Another Note on Language

I want to agree with Appiah in saying that race is not real in any rigid ontological sense. Race is not a biological category. Race is not known a priori. We cannot know race without recourse to experience, and even then, it is a concept used to structure our experience and explain divergences after the fact. It has a certain social and political utility, sometimes used to monstrous ends, and, in this country (as in most) it has become an indelible part of any individual's ideology. Race has become a lens through which we see the world; cultural-historical, not biological. 

It is not a fixed concept. Any "truth" it has is contingent on the individual and the context in which the term forms a conceptual framework. There are many conceptions of "race," not a single, true one. This is another way of saying that race means and signifies different things for different people. But words, it seems to me, never quite shed their etymologies. When we refer to someone who is mixed race, we think that the person is descended form parents of two different races (this is evident from the phrase itself). And descent is here the important word. In our common use of race, we are unable to rid ourselves of the notion of blood. In common usage, we become raced by dint of our being born to certain parents. In this sense, Du Bois' use of the word seems faithful to its history.


What Montagu and Appiah (and von Herder, I would claim, considering I'm sympathetic to his insistence that we refer to "peoples" and not races)* retrospectively prove is that one can adequately and persuasively explain how the ways in which we organize our experience are based off of false premises, and still, people will go on talking and acting exactly as they have before. Intellectual, theoretical work is seldom embraced en masse. Especially in America, where intellectual is a byword for elitist.

We have the great luxury of attending an institution where we are challenged to rethink the world around us. We have access to Appiah, and Du Bois, and others through their texts. We have professors to help explain those concepts which we don't readily grasp. Through our liberal arts education, we have the vocabulary to make sense of our social situation. Most folks don't. Without education, one can go through life relying on the same small set of seldom-challenged beliefs. The complex forces that govern economics and social stratification are, without equally complex modes of thought, incomprehensible. Frustration and anger find expression in scapegoating and othering. We know the rest...

Without education, this does not change. Without changing the everyday use of language, this does not change. And we're just as much bound to "race," I think, despite our education. One still plays host to the thousand representations of Others that one has seen or heard throughout one's life, and those are not so easily removed, either. We are stuck playing the race game. The lens is fixed in the eye.

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* von Herder, as distinct from Hegel. Hegel says the race of Africans are children; von Herder says all peoples are nations in their own right and there are no races. I'm still wondering what history might have looked like if we had embraced Herder's distinction instead of the one Hegel inherits from Bernier and Kant.

Herder and Language

What struck me most about Herder's argument, in the excerpt we read from his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humankind, was his insistence that we refer to the different peoples of the world as simply that: people. The word race, he claimed, is the wrong one, because it suggests that those different peoples are entirely different in kind. He puts emphasis on the importance of culture and language in the development of a nation, instead of physiognomy. He notes the distinct differences of each individual human that separates that one from every other on the planet. People and peoples are particular, but even in our particularity we are like one another. Each of us has the capacity for reason and use our intellect to seek "unity," or truth.

I was surprised by Herder, because his notion is remarkably egalitarian and seems to fly in the face of the prevailing notions of his time. In many ways, the phenomena that we classify as racism is a result of the language that allows one to justify another's oppression. By classifying others on the basis of race, and by, as Kant does explicitly, relegating that entire race to the status of subordinate, one opens up a kind of ethical vacuum in which one can justify much while sacrificing little of one's material goals. Because this other is something entirely other and because that other is not a "people" (like the one making this evaluation), the one's ends can be valued as greater, superseding any of the other's goals or desires. The division of the world into races becomes an excuse for exploitation.

On the other hand, it's harder to hurt someone who you know as a person, a fellow human being with his or her own purposes and desires. When you recognize the other's face as a human one, you meet and treat that other according to your own ethical standards. You don't meet her or him as you would a dog, or a beast of burden, or a hostile animal. Such an ethical meeting is the foundation of human community. But it is the case that we sometimes (often as a result of our upbringing or socialization) meet others solely or primarily as Blacks or Hispanics or Whites (this same might apply to women, as well, and perhaps men), and relegate their entire personhood to this mere description. They appear to us as members of a race (or gender), not as individuals and not as members of the same nation. This leads to division, and impedes our understanding of each other. If unchecked in times of social upheaval, the relegation of individuals on a massive scale to the status of other can lead to oppression and violence.

All this was a somewhat roundabout way of saying that the words we use have distinct importance, as does the way that we meet others, and that the language we use can often cloud our attempts to find common ground. If what we are seeking is some kind of truth, then we might do well by regarding Herder's words (slightly paraphrased):

[Those] who succeed in banishing mistakes from creation, lies from our memory, and insults from our nature are to the realm of truth just what the heroes in the fables were to the first world; they reduce the number of monsters on earth.

The Thought of Monogenesis and Race: Kant vs von Herder

I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to talk about all day. But I was flipping through the pages of my book, and I found a comparison between Kant and von Herder. We did not discuss the passage by von Herder in class on Thursday, but the similarity between the two is the notion of monogenesis. As we learned in class, monogenesis is the idea that all humans have the same origin or genus. Both Kant and von Herder refer to the concept of monogenesis in some form, but they are in opposition when it comes to defining races.

In Kant's piece, he describes monogenesis through natural division, which is based on identifying distinct lines of descent according to reproductive relations. According to this theory, he says all human beings anywhere on earth belong to the same natural genus, because they always produce fertile children with one another even if we find great dissimilarities in their form. So, basically, he's saying if we all belong to the same genus, we're connected in some way, like a family.

Similarly, von Herder supports monogenesis. The very first statement he makes in his article is no matter how different the forms in which humankind appears on earth, it is still everywhere one and the same human species. In other words, no matter how many differences humans possess, we are still one and originate from the same human species, thus we are from the same genus.

So what was interesting to me is the fact  that while both refer to and support monogenesis and how we all belong to the same genus, the concept of race is a completely different story. Kant describes four different races, and argues that race is the most helpful tool to organize humans. von Herder, however, sees no reason for the concept of "race." He argues that there are neither four nor five races. We are all one, and our "colors" run into one another.

If we think of this truly from the notion of monogenesis, there really should not be distinct "races." If we all belong to the same genus, then we are all the same species, period. I found it interesting that while Kant is trying to denounce polygenesis, he's still supporting the idea that there are, in fact, different races and the racial characteristics are permanent across generations. How is this possible? If we are all from one genus, or one "Adam," how can we be divided into races?

My question is, what are your interpretations of monogenesis and race? Do you think the two related? or are they two completely different concepts?