. . . June 1996

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Talk of race is everywhere and incessant in America, the din of discourse emanating from all ranks and stations, all age groups, all creeds, all parts of the political spectrum and all manner of news and cultural media.

Is race real or is it imagined? If it's real, is it real in a biological sense, a social sense, or both? If imaginary, how did the idea arise?

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, U-M associate professor of anthropology and psychology, tackles all of these questions in a book published this spring by the MIT Press: Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds. The book emerged from Hirschfeld's studies in the United States and Europe of children's thinking about race. It will interest not only anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, historians, political scientists and social workers, but parents and teachers as well. Professor Hirschfeld discussed some of his conclusions with Michigan Today's John Woodford.

MT: What is race?

LH: It is important to begin by talking about what race is not. Regardless of what our senses seem to tell us, race is not a biologically coherent story about human variation simply because the races we recognize and name are not biologically coherent populations. There is as much genetic variation within racial groups as there is between them. Now this does not mean that race is not real psychologically or sociologically. It is obvious that race is real in both these senses. People believe in races and they use this belief to organize important dimensions of social, economic, and political life. But this does not make race a real thing biologically.

In view of this, it makes more sense to think of race as an idea, not as a thing. Moreover, from what we know from the history of race relations, race is a bad idea. Considerable effort is now being made to rid ourselves of this particular idea, to create what is sometimes called a "colorblind" society. After 15 years of work on race as an idea, however, I've come to the conclusion that it is not merely a bad idea, but a deeply rooted bad idea. Our minds seem to be organized in a way that makes thinking racially---thinking that the human world can be segmented into discrete racial populations---an almost automatic part of our mental repertoire.

Indeed, I suggest that the idea of race emerges out of an evolved adaptation to understand humans as members of social groups. As such it may not be something that we can get rid of all that easily. This interpretation of racial thinking isn't all that far-fetched if you think about the sorts of problems our ancestral populations faced. Gaining accurate knowledge of who belonged to which group, and why, was clearly adaptive for members of a species whose existence is as social as ours. Those individuals equipped with this sort of knowledge were better able to assess accurately who was most likely to pose a threat and who probably did not. If racial thinking is derived in part from this sort of adaptation, it is very much a deep-rooted notion.

MT: Do you maintain, then, that racism is innate or inevitable?

LH: Definitely not. But structures that give humans the capacity to gather and organize certain kinds of knowledge are innate. These structures make it easy to conclude that people have essential, inheritable natures, and these are thought to give rise to other less obvious qualitative differences. Bear in mind that these structures make certain kinds of knowledge possible; they do not in themselves provide us with that knowledge. The cultural environment in which we live is equally important. In some sense we can say that these two things---the mind and the culture in which the mind finds itself---work together and make each other up.

Many people are uncomfortable with this thinking. There is great resistance to imagining that anything but learned culture---social influences---shapes beliefs like race that have political consequences. Indeed, it is widely assumed, despite the lack of evidence that it is the case, that we can go in and "redo" people's thinking simply by changing the cultural environment in which that thought occurs. But this strategy ignores what the mind as an adapted organ brings to the process of making race.

Maybe it's easier to see this if we consider less politicized aspects of common sense. We now know that Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics are not accurate descriptions of the world. Still, our common-sense intuitions are well captured by both Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics. In short, common sense, if not the physical world, is well described by these systems of thought. To be sure, we can learn other systems for describing the physical world, for example Riemannian geometry or quantum physics. But we can't unlearn common sense. Race is like Euclidean geometry in this regard. We can learn that it is an inaccurate description of the world, but that doesn't mean that it disappears from our conceptual arsonal.

This has consequences for what we teach children about race. Telling children that we're all the same inside, that race is unimportant and literally skin deep, may make us feel better about ourselves but probably doesn't do much to shape children's thinking. Nor does telling children that they shouldn't have racialist beliefs---beliefs that people are divided into discrete racial groups---do much more than make them anxious. When adults tell children that something they know to be the case is not the case, it is anxiety-provoking. It is not, however, a very effective way to change belief. Imagine how successful you'd be in getting someone to lose weight by telling them that they weren't hungry.

