AGAINST RACIAL REALISM

Anti-realism about race is the raison d’être of the racialization concept. The reason I want to reiterate the arguments in its favor is that Uyan, in her reply, does not engage with my arguments for anti-realism or seem to appreciate that the value of the racialization concept depends largely on whether race is a viable analytic category.

Uyan writes of my “commendable efforts to move the anti-realist agenda research program forward,” but it is unclear why she thinks they are commendable (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 16). It doesn’t seem to be because she thinks anti-realism about race is correct, because she is a race realist. She claims, for example, that “race … must be analyzed as a technology of social control” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 16). Elsewhere she writes that, “Race is a condition that only becomes legible as a biologically inheritable trait because of the material imperative of a particular historical location” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 25). If race were either a technology or a condition—these seem like very different claims—then race would be real.

Uyan neither accepts nor rejects my arguments against racial realism, and when she does allude to them, she sees me as “maintaining a critical distance so as not to reify race as a transhistorical category” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 17). However, anti-realism about race makes an ontological claim, not a historical claim. The anti-realist rejects the idea that race exists at any historical moment. In her discussion of my work, Uyan often interprets my position as a form of racial realism. This is puzzling, because I emphasized my anti-realism repeatedly—I worried, ad nauseum!

For example, Uyan claims that my “conceptualization understands inheritable race as not an ideological, but factual outgrowth” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 18). However, this can’t be right. I conceptualize race as an illusion, not as something either factual or heritable. In another place, she interprets me as claiming that “racialization racializes races differently in different contexts,” but this is similarly incompatible with racial anti-realism: it would be impossible to “racialize races” if there are no races (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 20). To give a final example, she writes that, “For Hochman, it would seem that race and racism are produced independently of each other”—but I do not believe that race is produced at all (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 20). Racialization is produced, and racism is produced, but “race” is not.

It is now widely—though not universally—accepted among specialists that there are no human biological races. There is broad scientific agreement that we are a fairly genetically homogenous species, that our biological traits are generally smoothly distributed across geographic space, that there are no major human lineages, and that conventional “racial” classification is not scientifically privileged (Keita et al., Reference Keita, Kittles, Charmaine, Bonney, Furbert-Harris, Dunston and Rotimi2004; Serre and Pääbo, Reference Serre and Pääbo2004; Templeton Reference Templeton2013). Any biological theory of race must either distort these facts or weaken the meaning of race to such an extent that it becomes trivial (Hochman Reference Hochman2016, Reference Hochman2019b).

The dominant academic view at the time of writing is that race is socially real, rather than biologically real (Diaz-Leon Reference Diaz-Leon2015; Haslanger Reference Haslanger2012; Msimang Reference Msimang2019; Omi and Winant, Reference Omi and Winant2015; Taylor Reference Taylor2013). On a surface level, this sounds plausible. The effects of being racialized are certainly real, whether they be felt on a visceral level in terms of discrimination and violence or enjoyed, often unknowingly, as a set of privileges and advantages (Smedley and Smedley, Reference Smedley and Smedley2005). Yet we should be careful not to infer the existence of race from the existence of racialization and racism, which do not require races, but only the belief in races.

Philosophers tend to think of race as a social kind, which can be understood using an analogy to kinds in the physical sciences (like gold). I have argued elsewhere that race does not qualify as a social kind (Hochman Reference Hochman2019c, Reference Hochman2020). That is not at all to say that racialization is socially unimportant—it is clearly of tremendous social importance. Rather, it is to say that there are no set of social properties that reliably distinguish racialized groups from other sorts of groups. To justify this claim, I run an inflation argument against a social kind approach to race, which says that if we try to define race using social properties alone, too many groups start counting as races.

Uyan does not discuss this argument, but I will run through it briefly, because it helps motivate my anti-realist position. I’ll use what I believe to be the most well-developed social kind definition of race in the literature—the one offered by Phila Msimang (Reference Msimang2019). Msimang argues that the “characteristics of a social race are that they are stereotyped groups” about which there is a “presumption that racial identity is fixed” and a “belief that race is a genealogical and heritable kind of group belonging” (Msimang Reference Msimang2019, p. 15).

