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Black banker, white banker:philosophies of the global colour lineSrdjan Vucetic aa University of OttawaPublished online: 11 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Srdjan Vucetic (2013) Black banker, white banker: philosophies ofthe global colour line, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26:1, 27-48, DOI:10.1080/09557571.2012.734783

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Black banker, white banker: philosophies of the globalcolour line

Srdjan VuceticUniversity of Ottawa

Abstract Critical study of the ‘global colour line’ usually begins by observingsimilarities between the colonial–colonized relationship on the one hand, and thedeveloped–developing relationship on the other. Despite the dramatic historical changes inhuman equality over time, both relationships are sometimes qualified with reference to raceand racism. This article reflects on these continuities and changes via two debates in thephilosophy of race: the ‘onto-semantic’ and the ‘normative’. Each of these debates, I argue,can help international relations (IR) better understand the complex social meanings andpolitical transformations of the global colour line. After I have made a case for the use ofcategories of racialization and racialized identity over the category ‘race’, I suggest that IRtheorists, too, should pay more critical attention to the burgeoning literatures on racialhabits and racial cognition.

Introduction

This crisis was caused by no black man or woman or by no indigenous person or by

no poor person. This crisis was fostered and boosted by irrational behaviour of

some people that are white, blue-eyed. Before the crisis they looked like they knew

everything about economics, and they have demonstrated they know nothing about

economics.

Brazil’s President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, made this claim at a press conference

he held jointly with Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Brasilia on

26 March 2009.1 That it quickly gained headlines was not surprising, given that

the ‘most popular leader in the world’ (Zakaria 2009) had just blamed the Great

Recession on a group of people of whom he identified by two phenotypes—‘white

skin, blue eyes’. Whatever meaning may have been lost in various translations,

Lula’s remarks smacked of racism from the outset. Therefore, as one journalist

immediately rose at the press conference to decry them, the President

1 The transcript of the press conference is unavailable on the usual Brazilian and Britishgovernment websites. The translation comes from The Guardian (Watt 2009), but also see thevideo on UOL Notıcias (Andrade 2009). This article has benefited from presentation at theBritish International Studies Association/International Studies Association (BISA/ISA)Edinburgh in 2012, as well as from the written comments by Duncan Bell, Shoshana Magnetand Robert Vitalis.

Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2013Vol. 26, No. 1, 27–48, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2012.734783

q 2013 Centre of International Studies

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backpedalled, but only very slightly and with some irony: ‘I only record what I seein the press. I am not acquainted with a single black banker’ (Watt 2009).

Lula’s remarks have been—and can be—criticized or dismissed as a matter ofignorance, bigotry or dirt-cheap populism. At the same time, the notion that theworld economy has its ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’—here invoked in terms ofa hierarchy between African-descended peoples and European-descendedpeoples—in fact accords with a vast stock of knowledge on the origins andevolution of the ‘global colour line’. This literature is rich and sparsely connected,but it is united by an intellectual pedigree that goes back at least to WEB Du Bois(1901) as well as by an observation that the line that once divided the colonial andthe colonized worlds roughly corresponds to the line that now divides thedeveloped and the developing worlds. This enduring line, the argument goes,owes its existence to the power of race and racism. While humans have alwaysdrawn lines among each other, it was some time in the age of colonial empires thatinsider/outsider differences became both global and ‘coloured’—attributed tohuman bodies in a way that made them appear natural and permanent.2

At a superficial reading, international relations (IR) is an obvious place for anengagement with the issues of race and racism because its scholarly production isbased precisely on the study of various lines that bind human beings to the global.Who gets to construct them, who seeks to resist them and under what conditionsdo such lines shift are some of the key questions that animate this discipline.Blackness and whiteness are relevant even if one accepts the old argument thatIR’s proper object of study is the international, not the global, meaning that theonly lines that the discipline should concern itself with are those that correspondto the boundaries of sovereign states. Whether we look at their laws, militaries oreducation and health systems, as David Theo Goldberg (1993; 2009) and othershave argued, it becomes obvious that states achieve sovereignty by defining theterms of political membership in racial terms. Next, states are simultaneouslynations and, contend scholars as diverse as Etienne Balibar (1991) and RogerBrubaker (2004), race and nation are twin forms of group identification and socialdivision such that nationalist iron continues to be struck on the racist anvil eventoday. Beyond nation-states there also exist close ties between race and class in thecontext of modern capitalism, which tend to further underscore the global colourline (Wallerstein 1991). As RJ Vincent observed 30 years ago: all else being equal,‘[i]f you are white, you are rich, and if non-white, poor’ (1982, 670). Intersect all ofthese lines with gender (for example, Brodkin 2000) and the Brazilian Presidentbegins to appear broadly correct in suggesting that the culpability for the ills ofthe world economy ought to lie with those who have so far disproportionallybenefited from its social structures for so long—rich white men.

Slogans like Vincent’s fall outside the standard IR classroom lore, andmainstream IR theories have little or nothing to say on the status of race ininternational political life (Persaud and Walker 2000; Wendy 2008). Behind theselacunae lies the variegated politics of IR, past and present. Largely thanks to some

2 For a recent sample of this literature, see Batur-Vanderlippe and Feagin (1999), Lakeand Reynolds (2008), Marable and Agard-Jones (2008), and Razack and colleagues (2010).On the life of Du Bois’ colour line metaphor, see Irwin (2010). The goal of this articleobviates the current academic practice of emphasizing the constructedness of race bytagging single or double scare quotes onto the word at all times.

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hard-nosed archival research conducted by Robert Vitalis (2000; 2005; 2010), we nowknow that IR originated as a science of race. A century ago, international politics wastheoretically much less interesting than the politics among ‘Anglo-Saxons’,‘Asiatics’, ‘Slavs’ and, indeed, the aforementioned blacks and whites. Whatconcerned those IR scholars were not the simple matters of war and peace so much as‘race war’, ‘race alliances’, ‘race suicide’ and similar phenomena arising from thedifferential rates of reproduction of allegedly different racial groups livingat allegedly different stages of civilization and modernity. Written in a wave ofreflection on this particular disciplinary history, IR perspectives on the lines of whichDu Bois wrote more than a century ago tend to provoke passionate exchanges aboutwhat it is that scholars should be studying. Where do race and its main corollary,varieties of racisms, fit on the scale of disciplinary concerns and why? Should race beprioritized over class and gender? How much does IR’s own whiteness—historicalas well as contemporary—shape the understanding of the global colour line?

