It appears that a race is any group of people conceived as a natural human kind in virtue of sharing a heritable essence. This explains why skin color, hair texture, and other phenotypic traits are neither necessary nor sufficient for individuating races and why ethnic groups like Italians and the Irish were once considered races (and in the contemporary United States, Hispanics are a de facto race). If I am right, the notion of race, as it actually functions in human cognition and discourse, is sometimes indistinguishable from notions of ethnicity, nationality, or even religious or political affiliation. Populations are often conceived as races even though they aren’t labeled as such, because race isn’t primarily about what people are called—it’s about what they are thought to be (including, of course, what they think themselves to be). To avoid confusion, I will for the most part call these ethnoraces.34
Psychologists Maaris Raudsepp and Wolfgang Wagner provide an interesting example of ethnoracial thinking operating outside the bounds of conventional racial territory that also shows the connection between race and dehumanization. The small Baltic state of Estonia was part of the Soviet Union from 1918 until the latter disintegrated in 1991. Since achieving independence, Estonian nationalists have made efforts to denigrate ethnic Russians living there. The nationalists have articulated a vision of an Estonian essence that Russians—as inferior and alien beings—do not share. Raudsepp and Wagner have found that both native Estonians and Russian-Estonians “raise the issue of out-group characteristics that are supposedly incompatible with the in-group’s essential attributes.”
Many of those who see themselves as native Estonians mention the Russian-ness … of the out-group, which is supposed to include Asian barbarism and communist mentality as expressed in this adapted version of the Estonian proverb “You may feed a wolf [tibia—a derogatory name for Russians] as long as you like; he will still look in the direction of the forest.” Alternatively, members of the Russian group define Estonian-ness as being characterized by peasant barbarism and fascist mentality.
In effect, ideologues from both groups regard Estonians and Russians as distinct ethnoraces. As one would expect, it’s lineage that determines whether someone has a Russian or an Estonian essence. Raudsepp and Wagner remark, “Only people descending from parents or grandparents who were Estonian citizens sixty years ago, were considered legitimate citizens of the new state … citizenship is defined by a proof of one’s lineage.” Consequently, there have been calls by Estonian nationalists for mass deportation of Russians, who are characterized as subhuman predators (“Cohabitation of human beings with wild beasts is not possible for long. And it is a crime not to send wild beasts back to their natural environment.…”), as well as discourse suggesting that Russian-ness is encoded in Russians’ DNA (“The Mongol gene of robbing, killing, and hating of work has been coded into Russians.”).35
This example illustrates something important about dehumanization. For dehumanization to occur the target group must first be essentialized. They, the others, must be seen as a distinct kind of person: not just superficially different, but radically so. This pattern is borne out by all of the cases of dehumanization that have been surveyed so far in this book. Think of the genocides described in Chapter Five—Namibia, Turkey, the Holocaust, Cambodia, and Darfur. Think of the slave trade, the conquest of the Americas, and the horrors of World War II. In every case, the perpetrators believed that the people whom they dehumanized were ethnoracially different from themselves.
Having defined the target population as an alien natural human kind, the second step on the road to mass violence is to attribute a subhuman essence to them. The enemy is no longer another kind of human being. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, our enemies are another species, lurking behind a mask of humanity. They are only apparently human for the same reason that Mr. Oreo was only apparently white, and they are really subhuman for the same reason that Mr. Oreo was really black.
FROM RACES TO SPECIES
The psychological transition that I’ve just sketched raises a further question. How, why, and under what circumstances does believing that a group has an ethnoracial essence get transformed into believing that it has a subhuman essence? To explain this shift, we need to look more closely into the psychological mechanisms that lie behind ethnoracial beliefs.
A lot of the research into the psychology of natural kinds comes from the study of folk-biological concepts—everyday intuitions about plants and animals. Anthropologists and psychologists have found that, in every culture studied, living things are classified in much the same way. According to Scott Atran, “In every human society people think about plants and animals in the same special ways.”* Atran points out that “people in all cultures classify plants and animals into species-like groups that biologists generally recognize as populations of interbreeding individuals adapted to an ecological niche.” These groups are called generic species. In all of the cultures that have been studied, generic species are seen as part of a broader taxonomic scheme—a nested hierarchy of categories that is strikingly similar to the Linnaean system used by modern biologists, and the generic species level is regarded as especially important. Atran remarks that:
[T]here is a commonsense assumption that each generic species has an underlying causal nature, or essence, that is uniquely responsible for the typical appearance, behavior, and ecological preferences of the kind. People in diverse cultures consider this essence responsible for the organism’s identity as a complex, self-preserving entity governed by dynamic internal processes that are lawful even when hidden. This hidden essence maintains the organism’s integrity even as it causes the organism to grow, change form, and reproduce. For example, a tadpole and frog are in a crucial sense the same animal although they look and behave very differently and live in different places.