Msimang’s three conditions of stereotyping, fixity, and genealogy offer a promising account of the social properties unique to “race,” but they turn out to be met in many sorts of groups that we wouldn’t usually think of as races. Consider the example of schizophrenics. Matthias Angermeyer and Herbert Matschinger (Reference Angermeyer and Matschinger2004) find—and this won’t surprise the reader—that there are stereotypes about schizophrenics. There is also a common belief in the fixity of schizophrenia: Angermeyer and Matschinger found that only 33.5% of their subjects agreed with the statement that “With modern treatment methods these days, many patients with schizophrenia can be cured” (Reference Angermeyer and Matschinger2004, p. 1053). What about the genealogy condition? Angermeyer and Matschinger (Reference Angermeyer and Matschinger2005) found that 60% of their subjects attributed hereditary factors as a cause of schizophrenia. As such, it appears that schizophrenics would constitute a “race” on Msimang’s social kind account of race. (Note that, on his account, it wouldn’t matter whether or not these beliefs about schizophrenics are actually true.)

This is just one example of what I am calling the inflation problem with the social kind approach to race. Perhaps it can be fixed, but I doubt it. However, this isn’t the kind of racial realism that Uyan endorses. Uyan claims that race “must be analyzed as a technology of social control and a category that developed out of the constraints and imperatives of specific social relations” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 16). (She also says that race is a “condition,” but I won’t respond to this, because I don’t know what it means).

The idea of race as a technology is popular among race theorists (Coleman Reference Coleman2009; Chun Reference Chun, Nakamura and Chow-White2012; Jones and Jones, Reference Jones and Jones2017; Lentin Reference Lentin2020). However, “race” does not have to be understood as a technology, as Uyan claims. In fact, I believe that the idea of race as a technology conflates “race” with racialization and racism. Racialization and racism are technologies, or tools. They do things in the world. They serve a range of different purposes in different contexts. I do not believe anything is added to the claims that racialization and racism are technologies by claiming that “race” itself is also a technology—except, perhaps, confusion. If we say that race “must be analyzed as a technology of social control and a category” we make clear communication about this important topic exceptionally difficult (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 16). If we think of race as a technology and as a biological category, then race is real in one sense, but an illusion in another. This is a recipe for confusion. Given the long history of race being used as a biological category, non-specialists are likely to interpret ‘race’ biologically when they hear the term.

There is a substantial body of evidence that shows that attempts by specialists to reimagine race as non-biological (e.g., as a social kind or as a technology of power) have been largely unsuccessful in changing how non-specialists understand the concept. Most people still understand “race” to be a biological characteristic, and this form of racial realism is associated with having racist attitudes (Brown et al., Reference Brown, Akiyama, White, Jayaratne and Anderson2009; Condit et al., Reference Condit, Parrott, Harris, Lynch and Dubriwny2004; Donovan Reference Donovan2014; Shulman and Glasgow, Reference Shulman and Glasgow2010). If my arguments against racial realism are correct, and this research is right, then we have both theoretical and normative reasons to understand race as an empty biological category and to adopt alternative concepts like racialization and racialized group.

Uyan argues, convincingly, that “the task of sociological analysis is the task of interrogating how and why a person may come to be legible as a particular racial or ethnic identity in the first place, rather than take as given that identification as a category of analysis” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 24). I find the distinction between a category of practice and a category of analysis immensely useful. I am familiar with it through the work of Mara Loveman (Reference Loveman1999), whom Uyan cites approvingly. Categories of practice are those categories that non-specialists use in their day-to-day lives, whereas categories of analysis are those that specialists adopt to analyze the world.

Uyan applies this distinction to racial and ethnic identities, and while it does apply there, it can also be applied to the category of race itself. Indeed, Loveman applies it in this way, arguing that, “to investigate and explain the causes, dynamics, and consequences of ‘race’ as a category of practice, social scientists would be better off eliminating ‘race’ as a category of analysis” (Reference Loveman1999, p. 898). While Uyan rejects racial identities as categories of analysis, she accepts “race” itself as an analytic category when she claims that “race” must be analyzed as a technology of social control. I have argued that this is a mistake: we are better off ditching race as a category of analysis altogether, replacing it with categories such as racialization, racialized group, and racism.

It is my anti-realism about race—my rejection of ‘race’ as an analytic tool—that drives my defense of ‘racialization’ and ‘racialized group’ as categories of analysis. While Uyan does not engage with my critique of racial realism, it is relevant, because to properly evaluate the racialization concept we must compare it to alternatives. The most popular alternatives are race realist concepts (such as race-as-social-kind or race-as-technology). However, if my arguments are good, race fails as an analytic category. ‘Racialized group’ isn’t just a trendy term, it represents a promising alternative to a deeply flawed concept that has been used to justify some of the worst events of human history, and which continues to be used to justify deadly violence and inequality.