Complicating these moral and political questions is the multiplicity of paralleland occasionally competing theoretical approaches on race and racism, many ofwhich are yet to be fully integrated into the context of IR. Why do blackness andwhiteness keep mobilizing public power if race is known to be scientificallyillegitimate? Are they produced by institutional allocation of economic resources,or are they primarily discourses and practices that force individuals and groupsinto acting subjects? What role does human psychology play, if any? Canindividual societies transgress the boundaries of whiteness and blackness, or willcolour lines always arise from larger, more enduring and possibly ‘hidden’structures upon which the modern international society rests? And if thesedichotomies are false, should we bring all these parts back into a singleexplanatory whole and, if so, how? In short, how do we study the ways in whichideas, discourses, institutions and practices come together to colour many socialdivisions at a global scale.

In this short article, I wish to consider some dimensions of these long-standingquestions through the lenses of two debates in the philosophy of race, both broadlyconstrued: the ‘onto-semantic’ debate on the meaning of race, and whether it is real;and the ‘normative’ debate on how race serves political and moral purposes, andwhether we should conserve or eliminate it from our discourse. In reviewing thesedebates, I wish to follow the general purpose of this special issue and encouragereflection about the multi-layered nature of the global colour line problematique.If the task before us is to examine anew this idea in IR, then the current exchangesin the efflorescent field of the philosophy of race may be a good place to start.

I should like to say at the outset that my own work lies in IR, not philosophy.My proposition is simple: ‘they’ (philosophers) can help ‘us’ (IR-ists) think harderabout the assumptions, concepts and conceptual relationships we use tounderstand and explain the processes of inclusion/exclusion that affect millionsof people. In addition to pointing out distinctions among different approaches torace, the philosophical debates can also help us identify options and opportunitiesthat have not yet been realized in the scholarship on the global colour line. Further,they can help us keep up with the latest developments in anthropology, feministscholarship, history, literature, sociology, psychology and biomedical sciences.Practices and knowledge claims emerging in some of these fields all too often gounrecognized in IR, which is both surprising and disappointing, given that they

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have had a critical impact on the ways our discipline has approached the globalcolour line in the past, not to mention their influence elsewhere (Bell forthcoming).

This article compresses a number of distinct debates and nuanced arguments,and there certainly is room for consideration of interpretations other than the oneoffered here. Whatever the interpretation, I believe that the philosophy of race hasa major potential to contribute to a more critical self-awareness about the principalassumptions and boundaries of what it is that we are doing when we areresearching the global colour line in IR.

Part I. What is race?

In the first instance, ‘What is race?’ is a semantic question. It foregrounds therelationship between the concept and the linguistics forms used to transmit it,and can therefore be rewritten as ‘What do we mean by race?’ Because of theconcept’s uneasy presence in the public domain, the definition of the concept ofrace cannot follow the desiderata of research puzzles or theoretical frameworks.Put differently, it is simply next to impossible to write about race without at leastimplicitly engaging the political questions concerning development, multi-culturalism, affirmative action, colour blindness and many other aspects ofpolitics and social justice. In the case of IR, as I said above, this issue iscompounded by the long shadow that the concept casts on the discipline’s historyand its relationship to public power dynamics.

This dimension of race has led philosophers to pay close attention to ordinarylanguage reasoning and popular intuitions on the concept.3 Following a patternestablished in the philosophy of language, two camps have emerged. On the oneside, ‘neo-descriptivists’ begin with a notion that terms have meanings thatdetermine their referents and argue that racial references are established only whenspeakers employ an implicit ‘folk theory’ that fixes the referent of the term ‘race’relative to the actual world, that is, on the basis of empirical meanings in the contextof use. What makes communication about race possible is therefore a background,folk-theoretical knowledge (see, for example, Glasgow 2009, 38–40).

In the opposite camp, the so-called ‘emergence’ school argues that the conceptof race emerges from collaborative practices of multiple speakers, some of whichmay be excluded from the production of meaning (for example, Haslanger 2008,61–63). Where these two schools meet is in the idea that the ordinary languageapproach can be helpful in identifying the ‘parameters’ of race-talk withina linguistic community, as in the broad question of whether race-talk refers toa natural biological or social kind. In the words of Joshua Glasgow, ‘[i]t is hard tooverstate the importance of this question . . . once we know what race is supposed

to be, we can figure out whether there is, in fact, any such thing’ (2009, 6–7, italicsin the original). In contrast to (most?) folk theorists of race, the vast majority ofacademic students of race, including philosophers and IR theorists, agree that race

3 Hardimon (2003). JL Austin was among the first to argue that philosophers ought topay attention to ordinary language. Arguably, his speech act theory was a study of thingsthat can be done in different contexts with ordinary words in general conversation.Compare Austin (1961 [1950], 123–154) and Wheadey (1969).

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is supposed to be a social kind. This point takes us into ‘onto-semantics’, a coinagethat is meant to underscore the dialectical nature of the concept.

In ordinary usage, ‘racism’ refers to a belief that some races are in some senseinferior to others. A series of great twentieth-century transformations—the waragainst Nazism, decolonization, second wave feminism, various scientific advances,civil rights and human rights movements, and other forces—have delegitimized thistype of thinking and acting such that (most?) people are now careful to keep theconcept of race away from the discourses of colour prejudice and biologicalsuperiority/inferiority. Scholarly definitions of racism, however, often go beyondexpressed beliefs in order to foreground further aspects of the social reality of racism:discourse and ideologies; choices and interactions; behaviours and outcomes;institutions and institutionalized orders; and practices and habits. I will discussmetaphysical matters below, but the simple point here is that, while race-talk mayor may not lead to racism, it is almost certain that racism need not be related to talk.After all, conventional usage might suggest that racism is easily reversible bymainstream education or legal action, which has demonstrably not been the case.

The contention that race is (or is supposed to be) a social kind suggests thatat some point in history people did not see race. From this perspective,genealogies on ‘What made race possible?’ are especially important in the studyof the global colour line because many groups commonly identified as races incontemporary ordinary language were once regarded as actual races at differentstages of development. Among historians, the emergent consensus holds thatrace and racism are products of European/Western modernity; the practice ofassigning properties of the human body onto ‘character’, which began with theseventeenth-century European travellers, paved the way for the later emergenceof race as a biological fact and a social problem. Pre-modern peoples alsoengaged in colonialism, but this type of colonialism did not result in racializedhierarchies. So while the ancient Aztecs, Athenians and Azande were sexist,slave-holding and xenophobic in matters of citizenship, religion and language,they were probably not racist in the ordinary sense of the term. In contrast,modern-era Europeans, whose expanding empires moved to establishboundaries between the superior whites and the inferior non-whites, werealmost certainly racist because they purposefully ordered and re-ordered peopleon the basis of assorted physical traits such as skin colour, hair and nose.