MT: Does this have implications for what children feel toward members of other groups?

LH: Yes. Studies show that by age 3, children have developed quite negative attitudes toward outgroup members. Many people believe that children learn these attitudes passively by modeling their beliefs after the important adults (usually parents) around them. As the saying goes, "As the twig is bent so grows the tree." I'm not sure that this is so, however. The studies we have conducted lend little support either to the claim that children are pliant learners nor to the contention that parents play a critical role in shaping children's attitudes. The twig may be bent, but it is not necessarily the parents that are doing the bending. In fact, it may be the twig that's setting its own course.

Again, this makes sense if we think of race as emerging out of an evolved adaptation to group living. Social groups are part of the social landscape and learning about them is best served by attention to that broad landscape. Children learn about race by having their attention directed to what the community as a whole believes, not by having their attention directed solely to what their parents believe.

This sort of process is not unique to race. Immigrants who speak with strong accents do not have children who speak in accented English. They don't because their children do not attend only to their parents' speech. They are also guided by the speech of others around them, even if that speech is less frequently encountered than parental speech. In the same way, the broad cultural environment shapes children's racial beliefs because of the way children tend to "listen." When learning about race, the child's task is to find information relevant to the nature of social difference, and culture is saturated with this sort of information. Much of it confirms that racial differences are fundamental and deep, so it isn't a surprise that children come to the same conviction quite precociously.

Look at the way race is portrayed on television---a source of information even our youngest children spend a lot of time "studying." For every episode of The Cosby Show a kid watches, he sees dozens of athletic shoe ads. These ads depict blacks as animal-like and dangerous, engaged in violent "games" of basketball played on inner-city courts and viewed through chain-link fences. When the child sees whites in these ads, they tend to be portrayed as disciplined, focused and controlled, running in parks or working out on sparkling exercise machines. What message do we expect children to take away from this?

MT: Do Americans tend to outgrow such views?

LH: Not automatically. Certainly few adults openly express such "raw" negative attitudes as "blacks are lazy," something that most preschool children are willing to say. But that doesn't mean that the less direct, less obvious, expressions of prejudiced belief disappear as we grow older.

Let me give you an example from some work I did recently. One of the principal ways that unequal economic and political power has been maintained in the United States is by racializing access to that power. This in turn has rested on maintaining discrete racial populations despite the high rates of racial mixing that have always occurred.

The "one-drop of blood rule" has been critical to maintaining the fiction of discrete racial populations. According to the one-drop rule, a person is black if they have any traceable black ancestry. Our studies found that white children seem to learn the one-drop rule during middle childhood. But that wasn't the most striking finding. I was amazed to discover that the vast majority of my colleagues---people who would have been mortified had I suggested that they hold racist beliefs---also have great faith in the one-drop rule. In particular, virtually all of them accepted that minority racial features like dark skin color or curly hair are genetically dominant over majority racial features like lighter skin and straight hair. For them, the one-drop rule is literally rooted in biology.

I was originally interested, however, in discovering when children learn the one-drop rule precisely because it has no basis in biology. Dark skin doesn't genetically dominate lighter shades. Common sense in this regard is insensible. The absurdity of the biological reading of the one-drop rule is obvious if we rephrase it. How reasonable is it to say that a white woman can give birth to a black baby but a black woman can't give birth to a white baby? Obviously, not very reasonable.

Of course, there is nothing inherently racist about a social use of the one-drop rule. It is a way of affirming group membership in a situation of great hybridity. In contemporary America there are good reasons for individuals with black and white parents to declare themselves black. This is especially true today when identity politics play an important role in the distribution of many resources. The key thing here is to see that identity is not based in biology despite the historic perception that it is.

MT: How would you attack what you call "a deeply rooted bad idea"?

