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This chapter engages with current philosophical accounts of racial categories, paying particular attention to the relevance for recent philosophy of both social constructionism as well as the cognitivist approach in understanding categorial schemes such as that of modern racial classification. It aims to show that, while much of the recent literature in fields as diverse as cognitive anthropology, analytic philosophy of race, and postcolonial theory has been tremendously useful in clarifying the precise nature and function of racial categories, and in accounting for their tenaciousness in a world in which they are recognized to be of little scientific value (with a few caveats), nonetheless these approaches must be complemented by a deepened understanding of the historical development of the categories they call into question, and of the way current thinking about race is shaped and also constrained by a past of which we remain largely unaware.

In order to articulate an account of racial ontology that transcends the politics of purity, it is necessary to spell out in more detail exactly what the politics of purity is and how it operates. Broadly understood, the politics of purity holds that the norm toward which racial categories and racialized individuals ought to strive, or are even driven, is one of purity. The claim is not that the categories and individuals actually are pure but only that they ideally should be — it is in this way that it is the politics, and not the reality, of purity. Even outright rejections of race, such as racial eliminativism and the new abolitionism, participate in the politics of purity insofar as it is precisely because the categories and individuals cannot live up to this standard of purity that they should be eliminated or abolished. This chapter articulates a more in-depth account of the politics of purity and elaborates its failures to understand important questions about race and biology.

This introductory chapter argues that modern racial thinking could not have taken the form it did if it had not been able to piggyback, so to speak, on conceptual innovations in the way science was beginning to approach the diversity of the natural world, and in particular of the living world. It also points out an oft-neglected aspect of the scope and aims of the natural and social sciences: the emergence of racial categories, of categories of kinds of humans, which may in large part be understood as an overextension of the project of biological classification that was proving so successful in the same period.

This chapter will delve into the question of what fundamentally concerns multiracial-identity scholars about the discrimination cases despite the fact that the empirical record does not by and large show anti-mixture animus. For multiracial-identity scholars, the primary locus of multiracial discrimination is in any societal resistance to the assertion of multiracial identity. The chapter calls this “Personal Identity Equality” and discusses its dangers. This is because the exotification of racial mixture is something that is now being drawn upon to undermine the pursuit of racial equality public policies. Tracing the challenges to race-based affirmative action over the last ten years, this chapter will demonstrate the ways in which Supreme Court litigation has referred to the growth of mixed-race persons as undercutting the legitimacy of affirmative action policies. The chapter will also demonstrate the ways in which the Supreme Court affirmative action litigation references to mixed-race persons parallels the public discourse notion that the growth of multiracial identified persons signals the decline of racism. The chapter concludes by identifying how the association of multiracial identity with the decline of racism poses challenges to addressing the continuing discrimination against all non-white persons including those who are mixed-race.

This chapter situates BiDil in the larger context of the rising use of racial categories in biotechnology patents. A central theme here is the interplay among commercial interests, regulatory structures, and scientific practice in generating distinctively racialized conceptions of biomedicine in the field of intellectual property. This chapter provides an introduction to some of the core concepts and rationales of patent law and then presents the results of a study showing the steady rise of racial biotechnology patents over the past decade. The use of race in these patents is often premised on an unstated white norm implying some sort of racial difference at the genetic level. Yet while race may be used as a surrogate for statistical correlations and genetics frequencies in the body of the patent, it often becomes solidified into a static and bounded genetic category in the legally operative claims section of the patent.

This concluding chapter presents preliminary recommendations about how best to approach the use of racial categories in biomedical theory and practice, given that biomedical progress has always been inextricably bound up with commerce in the U.S. The issue, however, is not whether commerce should affect biomedical research or practice, but what the proper balance between commerce and science is. New drug applications should be guided by a strict scrutiny framework similar to that employed in constitutional jurisprudence. Similarly, whenever an applicant uses race in relation to biology before an agent of the state, a justification for the use should be required. Demanding a clear and full articulation of the basis and justification for developing and employing such correlations should be considered an essential starting point for confronting the challenges to come.

This chapter presents a historical orientation and explanation of certain racial and ethnic categories, which are also discussed on the chapters on Chiapas and Oaxaca. It also discusses Indians, Mestizos, self-defined ethnicity, indigenous autonomy, and indigenismo.

This chapter looks simultaneously at the evolution of the language of race and at the racialization of both the judicial and military systems to analyze how racial categories were formed, inhabited, and transformed over time in French New Orleans. The representations of the social order that fueled the language of race both informed and were shaped not only by a discriminatory and violent royal justice that increasingly targeted slaves as the main offenders but also by the exclusion of free blacks from and then by their segregation within permanent militia units. When the Spanish took over the colony, they found a society in which race was more firmly embedded than at the beginning of the French period while fostering more tensions and contradictions.

This chapter considers how and where race enters modern biomedicine, with an emphasis on the role of federal regulatory frameworks and mandates in incentivizing the introduction of racial categories in research and practice. Foremost among these are initiatives such as the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act of 1993 and the Food and Drug Modernization Act (FDMA) of 1997. This chapter also considers the implications of how federally sponsored biobanks, which compile genetic data from around the world, frequently organize their vast data sets using population groupings that often become collapsed into racial categories reflecting the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) mandate. This sets the stage for exploring what happens to race after it enters biomedical research and practice by looking for where it travels, how and by whom it is taken up, and what diverse purposes it serves—both intentional and unintentional.

