<i>The Afterlife of Race</i>

What should we do with the idea of race? This question animates Lionel McPherson’s far-reaching and thought-provoking new monograph. Its title tips his hand: McPherson is ready to move on.McPherson is a “deflationary pluralist” when it comes to ‘race’. The pluralist instinct is understandable: We have attached multiple meanings to that word. To this relatively uncontroversial position, McPherson adds two assessments. The first is that given the plurality of its meanings, ‘race’ is neither stable nor informative, to the point that racial discourse is semantically “unruly” (3). If it cannot be managed, then trying to make it work is wasteful and even counterproductive. The second is that the idea of race was created, distributed, and normalized to facilitate Europeans exploiting non-European peoples and lands: it is “more an effect than a cause of subjugation, exploitation, and nonrepair” (77).Given the fruitlessness and ugly etiology of ‘race’, McPherson arrives at deflationism: It’s time to give up the term in favor of alternative terms that carry less semantic and ethical freight. His favored replacement term is ‘geoancestry’. ‘Geoancestry’ marks the geographic origins of our progenitors and by stipulation acknowledges the varied social and political inheritances of organizing our world around those lineages. As McPherson carefully documents, deploying ‘geoancestry’ can accommodate a range of phenomena from mixed and blurred ancestry to social significance to injustice to color labels.The etiology is difficult to contest. McPherson’s survey of the ideological landscape pushes hard to the conclusion that the function of racial thinking has more or less always and pervasively been one of unjustly empowering and enriching one group of people at the expense of wronging and harming others, in a way that sculpted the idea of race we inherited and continue to reshape today.The unruliness charge and the conclusion that it is time to deflate ‘race’ appear more contestable. McPherson thinks that philosophers who have tried to identify the definition or at least one very common definition for ‘race’ have reached an unbreakable “stalemate,” where no one analysis is winning the philosophical battle. So, he concludes, the battle is no longer worth it. For those engaged in that branch of race theory, this inference may be too quick. The stalemate argument pivots on the premise that philosophical disagreement about ‘race’ persists. One wonders if we must also give up ‘free will’ or ‘mind’. Moreover, even acknowledging that various meanings have been attached to ‘race’, it seems that a whole nation, like the United States, can talk about race without the speakers babbling past one another, referring to different things. Sometimes dialogue about race is even international. If we are not just engaging in stark miscommunication, then some common meaning to ‘race’ must anchor those conversations. Even if that meaning is opaque to most or all communicators, and even if it is an elusive target for theorists, it seems too early to just give up on the project of identifying it.Surprisingly, McPherson himself offers an analysis of ‘a race’: “one of a few discrete human groups that formed when geographic collections of people became biologically distinct, with each group forming on separate landmasses” (14). We are also told that “we have no core understanding of race—except in the narrow sense that human beings descended in full or part from respective continents tend to look different in characteristic ways” (15; see also 79). This compounds the curiousness: Why go deflationist when we could adopt McPherson’s “narrow” analysis? And why is this analysis better than the rival candidate analyses put forth by other race theorists?McPherson does indicate one reason why race is not just about continental ancestry: there is supposed to be some additional “X factor” (13) that connects the body and mind in a way that explains all the awful conjectures about how culture, ability, character, and even bare humanity might tie to different geoancestral origins. But why attribute this baggage to the very core of the concept, rather than it being a belief that is contingently attached to and therefore removeable from conversations involving race, an appendage that is integrated but not inseparable? Is the very concept so rotten that we must entomb it in the Hall of Failed Meaning and Reference?An optimist might dream that one day we could see race talk without racist talk. McPherson argues that such optimism does not realistically track the history of how the idea of race has been used (e.g., 30, 55–59). So perhaps the point is more psychosocial than conceptual: If the race idea is not conceptually racist, it is inevitably deployed in racist ways. Then again, the fact that people float ideas—even widely contested, false, and immoral ideas—about a subject matter does not mean that there is no good definition of that subject matter. People persistently float ugly and inaccurate proposals about differences between the biological sexes, but this is not reason to avoid a narrow definition of biological sex (contested as that concept also may be).More questions arise regarding McPherson’s fascinating proposal to replace ‘race’ with ‘geoancestry’ “in order to avoid verbal conflict and mass confusion” (82). Is it more realistic to think that the ugly claims that have been made about race will not reemerge with ‘geoancestry’? Consider the alternative proposal of abandoning ‘race’ for the neologism ‘racialization’, which refers to the social fact of being treated as racially different. McPherson thinks this substitution attempt is hopeless (77). What, then, makes ‘geoancestry’ more worthy of hope? If it is unrealistic to say that ‘race’ can be severed from toxic associations, how is it more realistic to hope that those poisons won’t be adapted to whatever terms we invent in the vicinity of race?Given these outstanding questions, it seems that we still need an all-things-considered evaluation to guide conceptual engineering: How should we choose between keeping our term ‘race’ as is; replacing it with nearby alternates like ‘geoancestry’ or ‘racialized group’; and redefining ‘race’ to be both accurate and ethical? The pluralism-based deflationary argument is: Let us avoid the “metaphysical drama” (22) of philosophical debates about race and just note that people with ancestors from different parts of the world tend to look different. Fair enough. But while people ignore the metaphysicians, still they need to know why they should not keep using the term ‘race’ for that idea that people with ancestries from different parts of the world tend to look different.McPherson points out that we can examine how racial ideology has shaped our social world (40) or how racism works (44) without solving metaphysical questions about what race is or whether it exists. Moreover, the metaphysical questions philosophers of race often grapple with today are not “the [original] contested issue” on which the historical source of our grappling, W. E. B. Du Bois, was mainly focused (67). Both points are true. At the same time, it is also true that the social history of race ideology might not tell us much about what race is or whether it exists. It seems worth our trouble to conduct both investigations concurrently.These are just some of the questions raised by part 1 of the book. Readers will find further engaging explorations in the two further parts.Part 2 investigates the ethics and coherence of multiracial identity. McPherson elegantly rearticulates the pressing need for some people of multiple backgrounds to explicitly recognize their whole identity, noting both that such persons have often been alienated from their communities of origin—and in some important sense from their own selves—and that identifying as multiracial need not represent a betrayal of one’s more oppressed lineages. McPherson wants us to continue to facilitate recognition of individuals’ complex color-conscious self-identifications, so long as they respect the “conceptual constraint” that this self-identification reflects at least some part of one’s actual ancestry (117). (Another question: How does this conceptual constraint fit with deflationary pluralism?)At the same time, McPherson is doubtful that much sense can be made of the distinction between monoracial and multiracial identities. Descendants of American slavery, for example, have been counted as Black, but they are largely a population of substantially mixed African and European ancestry. What, then, does it mean to identify as multiracial if monoracial identity already includes multiplicity? For McPherson, the family relations that matter are more about social connection and only secondarily about ancestry (132).The problems he identifies get even more complicated. Does singling out multiracial identity imply that there is some important distinction between different fractions of the same ancestral line? Valorizing mixed racial ancestry also, he thinks, reentrenches the mythical and oppressive belief in natural races. Then there is the worry that multiracial identity is another mechanism for advancing colorism, the destructive privileging of lighter skin tones over darker skin tones regardless of (supposed) race, in its own way doubling down on a colorized social hierarchy.Part 3 covers the question of whether Black Americans carry special obligations of solidarity to end anti-Black social inequality, beyond the obligations all people have on that front. Insisting that Black Americans form a specific sociopolitical entity apart from any global Black race, McPherson again finds more utility in other conceptual categories besides race. He does believe that Black American political solidarity can be an effective tool in moving closer to equality, but also that it would place an unjustifiable “double burden” on Black Americans to require that, in addition to their group suffering under centuries of brutal white supremacism, they have a distinctive moral responsibility to shoulder the load of correcting that injustice.Instead, on McPherson’s account, all Americans have a morally urgent duty to rectify American injustices, and any special burden of repair falls on those who have been and continue to be complicit in America’s entrenched social hierarchy. Joining this movement is for Black Americans a commendable choice rather than a duty; as he puts it, those who join the solidarity movement must be “volunteers, not hostages” (169). Finally, McPherson argues that participating in the Black solidarity movement does not require being “racially” Black in any sense. Instead, everyone has good reason to support Black political solidarity: It is solidarity for Black American social equality, not necessarily solidarity by that group (171). In fact, the potential success of this morally urgent goal demands inclusivity.The Afterlife of Race is wide-ranging, interesting, and sure to provoke reflection and conversation about timely and central issues surrounding race. (It also includes a bonus chapter arguing that apology for oppression without material reparation is hollow, and forgiveness is beside the point of reconciliation.) If you read it, perhaps you will find yourself, as I have, exploring new avenues for thinking about the future of, or after, race.Thanks to Lionel McPherson for rewarding conversation that informed this review.