THE AGENTS AND MECHANISMS OF RACIALIZATION

The racialization concept offers an attractive alternative to race-realist concepts, and ought to be evaluated in light of the failures of racial realism, but that does not make it immune to criticism. Uyan levels a range of charges against my definition of racialization. One of these is that my definition does not name or describe the agents and mechanisms of racialization. “What is left unclear” in my definition, writes Uyan, “is how, when, by whom, and why exactly particular processes of racialization are instigated. Delineating the causal mechanisms and agentic forces that drive racial group formation processes is key to the analytical capacity of racialization, especially if the term is to be productively applied to social science research” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, pp. 17–18).

Uyan is right, of course, that these “how, when, by whom, and why” questions are important if we are to understand instances of racialization. Without these clarifications, racialization functions as a “stagnant category of analysis” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 24). Worse still, Uyan believes that “in the absence of locating an agent or mechanism, the concept is tautologized: racialization, with an inability to locate a mechanism, offers itself up as the mechanism” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 26). We cannot explain why a group is understood to be a race by saying “they have been racialized.” Such reasoning is circular.

This much is right. The important question is whether it is a problem for my definition of racialization that it does not tell us “how, when, by whom, and why exactly particular processes of racialization are instigated” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, pp. 17–18). If racialization operated in one single way, at one unique time, instigated by one individual or group, and for one reason only, then we could bake all of this into a definition of the concept. However, as I will show throughout this article, none of the above is true. As such, my definition of racialization retains a level of generality, and this is a benefit of the definition.

It is the task of the researcher to answer the how, when, by whom, and why questions in their attempts to understand instances of racialization—the racialization concept cannot do these things. Uyan is correct that appealing to the racialization concept to explain why a group is racialized is unproductive. However, she is wrong to claim that this is the racialization concept offering “itself up as the mechanism” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 26). ‘Racialization’ is a general concept which points to something unified—a form of biologization—taking place in multiple contexts and through multiple mechanisms. Determining the specific mechanisms involved in particular cases of racialization is up to the researcher; it is not something the concept can achieve.

Conceptual animism is a recurring problem in Uyan’s reply. She writes, for instance, of the “concept’s inability to locate a specific agent in the process of racialization” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 19). However, concepts do not have abilities; they cannot locate things. The key question is whether people using the racialization concept can perform these tasks. What matters is whether there is some underlying problem with the racialization concept that renders it a poor conceptual resource. I do not believe that Uyan shows this.

While I argue that a definition of racialization must retain a level of generality because of how diverse the phenomenon is, Uyan believes that, in my view, “racialization is said to be a process without a specific mechanism or agent” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 19). This is a misinterpretation. There are always mechanisms or agents involved. My point is very simple: the racialization concept cannot specify what or who these are—that is the task of the researcher.

Uyan criticizes my phrase “racialization works differently in different contexts” because she sees it as suggesting that “racialization—a thing out there in the world—does its work differently in different contexts” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 20). This is a misreading. If I say, for instance, that “racism works differently in Brazil and South Africa” I am not implying that there are no racists or racist institutions in these countries, and that racism is some mysterious force that does its work automatically there. Rather, that sentence is the beginning of an explanation.

That said, claims like “racialization works differently in different contexts” do some explanatory work. Uyan argues that this claim is “as explanatory as the sentence: wind blows differently in valleys than it does in mountains” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 20). But that is a perfectly fine sentence! It is explanatory. Wind does blow differently in the valleys and the mountains. The sentence doesn’t tell us why—one would need a paragraph to explain this. Similarly, the sentence “racialization works differently in different contexts” is explanatory, but it is just a starting point.

Uyan critiques what she calls my “theory” of racialization. However, as I’ve already noted, I do not defend a theory of racialization, but a definition of racialization. This misunderstanding helps to contextualize Uyan’s criticisms. If I were offering a theory of racialization, it would be an awfully thin theory, and it would deserve some of the criticisms Uyan levels. But definitions are very different from theories. A general theory of racialization is undesirable for the reason Barbra Fields (Reference Fields2001) has identified: “Not all racializers do the same thing when they racialize” (p. 50).

