4 Is race about power?
If someone’s race does not depend on their ancestry, what might it depend on? One answer is that it depends on something about society – how society is organised, the relations between people, and social processes that sort people into groups.
Activity 5
Watch the following video.
Transcript
ANGELA SAINI:
I think we have a lot of preconceptions about what race really is.
C. BRANDON OGBUNU:
What is race has changed dramatically through time.
JONATHAN MARKS:
There is no official scientific definition of race.
TEXT ON SCREEN:
From an early age we’re taught that people of the world are made up of distinct, different races …
TV CHARACTER:
We’re all different.
TEXT ON SCREEN:
And talk of race is everywhere around us in society.
SOPHIE WILLIAMS:
I was aware that I wasn’t white.
TESSA MCWATT:
The teacher said, ‘No, no, Tess is something else’. And everybody’s eyes are on me, and I’m a really shy person. She said, ‘But what are you, Tessa?’
ANGELA SAINI:
A lot of people imagine that there is some biological tangibility to race, because we use it so much. Race really is a social construct, but just because something is a social construct, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have meaning in people’s lives like money, or the nation state, or democracy, or all these other things that define how we live but are also constructed.
C. BRANDON OGBUNU:
It influences what you’re eating, it influences the type of healthcare you have access to, the type of schooling you have access to, how people feel about you. I mean, it’s a powerful marker for all of these things that we care about when we’re trying to run a society.
SOPHIE WILLIAMS:
Race has never been something that I don’t have to think about. It’s put on to us.
ANGELA SAINI:
When you look at the history and origins of this idea, you start to see it for what it really is, which is the manifestation of power.
TEXT ON SCREEN
The term ‘race’ first emerged in the English language in the late sixteenth century – and originally just meant ‘type’.
ANGELA SAINI:
People imagine that people have always thought about skin colour in this racialised way, and we really haven’t. That idea is no more than a few hundred years old.
JONATHAN MARKS:
It’s not really until the age of colonialism, in the seventeenth century, that you start getting the idea that each continent has its own individual kind of people. It arose at a very specific moment in history. In the seventeenth century, you’re taking long trips by ship, and you’re struck by how different people look than you remember them when you got on.
TEXT ON SCREEN
In 1735, Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus set out to classify these apparently different peoples.
ISABELLE CHARMANTIER:
So, this is the first edition of Systema Naturae, so the Systems of Nature. And for man, Linnaeus distinguishes four varieties; these varieties correspond to the four continents. Where it really changes is in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae. This is the foundation of scientific racism. He brings in moral character, so the American is ‘red and choleric’, and stands up straight. The European, ‘white, sanguine, and muscular’. The Asian, ‘sallow, melancholic and stiff’. The African, ‘black, phlegmatic and lazy’. So these stereotypes have endured through the ages.
TEXT ON SCREEN
This was just the start of what came to be known as ‘race science’ – a discipline that emerged at the same time as colonialism and slavery. And that was no coincidence.
SOPHIE WILLIAMS:
If you’re going to take a group of people, and you’re going to decide that they’re not people anymore, then you need something to justify that.
ANGELA SAINI:
You can be defined very differently depending on the country that you’re in, or the time that you’re in. And that’s how these categories have always been used. They are political tools that change depending on their usefulness to whoever is doing the categorisation.
TEXT ON SCREEN
By the twentieth century, race science had given rise to eugenics – ‘the selection of desired heritable characteristics in order to improve future generations’. Britannica. Eugenics was used it its most extreme form by the Nazis to support the extermination of entire races. After World War Two, the UN brought together experts from across the world to officially declare that the idea of distinct races had no biological basis. When the humane genome was sequenced for the first time at the start of the twenty-first century, the DNA evidence also clearly challenged the idea of race as rooted in biology.
ANGELA SAINI:
We are one of the most homogeneous species on the planet.
JONATHAN MARKS:
Humans have far less genetic variation than chimpanzees do. And yet, those chimpanzees look the same to me.
ANGELA SAINI:
There were never any ‘pure’ races, there is no gene that exists in all the members of one race and not another. There is no black gene, there is no white gene.
JONATHAN MARKS:
Human groups overlap completely in their genetic variation.
TEXT ON SCREEN
So is there no scientific basis for race at all?
ANGELA SAINI:
In the same way that you’re related to your family, you can get a kind of fuzzy genetic similarity. But when you get to the continental level, which is really where we’re talking about race, that genetic similarity is so fuzzy, and so statistically weak, as to be almost meaningless.
C. BRANDON OGBUNU:
We have this envy of fields where things are hyper-simplistic. We want to be able to look at a genome and say that people are these kinds of concrete immutable things, that cannot be changed. Genetics doesn’t work that way, it’s the product of many genes interacting with each other and their environments. To fully answer the question about what a living thing is it’s going to be about much more than genes.
