Naomi Zack provides an overview of the subfield of philosophy of race, and strives to balance opposing perspectives. What is Race? Provide an overview for our audience who are interested inthinking, talking, and writing about Philosophy of Race to key ideas of race in thecanonical history of philosophy.When most people say we have to talk about race, they mean we have to talkabout racism. Racism is a societal vice that is a form of injustice. Philosophyof race is more broad than that. It grew out of African American Philosophyto include all racial groups and study how the very idea that humans aredivided into races or can be categorized by races, based on biological science.Racial injustice is important and ongoing, but so are our very ideas about raceas a system of human categorization. These ideas have a history and youcannot understand racism without knowing something about that history.The modern period beginning in 17 th c. saw the emergence of a universal ideaof race. Before then, it was understood that there were peoples defined bywhere they lived and their ancestries and the word “race” in Europeancultures often meant a line of descent---families and ancestors. There was nosystem of race. This changed when Francois Bernier published his “NewSystem of the Earth” in the first leading scholarly journal in Europe, Journalde Scavans. Bernier proposed that all humankind could be divided into 4 or 5races---everyone belonged to one of these races based on physical traits butthe European race, who he referred to as “we” was the first race. Otherbiologists and philosophers expanded this idea that held sway until the mid20 th c, adding moral and intellectual capacities, as well as aesthetics to theirtheories of race. Ideas of race developed along with the new sciences of biologyand anthropology. Influential philosophers such as David Hume, ImmanuelKant and Wolfgang Hegel took them up, with no empirical evidence. Always,the white race was superior. This was a convenient idea through theEnlightenment that otherwise preached human equality, because enslavedpeoples and others conquered though European colonialism could becategorized as deserving of their treatment because they belonged to lesserraces. Comparative measurements of brains were falsified, endless speculativetheories about skin color were posited and the whole of Western societybecame organized according to theories of race that posited whites as superioramong all races—the First Race.Before the end of WWII and the Nazi holocaust, anthropology had becamemore empirical and studies of non-European cultures led thinkers such asFranz Boas and Claude Levi-Strauss to shrink their ideas of race to biological categories alone. But at the same time, the physical sciences yielded nofoundation for human races—no essences were found, no distinctive bloodtypes, and there were discovered greater variations in racial traits within so-called races than between them. If you cannot distinguish at least one race,there is no system of races.After World War II, scientists resorted to the ideas of populations. But thedefinition of a population is somewhat arbitrary, because depending on howthe theorist divides them up, there are hundreds or thousands of humanpopulations and they do not line up with social ideas that there are 3 or 4 or 5races. When the human genome was mapped in the early 2000s, there was nodistinct DNA discovered that aligned with social ideas of race. The idea begunby Bernier is not a useful scientific concept.But there are human groups and differences---ethnicities or ethnic groups.However, there is no uniform way to characterize them. Some ethnicities worklike races because they identified by appearance, others are based on customsand traditions, still others religions, or national origins. No one knows howmany human populations there are and while scientists may studybackgrounds of peoples, there is no system of ethnicities.There are apparent holdoutsRace in sports – traits of group that has found a sport useful for upwardmobility come to be dominant in that sport. Basketball, first white men, thenJewish men, then black people.Race in medicine – higher rates of hypertension, obesity, diabetes amongminorities, but that is because of their living conditions.Higher morbidities during Covid-19 in minority communities because of theirpre-existing co-morbidites. And reports of those statistics accurately relatedthem to resources and living conditions, including historically justifieddistrust of the medical system, rather than to racially-based biological factors.However, it takes society about or at least 100 years to come to terms withscientific information such as the unreality of human races. And we are leftwith racism as an ongoing social injustice.Race is unreal and has been used to justify racism in society. Racism is realand difficult to disperse. Old racial myths endure, now literally in the ethersof the air, to be drawn down arbitrarily at unpredictable times. Politics hasalso become racialized so that instead of addressing injustice and unfairness, our leaders lead through party politic divisions that take up sides in thecultural wars within society. Speak to key thinkers and their ideas in fields outside of philosophy, as well asphilosophers.I’ve already discussed key thinkers who enabled the universal idea of race,including esteemed philosophers whose writings on race we now considerracist. Development of resistance to racist ideas outside of philosophy includedabolitionists such as Fredrich Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois who in his late 19 thcentury studies of African Americans in Philadelphia showed how socialdisadvantages had social causes and were not due to innate biologicalinferiority. In the 1930s and ongoing, anthropologists such a Claude Levi-Strauss and Franz Boas separated ideas of culture, intellect and morality frombiological racial developments. Over the second half of the twentieth century,many geneticists and anthropologists emphasized the biological emptiness ofthe idea of race. Along with DuBois, other 19 th century thinkers emphasizedthe importance of education for African Americans, for instance Anna J.Cooper. At the same time, Booker T. Washington became famous and highlypraised among white supremacists for advocating that black Americansaccept second class citizenship and segregation while focusing on training inphysical labor skills—agriculture, building, and so forth. The Civil RightsMovement of the 1960s, especially as led by Martin Luther King took upvoting rights and the integration of public facilities with at least formalsuccess. Still most progressive observers believe that racism against people ofcolor persists in institutional practices and other legaciesof Jim Crow. Old practices die hard.What of ideas of ethnicity and the overlapping of meanings with raceThe old idea was that race referred to biology and ethnicity referred toculture. But in reality, race does not refer to biology and ethnicity refers towhat used to be inaccurately called “race” as well as culture. The term“ethnicity” like race arose out of historical events such as wars---contemporary Palestinians are an ethnic group in this sense—andimmigration. National groups that were not considered ethnic groups in theircountries of origin, became ethnic groups in the United States. At first USEuropean ethnic groups were considered distinct races but then they wereidentified as ethnic groups or in the case of Europeans, became genericallywhite. Immigrants from Asia and Latin America have not been assimilated inthe same way. Unlike Germans, Irish, Jews, Italians, and Poles, they have notbecome generically white. There is no one standard for what determines an ethnic group—national origin, religion, traditions, and violent events can eachor all be factors.But the concept of ethnic groups is very important, because they are real.There are over 800 ethnic groups globally identified but no exact number ortaxonomy. In reality, ethnic groups are peoples in the pre-modern, pre-Bernier sense, and they are real, but not in a system as biological race wasposited.- While the universal system of a few races has no foundation inbiology, ethnic groups have foundations in history. Ethnic groups are real andwe have to recognize their existence now that we know that races are not real.And within some ethnic groups there are groups that remain racialized. Thisis true of Hispanic/Latin Americans who have black members and AfricanAmericans themselves who have a distinct culture. Discuss the social construction of race, with accounts and analyses of how racehas been socially constructed through colonialismRace was socially constructed first by scientists and in an overlapping waythrough practical projects such as the enslavement of Africans and genocidalactions against indigenous peoples. Throughout the world, the aim was towipe them out in order to seize their lands and resources. That was thecolonial process, undertaken in an historical period that otherwise proclaimeduniversal human value and freedom.