Because my article was a defense of the racialization concept, rather than an exploration of a case-study, I did not discuss particular instances of racialization in any great detail. One case I did briefly discuss was the racialization that occurred in fifteenth-century Spain, where Jews and Moors were labelled as razas with “impure blood.” Returning to this example, we can consider how we could begin answering the how, when, by whom, and why questions in relation to this context. We might begin roughly like this:

How: The Purity of Blood Statutes, among other measures

When: Beginning in the first half of the fifteenth century

By Whom: The old Spanish Christians (or, more accurately, a subset of them)

Why: To take power from new Christians—former Jews and Moors who had converted to Christianity (Nirenberg Reference Nirenberg, Eliav-Feldon, Isaac and Ziegler2009)

The concept of racialization may be unable to answer how, when, by whom, and why questions, but that does not mean that people using the concept cannot answer them.

Uyan criticizes “the absence of locating an agent or mechanism” in my definition of racialization, but there is no single agent or mechanism responsible for all instances of racialization (Reference Uyan2021, p. 26). Historically, racialization has been predominantly performed by White people—people who self-racialize as White. However, this isn’t universally true. Consider the work of two prominent African American philosophers of race who defend de-essentialized and anti-racist versions of biological racial realism: Michael Hardimon (Reference Hardimon2017) and Quayshawn Spencer (Reference Spencer2019). We can answer the four questions again, looking at their work:

How: Academic and public-facing work, drawing on philosophy of biology and genetic anthropology

When: The twenty-first century

By Whom: Michael Hardimon and Quayshawn Spencer

Why: Out of a belief in the scientific respectability and usefulness of de-essentialized, non-hierarchical accounts of race

The high variability in the answers to the how, when, by whom, and why questions should make us skeptical of the possibility of any general or universal theory of racialization. However, this does not detract from the usefulness of the racialization concept. The fact that racialization is complex does not mean that there is nothing that unites all cases of racialization. That thing is a particular kind of biologization. Because of how misleading and dangerous this form of biologization has been historically, it is essential that we can name racialization when it occurs. Naming racialization will not tell us how, when, by whom, and why it occurs, but that is simply because there are no universal answers to these questions, not because the concept is somehow faulty.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RACIALIZATION AND RACISM

The second of Uyan’s major criticisms regards the relationship between racialization and racism. Uyan charges me with what Karen Fields and Barbara J. Fields (Reference Fields and Fields2012) call the “race-racism evasion” (p. 95). They explain that this evasion occurs when there is a slippage between “racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something that the target is” (Reference Fields and Fields2012, p. 17). Fields and Fields offer a useful example. “Consider the statement ‘black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color’—a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality” (Reference Fields and Fields2012, p. 17). Of course, Black Southerners were segregated because of anti-Black racism on the part of Whites, not because of their skin color.

Uyan claims that the race-racism evasion “is highly operative in Hochman’s definition” (Reference Uyan2021, p. 20). However, she does not provide any direct evidence for this charge. Rather, she focuses on the fact that I avoid any categorical claim about whether racialization is inherently racist. Uyan notes that my “theory of racialization”—actually my definition of racialization—“has ‘no mention of racial hierarchy’” because I believe that the “outcome of racialization ‘is complex’” and “not necessarily racist” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 20). She continues, “What is puzzling in this elaboration is Hochman’s theorization of race as a category without necessary connection to racism” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 20).

Distinguishing racialization from racism conceptually is different from the race/racism evasion. Of course, nothing is stopping someone from using the racialization concept and committing the race/racism evasion. For instance, someone might say something misguided like “they were attacked because of how they are racialized,” which is similar to saying that “they were attacked because of their dark skin.” However, I do not say anything like this, and my definition does not encourage this evasion of racism.

Indeed, I have been a vocal critic of the race/racism evasion. For instance, I’ve argued elsewhere against the use of “race” as a euphemism for “racism” (Hochman Reference Hochman2020). There is no “race-based violence,” in my view, only racist violence. There are no “racial attacks,” only racist attacks. In fact, I believe that when Uyan claims that “race… must be analyzed as a technology of social control and a category that developed out of the constraints and imperatives of specific social relations” she is evading racism (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 16). Racism, not “race,” is a technology of social control. We should, I believe, name racism instead of euphemistically referring to “race.”

The race/racism evasion charge fails, but underlying it is a worry or confusion about the relationship between racialization and racism (see also Goldberg Reference Goldberg, Murji and Solomos2005; Rattansi Reference Rattansi, Murji and Solomos2005). Here is how I see the relationship. If racialization is the process or processes through which groups come to be understood as biological races, and biological races can be understood in a non-hierarchical manner, then non-racist racialization is possible. This is the kind of racialization biological race realists such as Hardimon and Spencer perform, for example. Brett St Louis (Reference St Louis2002) puts it plainly: “while all racism is predicated on the understanding of difference, not all understandings of difference lead to racism” (p. 662).