LH: Although my book is principally a detailed description of children's beliefs about race, I hope that it can also help us find ways to teach more effectively about the meaning of race.

Two approaches come to mind. One would be to teach about race the way we teach modern physics. We don't expect our students to abandon common-sense intuitions about the physical world just because they take a course in physics, even if the coursework shows that common sense is inaccurate. Indeed, we design college courses precisely to teach students to reason about the world in a way that may seem bizarre given common sense.

The corollary in teaching about race is to try to develop in children alternative styles of reasoning about human difference. Doing this would involve showing how much of our common sense about race is contrived psychologically, historically and culturally. For instance, it is part of both children's and adults' common sense that all we need to do to discover who is black and who is white is open our eyes and look. We may be able to shake a child's confidence in this if we point out that 70 years ago in our country, the Irish, Jews and Italians weren't seen as "white." The term "race riots" during this period was used to describe conflicts between whites and Italians as well as between whites and blacks. Who is white and who is not is a matter of politics, not biology, and it is important that our children understand this.

A second approach is to give younger children a sense of how dangerous categorization by race can be. Much teaching about race turns on telling children that race counts for little or that it counts for fairly superficial differences. This is an attractive idea but one that takes little account of how much race in fact is used to regulate resources and opportunity. The vast majority of whites don't acknowledge how much racism pervades our society and shapes the daily lives of blacks. Perhaps this is something that we should bring to our children's attention, not something that we should be helping them ignore.

MT: It seems you believe that adults have as much to learn as children.

LH: Most probably do. Too many of us fail to realize how much America racializes the environment and imputes to race qualities that simply are not there. We use race to index poverty and disadvantage. This is the rationale for racially based affirmative action, which I strongly support.

The problem is that in using race in this way, we risk coming to believe that there is actually a causal connection between race and poverty. We risk interpreting poverty racially because we are confident that poverty is often racially distributed. We do this not because there is a causal link between the things that make one a member of a minority race and the things that make one poor (although too many people are willing to make this claim). We do this because race is so deeply held that we are invited by our conceptual endowment to make the link.

The phenomena of race and poverty are not causally linked. It is the beliefs that we hold about race and poverty that are causally linked. In fact, however, people find it all too easy to imagine that race causes lots of things (say athletic prowess or intelligence). In part they do so because it is easy to believe that racial material gets inherited as a clump. The idea that there is such a thing as "black blood"---a coherent genetic racial structure transmitted from parents to children---is widely accepted. But there is no such thing as racial genetic material. This is why trying to explain the distribution of a complex biological adaptation like intelligence by reference to race makes little sense.

The people who accept The Bell Curve's argument that race is biological destiny are not the only ones who have something to learn in this regard. The government has been equally willing to use race to do a lot of work ranging from drawing Congressional districts to identifying who is eligible to participate in antipoverty programs. The logic of this strategy is the same as we talked about earlier. Race is an index of something else, in this case political disenfranchisement and unequal access to resources.

But wouldn't it be better to frame the question in a way that allows us to actually find out why people experience disadvantage rather than filter it through racial categories? The problem is not that we use heuristics---strategies that simplify the world in order to get a grasp on it. The Bohr atom (the image of the atom as a mini-version of the solar system) was both inaccurate and useful in advancing theory in physics. The problem is that with race we're using a heuristic that is particularly seductive and powerful. We invite ourselves to misunderstand the world through racially colored glasses and then congratulate ourselves for the clarity of our perceptions.

Using race to stand in for material disadvantage is not simply misleading, it is a strategy that appeals literally to our worse instincts. Because of the depth of these instincts, it is difficult to see past our strategic use of an idea to what we really want to know. In many areas of policy making---education, health care, housing---I can't help but believe that it would it be better to address the underlying structural problems that produce inequality rather than traffic in biases our conceptual endowment has prepared us for. These biases may be helpful ways to start unpacking the world's structure, but inevitably they impoverish our ability to penetrate that structure.

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