Race is conceived as an "us" or "them" produced by breeding--either a discernible type resulting from patterns of breeding in the past, or a prospect of likely (or licit) breeding in the future.[1] These two frameworks are not separable. If the males traditionally called Caucasoid were, in general, every bit as likely to have children with the females called Mongoloid or Negroid as they were to have children with the females called Caucasoid, then the Mongoloid, Negroid, and Causasoid types would count for us not as races but as intraracial variations on the order of blond and brunet. But it is true at the same time that if breeding actually went this way, the distinctions between the Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid types would disappear in the genetic mixing.

Under ideally simple conditions the race-community should coincide with the cultural tradition-community, providing each culture its own racial face, because the practical cooperation that sustains culture should extend to mating and thence to a more or less regular distribution of the communal repertoire of heritable physical traits, even as they vary over time. Naturally, things do not happen so simply. Often, if not always, there is intersocial gene flow to break a culture's hold on distinctive traits, and within a society there are kin- and class-based constraints on mating. (In a "multiracial" society, people pay attention to race precisely to maintain a sense of different breeding affinities, if not an out-and-out taboo on cross-race breeding.) It remains possible, however, to bring race and culture together by a coup: the members of a society can overlook physical-type differences among themselves if the primary move in their race-thinking is a stipulation that they are commonly descended from worthy forebears.[2]

Races furnish human material for cultures. The cultures that inspirit races are "of" them in the way--one must choose this analogy carefully--that a painting is made "of" its colors. The room that there is to argue about how matter and form qualify each other in a painting, and their relative contributions to the painting's effect, is analogous to our uncertainty about the mutual qualification of race and culture.

I have so far treated "race" as a collection of people, according to the most common usage. But if we are to be clear on the issues we confront under this heading we must draw a distinction, parallel to the sex-gender distinction, between physical-factual "breed" and social-personal "race" proper.[3] Nearly any time we speak of "race relations" or "the race question" or use categories like "black literature" or "white soul music," we construct transpersonal characters or spirits for which physical types are mere vehicles: we construct them, whether or not we started out envisioning them. And true racism is assuredly more profound, and more profoundly objectionable, than the silly breedism to which it is rhetorically reduced ("How can you dislike people for the color of their skin?"). Although talk of race very often purports to be about breed only, I think it must virtually always engage qualities of race (in the stricter sense) in some way.

Breed differences do not have a biological foundation as definite as that of sex difference and cannot be fixed to the same degree. As the deposits left by past breeding, they are only blurrily bounded (for the copulation opportunities have been somewhat open); as a menu for future breeding, they can of course be instantly redefined or even banished altogether, depending entirely on how we think about sexual eligibility. If it happens that people line up as strictly White or Black in a particular multiracial society, race difference will simulate the apparently natural or logical duality in sex/gender, and there will be a tendency to think of race genderishly--positively, as an appreciation of natural complementariness, and negatively, as a horror of sexual relations crossing the customary lines. The arrival of a third racial group in such a society poses a confusing new riddle of classification.[4] But overall there is no principle to be detected in the number or quality of salient breed/race types we now experience, except that they sketch for us some part of the range of physical possibility for humans and thus make us aware that a range is not to be denied. If confronting sex difference makes me realize that I need a partner to reproduce, confronting breed difference makes me realize that no finite reproducing community can have the category of the human all to itself. The gravity of these two realizations is fundamental to the meaning of gender and race, respectively.[5] At the heart of racism is a refusal to let oneself be de-centered, to represent only one set of possibilities among others.

The racial central meaning [that we intend in the concept] has an even looser tie to the breed center of meaning [that we factually assume] than gender does to sex; its emotional roots are not ordinarily as deep, and individuals usually have more latitude to choose what to make of breed identity, or even whether to acknowledge it, than is the case with sex identity.[6] An easily seen proof of race quality's ability to travel beyond its breed base is the massive black American influence on Western and ultimately world culture, quite noticeably affecting the way millions of non-blacks talk, sing, and move their bodies, often with direct reference to the activities of blacks. One ought to assume that racial influences run constantly in all possible channels and directions, even if not always so strikingly (for this white observer) as the black influences cited.