One might disagree with this, but Uyan says she finds it “puzzling.” It is unclear why. One hint is found when she describes “the mechanism through which race is imposed on someone (racism)…” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 20). In this sentence, Uyan defines racism as if it were the racialization process itself, as though the process of racially classifying someone constitutes racism. I find this definition of racism unhelpful. Racism is a form of prejudice and discrimination; it is not merely racial classification. To identify racism with the racialization process itself is to take the moral force out of racism. Surely many people racialize because they are taught to, and not out of prejudice. But if one were to define racism in this way, it would be puzzling to then divorce racialization from racism, since they would be more or less the same thing.

Uyan believes that there is “a very fundamental disjuncture in Hochman’s articulation of the racialization concept from other theorists of race: for him, racialization can happen without racism; or, racism does not necessarily produce race; or, since Hochman does not make the order of causation clear, it is very possible that one could understand his theory [read: definition] here to suggest that racialization causes racism, rather than racism causes racialization” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, pp. 20–21). To clarify, I believe the causality goes both ways. Racialization can cause racism, just as racism can cause racialization. Notice the conditionals. Uyan is after definitive claims, but none can be made.

Racialization often causes racism. Much racialization has a hierarchical component, and so is directly racist. It directly causes racism. What about the other way around: can racism cause racialization? On my understanding of racism, racialization is required for racism to occur.Footnote ¹ If racialization is a prerequisite for racism, then it would seem as though racism cannot cause, but must always follow, racialization. That is not to suggest that racialization is not motivated by prejudice, but that before racialization occurs, that prejudice is not properly understood as racism (for instance, it could initially be ethnism, colorism, nationalism, or religious discrimination, before it turns into racism as racialization is performed). Nevertheless, there is a sense in which racism does cause racialization. Racist individuals and institutions spread racialization. They spread the message, through their racist actions, that certain groups and individuals belong to certain “races.”

So, racialization can cause racism and racism can cause racialization. However, they do not always do these things. Above I cited works by Hardimon and Spencer. Their work is racializing, according to my definition, because it spreads the belief in the existence of human biological races. However, their work is anti-racist. The same applies to much work in biomedicine, which is racializing—spreading belief in the existence of human biological races—but anti-racist (Msimang Reference Msimang2020). Racialization does not always cause racism.

Similarly, racism does not always cause racialization. Lawrence Blum (Reference Blum2002) makes a distinction that will help me to explain this point. He differentiates between fully and partially racialized groups. A partially racialized group is partly or only sometimes understood to constitute a race. Think, for example, of Muslims (Selod and Embrick, Reference Selod and Embrick2013) and Latinos (Blum Reference Blum2002; cf. Chávez-Moreno Reference Chávez-Moreno, Murillo, Bernal, Morales, Luis, Bybee, Muñoz, Saenz, Villanueva, Machado-Casas and Espinoza2021). Racism against these groups can cause racialization—it can further racialize them. However, once a group is fully racialized, racism cannot racialize them any further (although it may play a role in maintaining their racialization). As such, racism does not always cause racialization.

Given that racialization does not always cause racism, and racism does not always cause racialization, racism plays no proper role in a definition of racialization. Note that rejecting the claim that all racialization is racist is different from sanitizing racialization. As I explained in the article Uyan critiques, racialization has, historically, gone hand-in-hand with racism, even if some racialization is not racist or is even anti-racist (Hochman Reference Hochman2019c).

IS RACIALIZATION NATURAL OR PREDICTABLE?

Uyan’s next criticism of my work is that I naturalize “race” and racialization. “Without locating an agent instigating a racialized condition,” she contends, “Hochman’s conceptualization understands group formation process as a natural…phenomenon, rather than phenomena generated and re-created within particular social context and history” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 21). She argues that my work ultimately “disseminates, if only implicitly, an ideology about the biological realism of race” which is “harmful for the anti-realist agenda” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 26). Worse still, she argues that I “unknowingly co-sign racist American logics of the past, regurgitating their tenants [sic] without subjecting them to critical inquiry” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 25).

This interpretation came as a surprise to me, given that—drawing on my training in the philosophy of biology—I have published extensively on the failings of race as a biological category and the fallacies of racist logics (Hochman Reference Hochman2013a, Reference Hochmanc, Reference Hochman2014, Reference Hochman2016, Reference Hochman2019b, Reference Hochman2020). Notice that Uyan writes that my “conceptualization understands group formation process” as natural, rather than that I myself conceptualize racialization as natural. She knows that I do not (I even have a paper critiquing naturalistic accounts of racialization and racism—see Hochman Reference Hochman2013b). Rather, she believes that a naturalistic understanding of racialization is a logical consequence of my work. As evidence, Uyan draws on a different paper of mine, in which I propose a new framework for understanding racialization: interactive constructionism. Before returning to Uyan’s critique, I will need to briefly describe this framework.

