Why race still matters hacking

Why race still matters Ian Hacking Ian Hacking. His work spans the philosophy of science, the philosophy of language, the theory of probability and statistical inference, and the socio-historical examination of the rise and fall of disciplines and theories. This Site. Google Scholar. Author and Article Information. Ian Hacking. Online Issn: This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.

Daedalus 1 : — Cite Icon Cite. This content is only available as a PDF. Article PDF first page preview. Close Modal. Email alerts Article Activity Alert. Latest Issue Alert. View Metrics. Cited By Web of Science Du Bois in the early twentieth century went a long way to establishing the predominantly correct view that race has no basis in actual physical differences between groups of human beings. Following the end of Nazi rule, the idea that race is socially constructed became widely — if not universally — accepted in scientific and political circles.

This appeared to be borne out in broad terms by the publication of the human genome project in El-Haj Nevertheless, there has never been a time in which race was not in use both colloquially and by scientists. Race is under constant, silent production, with research continuously emerging that appears to open caveats in the dominant position that there is no way to equate race with human genetic diversity Hartigan DNA ancestry testing is the object of particular popular fascination. Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates has spurred a digital genealogy industry through his role as producer of highly successful television series such as African American Lives.

There are a multitude of social media forums and DIY reality television-style YouTube posts in which people reveal the results of their ancestry tests. DNA testing is even proposed to have an antiracist impact, as seen in attempts to use test results to confront avowed white supremacists on the fallacy of racial purity.

DNA is the object of intense politicization, as was seen in the revelation by US Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren of the results of her DNA ancestry test in late However, the reliance on DNA to prove Indigenous identity directly contravenes tribal protocols for assessing membership, which do not see genetic testing as valid. However, there is no test for genetic Aboriginality and no Australian Aboriginal genome Fryer b.

Race under settler colonialism was a project of what the late Australian historian of race and colonialism Patrick Wolfe refers to as replacement and elimination, with the ultimate aim of wresting land away from its original inhabitants for the purposes of European wealth creation.

The measurement of blood quantum was used colonially in the process of Indigenous elimination. Hence to possess Aboriginal lands, white colonizers set about diluting blood, dissolving Indigenous people, and scattering those left around the landscape. This historical fact makes the appeal to racial measurement dressed up as genomic science particularly egregious to many Indigenous people within a context of ongoing colonization.

Antiracists are very good at denying the biological facticity of race, but not very good at explaining what is social about race. People are people, not black, white, or Indian. Social constructionism lends itself to such wilfully ignorant semantic arguments.