Finally, species classifications are used to draw conclusions about the natural world. Folk-taxonomies “provide an inductive framework for thinking about living things.”36 For example, if one porcupine is observed eating pine tree bark we suppose that all porcupines eat pine tree bark, and if we observe that one rattlesnake is poisonous we suppose that all rattlesnakes are poisonous. These commonsense assumptions are remarkably similar to the sorts of inductive inferences that biologists make all the time—probably because the impressive edifice of scientific biology was built on a deeply entrenched folk-biological foundation.
Even though biological essentialism is at the center of this way of thinking about the world, biological essentialism doesn’t make scientific sense. There simply aren’t any defining features—even at the genetic level—that all and only members of a species must share.37 So, it can’t be that our tendency to essentialize the natural world is based on observation. We can observe overt similarities between organisms, but we can’t observe the essences assumed to account for these similarities. Folk-essentialism is a theoretical construction—an explanatory grid that we impose on the world rather than extract from it. Of course, it’s not a formal theory—a theory of the sort that we derive from textbooks or other forms of didactic instruction. Rather, it’s a folk-theory that arises in large measure from the cognitive architecture of the human mind.
Atran and others believe that folk-biological thinking is a domain-specific ability rather than a domain-general one. Domain-general abilities are patterns of thinking that apply across the board: we can bring them to bear on whatever subject matter we please. The capacity for abstract reasoning is a good example. A person who understands the basic principles of logic can use them to reason about whatever she chooses. They are as applicable to thinking about ships and snails and sealing wax as they are to cabbages and kings. Mathematical thinking is another. When we perform calculations, the kinds of things that we are calculating over don’t matter. Two tigers plus three tigers equals five tigers just as surely as two volcanoes plus three volcanoes equals five volcanoes. In contrast, domain-specific cognition is limited to a specified area. It’s fast, easily learned, and hard
to shut off. Many cognitive neuroscientists believe that domain-specific thinking comes from the operation of special-purpose functional systems that were established in the human brain during the course of our evolution to deal with important, recurring problems faced by our prehistoric ancestors.38
Our remarkable ability to recognize and remember faces is a good candidate for a domain-specific ability. Faces are much easier to remember than names. How many times have you met someone and recognized that you’d met them before but couldn’t remember their name? Research suggests that the human brain has a special knack for processing information about human faces. We are hypersocial animals, and the ability to keep track of members of our communities has always been very important for our well-being. Faces are the most reliable way to recognize individuals, and facial expressions are the best windows into their emotional states, so natural selection got to work and installed high-powered face-recognition software in our prehistoric ancestors’ brains. This isn’t just armchair speculation. There’s plenty of evidence suggesting that the human brain contains a neural system specialized for face recognition. The brain handles face perception differently than it does ordinary object perception. When we look at faces, our brains attend to the total configuration of a face more than on its individual parts, which is why when faces are turned upside down they’re much harder to recognize. On the developmental side, newborn babies prefer gazing at faces (or facelike objects) to looking at other things, and they learn to recognize individual faces from very early on. Most intriguingly, people suffering from a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia (or “face blindness”) can recognize ordinary objects perfectly well, but can’t recognize faces. This suggests that the brain system used to process information about faces is distinct from the one that processes other sorts of visual information.39
Likewise, there is evidence pointing to the existence of a folk-biology module—a domain-specific cognitive system specifically concerned with thinking about organisms. As we’ve seen, species essentialism is found across diverse cultures and emerges early in childhood. There is even a folk-biological equivalent to prosopagnosia. Damage to the left temporal lobe of the brain can knock out a person’s capacity to recognize biological kinds, but has no effect on their ability to recognize artifacts, suggesting that there is a cognitive module for folk-biological thinking.40 Studies of the psychological development of children also support the hypothesis that there are special-purpose cognitive systems specialized for folk-biological thinking. Yale University psychologist Frank Keil asked children a series of questions to explore their beliefs about natural kinds. For example, he asked them to imagine a scientist bleaching a tiger so that its stripes disappeared, and then surgically attaching a mane to its head so that it looked just like a lion. He then asked the kids whether the animal was a tiger or a lion. Kids who were younger than seven said that the animal was a lion, and justified their diagnosis by appealing to its appearance (“a tiger doesn’t have hair on its neck”), but older children asserted that, in spite of its appearance, the animal was a tiger “because it was made out of a tiger.” The same pattern of responses followed a story about a raccoon that was painted to resemble a skunk. The younger children considered it a skunk, and the older ones thought it was a raccoon that looked like a skunk.41
It would be hasty to conclude from these responses that young children don’t essentialize species. Lions and tigers are quite similar, as are raccoons and skunks, so it may simply be that young children don’t differentiate natural kinds in as fine-grained a manner as older kids do. This idea was supported by the results of another experiment. This time, the youngsters were told a story about a porcupine that was modified so as to be indistinguishable from a cactus, in what Keil calls a cross-ontological category shift. Even the youngest children were sure that it was still a porcupine despite its cactuslike appearance, as is illustrated by the following dialogue between experimenter and child.