Interactive constructionism offers an alternative to the dichotomous (biological vs. social) approaches to “race.” It also offers an alternative to racial realism, because it is ‘interactive constructionism about racialized groups’—not “races.” There are a wide range of factors that are involved in racialization, including (but not limited to) biological and social factors. Race may fail as a biological category, but it is undeniable that a person’s biological characteristics (skin color, hair texture, eye shape, etc.) play a role in how they are racialized (by other agents). This is possible because racialization practices pick up on some patterns of human biological variation even though, as I argue, “race” is an overall poor and misleading guide to that variation. And, of course, social factors influence racialization, even though racialized groups are not a social kind in the sense of being distinguishable from other sorts of groups by a set of social properties (Hochman Reference Hochman2017, Reference Hochman2019c, Reference Hochman2020).

The factors involved in racialization include, but are not limited to, the following: administrative, biological, cultural, economic, geographic, gendered, historical, lingual, phenomenological, political, psychological, religious, and social (Hochman Reference Hochman2017). A racialized group is a group misunderstood to be a biological race, but factors such as these are involved in determining whether and how racialization operates (see also Ludwig Reference Ludwig2019). Each factor interacts with the others and plays more or less important roles depending on the context.

In devising interactive constructionism, I drew inspiration from developmental systems theory (DST)—a biological framework for understanding development, inheritance, and evolution (Griffiths and Hochman, Reference Griffiths, Hochman and Kehrer-Sawatzki2015; Oyama Reference Oyama2000). The name ‘interactive constructionism’ comes from DST. In that literature constructive interactionism refers to the epigenetic processes by which a wide range of developmental resources interact to construct the phenotype. That overlapped with my point about the variety of interactants involved in racialization. Moreover, developmental systems theorists are skeptical of dichotomous thinking (e.g., nature vs. nurture), and I was arguing against dichotomous biological kind versus social kind accounts of “race”—another way in which DST inspired my framework.

Uyan finds the connection I draw between my framework and DST problematic. She writes that “carrying a theory from biology into sociology presents a troubling teleology of social life: the ‘racialization of groups’ becomes analogous to the ‘development of cells,’ classifying racialization as if it is a biological condition of human development” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 22). There are two problems with this response: it mischaracterizes how I draw on DST, and it belies a misunderstanding of DST.

Drawing inspiration from DST in the creation of my own framework and offering a DST explanation of racialization are very different things. I only did the former. From DST, I drew on the constructive interactionism idea and the rejection of dichotomous thinking. I was not seeking to offer a DST explanation of racialization. Such an approach would fail miserably. As I wrote above, DST is a framework for understanding development, inheritance, and evolution. Racialization is far outside of its explanatory scope. I never argued that racialization is analogous to the “development of cells” and so is a “biological condition of human development,” and this is not implied by my work.

Even if I were to draw more heavily on DST, it would not support the conclusion Uyan wants to draw: that a DST explanation of racialization would be deterministic and naturalize the phenomenon. As Susan Oyama (Reference Oyama2000) explains, from a DST perspective:

From a DST perspective, development is not predetermined, and the nature/nurture dichotomy is untenable—all nature is nurtured. As such, even if I were to offer a DST explanation of racialization, the consequences would be different from those Uyan imagines. DST—more than any other approach in biology—emphasizes contingency in development and evolution. A change in one part of the developmental system (sometimes a surprising part) can have profound consequences. Developmental outcomes cannot be taken for granted. DST is a modern form of epigenesis, not preformationism (Griffiths and Hochman, Reference Griffiths, Hochman and Kehrer-Sawatzki2015). Uyan misunderstands DST and how I draw on it, and in doing so mischaracterizes my understanding of racialization.

RACIALIZED GROUPS WITHOUT GROUPISM

‘Racialized group’ is racialization’s companion concept. Uyan critiques my use of this concept, arguing that, “The term ‘racialized group’ is only analytically meaningful if one investigates under what historical and social conditions groupness is formed, and how this groupness maintains its boundedness across time” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 22). I disagree with this claim. When correctly applied, the concept tells us that a group is being misinterpreted as a biological race. It is analytically meaningful, even if the amount of information the concept can convey is extremely limited. This should be expected though. It is just a concept. The real work, as Uyan herself suggests in the quote above, is down to the investigator.

