort of fondly refer to as the Enlightenment, which is coincident with the Scientific Revolution and the Renaissance-- and I think the Renaissance is a really key idea in there, which we come to in a second-- that is when the construction of pigmentation as a classifier, as a colour palette, on which you can lay other behavioural characteristics.

That becomes solidified, it becomes formalised, by what is emerging at this time, which is science, science as we begin to think of it now. And the reverence towards these-- we didn’t call them scientists then, but sort of natural philosophers and their classification systems is sort of supreme in the West.

And I think what the important thing to recognise in this sort of conversation about Blackness and its construction is that this isn’t good science. It’s easy for us to say that in retrospect. But at the time, it was perceived as being, you know these are taxonomies. This is how we talk about humans. But they’re always hierarchical.

These are not taxonomies which say Homo sapiens is one species, and there are different characteristics which are distributed in the following ways, which might be cultural, or geographical, or physical. They’re very clearly hierarchical. Every person who comes up with a classification system for humans has it hierarchically, and see if you can guess who’s at the top of that hierarchy and who’s at the bottom.

LURRAINE JONES:

Black people in the modern day, they do invest in this idea of Blackness, which I find really interesting because if whilst Black was created, obviously whiteness was created. And they’re both social constructs. But as I said, Blackness sees itself through the eyes of whiteness. But all this sort of negativity around Blackness, that Black people, if they describe themselves as such, A, are forced to describe themselves as Black. Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, they speak about coming from other parts of the world and arriving. Stuart Hall speaks about coming from Jamaica, where he was regarded as like a brownie, because again you have the caste system in Jamaica and the pigmentocracy, which is the legacy of slavery, and arriving in England and discovering he was Black.

End transcript: Video 6 Adam Rutherford and Lurraine Jones

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Video 6 Adam Rutherford and Lurraine Jones

Based on the ethnic group categories on the last census – Black/African/Caribbean/Black British – these individuals only make up 3.5% of the UK population. It may well be that you live in a part of the UK where you do not come into contact with Black people regularly, or perhaps ever. The reference to skin pigmentation as a classifier was still present in the 2021 census for people racialised as Black and white, but other non-white classifications are based on country or continent.

Figure 2 Depiction of the ethnicity based classifications from the 2021 Census based on data from the ONS website.

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A word cloud featuring the words White British, White and Asian, Other mixed, Bangladeshi, White Irish, White and Black Caribbean, Other, Indian, Chinese, Other White, Pakistani, Arab, Other Asian, Black Caribbean, White and Black African, Other Black.

Figure 2 Depiction of the ethnicity based classifications from the 2021 Census based on data from the ONS website.

How did the construction of racial classifications based on skin pigmentation come about, and what was it in service of? Why are only the Black and white skin pigmentation classifications still in use in the UK census?