Naomi Zack

We are morally obligated to plan for disaster because it affects human life and well-being. Because contemporary disasters affect the public, such planning should be public in democracies and it should not violate the basic ethical principles of normal times. Current Avian Flu pandemic planning is restricted to a response model based on scarce resources, or inadequate preparation, which gives priority to some lives over others. Rather than this model of ‘Save the Greatest Number,’ the public would be more ethically served by a model of ‘Save All Who Can Be Saved,’ which is based on adequate preparation. And where events exceed adequate preparation, scarce resources should be allocated fairly.

If we put aside the polite social practice of using the word “ethnicity” as a euphemism for “race,” we can begin with a distinction that ethnicity refers mainly to culture, whereas race refers to hereditary physical traits. Both ethnicity and race are passed on in families, although in different ways. People are believed to physically inherit their racial traits. By contrast, ethnic traits are taught and learned, usually from relatives and others in a community. This cultural aspect of ethnicity is both cause and effect of American ethnic enclaves or neighborhoods where one group has a dominant presence. Places called Little Italy, China Town, Spanish Harlem, Little Persia, or Greektown are some examples, but so are Andersonville, Illinois, where Swedish immigrants settled and the Germantowns in Pennsylvania.

Before the construction of race in science, there were ideas of different human groups but no conceptual system of difference applying to all humankind. The construction of race in science drew on existing societal ideas and created abstract typologies that in turn became the cognitive element of race in society. However, at this time, after typologies of race have been discarded in the biological sciences, racial constructions in society endure and continue to be reconstructed. Socially constructed race has a momentum of its own that people live out, and social scientists, scholars, and those in the creative arts continue to study and suggest ways to change.

Ideas tend to drift toward consensus led by those with the strongest influence and highest status in their fields. The racist ideas about race developed by famous philosophers, as discussed in Chap. 1, became the consensus and common sense about race throughout society from about the late 1700s until the 20th century. Other, more liberatory ideas that did not prevail in their times, or influence public policy, are closer in egalitarian spirit to contemporary educated ideas about race than canonical philosophical thought. Those submerged egalitarian ideas regarding race were rooted in older spiritual and religious traditions in the West, which were taken up by white anti-racists, abolitionists and black thinkers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

American or pragmatist philosophy and continental philosophy begin and end with human life and subjectivity in society. In both philosophical traditions, the starting point is not the physical sciences, because both American and continental philosophy use methods of describing and analyzing actual human experience. Scholars of race in each of these philosophical traditions have the goal of understanding practical, political, social, emotional, and moral aspects of racial experience, rather than the intellectual and empirical justification for ideas about race, taken cognitively, or as strains of abstract thought or objective knowledge. Such thinkers have emphasized the importance of the human subject, as prior to the practice of science. The underlying insight is that human beings invent science, shape it, practice it, and change it.

Many scholars now consider race to be a social construction. This means that racial categories, such as “black,” “white,” or “Asian,” are not based on natural or inevitable human differences but are the result of social ideas, values, and practices, which could be otherwise, with the same biology. There are two ways in which human races have been social constructions. The first way pertains to the biological foundations for race in science, the subject of this chapter. The second way that race is socially constructed pertains to attitudes, biases, stereotypes, generalizations, and real-life practices concerning members of different racial groups and that will be the subject of chaper 6.

To speak of human race is to speak of human races—if there were only one human race, that “race” would be the whole of humanity. To understand the history of ideas of race in Western philosophy, it is important to avoid anachronism and not interpret earlier forms of human hierarchy or status, as racial systems, where and when there were not yet fully developed ideas of human races as hereditary physical systems. Because we now know that many of the past beliefs concerning human racial taxonomy were not scientifically accurate in terms that scientists would accept today, we cannot rely on the existence of human racial taxonomies as a system of division timelessly given in nature. We also know that ideas of human race have changed over centuries and even decades, particularly in the United States.

The Other is a fearsome posit that refers to those who are different from oneself and tribe in skin color, where they live or have come from, in language, religion, food, customs, sexual preference, ability, or even just in dress. Most of us have probably both been othered ourselves and othered others. There is a quality of rejection, aversion, or hatred, an attitude of alienation of the other from the self and/or the self from the other, which can make othering an absolute cliff in human interactions. To push or be pushed off that cliff, or even jump off it, creates a distance that cannot normally be closed. But this is the most extreme form of othering, which means that we should be prepared to regard othering as a “spectrum.”

Worldwide in the twenty-first century, the growing importance of politics in public consciousness has depended on organization by political parties. Heightened political awareness has been sparked by social media through populist movements, especially on the political Right. Party politics has been led by and in turn led these populist movements. After they are politicized, populist movements have the potential to make what is political personal by politicizing issues in the culture wars. The US twenty-first-century development of the political as personal has been unique in its initial lack of the usual populist motivation of urgency based on material need. A comparative consideration of political racism/ethnicism/culturalism in populist movements in India, the UK, and Europe shows how the US is distinctive in this way.

The word “racism” was not always in use along with beliefs in the existence of human races. During the age of racial essentialism and explicit white supremacy based on posits of racial hierarchy, what is called “racism” today was built into the idea of race. As ideas that human races were morally equal gained credibility, names came into use for those who retained inegalitarian beliefs and the practices associated with those beliefs. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first recorded use of the word “racism” in English derives from Richard Henry Pratt’s (1840–1924) criticism of government policy that segregated Native Americans.

