natural assumptions: race, essence, and taxonomies of human kinds

Social Research, Summer, 1998 by Lawrence A. Hirschfeld

Let me rephrase this in terms of what I am not saying. Race is not a cognitive device. Rather, race's particular cognitive properties are formed by a specialized cognitive device. But this device by definition underdetermines race. The readiness to categorize humans into natural human kinds does not in itself create any particular system of social reference. Social beliefs do not spring from a natural human kind device. Rather, a natural human kind device enables social belief. To produce a specific and articulate system of social belief, the evolved device must make contact with a cultural environment. Ultimately, the question of interest is how and under what conditions cultural, political, and other ideological systems of belief recruit and are recruited by innately guided strategies for acquiring knowledge.

Taxonomies of race vary considerably across cultures and historic time. My proposal neither denies this variability nor implies that it is trivial. Nor am I suggesting that racial thinking is impervious to cultural and political influence. Indeed, racial thinking is literally unthinkable in the absence of culture and polity. Something, typically a system of cultural belief, channels an abstract set of expectations about human difference toward a specific range of differences. In some, in fact in many, social formations this turns out to be racial. But given that interpretations of raciality vary considerably, the way these abstract principles are deployed must also vary.

I'm also not suggesting here that the relationship between natural human kinds and culture is harmless, simply a cognitive byproduct of evolution. Culture and cognition make contact in more than one way. On the one hand, our cognitive architecture makes some cultural representations possible and precludes others. On the other hand, this same architecture resonates in frightening ways with regimes of power and authority. Virtually any category can be infused with instrumental prejudice. I grew up a Detroit Lion's fan and detested the Green Bay Packers. Doubtless this sort of bias served to increase the commercial value of televised football games, because biased viewers like me were more likely to watch the televised games than an indifferent audience. It isn't difficult to trigger, and presumably manipulate, bias. In an ingenious set of experiments, Henri Tajfel (1981) showed that favoritism toward an ingroup and enmity toward outgroup can be activated with alarming ease.

The particular way that natural human kinds amplify prejudice, however, is astounding. Few prejudices support violence. Almost none do the way natural human kind prejudice does. Why? Perhaps because the deeper the reasoning and the greater the inferential power of a category, the deeper and broader the prejudice associated with it. That is to say, as prejudice targets deeper and deeper (more and more invisible) properties, the more strident the prejudice becomes. Naturalness may not create deviant and distorted cognitions, but it goes a long way toward making them compelling. This, I further suggest, is why racial and gender taxonomies so often figure in systems that regulate power and authority. It makes more sense to say that political economy recruits natural human kinds than to say that natural human kinds emerge out of specific regimes of power. In brief, the way natural human kinds, like race, are mentally represented makes them "naturally" attractive modes for politically representing relations of power and authority (Hirschfeld, 1997).