ANGELA SAINI:
If I were to go out on to the street today and find someone of Indian heritage like myself, and randomly then pick someone who is not of Indian heritage, it is perfectly statistically possible for my genome to have more in common with that person who isn’t of Indian heritage than that person who is.
TEXT ON SCREEN
If the idea of race has been created by society, what does that mean for how we see ourselves – and others?
TESSA MCWATT:
Even though race itself is a construct, racism is real and we are not in a post-racial society. Race keeps making itself and power keeps making race.
SOPHIE WILLIAMS:
Even though we know that race isn’t biological, we've been living with this idea of it being real for so long that it means that people who do have a shared racial identity have now cultural similarities which has been born out of hardship, but it’s still beautiful and important.
C. BRANDON OGBUNU:
The biology of race is not a useful concept. I have a different historical trajectory, I love the African American tradition, but it’s not better than anybody else’s, it’s just the one that I’m a part of.
JONATHAN MARKS:
I don’t think we’re going to stop classifying people because I think that’s how we make sense of the world. I think every generation is going to classify people according to the criteria that are politically important to them.
SOPHIE WILLIAMS:
I don’t think we need to find new boxes to put people in, I think we now have the opportunity to say, we understand that all of these things are a spectrum, in a way that we hadn’t considered before. So instead of finding new ways to categorise people we can just find new ways to exist better together.
TESSA MCWATT:
Race is a story that’s handed down and handed around. But we can choose the stories that we tell.
Now, watch the video again, answering the questions below as you go. You may need to pause the video or rewatch short segments.
1. In the video, race science is described as emerging at the same time as colonialism and slavery, and this is no coincidence. Why is this not a coincidence?
Discussion
1. According to the speakers in the video, the idea of race as innate biological difference was a crucial justification for the horrors of colonialism and slavery. Therefore, it’s not a coincidence that it emerged as an idea around this time.
2. In the video, C. Brandon Ogbunu says that ‘the biology of race is not a useful concept’. Describe one reason given in the video for this.
Discussion
2. The biology of race is not a useful concept, according to the speakers in the video, because the human species has very little genetic variation. There is no gene that exists in all and only the members of one race. Genetic similarities on the level of continental groups is very fuzzy and weak, to the extent that it is almost meaningless. Also, someone that has a particular ancestry (e.g. Indian heritage) can have more in common genetically with someone who has different ancestry than someone who also has Indian heritage.
3. Why might people have racial identities, even if there are no biological differences between races?
Discussion
3. One reason that racial identities might still exist is because the idea that race is real (in a biological sense) has been around for a long time and therefore has affected how people have been viewed and treated by others, and how they have viewed themselves. Therefore, people that are classified as a particular race might have cultural similarities and shared traditions.
In the video you have just watched, you have heard race being described as a social construction. Social constructions can nevertheless be real, and can have important impacts on people’s lives. One example of this is money. Money is real – just think of what it can do and what you can’t do without it. But unlike other real things in the world like mountains or electrons, money is socially constructed in the sense that its value and function – what makes it real – depends on collective social agreement.
For example, a ten pound note is a piece of paper which we collectively agree is worth ten pounds. We can use that piece of paper to do things in the world – we can buy things with it. When someone goes to pay for a book with a ten pound note, they trust that the seller will accept this piece of paper in exchange for the book. When the seller accepts the ten pound note, they trust that they will be able to use it to purchase something, or deposit it in a bank. Paper banknotes are clearly symbolic – the difference between a ten pound and a fifty pound note has nothing to do with the value of the paper it’s printed on. Rather, a fifty pound note is worth more than a ten pound note because we have collectively agreed to treat it as such. Even forms of currency which might appear more intrinsically valuable, like gold, only have value (in terms of, say, what can be purchased with it or exchanged for it) because of a broad social agreement that gold as a common currency has this value.
Of course, money has enormous effects on our lives – fundamental aspects of someone’s life, like their health, wellbeing, and safety, are hugely dependent on how much money they have. So, money is a straightforward case of something that is socially constructed. And, despite being socially constructed and arising out of human interests and actions, it is not dependent on how single individuals or small groups of individuals perceive it. If someone decides that the ten pound note they are holding in their hand is actually worth fifty pounds, that won’t change what they can buy with it or the balance in their bank account if they deposit it. It won’t change the social reality that the ten pound note is worth ten pounds.
Whether a category such as race is part of social reality depends on the practices and assumptions within a particular society. Although social categories are dependent on human interests and behaviours, they are not dependent purely on any one individual’s perspective. For any particular society at a particular time, there will be a fact of the matter about which social categories exist in that society. Discovering what social categories exist in a society allows social scientists to generate accurate explanations and predictions about the workings of that society.