Ideas and feelings about race are part of the perspectives of all individuals who are aware of racial difference. More than that, although race no longer has the backing in biological science it once did, it is so robust as a social construction tied to human kinship that individuals live out their racial identities in most or all of their relationships and social roles. Both same-race and mixed-race marriages provide examples of these far-reaching effects of race., as do the influences of race on social class, medicine, health, and sport.

Altogether, political philosophy, law, and public policy make up the official positions and practices regarding racial difference in society. However, it is useful to distinguish these different fields of research and practice. Standard political philosophy does not have a separate subfield addressing racial difference, although the tradition has resulted in principles of liberty and individual autonomy, as well as universal human rights, which many philosophers have applied to their concerns about race, for example ideal theory and nonideal theory as developed by John Rawls in his 1971 A Theory of Justice. Contemporary injustice such as ongoing de facto segregation and unjustified racial profiling are usually not included in ideal theory, but merit consideration, as does the demise of Affirmative Action.

Race was socially constructed through colonialism and global development affects poor nonwhite populations. Within US society, technologies of race and racism and individual racial identities, including mixed race, reproduce racial divisions and status. When segregation and marriage laws kept racial divisions in place through state force, custom now takes their place. Both monoracial identities and mixed ones, require constant internal dialogue, with or without external group support. Pragmatic and accommodationist approaches to racism allow nonwhites to live within racist systems by avoiding conflict. Politicized racial identities are forms of resistance. Racial eliminativism, based on the biological emptiness of race, is an ineffective social project and some scholars seek to retain minimal biological race.

In democratic political life, political philosophy, law, and public policy are often interrelated. John Rawls’s abstract thought experiment to develop, behind a veil of ignorance, basic institutions for already well-ordered and law-abiding societies, may not be relevant to the correction of practical injustice. Amartya Sen’s idea of addressing human capabilities and practices of applicative justice, better addresses real-life injustice. Concerns about affirmative action and racial profiling involve questions about their injustice. The US Supreme Court has upheld affirmative action only as part of a full range of individual qualifications. Police racial profiling has led to homicides against unarmed young black men, although police discretion has been upheld by the US Supreme Court.

Feminism has developed into gender studies and its focus on white middle-class women has broadened. Intersectionality as a method of analysis and basis for political action is more contextualized than identity politics, because people have multiple identities. Within philosophy, first white feminism and then African American philosophy became established. Black feminist philosophers proceed by reclaiming historical figures for philosophical analysis and inspiration, forging connections between different traditions in philosophy, and philosophizing contemporary concerns of black women. Black male philosophy is both the work of black male philosophers and a focus on the experience of black men, especially harmfully false and dangerous stereotypes. A new question of intersection arises: Who may write about whom and is the race/gender of sources important?

Modern biologists and anthropologists invented ideas of scientific race as a universal system of human typing that began with geography and description but by the nineteenth century relied on essences and assessment. When racial categories were seen to be arbitrary and culture viewed as the result of history, ideas of populations were substituted for race. But populations are more numerous than races and can only work as races if social races are assumed to be real and used to identify populations. Also, there are more differences within populations of physical racial traits, than between populations. By the twenty-first century, the idea of race was abandoned in biological science, although in the “race debates” some philosophers, try to retain it.

Ethnicity, including language, belongs to culture, race to biology. But ethnic groups have been treated as races and racial groups have ethnicities. US immigration has resulted in the racialization of different ethnic groups, as well as invention of the idea of ethnic groups. Despite the assimilation of European groups, Anglo-Americans remain dominant and we don’t know if Latinx, Asian, and Middle Eastern immigrants will assimilate, given views of them as “undocumented,” “foreign,” and “terrorist suspects.” Indigenous groups throughout the world continue to base their identities on geographical and ancestral ties. In Brazil, race is intertwined with socioeconomic class, while in India, caste is tied to occupation.

The egalitarian spiritual and legal tradition started in the ancient world when Cosmopolitans and Stoics proclaimed human equality and brotherhood. Medieval theologians promised human equality in heaven. George Berkeley’s plans for a seminary in Bermuda included Native Americans and James Beattie scolded David Hume for his lack of empiricism in describing Africans. Nineteenth-century African English and African American thinkers and activists resisted slavery. Jim Crow followed reining in the Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided an aspirational foundation for global egalitarianism. In 1954, the US Supreme Court legally ended school segregation in Brown v Board of Education. The Civil Rights Movement motivated legislation against racial discrimination, in 1964–1965.

As a social construction, race is part of family genealogy and it creates intergenerational groups and identities for individuals. Racial differences matter in concrete areas of life, such as marriage rates, social class, employment, wealth, and health. Marriage rates vary by race and ethnicity: African Americans marry less than whites, due to external economic constraint; Mexican immigrant women marry younger but for economic rather than cultural reasons. Social class now includes cultural capital in tastes and consumption, which may make it difficult for minorities to fully thrive within white-dominated institutions. Race affects health in environmental ways based on nonhereditary factors. Race-targeted medicine therefore needs to be distinguished from race-based medicine.

“Racism” as prejudice and discrimination came after races were posited and racism was practiced. Racism occurs in discourse (speech, gesture, symbols) and in action. Hearts-and-minds racism pertains to deliberate individual action. Racist hate crimes are a classic, broadly despised example of racist action, but racist action is more widespread than hate crimes that require immediate racist motives. Institutional racism affects millions and may lack individual intent. Still, its victims, such as poor nonwhite school children and minorities incarcerated for minor crimes or crimes they did not commit, may be harmed as much or more than with racist intent. Implicit racism includes white privilege, micro-aggression, and epistemic injustice.