How, where and when the social contract became simultaneously the ‘racialcontract’4 remains to be more fully examined, but most historians of race wouldcontend that racial thought reached a peak in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century, when colonial empires were the order of the day and when fewself-identified whites questioned social Darwinian, Galtonian, Spencerian orLamarckian ideas of race as a permanent or semi-permanent category thatdetermined the worth and potential of everyone everywhere.5 In this ‘racialist’discourse, human collectives were coded by geography and/or physiognomy and

4 The term comes from Charles W Mills (1997), but this problematique arguably goesback to the likes of Du Bois, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon.

5 For effective overviews of key personalities and events that made these ideaspossible and pertinent bibliographies, see, inter alia, Bernasconi (2001), Blum (2002) andZack (2002).

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these codes signalled the presence of heritable psychological, cultural andbehavioural traits.6 It was racialism that authorized the racist management ofallegedly backward peoples through enslavements, genocide, ghettos, land-grabsand apartheid. Indeed the art of modern government arose from historical wrongsas well as historical rights (Bauman 1989). By observing that he had met plenty ofwhite bankers, but not a single black banker, the Brazilian President invoked thishistory rather memorably—past racisms and racial oppressions still condition thesocial and economic experience of people identified by themselves and others asnon-white.

The vast majority of contemporary states are officially post-colonial and anti-racist, yet they are also ‘racial’ because they continue to rely on race in order toarticulate representations of difference and manage cultural and politicaldiversity (Goldberg 1993; King and Smith 2005; Omi and Winant 1986). In fact,it is often argued that it is the mainstreaming of anti-racism in both state and non-state institutions, policies and decisions that have (seemingly paradoxically) keptracial exclusions alive, albeit in non-supremacist, separate-but-equal terms. Theseobservations have moved a number of scholars to call for an analytical shift awayfrom ‘protoracism’ and towards a more critical study of ‘culture’ (Goldberg 1993,73; Kuper 2000, 240–242) and (again, seemingly paradoxical) ‘new racism’ (Barker1981) phenomena such as ‘racism and its doubles’ (Taguieff 2001 [1988]), ‘racismwithout racists’ (Bonilla-Silva 2006, 1–4), ‘racism without races’ (Balibar 1991, 21)and even ‘racism without racism’ (Goldberg 2009, 361).

To various degrees, each of these perspectives owes something to MichelFoucault’s notion of ‘state racism’—‘a racism that society will direct against itself,against its own elements and its own products’ (2003 [1975–1976], 62). ‘State racism’is a loose term, but one implication is that modern states are both ‘racial’ and ‘racist’ inthe sense that they function by ‘purifying’ their populations by identifying, andsubsequently isolating, the poor, the deviant, the criminal and other ‘degenerate’elements (2003 [1975–1976], 62; see also 81, 254–255). Crudely interpreting Foucault’sscattered writings on race further, we could also say that his own genealogy wouldconclude that racial representations of difference became meaningful only onceEuropean colonialism coalesced with anthropology, biology and other modernregimes of truth. This reading of history also accords with Foucauldian categories likebiopolitics and governmentality, which together motivate the analysis of race andracism as one set of relations among subjects, bodies and the state which becamecontractually established and managed in political modernity.7

Once again, all of these new ways of talking about race and the varieties ofracisms go beyond ‘mere’ semantics. Viewed in terms of the analysis of a priorimeanings, this debate always raises more questions than it answers: Whatprocesses created folk theories of race for the first time? Under what conditionscan they and do they change? In what ways do they vary in history and

6 In this context, ‘colour’ referred not only to skin tone, but also to facial and otherbodily features that were understood to be naturally constituted in a specific part of theworld. Philosophers like to qualify racialism as ‘thick racialism’, ‘biobehavioralessentialism’ and ‘racial naturalism’ (Mallon 2006; Blum 2002; Zack 2002).

7 Dillon and Neal (2011). Also see Brah (2005, especially 76–84), Elden (2002), Rattansi(2005) and Rose (2007, 162–163). Whether Foucault was as interested in the global colourline as in racialized divisions drawn in Europe remains a matter of some debate.

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geography? For philosophers like Glasgow, this is a positive development: anyreflection on what we mean by ‘race’ leads us to reflect on what we mean by‘reality’, and its knowability, by ‘history’, ‘ethics’, ‘politics’ and so on, all of whichgives unity to the philosophy of race as a field (2009, 124–125). What we mean bythe word ‘race’ thus depends on how we think about it in ontological terms,namely, whether we believe that race is real or illusory.

If one is to judge by ordinary language practices, affirmative action policies,national census questionnaires, forensic DNA assessments or personalized geneticgenealogies, race clearly exists. Many societies still tend to classify their membersvery much the way they classified them a century ago—as ‘Asian’, ‘black’, ‘mixedrace’, ‘white’ and so forth. But if we were to ask natural scientists whether race existedmost of them would answer in the negative—and in sharp contrast to theirnineteenth-century counterparts. The idea that phenotypes and genotypes—forexample, ‘white skin, blue eyes’ genes—are indicative of some biological or geneticfixity has been proven to be wrong. Beginning with the 1950 and 1951 United NationsEducational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declarations on anti-racism and especially since Richard Lewontin’s (1972) landmark (and much-debated) study have agreed that genetic variability within putative racial categoriestrounces the same variability between and among them.

