Crossed Lines in the Racialization Process: Race as a Border Concept

Headnote

Abstract

The phenomenological approach to racialization needs to be supplemented by a hermeneutics that examines the history of the various categories in terms of which people see and have seen race. An investigation of this kind suggests that instead of the rigid essentialism that is normally associated with the history of racism, race predominantly operates as a border concept, that is to say, a dynamic fluid concept whose core lies not at the center but at its edges. I illustrate this by an examination of the history of the distinctions between the races as it is revealed in legal, scientific, and philosophical sources. I focus especially on racial distinctions in the United States and on the way that the impact of miscegenation was negotiated leading to the so-called one-drop rule.

Keywords

race, racism, essentialism, miscegenation, passing, skin color, Thomas Jefferson

I

We see race. Or, more precisely, when we see someone, we tend to racialiie them according to a given set of racial terms, most of the time without thinking about it. We understand and apply the prevalent racial categories on the basis of both the immediate and the historical context. But we do not think enough about the way these categories, both the terms themselves and the ways in which they are understood, are constantly shifting or being replaced by new categories. As they do so, the racial identities themselves change, and it is among these fluid racial identities that one finds the racial borderlands. For the most part, the academic discussion of racial terms among philosophers still tends to focus more on an alleged core sense than on its borders. In this essay I approach race as a border concept and show that doing so can throw light on the racialization process, that is to say, the practice of seeing people in terms of race.

One great merit of the phenomenological contribution to the critical philosophy of race, as can be clearly seen in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon but also, more recently, in the work of Linda Martin Alcoff, is the focus it places on the process of racialization.' Nevertheless, the phenomenological account of racialization is still in its infancy insofar as it has not yet fully...