Superseding Race
Michael Banton
The LSE Calendar for 1947 included details of a course entitled `Racial Relations and
Racial Problems’ taught by Dr Kenneth Little, `Lecturer in Anthropology, with special reference to Race Relations’. As an undergraduate, I inferred that this designated a recognised field of study. Though my doubts about the suitability of the name increased, I continued with it and, in 1967, published a book with the title Race
Relations .
The book attempted a global conspectus of what was known about its subject. Its conception of knowledge was that embodied in university regulations, which stipulate that a candidate for the degree of PhD has to make an original contribution to knowledge. The phraseology implies a conception of the field to which the candidate is attempting to make a contribution, such that a university can appoint examiners competent to assess the originality and importance of any contribution.
My book maintained that race relations were distinguished by the use of race as a role sign, a sign of the role someone was expected to play, either voluntarily or involuntarily. Twelve years later I amended this. No one can see another’s race. All they can see is his or her colour, or, technically, phenotypical appearance. That was the role sign.
In 1982 Robert Miles criticised John Rex and myself for assuming that there was a distinctive class of social relations to be called race relations. Though Miles’ criticisms were justified, his proposed solution of the problem was unsatisfactory. He wanted to supersede the concept of race by replacing it with his functionalist conception of racism. Like me, Miles believed in the possibility of objective knowledge in the social realm, but he also believed that it is important to see all forms of science as necessarily serving political ends. I contend that it is usually best to separate the discourse of science from that of politics. The word race is needed to implement the laws criminalizing incitement to racial hatred and providing protections against racial discrimination, and therefore cannot be superseded in everyday usage. It should be possible to supersede its use in sociology as it seems to have been superseded in social psychology.
Though there is a widespread belief that the language of race needs to be reformed, there are few proposals as to how this might be done. My contention is that if, in their search for better explanations, social scientists fashion a better vocabulary, their practice may well spread to popular usage. Though the distinction between social scientific discourse and political discourse has to be drawn with delicacy, it has been recognised by many writers. My contrast has been between folk concepts, which are ordinary language concepts built into the institutions of particular societies, and analytical concepts, like those in economics of demand, supply, and inflation. Folk concepts are culture-bound. Analytical concepts can be applied independently of place and time. Miles reminded us that this was Marx’s distinction between phenomenal form and essential relations. American anthropologists speak of a distinction between emic and etic constructs. The distinction is not unlike that
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between the language a patient uses to describe his or her symptoms and that which a doctor uses in making a diagnosis.
Expressions like racism , sexism , anti-Semitism , and Islamophobia are folk concepts with important uses in political contexts. Writers who address problems of public policy have to use folk concepts. Sociologists have to seek the causes of social phenomena and to seek better explanations than those of ordinary language.
In the immediately pre-Darwinian era theories were advanced about the permanence of racial types. At their core was the assumption that an emic , or folk, conception of race could serve as an etic , or scientific concept. Since then medical scientists have discovered a host of physical conditions that are inherited. For example, there is a variant of the FY gene that is widespread among Africans, though otherwise rare, which inhibits production of a certain protein; thereby it improves resistance to malaria while increasing the risks of sickle cell anaemia. Such a variant is now called an Ancestry Informative Marker. It would not be wrong to identify populations distinguished by such markers as races , but to do so would cause confusion by introducing the word’s popular associations.
The LSE motto is Felix qui potuit , from a Latin exclamation `happy is the person who can know the causes of things!’ To supersede the vocabulary of race in social science we need first to identify intellectual problems that are capable of solution, or prevailing explanations susceptible of improvement. It is futile to aspire to the total understanding of social phenomena. What we can do, is to try and answer the questions suggested to us by the intellectual traditions within which we stand. Those traditions reflect the accumulation of knowledge achieved by the search for the causes of things.
My 1967 book did not score well on this count. It fell into line with the popular assumption that race relations are relations between groups. Many sociologists still think in these terms and take insufficient account of the variations in the beliefs, attitudes and behaviour of the members of the groups they envisage. Without acknowledging this, they practice methodological collectivism. Those who have read my article on ethnic conflict in Sociology 2000 34(3):481-98 will have seen how I outline an approach from the premises of methodological individualism. They may also have noted that I believe that in social science we should work to supersede the concept of ethnicity as well as that of race (We will have to take account of the significance attributed to ethnic origin but must avoid any suggestion that ethnicity is an external factor bearing upon individuals).
The article contains a brief description of the research of some Malaysian students that I supervised. We asked a sample of Malaysians about an imagined conflict between a Chinese employer and his Malay employees. It could be predicted that
Chinese subjects with high incomes might side with the actions of the employer, while Malays of low income would side with the workers. But how would a Chinese worker align himself? Would a Malay employer side with his fellow employer or with his co-ethnics? Together with a second student, I constructed a technique for comparing the priority that a subject attached to alignment with co-ethnics compared with action reflecting self-interest (of either a monetary character or of association with persons of higher social status), and with action reflecting a sense of personal
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obligation to a co-worker or neighbour. A preference for alignment is an analytical concept.
Many humans have a taste for association with co-ethnics, just as they have tastes for consumer goods and for status in the eyes of others. Tastes can be negative as well as positive. The prices peoples place upon their tastes reflect their preferences and these in turn reflect trade-offs: how much of an ethnic preference will someone trade off in return for a financial gain?
In contemporary Europe public policies and private preferences often meet in the selection of schools for teenagers. A question of particular interest for the improvement of current theories is the significance parents attach to the ethnic characteristics (including skin colour) of secondary school pupil populations when they seek places for their children. This can be measured relative to the importance they attach to the school’s academic standard and how long it will take a child to travel to and from the school. Parents frequently have to assess the relative importance of such considerations. Research into such matters might illuminate the causes of related ethnic preferences.
One reason for studying preferences for association with co-ethnics relative to other tastes is that it could help us to better explanations of group mobilization, maintenance and dissolution. The analysis of such preferences might well lead to the development of a vocabulary that would supersede the idioms of race and ethnicity.
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Please note that this presentation should not be quoted without gaining the author's permission. michael@banton.demon.co.uk
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