It is important to remember that this agreement has not been total. Even thoughthe first UNESCO declaration never denied the existence of discrete racial groupsas such (only their hierarchy), the ‘international’ scientific community still lobbiedfor the second declaration because it concluded that the breaking of the biology–human-diversity link was scientifically unwarranted as well as unnecessary for themainstreaming of anti-racism (Banton 2002, 29–31). The biology–diversitylink still has its supporters in population genetics, specifically in the studies of‘breeding populations’ or geographically structured groups whose intramuralreproductive rates are sufficiently higher than their rates of reproduction withcomparable groups.8 The biology–diversity link is also preserved in genomicmedicine. The studies of the variation in drugs trials across genetically isolablegroupings are particularly popular in the United States (US) context, where researchappears to be driven not only by new technologies and new economic opportunities(as identified by the powerful pharmaceutical industry), but also by rather specificpolitical and moral arguments. A well-known paper by Neil Risch and colleagueson the epidemiologic validity of racial self-categorizations (as a proxy for ancestry)appears to have been motivated by what the authors regard as the unjust nature ofthe colour-blind approach to American health care, which privileges and protectsthe ‘Caucasian majority’ at the expense of the non-Caucasian groups (2002, 11;compare Rose 2007, 157–158). The same can be said about the case of BiDil,NitroMed’s heart disease drug designed to target African American patients. Here,

8 Dissimilarities are typically established between the gene pools of the mostgeographically divergent peoples and they almost never harmonize with races thatcurrently exist in public policies or practices (Marks 2008, 25, 30–31; Zack 2002, 69).The term ‘breeding populations’ comes from Glasgow (2009, 4), whilst Mallon and othershave used terms ‘racial population naturalism’ or ‘thin racialism’ (Mallon 2004, 647–657;2006, 542–543). Note that ‘genetics’ and ‘genomics’ are often used interchangeably, but thatthe former refers to the more established practice of molecular analysis, while the latterrelates to the more recent techniques for analysing entire genomes.

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it appears that the authorities endorsed the drug primarily on the basis of argumentsfor racial justice, not medical validity (Lee 2008).

The idea that race might have biological (genetic) dimensions still lingers amongscientists. For Jonathan Marks, this lingering has a lot to do with ‘non-scientific’factors: ‘The more of life you think genetics controls, the larger the potential market forits products’ (2008, 27). The infusion of capital and privatized interests into the wallsthat normally separate different communities of knowledge will probably ensure thatthe genecitization of racial politics proceeds even if most authorities continue toquestion its scientific bona fides as well as political wisdom. Scores of culturalanthropologists and philosophers of race have shown that ‘race drugs’ and‘genetically isolable collectives’ are ideas that rest on exceedingly weak evidence,while numerous geneticists, including Lewontin himself, have concluded that thefuture for genetic epidemiology lies in the study of individual genotypes, notpopulations.9 But herein lies a major uncharted research avenue. As anthropologistshave shown, the genecitization of practices such as transnational adoption or eggand sperm donation has a significant impact on the politics of belonging andinterpretations of insider/outsider distinctions between peoples (Marks 2008; Rose2007). The impact of the genomic revolution on the ways in which national boundarieswill be negotiated, critiqued and reproduced should be of considerable interest to IR.

The failure of science to find evidence of the natural biological foundations of theidea of human races paved the way for the rise of ‘culture’ as a default explanation forhuman differences. This school of thought is associated with sociology andanthropology and it usually labelled ‘constructivism’ or ‘constructionism’ (some-times prefaced with the adjectives ‘social’ or ‘political’). In this view, race is realbecause it is created by human culture—it has come into existence and continues toexist as a social kind. Today, many constructivists eschew the term ‘race’ itself infavour of ‘racialization’ or ‘racialized identity’. Introduced into English in differentcontexts by sociologists Michael Banton (1977, 18), Robert Miles (1989, 79) andMichael Omi and Howard Winant (1986, 64), ‘racialization’ refers to a social andpolitical process by which race is inscribed and projected onto the human body.10

Philosopher Sally Haslanger has provided the most precise definition of the term yet:

A group is racialized (in context C) if and only if (by definition) its members are(or would be) socially positioned as subordinate or privileged along somedimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.) (in C), and the group is ‘marked’as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed tobe evidence of ancestral links to a certain geographical region. (Haslanger 2008, 65;also see 2000, 44, italics in the original)

As a category of analysis, racialization applies to objects and situations, but itsfocus is on agency, subjects, and identity formation. Also, racialization is closelytied to different theories and analyses of power within modern societies.Embedded in Haslanger’s definition is the notion of Foucauldian power as well,according to which the very process by which race is inscribed and projected ontothe human body constitutes an exercise of power, rather than a reflection of some

9 Feldman and Lewontin (2008). Also see Foster (2009, 357–259), Glasgow (2009,97–108), Mallon (2006, 543), Marks (2008) and Rose (2007, 155–171).

10 The idea can be variously traced to Arnold Toynbee, Arthur Keith and Frantz Fanon(Barot and Bird 2001; Murji and Solomos 2005).

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pre-existing social hierarchy. Foucault indeed theorized race as an important‘sorting mechanism’ in the systematic subjugation of bodies which constitutedwhat he called the biopolitics of political modernity (Dillon and Neal 2011, 7).

What further makes ‘racialization’ attractive to theorists and philosophersis the way that the term in principle avoids ordinary language confusions betweenthe historical race, which was once thought to be a natural biological kind, and thecontemporary racial group, which (as Glasgow would put it, ‘we’ know) issupposed to be a social kind. Consider Lula’s remarks one more time. What wascontroversial about them was not so much the observation that some people in theglobal political economy (‘white men’) had benefited more than other people(‘women’, ‘blacks’, ‘indigenous people’), but the fact that the President invokedolder biological theories on the existence of colour-coded races. Had he declaredthat whites had benefited from their collective racialization in the modern worldsystem more than non-whites, Lula would probably have been lauded for hissophisticated understanding of the global colour line. As far as ordinary languagegoes, the word ‘racialization’ has little traction, but it helps to remember that thesame quality applied to the concept of gender not so long ago (Haslanger 2005).

The vast majority of philosophers have enthusiastically embraced, andcontributed to, constructivist teachings. According to Ron Mallon (2006), the notionthat race is historically and cross-culturally constructed, contingent, contestable, aswell as situated within the relations of power is now a matter of ‘ontologicalconsensus’. This consensus is no more than three to four decades old, but itsdominance in the social sciences cannot be overstated. One could amass citations, butit would be pointless: entire research programmes in political science, sociology andanthropology are today devoted to the study of how race articulates and legitimizesintragroup unity and intergroup incommensurability, while influencing thedifferentiated distributions of wealth, worth, resources, entitlement and opportunityin broader social systems that social scientists study under the rubrics the ‘sovereignstate’, ‘freedom of movement’ or ‘division of labour’. In this ontology, race stands asexplanandum, not explanans, meaning that here ‘blacks’ or the ‘Caucasian majority’ donot exist independently of the acts of categorization in specific contexts. An exampleof a constructivist research question is how race structures the world such that manygroups of people are identified—by themselves and others—in racialized terms andso privileged/oppressed on the basis of that racialization.

