Race: let’s talk about it

“ Above all, let’s not talk about it » promised a well-bred family when sitting down to eat, at the height of the Dreyfus affair. Las ! However, they talked about it and did not have enough of all their forks to skewer each other, if we are to believe the satirical drawings of Caran d’Ache. And indeed, how could we not talk about it, when everyone was talking about it? ?

The social sciences family has already talked a lot about race (on the Life of Ideas, see for example here, here, and here). So why reopen the debate? ?

A consensus dominates in France: race is not a biological reality, but a social one. Assignment, condition, categorization suffered, and sometimes appropriated by those it oppresses, it would have nothing to do with biology. This consensus of researchers in social sciences, professional and political, is defended as a guarantee against racism, a condition of social justice and peace. However, it is not free of stumbling points, such as the question of ethnic and racial statistics, already discussed in La Vie des idées (see here and there and this). The question – moral, political, cognitive – is the following: can the just opprobrium which weighs on racist behavior, which has already been seriously undermined for some time, survive if we also bring to the fore the very notion of race? ?

The philosopher Magali Bessone, for her part, proposes that we cannot effectively combat racial inequalities and discrimination (and racism) without using the notion itself (see the review by Dominique Schnapper). Anti-racism itself needs to be critically rethought: Daniel A. Gordon’s book, Immigrants and Intellectuals. May ’68 and the Rise of Anti-Racism in Francelisted by Emmanuel Debono, allows for example to examine his “ moment 68 », between the end of the Second World War and the march of the Beurs, and to highlight the road that remains to be covered to better understand the historical trajectory of the phenomenon.

Beyond the question of the advisability of a strategic use of the notion of race, it must also be emphasized that the consensus on which a large part of social science research on race is based is based on a denial : because race is indeed an object of research for biology. Better (or worse), research on the origins of man and the biological diversity of human populations was refounded even before the Second World War on a basis which did not exclude the concept of race. One of the founding fathers of population genetics, Theodosius Dobzhansky, spoke out in the 1950s against what he considered to be the tyrannical enterprise of the social sciences, in particular of American cultural anthropology: the negation of existence of human races. As early as 1950, many evolutionary geneticists mobilized alongside physical anthropologists to challenge the claim ofUNESCO to delegitimize the notion of race. The revolt was so strong that the international institution had to allow these protesters to publish under its aegis a denial of its first “ statement on race » where they strongly nuanced the thesis according to which race was only a social construction. However, the protesters did not all belong, far from it, to the camp of crypto-racists determined to provide weapons to American or South African segregationists. On the contrary, behind Dobzhansky, they proclaimed both the need to fight against racism and the need to maintain race as a category for analyzing human life. They both challenged the validity of companies defending the idea of ​​unequal intelligence of races (The Bell Curve1994) and supported research programs based on the idea of ​​collecting the genetic heritage of populations “ pure » like the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) designed by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.

In other words, race has indeed remained a biological category, because it has continued to be used by biologists. She is therefore at once, at the same timein an inextricable, biological and social way – and its use in biology is far from being reducible to racism: on the contrary, like Dobzhansky, the majority of researchers in human biology who use it profess anti-racist convictions.

To condemn racism, we cannot therefore rely on a scientific consensus which would show the non-existence of races. Without doubt, as Bertrand Jordan shows in his interview with Claude-Olivier Doron and Jean-Paul Lallemand, the scientific argument is even useless in the fight against racism. Rather, it is the way in which the notion is used that must be the subject of research. Under what conditions are studies implementing the notion of race carried out? ? How are the population samples used for these studies constructed? ? What negotiations are taking place between public authorities, researchers, associations, consumers on the use of the concept ? How, in short, do we continue to talk about race ? Finally, what are the differences between the current use of the concept in population genetics and pre-war physical anthropology ? The field of application of these questions is gigantic, as genomic advances, and their availability to the public and States, are revolutionizing our relationship to our biological difference. Genetic tests and analyzes are used today to formulate probabilities of the occurrence of rare diseases linked to populations (Tay-Sachs disease for Ashkenazi Jews, for example, or sickle cell anemia for African Americans), but also to determine the membership of an individual’s ancestors to a geographically located population group, or the membership of a living individual, or even the remains of a skeleton, to a previously defined racial group. Doron and Lallemand, in their bibliographical essay, show how the social sciences have for several years questioned the existence of races understood as biologically and genetically established facts.

It would be tempting to bring the phenomenon back to the specific history of the United States, to “ racial problem » American, and the resulting census categories. However, this would be ill-founded. Firstly because race is as much a French reality as it is an American one: as shown in the book by American historian Alice Conklin, In the Museum of Man Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (listed in English by Julia Clancy-Smith), the anthropological profession has invested the notion with as much ardor in our country as in the United States – republican universalism or not. Many other countries, moreover, like Israel, have mixed the notion of race into their public life (see the review of The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemologyby Nadia Abu El-Haj, by Audrey Kichelewski).

But above all, the offer for personalized medicine, the concern to know one’s ancestors through genetic tests, to sell medicines to certain categories of consumers, or to charge more expensive insurance by raising the scarecrow of populations “ at risk ”, are far from being uniquely American social realities. New ways of linking racial common sense are thus born (“ races exist, we see it clearly “, “ they are not like us, we do not have the same bodies “) to a new type of evaluation of difference and belonging which translates into new social – and commercial – practices.

No doubt there will not be enough of one file to settle the question – so, we can be sure, we have not finished talking about the concept of race.