Uyan focuses on what she sees as “analytical conflations of groupness and category” in discussions of racialized groups. The fact that there is a racialized category does not indicate that there is a homogenous group attached to that label. I agree with this. While Uyan does not use the term groupism, that is how this problem is usually described. Rogers Brubaker (Reference Brubaker2002) describes groupism as “the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis” (p. 164).

Uyan’s article is written as a reply to my defense of the racialization concept, but when she turns her focus to groupism she switches her attention to a fellow philosopher, Lawrence Blum, whose work I admire. Uyan argues that Blum’s (Reference Blum2010) understanding of the racialized group is groupist. I will not evaluate this charge, because my aim in this paper is to defend my definition of racialization, not Blum’s. Uyan interprets Blum’s work as relevant due to my “direct reliance and citation of [his] conceptualization” of ‘racialized group’ (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 22). To be clear, I see myself as developing Blum’s work on the topic, not as endorsing it in its entirety.

It is unclear why Uyan discusses Blum but not my own work dealing with this subject. I respond directly to the worry about groupism in the paper Uyan targets (Hochman Reference Hochman2019c).Footnote ² I argue that the category of the racialized group does not lend itself to groupist thinking and that it actually serves as a bulwark against groupism. This can be seen when we consider the fact that while a “race” is something one supposedly has, “racialization is something that is done to a group, by some social agent, at a certain time, for a given period, in and through various processes, and relative to a particular social context” (Garcia Reference Garcia2003, p. 285). Given that racialization falsely biologizes large populations—which will often not have some pre-existing groupness—it is reasonable to assume that those groups are internally diverse in many respects. My definition of ‘racialized group’ only requires one commonality between members of racialized groups: that they are racialized the same way. That is not to suggest that there are no further commonalities—there often are—but my definition does not assume them.

One might argue that it is groupist to use the term ‘racialized group’ without first checking for high entitativity, group cohesion, or groupness. I think that this would be a mistake. The concept of the group can be understood minimally. When we use this term in ordinary speech, we often talk of groups this way. For instance, we might refer to a group of people when the only known aspect of their groupness is their collective physical proximity. If I mention “that group of people over there” and you respond by saying “they are not really a group, they are really different sorts of people,” then you have misunderstood the meaning of the term group, falsely assuming it implies high entitativity.

Uyan might reply by saying that this is a demonstration of how the term ‘group’ functions as a category of practice, but that does not imply that it is a useful category of analysis. This would be a good response, but I do think a minimalist account of the group concept is analytically useful. The concept of the group, and in particular the racialized group, plays an important role in conceptual space. When Uyan writes of “analytical conflations of groupness and category,” I interpret her as suggesting that we should call racialized groups racialized categories instead (Reference Uyan2021, p. 24). However, this would be misleading. Black, White, Asian, etc. are indeed racialized categories. However, Black people, White people, Asian people, etc. do not form categories, any more than a group of people standing in close proximity of each other form a category. Rather, they form groups, minimal as they may be in their groupness.

If we put the charge of groupism against Blum to one side and look at my definition, there is nothing to suggest groupism, unless the mere use of the term group is groupist—but I’ve already warned against such an assumption. Groupism is a problem, but I do not believe that the solution is to stop talking about groups, any more than sexism is solved by not talking about sex and gender. Groupism is, in my view, a misunderstanding of the metaphysics of groups. As such, we should try to be clear about what we can infer when we are talking about groups, rather than avoid using the term.

IDENTIFYING THE ORIGINS OF RACIALIZATION

The last of Uyan’s major criticisms of my definition of racialization is that it cannot help us to identify the origins of racialization. I have already responded to Uyan’s argument that, “The most recent definition of the concept cannot, and does not try to, account for a mechanism for the process of racialization” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 15). I mention this again because she argues that, “such an accounting is a necessary component of any conceptualization that aims to help identify the origins of racialization” (Uyan Reference Uyan2021, p. 26).

Just as Uyan argues that my definition of racialized groups is groupist without considering my argument for why it isn’t, she argues that my definition of racialization cannot help us to identify the origins of racialization without discussing my own attempt to identify those origins. Guided by my definition of racialization, I argue that the first instance of the phenomenon occurred in fifteenth-century Spain (Hochman Reference Hochman2019c). This took place, I argue, with the racialization of the Jews and the Moors by the old Christians (who started calling themselves “natural Christians”). I discuss this briefly in the paper Uyan responds to, and in more detail in Is “Race” Modern?: Disambiguating the Question, which is published in this journal (Hochman Reference Hochman2019a).