In IR studies of race and racism, broadly constructivist viewpoints can be found inthe 1970s (Lincoln 1970; Rosenau 1970; Lebow 1976; Cheng 1977), but a more-or-lessunified research agenda is only just being put together. Apart from carefullyscrutinizing their discipline’s richly racist past, many IR theorists—poststructural-ists, critical and postcolonial theorists, or simply constructivists—have so farinterrogated the making and breaking of racialized identities in North–Southrelations, the US-led Global War on Terror, immigration controls, the management ofcultural diversity and the like. In some IR circles, the question of how race is(re)produced across space and time is on its way to becoming central to the analysis ofpractices of power and, in turn, politically engaged critiques of the international.11

11 See, for example, Agathangelou and Ling (2009), Darby and Paolini (1994), Doty(1996), Shilliam (2012) and the collections edited by Gruffydd Jones (2006) and Long andSchmidt (2005). Vitalis’ new book project, The End of Empire in American Political Science,considers even earlier ‘broadly constructivist’ viewpoints on race and racism in the

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Another IR approach to the global colour line has emerged from macro-level,materialist theorizations of the Marxist tradition. One of the main inspirations here isImmanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory on the structure and dynamics of themodern capitalist economy in its objective, historical-material totality. In one version(Wallerstein 1991), race is said to be a function of the expansion of capitalism’s core–periphery dynamics on a global scale. In the context of IR theory, Branwen GruffyddJones (2008) has recently expanded on this line of reasoning to argue thatcontemporary international anti-racist and human rights regimes have in factworked hand in hand with the ‘internationally coordinated’ efforts to protect privateeconomic interests to reproduce the structures of racial oppression:

once the pattern of global uneven distribution of power had been established, racialdiscourse was no longer necessary; the racialised distribution of power was alreadyintact at the level of societal interaction with nature. The conclusion must be that themassive impoverishment of the majority of African peoples today, as well asmillions in Asia and Latin America—normalised as a question of development—isnot simply a humanitarian tragedy, but, in part, the product of a racialisedinternational order, a form of global structural racism. (2008, 924–925).

What is remarkable about this argument is its explicit philosophical motivation.Gruffydd Jones moved to explore the utility of reinvigorated world-systemicthought in dealing with race and racism precisely because of her dissatisfactionwith the dominant ontologies of race in IR. For her, the study of the discursiveconstitutions of racialized identity is ‘vital but incomplete’ (2008, 911).

When analyzing the (re)production of race and various racisms, poststructur-alists typically use the bracketed ‘(re)’ to emphasize the fluidity of racializedsubjects that are (re)produced by discourses and practices that emerge from theconstructed, contingent and contestable background knowledge of whatconstitutes social and political reality. Racial power, then, is about (re)producingracialized subjects that appear to possess fixed materiality. According to GruffyddJones, racial power is material in the sense that it is routinely reproduced—note nobracketed ‘(re)’—through the relations structuring societal interaction withnature; specifically, through the regulation of nature as private property within thedevelopment of global capitalism, which carries the legacies of imperial conquestand colonial dispossession of non-European, non-white peoples (2008, 917–922).

For Gruffydd Jones, a more complete understanding of racial power requiresa new social ontology, namely critical realism’s preference for the so-called ‘depthontology’. A review of this position is not needed since, as far as IR is concerned,the 2000s can be regarded as a ‘critical realism awareness decade’. For thepurposes of this article, the most important part of the critical realist positionconcerns the existence of a mind-independent external reality.12 At the risk ofoversimplifying matters, it can be said that critical realism assumes that social

Footnote 11 continued

writings of Ralph Bunche, Alain Locke, and other members of the ‘Howard School ofInternational Relations’.

12 With respect to epistemology, which I put aside in this article for the reasons of space,critical realists are relativists in the sense that they rely on both correspondence andcoherence theories of truth, while at once positing that truth claims are subject to rationaljudgments. For the most recent review and discussion of critical realism in IR, see Josephand Wight (2010).

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phenomena operate at multiple levels or layers of reality. At deeper levels, entitiesexist regardless of our knowledge claims about them; at the ‘empirical’ level,however, we can directly observe them thanks to their ‘causal effects’ (powers,mechanisms, properties, etc). Here, causation is broadly conceptualized to describea reality as an open system in which ‘racialized oppression’ emerges asa consequence of a deeper and prior interaction of the ‘enabling/constraining’entities and mechanisms such as ‘human rights/wrongs’, ‘collective entitlements/obligations’ or ‘private/public property.’ In other words, we cannot understandrace as a meaningful social category without first understanding how capitalistsociety structures human beings into specific roles and ranks.

Many poststructuralists are uneasy with this line of argumentation. Arguably,this unease is metaphysical: one can accept that the experience of being assignedor ‘ascribed’ to categories such as blackness or whiteness causes people to think andact as if they are black or white—that is, individual persons who share a collectiveidentity defined by race—without also accepting that racialized identities cannotexist outside certain material hierarchies. Like many other IR debates, this debateon the nature of racialized reality has followed paths blazed by others, this time byMarxist methodologists. One of the questions they examined was the extent towhich critical realism emerged as ‘Marxism by stealth’ and a way to continue tostudy how, for example, race serves to the convince the poor that they are a certaincolour and that defending their relatively privileged status within a broader globalorder is in their best interest. Arguably, one of the ways in which critical realismharmonizes Marxist politics is by fostering research centred on the concept of classand, in turn, facilitating politically engaged critiques of poverty, exploitation andother unjust manifestations of social power, many of which are often dismissed incontemporary academia as passe ‘Marxian’ or ‘Marxoid’ topics.13 Related, andequally relevant to IR, is the debate between (cultural) sociologists and (cultural)anthropologists on what comes first, ‘social structure’ or ‘culture’ (Kuper 2000).As I will show in the next section, the question that has kept moral and politicalphilosophers awake at night is whether the category of race is ‘empty’ or at the veryleast ‘derivative’ of some other category such as class politics.

There are two bodies of research that complicate the standard discursive-materialist dichotomies. The first goes under the rubric ‘racial habits’, whichbegins with an observation that racialized outcomes are not necessarily contingenton racists actors. The goal of this line of research—which draws inspiration fromFreudian, Deweyan, Bourdiean and other frameworks—is to demonstrate howindividuals and groups become racialized through embodied habits, which can bedefined as preconscious or unconscious engines of action co-constituted withculture and social structures already dominant in society. For example, thehabitualized aesthetics of appropriating Native or African American spiritualtraditions as an antidote to consumerist and materialist conformities in thecontemporary US has less to do with engaged history and more to do withsubconscious desires of people designated as white to continue to pursue theirprivileges and protections. ‘From blackface minstrelsy, to Elvis, to the RollingStones, to Eminem, white youths have long sought to scare their parents by

13 Materialists are scepticial that race is symbolic ‘all the way down’. See, for example,Gruffydd Jones (2008) and relevant contributions in Brown and colleagues (2002).