Chapter 1 examines racial ideology and how racial democracy works in Cuba. The revolution, throughout its decades, has reinforced the ideology of racial democracy and in doing so, has created a set of norms that guide much of the thinking and doing around race and racism in Cuba. These norms are silence regarding racism; anti-racialism; and an understanding of racism as racial prejudice, rather than systemic racism embedded in the country’s institutions. The ideology of racial democracy or racial harmony serves to legitimate the racial status quo by trivializing racial hierarchies or refuting them completely. Consequently the ideology has created, over time, standard ways of perceiving race, or racial norms. In addition to racial norms, the chapter also discusses racial categorization in Cuba and its relationship to racial ideology.

Chapter 1 provides an in-depth introduction to the Anglo-American and Latin/Caribbean racial systems—the two layers of the racial palimpsest that exists in southern Louisiana. A racial system is a collection of formal and informal rules that order the ways color, phenotype, and status are “read” from individuals’ bodies in a way that places them higher or lower in the social hierarchy which apportions resources and opportunities. The conceptualization of the Anglo-American and Latin/Caribbean racial systems emerges from an in-depth, comparative analysis of the ways racial categories and practices changed over time in the United States and across the Americas. This discussion lays the conceptual foundation for the racial palimpsest concept, which is then applied to material in the chapters that follow.

This chapter illustrates the changing dynamics of racial categories in the life of Elisha Apes. Apes deserted the whaleship Ann Maria on its 1839–1841 voyage and spent the next fifty years, until his death in 1891, at Waikouaiti, or “Old Waikouaiti,” New Zealand, now the seaside resort village of Karitane. The younger brother of the radical Pequot Indian writer William Apess, Elisha Apes was native to North America, but when he settled in New Zealand, he became a foreigner and a settler, categorically “European” and “white.” In Apes’s case, it was not just that nineteenth-century New England and New Zealand employed different racial categorizing schemes but, more important, that colonialism used indigeneity to construct racial categories. Because Apes was not indigenous, not native, to New Zealand, he fell into the same racial category as New Zealand’s primarily British settler class.

Chapter 2 situates Monroe Coleman’s decision to participate in black freedom movements in Oklahoma against the backdrop of his early life as a “mulatto” child in Reconstruction-era Mississippi, highlighting the relationship between migration and the construction of racial categories in this period. Reading Coleman’s life alongside the lives of his contemporaries, this chapter argues that the westward migration of “mulatto” freedpeople constituted a telling response to racial violence and white racial nationalism in the aftermath of Reconstruction. While the rise of black Oklahoma was promoted, narrated, memorialized, and ultimately historicized as “all-black” and self-consciously “domestic,” such an image stands in contrast to the racial and national realities of the period.

This chapter discusses the racial ambiguities further complicated by the arrival and intermarriage of foreigners into the native communities of New England through whaling channels. In many ways, their experiences matched those of Americans who became beachcombers in the Pacific. The foreign diaspora had little effect on the overall cause of American imperialism, yet the United States had more racial categories, more reasons to categorize by race, more uncertainty about who belonged in which category, and more emphasis on race over other social hierarchies. In the United States at that time three groups—Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans—intermingled and intermarried, splintering race into myriad combinations. Americans often employed a number labels for nonwhites: blacks, Indians, and “mulattoes.” So many racial permutations spawned confusion while heightening the supremacy of race in American society.

This chapter illustrates how the issue of race is an inextricable component of Chesnutt’s writing and of American literature in general, as a result of the deeply ingrained racist legacy of the United States. Part of the failure among critics to recognize the pervasiveness of racial discourse has been the neglect of “whiteness” itself as a racial category, remaining complicit with its assumption of “universal” appeal. Recent interpretations of Chesnutt’s work have drawn attention to his depiction of “whiteness,” but they have also been limited by a theoretical lens contoured by the same distinction between nonracial “whiteness” and “racial” blackness that Chesnutt’s white editors used to exclude his work from publication.

This chapter examines Winnifred Eaton's attempts to recalibrate U.S. domestic racial categories of “white” and “Asiatic” by viewing them through the shifting lens of international relations in the Pacific. In her fictions of Japanese American romance, Eaton borrows from the set of racial meanings categorizing the Japanese as white that were being used to narrate commercial and geopolitical contests over Asia. In Eaton's fiction, this sense of Japanese whiteness becomes a tool to pry apart and fracture the juridically and culturally ascendant conception of homogeneous Asiatic otherness in the United States. The chapter's understanding of the field of U.S. Pacific empire is not restricted to the Philippines and other territorial possessions but includes the various nations and imperial powers that were seen as actors on a world's stage vying for Pacific geopolitical power, and broadens this focus in order to challenge the “frontier model” of Pacific expansion.

Chapter 1 examines the workings of racial ideologies through constructions of mixed-raceness and blackness in the United States and Brazil from the development of slavery to the 1990s. Through consideration of legal structures, censuses, scientific and academic writing, and cultural productions, the chapter provides the historical context in which the U.S. mulatta and Brazilian mulata figures emerged and the intertwinement of race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. It provides a genealogy of the relationships of representation, racial categorization, and racial ideology. The chapter sets up a framework for how dominant popular media draws on legacies of slavery and colonialism to produce narratives of racial progress, racial democracy, and multiculturalism while upholding white supremacy.