Race, Racism, and Academic Complicity

Author(s): Katya Gibel Mevorach

Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No. 2 (May, 2007), pp. 238-241
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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 KATYA GIBEL MEVORACH

Grinnell College

Race, racism, and academic complicity

COMMENTARY s race real? For too many Americans the answer is a resounding yes. As
Stephan Palmi6 points out (this issue), "In the United States, dispari-
ties in health, wealth, and social inclusion among 'racially defined'
populations have widened rather than narrowed in the post-civil
rights era, in the process eroding both the credibility of the idea of
a 'raceless' meritocratic society and the experiential salience of the notion
that 'race' is a mere social construction." But the revival of the biological no-
tion of "race" is perhaps not so surprising: As historian Barbara Jean Fields
(1990, n.d.; Palmi6 cites her sister, anthropologist Karen Fields) has argued
with forceful eloquence, it is far more comfortable for Americans to live with
this belief than to tackle the more troubling political question of racism. For
this reason, each semester I insist that students use the word race only as
a verb. And so I was gratified to read Palmie's title, "Genomics, Divination,
'Racecraft' "-when one changes the noun race to a verb, the resilience of
"racecraft" is easily revealed to be as salient and dependent on an internal
logic of belief as "witchcraft" is.
As an intellectual strategy, Palmi6 suggests that the analytic of classical
anthropological theories of divination and witchcraft be adapted for a con-
sideration of "racecraft" and turns attention to personalized genomic his-
tories, in which it is obvious (or should be) that "technologies of genomic
historicization and identity arbitration ... paradoxically perform their cul-
tural work in systematically reproducing fundamentally racist modes and
models of sociality."
The 21st century is almost a decade old, and more than two centuries
have passed since naturalists invented a classificatory system and applied
it to human populations, a taxonomy in which sight and aesthetic pref-
erences were linked, simultaneously prescribing a hierarchical order that
seemed, objectively, to cohere with contemporary notions of "civilized" and
"primitive." One might have thought-or perhaps this should be qualified
as "I would have thought"-that at this point the shibboleth of biological
race would have disappeared along with alchemy. Instead, it perseveres in
the United States, where thinking of race as a salient physical category of

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 238-241, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. ? 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
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http: I /www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.2.238.