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following the white guy who acted black on stage’ (MacMullan 2009, 179). If race-making occurs through a plethora of informal, illicit and, importantly, implicitpractices, there is little wonder that even a multicultural, anti-racist andoccasionally post-racial ‘Obamerica’ remains so profoundly racialized (Bonilla-Silva 2010, chapter 9; also see Alcoff 2006, chapters 7–8).

Separate, but directly relevant to the study of racial habits is the researchprogramme on ‘racial cognition’, which is an umbrella term that unites studies incognitive and evolutionary psychology, as well as (and to a lesser extent) inevolutionary anthropology. On the basis of a whole variety of experimentalresearch, social psychologists have now for decades argued that racial prejudice—prejudice related to skin colour and/or body appearance—can be present evenamong those who consistently reject the existence of races (or believe that there isa single human race) and otherwise hold reliable anti-racist attitudes.14 That racemay be a by-product of evolved cognition of the human brain is a more recentcontention. Philosophers Daniel Kelly, Edouard Machery and Ron Mallon(2010, 450) summarize this body of research thus:

Racial categorization develops early and reliably across cultures; it does not dependentirely on social learning; it is, in some respects, similar to our folk biology. Thus,racial categorization seems to be neither the product of socialization alone nor of theperceptual saliency of skin color. It does not appear to result from a general tendencytoward group prejudice, either. Rather, this body of evidence is best explained by thehypothesis that racial categorization results from some species-typical, canalizedcognitive system. Because it is species-typical, environmentally canalized, andcomplex, this supposed cognitive system is plausibly the product of evolution bynatural selection. Given the specific properties of racial categorization, this cognitivesystem is also plausibly domain-specific, treating race differently than othercategories (including some other social categories). All this is grist for the mill ofevolutionary psychologists.

Viewed from perspective of the ‘psy sciences’ taken together, race oftenappears less contingent and contestable than constructivists have intimated.But if evolved cognition is even partly behind folk theory of race, then itsacademic analogue ought to invite further reflection on the psychologicalmicrofoundations of racial categorization.

Now it is constructivists’ turn to feel uneasy. Social and cognitivepsychology, experimental and otherwise, is often dismissed for beingsubjectivist and ahistorical; what we are meant to study instead are culturaland social structures that make race possible in different contexts, not what goeson inside people’s heads. For pragmatically minded philosophers, this attitudeleads to a lost opportunity. A rapprochement between constructivism andpsychological disciplines is desirable because each approach has weaknessesthat can potentially be offset through some form of combined and eclecticreasoning.

While it is true the wild variation in meanings of race continues to puzzleevolutionary psychology, it is equally true that constructivism struggles with theapparent pervasiveness of certain forms of racialism. Indeed, why do race and its

14 A fact that has led some psychiatrists to suggest that (extreme) racism is a treatablemental disorder (Poussaint 2002).

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cognates persist in the face of overwhelming evidence that the natural biologicalconcept is false? One answer is that race and racism are sufficiently differentphenomena such that the elimination of the latter need not eliminate the former.Another answer is that the greatest barriers in battling racism may not be legal,social or political, as hitherto understood, but psychological. Similarly, if raceis a product of universal evolved cognitive mechanisms, then it may be that race-like categories delineated human population even in pre-modernity—a claimthat runs contrary to the teachings of most standard genealogies as well as mosthistorical materialist readings of race.15

At a minimum, these possibilities give philosophers ground from which tocriticize the systematic ‘disregard’ of psychology in constructivist approaches onrace (Kelly et al 2010, 468; compare Appiah 2006; Rose 1998). This disregard is aproblem because it continues to cement the purposive and representational biasesof contemporary race theory, which is an ontological issue as well. If race-making isnot simply a function of linguistic practices (both ordinary and extraordinary), butalso one of the routines of thought, perception and activities in everyday contexts,then the current analysis of the global colour line will remain ‘vital, but incomplete’for yet another reason.

Importantly, racial habits are never theorized as ‘false’ ideas, but as a part ofbroader reality structured around social institutions and organized relations thatare at once ‘reproduced’ and ‘(re)produced’ because most humans in mostcontexts indeed do not reflect on their course of action; instead, they automaticallyact and interact in accordance with the cultures and/or social structures ofconduct into which they were socialized or which they learned implicitly. Alongthe same lines, virtually all students of race working in psychological disciplineswould agree: race and other identities cannot be examined by separatingenvironmental factors from intrapyschic ones. Indeed, both relational psycho-analysts and cognitive-cum-evolutionary psychologists would now agree that thesocial environment in which cognitive, affective, Freudian or any othermechanisms in the human psyche operate is as important as the structure andfunction of the mechanisms themselves.16

If racialization is both relational and unconscious, then the pervasivenessand durability of colour lines in the world should not be surprising. Thisconclusion accords with a Foucauldian teaching that the privileged and theoppressed cannot change the system of power in which they find themselves,but can only tweak its modalities.17 And so we reach a question implied inFoucault’s power/knowledge nexus: what if the scholarship on race, too,constitutes part of the operation of power that makes it difficult to challengeracism?

15 For this claim, see, especially, Isaac (2004) and Memmi (2000), but also consider anassessment of race in the medieval period in Frederickson (2002) and Foucault (2003).

16 I cannot describe this literature further here, but see Hook (2007), Kelly andcolleagues (2010) and Machery and Faucher (2005). For IR perspectives on therapprochement between constructivism and psychology, see Shannon and Kowert(2011).

17 On the theorizations of the unconscious dimensions of racism within the frameworkof Foucauldian power, see, inter alia, Brah (2005), Hook (2007) and Rose (1998).

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Part II. Should we do away with race?

