Race

The term race first appeared in the English language in 1508 to refer to a category or class of persons, without reference to anything biological. It was only in the late 18th century that the word race was invested with a physical connotation, and only in the early 19th century that specific theories of racial types began to emerge, most notably about populations outside Europe. Many of the ideas associated with genetics and racial differentiation during this period were founded on pseudoscientific theories that are now discredited. But at the end of the century, eugenicists and social Darwinists were offering scientific justifications for genocide and imperialism through which Europeans projected many of their darkest impulses onto Africans.

In monographs, articles, and textbooks, the term race is often presented within quotation marks. This practice has created a double bind, on the one hand freeing race but also at the same time legitimizing it, thus giving it a reality and a theoretical background that does not exist. Race, like culture and ethnicity, has been problematized by ambiguous usage in various spaces and in different times. Social construction theorists have claimed that these concepts are products of specific histories and geopolitical experiences. Moodley suggested that sometimes they are used as empty signifiers covered in ideological meanings that promote particular self-interests but do nothing for African American and ethnic minority groups.

In the United States, the person who is most noted for thinking about race has been W. E. B. DuBois. DuBois argued that race was not scientific or biological but that it was a sociohistorical concept. However, scholars and researchers in psychology and other disciplines continue to use the notion of race to get at the truth about difference, meaning, genetics, and culture. Sometimes a reductionist and fixed view of race and racial difference becomes the basis for understanding the relationship with ethnic minority individuals and groups. As Karen Henwood and Ann Phoenix have pointed out, racial difference is neither fixed in stone nor merely illusionary, because it is the outcome of practices of (de)racialization, which position groups and subjects in more or less advantageous and discriminatory ways.

Race, racial difference, and the many forms of racism experienced by African American and other ethnic minority groups are not fixed categories, nor are they transhistorical, pointing to a time at which discrimination and domination originated. These ideas and ideologies are dynamic, forever changing in relation to the discursive social, economic, cultural, and political practices that operate at a given time. The most useful way to work with race is to explore the power relations that intersect between the personal and the social level to produce racism and misogyny. For psychologists who are critical or anxious about working with the ideas and ideologies of race and racial difference, understanding its social and cultural history will offer numerous possibilities of how problematic race can be when it is taken for granted and seen as biological.