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 Race, racism, and academic complicity m American Ethnologist
distinction is not only reinforced on a daily basis but is
also reproduced each time race is deployed as a noun in
conversation, communicated through media channels, and
registered on official documents. Perhaps the most insidi-
ous aspect to the shameful legacy of the science of race--
not the obsession with classification that propelled Johann
Friedrich Blumenbach but, rather, 19th-century scientific
racism produced by reputable scholars with credentials
from and membership in prestigious institutions-is that
the concept of "race" continues to underwrite the biolo-
gization of difference within the academy from undergradu-
ate classrooms to biogenetic research laboratories and think
tanks.
Palmi6 adds his voice to a surprisingly small sector of
academics addressing other academics in an academic fo-
rum (in doing so, acknowledging the power of academic au-
thority to prescribe and pronounce truths that percolate to
the public sector). His article therefore represents an inge-
nious intervention against what appears to have morphed
into a U.S. religious belief that, like all religious beliefs, re-
fuses scrutiny but, unlike beliefs rooted in religion, necessar-
ily prescribes historical amnesia, at best, and obstinate ig-
norance, at worst, as the vanguard of faith and therefore the
guarantor of truth. He reminds readers that "most anthro-
pologists" would insist that identities are sociological and
indeed that the discipline should be credited for contribut-
ing the idea of "social" categories. This intellectual orienta-
tion, which began with Franz Boas's research on European
immigrants and his efforts to emphasize environment over
biology (although his emphatic position on the primacy of
culture seemed to waiver just a little when it came to the
Negro), took a decidedly political turn in reaction to Nazi
racial ideology, which lifted white supremacy to a more so-
phisticated level. Indeed, I am mystified by the absence in
Palmie's article of reference to Ashley Montagu, who force-
fully insisted that the word race could not be dissociated
from its past and should therefore be disappeared-a per-
spective aptly captured by the title of his 1940 book, Man's
Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1952). And 60
years later, in what Palmi6 accurately refers to as a "logic of
a peculiarlyU.S. culture of race" (my emphasis), the popular
or commensensical understanding of race correlates certain
physical characteristics and lines of descent. Although racial
ambiguity is no longer cause for alarm, and those who "look
white" can pass without fear of violence if their colorful ge-
nealogy is disclosed, race is still imagined and lived on the
default lines of skin color and ancestry and therefore trans-
lates as an identity in the collective memory of groups whose
members share a history of exclusion, marginalization, and
oppression based only on the color of their skin or ancestry.
The body, metaphorically read as a text, is subject to inter-
pretations and translations because learning to "see" and to
make meaning of what is seen is context bound and situa-
tional (Azoulay 2003).
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Faculty who teach undergraduate students should be
required to historicize the terms race and ethnicity. Adding
Montagu to syllabi would credit the scholar who was so in-
strumental in popularizing the term ethnicity (intended to
accentuate environment and socialization) and the corol-
lary significance of culture (also a reminder that activism in
academia is not new). Yet of equal importance, introduc-
tory social sciences, in general, and anthropology courses,
in particular, should highlight the significant fact that, in
retrospect, ethnicity did not replace race and its biological
connotations-rather, race and ethnicitybifurcated: Race re-
mained married with biology and ethnicity eloped happily
with culture. In the United States, the semantic transition
of European immigrants from "white racial types" to "white
ethnics," as Matthew Frye Jacobson (1998) details, erased
all trace of the racial vocabulary and imagery so central to
19th- and early 20th-century discourses of difference from
the national collective memory, whereas race continued to
be associated with the epidermal surface of the body-skin
color. Although ethnicity incorporated "culture" and "her-
itage" into its definition, it also remained anchored to ances-
try and shared descent; consequently, metaphors of roots,
blood, and common origin have bound it to the race con-
cept it was meant to replace. And culture-another ubiqui-
tous term-never escaped its umbilical tie to race: Culture
was and remains internally divided between opposition to
and conceptual claim to the natural and the organic (bril-
liantly mapped out by Robert J. C. Young in Colonial Desire
[1995]).
Palmie, like Young, does not shy away from pointing
to the complicity of the academy in legitimizing "race" as
an idea rooted in the body, revealed and guaranteed by the
discerning eyes of scientific expertise. Academic expertise is
acquired through academic channels-the site of authority
and validation-so dislodging the idea of "race" should be-
gin here. And yet, despite disclaimers to the contrary, in the
classroom and in publications, passing reference to race as
"a social construction" turns into a rhetorical gesture whose
impotence is facilitated by amnesia--omission, neglect, and
erasure of the historical processes testify to the tenacious ef-
forts required to keep race alive.
In the last 40 years, development of new technologies
has enabled molecular biologists to study genotype (invisi-
ble markers). Research from this field should have exorcised
the myth of biological race and pioneered radically new bio-
cultural paradigms. Yet, despite molecular biology's promise
of a more sophisticated examination of human variation be-
neath and beyond the surface of the skin, phenotype remains
in the registry of scientific speculations. The problem is sim-
ple: In the matter of race, there is no such thing as "getting it
right."
There are no generic races precisely because "race" is