Every scholar of the global colour line must come to terms with the politics of anti-racism: What role, if any, should race play in the pursuit of social justice? Shouldwe abandon racially divided societies and move toward colour blindness? Howought we to approach development or multiculturalism? This inevitability ofpolitics can be stated more broadly. According to Ron Mallon (2006), rather thanbeing semantics or ontology, the philosophical debate on race is mainlynormative. This is to say that the ontological consensus still leaves us witha dissensus regarding moral, practical, prudential and, indeed, politicalimplications of race-talk. The relevance of this debate is self-evident: whatconcept—or concepts—best suits our anti-racist aims? To paraphrase Mallon, thepenultimate question in the philosophy of race is neither ‘What do we mean byrace?’ nor ‘Is race an illusion?’ but ‘What do we want race to be?’ (2006, 550).

In lieu of an answer, Mallon urges us to consider the basic normative parameterssuch as the epistemic and political value of race-talk (whether its meanings could bemore effectively subsumed under a different kind, namely ethnicity, and whetherit helps in dealing with racism and its legacies) and the degree of entrenchment ofrace-talk in everyday discourse, both public and private. On these parameters,scholars tend to be divided in two main camps. ‘Conservationists’ maintain thatracial categories should be conserved for the purposes of public policy analysis,social reform and/or identity-based politics (Mills 1997). In contrast, ‘eliminati-vists’—a catchall term that includes political liberals (for example, Appiah 1996),postcolonial theorists (Gilroy 2000) and conservative polemicists (D’Souza 1995)—contend that race is an illusion laden with disagreeable claims and, as such, shouldbe eliminated from public discourse.

The problem with the eliminativist position from the perspective of the studyof the global colour line is that it erases the philosophical and theoretical basis foranti-racist politics that is supposed to motivate scholarship in the first place. This isa major normative argument for conserving race that goes back to Du Bois: criticalconfrontation with race is the necessary step in the possibilities of overcoming theproblem of race. What also needs emphasizing is that conservationist race-talkconsciously seeks to avoid any reference to nineteenth-century racial meaningsor, for that matter, the language emerging from contemporary genomics. Theconcept of racialization serves so many philosophers well—think of LawrenceBlum’s (2002) racialized groups, Linda Martın Alcoff’s (2006) racialized identities,Glasgow’s (2009) asterisked ‘race*’ and even Appiah’s (1996) racial identities—precisely because it so clearly emphasizes the fact that race is a socially andpolitically constructed phenomenon. The normative goal here is not to ‘conserve’race so much as to ‘substitute’ it with race-like discourse.

One candidate is class. Robert Miles (1989) has long demanded that race bereplaced with racism defined as an ideological struggle within contemporarycapitalism. Miles developed his concept of racialization precisely in order toexplain the political conflicts arising from twentieth-century tensions between thecapitalist need for massive free movements of labour, on the one hand, and thenationalist need for loyal citizens, on the other. Another candidate is ethnicity.Its prima facie advantage lies in the successful replacement of ‘race’ in globalordinary language usage concerning certain groups such the Jews or theSinti/Roma, as if following the lead of those mid-twentieth-century UNESCO

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statements. There are conceptual advantages as well: constructivist definitions ofrace usually encompass a reference to real or fictive ‘ancestral links’ as a necessarycondition for racialization. This is of course a standard definition of ethnicity—membership based on (ideas, discourses, practices, etc of) shared ancestry. Giventhat the costs of race-talk (intellectual incoherence, essentialism and reification)generally outweigh the potential benefits (for example, enabling group-basedsocial justice claims), argues philosopher J Angelo Corlett (2003), this overlap is anopportune reason to ‘replace’ the former with the latter.

The problem with the substitutionist strategies is that they erase the fact thatrace is both more global and more directly enmeshed in power relations. The race-to-class move imposes a high price on theoretical and empirical work because itdisregards a world of ideas and practices that precede—some would saysupersede—the modern nation-state (to say nothing of the international labourmarket). Class relations become much more complex once people see each othernot as rich/poor, but as indelibly different from one another on some seeminglynatural (biological) dimensions. A vast body of sociological research on access toopportunities in a variety of contexts shows that that, controlling for educationand income, non-whites almost always face greater challenges than whites. Thesame applies to ethnicity. When ethnic differences are tagged onto the body, thehierarchy between ethnic actors becomes seemingly self-evident and indelible.At stake here is both analysis and ethics: ethnicity not only misses the full gamutof (bio)power relations that made race historically possible, but is also poorlyequipped to address the judgments about justice based on colonial andpostcolonial struggles along the blackness/whiteness boundary.

It can also be argued that the race-to-ethnicity move would in fact go againstthe semantic teachings on the role of ordinary language and the folk theories ofidentity. Going back to Mallon (2006, 550), public policies dealing with differentinter-generational groups will work best if the communities of language targetedby those policies themselves recognize differences between race and ethnicity intheir everyday discourse, both public and private. All being equal, in generalconversations and popular intuitions race-talk operates on a higher degree ofabstraction than ethnicity-talk. For example, while ethnic meanings typicallyderive from contextual knowledge claims (and disclaims) regarding the subject’sgenealogy (‘Her ancestors are from X’), race-talk usually requires a broader andmore abstract background knowledge about the human body and/or the ways inwhich identities have been racialized (‘Her ancestors are black’ or ‘Her ancestorswere mistreated by the colour of their skin’). It is also worth pointing out thatordinary language does not recognize ‘ethnicism’ as a functional equivalent ofracism.

Yet another self-consciously normative position against substitutionism arisesfrom intersectionality theory, which is based on the idea that categories ofdifference such race, class, ethnicity and sexuality always have simultaneous andinteracting effects on the social and political world. This philosophy drivesjournals with double titles like the venerable Race & Class or the newerRace/Ethnicity, as well as numerous research programmes in both social sciencesand humanities (Hancock 2007, 64; also see Rattansi 2005; Puar 2007). From thisperspective, we do not want race to be either class or ethnicity because anyreplacement move ignores the ontological fact that the intersections, interlock-

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ings and assemblages of these categories are always greater than the sum of theirparts.

The latest and related attempt to capture overlap, intersection and interlockingbetween race and ethnicity—or between racialization and ethnicization—is theconcept of ‘ethnorace’. Building on Goldberg (1993; 2009), Alcoff defines‘ethnorace’ as

pertaining to groups who have both ethnic and racialized characteristics, who area historical people with customs and conventions developed out of collectiveagency, but who are also identified and identifiable by bodily morphology thatallows for both group affinity as well as group exclusion and denigration. (Alcoff2009, 22)

Like racialization, ethnorace is unlikely to enter ordinary conversations soon(to say nothing of helping shift people’s self-conceptions in them), but it can helptheorize the dynamic nature of social divisions based on kinship. In addition todescribing pan-ethnic categories that have ideas of race embedded within them(for example, Latinos in the US), ethnorace might be part of the answer to long-standing research puzzles on how ethnic groups in different contexts becomeracialized, deracialized or re-racialized.

