Color Conscious Paperback – March 16, 1998

Excellent book!

Good book could be great

Excellent

I found this book to be a very interesting read for someone who has done a fair about of research about race and critical race theory. I thought Appiah's section could have been a lot shorter, as he focuses on minute details about the thoughts on race of a couple historical figures, including Thomas Jefferson. I personally found it interesting, but most of what he wrote was not necessary for his conclusion (that "race" is a social construction). That argument could be made in 10 pages, but he made it 100. I particularly enjoyed reading the discussions about biology and genetics in both sections. Gutmann offers unique and persuasive arguments in support of a variety of controversial color-conscious issues.I think some of the other reviewers are missing the point of Appiah and Gutmann's assertions that race is not a biological category, but one that has been socially constructed. They obviously acknowledge that people have superficial genetic differences that result in a variety of skin colors and morphological features. They also acknowledge that people who have descended from the same place have more similar genes. We can talk about genetic differences between populations, but 'race' is such a broad category that encompasses so many people from different populations that there is actually more genetic differences within 'races' than between them. They advocate using 'color' instead of race in order to avoid reifying 'race' as a legitimate descriptive category. Thus, they can support government policies targeted at black people or Native Americans without engaging in contradiction. They both agree that the overall goal would be a color-blind society in which color doesn't matter and 'races' no longer exist, but they agree that color-consciousness is currently necessary because our social institutions embue color with meaning and discriminate against non-whites.I would recommend this book, but I would suggest skimming through Appiah's section.

It is sad that a book such as this is written by the head of a philosophy department at a world university such as NYU and by the President of the University of Pennsylvania. President Gutman's proposal to replace "race" with "color consciousness" sums up their actual or feigned ignorance and the cluelessness of modern intelligentsia. I can just imagine her and other academics in a conference room with a skin color chart deciding whose skin color will justify their academic noblesse oblige and whose will not warrant it; this is their solution for racism. For a philosopher of language, Appiah seems to have no understanding of the nature of the scientific wordgame and seems to truly believe there is a substantive difference --- not just an aesthetic difference --- between saying statistical "population" and statistical "race". Or, is he simply pretending to do so as a political image to satisfy ambitions for further academic advancement such as Gutman must be doing. One does not get that high in the academic world unless one is a politician first and scholar much later. This book should give serious consideration to eliminating academic tenure for administrators and heads of departments. Universities now are just venture capitalists that also have classes, there is no reason for tenure for their administrators.

Amy Gutman argues that racial quotas are needed because of racial discrimination. There is some truth to this: for example, the Nixon administration invented quotas to fight blatant discrimination by craft unions in Philadelphia, and it's hard to imagine any other tactic working to end discrimination by unions devoted to enforcing anti-competitive, nepotistic hiring. Unfortunately, Gutman makes no attempt to distinguish anti-competitive organizations from competitive ones, which have economic incentives to not discriminate. In fact, I don't think Gutman is even aware of the distinction. She merely assumes that if blacks are under-represented anywhere, it's because of discrimination. Well, we've certainly heard that before, so what's the point of writing another book if you're just going to repeat the same old dogmas?Appiah, on the other hand, is a more open and intriguing thinker. This may stem from the near-comic ironies of his position in life. He is a Professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, but he's not very Afro-American. He was born in Ghana of a local father and an English mother. He has spent a lot of his career arguing that "race" has no biological "essence," but is just a social construct.It's not hard for him to knock down the absurd strawmen he sets up. He assumes that if there is no Platonic essence to each race, and that if each member of each race can't be perfectly identified, the whole concept of race must be discarded. Of course, reality is not Platonic, it's relativistic and probabilistic. It's humorously hypocritical for a relativist like Appiah to denounce the concept of race just because it's relativistic.For example, all his criticisms of the concept of race apply with equal, if not greater, force to the concept of family. Nobody can agree on the precise numbers of races? Nobody can agree on the precise number of extended families either. Are some people descended from more than one race? Well, everybody is descended from more than one family. There's no single gene that proves you belong to one race or another? Well, there's no single gene that proves you are your father's child either. Paternity testers examine a host of genes in order to increase the probability of a correct attribution. (In fact, the exact same DNA techniques are used by forensic scientists to inform police of the probable race of criminal who left a bloodstain at the crime scene.)Why does family provide so many perfect analogies for race? Because they aren't analogies: a race is an extremely extended family. There are no hard and fast borders between families and races -- the only qualitative difference is that races show a degree of endogamy (in-breeding), which means that races are actually somewhat more coherent and definite, and less fuzzy than families.