Public Forum

Letters to the Editor

Doing “Racial” Research: A Dissent

Professors Barlow and Duster’s “Researchers Challenge California Initiative to Ban Racial Data” (Footnotes, July/August 2003) contains some patent inaccuracies and is most misleading. Their designation of the Racial Privacy Initiative (RPI) as an “Initiative to Ban Racial Data” sets the tone of misinformation and aspersion. This level of negative preemption should not emanate from professors of sociology and the president elect of the ASA. Proponents of the RPI argue for separation of race and state. Have done with those official requests for confessions of racial identity. My “race” has to be my private business, given the perpetual controversies over “race” within both “politics” and “science.”

Barlow and Duster claim: “The American Sociological Association has a compelling interest to oppose the RPI.” They do not, however, inform readers how they arrived at this conclusion. However, readers are justified in expecting sociology professors to offer reasons for their central claims, as they expect from students. Arguably, the ASA has a compelling interest in opposing the government’s cradle to grave imposition of racial identities on individuals. A reason? This imposition flies in the face of logical reasoning. In Census 2000, a person can claim membership of many “races.” In the interest of consistency, government should measure and keep records of inequality among “blacks,” “whites,” and “multiracials.”

Barlow and Duster advise sociologists to function as spokespersons for government. But it’s all in a good cause—the eradication of racial inequality. “Sociologists,” they write, “can explain to the public that governmental efforts to track race are not mere efforts to force people to proclaim an arbitrary identity, but are necessary to overcome racial inequality.” Unfortunately, the history of these “governmental efforts to track race” does not reveal benign intentions, and the public has no way of knowing how future governments might use confessions about racial blood lineage. In a classic example of inconsistency, Barlow and Duster support government’s “collection of racial data” and at the same time warn readers: “Government, however, is expanding its collection of data about the public at the very time that the public is being denied access to government data.” The ASA has a compelling interest in warning the public about government’s tracking of race.

Barlow and Duster inaccurately portray what the government does about “race” and data on “race.” Government does not “track race.” “Race” is not trackable by government. Some biologists and geneticists select certain anatomical attributes, as well as geographic and genetic markers to categorize persons as “races.” Governments—particularly in the American South, Nazi Germany, and South Africa—allocated persons to racial groups on the basis of appearances, droplets of blood pre-defined as racial, personal confessions, local customary practices, location of birth and residence, “culture,” and so on, and on that basis denied them access to property, civil and human rights. In pursuit of redress, Barlow and Duster ask sociologists to help Federal, state, and local governments to maintain racial classification. Such classification, they argue, is necessary for overcoming racial inequality. Their analysis fails on its own terms. How is “racial inequality” even identifiable, given the following: (1) the different bases of racial classification used by various levels of government, states, and counties; (2) discoveries of racial under, over- and miscounting at federal, state, and local levels; and (3) reports of one person having many different racial identities on official documents? Second, the continued classification of persons itself creates the polarized racial identities that underlie discrimination. Barlow and Duster simply refuse to reflect on the effects of their own practices. Their conception of “empirical research” derives from an empiricism/positivism that obscures what “researchers” bring to the table, theoretically. Governments and sociologists do not collect; they fabricate racial data. In Karl Popper’s famous observation: “All our knowledge is theory-impregnated.” Data become “racial” through an a priori racial classification of actors.

Barlow and Duster assert that people routinely use “race” to order their behavior and relationships. This assertion should be accompanied by a specification of the concept of race that people allegedly use, as well as the conception of race that the researchers themselves are deploying when they designate actors as “whites” and “people of color.” Researchers necessarily take some conception of race into the “field.” The authors refuse to divulge theirs, and present themselves as “scientific” investigators of the social world. By implication, they ignore cardinal contributions from those working within the ethnomethodological and symbolic interactive perspectives. The meaning of actors’ routine use of “race” has to be negotiated. Any instructor of a course on “race relations” can observe the confusion over what is race by asking students to count how many races there are in the classroom, or in U.S. society. The answers will range from 1 to the number of students in the classroom, as “race” is understood as “nationality,” “ethnicity,” “culture,” “skin color,” and “skin color plus,” and there will be quite a few students pleading the Fifth. The “social meaning of race” may be construed as follows: the multiple senses in which the word “race” is used in science, social scientific research and texts, journalistic commentaries, and private conversations indicate that people are clueless about “race” and are talking past one another. Let “race” go, the way phlogiston went. How? First, by terminating the official classification of individuals according to their anatomical and/or cultural properties.

Yehudi Webster, California State University-Los Angeles

Reply to Webster: The Serious Consequences of Banning Racial Data

Professor Yehudi Webster continues his efforts to depict the collection of data about populations’ race, ethnicity, and national origin as arbitrary and unscientific [May/June 2003 Footnotes, p. 7]. He even holds responsible those who defend the collection of such data for “the polarized racial identities that underlie discrimination.” In the January, 2003 Footnotes [p. 9], Troy Duster, responding to Webster [p. 8-9], argued that race is a real set of social relationships of privilege and oppression in every sphere of American social life, and that sociologists (as well as government) must employ race-based data both to document the problems of racial discrimination and to propose solutions to them. Our main difference with Webster is that we maintain that American society is structured and stratified by race. Webster, on the other hand, believes that “governments and sociologists do not collect; they fabricate racial data,” and that this “fabrication” is itself a primary source of the racialization of society. Webster’s perspective on race trivializes one of the most powerful social phenomena of contemporary American society.

But Webster’s position more than distorts the significance of race: it leads directly to his advocacy of California’s Proposition 54. This ballot initiative proposes to terminate the collection of population data about peoples’ race, ethnicity, and national origin. Sociologists should debate the significance of race, and how to measure racial discrimination, and the appropriate policies to remedy it, but, as Duster and I argued in the July/August 2003 Footnotes, Prop. 54 is a blunt instrument that compels sociologists as a whole to take action. Prop. 54 would deny sociologists the capacity to demonstrate the continuing power of race in the United States, and the deadly realities of racial inequality in health care, criminal justice, education, employment, housing, etc. Absent the collection of such data, racial discrimination will certainly increase, as the weakening of state monitoring programs will encourage more brazen attempts to discriminate. We are gratified that at its August meeting, the ASA Council did take action, putting the ASA on record—along with the American Public Health Association and the California Medical Association—in opposition to Prop. 54.

The debate with Professor Webster is not just a difference of opinion. Those who advocate the abolition of race as a legitimate subject of sociological inquiry and public policy are engaging in serious business. They would deprive us of the ability to monitor and redress real racial discrimination by public and private agencies. They propose a policy that would give a green light to those who might benefit from discrimination. Webster is accountable not just for his views about race, but for the potentially deadly consequences that may flow from them.