Uyan claims that it is necessary for a definition of racialization to “account for a mechanism for the process of racialization” in order to help us identify the origins of racialization. However, the assumptions (a) that there is a single mechanism of racialization and (b) that one would be necessary to help us locate the origins of racialization, are both mistaken. All that is needed is a good definition of racialization and a good knowledge of history.

Recall that I define the racialization of groups as the process or processes through which a group is understood to be a major biological entity and human lineage, formed due to reproductive isolation, in which membership is transmitted through biological descent. As David Nirenberg (Reference Nirenberg, Eliav-Feldon, Isaac and Ziegler2009) explains,

It appears that this is the first time in history that a group was racialized in the sense I define above.

Some scholars locate racialization earlier. For instance, Geraldine Heng (Reference Heng2018) focuses on thirteenth-century England and writes that:

What Heng shows is that some of the mechanisms of racialization were established before racialization first occurred. However, using my definition, she does not show that racialization was practiced in thirteenth-century England. Jewishness was biologized during this period (consider the myth of Jewish male menstruation). However, Jewishness was not biologized as racial during this period (“Jewish male menstruation” was “curable” through conversion).

This example suggests that focusing on the mechanisms of racialization, as Uyan recommends, can actually lead us astray if we are trying to determine the origins of racialization. The Jewish badge (the yellow star) identified Jews in both thirteenth-century England and fifteenth-century Spain. However, it was only a mechanism of racialization in fifteenth-century Spain, where it was interpreted as indicating Jewish raza. In other words, the same mechanism operated as an instrument of (unracialized) anti-Jewish prejudice in thirteenth-century England and (racialized) anti-Semitism in fifteenth-century Spain.

Overlooking my account of the origins of racialization, Uyan claims that any attempt to engage with the history of racialization on my part would be limited by my “implicit acceptance of a certain folk wisdom derived from a particular and unique American history” (Reference Uyan2021, p. 24). I am not sure how she arrives at this conclusion. I argue that the race concept first developed in late Medieval Spain and was turned into a scientific category in Germany in the late eighteenth century. America does not play any explicit or (as far as I can tell) implicit role in my definitions of ‘race’ and ‘racialization.’ As such, it is unclear to me why Uyan believes that my “definition unknowingly cosigns a uniquely American logic of racism, a logic that requires a biologically essentialized understanding of race” (Reference Uyan2021, p. 25). I do not see what, specifically, is supposed to make my definition American, racist (I think that for it to cosign racist logic it would have to be racist), or essentialist.

Let me go through these claims, one by one. First, I argue that the category of race is European in origin, not American. Second, I argue that racist claims are empirically untenable and morally reprehensible. And third, I argue that essentialism is not “essential” to the concept of race (early scientific race theory was predominantly typological rather than essentialist, and current scientific race theory is predominantly statistical rather than essentialist). I do argue that we should understand ‘race’ as a biological category, but one which fails to refer, so it is hard to see how I am “cosigning” any version of racial realism, let alone a racist version.

Uyan worries that “race, as theorized in the latest definition of racialization, lies outside of the racist interests of the planter class in the case of the U.S.” (Reference Uyan2021, p. 25). However, racialization does initially lie outside of these interests. ‘Race’ is a European import to the Americas. The concept of race itself is not originally or inherently tied to these interests. Indeed, in Australia—where I live—racist logics have historically operated very differently. It was a part of the White Australia policy to “breed out” Aboriginality (Carlson Reference Carlson2016). This racist logic is starkly at odds with the racist logic of the one-drop rule.

Uyan claims that, “Only within the exploitative arrangements of chattel slavery and in conditions where property ownership over another human being were legal did the ‘value’ of an inheritable ancestry take on social meaning” (Reference Uyan2021, p. 25). This is untrue. There have been meaningful heritable identities throughout recorded history, long before racialization first occurred. But even if we focus on racialization, its “value” preceded the trans-Atlantic slave trade—think again of inquisitorial Spain and the racialization of the Jews and the Moors. It may be Uyan, not me, who overemphasizes the Americas in the origins of racialization.

Rather than limiting our ability to explore the history of racialization, or reproducing American racist logics, my definition of racialization can help us to identify the origins of racialization and to explore its manifestations in a range of contexts, all while maintaining critical distance from those logics.