Philosophy of Race

What it asks

Human genetic variation does not divide into the groups called races. Within-group variation exceeds between-group variation, and the boundaries drawn have varied by country and century.

And race organises housing, wealth, policing, health outcomes and life expectancy with brutal consistency. Something is doing that.

So the question is what. If race is not biological, is it a social kind - real in the way money and universities are real, made by practices and no less consequential for it? Or should the concept be abandoned, on the grounds that it was invented to do a job nobody should want done?

The recurring problems

Eliminate or conserve. If race is not biologically real, one response is to stop using the term. The objection is that the injustices are organised by racial categories, and that a vocabulary without them cannot describe what needs describing.

What social reality means. Saying race is socially constructed is often heard as saying it is unreal. Money is socially constructed. The claim is about what KIND of thing it is, not about whether it matters.

Structural racism. Outcomes can be produced by rules that no participant applies with racial intent. Locating responsibility for a pattern that everyone maintains and nobody authors is a genuine and unresolved problem in moral philosophy.

Race in medicine. Racial categories correlate with health outcomes for reasons that are overwhelmingly social. Using them as clinical variables can help patients and can entrench a biological reading, and both effects are real.

How it developed

Race as a philosophical concept was constructed by philosophers, and the field has to begin by acknowledging it. Several major Enlightenment figures produced racial hierarchies in works still taught for other reasons, and how to handle that is a live methodological question rather than an embarrassment to be footnoted.

Du Bois is the founder of the modern field. His 1897 essay asked what races are if not biological groups, and The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 gave the field double consciousness - the experience of seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that regards one with contempt.

Fanon in 1952 analysed what colonial racial orders do to those inside them, using phenomenology and psychiatry together.

The analytic field formed in the 1980s and 1990s around the eliminate-or-conserve dispute. Mills's The Racial Contract in 1997 reframed political philosophy itself, arguing that the social contract tradition was built on an unstated racial contract determining who counted as a party to it.

The positions within it

Racial eliminativism, social constructionism, racial realism or conservationism, and populationist views that retain a limited biological notion. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

Constructionism is the standard position and the eliminativist objection has not gone away.

The most active work is on structural injustice - how to describe and assign responsibility for harms that nobody intends - and on the use of racial categories in medicine and in algorithmic systems, where the question of when a category helps and when it entrenches is being answered by deployment rather than by argument.