. . . Race, like gender, consists of a complex, infinitely variable fabric of personal qualities that no formula can perfectly define. As with gender, it is our lively sense of contrast in a certain dimension, rather than any definite perception, that makes race a palpable quality. The strangeness wants a name; it will be called something like "paleness" or "darkness" first and then given other characters. This explains the seeming paradoxes that (1) people can only imprecisely and inconsistently spell out the character of a difference that they feel to be the most obvious thing in the world, and (2) they can lump diverse physical types into one or two racial categories that to an outsider seem arbitrarily defined and applied--like "white" and "colored" through much of American history.[7]

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1. The relation between race and breeding is suppressed in much contemporary writing on race. This is no doubt a justified reaction to the fiascoes of anthropological race-theory, but the backlash perspective is nonetheless strangely unseeing. Noting that races have been called "families," Anthony Appiah gets as far as asking whether a supposed special moral status of family relations could properly be generalized to the whole racial community. Though I would not argue for parity between the cases, I do suppose that if there were a special moral responsibility inherent in the procreational relationships in the family then there must be some echo of this in the procreational network that a race is. But the only feature of moral interest Appiah sees in the family is not procreational responsibility at all but "intimacy," which, he points out, must be lacking in so large a group as a whole race. See his paper "Racisms" in D. T. Golberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 3-17.

2. That race-thinking can be far more stipulative than observational is an important lesson of the story that Jacques Barzun tells about race-thinking in France in Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937). Gobineau and his followers apparently needed to be able to assume that their personal worth had a natural guarantee in their descent--see Barzun, pp. 85-86, 281-284.

3. The breed-race distinction has always been fogged, as far as I can tell. In writing on race in this century one finds formulae like "race in a biological sense" and "race in a sociological sense," for instance, but a couple of major problems are caused by drawing the distinction in this way. First, breed is at best a doubtful object of biological inquiry (so that in some quarters the proposition "'Race' does not exist" has become a commonplace); the breed center of meaning is constructed by the imputing and accepting of breed identity, which is a "sociological" reality. Second, since "race in a sociological sense" (whether as breed identity or as race character) is thoroughly entangled with "culture," the desire to draw a culture-race distinction tends to claim character qualification for culture and thus to push race back into breed. For the history of modern thinking about race see Michael Banton's books The Idea of Race (London: Tavistock, 1977) and Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

4. See James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights: Waveland, 1988).

5. Hence Hannah Arendt interprets the Nazis' radical version of genocide as "an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the 'human status' without which the very words 'mankind' or 'humanity' would be devoid of meaning"--Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking, 1964), pp. 268-269.

6. On the emotional roots of gender, see Chapter 6 [in Gender Thinking]. Anthony Appiah gives an interesting discussion of the relative looseness of breed-identity construed as an "ethical" (personally chosen) rather than natural identity in "'But Would That Still Be Me?' Notes on Gender, 'Race,' Ethnicity, as Sources of 'Identity,'" Journal of Philosophy 87 (October 1990), pp. 493-499. One sees here how Appiah is torn between insisting on the metaphysical incoherence of human-kind identities (due to the physical indefiniteness of their centers of meaning) and acknowledging in each case a social and personal cogency.

7. Breed-typing is suspect, for the purely descriptive purposes of physical anthropology, because it blinkers our view of the complex realities of physical variation. It makes us see discrete types where there is continuous variation, concordance of heritable traits where there is discordance, and genetic causation where the environment is the greater influence. See the critiques collected in A. Montagu, ed., The Concept of Race (London: Collier, 1964). But even if the concept of breed had no value at all for scientific taxonomy, that would not mean that race has no real basis. Perceived differences and resemblances are its basis, and the issue of what humanity will look like in the future is its emotional and normative charge.