a metaphor, a social construct, a human invention whose
criteria for differentiation are neither universal nor fixed but
239
American Ethnologist m Volume 34 Number 2 May 2007
have always been used to manage difference. Race, ethnicity,
and culture manifest themselves as metonyms that presup-
pose difference is inherited-after all, one does not wake up
in the morning and arbitrarily declare oneself to be Chinese,
Cherokee, or Chicano and seriously expect to be identified
and recognized as such without some proof. And once recog-
nition is contingent on providing evidence, one is directed
to the registry of sociopolitical and legal-not biological-
affairs. Research projects designed to find genomic data to
support or invalidate the "truth" of oral histories-as in the
Jefferson-Hemings affair-are proof that the authors of sci-
entific hypotheses, procedures, and conclusions are inextri-
cably aligned with and tied to the political culture of the era
in which the projects are conducted.
Reiteration that the data are "empirical"-therefore, al-
legedly "objective" and, consequently, able to identify ge-
netic signatures-testifies to the spurious reinforcement
that race and racial categories are real. It is an infuriating
and insidious resistance to placing racism at the center of
research projects and their preliminary articulation. (And
note, the discreet 21st-century version of racism, the en-
gine that drives race thinking, may be less violent than in
an earlier era but it is, arguably, no less lethal.) When a pur-
ported biological criterion (DNA) is the intellectual point of
departure and it is mapped with units of analysis based on
myths of racial difference, one is witness to a sociological
process in which biology is invoked as evidence of iden-
tity, and it is precisely for this reason that the prestige of a
scientific mantle needs to be interrogated, especially when
it is exported to the consumer market. The danger is that
when genetic studies are privileged, attention is distracted
from the social mechanisms that condition ways individ-
uals and groups form a sense of shared collective identity.
The genomic patterns and social boundaries that designate
the criteria that determine who is black, white, or mixed are
not, as Palmid correctly underlines, "predicted from a per-
son's biological endowment, however defined." They result
from politics of recognition-rooted in social norms, politi-
cal policies, and legislation. Until-and unless-academics
across the disciplines internalize this as an epistemological
principle, they will not convey this information to all those
who rely on, appeal to, and believe in the authority of the
academic voice. Race is an ideology-and one can only com-
mend each scholar who takes on this topic and reminds col-
leagues that racism is neither a tragic flaw nor an irrational
historical residue but continues to be a social phenomenon
that demands attention.
As long as pronouncements to educate the public that
race is a bogus concept are refuted by reports in science
journals, forensic commentaries, newspaper headlines, and
pharmaceutical advertisements alleging genetic predispo-
sitions of named population groups related by physical ap-
pearance and geography, anthropologists-as the inventors
of race-are responsible for speaking out, in the classroom,
240
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in colloquia, and in the media. The tendency to cluster peo-
ple in familiar ways repackages racial differences under the
label of variation. Finding new names for old configurations
does not allow for radically different ways to cluster popula-
tions as subjects of study.
Extending Palmid's concern with identity and genomic
laboratories to the realm of medical technologies, let me
reemphasize the following: I am not an opponent of genetic
studies per se, nor do I deny that deciphering genetic pat-
terns may constructively contribute to medical research de-
voted to the eradication of medical disorders, disease, and
chronic illnesses (Azoulay 2006). But I cannot overempha-
size that the social categories that scientists have been using
are permeable and flexible. Although they are instructive
when examining the sociopolitical ways in which people
identify one another and are identified, a radical cultural
shift is needed.
As sociologist Paul Gilroy observes, "Whether it is
articulated in the more specialized tongues of biological
science 'and pseudo-science, or in a vernacular idiom of
culture and common sense, the term 'race' conjures up a
peculiarly resistant variety of natural difference" (2001:29).
As scholars, we need to ask, what difference does difference
make? What cultural predispositions inform scholarly
research that takes human variability as its focal point? And
we need accountability on the part of both researchers and
their funding agencies, who should address the question,
why is it important to find a genetic code? For whom is
the enormous investment in time, energy, and capital of
significance? Most importantly, why does determining bio-
logical difference take priority over variations in the quality
of life among humankind? Given the racial context that
frames genetic research by default-if not design-Gilroy's
compelling appeal for liberation from "all racializing and
raciological thought, from racialized seeing, racialized
thinking and racialized thinking about thinking" as "the
only ethical response to the conspicuous wrongs that
raciologies continue to solicit and sanction" (2001:40-41)
needs to be loudly broadcast and heeded throughout the
field(s) of bioscience. In the same frame, Palmid's article
represents an insistence-that our vocation should be
devoted to promoting the project of a democratic society of
free and equal individuals.
[scientific racism; academic amnesia; race, ethnicity, culture;
genetic signatures; biotechnologies]
References cited
Azoulay, Katya Gibel
2003 Not an Innocent Pursuit: The Politics of a "Jewish" Genetic
Signature. Developing World Bioethics 3(2):119-126.
2006 Reflections on "Race" and the Biologization of Difference.
Patterns of Prejudice 40(4-5):353-380.
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241

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