And as polysyllabic as ever. Today's subject: is race real? Not very, of course.

To many contemporary social scientists and race theorists, the idea that “race” is something essential — that “blood” differences determine racial identity — is too close to the kind of thinking that has historically justified (and legally codified) separatism and, its civic offshoot, race-based social policy, bigotry, and racism. Which is why many theorists have worked so diligently to disarticulate race from blood, and reconstitute it as a product of human conception — a social construct — a maneuver that they believe allows them to rescue the category of race while simultaneously cleansing it of its least desirable attribute: the idea that it is somehow fixed and, by extension, determinative.

For my part, I’ve argued that the social construction argument for race — based as it is on dubious claims to history, memory, and heritage that collapse under the weight of logical analysis — is, at its heart, no different from the blood argument for race, in that both rely on an identical first cause, namely, an a priori belief in what one is.

That's the problem.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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