Race, Liberalism, and Economics

The Anatomy of Racial Inequality: A Clarification

The Anatomy of Racial Inequality A Clarification Glenn C. Loury In The Anatomy ofRacial Inequality, I have tried to do three things: outline a theory of "race" applicable to the social and historical circumstances of the United States; sketch an account of why racial inequality in our society is so stubbornly persistent; and offer a conceptual framework for the practice of social criticism on race-related issues-criticism that might encourage reflection among our political and intellectual elite and, in this way, promote social reform. In my book, these objectives are subsumed, respectively, in the successive chapters entitled "Racial Stereotypes," "Racial Stigma," and "Racial Justice" (Loury 2002). Any theory of "race," it seems to me, must explain the fact that people take note ofand assign significance to superficial markings on the bodies of other human beings-their skin color, hair texture, facial bone structure, and so forth. This practice is virtually universal in human societies. Scientists have conjectured that it has a deep neurological foundation. This is the point of departure for my analysis. I refer to a society as being "raced" when its members routinely partition the field of human subjects whom they encounter in that society into groups and when this sorting convention is based on the subjects' possession of some cluster of observable bodily marks. This led to my claim that, at bottom, "race" is all about "embodied social signification." Let us call this the social-cognitive approach to thinking about "race." It may be usefully contrasted with an approach derived from the science/art 238 The Anatomy of Racial Inequality 239 of biological taxonomy. There, one endeavors to classify human beings on the basis of natural variation in genetic endowments across geographically isolated subpopulations. Such isolation was a feature of the human condition until quite recently (on an evolutionary timescale), and it permitted some independence of biological development within subpopulations, which can be thought to have led to the emergence of distinct races. When such philosophers as Jorge Garcia or Anthony Appiah deny the reality of "race," they have in mind this biological-taxonomic notion, and what they deny is that meaningful distinctions among contemporary human subgroups can be derived in this way. Whether they are right or not would appear to be a scientific question.I But, whatever the merits of this dispute, it is important to understand that the validity of racial classification as an exercise in biological taxonomy is distinct conceptually from the validity (and relevance) of my concern with racial categorization as an exercise in social cognition. Moreover-and this, too, is absolutely critical-to establish the scientific invalidity of racial taxonomy demonstrates neither the irrationality nor the immorality of adhering to a social convention of racial classification. Even if Garcia and Appiah are correct and the scientists who think that "race" is a useful biological-taxonomic category are wrong, it would not follow from this that seeing oneself or other people as belonging to "races" is akin to believing that someone with exceptional talents or an odd personality has come from another planet. We can adopt the linguistic convention that when saying, "person A belongs to race X," we mean, "person A possesses physical traits that (in a given society, at a fixed point in history, under the conventions ofracial classification extant there and then) will cause him to be classified (by a preponderance of those he encounters in that society and/or by himself) as belonging to race X." Whereas this maneuver would seem deeply unsatisfactory if applied to the question of someone being a planetary alien, I hold that this is a plausible way to proceed when discussing the social reality of "race." This is a pragmatic judgment on my part, not an a priori logical claim; that is, I hold this view because the social convention of thinking about other people and about ourselves as belonging to different "races" is such a long-standing and deeply ingrained one in our political culture that it has taken on a life of its own. Belief that "alien beings are with us" has no comparable salience. Ifit did, the subjective reality of this belief (and of the practice of classifying people on this basis) would be of interest, regardless ofits objective correctness. Thus, for students of the history and political economy of 240 RACE. LIBERALISM. AND ECONOMICS the modem multiracial nation-state, the logical exercise of deconstructing racial categories...