C: It’s still a porcupine.
E: What would happen when it wakes up? Will it be a cactus plant or will it be a porcupine?
C: A porcupine.
E: Why would you think that it would be a porcupine?
C: It will look like a cactus, but it won’t be one.
E: Why not?
C: It’ll be living more.
E: Are cactus living?
C: Yes, but it may be walking around.42
The young children may not reliably distinguish species as natural kinds, but they appear to attribute different essences to plants and animals.
Is this form of thinking specifically biological? Might it reflect their views about kinds in general? To investigate this question, Keil showed children pictures of a coffeepot and a birdfeeder with a similar shape, and read them the following story:
There are things that look just like this (shows picture of coffeepot), and they are made in a big factory in Buffalo for people to make coffee in. They put the coffee grounds in here and then they add water and heat it all up on the stove and then they have coffee. A while ago some scientists looked at these things carefully and they found out they aren’t like most coffeepots at all, because when they looked at them under a microscope, they found that they were not made out of the same stuff as most coffeepots. Instead they came from birdfeeders like this (points to picture of birdfeeder) which had been melted down and then made into these (points to picture of coffeepot) and when people were all done making coffee with these (points to picture of coffeepot), they melted them down again and made birdfeeders out of them. What are they, birdfeeders or coffeepots?
Both young and older children univocally claimed that the devices were coffeepots. When asked why, the responded like this:
C: A coffeepot.
E: Why?
C: Because it doesn’t look like a birdfeeder. I wouldn’t put birdseed in it.… I would put coffee in the coffeepot.
E: So even though this special object was made from birdfeeders that look just like this and when they were done with them, they melt them down and make birdfeeders again, you think the best name for it is what? A birdfeeder or a coffeepot?
C: Coffeepot.
E: And your reason?
C: Because it doesn’t look like a birdfeeder and I wouldn’t put birdseed in it.43
Essence trumps appearance when it comes to biological kinds, but appearance calls the shots when distinguishing artificial kinds.
It should be clear by now that we tend to think about races along the same lines as we think about species. Both races and species are presumed to be natural kinds defined by hidden essences passed down the “bloodline” from parents to their offspring. Both are scientifically vacuous but intuitively compelling. Organisms may fail to manifest their species-essence (even though stereotypical tigers have four legs and stripes, three-legged tigers and a tiger without stripes still count as tigers) just as people can fail to manifest their racial essence (Janie and Mr. Oreo were black, even though they looked white, and Yakov Bok was Jewish, even though he didn’t menstruate).
The striking similarity between patterns of folk-biological and racial thinking suggests that racial thinking is domain-specific—i.e., that we have an inbuilt tendency to divide the human race into discrete subpopulations which we imagine as natural kinds. This tendency can be resisted, or counteracted with education, but it is a pattern of thinking into which people everywhere tend to slide, even when they know better. Lawrence Hirschfeld, whom I introduced earlier in this chapter, is a proponent of this hypothesis. His research provides a wealth of evidence that even young children partition the human world into ethnoraces, which they treat as natural kinds. Hirschfeld doesn’t claim that small children use the same racial categories as the adults around them do. It’s the form of ethnoracial thinking that spontaneously emerges during childhood, rather than its specific content.
Less Than Human Page 21
