Race and Racism

18 Oct 2023 14:54

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The human species may or may not be meaningfully divided into distinct groups, internally unified by common descent, which correspond to "races". Whether it is or not is a question somewhere at the border of historical genetics, and our decisions about what kind of taxonomy is useful to us. Racism, though, is a cluster of practices and supporting ideas, in which it is important to classify people into racial groups, and treat those of different races differently. Races are imagined as categorical, unified by descent. Races are supposed to be inferable from surface features such as skin color and the shape of the face (as opposed to, e.g., molecular markers of immune response), but to carry important implications for many things other than physical appearance, like moral character and intellectual capacity.

See also:
• The American Dilemma
• Historical Genetics

Recommended (very misc. and inadequate):
• Alexander Agadjanian, "How Many Americans Change Their Racial Identification over Time?", Socious 8 (2022)
• Richard Alba, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream
• Margo Anderson and Stephen E. Fienberg, "Race and Ethnicity and the Controversy over the US Census", Current Sociology 48 (2000): 87--110
• Kwame Anthony Appiah
  • The Lies That Bind
  • "How to Decide If Races Exist", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (2006): 365--382
• Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study of Modern Superstition
• Rogers Brubaker, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities
• Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality
• Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality
• Anthony Daniel Perez, Charles Hirschman, "Estimating Net Interracial Mobility in the United States: A Residual Methods Approach", Sociological Methodology 39 (2009): 31--71
• Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality

To read:
• Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race
• David Austen-Smith and Roland G. Fryer, Jr., "An Economic Analysis of 'Acting White'", Quarterly Journal of Economics 120 (2005): 551--583
• Ian Ayres, Pervasive Prejudice?: Unconventional Evidence of Race and Gender Discrimination [Sounds cool, if depressing in its substantive conclusions...]
• Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars
• René Baston, "From old-fashioned to offensive racism: How social norms determine the measurement object of prejudice questionnaires", Philosophical Psychology 36 (2022): 247--269
• Daniel J. Fairbanks, Everyone Is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race
• Paul Lawrence Farber, Mixing Races: From Scientific Racism to Modern Evolutionary Ideas
• Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
• George M. Frederickson, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements
• Joan H. Fujimura and Ramya Rajagopalan, "Different differences: The use of 'genetic ancestry' versus race in biomedical human genetic research", Social Studies of Science 41 (2011): 5--30
• Joshua Glasgow, Sally Haslanger, Chike Jeffers, and Quayshawn Spencer, What Is Race?: Four Philosophical Views
• Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West
• Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds
• Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity [Reviewed in BMCR, 2004.06.49; now in JSTOR]
• Nina G. Jablonski, Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color
• Michael Keevak, Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking
• Richard H. King, Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940--1970
• Dean Knox, Will Lowe and Jonathan Mummolo, "Administrative Records Mask Racially Biased Policing", American Political Science Review 114 (2020): 6199-637
• Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality
• Maurice Olender, Race and Erudition
• Donlad B. Redford, From Slave to Pharaoh: The Black Experience of Ancient Egypt
• Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century
• Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd, "The Roots of Intense Ethnic Conflict may not in fact be Ethnic: Categories, Communities and Path Dependence", European Journal of Sociology 45 (2004): 209--232
• Chris Smaje, Natural Hierarchies: The Historical Sociology of Race and Caste
• Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea
• Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought
• Paul L. Wachtel, Race in the Mind of America: Breaking the Vicious Circle
• Keith Wailoo et al. (eds.), Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History
• Ian Whitmarsh and David S. Jones (eds.), What's the Use of Race?: Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference [2010]
• George Yancey, Who Is White? Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide
• Naomi Zack, The Philosophy of Science and Race