There is indeed no shortage of reasons why most philosophers of race preferto ‘reconstruct’ or ‘ameliorate’ race-talk rather than outright replacing it withsome other discourse (Glasgow 2009, 147–154; compare Alcoff 2006, chapter10). Once again, the philosophical debates considered in this article aredialectical in the sense that theories on how we ought to talk about the worldalways depend on theories on what is in the world. The question ‘What do wewant race to be?’ always and by necessity depends on ‘What can we want?’ andvice versa—the facts regarding human diversity cannot be separated from thepolitical and normative interpretation of that diversity. So while somephilosophers might explore how the latest research on the peculiar evolutionof human cognition may be relevant for eliminativist, substitionist andreconstructionist desires alike (Kelly et al 2010), IR-ists might, following Vincentand Vitalis, investigate what normative positions made race such a taboo intheir own discipline. Along the same lines, if the discourses on the degrees ofethnic assimilability and entitlement contain forms of ‘new racism’, thenstudents of the global colour line ought to pay closer attention to the criticalstudies of ethnicity.

Relevant here is Brubaker’s protest against what he once called ‘complacentand cliched constructivism’—the analytically lazy usage of the terms ‘race’,‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’ as if these are ‘substances or things or entities ororganisms or collective individuals’ (2004, 3, 9–11). If the constructivistconsensus in ontology indeed privileges the study of processes, then we ought tochange our categories of analysis; racialization, ethnicization and nationaliza-tion should take precedence over race, ethnicity and nation. No less important,Brubaker accepts that the theoretical net for proper ‘relational, processual,dynamic, eventful, and disaggregated’ analysis must be wide, but his researchaims to mix Bourdiean practice theory with psychological insights on the roleand actions of individuals.

These ideas are only being developed through concrete empirical studies.What Brubaker and his students offer is a set of plausibility probes based on extant

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cognitive psychology perspectives on the connection between essentializedinsider/outsider differences and mass-level collective action (2004, chapters3 and 8). Indeed, much more can be said about the impact of ‘racial cognition’ onrace-making in society.18 Students of the global colour line would do well to payattention to this line of research for at least two reasons. First, moves toaccommodate psychological insights into constructivist viewpoints can be purelymethodological. In other words, bringing the psy sciences (back?) in does notnecessarily upset the ontological consensus on race. Second, and more arguably,the ‘psychological turn’ might in fact induce race scholars to further work outtheir ontological commitments on the mutual constitution of agents andstructures. After all, the question of how cultural and social structures of racesystematically influence individuals is no less pressing than the one of howindividuals create and resist those structures.

Conclusions

As an object of reflection in IR, race has waxed and waned over time, yet onewould be hard-pressed to deny its centrality to the origins of the discipline or,indeed, its relevance in the development of the modern international. But race isalso a mercurial object of reflection. The debates over its ontology, epistemologicalstatus, and legitimacy are necessary precisely because race is a moving target—itsmanifestations vary in history and geography.

In this article, I have argued for the use of the categories racialization andracialized identity over the category race. When it comes to onto-semantics, allphilosophers of race agree that race is a social kind as opposed to something thatexists in nature: Xs become racialized when their perceived ancestral ormorphological differences are invested with meanings that position them assubordinate to Ys in context C. Packed into this conceptualization is an emphasison the multidimensionality of power. The near-universal agreement that racismnow has a negative moral quality means that coercive power is less effective inproducing racialized oppression than ever before. Rather than coercion,‘racialization’ refers to the political construction of difference such that theidentity X comes to be viewed as indelible and therefore antithetical to the projectbuilt and established by Y. For example, anxieties related to immigration or themanagement of cultural diversity are racialized every time a group of people istreated as unassimilable. What makes the study of the global colour line sovaluable relates precisely to its exploration of the processes of racialization inrelation to one another, across multiple sites.

A dual emphasis on coercive and disciplinary forms of power embedded inracialization theory may be one way to ease the frequent tensions along thematerialist–ideational dichotomy. It also suggests that actors authorized to drawand re-draw colour lines must be regarded as at once an effect of a global system

18 In the popular Johnson–Lakoff model of the political mind, for example, all sharedmeanings are embodied in the sense that they are produced in the human brain, which is atonce evolved and situated in the social world. A research question that arises from thisperspective is how mental constructs like metaphors, schemas and frames influence thequotidian patterns of ethnoracial mobilization. See, especially, Lakoff (2009, chapter 9).

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of racialized power and agents of that power at the local level. This approachto conducting empirical research on race not only accords with the aforemen-tioned call for historical and cross-societal comparisons, but also dovetails with anage-old anthropological dictum that researchers cannot analyse how meaning-making practices are made without observing human actors interacting with otherhuman actors in ‘real time’ and in ‘everydayness’.

Comparative race-making still remains but one important area of study. Thequestion that has motivated the students of race in IR is not so much howracialized identities are organized into hierarchies within and between specificstates, nations or social movements, but how racialized identities might operateas an international structure. This community has a distinct research record,but it is probably safe to say that it is struggling to come up with a framework orframeworks for theorizing the global—or at least the international—from theperspective of race. States, nations, social movements and other ‘units’ are all saidto operate within a racialized global system, but what remains to be analysed ishow this macro-structural feature affects patterns of privilege, protection, controland inequality among them.

I have also suggested that the concept of racialization may be well equipped toincorporate the theoretical frameworks on racial habits and racial cognition inaddition to assorted social and cultural structures. Virtually all students of raceagree that racialization occurs even in the absence of expressed racist purposes orconscious beliefs that X are inferior to Y. If race-making is partly a function of theevolution of human psychology, then we may have an easier task explaining whyphenotype and ancestry were built into so many political orders in modern history,including the modern international. International relations has good ‘foundational’reasons to be reticent about exploring evolutionary explanations of the social andpolitical world, but reticence should not turn into ‘disregard’. If philosophers areright, the tensions over what race means, what race is and what do/can we wantrace to be will prove to be an asset in the transdisciplinary conversations that willtake place in the next generation of studies of the global colour line.

Notes on contributor

Srdjan Vucetic is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Public andInternational Affairs at the University of Ottawa. His latest publication is TheAnglosphere: a genealogy of a racialized identity in international relations (StanfordUniversity Press, 2011).

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