# 4.2 Will race always exist?

The position that race is a matter of power defines race in terms of systematic privilege or systematic oppression. One consequence of this position is that if the power relationships – the racial hierarchy – cease to exist, then race itself will cease to exist. This is because race itself is a position in a racial hierarchy, so without a racial hierarchy there is no such thing as race. Therefore, the end of racism (the end of discrimination or differential treatment based on race) would also mean the end of race.

For some philosophers, the elimination of race in a society without racism is not particularly troubling. However, other philosophers have been skeptical of this idea, and have been wary of defining races and racial identities purely in terms of oppression. The philosopher Chike Jeffers has argued that race is fundamentally about both power and culture. He suggests that racial hierarchy and unequal power relations explain how race was invented, and is still an important part of what race is today. However, he also argues that once racial categorisation became part of social reality, and people began to identify as being members of particular races, particular cultural traditions developed within racial groups (for example, Black American cultural traditions). Culture has therefore become part of what race is.

## Activity 6

Spend about thirty minutes on this activity

Read the below paragraph excerpted from the 2013 paper ‘The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races”’ by Chike Jeffers. Read it through slowly and carefully. You may need to read it through again as you answer the questions below.

> What it means to be a black person, for many of us, including myself, can never be exhausted through reference to problems of stigmatization, discrimination, marginalization, and disadvantage, as real and as large-looming as these factors are in the racial landscape as we know it. There is also joy in blackness, a joy shaped by culturally distinctive situations, expressions, and interactions, by stylizations of the distinctive features of the black body, by forms of linguistic and extralinguistic communication, by artistic traditions, by religious and secular rituals, and by any number of other modes of cultural existence. There is also pride in the way black people have helped to shape Western culture, not merely by means of the free labor and extraction of resources that economically supported this culture but also directly through cultural contributions, most prominently in music and dance. These contributions are racial in character – that is to say, they are cultural contributions whose significance can only be fully understood when they are placed in proper context as emerging from a racialized people. It does not seem necessary, however, to assume that the oppressive nature of this process of racialization must necessarily problematize the continued existence of the culture that emerged from it. There is, in fact, reason to think that the historical memory of creating beauty in the midst of struggling to survive oppression can and should persist as a thing of value in black culture long after that oppression has truly and finally been relegated to the past.

(Jeffers, 2019, p. 422)

1. What does Jeffers think is the problem with defining race purely in terms of power relations?

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### Discussion

1. Jeffers thinks that race – in this passage, being Black – cannot be defined purely in terms of oppression or disadvantage. He proposes that there is joy and pride in Black culture and Black cultural contributions.

2. Does Jeffers think that race can still exist after the end of racial oppression? Why?

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### Discussion

2. Yes, Jeffers thinks that race can and should still exist after the end of racial oppression. This is because there are distinctively racial cultural traditions, and the contributions of those traditions is valuable. Even though he thinks that the ‘process of racialization’ (the creation of race as a set of categories to divide humans into) was oppressive (based in unequal power relations), he thinks that the cultures that emerged out of this process can nevertheless be valued and held onto.

You have now explored the position that race is about power, and considered a challenge to this view: that race is not only about power, but is also about culture.

OpenLearn - What can philosophy tell us about race?
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